Sexual Taboo: Vampire Myths and Stories
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The belief in vampires has been around for most of recorded history, dating back before the bible and Ancient Egypt to Babylonian demonology and very early Sumerian mythology . Although, it was never the mythology that we think of today; in those times it was a belief rooted just as strongly as...
What is Practical Wisdom?
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Aristotle within his Nicomachean Ethics defines the different regions of the soul, especially the virtues and functions of each. After all his contemplation over universal ideas, such as the very essence and base of justice and wisdom, he also realized the soul must contain a part to contemplate...
Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Good versus Evil, this is the ever present conflict in human morality and while nearly one third of the modern world supports this doctrine by supporting Christianity, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche abhors this division of morals. His essay, Genealogy of Morals, remembers that once Good versus Bad...
Antigone Commentary
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Sophocles wrote three plays about Thebes and while the tragedy of Antigone is chronologically the third and last of these, it was ironically written first out of them. It opens up, giving little background, with the two sisters Antigone and Ismene discussing their two now deceased brothers in...
Carpe Diem? Try Tomorrow
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
Initially, I sat in front of a blank page contemplating how to start the introduction, how to draw the reader in. But after an hour, it became clear to me that I could not easily conjure up a stylish lead-in with the subject matter. So here I am addressing the issue flat out. Does this make me...
The North Indian Tabla Drum as Saivite Hindu Religious Path
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
The traditions of Hindustani (North Indian) tabla drumming gather the various strands of culture that exist in India into a complex social tapestry. In order to understand the cultural phenomenon of tabla music, it must be heard within the context of an Indian heritage originating from a wide...
Anthrologists in Disagreement over Cockfighting
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
In anthropological theory there has been a clear division and consistent debate between cultural materialists and non-materialist symbolic anthropologists. Theorists such as Marvin Harris and Julian Steward are exemplary of the materialist position, while others such as Sherry B. Ortner and...
Postmodernism: Moving Toward Transcendence
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The conception of a utopian society has both motivated and haunted countless civilizations since the dawn of time. Sublime and intangible, the aspiration to reach a “perfect” society is arguably the heart of one of the world's most significant movements; modernism. Proponents of...
An Animal's place in America
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In 1975, an Australian philosopher by the name of Peter Singer first published his controversial book Animal Liberation. It has since become widely known as the beginning of the current “animal liberation movement” in America. The book preached the virtues of vegetarianism and vilified...
The Good-Morrow
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
“The Good-Morrow” is a story written by John Donne that talks about two lovers finding each other, and realizing that nothing in the world ever has or will matter. I believe that the lover's Donne is speaking about are himself and a lover of the past. However, the poem is not just about...
Masculinity in The Woman in White
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The novel, The Woman in White, “seeks to revise recent accounts of the model of male identity posited by the first sensation novel”(Ablow, Par. 4). In The Woman in White, the author, Wilkie Collins, presents masculinity through the character of Marian Holcombe at a time when femininity...
The Flavor and Sound of Liberation
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
The versatile musical functionality of the tabla reflects its utility as an instrument of contemplation. As the rhythmic expression of the drone, the tabla focuses the listener's attention on the present musical moment. From a psychological perspective, “the basis of listening is the...
Devotion and Musical Practice in North India
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
The guru-shisya parampara is the system of master/disciple lineage that characterizes the traditional education system of North Indian music. The term parampara, ‘disciplic succession,' is introduced in the Bhagavad-gita (4.2), when Krsna tells Arjuna: “This Knowledge of yoga was...
Longing For HER: Ferlinghetti's Mad Quest for the Muse
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
While Lawrence Ferlinghetti makes no claim to being enlightened, his poetry is nonetheless a record of and reaction to the sacred journey. While it is illuminating to read words of the awakened prophets of world history, I think it can be as rewarding to read the work of those who, sincere in...
The Inner Soundscape of Nada-Yoga: Sonic Path of Union
Thesis - 3 pages - Philosophy
The Himalayan religious traditions (Saivite Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Tibetan Bon-po) are related by a common heritage of esoteric practices intended to unify the religious aspirant with the ultimate reality (as defined by the particular tradition). This gnosis is defined variously as dzogchen...
Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One is a novel that with its darkly scathing humor attempts to impart the message that the plasticity of the present tense is illusory by exposing the superficialities of California's mortuary business. The contemporaneous effect that living in a world where a perverse...
Notes From Underground: The Autonomic Remonstrance of a Persona
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Dostoevsky's classic, Notes From Underground maintains the transient ability to pass through the realm of classic literature and into the incendiary realm of the literary fiends who feed on accumulated grotesqueries. This transmutability is painfully not shared with the fabricated persona of the...
Bleeding Death: Mortality and Acceptance in Catch-22
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The death toll during World War I surmounted fifteen million. The second World War erased the lives of fifty-five million, nearly five million of which were civilian Jews exterminated throughout Hitler's tyranny. Nine million died during the Russian Revolution, and twenty million more died...
A Fictional History: Shakespeare, England and the Importance of Historical Fiction
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
It is almost amazing, the overwhelming feeling of disgust that infiltrates a high school classroom whenever the subject is history. A kind of primitive competition to find the few kids who actually enjoy the class and bribe them for photocopies of notes and exam answers suffocates like a humid...
Concise Summary of Descartes' Reasoning in "Meditations on First Philosophy"
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Descartes' Meditation One sets out his purpose of creating a new scientific paradigm to be based on a foundation built above the wreckage of his former opinions. He sought a reason to doubt the entire canon of his opinions so that he might begin “to establish anything firm and lasting in the...
Exposition of Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in Philosophy
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Taking their cue from the scientific philosophy of Francis Bacon, the thinkers of the Enlightenment assumed that the mind acted as a mirror, simply reflecting images of outward objects onto the subjective self. Immanuel Kant proposed a reorientation in which the relation between subject and...
Duality in Mahayana Buddhist Scriptures
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
The Buddha's teachings, although expressive of ultimate reality, have been conveyed through the relative medium of language. This discrepancy has led to the invocation of dichotomies such as “reality versus unreality”, “existence versus nonexistence” and “truth versus...
Essay about The Once And Future King by T.H White, Henry IV by Shakespeare, linked to the archetypal values in Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Adventure.
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Perhaps the very word “hero” should suffer a live vivisection for all of its purported morality and bloody, patriarchal implications. There are many universal components of the hero as explored and anatomized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero's Adventure. You've seen it many times before;...
Flannery O'Connor
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Flannery O'Connor was the unmitigated master of her particularly esoteric craft of assaulting the all-devouring gray spaces of the humanistic spectrum. To those who merely make a skeletal browsing of her work or simply are first time readers may find her to be unnaturally grotesque in her stark...
Frakenstein
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When Mary Shelley set herself to the task of writing Frankenstein she consciously wanted to create a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake the thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of...
Dracula and Fear of Female Sexuality
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Bram Stoker's Dracula is undoubtedly one the most consciously sentient and hyperbolic literary incarnations of the excessive fear of women's sexuality that still survives with a vast legitimacy for its content today. Much like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the novel is satiated with the fear of the...
Book Review of Beloved by Toni Morrison
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
It is easy for cataclysmic traumatism to press to obscurity past history because of the weakness and shame of the human spirit itself. History is never a clean palindrome backward and forward, because during its recollection there is always an emotional motive, and nearly every motive is bruised....
A Comparison of Zen and Shin Buddhism: Dogen VS Shinran
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Buddhism was not originally a Japanese religion, since the said originator of the way, Siddhartha Gautama (also referred to as Shakyamuni Buddha) was born in a region that is now Nepal, and spread his teachings mostly around northern India. China later received his teachings through various...
All Quiet on the Western Front
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Eight and a half million people dead and another 20 million injured, it was a disaster unparalleled in human history. There was nothing great about this "Great War" except for the death and destruction. Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front describes the pointlessness...
What is Judaism?
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
What is Judaism? What does it mean to be a Jew? According to Webster's Dictionary, “Judaism is a monotheistic religion that traces its roots back to Abraham and having its spiritual and ethical principles embodied chiefly in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Talmud.” There are three...
