Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Comparative philosophy'

Cartesian dualism is analyzed as a psychological image, instead of as a philosophical proposition. This is done by first arguing that elements of existing commentary are indicative of a psychological complex, acting unconsciously, in contemporary academic communities. As a hermeneutic study, these elements are then further interpreted through a Jungian lens, specifically cultural complex theory. Myth is used to highlight and identify the deep psychological structures that are active in what I am calling the Cartesian Split complex. In this new context, possible origins are explored in cultural history, as well as its purpose, with potential lessons offered for a wide range of academic fields, including depth psychology. Specifically, there is a call to refine terminology used for consciousness, as well as for the overall mind-body dichotomy. Also, a new approach is offered for the history of consciousness. Most importantly, a diagnosis is given concerning the present nature of consciousness, and a potential remedy is offered, in the form of a new reading of the original texts. Such a new reading, however, depends on a new perspective, that which is constructed by the present study.

The doctrine of the metaphysics of Light was a powerful current of thought that flowed through Western philosophy from ancient times down through the Renaissance. It taught that reality was essentially and fundamentally Light, not in a metaphorical but in a proper sense. Moreover, this Light was understood to both emanate being and illuminate cognition.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the possibility that the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light also appeared in the systems of two other philosophers: Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, a Persian philosopher of the 12th century, and Abhinavagupta, a great Kashmir Shaivite philosopher of the 10th century. Suhrawardi worked within the Islamic philosophical tradition and so had direct historical connections with the Neoplatonic sources of the metaphysics of Light in the West. He also claimed Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Indian sources for his Light doctrine. Abhinavagupta had no attested historical connections with either Suhrawardi or Neoplatonism. Yet there are remarkable and striking similarities in the systems of Suhrawardi and Abhinavagupta in both ontology and epistemology that identify them with the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light. The situation with regard to cosmology is more complex. Suhrawardi enunciates a system of emanation similar to that of his Neoplatonic forbearers. Abhinavagupta enunciates a system of emanation, but its categories are radically different from Neoplatonism. Combined with Suhrawardi's invocation of ancient sources, this suggests that both Suhrawardi and Abhinavagupta taught a true metaphysics of Light, but that the context of the doctrine itself should be extended beyond Neoplatonism to include traditions from Iran and India.

This thesis explores Derrida’s engagement with Plato, primarily in the texts “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” and On the Name. The themes of participation and performance are focused on through an analysis of the concepts of mystery and metaxy (μεταξν). The crucial performative aspects of Plato and Derrida’s texts are often under appreciated. Neither author simply says what he means; rather their texts are meant to do something to the reader that surpasses what could be accomplished through straightforward reading comprehension. This enacted dimension of the text underscores a participatory worldview that is not just intellectually formulated, but performed by the text in a way that draws the reader into an event of participation—instead of its mere contemplation. On this basis, I propose a closer alliance between these authors’ projects than has been traditionally considered.

This psychobiographical study explores the research and conclusions of Michael Murphy's theories on evolutionary panentheism and metanormal human potential. Murphy's diverse oeuvre renders it impossible to produce a comprehensive study without accounting for Murphy's integrality; multiple ways in which separate personal and professional events unite to create a whole. The current literature on Murphy appears as segmented overviews which inhibit thorough chronicling of his work. This lacuna contributes to a resistance to attend to Murphy's philosophy within an academic schema. By addressing his achievements as components within the totality of his worldview, the researcher demonstrates that Murphy deserves stronger academic recognition.

This qualitative study incorporates features of psychobiography, hermeneutics, and narrative analysis. Psychobiology emphasizes biographical and psychological development, allowing the researcher to use these aspects of Michael Murphy's activities to provide additional insight into his motivations, philosophies, and work-product.

This psychobiography uses Michael Murphy's literary and nonliterary works, as well as data obtained from interviews with Murphy, as representative constituents of his philosophical totality. Murphy's works integrate his (1) theory on evolutionary panentheism, which proposes a God that not only desires humanity within Its consciousness, but also "cares" for Its creations, residing within and evolving with them, (2) faith in the theories of involution–evolution, which maintain the existence of accessible levels of advancement, (3) innate trust in the interrelationship of all things, (4) evidence that advanced human potential has been part of humanity's development since the origins of contemplation, (5) conviction, stemming from data-driven research of metanormal occurrences, that humanity can evolve and transmute, (6) commitment to overcome the divisiveness of science and religio-mysticism, as well as the disparities of religious tenets, (7) humanist efforts to mitigate problems of the disenfranchised, persecuted, diasporic, and powerless factions of humanity; and finally, (8) trust in the inherent value and possibilities of human life. These components reflect Murphy's overarching goal: building a bridge between science and religion in order to facilitate an intelligent, integrated understanding of the natural and cosmological order--and the future it portends.

Classical, scientific, and Abrahamic origin stories of knowledge establish grounds. Upon excavating these grounds, this dissertation has found repeated and entangled emphases on isolation related to a materially grounded cosmology. The core evidence for this position comes from their comparable displays of the psyche/mind/soul/spirit’s entry into and/or imprisonment within body, the symbolic restraint of Classical and Abrahamic progenitors with stone, and the initiation of philosophy—according to Aristotle—with a theory of materialism. Symbolic interpretations of the religious myths are supported by commentary from within the respective traditions.

Following a consideration of the existential implications of a material ground and (fundamentally) isolated self-image, the work considers mythic liberations of progenitors from stone and Einstein’s liberation of scientific traditions from material reductionism. As Einstein’s labors included an integration of wave dynamics into the way matter is seen, Herakles’ and Christ’s liberations of Prometheus and Adam are actuated by symbolic fluids. Later, their transcendence and atonement(s) are actuated by fluid. As is shown, Classical, Christian, and scientific knowledge narratives all contain reactions to a material ground of being contingent with the integration/imbibing of waves/fluids. The primary examples for this include the hydra-blood that freed Prometheus from stone and Herakles from life, the nectar of immortality he drank upon his death, the wine-blood of Christ that freed Adam from stone and his followers from mortality, and the form of waves and fields Einstein added to the theoretical particle.

This dissertation argues that the reason fluids have played such integral roles in the historical and symbolic transcendence of material/embodied isolation and Classical atoms (isolated matter) is because—unlike material particulates—fluids and waves are capable of union and harmony. My read of particle-wave duality is as a new foundation that challenges atomized cosmologies and worldviews leading many towards a vision of self as estranged from other. My final argument is that each of these prominent Western knowledge traditions present stories that follow a meta-narrative arc defined by an initial commitment to a materially grounded cosmology that is later enhanced—if not healed—by theoretical waves and symbolic elixirs.

Keywords: Mythology, Philosophy, Science, Religion, Wave

This dissertation compares Trinitarian and Buddhist epistemologies relative to the benchmark of scientific knowledge. To this end, it first develops a methodological framework for this comparison and then derives a comparative benchmark from the post-positivist philosophy of science. The methodological framework is developed by combining Francis Clooney's comparative theology with Robert John Russell's method for the Creative Mutual Interaction (CMI) of theology and science. The comparative benchmark is given by the Peircian triadic circuit since this circuit emerges as a methodological invariant within the post-positivist philosophy of science.

Trinitarian and Buddhist epistemologies are therefore compared in terms of their respective abilities to ground the Peircian circuit. However, since the Peircian circuit involves a harmonious integration of three distinct operations within a single noetic process, the ability to ground this circuit presupposes a solution to the one-and-many problem. Thus, Trinitarian and Buddhist epistemologies are ultimately compared in terms of their respective approaches to the one-and-many problem.

To this end, Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhist epistemologies are compared with Trinitarian epistemology. These Buddhist Schools have been chosen due to their active participation in the Buddhism-and-science dialogue. Prior to making this each tradition receives a detailed philosophical exposition in which its epistemology is derived from its metaphysical commitment to oneness, manyness, or some combination of the two. Finally, these systems are compared in terms of their respective abilities to solve the one-and-many problem and hence to ground the Peircian circuit.

This comparison shows that Trinitarian theology can ground the Peircian circuit because it has a both/and approach to the one-and-many problem and also supports an exhaustive cosmic personalism. By contrast, Theravadin Abhidhamma fails outright because its radical pluralism dissolves the human mind and hence all three Peircian operations. Between these two extremes, Tibetan Madhyamaka and Zen provide a dialectic of oneness and manyness in which the Peircian circuit is neither grounded nor destroyed. For these last two systems, therefore, the Peircian circuit emerges as a de facto structure of conventional knowledge.

This dissertation focuses on the elements of performance that contribute to the actress’s development of somatic practices. By mastering the art of articulation and vocalization, by transforming their bodies and their environment, these actors created their own agency. The female actors lived the life of the characters they portrayed, which were full of multicultural models from various social and economic classes. Somaesthetics, as a focus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and somatic awareness, provides a pragmatic approach to understanding the unique way in which the woman of the early modern Spanish stage, while dedicating herself to the art of acting, challenged the negative cultural and social constructs imposed on her. Drawing from early modern plays and treatises on the precepts and practices of the acting process, I use somaesthetics to shed light on how the actor might have prepared for a role in a comedia, self-consciously cultivating her body in order to meet the challenges of the stage.

The pervasive perspective of Western culture views spirit as enmeshed or entombed in matter, an interpretive frame that drives us to periodic socio-political disintegration and bourgeoning planetary illness because it neither honors flesh as vehicle for spirit nor tends spirit as animating flesh. Rather, our dominant paradigm emphasizes disdaining the body and lamenting the spirit, thereby either indulging the former or discounting it, while either disempowering the latter as incarcerated in flesh or seeking its "liberation" from flesh. This is an Anti-Life Equation denigrating both body and spirit, and playing a fundamental role in humanity's current crises in faith, politics, and sustainability.

The Myth of Orpheus has traditionally been interpreted as exemplifying this emphasis by portraying him as a failure both of body because attached to his mortal lover and of spirit because unable to refrain from dooming her to eternity amongst the shades of Hades. In this frame, the mythic master of the lyre becomes a proponent of a transcendentalist imperative to free spirit from carnal prison. But what if Orpheus was not a failure – not because he failed in bringing Eurydice's spirit shade back to the day world, but because he succeeded in relinquishing his love from her carnal form and from his attachments to and projections upon her?

From this perspective, that of a Recombinant Mythology, we may reclaim our foundational stories from the anti-life perspectives and interpretations that color them. Thus we may recognize Orpheus as the very image of perceiving, acknowledging, and embracing the spiral gift of life, in which spirit enters body as a journey of experience for the tempering of soul, for transforming or transmuting phenomenal, incarnate being, rather than as a trap of separation, dislocation, and isolation from divinity.

This dissertation revolves around the riddle of how to honor seemingly disparate traditions such as West African (Dagara) divinatory practices and Western philosophical praxis. The project, following the participatory approach of Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman, sets out to honor these differences by embracing the agapeic-erotic metaphysics of William Desmond, and in so doing delimits modern distinctions between science, philosophy, religion, and anthropology. Rather than move beyond the important scholarly contributions of these fields, however, this dissertation embarks on an interdisciplinary adventure between these traditions by critically reading the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in parallel with Desmond. This project articulates multiple ecologies of participation, with totemism, animism, and naturalism foremost among them. It clarifies how Descola and Viveiros de Castro's robust reading of animist/Amerindian shamanic perspectivism is in keeping with Ferrer and Sherman's participatory enaction. It is critical of Viveiros de Castro's dismissal of totemism as overly abstract, as well as Descola's conflation of naturalism solely with post-Enlightenment thought, and his broad use of the category of analogism to include disparate traditions such as Vedic, Ancient Chinese, Greek, West African, and Central American thought. By way of clarifying this critique, this dissertation applies the same participatory understanding offered to animism by Descola and Viveiros de Castro to both totemic (divinatory) and naturalist (metaphysical/philosophical) enactions, placing all three under the broader heading of ecological perspectivism. The subsequent comparative lens allows for a more balanced reading of these three ecologies by broadening the use of these terms. By including the work of Desmond, it also answers important concerns leveled by critics regarding the metaphysical underpinnings of Descola and Viveiros de Castro's assertions regarding ontological relativity. In so doing, this project sets the stage for renewed dialogue between what are often seen as radically divergent traditions (e.g., the animism of the Achuar, the totemism of the Guugu Yimithirr, and the naturalism of modern science).