<p>Currently, there is significant divergence in scholarly opinion as to whether or not human nature exists. In my PhD thesis, I argue for the existence of human nature. In so doing, I critique rival views on human nature and orthodox entry points into the issue. I also offer a partial explanation as to why such a strong divergence of expert opinion may exist, and argue that accuracy on the issue is important with respect to individual and collective problem solving. The view of human nature I defend is what I call ‘ecological.’ This construct aligns with the fact that biological systems exist at multiple levels of organization and relative to varying ecologies, developmental stages, frames of reference, and viable systems of orientation. Given this, I contend human nature is not something that ‘inheres’ and projects out from the organism; rather, human nature is diffuse and exists at simultaneous levels of biological organization, and at the intersection of genetic and epigenetic factors, past and present, and scientific truth and pragmatism.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>My dissertation is situated at the intersection of modernism, print culture, and early-twentieth-century post-Newtonian physics, namely relativity theory and quantum theory. I investigate the ways in which the emerging concept of the unknowable—loosely defined as that which is beyond knowledge but maintains an influence on what can be known—catalyzed a cultural reorientation away from Victorian notions of positivism and progress and toward those aspects of reality that resist knowledge. Although a great deal of critical attention has been paid to modernism’s epistemological uniqueness, scholars are only beginning to acknowledge that concurrent revolutions in physics both reflected and influenced modernists’ conceptions of history, subjectivity, and aesthetics. Scholars such as Gillian Beer, Michael Whitworth, and Mark S. Morrisson have demonstrated that print and popular culture provided crucial avenues through which scientific ideas were disseminated in British society. Furthermore, their research has shown that modernist authors not only read popular science material but also published their work alongside articles about science in a variety of magazines, journals, and newspapers. Building on these connections, I show that books and periodicals served as platforms for dialogue and ideological exchange between science and literature as both disciplines increasingly recognized and grappled with the pervasive influence of the unknowable. </p>

There were two-way and non-governmental communications between China and the United States in the field of agriculture throughout twentieth century. During the late nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals already recognized the importance of western agricultural science and technology, and they began actively to court modern agricultural knowledge from western countries. The Plant Improvement Project (PIP) conducted by Cornell University and the University of Nanking from 1925 to 1931 was the groundbreaking agricultural cooperation in agricultural science and technology between the United States and China. Although most of the activities of this project were non-governmental, organized by two universities, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the PIP broke new ground. In 1925, Professor H. H. Love of Cornell University was invited to the University of Nanking to lead a five-year cooperative program of crop improvement, which was called the PIP. From 1925 to 1931, Love along with C. H. Myers and R. G. Wiggans of Cornell University went to China to implement PIP. With the joint efforts of specialists from Cornell University and the University of Nanking, many high-yielding crop varieties were bred and distributed to farmers to improve yields and fight hunger; at the same time they trained a professional group of crop breeders and extension workers to continue crop breeding and distribution. PIP sought a new model for China’s application of the American concept of the integration of agricultural research, education, and extension, which resulted in both success and failure. PIP, however, exerted profound influence on the follow-up work not only at Cornell and Nanking but also for the governments of United States and Nationalist China.  <div><br></div><div>Following the PIP, in 1934, aiming to increase the well-being of rural populations, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) trustee committee approved its first comprehensive program (China Program) for rural reconstruction in China. The RF established the North China Council for Rural Reconstruction (NCCRR) in 1936. By studying the policy, hopes, and outcomes of the NCCRR, this chapter provides a specific example of the problem western civil organizations faced in reshaping non-western rural societies. The NCCRR developed techniques for modernizing rural Chinese society; however, constant warfare, political instability, and funding shortages hindered the success of this endeavor. Its impact on China’s rural development remained after the termination of the China Program in 1944.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Then, to promote China’s post-World War II economic reconstruction and hunger relief, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry developed their transnational cooperation with the International Harvester Company from 1945 to 1948. In 1945, the Agricultural Engineering Program for China was proposed by Dr. P. W. Tsou, then a member of the Executive Committee of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the resident representative of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of the Nationalist government in the U.S., to the International Harvester Company. This initiative was supported by International Harvester Company to help China quickly achieve agricultural mechanization. This program was composed with Harvester Fellowships to sponsor Chinese students to learn agricultural engineering in the U.S. and from the committee’s field investigations, demonstrations, and teaching in China. The Chinese Ministry of Education selected ten students who had graduated from agricultural universities and ten students who had graduated from the engineering universities with two to three years of practical work experience. In total twenty students went to the U.S. to study agricultural engineering. Those from engineering universities were sent to the University of Minnesota while those from agricultural universities received admission into master’s program of Iowa State College (later Iowa State University). In two years’ time, they took engineering courses and completed the master’s degree in agricultural engineering. Then, they received a one-year internship at local farms to practice. In September 1948, the first student group returned to China. These twenty students were the first group of Chinese graduate students to study agricultural engineering in the United States. After they returned home, most of them became China’s leading agricultural engineering experts for the People’s Republic of China. In addition, four experienced agricultural engineers (Edwin L. Hansen, Howard F. McColly, Archie A. Stone, and J. Brownlee Davidson) in the United States formed the Committee on Agricultural Engineering to conducted extensive field investigations in China from January 1947 to December 1948 until political and military conditions were not suitable for them to stay in China.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Except for the cooperation with the private sectors in the U.S., the Nationalist government also proposed to the U.S. government cooperation to organize a joint program to provide economic and technical assistance to China’s agricultural industry. In June 1946, the China-United States Agricultural Mission initiated its work. The committee members from the U.S. included Claude B. Hutchison as the head of the U.S. delegation and Raymond T. Moyer as deputy head. Committee members from China included Zou Binwen as the head of the Chinese delegation and Shen Zonghan as the deputy head. After the investigation of fifteen provinces, delegation members provided their findings and suggestions on the reconstruction of Chinese agriculture in their reports. In 1947, the Report of China-United States Agricultural Mission was released by the two governments. This report is a comprehensive agenda for agricultural construction which put forward feasible and systematic plans for agricultural management, crop improvement, and rural education. This plan did not get adopted in mainland China, but it incubated an organizational structure for the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction and provided a blueprint for agricultural reform in Taiwan. This mission had a profound effect on later cooperation in the field of agricultural science and technology between the two countries, which merits scholarly attention. <br></div><div><br></div><div>Final success of this transnational agricultural communication and cooperation was in Taiwan under the direction of the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction from 1948 to 1979. This program, funded by the U.S. government, had a distinct success in agricultural development in Taiwan, but it eventually ended after the Carter Administration withdrew diplomatic recognition from Taiwan in 1979. Later this commission became part of the Council of Agriculture in the Executive Yuan of the Republic of China (ROC). <br></div><div><br></div><div>This agricultural communication and interaction between China and the U.S. made long-term impacts to China, the U.S., and the rest of the world. For the ROC and the PRC, these organized programs and cooperation gradually developed agricultural science and technology, increased agricultural production, and cultivated agricultural experts. These programs did not achieve their pre-set purpose to prevent communism from expanding in rural China, however, both the Nationalist government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enjoyed those rewards. The ROC directly benefitted from this assistance while PRC also indirectly obtained agricultural science and technology through those trained experts who chose to stay in the mainland after the revolution.<br></div><div><br></div><div>For the United States, these attempts in China helped Americans to expand and reevaluate their global assistance and development projects and governmental agencies, including the Marshall Plan, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), and later the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). <br></div><div><br></div><div>For the rest of the world, new global agricultural cooperation, such as Green Revolution agricultural science, eradicated starvation and famine in many developing countries such as India, Mexico, and the Philippines. Meanwhile, global agricultural cooperation generated new problems including environmental degradation and pesticide contamination. Further international cooperation and agricultural development can be tracked back to the U.S.-China agricultural cooperative experience.<br></div>

Given the state of the planet at present —specifically, the linked global ecological and economic crises that conjure dark imaginings and nihilistic actualities of increasing resource depletion, poisonings, and wide-scale sufferings and extinctions—I ask What might we hope now? What points of intervention offer possibility for transformation? At best, the response can only be partial. The approach this thesis takes initiates from specific pre-discursive assumptions. The first understands current conditions as having been produced, and continuing to be so, through practices that enact and sustain neoliberal relations. Secondly, these practices are expressive of a subjectivity tied to a Cartesian worldview, which, therefore, needs to be interrupted at its foundational roots. Thirdly, the scaffolding that supports this subjectivity draws on Newtonian science and neo-Darwinian narratives deemed to be natural law and, therefore, ontological, immutable reality. Contrary to modernist thinking, I premise that these two strains, subjectivity and science, are neither autonomous nor ontological, but that they are materially and contingently integral. Finally, this thesis presumes that different and life-affirming trajectories are, in fact, desired. An integral framing of science and subjectivity provides a productive method of feminist science studies analysis and theorization. Observing the capitalist Western social imaginary through this lens reveals its philosophical and scientific infrastructures to be outdated and crumbling. Observing how emerging scientific narratives in quantum physics and systems-biology intersect with marginalized theories in process-philosophy and subjectivity reveals a life-affirming imaginary of difference, one that arrests nihilism and sets ethical trajectories in motion. Certain, though not all, percepts of feminist new materialism engage twentieth and twenty-first century sciences successfully to show that ethicality matters. Though many questions remain, this points auspiciously towards the possibility for a transformed politics of justice.

Il n’est pas évident si et dans quelle mesure la connaissance non empirique peut donner de l’information sur des systèmes physiques réels. Hume croyait que toute connaissance à propos du monde qui nous entoure ne doit sa certitude à rien d’autre que l’expérience répétée de la conjonction des causes et des effets observables. Or, il y a quelques raisons de croire que le rôle de la raison en physique dépasse celui qui lui est attribué par Hume. Le principe de la moindre action est un bon candidat, pour quelques raisons : il a été découvert à partir d’un argument métaphysique, il rivalise avec les lois de Newton au titre de fondement de la mécanique classique, et il a fini par motiver le développement de nombreux formalismes qui lui sont propres jusqu’au sein des théories les plus récentes de la physique. Nous analyserons les idées ayant mené à sa découverte par Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis. / It is unclear whether and to what extent non-empirical knowledge can provide information about real physical systems. Hume believed that all knowledge about the world around us owes its certainty to nothing other than the repeated experience of the conjunction of observable causes and effects. However, there are some reasons to believe that the role of reason in physics goes beyond that attributed to it by Hume. The principle of least action is a good candidate for a number of reasons : it was discovered from a metaphysical argument, it rivals Newton’s laws as the foundation of classical mechanics, and it eventually motivated the development of several formalisms in a wide variety of the most recent theories of physics. We will analyze the ideas that led to its discovery by Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis.

Master of Arts / Department of Economics / Peri da Silva / Economists use various models to explain why it is that firms are capable of pricing above marginal cost. In this paper, we will examine two of them: the Cournot and Bertrand duopoly models. Economists generally accept both models as good explanations of the phenomenon, but the two models contradict each other in various important ways. The puzzle is that two inconsistent explanations are both regarded as good explanations for the same phenomenon. This becomes especially worrisome when the two models are offering divergent policy recommendations. This report presents that puzzle by laying out how the two models contradict each other in a myriad of ways and then offers five possible solutions to that puzzle from various economists, philosophers of science, and philosophers of economics.

This dissertation examines key areas in ontology through the intersection of metaphysics and physics. I argue that modern physics gives us good cause to look for new metaphysical models in place of the classical conceptions of ‘object' and ‘space'. Part I addresses the object in itself, wherein I argue that physics, along with various philosophical concerns, encourages us to re-evaluate the intrinsic/ extrinsic distinction in favour of new classifications. In particular, I use conclusions of relativity theory and the acquisition of mass via the Higgs field as indications of the inadequacy of intrinsicality, concluding that the distinction is more trouble than it is worth. Part II examines the intersection of objects and space, wherein I criticise substantivalism and promote singular fundamental ontologies like relationalism and supersubstantivalism. I examine phenomena like spatial expansion and field theory as well as separability issues more generally to emphasise the lack of rationale for a substance dualism of ‘object material' and ‘space material'. I also challenge the coherence of substantivalism's ‘occupation relation' and the ease of interpreting mathematical models into physical terms. I conclude that, again, the classical notion of ‘object' and its substantival framework are misplaced and should be put aside in favour of developing monistic ontologies. Part III looks at space in itself and the properties commonly attributed to it. I explore issues of separability using key experiments, and what makes spaces ‘physically real', before an extended examination of dimensions and dimensionality, highlighting the confusion physicists express toward such a ubiquitous concept in modern physical theories. I also explore how we use dimensions and reasons for adopting realist or instrumentalist approaches toward them, arguing that much more work should be focused on this area. I conclude with ways in which physics motivates new metaphysical models and suggest improvements for future methodological partnerships.

If we are interested in questions about how we ought to organize our political lives, what kind of weight, if any, should we give to evidence about what people actually think? The thesis explores this question about the role of public opinion in normative political theory. First, I disentangle a number of distinct justifications for taking account of public opinion. Specifically, the thesis evaluates four views of the status of public opinion: as an epistemic resource; a feasibility constraint; a means of democratizing political theory; or constitutive of moral and political ideals. I defend the epistemic argument, outlining two forms in which popular attitudes represent a valuable epistemic resource. The thesis criticizes the feasibility and democratic accounts of the role of public opinion as these are presented in the existing literature, but suggests more convincing ways of reconstructing these arguments. Finally, I reject the view that public opinion constitutes the ideal of justice, arguing that such an account is subject to a fundamental tension. As well as clarifying the status of popular attitudes, the thesis addresses the methodological difficulties that arise when we seek to bring public opinion to bear on ideas from political theory, whose meaning and status in everyday political thought and discourse is often limited or uncertain. I outline two approaches to integrating normative theory with the investigation of popular attitudes that mitigate the methodological problems that often confront such projects. The second major aim is to situate the question of the role of public opinion in the context of wider debates about the aims and methods of contemporary political theory. In particular, I address recent demands for greater ‘realism’ in political theory, distinguishing two main strands of realist critique and drawing out their contrasting implications for the role of public opinion.

The study of intra-state conflict has increased exponentially during the post-Cold War period. This has given rise to a variety of competing approaches, which have (i) adopted differing methodological and social theoretical orientations, and (ii) produced contradictory accounts of the causes and nature of violent conflict. This project intervenes in the debates which have resulted from this situation, and develops a critical realist approach to conflict studies. In doing so it rethinks the discipline from the philosophical ground up, by extending the ontological and epistemological insights which are provided by critical realism into more concrete reflections about methodological and social theoretical issues. In addition to engaging in reflection about philosophical, methodological, and social theoretical issues, however, the project also incorporates the insights of two largely neglected literatures into conflict studies. These are, first, the insights of the gender-studies literature, and second, the insights of decolonial/postcolonial forms of thought. It claims that the discipline is strengthened by incorporating the insights of these literatures, and that the critical realist framework provides us with the philosophical basis which is required in order to do so.

Thesis (MA (Philosophy))--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / It seems to be a priori impossible to formulate any general theory or model that encompasses all of the properties of complexity. So, one must make do with partial solutions. A possible approach we propose is to take inspiration from quantum theory, since there seems to be a strong analogy between complex systems and quantum systems. Although we do not propose any literal application of quantum mechanical formalism to complexity, we suggest that the language of quantum mechanics is already so well developed - and for a much wider spectrum of problems than most theories - that it can serve as a model for complexity theory. There are many problems common to both complex systems and quantum systems and we suggest that it might be useful to test the applicability of aspects of the “language” of quantum mechanics to a general complex system. What we suggest here is an interdisciplinary talk led between the natural sciences and philosophy, which we believe is the only way in which to deal with complexity “as such”.