Thesis advisor: Brian D. Robinette / This project attempts to respond to Charles Taylor's invitation, made in A Secular Age, for "new and unprecedented itineraries" capable of guiding seekers toward an encounter with God. Today, many Westerners find belief in God difficult if not impossible. This essay begins with an overview of Taylor's secularization narrative and explores the causes and pressures that have made belief in the Transcendent problematic. To respond to Taylor's summons for new itineraries, I turn in Chapters 2-4 to the work of philosopher William Desmond. After introducing readers to Desmond and locating him on a landscape dominated by phenomenologists, I introduce Desmond's metaphysical philosophy and argue that this his thought can be approached as a form of spiritual exercise capable of reawakening a sense of the Transcendent. In Chapters 3 and 4 I engage the work of Pierre Hadot to show how Desmond's philosophy can work to transform the way one perceives the world. Read within this framework, I believe Desmond's metaxological metaphysics provides a series of spiritual exercises needed in an increasingly secular age. Read in this light, metaxology becomes less a philosophy about which one must be informed than a philosophy capable of forming readers to perceive reality anew. In Chapter 5, I draw out some of the theological implications for this interpretation of Desmond's work. In the conclusion, I survey the project and indicate what I consider to be the theological achievement of Desmond's project and potential openings for future engagement with his work. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Revisions to secularization theory over the past two decades call for reconceptualization of the relation between race and secularity. Structural theories— depicting secularization as the linear, straightforward decline of religion in modernity— commonly explain the tenacity of African-American religiosity as resulting from their marginalization in modern society, a product of educational and economic disparities. However, recent theories address the secular as a historically contingent, incidental phenomenon, what has been called an "accomplishment"; it merits substantive study in itself, carrying the distinct values, beliefs, and understandings of a particular social history. This new framework invites analysis of the racial assumptions embodied in mainstream US secularity as explanation for blacks' religiosity, rather than citing their structural exclusion alone. This research attempts such through ethnographic analysis of black and white young adults' discussion of their religious and spiritual identities, using interviews conducted in Wave 4 of the National Study of Youth and Religion. Finding that most white young adults pursue autonomy from family and community as means of establishing credible identity, and that most black young adults facilitate identity by showing fidelity to them, I argue that these differences demonstrate racialized understandings of human agency, personhood, and social structure that vividly persist in the 21st century United States. Yet those of white young adults are typically treated as normative both in sociological discussions of secularity as well as in broader Western culture, with costly political consequences.

In pursuit of a just political order, Will Kymlicka has defended a liberal conception of multiculturalism. The persuasive appeal of his argument, like that of secular-liberalism more generally, is due to presenting liberalism as a neutral and universal political project. Utilizing Charles Taylor’s genealogy of ‘exclusive humanism’ in A Secular Age, this thesis attempts to re-read Kymlicka in order to make certain theological commitments in his work explicit. Here I argue that Kymlicka, in order to make his conception of multiculturalism plausible, relies on a theologically-thick and controversial humanism operating under secular conditions of belief. By committing himself to a particular conception of the human and specific conditions of belief, Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism is rendered provincially incoherent because it fails to treat in a neutral manner certain theological commitments.

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Rev. Diss. Univ. of Jyväskylä, 2003. / Die Originalausgabe der Dissertation erschien 2003 als Bd. 224 der Reihe "Jyväskylä studies in education, psychology and social research" Bibliography: S. 363-382.

Thèse (M.A.)--Université Laval, 1997. / Bibliogr.: f. 157-158. Publié aussi en version électronique.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T17:16:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo140_1.pdf: 1276778 bytes, checksum: 7ba6ba4f42269e134f73c5198eacaf03 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Esta Dissertação de Mestrado em Direito investiga os aspectos filosóficos ligados à estrutura do conceito de sujeito de direitos. Estes aspectos estão delineados a partir do problema que concerne à epistemologia, à política e ao direito, examinado pelos filósofos Charles Taylor e Paul Ricoeur, referente à individualização dos conflitos. Para estes filósofos, os indivíduos das sociedades modernas ocidentais são definidos como self (selbst em alemão; identidade nas línguas neolatinas). No conceito de self, estão estruturadas as noções de respeito e estima (dignidade humana), de responsabilidade (imputabilidade e capacidade), de reconhecimento social (estágio primário do self) e de reconhecimento jurídico do sujeito (estágio secundário do self). À semelhança do The Concept of Law, de H. L. A. Hart, há o reconhecimento social das regras primárias e secundárias; porém, Taylor e Ricoeur ajudam a estruturar o conceito de sujeito de direitos numa formulação realista da virada pragmática da linguagem, de modo a trazer uma versão distinta de Hart. Na hipótese de Taylor e Ricoeur, este conceito faz parte de uma narrativa secularizada da cultura, no interior do grupo social, por meio de práticas sociais internalizadas pelos indivíduos. Por não abandonar a perspectiva epistêmica, tal marco teórico possibilita elucidar certa confusão, presente numa parte da doutrina filosófica constitucional, entre elementos afins à filosofia do direito e ao pensamento filosófico geral. A partir disto, postula-se uma dogmática jurídica autêntica, longe do cientificismo conceitual, mas também com o caráter científico de uma hermenêutica crítica contrária à ontologia gadameriana

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While psychological practice continues to expand, the sobering decline of mental health identified by Hillman and Ventura (1993) is evidenced by increased rates of suicide (Weir, 2019; Hedegaard, 2021; Stone et al., 2018) and psychopathology (Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, 2018; Twenge et al., 2010). Charles Taylor identified, in the same time frame as the noted decline of mental health, a malaise of modernity (1991), that is, the loss of meaning and transcendence in the modern world. Throughout the history of psychology and Western thought and culture, increased rates of psychological distress certainly coincide with what I will refer to as the malaise of psychology: the reliance on immanence-based theories that locate meaning and purpose within (i.e., emergent from) persons themselves, as opposed to being anchored in any genuine transcendence, that provides meaning and purpose to persons by calling them out of themselves, to something higher. Psychological practice has, ironically, come to reject the autonomous individual in favor of a socially/relationally constructed persona while at the same time locating the source of meaning and truth within the individual person and honoring the individual desires and needs as the definitive source of the meaning of life itself. This movement contrasts sharply with a genuinely transcendent approach which recognizes the importance, and even grants the ontological status, of higher goods and commonalities, that is, the existence of something higher in our humanity itself that calls us at once into being and into responsibility. I will propose that to remedy the malaise of psychology, we must locate the foundation of meaning, purpose, healing, and transformative change in our ethical obligations and responsibilities toward others, a recognizing and striving towards being for the other (e.g., P. Marcus, 2008) as opposed to being simply for oneself, within oneself, and, thus, merely with the other. Furthermore, I argue that being for the particular other cannot occur unless human beings are genuinely responsible moral agents capable of an individual power and potential to act for the sake of that responsibility (Williams et al., 2021). That is, only in the transcending encounter with the other wherein we are called out of our self to something greater beyond us can we achieve fundamental and lasting change in mental health and healing for self and others. I will support this assertion by drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Charles Taylor, and C. Terry Warner, as well as others. Psychology, I will argue, must include this conception of an inherently moral system of human relationships in which each human being is responsible (i.e., able to respond) to the felt moral imperative from the other. Such obligation one might only be able to fulfill as one is attuned to and disposed to be for the other. This mode of being is distinctly not a systemic, nor a technological, solution to be achieved by strategic inner change or insight. Rather, it consists in the recognition and amalgamation of many individual acts of being for the other—by unique individuals for the sake of other unique individuals. I will end by outlining one possible model of application of this approach to clinical practice, viz., Alterity Focused Therapy© proposed by Burdge, Burdge, and Major (2022).

Submitted by JOSIANE SANTOS DE OLIVEIRA (josianeso) on 2018-05-11T15:32:26Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Odair Camati_.pdf: 1067364 bytes, checksum: 5f0ed114a31bc5d5fcfe07a390e1b15c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-05-11T15:32:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Odair Camati_.pdf: 1067364 bytes, checksum: 5f0ed114a31bc5d5fcfe07a390e1b15c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-03-21 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Neste trabalho sustentamos a tese de que o encontro entre as teorias de Charles Taylor e Will Kymlicka oferece boas perspectivas para o estabelecimento de um projeto multicultural em sociedades liberais e democráticas, mas possui limites quando da tentativa de universalização desse mesmo projeto. As dificuldades quanto à universalização se apresentam de formas distintas nos autores referidos. Para o liberal Kymlicka, os valores tradicionais do liberalismo são suficientes para o reconhecimento de todas as diferentes manifestações culturais. Com isso a universalidade estaria pré-concebida, o que, segundo nosso entendimento, impediria um diálogo construtivo com aqueles que não comungam os mesmos valores. Taylor, por sua vez, propõe um modelo de razão prática com raízes hermenêuticas que ofereceria elementos para o estabelecimento de juízos de valor com validade para todas as comunidades humanas que se colocassem em processo de compreensão mútua. As limitações residem na dificuldade para estabelecer condições mínimas para que esse processo se desenvolva sem distorções. Para chegar a esse momento, faremos antes uma retomada dos principais elementos envoltos nas discussões multiculturais no sentido de provar a necessidade de debater tal temática. Na sequência, apresentaremos criticamente os fundamentos conceituais desenvolvidos pelos filósofos canadenses em suas teorias do multiculturalismo. Basicamente, a autonomia é o conceito central em Kymlicka e o reconhecimento ocupa o mesmo espaço em Taylor. Por fim, a partir de um liberalismo brando, da não possibilidade de total neutralidade estatal e da valorização do contexto de escolha, propomos que existem elementos suficientes para desenvolver um projeto multicultural em sociedades liberais e democráticas. O que não significa, necessariamente, que temos elementos para um projeto multicultural com validade universal / In this work, I support the thesis that even though the encounter between Charles Taylor’s and Will Kymlicka’s theories offers good prospects for the establishment of a multicultural project in liberal and democratic societies, it has some limits when we try to universalize it. The difficulties regarding universalization are presented in different ways by the aforementioned authors. On the one hand, Kymlicka’s liberalism holds that the traditional values of liberalism are sufficient for the recognition of all different cultural manifestations. On this view, the universality would be preconceived, which, according to our understanding, would preclude a constructive dialogue with those who do not share the same values. On the other hand, Taylor proposes a model of practical reason with hermeneutical roots that would provide elements for the establishment of value judgments valid for all human communities that put themselves in a process of mutual understanding. The limitations of this model lie in the difficulty of establishing minimum conditions for this process to be developed without distortions. To get this point, we shall first take up the main elements involved in multicultural discussions in order to prove the need to discuss such issues. After that, we shall critically expose the conceptual foundations developed by both Canadian philosophers in their theories of multiculturalism. Basically, while autonomy is Kymlicka’s core concept, recognition is Taylor’s one. Finally, from a soft liberalism, which claims the lack of state neutrality and the valorization of the context of choice, we propose that the encounter between the two theories has enough elements to develop a multicultural project in societies that are both liberal and democratic. Yet this does not necessarily mean that we have elements for a multicultural project with universal validity.