Ahl-i Haqq (Yārisān) is a unique religion with the fundamental teaching that the power of God, following the original stage of nothingness or absolute oneness, manifests itself in a cyclic manner in seven layers. This sevenfold power of God is called the Haftan. The first comple…
This project examined, by qualitative investigation, the actual content and mechanics of ghost beliefs in Britain today. Through questionnaire, personal interview, and email correspondence, the beliefs and experiences of 227 people were assessed, and considered against historica…
The researcher in this study investigated how preschool teachers' beliefs about teaching practice, children, and discipline and behavior management related to the preschool teachers' level of education, type of teaching certification, years of teaching experience, and race. The …
This dissertation describes and interprets an example of a relationship between belief, imagination, reading, writing, and the art of gardening in colonial Pennsylvania. The chapters analyze and interpret the role and influence of Francis Daniel Pastorius’ art of gardening in ea…
This dissertation explores the tradition of literary romance in order to make an argument concerning the truth of imaginative fiction. In much of literary history, romance literature is subjected to a steady critique. It is assumed that romance stories are overly formulaic, or t…
René Descartes and John Locke were some of history’s most outstanding proponents of the idea that deontological concepts are appropriately applied to the domain of belief. Inasmuch as it is allowed that “ought” implies “can,” then, this suggests that both authors held that our b…
This dissertation is about the nature of perspectival thoughts and the context-sensitivity of the language used to express them. It focuses on two kinds of perspectival thoughts: ‘subjective' evaluative thoughts about matters of personal taste, such as 'Beetroot is delicious' or…
I argue that investigation of Islamic movements in South Asia and elsewhere should be informed by anthropological concerns with subject-formation within historically specific cultural regimes. This entails a widening of the conventional emphasis on the public-formal aspects of I…
The work addresses the manner in which belief develops from a Norse Pagan belief structure to a Christian one throughout conversion and Christianization in Iceland. Here the term "belief" suggests something different from the more commonly studied socio-political aspects of conv…