Thesiss

This dissertation offers a holistic review of the so-called "Platonizing Sethian apocalypses" discovered, in Coptic translation, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. These texts are of fundamental importance to the history of philosophy and early Christian literature, for they played…

Iamblichus of Chalcis was one of the most important figures in the later Platonic Academy. His influence derived from his commentaries on the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagorean writings, but Iamblichus' most significant contribution was to place religious rituals at the …

This dissertation examines the philosophy and poetry of three major British Romantic writers (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth) to contest a popular narrative promulgated by literary scholars and intellectual historians that identifies the Ro…

When the Roman Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus—better known to many as Julian the Apostate—perished on a Persian battlefield in 363 CE, his efforts to turn back the Christianizing currents of the Roman Empire died with him. In the final decades of the fourth century, subsequen…

This dissertation is a study of the initial steps of monastic training and socialization in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt with particular focus on connections to philosophical education and social practices, especially in the Neoplatonic tradition. This study explores aspects …

Manly Palmer Hall is perhaps the most widely impactful metaphysical religious leader of the twentieth century who is hardly mentioned in academic discourse on American metaphysical and esoteric religious movements. While it is not entirely known why Hall has been neglected in ac…

The history of philosophy has been haunted by a singular dilemma manifesting itself in two ways. Metaphysically, it manifests as the One/Many problem: if Being is primarily one, then how do we account for multiplicity, if, however, it is fundamentally many, then how can there be…

This project investigates challenges to the New Testament’s presentation of the Incarnation of the Son of God which derive from the theological and philosophical worldviews of Orthodox Judaism, namely those promoted by Maimonides and Kabbalah. Maimonides’s worldview entailed tha…

This dissertation examines the theurgic Neoplatonism of Iamblichus’ De mysteriis alongside other Greco-Egyptian sources from the second through the fifth centuries CE, including parts of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri (PGM), and related philosophical te…

The tenth-century Ikhwan Al-S[dotbelow]afa' were a secret society that combined neoplatonic thought with their understanding of religion and reading of scripture. They wrote fifty-two epistles on various branches of the sciences, beginning with mathematics and ending with the oc…

Even though it is arguably the most important source for Neoplatonic ideas in the Arabic speaking philosophical tradition, the Arabic Plotinus has until recently received little philosophical attention. This is regrettable, because of the enormous historical and philosophical in…