No description available.

No description available.

From the book of Genesis the human person is presented as divine image-bearer, a Godlike status that is further explained in terms of the dual constitution of matter and spirit. Natural Law provides a person-centred ethic that draws on a number of human goods that emanate naturally from the human person and lead in practice to human flourishing. This theory empowers towards making ethical decisions in the interest of human persons. Aristotle explained the human being as a substantially existing entity with rational powers. By means of his form-matter scheme he handed on, by way of Boethius, to Aquinas, a ready model for the Christian belief in the dual nature of the human person as an ensouled body or embodied soul. Applying the new scientific method to the question of the human self David Hume concluded that he could neither prove nor disprove her existence. By so reasoning Hume indirectly pointed to the need for other disciplines than empirical science to explain the human person. Emmanuel Levinas has drawn on the metaphysical tradition to draw attention to the social and ethical nature of the human person as she leaves the trace of her passing through the face of the other person who is encountered with an ethical gravitas of absolute demand. The genesis of the human person most naturally begins at conception at which point and onwards the human embryo grows continuously through an internal, animating principle towards a full-grown adult person. The main conclusion is that biblical anthropology and metaphysical philosophy provide the needed structures and concepts to explain adequately the full meaning of the human person and to establish the moral right of the human person at every stage to respect and protection.

The Theatre of the Absurd often has been considered the reflection of a deconstructionist gesture, a negation of the existent theatrical norms, therefore an end in itself without any prospect of possible alternatives or remedies. While this may be partially true, the entropy inherent to the absurd does not adhere to a mechanically formal posture; rather, the "purposeless wandering", in Eugène Ionesco's case, points, through humor (Ce formidable bordel), toward a longing for meaning, deeply rooted in the human being. This very longing is the crux of Ionesco's humanism. For him suffering (Le Roi se meurt), as the offshoot of the human being's finite condition and the affect that bonds the community, is intertwined with an unexplained feeling of wonderment--an opening to contemplation of the infinite. The merging of suffering and wonderment that suffuses Ionesco's textual and visual works presents the field in which his vision of a metaphysical humanism must find form. Art, in Ionesco's perspective, as the expression of being and the witness of its time (Rhinocéros), can be understood as a redemptive medium, a hope for humanism. Through the interplay of text (plays, reflections and short stories), image (drawings, gouaches and lithographs) and performance, this dissertation explores themes, imagery and structures that reflect Ionesco's paradoxical view on humanism. Thus, in light of interdisciplinary readings, I identify archetypal images recurrent in Ionesco's works and his subversive interpretation of these images as revelatory of the author-painter's inner search for meaning. This quest, which is the unifying principle throughout Ionesco's work, is revealed in themes spanning from the entropy of language (La Cantatrice chauve, Les Chaises) to the sacrificial act of substituting for the other (Maximilien Kolbe). In this ultimate act of testimony, Ionesco depicts Emmanuel Lévinas' ethics wherein the self becomes a "hostage" of the other, vulnerable at the encounter with the other. My analysis of Ionesco's humanism continues beyond his works with a reading of the historicized absurd and humanism in the works of two contemporary diasporic playwrights: Matéi Visniec and Saviana Stanescu.

Magister Artium - MA / Die studie neem - in hoofstuk een - tot probleemstelling dat Karel Schoeman se outsider-karakters nie noodwendig draers van 'n eksistensieel-metafisiesie belewing is nie. Die karakters is nie, soos vry algeneem aanvaar word, te verklaar deur persoonlik-individualistiese karaktertrekke niw. Die outsider-karakter kan teruggevoer word tot die vertrouenskrisis tussen Afrikaner-skrywer en Afrikaner-hegemonie.

<p> There are very few studies devoted specifically to the ethical teaching of Spinoza's Ethics. Instead, commentaters have focussed their attention mainly on the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines found chiefly in Parts I and II. Nevertheless, ethics was Spinoza's primary concern and the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines were intended by him to support and culminate in a practical doctrine of the best way of life. Despite its title, however, the Ethics is silent about what Spinoza means by ethics; indeed, nowhere in this work does he define or explain what ethics is. With this in mind, my chief objective will be to determine what Spinoza himself means by ethics and the significance of this for an understanding of both his ethics and his philosophy as a whole.<p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

<p> An account of salient conceptions shared among McTaggart's contemporaries is offered to maintain the interpretive hypothesis that McTaggart's rejection of time may be a consequence of a more general metaphysical theory.</p> <p> Yet though McTaggart's rejection of time may follow from a more general account, the more general account may be false. In what follows we consider the possibility of generating complete lists from given wholes, as opposed to the practice of generating wholes by enumeration or induction. Historical support is offered for this scheme, followed by a distillation of McTaggart's doctrines, a brief linkage with mereological treatments of time and geometry, and an exegesis of McTaggart's unique account of change. Finally a treatment of McTaggart's argument for the rejection of time is offered which seeks to show that McTaggart's infamous conclusion has largely been misunderstood because of McTaggart's unfortunate emphasis on the verbal implications of his doctrines and the consequent subversion of his positive account of infinite divisibility, inclusion and the relation between descriptions and wholes.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

No description available.

Assertions about metaphysical modality (hereafter modality) play central roles in philosophical theorizing. For example, when philosophers propose hypothetical counterexamples, they often are making a claim to the effect that some state of affairs is possible. Getting the epistemology of modality right is thus important. Debates have been preoccupied with assessing whether imaginability—or conceivability, insofar as it's different—is a guide to possibility, or whether it is rather intuitions of possibility—and modal intuitions more generally—that are evidence for possibility (modal) claims. The dissertation argues that the imagination plays a subtler role than the first view recognizes, and a more central one than the second view does. In particular, it defends an epistemology of metaphysical modality on which someone can acquire modal knowledge in virtue of having performed certain complex imaginative exercises.

Iconoclastic discourse, as a critique of ‘idols’ of various kinds, has been appropriated by a range of different thinkers and traditions – often not always explicitly religious – throughout history. One of the more recent targets of iconoclasm is metaphysics, understood as a way of doing philosophy that appeals to an ideal or transcendent ground that is used to offer a totalising explanation of ‘reality’. For some reason, the issue of ‘metaphysical idolatry’ has become entangled with the problem of ‘writing’, or ‘representation’ more generally, which is pictured in some rather strange ways by a range of thinkers and theorists – including philosophers and theologians such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and Catherine Pickstock – in order to either challenge, or to be held accountable for, the ‘idolatry’ of metaphysical thought. It seems, however, that these strange pictures of writing compound rather than solve the problem of metaphysics, and it is towards pictures such as these that we direct our own iconoclastic critique. What many critics of metaphysics have failed to comprehend, we argue, is that metaphysics is a certain type of philosophical practice, and it must therefore be judged from this perspective. Idolatry itself has, since biblical times, been understood as a form of sinful practice, and unless we understand iconoclastic problems in a praxeological way, we risk basing our critical arguments on delusional assumptions. We turn to the work of thinkers as diverse as Marx, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ryle, Bourdieu, Ingold, and others, who have challenged metaphysics, and the strange pictures that metaphysical thought has inspired, through the adoption of what we call a praxeological approach. It is from this perspective, we argue, that we can make iconoclastic judgements, and justify these judgements, in a way that avoids the speculative conundrums of some other more problematic approaches.