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Merlin's Beard and Odin's Eye: An Examination of The Wizard Archetype in Literature, Opera, and Cinema

This was my thesis that consummated my Honor's degree at Loyola. I discuss the striking similarity between the "wizard figures" of several major works-- namely Merlin, Wotan, Gandalf, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Dumbledore--along with the literary and psychological importance of the wise old man, a Jungian archetype.

I have developed a distinctive eight step "Wizard Cycle" (somewhat akin to Joseph Campbell's Monomythic Hero Cycle) that each of the five archetypical wizards follows. The paper includes a detailed literary analysis of the importance of each step to the story's overall effect. As far as I am aware, this paper is one of the first to explore this important archetype in such depth.

This is the third manuscript of this project, and it was presented to an audience of Loyola Honors students and professors in May, 2008, for the annual Honors Academic Festival. I also presented the previous (second) manuscript of this work to the Louisiana Collegiate Honors Conference in March, 2007, at the University of New Orleans.

Epistemological Themes in Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell is one of the most innovative and original works of science fiction published in the last decade. It asks a lot of hard questions about the human mind and identity. It also explores the implications of true Artificial Intelligence: Would such beings have rights under the law? If intelligence and personality can be created in a machine, is the human brain anything more than just a biological computer?

Of particular interest to me was how the Puppetmaster came to be. Rather than being "created" by a programmer, the Puppetmaster began as a simple project that traversed the internet, but eventually achieved self-awareness as a result of its "natural" evolution. The idea that A.I. will evolve from the primordial soup of the information superhighway (rather than be explicitly created by a programmer) is a truly fascinating one, and the main focus of my paper.

This paper was a welcome opportunity to fuse my love of computers and Artificial Intelligence with my study of Epistemology.

Nobody's Problem: A Response to Thomas Metzinger's Being No One

I begin by exploring Metzinger's excellent theory of the phenomenal self-model as presented in Being No One. I acknowledge its potential value for bettering our understanding of the mind, but object to the notion that it can provide any account whatsoever for the cause of "subjective-ness"... in Nagel's terms, the "what-it-is-like-ness" of having a self-aware, subjective mind. Ultimately, his explanation that consciousness is in illusion and that it is "no one's illusion," is a cop out, and logically self-contradictory.

This paper is primarily concerned with the Philosophy of Mind, but also somewhat with Metaphysics.