The central aim of this thesis is to analyse the influence of Kierkegaard on Bonhoeffer. This relationship has been almost universally recognized. And yet this area has received no comprehensive study, limited within the secondary literature to footnotes, digressions, and the occasional paper. Furthermore, what little literature there is has been plagued by several stereotypes. First, discussion is often limited to Discipleship. Second, Kierkegaard has been identified as an individualist and acosmist who rejected the church, leading many to consider Bonhoeffer the ecumenist and ecclesiologist as selectively agreeing with Kierkegaard, but ultimately rejecting his overall stance. This thesis will argue that neither stereotype is true, and suggest (a), that Kierkegaard’s influence can be found throughout Bonhoeffer’s work, and (b) that although a more stereotypical perspective may be present in SC, by the end of his life Bonhoeffer had gained a far deeper understanding across the breadth of Kierkegaard’s work. The importance of this thesis is not simply to ‘plug the gap’ of scholarship in this area, but also to suggest the importance of analysing Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer together. This will focus on three specific areas. First, alongside the influence of Kierkegaard on Bonhoeffer, it will argue for the importance of using Bonhoeffer as an interpretive tool for understanding Kierkegaard. This thesis will show how Bonhoeffer adopted and adapted Kierkegaard’s work to his own situation, forcing Kierkegaard to answer questions that were not present during his own life. In this way, we are led to compare Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer as individuals, and not simply their static declarations. Secondly, against the tendency to consider Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer’s final attacks on Christendom as unfortunate endings to otherwise profound careers, it will be suggested that these attacks stand as the fulfilment of their earlier thought. It will be argued that despite their different contexts, both Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer were led to the same conclusions concerning Christendom. Thirdly, given Kierkegaard’s submission to indirect communication and his somewhat 'prophetic' proclamations concerning one who will come after him and reform, this thesis will ask whether Bonhoeffer stands as something of a fulfilment to Kierkegaard’s thought in the guise of a Kierkegaardian ‘reformer’.

Horrendous evils pose distinctive challenges for belief in an ethically perfect God. To home in on these challenges, I construct an ethical framework for theodicy by sketching four cases of human action where horrors are either caused, permitted, or risked, either for pure benefit (i.e., a benefit that does not avert a still greater harm) or for harm avoidance. I then bring the framework and the moral valuations confirmed by this casuistry to bear on the project of theodicy. I construct four analogous structures – one for each case – and identify examples of each structure in theodicies in contemporary philosophy of religion. I summarize each theodicy and evaluate whether it is structurally promising with respect to horrendous evils. That is, if the proposed interconnected set of facts and reasons were true, would God be ethically in the clear? My initial conclusions impugn the dominant structural approach of depicting God as causing or permitting horrors in individual lives for the sake of some merely pure benefit. This approach is insensitive to relevant asymmetries in the justificatory demands made by horrendous and non-horrendous evil and in the justificatory work done by averting harm and bestowing pure benefit. I next argue that the structurally promising theodicies I have identified are implausible due to their overestimation of the extent to which finite human agents can bear primary responsibility for horrendous evils and their underestimation of the importance for theodicy of being consonant with a broadly Darwinian approach to evolutionary theory. The project of theodicy is in trouble. The second half of my thesis develops an approach to theodicy that falls outside my proffered taxonomy. Following a suggestion of Leibniz, Robert Adams has argued that theodicy can be aided by the insight that almost all of the evil of the actual world is metaphysically necessary for the community of actual world inhabitants to be comprised of the specific individuals who comprise it. Beginning with this insight, I develop (what I term) Non-Identity Theodicy. It suggests that God allows the evil he does in order to create and love the specific individuals comprising the community of inhabitants of the actual world. This approach to theodicy is unique because the justifying good recommended is neither harm-aversion nor pure benefit. It is not a good that betters the lives of individual human persons (for they wouldn’t exist otherwise), but it is the individual human persons themselves. In order to aim successfully at the creation of particular individuals, however, God would need a control of history so complete that it might be argued to be inconsistent with beliefs about human free will that are important to some theologies. I construct a second version of Non-Identity Theodicy designed to avoid this problem by considering whether God’s justifying motivation for allowing the evil of this world could be his aiming for beings of our type, even if it could not be his aiming for particular individuals. I suggest that God would be interested in loving those he creates under various descriptions (e.g., biological, psychological, and narrative descriptions), and argue that a horror-prone environment is necessary for us to be the type of being we are under each of the descriptions. I assess the structural promise and plausibility of Non-Identity Theodicy. In order to do so, I engage with Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem and with some influential assumptions in the ethics of procreation literature. I end by recapping what I take to be the key areas of overemphasis and under-emphasis in contemporary theodicy.

The extent to which conscious and unconscious mental processes contribute to our experiences of learning and the subsequent knowledge has been subject to great debate. Dual process theories of implicit learning and recognition memory bear many resemblances, but there are also important differences. This thesis uses subjective measures of awareness to explore these themes using the artificial grammar learning (AGL) and remember/know (R/K) procedures. Firstly, the relationship between response times associated with intuition and familiarity based responding (conscious judgment of unconscious structural knowledge) compared to rule and recollection based responding (conscious structural knowledge) in AGL were found to be strikingly similar to remembering and knowing; their R/K analogues. However, guessing (unconscious judgment knowledge) was also distinct from intuition and familiarity based responding. Secondly, implicit learning in AGL was shown to occur at test, which would not be expected in R/K. Finally, wider theories of cognition, unconscious thought and verbal overshadowing, were shown to have measurable effects on AGL and R/K respectively. The approach used in this thesis shows the merits of both in-depth analysis within a given method combined with the synthesis of seemingly disparate theories. This thesis has built upon the important distinction between conscious and unconscious structural knowledge but also suggests the conscious-unconscious division for judgment knowledge may be as important. Implicit learning and recognition memory tasks differ in the kinds of mental processes that subjective measures are sensitive toward; particularly so in situations where judgment knowledge is unconscious. Different theories and methods divide nature in different ways; the conscious-unconscious judgment distinction may prove an important one.

This thesis presents descriptive and explanatory accounts of both non-theism, the lack of belief in the existence of supernatural agents, and strong atheism, the moral opposition to such beliefs on the grounds that they are both harmful and signs of weak character. Based on my fieldwork with non-theist groups and individuals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Denmark, an online survey of over 3,000 non-theists from over 50 countries, and theories from both the social and cognitive sciences, I offer a new account of why nations with low economic and normative threats produce high levels of non-theism. This account is offered in place of the common explanation that religious beliefs provide comfort in threatening circumstances, which I show to be both anthropologically and psychologically problematic. My account centres on the role of threats, both existential and normative, in increasing commitment to ingroup ideologies, many of which are religious, and the important role of witnessing displays of commitment to religious beliefs in producing such beliefs in each new generation. In environments with low levels of personal and normative threat, commitment to religious ideologies decreases, extrinsic reasons for religious participation decrease, and superstitious actions decrease. Given the human tendency to believe the communications of others to the extent that they are backed up by action, such a decrease in displays of commitment to religious beliefs leads to increased non-theism in the span of a generation. In relation to strong atheism, I document a correlation, both geographical and chronological, between strong atheism and the presence of religious beliefs and demands in the public sphere. I then offer an explanation of this correlation based on the effects of threats against a modern normative order characterized by philosopher Charles Taylor as a system of mutual benefit and individual liberty.

Informed by institutional ethnography, and taking the problematic from disjunctures in teacher/participants’ experience between actual practice and official policy, this study is an intertextual analysis of print/electronic documents pertaining to students ‘at risk.’ It unpacks the Student Success Strategy in Ontario secondary schools as organized around discourses on risk and safety. Discriminatory classing and racializing processes construct students ‘at risk’ in ways that reproduce socio-economic inequities through premature streaming into pathways geared to post-secondary destinations: university, college, apprenticeship and work. This study questions the accounting logic that reduces education to skills training in workplace literacy/numeracy, and contradicts the official ‘success’ story that promotes Ontario as a model of large-scale educational change. The follow-up intertextual analyses reveal ideological circles that promote ‘evidence-based research’ and ‘evidence-informed practice,’ while actually gearing education to improving ‘results’ on large-scale standardized tests and manufacturing consent for government policies. Questions arise about the lack of transparency and selective use of educational research. A web of behind-the-scenes activities are made visible at public policy think-tanks (e.g. Canadian Council on Learning; Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network), and two little-researched bodies in educational governance — the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) and OECD. Although invisible to teachers, the infrastructure for the Student Success Strategy is the Ontario School Information System (OnSIS); this web-enabled data-management technology has built-in capacity to profile students ‘at risk’ and to instigate accountability and surveillance over teachers’ work, with implications for re-regulating teaching practice towards test scores and aggregate statistics. With the intention of transforming education towards genuine equity, and linking the re-organization of social relations in large-scale reform locally, nationally and globally, this study contributes to critical scholarship on the effects of reform policies on people’s lives and extends knowledge of how translocal text-mediated ruling relations operate in education.

Informed by institutional ethnography, and taking the problematic from disjunctures in teacher/participants’ experience between actual practice and official policy, this study is an intertextual analysis of print/electronic documents pertaining to students ‘at risk.’ It unpacks the Student Success Strategy in Ontario secondary schools as organized around discourses on risk and safety. Discriminatory classing and racializing processes construct students ‘at risk’ in ways that reproduce socio-economic inequities through premature streaming into pathways geared to post-secondary destinations: university, college, apprenticeship and work. This study questions the accounting logic that reduces education to skills training in workplace literacy/numeracy, and contradicts the official ‘success’ story that promotes Ontario as a model of large-scale educational change. The follow-up intertextual analyses reveal ideological circles that promote ‘evidence-based research’ and ‘evidence-informed practice,’ while actually gearing education to improving ‘results’ on large-scale standardized tests and manufacturing consent for government policies. Questions arise about the lack of transparency and selective use of educational research. A web of behind-the-scenes activities are made visible at public policy think-tanks (e.g. Canadian Council on Learning; Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network), and two little-researched bodies in educational governance — the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) and OECD. Although invisible to teachers, the infrastructure for the Student Success Strategy is the Ontario School Information System (OnSIS); this web-enabled data-management technology has built-in capacity to profile students ‘at risk’ and to instigate accountability and surveillance over teachers’ work, with implications for re-regulating teaching practice towards test scores and aggregate statistics. With the intention of transforming education towards genuine equity, and linking the re-organization of social relations in large-scale reform locally, nationally and globally, this study contributes to critical scholarship on the effects of reform policies on people’s lives and extends knowledge of how translocal text-mediated ruling relations operate in education.

This thesis explores how the Rapture fiction and popular prophecy of modern American premillennial dispensationalism shapes the eschatological beliefs of its readership. This will be accomplished through a text-based critical analysis of the anxiety narratives of the Bible study and exegetical guides of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library, and its counterpart, the Left Behind fiction series. This thesis represents the first scholarly analysis of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library, and the first situation of Left Behind fiction within its theological context. It will be proposed that these two sets of texts shape the eschatological beliefs of their readers through a discursive ‘streamlining’ that is performed in several ways. Firstly, the historical development of the movement will be examined, exploring the evolution of a specific premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic and its ‘channelling’ through particular cultural institutions. Secondly, an analysis of the Tim LaHaye Prophecy Library and Left Behind fiction will demonstrate that this premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic is almost exclusively communicated through anxiety narratives which focus on expressions of horror, isolation, powerlessness and paranoia. It will be argued that these narratives serve to explore ‘abjective’ elements of premillennial dispensationalist belief, re-integrating them into the fabric of the faith. Particular attention will be paid to these abjective elements, which include the role of the eschatological body, the nature of individual salvation, and the perpetual deferment of the Rapture. As such, the popular media of premillennial dispensationalism serves as a further channel for the discursive streamlining of the movement’s prophetic scheme. Finally, this thesis proposes that the ‘deprivation’ theory of millennial appeal does not adequately explain the appeal and success of premillennial dispensationalism. As such, the following analysis will suggest that an alternate critical analysis of the movement, concentrating on its tropes of anxiety, serves to better explain the continued appeal of this ideology.

This dissertation engages with contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the issue of self-knowing with respect to the notions of honesty and authenticity. Accounting for the two philosophers' developing conceptions of these notions allows a response to interpreters who conceive the activity of self-knowing as a primarily personal problem. The alternative accounts proposed take as a point of departure transitional texts that reveal both thinkers to be engaged in processes of revision. The reading of honesty in Chapters 1 and 2 revolves around Nietzsche's groundwork on prejudice in Morgenröthe (1880-81), where he first problematizes the moral-historical forces entailed in actuating the 'will to truth'. The reading of authenticity in Chapters 3 and 4 revolves around Heidegger's lectures on what motivates one's thinking in Was heißt Denken? (1951-52). The lectures call into question his previous formal suppositions on what calls forth one's 'will-to-have-a-conscience', in an interpretation of Parmenides on the issue of thought's linguistic determination, discussed further in the context of Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950-59). Chapter 5 shows how Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche contributed to his ongoing revisions to the notion of authenticity, and to the attending conceptions of critique and its authority. Particular attention is given to the specific purposes to which distinct Nietzschean foils are put near the confrontation's beginning--in Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche's second Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung (1938), and in the monograph entitled Besinnung (1939) which they prepare--and near its end, in the interpretation of Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-85) presented in the first half of Was heißt Denken? Chapter 6 recapitulates the developments traced from the vantage point of the retrospective texts Die Zollikoner Seminare (1959-72) and the fifth Book of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1887). Closing remarks are made in relation to recent empirical research on the socio-environmental structures involved in determining self-identity.

This study explores the rediscovery and development of a tradition of Ciceronian academic scepticism in British philosophy between c.1660-c.1760. It considers this tradition alongside two others, recently recovered by scholars, which were recognised by contemporaries to offer opposing visions of man, God and the origins of society: the Augustinian-Epicurean, and the neo-Stoic. It presents John Locke, Conyers Middleton and David Hume as the leading figures in the revival of the tradition of academic scepticism. It considers their works in relation to those of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Bernard Mandeville, whose writings refashioned respectively the neo-Stoic and Augustinian-Epicurean traditions in influential ways. These five individuals explicitly identified themselves with these late Hellenistic philosophical traditions, and sought to contest and redefine conventional estimations of their meaning and significance. This thesis recovers this debate, which illuminates our understanding of the development of the ‘science of man’ in Britain. Cicero was a central figure in Locke’s attempt to explain, against Hobbes, the origins of society and moral consensus independent of political authority. Locke was a theorist of societies, religious and civil. He provided a naturalistic explanation of moral motivation and sociability which, drawing heavily from Cicero, emphasised the importance of men’s concern for the opinions of others. Locke set this within a Christian divine teleology. It was Locke’s theologically-grounded treatment of moral obligation, and his attack on Stoic moral philosophy, that led to Shaftesbury’s attempt to vindicate Stoicism. This was met by Mandeville’s profoundly Epicurean response. The consequences of the neo-Epicurean and neo-Stoic traditions for Christianity were explored by Middleton, who argued that only academic scepticism was consistent with Christian belief. Hume explored the relationship between morality and religion with continual reference to Cicero. He did so, in contrast to Locke or Middleton, to banish entirely moral theology from philosophy.

This thesis presents a new study of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1696), with special reference to Bayle’s polemical engagement with the theologian Pierre Jurieu. While recent years have seen a surge of interest in Bayle, there is as yet no consensus on how to interpret Bayle’s ambiguous stance on reason and religion, and how to make sense of the Dictionnaire: although specific parts of the Dictionnaire have received much scholarly attention, the work has hardly been studied as a whole, and little is known about how the Dictionnaire was influenced by Bayle’s polemic with Jurieu. This thesis aims to establish a new method for reading the Dictionnaire, under a dual premise: first, that the work can only be rightly understood when placed within the immediate context of its production in the 1690s; second, that it is only through an appreciation of the mechanics of the work as a whole, and of the role played by its structural and stylistic particularities, that we can attain an appropriate interpretation of its parts. Special attention is paid to the heated theological-political conflict between Bayle and Jurieu in the 1690s, which had a profound influence on the project of the dictionary and on several of its major themes, such as the tensions in the relationship between the intellectual sphere of the Republic of Letters and the political state, but also the danger of religious fanaticism spurring intolerance and war. The final chapters demonstrate that Bayle’s clash with Jurieu was also one of the driving forces behind Bayle’s reflection on the problem of evil; they expose the fundamentally problematic nature of both Bayle’s theological association with Jurieu, and his self-defence in the second edition of the Dictionnaire. The title of this thesis comes from Herman Melville’s novel: ‘Pierre, or the Ambiguities’.