In philosophy time is one of the most difficult subjects because, notoriously, it eludes rationalization. However, Bergson succeeds in presenting time effectively as reality that exists in its own right. Time in Bergson is almost accessible, almost palpable in a discourse which overcomes certain difficulties of language and traditional thought. Bergson equates time with duration, a genuine temporal succession of phenomena defined by their position in that succession, and asserts that time is a quality belonging to the nature of all things rather than a relation between supposedly static elements. But Bergson's theory of duration is not organised, nor is it complete - fragments of it are embedded in discussions of various aspects of psychology, evolution, matter, and movement. My first task is therefore to extract the theory of duration from Bergson's major texts in Chapters 2-4. In Chapters 5 and 6 I consider duration and time on an abstract level, as general metaphysical concepts, developing arguments beyond Bergson's explicit discourse. In particular, Bergson proposes the idea of duration as heterogeneity wherein all elements entwine and influence each other, and where the past contributes to the present. I challenge this unidirectional view of temporal reality and suggest that if in heterogeneity everything influences everything else, then subsequent temporal phases produce retrospective changes in previous temporal phases. Also, I challenge the exclusion of temporal relations from the theory of time, and incorporate into the theory of duration both time as a quality and time as a network of relations. Chapters 7 and 8 exemplify and concretise heterogeneous duration as self, examining various aspects of selfhood and its temporality. Chapter 9 deals with the problem of discontinuity within duration that emerges in chapters 7 and 8. Discontinuity comes through in various gaps and leaps involved in the existence of an individual consciousness and in the universal development of evolution, whereby the previous phase cannot account for the novelty of the following phase. I propose a way of saving the idea of the continuity of duration by changing one's observation point in regard to the observed process: the sense of discontinuity is due to our view of the past, contaminated by our knowledge in the present. Instead of examining temporal reality from the imagined present situated in the past to the actual present, we can look at it backwards, from the actual present into the past, descending from the new to the old, from the more complex to the less complex.

This thesis aims to determine what is distinctive to the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). While his work has largely been received as a form of 'Christian existentialism' (notably by Jean-Paul Sartre), and thus interpreted in relation to other philosophies of existence, it is my contention that this prevents an appreciation of his specificity. I therefore recommend a new reading of his thought, which, through analysis of his various philosophical presentations of time, re-situates him within the twentieth-century French intellectual tradition. Part I of the thesis provides an introduction to his philosophy of time, analysing his position in specific relation to Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Chapter One raises the question as to whether his position is then compromised by his engagement with eternity, for this seems to undermine time's significance. However, what begins to emerge from Chapter Two onward, is that such a question may be inappropriate with respect to Marcel's understanding of philosophy. Part II (Chapters Three and Four) then explores the implications that his work’s various modes have on the content of his arguments: first, the diary-form of his formative works and his (continuing) use of a first-person narrative style in his essays and lectures; and second, the (non-narrative) form of his theatre, to which Marcel also accorded philosophical significance. Here, Marcel is read alongside Paul Ricœur (1913-2005) and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), who also tried to approach philosophy differently – as is especially manifest in their conceptions of time. Finally, Part III (Chapter Five) reconsiders the relation between Marcel’s philosophy and religion, asking how his references to God affect the basis of his philosophy, and what this entails for interpreting time in his work. In light of these discussions, the conclusion then reflects on what philosophy is for Marcel, and how he should therefore be received.

It is my contention that physics and metaphysics (or at least the aspects of metaphysics to be considered in this thesis) broadly strive to achieve common goals: to understand what our physical system is constituted by, and both how, and why it evolves in the way that it does. Metaphysicians, as well as the scientific disciplines, play an important role in our understanding of the universe. In recent years, physicists have focussed on finding accurate mathematical formalisms of the evolution of our physical system - if a metaphysician can uncover the metaphysical underpinnings of these formalisms; that is, why these formalisms seem to consistently map the universe, then our understanding of the world and the things in it is greatly enhanced. Science, then, plays a very important role in our project, as the best scientific formalisms provide us with what we, as metaphysicians, should be trying to interpret – but these interpretations are integral to understanding the nature of natural laws and causation. In this thesis I examine existing metaphysical views of what a law is (both from a conceptual and from a metaphysical perspective), show how closely causation is linked to laws, and provide a priori arguments for and against each of these positions. Ultimately, I provide an analysis of a number of metaphysics of natural laws and causation, apply these accounts to our best scientific theories, and see how these metaphysics fit in with our concepts of cause and law. Although I do not attempt a definitive metaphysical account myself, I conclude that any successful metaphysic will be a broadly Humean one, and furthermore that given the concepts of cause and law that shall be agreed upon, Humean theories allow for there to be causal sequences and laws (in line with our concepts) in the world.

In this thesis, I offer the first full-length study of the metaphysical view known as pandispositionalism. Pandispositionalism is a view about natural properties (and relations), and its central claim is that all such properties are irreducibly dispositional, or 'powerful', in nature. In recent decades, the idea that dispositions are real, irreducible features of reality has gained increased credibility, yet pandispositionalism – the strongest form of realism about dispositions - remains a possibility which has not been fully explored. During this thesis I aim to go some way towards remedying this. The thesis is split into two parts. The first part of the thesis, which comprises six chapters, falls under the broad title 'The Metaphysics of Pandispositionalism'. My primary aim during this part of the thesis is to develop a metaphysical framework within which pandispositionalism can plausibly be sustained. In the course of doing this, the questions to be addressed include: Are irreducibly dispositional properties best viewed as universals or (sets of) tropes? In what ways are properties related on the pandispositionalist picture? How are relational structures of dispositional properties best represented? Can geometrical properties really be understood in dispositional terms? The second part of the thesis, which comprises five chapters, falls under the broad title 'Pandispositionalism and Causation'. It has often been said that a plausible realist account of causation should fall out of a dispositional ontology, but the details are yet to be worked out. In this part of the thesis I aim to sketch the kind of view of causation we are arguably left with if pandispositionalism is accepted. Questions to be addressed include: Should the pandispositionalists accept that causes and effects can be simultaneous? Can the Salmon-type process theory of causation be straightforwardly understood in dispositionalist terms? Can the pandispositionalists plausibly view cases of property realisation as cases of causation?

In 'Oneself as another' Paul Ricoeur considers the nature of selfhood concluding that it can only be understood as polyvalent. He uses narrative identity to show that because selves both “act and suffer” human identity is intimately tied with encounter with the Other. The ethical dimension is explored in a mediation between Aristotelian teleological ethics and Kantian deontological morality, resulting in phronēsis or practical wisdom. The book ends with a number of aporias, including the problem of identifying the internal voice, heard in the conscience – the voice of attestation. In a related paper, which provided the impetus for this thesis - “The self in the mirror of the Scriptures” - Ricoeur considers the issues of identity from a religious perspective. The thesis critically reviews the development of Ricoeur’s thought, moving from philosophy through hermeneutics to ethics, and its implications for theology, moving from questions of the will, to biblical hermeneutics and Christian ethics. It questions the concept of narrative identity and is particularly concerned with the place of the incompetent narrator in community. It concludes that we must take seriously Ricoeur’s insistence that biblical faith adds nothing to the consideration of what is good or obligatory, but belongs to an economy of the gift in which love is tied to the naming of God. However, to consider what this might mean in pastoral and ethical terms for those who understand themselves as summoned selves, and seek to find their image in the mirror of scripture, the thesis concludes with extended exercise in biblical hermeneutics, drawing on Ricoeur’s consideration of genre as a poetic mode. The thesis suggests that the comic parables help us to hope for more than we experience in our frailty, while the tragic parables illuminate our incapacity and enable us to forgive others their failure.

Pascal's Wager, discussed in his Pensées, has provoked discussion and strong views ever since its publication. In it, he proposes: Either God is or he is not. But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question.ⁱ In this thesis I hope to make a contribution to the ongoing debate by setting Pascal's Wager into a modern decision-making context, providing a taxonomy of objections to the Wager and developing a critical framework which can be used to systematically examine each category in turn to see whether an objection holds. I will also present a new approach to handling 'mixed' strategies, as suggested by Alan Hájek and others, which uses a heuristic model of our perception of infinite rewards. I hold that Pascal's remedy for the unbeliever is a therapeutic response which is entirely in line with modern psychological practice and should not offend moral sensitivities, because it is purely an experiment to see whether faith can naturally arise once the objections are temporarily set aside. I argue that Pascal's Wager needs to be seen as an exercise in personal risk management and that Pascal anticipated both modern decision theory and the associated psychology of how we make choices in formulating his Wager. I suggest that if we understand it in this light, employing the critical toolkit that I assemble, then Pascal's Wager holds against all current objections. ⁱ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995). 122. L418.

This thesis forwards a path-based hermeneutics as a middle path (Skt. madhyamā-pratipad) between Deconstruction and Mādhyamaka, in order to understand our existential relatedness without reference to Being. It does not attempt to do so by way of a comparative analysis, which I believe results inevitably in some form of reification of both in terms of their method. Rather, what I see as unique to both Deconstruction and Mādhyamaka is this very lack of method – hermeneutical or otherwise – hence underscoring the significance of this path (either as démarche or mārga) that demands our existential response. The method is the argument, and in working through the various linguistic, epistemological, and ontological assumptions we thus engage (as our response and responsibility at once) with our very conditions of possibility that make them impossible at the same time.

The aim of this thesis is to examine a radical relational agency, applied to contemporary environmental resistances, that incorporates both the thought of Michel Foucault and complexity theory. While Foucault’s thought, following from his argument that power is a relation, implies a relational agency, it does not, however, account for the agency of nonhumans and environments. Because power is a relation and not a possession, it can no longer be viewed as an attribute of individual subjects. Similarly, a relational agency is defined as an aspect of power relations. Complexity theory, on the other hand, acknowledges that humans interact with nonhumans and environments, but does not acknowledge that all relations are relations of power. In addition to Foucault’s explanation of power relations, complexity theory explicitly describes the processes of self-organization through which individual and diverse agents interact and change can emerge. Thus, a radical relational agency is defined as an aspect of the power relationships between many diverse agents. Change, according to both Foucault and complexity theory, happens nonlinearly. As a result, it often occurs unpredictably. However, change within complex systems is also limited by previous historical emergences. In this sense, both possibility and risk are inherent in the relationships between humans, nonhumans and environments. Indeed, I argue that a radical relational agency occurs because there are both possibilities and risks generated within ecological relations and relations of power. Therefore, I argue that any environmental action must account for the unpredictability inherent to the complex interactions between humans, nonhumans and environments.

This thesis reworks the idea of Chineseness as a translational point in its exploration of the intricate knot of nothingness, a sublimity which makes Chinese culture irreducible to the postcolonial, postmodern or poststructuralist movements because what the West arrogates from Eastern philosophy or contrariwise is simultaneously an interrogative advancement and a detour to selfsameness. Derrida's deconstructive absence in Chinese writing may be surprising to those acquainted with his eloquence on phonetic writing and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. By (dis)locating the commentaries revolving around Derrida's reticence on Chinese inscriptions, I shall launch the argument from what most have put down merely as a "lack" of knowledge, inverted here to expose the always already missing link between the articulator and reality. Derrida's cryptic remark about Chinese writing as "the testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism" can be read as a suggestion of a certain parallelism between deconstruction and Eastern philosophy, accidentally encountering in this paper. The signifying dissemination within writing is most advantageous to the reading of dao and khora as synonymous sites and only meeting with a supplementary inversion, an ironic twist, at the divide between the East and the West. This Lacanian knot, a result of the encore of centres, is reconciled provisionally with a deus ex machina, the "parallax view" of Slavoj Zizek, the interpretative (l)ink. As part of the many chiasmic encounters, it is the assertion here that Derrida's rewriting of the Heideggerean Dasein, "There is nothing outside the text", signals the revolutionary aestheticisation of the ontological contours which gives to a replete subjectivity, political or otherwise. Inversely, the ontological disclosure in and through aesthetics provides impetus to epistemology. And the circular relations between aesthetics and existential ethics are that which provides the possibility of reconciliation with alterity, the trace that inevitably keeps reading open. Given that we can relate the ethical only to the contextual, the contingency underlying its very definition discloses an indeterminacy that ensures openness to the future, and, coupled with the readiness to respond to the call of the other, prompts a re-reading as reading irresponsibly. In other words, the semiotic coming-to-be reciprocates the coming-to-be of the human entity. Derrida's silence about Chinese writing may be a gesture to the signifying reticence at the heart of discourse, simultaneously the poetic place and moment, which enables this critical traversal, a wayfaring entailing the bearing of the past so that alterity can be imag(in)ed, the "supernumerary" of both dao and khora, with the disablement of a fixed discursive trajectory.

The thesis positions three modem thinkers working in different areas of the human sciences - William James, Ludwig Binswanger and Oliver Sacks - within a framework of romantic science. Romantic science is a term which is developed explicitly in the work of Sacks and also illuminates the central concerns of James and Binswanger. As such, romantic science provides a useful framework in which to discuss conceptual changes in the medical humanities (a branch of the human sciences directed to patient care) since the late nineteenth century. The introduction explores romantic science, firstly, as a modem tradition of research and inquiry in the human and natural sciences, beginning with the ferment of intellectual activity in late eighteenth-century Germany, and, secondly, as a genre of writing, which fuses discontinuous discourses in an attempt to compensate for the inadequacies of more conventional modes of scientific understanding. My central theoretical interest is to trace significant shifts in the terminology of 'the self' in modem manifestations of romantic science. Each of the three thinkers considered in the thesis is both theorist and practitioner (Binswanger was and Sacks is a professional physician and James consulted with private patients), which makes for a peculiar blend of theory directed towards practical ends. Theoretical issues of the self implicate a range of intersubjective problems concerning therapeutic practice. As such, the thesis is also concerned centrally with theories of reading which help to activate the self.