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The repository facilitates access to our research, creative works, and publications by collecting, sharing and archiving content selected and deposited by our faculty, graduate students and staff. Faculty, graduate students and staff can use the institutional repository to set up collections and deposit content into the collection. To inquire about establishing a new collection, please contact us at repository@icscanada.edu Thank you for visiting the ICS Repository! ICS is a private graduate school that receives 80% of its funding from generous donors. A donation of any amount will help to ensure the repository continues to be available and grow. Please donate online at www.icscanada.edu/support. If you need more information please send an email to donate@icscanada.edu
Recent Submissions
Item Finitude and Wonder: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Anthropology(Institute for Christian Studies, 2025-06)This thesis traces the development of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s anthropological thought across three works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, and On Certainty. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein articulates an understanding of the human being as a creature whose very existence is founded on language. Then in the Investigations, Wittgenstein adopts a more refined and naturalistic view of the human being as a relational creature shaped primarily by the linguistic practices of its community. Finally, in On Certainty, Wittgenstein strikes at the heart of the mystery of being human, that is, being a creature inescapably rooted in dependence and trust. Particularly with its inclusion of On Certainty, this thesis argues for a holistic understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as it pertains to living a deeply human life filled with wonder. Read especially against the backdrop of his life and personality, Wittgenstein’s philosophy reveals itself to be more than a theory about language, but rather an existential work informed by a deep anthropological concern.Item In Pursuit of Human Flourishing: A Study in Personal Violence and its Remedy, as Informed by Thomas Aquinas with Help from Aristotle and Proclus(Institute for Christian Studies, 2024)The work of this thesis begins with a rather obvious observation: bad things happen in this world. Very many bad things happen, very often. More specifically, people do bad things to other people, and to themselves. There are a great many people who have invested their lives in addressing varying kinds of harm within human existence, in varying expert ways. Within the messy business of thinking about bad things that happen, however, what has emerged as especially perplexing and vexing to me is the problem of the ordinary ways in which people of relatively good will do personal violence to the people around them in the world. There are of course many contexts of moral education addressing the problems of human interpersonal activity, and many contexts designed to equip people with principles and skills to be responsible human beings. Given that people of good will typically already have some form of moral code to guide their behaviors, and already have some form of moral identity to animate a desire to do good, what can be done about the problem? How are people who already have a desire to do good and a sense of what the good is to approach the reality that they actually at times do harm? Further, how are they to be helped to do otherwise? This is the problem that this thesis will address – a difficulty that we will refer to as the problem of personal violence.Item Liberating Tradition: An Exploration of Liberation Theology Through the Lens of Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics(Institute for Christian Studies, 2016)This thesis explores the potential for critical transformation within religious traditions by examining Latin American Liberation Theology through the lens of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology. It argues that Ricoeur’s concepts of cultural imagination and collective memory provide a robust philosophical framework to understand how religious communities can generate self-critical movements from within, rather than in opposition to, their own traditions. Using the case of Liberation Theology—a movement that reinterprets Christian doctrine to address systemic oppression in Latin America—this work analyzes how reinterpretations of religious narratives can inspire social and political action toward justice. The study traces how Liberation Theology operates both ideologically, by uniting communities around shared memories of suffering, and as a utopia, by envisioning transformed futures grounded in biblical hope. Through detailed engagement with Ricoeur's theory, the thesis demonstrates how religious traditions, when reimagined through faithful and innovative memory practices, can become dynamic sources of liberation rather than instruments of oppression.Item Michel Foucault's ascesis and the Christian epistemologization of the subject in Foucault's genealogical technique de soi(Institute for Christian Studies, 2006)In this thesis I examine Foucault's later writings in the 80s on the technology of the self and engage current scholarship that discusses the applicability of Foucault's use of this concept for understanding freedom in Christian theology. After a detailed examination of Foucault's writings on this subject matter I show that lie sharply contrasts an "aesthetics of existence," a term referring to the self in ancient Greece, from a Christian technology of the self. This latter term I show is in fact precisely what Foucault exposes as a constrictive technology of the self which he credits as making an indefinite subject into a predicable, knowable and definite subject. Bringing this prevalent distinction into the greater scholarship on Foucault, I challenge some readings that support the view that a premodern Christian ascesis functioned as an inspirational source for Foucault's "critical ontology" of the modern subject.Item Decreation: The Unity of Action and Contemplation in Simone Weil(Institute for Christian Studies, 2024-05)"As described above, any introduction to Simone Weil that foregrounds the events of her extraordinary life at the expense of her ideas is, in my view, insufficient. That is not to say, however, that her personal experiences ought to be ignored. In fact, it would be unwise to attempt to divide her personhood from her philosophical and mystical ideas. According to Marie-Magdeleine Davy, Weil is “essentially paradoxical, even contradictory” but she “nevertheless presented in herself a perfect unity.” This unity is not merely true in the sense that apparent contradictions in philosophy can be reconciled, but also in that the apparent political and mystical division of her life and commitments are bound together. In Davy’s description, “from whatever angle you look at her, from the intellectual, the religious or social, she is entirely a whole.” Despite this, scholarship on Weil often approaches her from one of two directions: either the socio-political or the mystical and religious. Seminal texts like A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism partition her thought into categories like “Liberty,” “Oppression,” and “Power,” and minimally engage with her mystical theology. This kind of categorization is not without its uses; for one, it allows scholars to engage with individual concepts in depth while leaving behind the aspects of her thought more peripheral to their concerns, but partitioning the mystical and political into distinct categories can too easily allow scholars to disregard their interconnectivity."
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