<p> This dissertation examines two radically different political projects in Argentina as moments in a dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution. The short-lived, progressive Peronist government of 1973 sought to construct a more egalitarian and democratic society, addressing social inequalities while fomenting political mobilization. In response, the last and most violent military dictatorship (1976&ndash;1983) aimed at suppressing social antagonisms and the perceived excesses of mass democracy. In each case, education was a means to form citizens suitable to a specific conception of society. Therefore, each political project can be understood with special clarity through an examination of civic education and pedagogic reforms. The progressive Peronist government encouraged students to participate in exploring and addressing social inequalities to bring about social justice. The dictatorship was counterrevolutionary insofar as it put forth an ideological project without precedent in previous military regimes that aimed not simply at preserving the status quo ante but at founding a new society. In order to do so, it sought to eradicate &ldquo;subversion&rdquo; and to form spiritually minded, obedient, and individualistic citizens through a broad schooling reform. Based on both archival research and oral history, this dissertation sheds light on the political uses of education, on the Cold War dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution in Latin America, and on the centrality of social antagonisms for our understanding of authoritarianism. </p>

The Liber Uricrisiarum of Wellcome MS 225 is a fifteenth-century treatise on uroscopy, the science of diagnosing illness by examining a patient's urine. The manuscript is previously unpublished; furthermore, the dissertation provides scholars with the first major text in Middle English on the subject. Uroscopy was ancient and was widely used: for nearly sixteen centuries it was the principal means of diagnosis. Moreover, in Middle Eastern and Western civilizations, uroscopy was synonymous with and emblematic of the medical profession According to the manuscript itself, the Liber Uricrisiarum is a translation, nearly 'word for worde,' of the treatise De Urinis by Isaac Judaeus, a Hebrew physician of the late ninth and early tenth centuries. The Liber Uricrisiarum is in fact not simply a translation but an elaboration of Isaac's text. There is, for example, a long digression on the planets and on astrology, as well as discussions of the humors, digestion, circulation, anatomy, and reproduction, making the Liber Uricrisiarum a relatively compact compendium of medieval medicine The existence of this text and others like it in Middle English demonstrates the emergence of vernacular texts, generally translations from Latin or Greek, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. These vernacular texts made medical and scientific knowledge available to the lay medical practitioner, the leche (healer) who was not educated at a university as was the physician and who therefore knew little Latin or Greek. Accordingly, Wellcome MS 225 does not discuss the philosophy of diagnosis, suggesting a text made for medical practitioners rather than medical theoreticians The introduction accompanying the edited text places the manuscript in its historical context and also discusses, among other subjects, sources and analogues, scribal hands, the dialect in which the manuscript was written, and editorial principles. Textual notes describe individual features of the manuscript in detail, and explanatory notes identify medical terminology and Latin words, as well as Middle English vocabulary The manuscript has been ascribed to Henry Daniel, a Dominican friar who flourished around 1379. But the ascription, though plausible, remains doubtful / acase@tulane.edu

In the last fifty years or so there has been a tremendous renewal of interest in Aristotle's biological writings. As I understand it, this interest was motivated by at least two different sorts of researchers who had different assumptions and motivations. On the one hand there are the biologists, and chief among them, D'Arcy Thompson. On the other hand there are those who, in their study of Aristotle's philosophic work, have been forced to recognize that a significant portion of the corpus---more than one quarter of the total by most accounts---is devoted to these biological subjects and wish to make sense of how these musings are to be understood in light of the canonical works, e.g. the Metaphysics, Physics, De Anima, Nichomachean Ethics . Many point to David Balme as one of the principle sources of this interest in putting the biological works within a philosophical framework. The point is to understand better why Aristotle repeatedly turns to biological examples to clarify questions encountered in the study of physics or metaphysics; for 'plants and animals are substances (ousiai) most of all' (Meta. Z.8). One must understand Aristotle's philosophical biology at the same time as trying to understand his biological philosophy The sign of this renewed interest is the recent appearance of numerous books and articles devoted to the study of Aristotle's biological writings. The study I am undertaking of Aristotle's Parts of Animals (PA) aims to contribute to this growing body of scholarship. Perhaps the easiest, yet the most significant, way to distinguish the contribution I think I can make is this. Most scholars believe that the PA is not really a book, that it does not form a whole that is coherent; hence, among the numbers of books and articles, there is not a treatment of the argument of the PA as a whole, as its arguments unfold. To understand the general sentiment regarding the status of the PA we do not have to look far; David Balme and others hold that PA I is a 'string of papers' and that PA II--IV is largely independent from the argument of PA I. (see also Pellegrin 1986, pp 146 ff.). In contrast to this position, I suggest that the argument of the PA can be seen as a whole, that the topics first touched upon in PA I are picked up, expanded, modified, and examined in greater detail in the course of the argument of the PA as a whole / acase@tulane.edu

<p>Democracy has been a part of the Swedish society for a long period of time and it is also a part of the Swedish elementary school curriculum, in which you can find a number of statements that expresses that the Swedish elementary school should socialize the children into becoming role model citizens. This also conjures with the available research that describes schools in general as socializing. This led me to a question that hasn’t been answered: How much of the curriculums reasons for socialization the pupils are based on democratic values and how much of it can be dated back to events prior to the curriculum?</p><p>The methodological approach is an analysis of ideologies as described by Sven-Eric Liedman and Ingemar Nilsson in Ideologi och ideologianalys. The text is focusing on the fact that a text has two layers; one is the manifest which is roughly the same as explicit or present in the text. The other layer is the latent, which is a part of the texts meaning that is indeed present but it doesn’t show until you analyse the text in the company of a valid context, in my case the context is going to a text about political socialization and a brief review of curriculums different contexts. The essay, then, is consisting of 6 different cases consisting of a brief context and an analysis of a curriculum. The chosen curriculums are from 1919, 1955, 1962, 1969, 1980 and 1994.</p><p>The study showed that a part of the curriculums reasons for socializing the pupils are based on democratic values which can be found in every curriculum that I’ve studied. The study also showed that the curriculums that I’ve studied are also partly consisting of opinions that can be dated back to events that occurred years prior to the curriculum.</p>

My dissertation examines the Franciscan engagement with medicinal alchemy between 1250 and 1360. I investigate the works of three generations of Franciscan alchemical and apocalyptic authors: Roger Bacon (ca. 1214/20--ca. 1292), Vitalis of Furno (1260--1327), and John of Rupescissa (ca. 1300--ca. 1366). Working across the disciplines of religious studies and the history of science, I demonstrate that the material process of alchemy inflected Christian conceptions of apocalypse, resurrection, and prophecy. / Radical apocalypticism and religious alchemy share a defining characteristic. Both are concerned with manifesting spiritual truth on the physical plane. In the case of the Apocalypse, evil is neither an idea nor a concept, rather it is personified by Antichrist and his followers. The New Jerusalem was not merely a vehicle for spiritual reflection; it was a promise to the elect. Therefore, those who will be resurrected in body and inhabit the New Jerusalem will manifest heaven writ on earth. Alchemy represented an even more present possibility of literally distilling a heavenly reality. The alchemist's theoretical ability to create a post-resurrection body or to use the substance of heaven to cure every ailment, drive away demons, and bestow courage on enemies of Antichrist not only effaced the separation of heaven and earth, it offered unmediated access to divine power.

Democracy has been a part of the Swedish society for a long period of time and it is also a part of the Swedish elementary school curriculum, in which you can find a number of statements that expresses that the Swedish elementary school should socialize the children into becoming role model citizens. This also conjures with the available research that describes schools in general as socializing. This led me to a question that hasn’t been answered: How much of the curriculums reasons for socialization the pupils are based on democratic values and how much of it can be dated back to events prior to the curriculum? The methodological approach is an analysis of ideologies as described by Sven-Eric Liedman and Ingemar Nilsson in Ideologi och ideologianalys. The text is focusing on the fact that a text has two layers; one is the manifest which is roughly the same as explicit or present in the text. The other layer is the latent, which is a part of the texts meaning that is indeed present but it doesn’t show until you analyse the text in the company of a valid context, in my case the context is going to a text about political socialization and a brief review of curriculums different contexts. The essay, then, is consisting of 6 different cases consisting of a brief context and an analysis of a curriculum. The chosen curriculums are from 1919, 1955, 1962, 1969, 1980 and 1994. The study showed that a part of the curriculums reasons for socializing the pupils are based on democratic values which can be found in every curriculum that I’ve studied. The study also showed that the curriculums that I’ve studied are also partly consisting of opinions that can be dated back to events that occurred years prior to the curriculum.

This dissertation looks at Aristotelian political thinkers of the later Middle Ages and argues that they meet all of the criteria of a mature Kuhnian science. Scholars of medieval Europe have spent decades arguing over exactly how one should define medieval Aristotelianism and which thinkers qualify as Aristotelian. I answer this question by turning to the philosophy of science literature. By using the criteria laid out by Thomas Kuhn- a common education, a shared technical language and general agreement on problem choice- I am able to parse out a group of political thinkers who qualify as a scientific community. My dissertation then goes on to illustrate how several different medieval thinkers were able to operate within this Aristotelian paradigm. This project gives scholars of the Middle Ages a more useful lens through which to view the phenomenon of medieval Aristotelianism. For those interested in political science more broadly, I demonstrate that our field has, in fact, experienced a period of maturity, in which scholars shared a unified paradigm and proceeded with their research in concert. I also show some of the benefits and limitations of a common research agenda in the study of politics.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Francisco, 2009. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 47-06, page: 3510. Adviser: Elizabeth S. Watkins.

In the foundational scholarship on literature and evolution, there remains a tendency to focus on Darwinian evolution's influence on Victorian literature. Without ignoring Darwin's importance to both the late-19th century and our own time, this dissertation contributes to an emerging interest among historians and literary scholars in exploring the pre-Darwinian, transatlantic contexts of evolutionary discourse. By returning to a time when 'the development hypothesis' was a more fluid concept, we can examine how writers and poets on both sides of the Atlantic were able to actively shape its meanings and to use it as a framework for reflecting on their literary craft. In this dissertation, I argue that for Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, development is a key term in their particular constructions of a distinctive American literature in the 1840s and '50s. It underlies Whitman's conception of an experimental poetic voice in the 1855 Leaves of Grass as well as Melville's ambitions for literary narrative in Mardi and Moby-Dick. At the same time, the sweep of their careers well beyond the publication of Origin of Species in 1859---into the last decade of the nineteenth century---allows us to chart their later responses as evolution increasingly gained acceptance and Darwin became a front man of sorts for evolution. Although Whitman and Melville continue to incorporate evolution and scientific modernity into their late-career self-fashioning, we can trace a movement toward increasing distance, disillusionment, and abstraction in these deployments. This dissertation has implications not only for contemporary Whitman and Melville studies but also for re-assessing the broader trajectory of 19th-century American literary history. In conventional textbook accounts, the influence of Darwinian evolution is measured primarily in terms of the emergence of literary naturalism, a realist genre known for its unsparing look at lives caught in the scope of unsympathetic natural forces. Here, I suggest that developmental evolution offered alternative formal and epistemological possibilities for mid-19th-century American literature, enabling Whitman and Melville to develop hypotheses about literary truth and human value. / text