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The purpose of this study was to ascertain what historians view as being the best and/or most significant American history books written in the Nineteen Sixties. An instrument was constructed which included questions about specific books, demographic data about the respondent, and questions relating to the respondent's ideas about the source of his own judgments about the writing of American history.

Since the 1960’s it has been common for many historians to treat Friedrich Nietzsche as a proto-postmodernist. Nietzsche’s scepticism and apparent embrace of aestheticism have fueled the belief among historians that Nietzsche’s philosophy anticipated a postmodern understanding of history. This project seeks to challenge the proto-postmodernist reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy of history by arguing that Nietzsche’s thought underwent a significant change after the termination of his friendship with the German composer Richard Wagner. Utilizing Nietzsche’s personal correspondence, material from his many notebooks, records of the books he read and owned, as well as the works he published, this thesis attempts to unravel the protopostmodern reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy in favour of a naturalist interpretation of his thought. It will then attempt to outline what the consequences of Nietzsche’s naturalism are for his philosophy of history. / Graduate

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A study of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars as a gallery of portraits of Roman emperors. The object is to make sense of Suetonius' methods of depicting emperors as emperors and to ask what light is cast on contemporary perceptions of the role of the Emperor. In order to set the Caesars in context, the work is approached from three different angles, the literary, the social and the ideological. The first part looks at the literary background of the Lives. The question here is of how far the rubric method and the actual choice of rubrics can be accounted for in terms of literary tradition as opposed to the author's understanding of what was significant about an emperor. The second part considers the impact of the author's position in society on his presentation. An attempt is made to discover the viewpoint of one who was simultaneously an equestrian official and an antiquarian scholar. His view of society is related to his views of the emperor's place in society and his functions as an administrator. The last part examines the relationship between his representation of the emperor and the ideals desiderated in or attributed to autocratic rulers. Discussion centres on the use of virtues and vices as categories of estimation and on their relationship to official and theoretical 'ideologies'. Since it is argued that Suetonius shares the views of other Roman sources, discussion of individual virtues and vices ranges far beyond the Caesars.

This thesis proposes a consideration of Berkeley's thought from the standpoint of its roots, rather than (which is the prevalent perspective in today's Berkeley scholarship) from the point of view of the developments that this thought has brought about in modern philosophy. Chapter One deals with a number of specific introductory issues, and then delineates a theoretical context within which my own approach will reveal its scholarly significance. In Chapter Two I advance the idea that there is in Berkeley's early writings an entire network of Platonic features, attitudes, and mind sets, prefiguring his speculative and openly Platonic writing Siris. Chapter Three is a systematic attempt at considering Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy in close connection to the topic of liber mundi, with the twofold objective of pointing out those of the medieval implications of the topic that Berkeley preserved, and the "novelties" he brought forth in his use of the topic. The central idea around which Chapter Four is clustered is that, in Siris, Berkeley comes to make use of one of the most ancient "spiritual techniques": alchemy. Berkeley’s arguments and notions in Siris will be discussed by constant reference to alchemic notions, writings and authors. Chapter Five is an attempt at considering Berkeley’s thought from the standpoint of the Christian apologetic tradition, and its objective is to show that one of the roots of Berkeley's thought could be found precisely in this tradition. In Chapter Six I will show that even when designing such a practical project as the "Bermuda scheme" Berkeley was under the modeling influence of the past. More precisely, the chapter purports to offer a discussion of Berkeley's "Bermuda scheme" in light of the Western representations of the "happy islands", "earthly paradise", ''eschaton". The last chapter (Chapter Seven) purports to undertake a comparative analysis of some of the ideas professed by medieval Catharism, and George Berkeley’s denial of the existence of matter. The central notion around which my comparative approach is articulated is the idea that, in both cases, matter is regarded as the source of evil. What I will try to show is that Berkeley's attitudes to the material world echoed certain Cathar theological anxieties and patterns of thought.

The dissertation offers a critical analysis of the Epitome de Caesaribus, a fourth-century Latin series on the lives of the emperors from Augustus to Theodosius (c. AD 395), and consists of seven chapters defining the text, the genre, its sources, its religious milieu, and its political and social ideas. The political ideas in the Epitome were deeply marked by the influence of the ascetic ideal honouring moderation in drink, food, sleep, sex, and emotions such as anger. Within the fourth-century Roman Empire, the epitomator offers moderate pagan views which show interest about dreams, asceticism, and the providential nature of the divinity. The dissertation proposes to see the Epitome as a literary artefact which, through comparison with contemporary authors, allows one to extract from a bland text ideas found among fourth-century elites in the emperor Honorius' Italy (395-423).

Inaug.-Diss.- Cologne. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 85-87.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2002. / Adviser: Jesper Rosenmeier. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-237). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2000. / Also available online.