No description available.

Thesis (D. Lit. et Phil.)--University of South Africa, Pretoria, 2002.

<p> This phenomenological study explored transgender individuals&rsquo; lived experiences of romantic relationship. This study utilized the concepts of Jung&rsquo;s transcendent function and Buddhism&rsquo;s middle way in order to articulate the transgender individuals&rsquo; felt experience of romantic relationships. Eight participants were interviewed and provided the research data, which was then examined in order to articulate and describe the experiences of the participants. This researcher found that most of this study&rsquo;s participants pursued the fulfillment of their genuine gender individualities and participated in romantic relationships that are built on the full expression of their authentic gender identities. Additionally, many participants reported that their relationships were built around values such as support, negotiation, communication, and compromise. Further, multiple participants described the presence of the third, or in other words, the multiple or plural spectrum, via the ways of working through romantic relationship issues by forming contracts and an openness to co-create defined relationship boundaries. This research arrives at an understanding of the transgender romantic relationship and subsequently, human relationships through depth psychological understanding. The findings are discussed in connection to the themes provided by the participants: the personal evolution of their transgender experience, the experiences of living in a romantic relationship, and the experiences of the third. Further areas of depth psychological research, study, and clinical implications are also discussed.</p>

No description available.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2002. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study comprises a survey of the atheist solution to the problem of evil that has occasionally in the past been suggested by philosophers, but has largely been neglected in the philosophy of religion. Against this background, the study has two main objectives. It focusses in the first place on the reasons upon which philosophers like Mackie and McCloskey regard the giving up of one or more of the attributes of God in theism as an adequate solution to the problem of evil, considered to be the strongest argument against the rationality of theistic belief. What the study however would like to add to this objective, is to point to the existence of an even more fundamental reason upon which it can be claimed that the problem of evil can be solved along this way and that the emotional pressure so typical of this problem can be relieved without any serious implications for the belief in God. Concerning the more negative orientated of these reasons, it is shown that the latter revolves around the concept of the logical inconsistency of the theistic theory that can truly be regarded as the rationale of the atheistic argument known as the problem of evil. Furthermore, this concept also represents the cornerstone of the rejection of theistic solutions to this problem by Mackie and others as inadequate. In focussing on the origins of these reasons, it is shown that although the roots of the problem of evil is to be found in pre-Christian times and it continued to be a point of discussion throughout the whole of the Apostolic Age and the Middle Ages, it was the period of the Enlightenment and in particular the legacy of David Hume that became the strongest inspiration of the atheist rejection of theism in modern times. Concerning the more positive orientated of these reasons, the focus is on the efforts of philosophers that have been following the suggestions of Hume and that have against the background of the deficiencies of the theistic solutions to the problem of evil, started to experiment with solutions wherein at least one of the constituting propositions of the problem of evil is rejected. It is also argued that the way to these experiments has been paved by the contributions of Mill and Geach and that the latter encouraged philosophers to also belabour the problem of evil from an atheistic point of view. Against this background, the final focus is on the second objective of the study, namely to show that there exists an even more fundamental reason upon which it can be claimed that the problem of evil can be solved along this way and that the emotional pressure so typical of this problem can be relieved without any serious implications for the belief in God. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie behels 'n ondersoek na die ateïstiese oplossing vir die probleem van die kwaad wat weliswaar in die verlede al by geleentheid deur filosowe gesuggereer is, maar wat nietemin nog nie veel aandag in die godsdiensfilosofiese debat oor hierdie problematiek geniet het nie. Binne hierdie raamwerk het die studie twee oogmerke. Dit wil in die eerste plek fokus op al daardie redes op grond waarvan filosowe soos Mackie en McCloskey meen dat die skrapping van een of meer van die Goddelike attribute in die teïsme tot 'n toereikende oplossing van die probleem van die kwaad as sterkste argument teen die rasionele houdbaarheid van hierdie teorie kan lei. Wat die studie in die tweede plek egter hieraan wil toevoeg, is om aan te toon dat daar 'n nog meer fundamentele rede bestaan op grond waarvan daar aangevoer kan word dat die probleem van die kwaad inderdaad langs hierdie weg en ook sonder ernstige implikasies vir die geloof in God opgelos en die emosionele druk so eie aan hierdie problematiek verlig kan word. Wat die meer negatief gerigte van hierdie redes aan betref, word daar verduidelik dat laasgenoemde rondom die konsep van die logiese inkonsistensie van die teïstiese teorie sentreer. Laasgenoemde kan met reg as die spil van die ateïstiese argument bekend as die probleem van die kwaad beskryf kan word en verteenwoordig die rasionaal van die argumente op grond waarvan Mackie en andere die teïstiese oplossings vir die probleem van die kwaad as ontoereikend afwys. In 'n nadere omskrywing van die oorspronge van hierdie redes, word daarop gewys dat alhoewel die probleem van die kwaad sy wortels in die voor-Christelike tyd het en dit ook dwarsdeur die Patristiek en die Middeleeue In onderwerp van drukke bespreking gebly het, dit egter die denkklimaat van die Verligting en in die besonder die nalatenskap van David Hume was wat sedertdien die belangrikste inspirasie van ateïstiese afwysings van die teïsme geword het. Wat die meer positief gerigte redes betref, word daar gefokus op ateïsties georiënteerde filosowe se pogings om op voetspoor van die onderskeidings van Hume en teen die agtergrond van die leemtes van teïsties georiënteerde oplossings vir die probleem, met daardie oplossings te eksperimenteer waarin daar van ten minste van een van die proposisies wat die probleem van die kwaad konstitueer, afstand gedoen word. Daar word aangevoer dat die weg tot eksperimentering met hierdie oplossings reeds deur onder meer die opvattings van Mill en Geach gebaan is en dat dit aan filosowe oënskynlik genoegsame rede gebied het om die probleem van die kwaad ook vanuit 'n ateïstiese gesigspunt te bearbei. Teen hierdie agtergrond word daar ten slotte op die tweede oogmerk van die studie gefokus, naamlik om aan te toon dat daar 'n nog meer fundamentele rede bestaan op grond waarvan daar aangevoer kan word dat die probleem van die kwaad inderdaad langs hierdie weg en ook sonder ernstige implikasies vir die geloof in God opgelos en die emosionele druk so eie aan hierdie problematiek verlig kan word. / wa201509

No description available.

Roman Ingarden utilizes the phenomenological method in his description of the essential features or strata of "the" literary work of art. The two books, The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, taken together, constitute a full description of the acts of consciousness in the apprehension of literary works. / However, certain confusions arise concerning the notions of polyphonic harmony, aesthetic value qualities and metaphysical qualities in his description of literary works. It is not clear how they work together with the essential strata to found a literary work of art. And as related concerns, the number of essential strata and Ingarden's basis for a concretization are never fully clarified. It is argued that those confusions are the superficial symptoms of an internal methodological problem. Ingarden begins his analysis with the literary work considered as an abstract entity and not as a particular object of a reading consciousness. Following Husserl's phenomenology of perception, it appears that Ingarden makes an apparent error when he begins his analysis in the phenomenological mode of eidetic reduction. Because he has no object as such before him to reduce, it is claimed that his application of the phenomenological method is inverted. / An alternative to Ingarden's methodological procedure is presented when a "reading" or concretization of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim is offered as an object for phenomenological reduction. The essential characteristics and their relations derived from the phenomenological reduction of this object are then compared with Ingarden's results. / The new structural relations which emerge in the reduction of a particular reading help to clarify the confusions found in Ingarden's analysis and demonstrate how the various newly described polyphonies found the presence of metaphysical qualities in literary works. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-01, Section: A, page: 0177. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

The first part of this study investigates the history of the Fuke sect and the development of the shakuhachi from its origins to the abolition and revival of the sect; the remaining chapters deal with the Tozan-ryu. Translations of all the different extant versions of the Keicho No Okitegaki, a statute which regulated the special privileges accorded to the komuso (mendicant priests) by the Tokugawa authorities, are given and discussed. To the author's knowledge, these documents have not yet been translated into English. / Pertinent data have been collected that sustain the hypothesis that Tozan-ryu is the result of a transformation of style due to new artistic and economic changes as well as cultural shifts that developed in Japan shortly after World War II. The dissertation also presents a comparative study of the Fuke tradition and the Tozan-ryu. / Although the Tozan-ryu developed out of a strong socio-religious heritage, it was also based on a new concept prevailing in early twentieth-century Japan. The combination of an artistic process of secularism, a Western educational influence and a new economic stimulus were the three major factors of this transformation. / The treatment of miyako-bushi (the in (dark) mode), the basic scale of Japanese secular music, is examined in the context of Nakao Tozan's early works. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-11, Section: A, page: 3556. / Major Professor: Dale A. Olsen. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

This dissertation is an ethnography of the body as medium in the North American Spiritualist tradition. With its origins in the “burned-over district” of upstate New York, Spiritualism is a homegrown religious movement rooted in the radical Protestant milieu of “Great Awakenings,” which evolved into an international religious movement with a distinctly secular bent. Spiritualists, unlike Pentecostals and Evangelicals, de-emphasize faith or belief and understand the spirits as present to the “natural” senses and thus demonstrable as “evidences, ” complicating the dialectics of faith and skepticism. Situated within North American “metaphysical” traditions, 19th century and contemporary Spiritualism foregrounds the centrality of mediumship and thus the spirit medium’s sensorium, through its practices of spirit communication. The medium is a figure of mediation, one who communicates the spectral presence of the dead—or as the Spiritualists’ say, “There are no dead!”—to the living. This dissertation looks at how this emphasis on spiritual evidences draws out modern antinomies between secular and religious experience, and the certainty and doubt engendered by the medium’s attention to ephemeral affects, sensations and images that define spirit presence. As such, it takes as its point of departure the Spiritualist medium’s discernment of the spirit world as a practice of making the body a media, or instrument, for the visual, auditory, and haptic sensation of the spirits of the dead. Based upon over three years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this anthropological study was conducted in Spiritualist Churches, home circles, training courses, and in mediumship centers in New York City, upstate New York, New Jersey and London, including many summers spent in the long-standing Spiritualist camp of Lily Dale, in northwestern New York State. As this dissertation proposes, a focus on bodily mediation allows us to think the body not only as a specific kind of media in the common technological sense, but as a sensory instrument for mediation in the originary ontological sense, as religious mediation across thresholds—between people and spirits, the living and the dead, God and creation, human and nonhuman forces. This work argues that Spiritualism places secular and religious notions of experience within an immanent frame, making visible the problem of a body affected—in this case, by “clouds” of spirits—and, more fundamentally, the problem of the body’s doubleness: as if always already shadowed by its own spectrality. Mediumship, it argues, addresses itself to a kind of evidence, where what is sought is a kind of experience: an experience in which the spirits become discernible, and are figured into a verifiable state to become evidence for others. By making the body the central instrument for mediating invisible forces of spirit, history, and affect, North American Spiritualism—it proposes—opens onto a set of problems connecting image, settlement and experience, laced together as a problem of the body. If mediumship concerns the fact of sensation, the fact of being-affected, affects are the foreground, not the background, against which everything else takes place: to speak of the experience of mediumship is to speak of attunements to overlooked images and affects and the way these are concretized into more enduring spirit figures. It is to this cloudy realm of fugitive images and affections that this work tries to attend. Specifically, and in light of Spiritualisms’ focus upon spiritual experience as the unmediated ground of divine apprehension, this dissertation situates Spiritualism within a broader stream of Protestant iconoclasm, albeit at the margins, as a syncretic “metaphysical” movement of diverse spiritual and occult influences. This work suggests affinities between the Spiritualist medium’s mediation of spirit images, and a Puritan iconoclasm at the foundation of North American settler spirituality—where the displaced body of the settler becomes the central placeholder of religious experience and sacred image, the body itself figured as the sacred image or icon of God. Drawing upon these inheritances, Spiritualism is here situated within a spiritual geography of settlement. In particular, this concerns a geography connecting 19th century and present-day practices of spirit communication with spectral “Indians” and North American settlement’s iconoclastic foundations: a history of violence haunted by spectralized others. This dissertation would be of interest to readers of religious/mystical experience, philosophy of religion, media theory, affect theory, settler colonialism, Native American studies, gender studies, and ethnographic writing.

In this dissertation, I will examine the conceptions of philosophy of the 19th and 20th Century thinkers Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and their implications for contemporary theories of religious ethics and philosophical practice, especially that of Pierre Hadot. In doing so, I will elucidate their understanding of both the goals of philosophical practice and the means by which they are achieved, focusing in particular on the importance of the body in their respective theories of philosophical practice. Specifically, I argue that Ravaisson, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of philosophical practice are grounded in an understanding of habit as a dynamic process of producing and transforming bodily dispositions that problematizes distinctions between self and world and limits attempts to achieve conscious self-mastery. As a result, their work calls into question the extent to which self-conscious cultivation of intellectual and bodily habits that conform to an ideal self-conception is either possible or desirable, and instead affirms a conception of philosophical practice as what I term “indefinite self-cultivation.” In chapter one, I examine Félix Ravaisson’s conception of philosophical practice in relationship to his theory of habit, which he claims originates as a principle of desire that gives rise to bodily spontaneity. This theory of habit underlies a conception of philosophical practice as imitation of models of ideal conduct through which habits of inventive conduct that outstrip capacities for rational deliberation are produced. In chapter two, I contrast Ravaisson’s conception of habit with Henri Bergson’s, who regards habit as a form of bodily memory that produces automaticity. Philosophical practice for Bergson resists the effects of habit on thought and action by engaging in philosophical intuition, an application of mental effort to processes of change and movement that generates new ideas and new forms of life. In chapter three, I examine Merleau-Ponty’s intermediate position between these theories of habit, and his argument that the fluid nature of habituation as a process of social interaction makes living according to a determinate way of life possible only at the risk of doing violence to oneself. For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy entails critical practice of interrogating and expressing affects and immediate responses to events that serves as a way to question consciously-held values and uncover new personal and social possibilities. Finally, in chapter four, I conceptualize Ravaisson, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of philosophical practice as forms of indefinite self-transformation by putting their work in critical conversation with Pierre Hadot’s theory of philosophy as a way of life.