Researchers have raised concerns about measurement equivalence in comparing personalities across cultures using personality assessments. The self-reported personality measurements often do not assess the same construct, trigger different response styles (i.e., extreme response style), or use behavioral exemplars that are inappropriate across cultures (Byrne&Watkins, 2003; Chen, 2008; Poortinga, van de Vijber,&van Hermert, 2002, van de Vijver&Leung, 1997). James et al. (2005) developed a new measurement system for aggression that is different from traditional personality assessment. It is referred to as the Conditional Reasoning Test for Aggression (CRT-A). The CRT-A is an indirect measure for assessing unconscious motives to be aggressive that was developed in the USA. It has not been studied with people from different cultures. Study 1 investigated the equivalences of the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ) and the CRT-A by administering both to groups of Americans (n=432) and Koreans (n=363). Results based on the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and DIF analyses showed that the AQ and CRT-A are not invariant across these cultures. Study 2 replicated LeBreton et al.(2007) study regarding faking issues of the CRT-A with the Korean population. Study 2 found that on the CRT-A, Koreans were able to identify aggressive alternatives when they were told to do so, and Korean students and employees did not score differently on the CRT-A. Implications and future directions of the study are discussed herein.

This thesis provides one component of a greater defense of Christian ethical relativism, or the notion that what is a morally allowable action for one Christian may be wrong for another and both could be correct in their assertions. This essay does not develop such a Christian relativism, but merely defends the idea that a relativistic view could be developed in an academically rigorous manner and may be able to explain the diversity of Christian ethical traditions in a simpler manner than that offered by the ethical absolutist. As such, the thesis argues that a relativistic view ought to be developed.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottfried Herder unwittingly contributed to the political strands of Marxism and Fascism, respectively, but also to the gently progressing secularisation of Christian values that pervades the contemporary age. While Herder conceived of God traditionally, as a transcendent Being, he also sowed the seeds for Hegels philosophy in which God is realised immanently through the development of mans full capacities for reason. Since Hegel also posits that the end is implicit in the beginning, his scheme cannot hold without the kind of necessity that comes from a Godly (transcendent) source. At the same time, Hegels philosophy of history as revealed in The Phenomenology of Spirit and Herders Another Philosophy of History contain remarkable similarities that show how Herders and Hegels quest to reconcile the earthly and the finite with the infinite and the eternal led to the secularisation of philosophy and the beginning of the modern cultural ethos. The reader should see how Herder struggled to reconcile the many competing viewpoints of his age with his awareness that these viewpoints were limited, and how Hegel subsequently attempted to address this conundrum, along with the fundamental philosophical and theological question (left unresolved by Herder) of how man can have free will under God. The reader should realise how Gods immanence in man, partially accorded by Herder, and more substantially accorded by Hegel, leads eventually to the secular perspective of modern times, with both its negative, totalitarian and extreme manifestations, and its positive, pseudo-Christian and mildly socialist outcomes.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine Holocaust denial and professional historiography. Although much has been written about both subjects, the issue of distinguishing between them seems to have been largely ignored. They are, however, linked because of the way deniers conduct their business: in the attempt to make credible the claim that the Holocaust never happened, deniers mimic the styles and conventions traditionally employed by professional historians. Using footnotes and writing in the third person, deniers hope to get the surface right and make their readers believe their work. But appearances are deceiving, for deniers do not do history and are not historians. Theirs is a claim that defies morality and any sense of historical reality. Professional historians, while undoubtedly recognizing the moral bankruptcy of deniers and certainly not accepting their work as historical writing, have failed to make evident enough that deniers are not historians. Moreover, those who have attempted to refute deniers and not often have these been professional historians have usually done so on the basis of evidence: they have gone back to the data and shown how deniers have falsified or misrepresented it. While there is nothing necessarily wrong with that method, my own tack is different. At the same time as I take for granted the fact that deniers are not historians, what I aim to do is show how that is the case. Thus, this is partly a way beyond factual analysis, and partly the framework for factual refutation should it ever become necessary. Until deniers do history, however, evidence-based refutation is not necessary, and this very recognition should be implicit and explicit in any examination of Holocaust denial. My hope is to make this clear in three distinct but nevertheless related chapters. The first is about the evolution of Holocaust denial and how deniers have, especially in recent years, attempted to convey the appearance of legitimate scholarship. In the second, I focus on competing narratives as part of my effort to show that the appearance of denial literature is just part of deniers mode of deception. There is a major difference between competing narratives that are compatible historical narratives vs. historical narratives and between competing narratives that are incompatible historical narratives vs. denial literature. Drawing comparisons between the two should make more evident the genre-specific characteristics of history-writing and Holocaust denial. They are not, and can never be, the same, no matter how much deniers may try to convince us otherwise. But what to do about this dichotomy? That question is largely the basis for my third chapter. It is my contention that turning to the evidence cannot be the only method by which to distinguish between history and denial. More is required to convince others of the falsity of deniers claims, and for me this is a larger issue, one that must take into account not just how but also why we write about the past. Lost is the sense that there is an ethical component to history-writing, specifically as this relates to events like the Holocaust, the issues surrounding which seem to require no less than a general notion of right-wrong. Judging between accounts thereby takes on a more meaningful role in the sense that focusing solely on issues of true-false tends to minimize the importance of the Holocaust as lesson. So, too, I think, does this lend itself rather easily to the disconcerting placement of post-modernism/relativism and Holocaust denial under the same sign. That is, Holocaust denial is untrue, and because post-modernists are often condemned precisely because they question the very notions of truth and objectivity in historical writing, deniers and post-modernists are often linked. However, such a narrow focus risks missing the forest for the trees. Instead of looking solely at how post-modernism threatens the truth, history would be better served through the use of post-modern concepts in order to make more evident the ethical component of the discipline of history. In fact, this is what a number of scholars from other disciplines have suggested, for it is in the meaning of the Holocaust the Holocaust as lesson that we have the best prevention against denial. Our discipline, after all, is comprised of much more than facts. The more effectively we impart this to students and readers, the better the chance they will understand who historians really are, what they really do, and why it is important. This alone should make clearer the idea that deniers are not historians, and that what they say is wrong on much more than just a factual level.

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The Bush Doctrine represents a paradigm shift in international security policy. Never had a foreign policy demonstrated such will through unilateralism, preemptive militarism, and a sense of exceptionalism. I argue that this shift in policy resists modern international order in an attempt to reestablish ancient modes of power and control. The international system maintains order through rules and institutions which are perceived to be legitimate because they have the consent of the governed. An example of this would be the UN, where member states engage in a democratic deliberation geared towards reaching understanding and consensus. However, order breaks down when a member state fails to recognize the legitimacy of a rule or institution. This was the case for the Bush Doctrine when the U.S. decided to invade Iraq without a UN resolution. The Bush Doctrine is the embodiment of neoconservatism, an intellectual movement influenced by the thoughts of Leo Strauss. What neoconservatism has inherited from Strauss was a fear of relativism. Strauss's critique of modernity holds that liberal society fosters moral relativism which, in turn, destroys the moral fabric of society. Strauss calls for a revival of antiquity, more specifically a Platonic design of society, where elites rule through the use of myths which provide society with moral truth and national purpose. Neoconservatism has projected Strauss's war on modernity onto the international level. The Bush Doctrine assumes its core democratic values to be universal and thus views consensus building as unnecessary. Rather, deliberating on 'right' may enlighten us to the conventional nature of morality. Therefore, neoconservatism works to reestablish ancient modes of control through the use of moral absolutes, where the practice of these values, consequentially, resists international order governed by liberal principles. As a result, neoconservative policies disrupt international order and isolate the U.S. from the modern world.

This work investigates a series of phenomena that shed light on the analysis of attitudes de se. We adopt Lewis’ (1979) proposal that attitudes de se involve self-ascription of a property, and investigate how this view of mental content is reflected in natural language. The implementation favored is a strong version of Lewis’ position: root and embedded clauses are uniformly treated as being of property type. Our approach elaborates Chierchia’s (1990) view that de se construals arise via binding by an abstraction operator in the clausal left periphery. Part I develops an argument that such operators occur in root as well as embedded clauses. This is contrasted with the view that the evaluation index incorporates an individual parameter, a prominent version of which treats the behavior of predicates of taste such as tasty as evidence that truth is relativized to individuals (Lasersohn, 2005; Stephenson, 2007a, 2007b). Chapter 2 argues against this view, defending a semantics for taste predicates that requires no appeal to an individual parameter. Chapter 3 employs an argument from Moore’s Paradox to motivate the proposal that root clauses bear individual abstractors in their left periphery, while Chapter 4 identifies phenomena that the system accounts for. Part II concerns two elements whose distribution is confined to embedded clauses: controlled PRO and the logophoric pronoun in the Niger-Congo language Ewe. Chapters 5 and 6 investigate the semantics of partial control, a variety of control where the controller denotes a proper subset of the understood subject. The view that control complements express properties lends itself to a principled account of which predicates license partial control. Chapter 7 presents novel data regarding the logophoric pronoun in Ewe. We show that, contrary to what had been assumed in the absence of the necessary fieldwork, Ewe logopohors are not obligatorily de se. We propose an account of this finding that is compatible with the implementation of the property view that we favor. Chapter 8 closes the dissertation by considering why it should be that certain expressions, such as PRO, are obligatorily de se while others, like the Ewe logophor, can be de re. / Linguistics

This paper examines the popular philosophical theory of moral relativism. Traditionally, the theory argues that communities have their own conceptual frameworks of morality that are inaccessible to those outside of the community. Thus, one community cannot give another community a moral reason to change a practice. In this paper, I will examine David Velleman’s version of the theory presented in his book Foundations for Moral Relativism. This version posits that the drive towards mutual interpretability is a universal drive among human communities. From this drive stem all the practices and moral values of communities. However, Velleman does not believe that this implies that communities can understand each others’ conceptual frameworks. In this way, his account remains a normal version of moral relativism. I will argue that there are some cases in which a person can understand a different community’s conceptual framework enough to provide a reason for that community to change a practice. Importantly, my argument will not say that the reasons for change are moral reasons. They will be practical reasons based on the normative fact that human communities should strive towards mutual interpretability. Thus, my account will also maintain the crucial tenets of moral relativism. If accomplished, this argument will add a great power to the theory.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine Richard Rorty’s arguments in favour of a limited role for religion in the public sphere, both with regard to their practical value and their consistency with Rorty’s other philosophical commitments. A brief description of Rorty’s various philosophical commitments is followed by a detailed analysis of the negative practical consequences that can be foreseen resulting from Rorty’s approach to the topic of religion and any attempt to enforce his proposed treatment of religion. After looking at the practical problems with Rorty’s position, a closer look was taken at Rorty’s consistency across his philosophical writings. With a particular focus on Rorty’s pragmatism and his epistemic relativism the author concludes that Rorty’s arguments for reducing the influence of religion in the public sphere remain of questionable practicality and, furthermore, are at odds with his epistemological commitments. Rorty’s commitment to liberal democracy entails a commitment to protecting citizens’ rights to voice their opinions in hopes of influencing public policy. Despite his controversial writings with regards to the role of religion in society, authors such as Jeffrey Stout and Nicholas Wolterstorff provide alternative approaches to the appropriate treatment of religion in society that remain consistent with an anti-foundational commitment to liberal democracy and can expect to produce more favourable practical outcomes. / Graduate

The overall goal of this thesis is to examine the newly emerging ideas and practices of spirituality and development. Spirituality and development will be discussed within the broader discourses of alternative development critiques. The issues that arise in the attempts to translate ideas of spirituality and development into practice are examined. The theoretical underpinnings of spirituality and development are analyzed, based on a literature review of spiritual, anti-colonial, post-colonial, feminist, environmental, radical economic, eco-feminist, ecumenical, geographical and anthropological critiques of development. The thesis then explores the discourses of spirituality and development within three Northern donor agencies; the International Development and Research Centre (IDRC), the World Bank and the World Council of Churches (WCC).