Alyssa L. Firman

This paper begins with an overview of the various traditions of disaster research, as well as the major theories pertaining to industrial disaster prevention. Six modern industrial disasters are then expounded and analyzed in the context of the prevailing theories, revealing a common causal linkage. In closing, the common cause is analyzed and discussed, including barriers to rectification.

Through an explication of the prominent Hegel scholar John Russon’s interpretation of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic in his paper Hermeneutical Pressure and the Space of Dialectic, I endeavour to show how this dialectic applies to the historical relationship of man to woman. I bring this descriptive claim to full recognition through Iris Marion Young’s paper Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality, in which Young demonstrates the way in which typical feminine physicality embodies the consequences of the lived contradiction that is the self consciousness of the slave in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. I will proceed to defend the normative claim that understanding this dialectic forces the women of the current historical epoch to realize themselves as competent, equal, hermeneutical agents who are responsible for actualizing the realization of themselves in the world as competent, equal, hermeneutical agents through the roles they assume.

The one who comes to apprehend the truth of being in the human, as the human, can either assume the truth in becoming one with it, or they can negate the truth by choosing to live without accordance with it. The one who affirms the truth and seeks to live in accordance with it is the one who, in the Indian Epic philosophy of The Mahabharata, comes to walk through the illusory world in internal contentment as an ascetic. Asceticism, as will come to be understood, is not merely an empty renunciation of all worldly things; but is the full renunciation of attachment to any and all worldly things, including oneself, in the face a greater understanding. It can only be realized by those of intelligence, whose realization is that asceticism is itself the only possible freedom there is from bondage in human existence, rather than death. The one who chooses to sleep walk through existence in their capriciousness, striving for only the carnal pleasure derived from desires, determined in their dependency, will never, and if ever then not easily, be able to come to realize this truth which the ascetic knows; namely, that the human beings thoughts and actions are both the lock and the key of the chains which constrain its mind, with which it either permits or inhibits its own freedom.

In this essay, four possibilities of human nature put forth in the Neo-Confucian tradition of Chinese Philosophy will be explored, in hopes of shedding light on the arguments and ideas supporting belief in each of the varying possibilities; Mencius, who claimed human nature is good, and Hsün Tzu, who believed human nature is evil. As well as Kao Tzu, who believed human nature is neither good and evil, and Yang Hsiung, who believed that human nature is a mixture of both good and evil.