| 1. |
- Malmqvist, Erik, 1980-
(författare)
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Good Parents, Better Babies : An Argument about Reproductive Technologies, Enhancement and Ethics
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study is a contribution to the bioethical debate about new and possibly emerging reproductive technologies. Its point of departure is the intuition, which many people seem to share, that using such technologies to select non-disease traits – like sex and emotional stability - in yet unborn children is morally problematic, at least more so than using the technologies to avoid giving birth to children with severe genetic diseases, or attempting to shape the non-disease traits of already existing children by environmental means, like education. The study employs philosophical analysis for the purpose of making this intuition intelligible and judging whether it is justified.Different ways in which the moral problems posed by reproductive technologies are often framed in bioethical debates are criticised as inadequate for this task. In particular, it is argued that the intuition cannot fully be made sense of in terms of harm to the children that such technologies help create.The study attempts to elaborate an alternative to that broadly consequentialist approach, by drawing on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, Hans Jonas’s ethics, and Aristotle’s practical philosophy, as it has been received and developed in the hermeneutical tradition. It is suggested that reproductive choices, unlike decisions for already born children, are characterised by a peculiar one-sidedness: the future child appears to the parents as something wholly theirs to decide about, not as a concrete other with whom they must interact in a responsive and attuned way. This is problematic because it means that such choices cannot call upon the particularised moral understanding only gained in interpersonal encounters. In particular, it makes them easily shaped by various tendencies, to which parents are always susceptible, to relate to children in instrumentalising ways, and at risk of reinforcing such tendencies. However, this does not mean that all uses of reproductive technologies are equally troubling. When selecting against severe disease the parents can rely on a widely shared illness experience to escape the dangers that one-sidedness involves. It is concluded that the intuition under discussion, thus explicated and in some ways qualified, makes sense morally.
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| 2. |
- Sörhuus, Mikael
(författare)
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En känsla för det heliga : En undersökning av den samtida emotionsforskningens möjliga bidrag till religionsfilosofin
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis I examine the possibility of critically using material from contemporary emotion theory to develop a fruitful model for understanding the potential epistemic relevance of emotions in religious contexts. The relevance of this thesis is mainly twofold: since religion is an emotional phenomenon, the possible normative epistemic role of emotions needs to be examined. This is a question for the philosophy of religion, but not one that has been much explored. Contemporary emotion research provides promising tools for such an examination, but these tools have only been utilized to a minor degree in the field.In chapter 1, the preliminaries for my inquiry is articulated. In chapters 2 and 3, I evaluate psychophysiological, psychological and philosophical emotion research and find that the philosophical reasons and the empirical evidence speak in favor of a perceptual theory of emotion. In chapter 4, I examine how emotions, being perceptions, are of epistemic relevance. Focusing on a metaphysical discourse I come to the conclusion that emotions are of strong epistemic relevance. In chapter 5, I examine the possibility of giving emotions, being perceptions that are of strong epistemic relevance, an epistemological framework. For this I use the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey and conceive of emotions as habits, or part of habits, which are indispensable for certain human inquiries and knowings.In chapter 6 I turn to religion. I conceptualize religion as lived, and epistemic in that it offers certain goods that agents, being participants in religious spheres of practice, can utilize to deal with existential problems, inter alia, situations involving transcendence. My conclusion is that emotions, given the kind of problems that religious goods can help agents to handle, enable agents to examine the utility of such goods and implement them in their lives. Since this is an epistemic process, and these goods are utilized in many different spheres of practice, I choose to speak of emotions as enabling and justifying religious ways of life. In the end, emotions are about living and hence philosophical work about religious emotions becomes philosophical work about religious practice.
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| 3. |
- Andén, Lovisa
(författare)
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Litteratur och erfarenhet i Merleau-Pontys läsning av Proust, Valéry och Stendhal
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to explore the relation between literary expression and experience in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The principal focus is Merleau-Ponty’s investigations into literature, in two of his first courses at Collège de France, 1953- 1954: Sur le problème de la parole (On the Problem of Speech) and Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage (Research on the Literary Use of Language). While the former remains unpublished, the latter was finally published in 2013. At the time of his premature death, Merleau-Ponty left thousands of pages of working notes. They were supposed to contribute to a major philosophical work, the planned title of which was Être et monde (Being and world). Merleau-Ponty had planned to undertake an extensive examination of language in the last part of the work. However, in the absence of this text, the courses on literary language afford us the possibility of sketching the direction that this research might have taken.The examination of literary language use is, for Merleau-Ponty, made possible by an understanding of language found in Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Saussurean linguistics anticipates the structuralist reading that was later to dominate the intellectual scene. Instead of reading the linguistics of Saussure in opposition to phenomenology, he finds in the former an ally that allows him to think Husserlian phenomenology further.In the course notes, Merleau-Ponty explores the relation between sensible experience and linguistic expressions through close readings of Proust, Valéry and Stendhal. In the writing of Marcel Proust, he finds a writer that perpetually examines his experience, searching for expressions that are capable of bringing it forth. In Stendhal’s writing, Merleau-Ponty finds a literary method that makes the world appear through the “small true facts” that describe it. Finally, in Paul Valéry’s poetic writing he finds a writer superimposing words over other words, in order to create new significations. In their literary writing he finds a capacity to seize the world anew, beyond our habitual preconceptions of it, thus bringing us closer to the experience we already perceive.
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| 4. |
- Jahnke, Fredrik, 1970-
(författare)
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Toleransens altare och undvikandets hänsynsfullhet : Religion och meningsskapande bland svenska grundskoleelever
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In contemporary western society, the changing religious diversity brought to the fore a more visible religion. The Swedish school and the Swedish classrooms are no exception. From a perspective of sensemaking and a wide understanding of religion and religious positions this thesis analyses the discourse on religion among pupils (age 9 to 16) in the Swedish elementary school and under what circumstances they do, or do not, talk about religion with each another. This qualitative study includes themes from and contributes to the study of religion, research on children and young people, and particularly to religious education (RE) in Sweden and elsewhere. The results show that the pupils during the interviews showed different and parallel ways of understanding, relate to and way of talking about religion. However, to some degree they seemed to be unwilling to talk about religion with each other, even though they expressed some interest thereof. Two reasons for this were their limited common discourses on religion, and their concern and anxiety to create conflict and to “step on somebody’s toes”. The latter was also combined with their tendency to show tolerance, respect and deference towards each other. Thirdly, due to their partial lack of discourses on religion the pupils had difficulties to position themselves in relation to religion and to understand others. For instance, this came to the fore and was exemplified by the non-Christian Swedish pupils. They seemed to lack categories to speak of themselves in relation to religion and, for instance, answer questions like: “What do you believe in?”.Even though the pupils did not talk much about religion with each other, the result shows that they had several ways of talking about and understanding religion and religious phenomena – for instance based on popular culture. Not all these understandings and discourses on religion where paid attention to in school or in class. Instead, the pupils had to adapt to discourses prevalent in school which narrowed the possible ways of understanding and talking about religion. In line with this, there were several positions in relation to religion – for instance unsure and uncertain positions – in these schools that was not observed. However, these pupils also have the need to express and understand themselves in relation to religion as well as being understood by others. This is a future challenge for RE-research as well as teaching in schools.The results of this study show, lastly, that the experience and desires expressed by the pupils concerning talking about religion differed to a great extent from the use of dialogue in RE-research. Among the pupils it seemed that the conversation about religion was sacrificed on the altars of tolerance, respect and deference. These results were discussed in relation to the concept of safe space, a concept that needs to be elaborated and sharpened further in RE.
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| 5. |
- Mehrabi, Tara
(författare)
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Making Death Matter : A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD.
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| 6. |
- Farisco, Michele
(författare)
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Brain, consciousness and disorders of consciousness at the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present dissertation starts from the general claim that neuroscience is not neutral, with regard to theoretical questions like the nature of consciousness, but it needs to be complemented with dedicated conceptual analysis. Specifically, the argument for this thesis is that the combination of empirical and conceptual work is a necessary step for assessing the significant questions raised by the most recent study of the brain. Results emerging from neuroscience are conceptually very relevant in themselves but, notwithstanding its theoretical sophistication, neuroscience is not sufficient to provide a complete interpretation or an appropriate understanding of their impact. Consequently, the present thesis starts from the need for an interdisciplinary and hybrid field of research, i.e. fundamental neuroethics.Within this framework, the thesis takes consciousness and related disorders (i.e. Vegetative State/Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome, Minimally Conscious State and Coma) and the addicted brain as illustrative cases of the potential fruitful collaboration between empirical and conceptual investigations.The general goal of the thesis is to contribute to the overall development of bridging the gap between empirical and conceptual understandings of consciousness. The first paper sets the theoretical framework, providing an empirically-based description of the brain with significant philosophical implications for an understanding of consciousness. The last three papers of the thesis try to apply the theoretical framework to illustrative cases. Papers II and III analyse the possible application of science and technology for an easier detection and clinical care of patients with disorders of consciousness, with particular attention to communication mediated by neurotechnology and the simulation of the conscious brain, respectively; paper IV provides a potentially new ethical analysis of addiction within the elaborated general conceptual framework.The conclusion of the thesis is that the impact of neuroscientific results needs that a dedicated conceptual approach reveals and investigates their conceptual meaning. This conceptual analysis is not exclusive but integrative and complementary to the empirical science. The case of consciousness, analysed from both an ethical and conceptual point of view, is highly illustrative in this respect. In the end, a conceptual/linguistic work of clarification is urgently needed.
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| 7. |
- Hallengren, Anders, 1950-
(författare)
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The code of Concord : Emerson's search for universal laws
- 1994. - 1
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this work is to detect a pattern: the concordance of Ethics and Aesthetics, Poetics and Politics in the most influential American thinker of the nineteenth century. It is an attempt to trace a basic concept of the Emersonian transcendentalist doctrine, its development, its philosophical meaning and practical implications. Emerson’s thought is analyzed genetically in search of the generating paradigm, or the set of axioms from which his aesthetic ideas as well as his political reasoning are derived. Such a basic structure, or point of convergence, is sought in the emergence of Emerson’s idea of universal laws that repeat themselves on all levels of reality.A general introduction is given in Part One, where the crisis in Emerson’s life is seen as representing and foreshadowing the deeper existential crisis of modern man.In Part 2 we follow the increasingly skeptical theologian’s turn to science, where he tries to secure a safe secular foundation for ethical good and right and to solve the problem of evil.Part 3 shows how Emerson’s conception of the laws of nature and ethics is applied in his political philosophy.In Part 4, Emerson’s ideas of the arts are seen as corresponding to his views of nature, morality, and individuality.Finally, in Part 5, the ancient and classical nature of Concord philosophy is brought into focus.The book concludes with a short summary.
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| 8. |
- Ellis Nilsson, Sara, 1977
(författare)
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Creating Holy People and Places on the Periphery. A Study of the Emergence of Cults of Native Saints in the Ecclesiastical Provinces of Lund and Uppsala from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries : Att skapa heliga personer och platser i periferin: en studie om uppkomsten av inhemska helgonkulter i de lundensiska och uppsaliensiska kyrkoprovinserna, ca 1000–1300
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Holy people have been venerated in various forms by all religions and ideologies throughout history. Christianity is no exception with the development of the cults of saints beginning shortly after its formation. By the time Christianity reached Scandinavia, saints’ cults had been fully integrated into the Roman administrative structure. The new religion brought with it institutions, as well as religious practices. This thesis examines the cults of native saints that arose in Scandinavia during the Christianization of the region. It compares the Ecclesiastical Province of Lund, established in 1103, and the Ecclesiastical Province of Uppsala, established in 1164. The focus on these two provinces is partly based on their, at times, unequal relationship. The study aims to explain the underlying reasons for the establishment of new cults of saints in connection with the development of an ecclesiastical organization. The primary source material is comprised of liturgical manuscripts and fragments, iconography and diploma. Due to the relative lack of early medieval sources from Scandinavia, the surviving parchment fragments provide an especially valuable resource for research into Scandinavian medieval society. They can reveal the importance of cults of saints for those who promoted them. The first part of this study presents the native saints whose cults are believed to have been established before the year 1300 and places them in categories developed in previous research. The analysis of the geographical spread of cults of native saints in the Lund and Uppsala provinces reveals that the type of saint has no bearing on the spread of the cult. The second part examines and compares the rise of cults of native saints and their place in the early liturgy in each bishopric in the two provinces. The study concludes that the right conditions and permanent central ecclesiastical institutions were required before new cults could be created, especially on an official level with a feast day and liturgy. Although all cults played a key role in conveying ideology and creating a permanent holy landscape on the Christian periphery, their later use in the legitimization of ecclesiastical and secular institutions differed in the two provinces.
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| 9. |
- Klasson Sundin, Maria, 1961-
(författare)
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Barnets religionsfrihet – en villkorad rättighet? : En filosofisk undersökning utifrån FN:s barnkonvention
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation uses philosophical tools to examine the child’s right to freedom of religion within the context of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and other international human rights instruments.Article 14 of the CRC establishes the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. It also establishes the right of the child's parents to guide and support the child in its exercise of the right to freedom of religion, while adjusting this support according to the child's evolving capacities. The emphasis of the study is on how to understand the child as, on the one hand, agent and subject in the exercise of this right and, on the other, dependent on parental support and guidance. For this purpose, the theoretical underpinnings of the child’s right to freedom of religion are examined with a particular focus on the conceptualization of this right in relation to children. With the text of the CRC as a starting point, different theories on rights, autonomy and religion are analyzed in order to find those compatible with both aspects of Article 14: the child as agent and the child as dependent. Theories that demand fully developed cognitive abilities in order to be a moral agent and a rights holder are rejected, as are theories in which the parents are the sole decision-makers on the basis of their own view of what is in the child's interests. In the same way, conceptions of religion in purely cognitive terms, or not taking into account dimensions of practice and observance accessible to children, are rejected.The conclusion drawn from the analysis is that relational conceptualizations of rights and autonomy and multi-dimensional conceptualizations of religion are best served to include both aspects of the child's right to freedom of religion. In viewing all humans, adults and children alike, as both active agents and vulnerably dependent on others, these conceptualizations challenge traditional views on rights and autonomy, and modern views of religion. In the final chapter, aspects of these relational conceptions are put together into a relational, mutuality-oriented model of the child's right to freedom of religion.
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| 10. |
- Kristensen, Kasper, 1985-
(författare)
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Spinoza on Ethical Cultivation : An Analysis of Vulnerability, Empowerment, and Early Modern Cultura Animi
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation concerns Benedict Spinoza’s (1632–1677) account of ethical life, emphasising the role of techniques and exercises for achieving greater power to control one’s thoughts, emotions, and actions. The study aims to show that Spinoza offers a much more coherent and ambitious ethical theory than what is commonly acknowledged, involving both theoretical and practical considerations.The primary focus of the dissertation is to trace the influence of the early modern cultura animi (cultivation of the soul) tradition on Spinoza’s moral philosophy and to explore the novel use to which he puts it. Chapter One relates the central aims of Spinoza’s philosophy to a conception of philosophy as the art of living, connecting the Renaissance humanist revival of cultura animi tradition to Spinoza’s own attempt to construct a scientific ethics. Chapter Two analyses how Spinoza’s theories of imagination, judgment, and emotions explain the deep-rooted habits and prejudices that present key obstacles to ethical progress. Taking this diagnosis of human nature as a point of departure, Chapter Three explores the difficulties involved in trying to attain adequate knowledge and argues that Spinoza constructs his philosophical method to remedy the natural weakness of human understanding. Chapter Four explains Spinoza’s account of the central moral concepts of good and evil, articulating and defending an objectivist reading of his value theory. Chapter Five considers the extent to which a rational understanding of good and evil can alter habits and guide action given that passions are often more powerful than reason. Building on the weakness of reason to control the passions, Chapter Six shows that spiritual exercises are necessary components in Spinoza’s proposed remedy insofar as they fortify rational understanding by producing firm habits of character. The concluding discussion underlines that Spinoza’s ethical cultivation should not be seen as a linear process that secures stable happiness. Rather, people are and remain subject to the power of illusory beliefs and passions, and the ethical struggle is ongoing. By cultivating understanding, modifying one’s desires, reforming vicious habits and performing virtuous actions, however, the individual can learn to live with his or her vulnerability more happily and virtuously.
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