A thought experiment by Avicenna known as the Flying man presents a hypothetical man in the air who is not aware of the existence of his body but simultaneously is aware of himself. A common objection to the Flying Man accuses Avicenna of committing an epistemic and logical fallacy known as the Masked Man. This paper analyses the two most recent interpretations of the Flying Man thought experiment, where each interpretation attempts to understand the main argument which Avicenna poses through the thought experiment.  On one hand, I will examine Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich’s interpretation, which rejects previous criticisms of the Flying Man with an emphasis on Avicenna’s philosophy of essences. I will, on the other hand, present Jari Kaukua’s interpretation; a response to Adamson and Benevich’s interpretation with two closely related objections. The last section of this paper discusses and evaluates the scholars’ debated points and offers a more charitable interpretation of the Flying Man through my suggestive indicative method.

Essentialist thinking refers to the intuition that category membership and category-specific features are caused by an internal, invisible, essence. Across three studies, we investigated essentialism from a developmental, a cognitive, and a social perspective. In the first study, using a structured interview, we investigated whether Canadian children aged 5-to-8 hold an essentialist view of national identity, and whether their view differs from that of American children. Compared to older children, younger Canadian children were more likely to believe that Canadian identity was biologically based, and that traits associated with Canadian identity were heritable. However, we found no differences between Canadian and American children in terms of essentialist thinking. In the next study, we tested whether adults obscure their essentialist thinking and whether it may be unveiled by cognitive demand. We presented participants with a switched-at-birth paradigm where some participants were under time pressure and others were not. We found that adults under time pressure were more essentialist about national identity and gender than adults not under time pressure, though we saw no effect on race. This suggests that adults obscure their essentialist thinking, but it can be unveiled during cognitive demand. Finally, we assessed whether essentialist thinking is associated with addiction stigma. We presented participants with fictional news articles about scientific studies to prime either essentialist or anti-essentialist views about addiction. Both participants’ biological and non-biological essentialism were associated with addiction stigma, with the latter being a stronger correlate. This suggests that the extent to which individuals view addiction as a fundamentally distinct category has more impact on stigma than whether adults view addiction as genetically based. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Essentialism is the human intuition that category membership is caused by an internal, invisible, source. Humans treat category members as if there is something deep inside them that makes them who they are. Across three chapters, we investigated whether people are essentialist about social categories, and the subsequent consequences. In the first study, we showed that younger children, more than older children, believed in an internal, Canadian, essence. There was no difference between Canadian and American children in how they viewed national identity. Next, we demonstrated that adults are more essentialist about social categories like national identity and gender when they are under time pressure. Finally, we showed that thinking about addiction as a biologically based and distinct category is associated with addiction stigma.

People often express essentialist beliefs about race and nationality, viewing each as causally powerful and stable over time. However, do essentialist intuitions apply across intersectional categories? Here, across White-non-Latine (n = 197), White-Latine (n = 202) and non-White-Latine (n = 151) Americans, we find that essentialist beliefs about nationality differ based on participant race-ethnicity and the skin-color of the target American. In White-Latines and non-Latines, both white-skinned and brown-skinned targets’ “Americanness” were essentialized above chance, but white-skinned targets were essentialized at higher rates. However, non-White-Latines essentialized Americanness similarly in both white and brown-skinned targets. Further, only participants who essentialized Americanness in white-skinned, but not brown-skinned, Americans expressed greater warmth toward White immigrants over Latine immigrants. Those who essentialized Americanness equally in white- and brown-skinned targets showed no difference in warmth. These findings illustrate the importance of investigating cognitive precursors to prejudice through an intersectional perspective in ethnically diverse samples.

In this thesis the Swedish author Elin Wägner’s debate book Alarm clock and the American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland are analysed and compared from an ecofeminist perspective. Since the use of an ecofeminist perspective can be perceived as anachronistic as the term ecofeminism was drafted far later than the literary works in question I have chosen to distinguish between empirical and analytical concepts to approach their texts. In order to interpret their texts in their intellectual and historical contexts, concepts such as ecofeminism, matriarchy, utopia, vision and science have been of significance. This as the authors’ theoretical approaches in matriarchal theories, utopic perception, vision and science shaped their literary point of departure. The sociologist Lester Frank Ward’s theories on social planning had a huge impact on Gilman’s ideas as had the influence of the Darwinian movement focusing on evolution and eugenic, theories that at the time around the turn of the 19th century influenced social science, history and psychology. Elin Wägner found her inspiration in works by Johan Jakob Bachofen, Rosa Mayreder and Mathilde Vaerting, anchored in the Central European literacy discourse of her time; ideas significant for her civilization-critical thinking focusing on the relationship between women’s subordination and the environment, where the ruling of the earth is understood by the same logic that drives men’s dominion over women. Wägner and Gilman follows a line in the eco-feminist theorem, based on the statement that women are more responsive than men to nature and environmental issues, a biological determinism, conceptual essentialism and universalism, based on women’s different experiences in a gender society.

The purpose of this study is to learn to what extent the point of view of patrons of Wichita Falls, Texas, has a background of progressivism or of essentialism and to what extent, if possible, the children are influenced in school by the point of view held by the parents; also which part of the school system -- general education, the curriculum, the child, or the administration -- has the most progressive approval of the parents.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka förekomsten av essentialistiska och icke portinom essentialistiska rätteringar i läroböcker inom religionskunskap på högstadie porträtteringar kan vara problematiska. En sådan problematik nivå eftersom essentialistiska är att de som fenomen kan identifieras och definieras samt att essentiali cementerar idén om att religion stiska beskrivningar av specifika religioner onekligen blir begränsade och reduktionistiska. Detta kan i sin tur leda till att fördomsfulla tankegångar uppmuntras då de undermåliga porträtteringarna misslyckas med att införliva religioners levande och dyna miska karaktär. Med utgångspunkt i Torsten Hyléns definitioner av essentialism används en kvalitativ innehållsanalys på tre läroböcker inom ämnet för att undersöka både förekomsten och avsaknaden av essentialism i dessa. I studien identifieras återkommande essentialistiska porträtteringar men även ickeessentialistiska porträtteringa r . Läromedelsanalysen fastställer även att det är nästintill endast är kärnessentialistiska porträtteringar som kan identifieras. Detta är viktigt för blivande och praktiserande lärare inom religionskunskap att ta med i beräkningen i relation till deras egen undervisning då specifikt kärnessentialistiska porträtteringar kan leda till problematiska föreställningar om religion som fenomen och om specifika religioner. Inom slutsatse finns det även förslag på omformuleringar som kan göras i syfte att inte porträttera religion eller religioner essentialistiskt.

In Critical Practice, Catherine Belsey states how traditionally, classic realism is interpreted as a genre that"presents individuals whose traits of character, understood as essential and predominantly given, constrain the choices they make" (Belsey 74). Belsey's claim is significant in that it articulates what is often the locus of tension and conflict in the genre: rigid, essentialist identitary discourse.In summarizing and considering the various identitary discourses at play within Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and The Street and Gérard Bessette's La bagarre and Les pédagogues, the purpose of this thesis is to analyse how issues surrounding constructions of identity are dramatized in these classic realist, satirical texts in order to show how their cultural work in terms of identity can be understood as being more ambivalent than has heretofore often been thought. The thesis' theoretical focus is rooted primarily in post-colonial theory, especially the ways it interrogates representations of cultural and ethnic struggles for recognition and power that are a result of colonial and/or cultural hegemonic domination. More specifically, the thesis discusses and appropriates the theory and concepts of the post-colonial critic Homi K. Bhabha, particularly in terms of how the selected primary texts can be said to exemplify Bhabha's notions of ambivalence, hybridity and a Third Space of identity; how the narratives' main conflicts and tensions around identity can be better understood by looking at how some of the characters can be said to inhabit a Third Space. However, the thesis will also show that while Bhabha's claim that instances of ambivalence, hybridity and the Third Space in the selected texts can be said to represent" neither the one [...], nor the Other [...] but something else besides which contests the terms and the territories of both [i.e. of competing identities]," (Bhabha 41) their concomitant essentialist discourses can be said to trouble the idealism of Bhabha's faith in such notions.In short, this thesis posits that though the selected texts perform important cultural work via their complex problematizations of the ambivalence of said discourses, they also satirize and critique essentialist and ethnocentric discourses.

Syftet med undersökningen har varit att identifiera strategier som utvecklats av religionskunskapslärare som har en medveten strävan att motverka en statisk tolkning av identitet(er) i sin undervisning. Eftersom att sådana tolkningar av identitet kan bidra till att diskriminerande strukturer i samhället rekonstrueras. Detta har gjorts utifrån en övergripande frågeställning; Hur närmar sig religionskunskapslärarna i min studie frågan om hur de kan förebygga och motverka de problem som en essentialistisk tolkning av identitet kan medföra? Den övergripande frågeställningen förgrenar sig i tre olika frågor. Varför menar lärarna att en essentialistisk tolkning är ett problem i religionskunskapsämnet? Vilken förståelse för identiteter vill lärarna förmedla till eleverna? Vilka konflikter uppfattar lärarna finnas mellan styrdokumenten och deras yrkesutövning? För att besvara frågorna har religionskunskapslärare med ett särskilt intresse för de här frågorna eftersökts, eftersom att de antas besitta särskild kompetens som är värdefull. Lärarna har träffats i gruppintervjuer som därefter följts upp av enskilda intervjuer. Analysmetoden har utgjorts av innehållsanalys med inslag av idéanalys. Detta mot en teoretisk utgångspunkt som utgjorts av socialkonstruktionism, postkolonialt perspektiv och normkritiskt perspektiv. Analysen har resulterat i att fem nyckelbegrepp har identifierats utifrån vad lärarna anser är viktiga delar av deras undervisning för att förklara och problematisera identiteter. Undersökningen visar att religionskunskapslärare menar att generaliseringar kan vara nödvändiga för att förklara religion men att dessa samtidigt är problematiska på många olika sätt. Istället för att religionskunskapsundervisning ska förmedla idealbilder av hur en religiös människa ska vara menar de att deras uppdrag är att berätta om hur människor formas av religion på ett för varje människa unikt sätt som anpassas till deras liv.

The aim of this study is to examine which notions of women exist within three different nationalist parties by analyzing how women are visually represented for political purposes. The aim is also to examine how these notions relate to a nationalist cultural policy. A semiotic analysis as well as a contextual idea analysis using ideal types was implemented in order to distinguish different notions of women in the material. The result shows five different representations of women, which can be summarized as two dominant notions. “The good woman” represents the nation and is depicted as natural, attractive, domesticated, warm, feminine, heterosexual and in need of protection. “The bad woman” does not represent the nation and is depicted as unattractive, cold, selfish, rebellious and queer. Given the nation-building purpose of the nationalist culture policy, these notions of women could entail a restriction of women’s cultural expressions as a consequence.

Läroböcker utgör en grund för många lärare i deras undervisning. Det innebär att läroböcker behöver hålla god kvalitet och innefattas av de kunskaper som det aktuella ämnet avser förmedla. Religionskunskapsämnet syftar bland annat till att elever ska utveckla förståelse för religion utifrån olika tolkningar och perspektiv. Att religioner inte är slutna system utan dynamiska så till vida att olika religiösa förhållningsätt existerar sida vid sida inte bara mellan religioner utan också inom. I föreliggande uppsats ligger fokus på judendomen och syftet har varit att undersöka i vilken mån sex läroböcker behandlar olika judiska tolkningar och perspektiv och därmed kan hjälpa elever att uppnå de kunskapsmål som innefattar inomreligiös variation. Med kvalitativ textanalys som metod har varje lärobok systematiskt analyserats med hjälp av ett analysverktyg som avsågs kunna ge svar på uppsatsens frågeställningar. Huruvida de analyserade läroböckerna synliggör inomreligiös variation visade sig variera. Vad gäller gudsuppfattning visade det sig att samtliga läroböcker innefattades av teologisk essentialism då den förmedlade synen av judendomen var förenad med en transcendental makt, en helig gud. Ett kärnessentialistiskt förhållningssätt var också tydligt framträdande i vissa av läroböckerna, vilket fick till följd att inomreligiös variation många gånger uteblev kring judars utövande av bland annat kosher och sabbat. Istället förmedlades dessa i enlighet med traditionell judendom. I vissa av läroböckerna poängterades vikten av att människor formas av sin omgivning vilket innebär att individer och grupper ger uttryck för olika religiösa tolkningar och att graden av strikthet varierar. Kön var en aspekt som i vissa fall kopplades samman med utövandet av religionen och att synen på kön varierar inom de olika inriktningarna. Liksom att judar i Sverige kan ha ett annat förhållningssätt till tro och utövande än till exempel judar i Israel.