In my dissertation, I argue that dance—whether as practice or performance— embodies the ideologies and values of the human communities that creates it. Specifically, I posit that the contredanse, a French derivative of the English country dance, embodied a mode of sociability, w…
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he following dissertation takes up Alasdair MacIntyre’s challenge in After Virtue. He argued that the Enlightenment project failed western civilization, leaving moral chaos in its wake, which has led to the current state of western morality. He suggested contemporary ethicists p…
Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–1789), a successful portraitist famous throughout Europe during his lifetime, has only recently been awarded a place in the canon of eighteenth-century art. Born in Geneva, trained in Paris, and profoundly altered by his experiences during a five–year …
The Enlightenment era in the West is traditionally referred to as the “Age of Reason” and the cradle of liberalism, which has been perhaps the dominant political ideology in the West since the eighteenth century. Philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill are credited …
Hobbes was Britain’s quintessential atheist at the dawn of the eighteenth century, and Hobbism (a widely recognized creed) was commonly used to identify and police theological and ecclesiological heterodoxy. A competing interpretation of Hobbism emerged over the first fifty year…
This thesis examines the development of materialism in the French Enlightenment from 1745 to 1789. As a relatively new intellectual category in the eighteenth century, materialism was systematized after the 1740s in France and endorsed a monistic ontology and cosmology of matter…
The purpose of this project was to impact participants' awareness of God's presence among a select group of current and former members of the United Methodist Church, Paradise Valley, Arizona via participation in a three-day retreat based in the practice of prayer. The design of…
Rife with knowledge projects, encyclopedia-writing, botanical books, travel accounts, and other writing that we today would call ‘scientific,’ the eighteenth century is marked by an explosion of empiricism and rational materialism, re-shaping epistemological frameworks for under…
The most commonly ignored doctrine in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is his defense of his own critical methodology. This dissertation analyzes Kant’s statements on method in the “Discipline of Pure Reason” and a series of lectures from the 1760s and 1770s to prepare the way for…
Several schools of psychology draw from Buddhist thought and use meditation and mindfulness practices. However, meditation for stress reduction differs from meditation embedded in a project like enlightenment. These evidences led to the hypothesis that Buddhism and psychotherapy…
Contemporary Chinese art draws attention from around the world. Western audiences are familiar with artists like Ai Weiwei艾未未, Xu Bing徐冰, Cai Guoqiang 蔡国强, and Zhang Hua 张洹, but may not have heard about the scholar-artist group. This group is unrecognized partly because American…
Interest in the past and its artifacts pervaded eighteenth-century British culture. Antiquaries from many fields formed societies that fostered discourse on a wide variety of topics. Society members were allowed access to rare artifacts and given forums to discuss their findings…
In the long nineteenth century all the English Protestant missionary societies in India used education as a missionary tool. This study examines their reasons for doing so and their attempts to implement various educational strategies. It also examines the theological and educat…
This dissertation treats the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III (1703-1730) in the context of the European early enlightenment. Intellectual historians have generally placed the Ottoman Empire outside the Enlightenment movement, while Ottoman historians have viewed the early …
This dissertation explores points of literary contact between Arabic and English novels in order to write a transnational history of the genre. Focusing on early novels that think beyond the nation--English novels of the eighteenth century that imagine the East and Arabic novels…
Despite long-standing recognition that the constellation of ethical and political ideas developed by the seventeenth-century Natural Law School played an important part in the development of Enlightenment thought, the relationship between the two remains a fertile area of resear…
What or who is the modern subject? Are people sovereign, filled with passion, creativity, freedom and autonomy; or are we slaves, robots and automatons forever tied to the chains of civilization? It is very common to critique modernity. From the Frankfurt school to Foucault, man…
In late-eighteenth-century Dublin, options were limited for an expanding reading public who wished to consult quality printed works. During this period of the Anglican Ascendancy, membership to institutional libraries or participation in associational activities was largely limi…
This dissertation sets out to rethink, contextualise and historicise a commonplace notion in the Scottish Enlightenment which poses nations and societies as either improving or primitive. The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers were the eighteenth-century pioneers in an intellec…