In contemporary philosophy, the will is often regarded as a sheer philosophical fiction. In Will as Commitment and Resolve , Davenport argues not only that the will is the central power of human agency that makes decisions and forms intentions but also that it includes the capacity to generate new motivation different in structure from prepurposive desires. The concept of "projective motivation" is the central innovation in Davenport's existential account of the everyday notion of striving will. Beginning with the contrast (...) between "eastern" and "western" attitudes toward assertive willing, Davenport traces the lineage of the idea of projective motivation from NeoPlatonic and Christian conceptions of divine motivation to Scotus, Kant, Marx, Arendt, and Levinas. Rich with historical detail, this book includes an extended examination of Platonic and Aristotelian eudaimonist theories of human motivation. Drawing on contemporary critiques of egoism, Davenport argues that happiness is primarily a byproduct of activities and pursuits aimed at other agent-transcending goods for their own sake. In particular, the motives involved in virtue and in its practice as understood by Alasdair MacIntyre are projective rather than eudaimonist. This theory is supported by analyses of radical evil, accounts of intrinsic motivation in existential psychology, and contemporary theories of identity-forming commitment in analytic moral psychology. Following Viktor Frankl, Joseph Raz, and others, Davenport argues that Harry Frankfurt's conception of caring requires objective values worth caring about, which serve as rational grounds for projecting new final ends. The argument concludes with a taxonomy of values or goods, devotion to which can make life meaningful for us. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien created mythology that is fundamentally Christian but in vastly different ways. This task will be accomplished by examining the childhood and early adult life of both Lewis and Tolkien, as well as the effect their close friendship had on their writing, and by performing a detailed literary analysis of some of their mythological works. After an introduction, the second and third chapters will scrutinize the elements of (...) their childhood and adolescence that shaped their later mythology. The next chapter will look at the importance of their Christian faith in their writing process, with special attention to Tolkien’s writing philosophy as explained in “On Fairy-Stories.” The fifth chapter analyzes the effect that Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship had on their writing, in conjunction with the effect of their literary club, the Inklings. The next two chapters will provide a literary analysis of Lewis’s and Tolkien’s writing, with a special concentration on how they transformed their fairy-stories into Christian myths. The thesis will finish with a summary of the conclusions found through the examination of Lewis and Tolkien’s lives and the literary analysis of their mythology. (shrink)

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, both nations experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. This article is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai—medical radiologist, and survivor of the American atomic (...) bombing of Nagasaki, and Albert Wohlstetter—leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Using a combination of mythopeic analysis, biography and illuminative juxtaposition, the study discovers surprising similarities and analogies between the two cases. They each enact and propose interesting variations of sacrificial causalities—claims that human nuclear sacrifices past or promised can bring peace by deterrence now or peace by abolition soon enough. This is an important study now, as both Japan’s nuclear pacifism and the American nuclear umbrella in Northeast Asia are coming under more severe questioning than perhaps ever before. (shrink)

In this essay, I compare and contrast how Boethius, the author of Beowulf, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis found ways to integrate their Christian theological and philosophical beliefs into a work that is set in a time and place that possesses the general revelation of creation, conscience, reason, and desire, but lacks the special revelation of Christ and the Bible. I begin by using Lewis’s own analysis of the Consolation in his Discarded Image to discuss what it (...) means for a Christian author to write in a pre-Christian mode. I find a model for such writing in Ecclesiastes, and discuss how Boethius, while confining himself to the pagan wisdom of Greece and Rome, points the way from philosophical consolation to theological transformation. I then use Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ to unpack the distinction between the author’s Christian faith and the purely pagan consolation he offers to his characters, and locate that dynamic in the epic itself. Next, I explore how Tolkien, in imitation of Beowulf, balances a deep sense of loss and fatalism with an intimation of a higher providence guiding all. Finally, I show how Lewis, in imitation of Boethius, finds in the pagan world of his novel seeds of a greater revelation to come. (shrink)