Various traditional cultures around the world used to subscribe to a reality of Divine Sovereignty, ie. that the Earth ultimately belongs to the Creator. Modern politics and disciplines within Western science have become detatched from this humble spiritual perspective. Yet when reexamined at source, mainstream religious, scientific and legal theories which appear to discredit Divine Sovereignty are found to be tainted by contemporabeous vested interests. Spirtual luminaries, who have interpreted Divine Sovereignty within the political context of distributive justice and economic democracy, have been mercilessly persecuted. Evidence indicates that Jesus was a classic example, and that his original universal teachings have been adulterated. By exploring the work, and substantiating the spiritual philosophy of the 20th century polymath Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar, the thesis assembles past and present knowledge into a new coherent paradigm, which encompasses Divine Creation, the divine nature of matter, plus a spiritual explanation of human and social evolution. The research elucidates the relevance of the latter to the current conflict in the Middle East and concludes by outlining Sarkar's principles for establishing a just sustainable post-sexist society which operates in accordance with Divine sovereignty.

Methodological naturalists generally believe that science is the best and only method for discovering the properties of reality and what exists. A central tenet of methodological naturalism is that science is limited to evaluating only natural things. Science cannot allow for the possibility of supernatural objects because doing so would irreparably damage the scientific method. Or, it may be that evaluating the supernatural is beyond the capabilities of science. In this thesis, I challenge these assumptions. I defend a form of naturalism known as Provisory Methodological Naturalism which holds that science can, at least theoretically, evaluate supernatural claims. Provisory methodological naturalists believe the notion that science only evaluates natural things is provisional and subject to being overruled. Should supernatural objects exist, science would be able to observe them.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-192). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-192). Also available on the Internet.

The purpose of my thesis is to examine the relation between the human and the divine in the Homeric poems, and define thereupon the limits of human and divine responsibility. To this end I particularly focus on the Homeric concepts of fate and divine justice, as these are expressed mainly by the terms and . Nonetheless, since the Greek terms do not always coincide in their semantics with the respective terms of any modern language, it is regarded as necessary that the field of each term be defined prior to the examination of the concepts themselves. Similarly, issues such as morality and Homeric ethics have to be raised, since they form the basis upon which any discussion of Homeric thought can rely. The Iliad and the Odyssey employ the two basic ideas of fate and divine justice each in a discrete manner, and this requires that each poem be examined separately. A comparison between the two works, necessary for a more overall idea of the Homeric world and the Homeric compositions, is incorporated in the chapter on the Odyssey.

In Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), Heidegger submits an attempt to think from a more original position within being by presenting ”a deeper form of questioning”. This attempt is supposed to serve as the final transition from what he calls ”the guiding question” to ”the basic question” and with that the final leap from the metaphysical tradition still present in Being and Ttime into ”the second beginning”, free from transcendental thinking. The intention of this essay is to observe how the being-historical questioning is presented in Contributions to Philosophy as it is contrasted with the position of the question in Being and time. In my endeavor to understand ”the questioning”, two of Heideggers lecture courses on Saint Augustine are presented. I show how Heidegger pinpoints Saint Augustine’s turn from searching for God as an object into forming himself into a question, and so in prayer becoming the very thing he is searching for in a deeper form of questioning. Furthermore he claims that Augustine’s ”not knowing” (nescio) has been consistently misread as a lack of knowledge, whilst it is in fact a pre-requisite for the real break through of true knowledge. I suggest that Heideggers re-reading of nescio can be helpful in trying to understand the preparation for the Event of the second beginning of which the questioning is a part.

The aim of this thesis is to find out whether Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be equated with a conceptual system or ”Begriffsschrift”, and what the function of such a representative system would be. How can solipsism, idealism and realism be understood given that interpretation? Wittgenstein’s early philosophical inquiry revolved around the same problem with which Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell had dealt with. But according to Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein forcefully questioned their idea that logic can constitute a general foundation and Wittgenstein was particularly against the idea that mathematics requires a foundation of logic. The thesis discusses how this can be deduced from a close reading of Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus. The results from this reading coupled with a review of the concepts of solipsism and subject give a divergent interpretation on what is complex and what can only be shown. The study indicates that what solipsism disclose is that a variable that consists of ”I”, referred to a subject, cannot be equated with a variable ”x” because ”I” include an unwanted function which gives rise to a nonsensical generality.

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As its criticisms have revealed, a closer look at the concept of the Real, the thesis of “all experiencing is experiencing-as,” and the criterion of the soteriological transformation have shown some difficulities in John Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis. Focusing on the theory of religious experience contended by Hick, this research explores the Kantian and Wittgensteinian elements of his hypothesis to ease the tension between its metaphysical and epistemological aspects. Since Hick’s hypothesis is based on the doctrines of religions within the Indo-European language group, this research introduces those traditions from outside this group to rethink its criteriology. These two attempts inevitably call for a refined model of Hick’s hypothesis. Both Hick’s hypothesis and the refined model reflect certain understandings of the notion of Religion. Meanwhile, every religious tradition also manifests its various dimensions. This research consequently suggests that the ideal of Religion can be considered in terms of the idea of functional unity and can be taken as the regulative principle to direct any model of religious pluralism, which is subject to be modified when it encounters any “anomalies” of religious phenomena -- this pattern can be further illustrated in light of the Confucian proposition of “the Li is one but its manifestations are many (理一分殊li-yi-fen-shu).”