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The title of my thesis may lead the reader to expect to find in it rather more and different things than there actually are. Because of this I think it advisable to outline some of the restrictions which have been imposed upon it and some of the reasons which explain these. The first and most important restriction lies in the fact that it is mainly confined to the exposition and elucidation of Vico's theories. There is little philosophical discussion of the tenability and value of his ideas and such as I have been able to include i3 largely to be found in the brief concluding section. I have found it necessary to omit altogether any comparisons of Vico with latter-day thinkers of his type, e.g. Hegel, Spengler and Toynbee. A variety of reasons have contributed towards this. Hie first is the obscure, diffuse and often muddled nature of "Hie New Science", which is notoriously difficult to understand. In part this problem arises not so much from the difficulty of the ideas as from the fact that there are so many of them. But this alone would not be a reason for puzzlement. It becomes so when allied to a second factor: the difficulty of understanding the meaning of some of Vico's principal pronouncements about the nature of the enterprise carried out in "The New Science" and about the relationships between at least some of its main theories. It is admitted on all hands that Vico's language is obscure. I should not want to dispute this and, indeed, have had to go to some lengths to try to clear up a few of these obscurities. It is also alleged sometimes that some of the difficulties of understanding 'The Now Science" arise from philosophical confusions. This is a much more disputable claim, it will become clear in the following work that I hold that Vico was by no means so confused in his grasp of his own doctrines as the general obscurity of "The New Science" might suggest. Certainly I do not think that he was guilty of one or two basic philosophical confusions which, if located, would provide the clue to the unravelling of most of the difficulties of his work. Nor do I think that those mistakes which he does make are so fundamental that he is left with nothing of importance to say once they have been rectified.

The question ‘Why ought we to do what we think we ought to do?’ was said by H.A. Prichard to be an improper question, manifesting erroneous presuppositions about the nature of moral reasoning. Moral rationalists think it a legitimate question, and they maintain that we are rationally justified in acting as we are morally obliged to act. Anti-rationalists deny this claim: specifically, they deny that acting in accord with moral obligation is endorsed by practical rationality. In my dissertation I try to uncover the source of disagreement amongst these three views. I then propose a resolution by appealing to my interpretation of Plato’s version of moral rationalism. I argue that contemporary moral rationalists and antirationalists in fact share the presupposition(s) that Prichard regarded as erroneous and which are not found in Plato. However, Prichard misread Plato as a rationalist of the instrumental persuasion and also offered only the beginnings of a positive view on the nature of practical reason. Therefore he failed to recognize that Plato gives a good positive answer to the original question on which the rationality of morality does not depend upon endorsement from any external source. Even so, Prichard’s limited remarks on the nature of moral deliberation show intimations of a better conception of the nature of moral rationality than is assumed in the contemporary debate between moral rationalists and anti-rationalists. One proponent of a more developed conception of the nature of moral thinking in the spirit of Plato is Iris Murdoch, and from her work I sketch a conception of the relation between thought, words and moral experience that in my view offers a way to understand the rationality of morality that is truer to the phenomena.

This thesis offers a reconstruction and analysis of a debate about responsibility, and causation initiated by Plato, and continued by the Stoics. The pivotal moment of the discussion is a problem I call ‘the greatest difficulty,’ found in Plato’s Parmenides. The debate, however, involves a complex network of arguments including subordinated or parallel discussions about ontology, method, ethics, and epistemology. Instead of isolating the main topic, I highlight the structure of the debate, and the interconnection between its parts, to show the complexity and sophistication of the argumentation in both Plato and the Stoics, and the depth of the Stoics’ engagement with Plato’s works. The motivation for doing this is to better understand many of the otherwise unexplained and odd starting points of the early Stoic philosophy. But since this requires a reconstruction of the dialectical background the Stoic texts assume, this means that the bulk of the thesis is devoted to discussing Plato. The hope is that by showing the structure of the debate in Plato’s dialogues, the connections in the Stoic fragments will show with more clarity. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first two are dedicated to Plato’s discussion of causality and responsibility in Phaedo 95e8-105c7, and Republic 6, 506d7- 509c4. The third chapter discusses ‘the greatest difficulty’ in Parmenides 133a11-135c4 as an objection to the main arguments of the previous dialogues. In chapter four, I analyse how Plato revisits the greatest difficulty in Sophist 245e6-249d5. Finally, in chapter five, I examine surviving evidence from the early Stoics, to argue that they engaged with Plato’s ongoing debate via the Sophist, and that their views on these topics are a careful continuation of this debate.

This thesis seeks to shed light on the intricate relationships holding between the various explanatory frameworks currently used within cognitive science. The driving question of this philosophical investigation concerns the nature and structure of cognitive explanation. More specifically, I attempt to clarify whether the sort of scientific explanations proposed for various cognitive phenomena at different levels of analysis or abstraction differ in significant ways from the explanations offered in other areas of scientific inquiry, such as biology, chemistry, or even physics. Thus, what I will call the problem of cognitive explanation, asks whether there is a distinctive feature that characterises cognitive explanations and distinguishes them from the explanatory schemas utilised in other scientific domains. I argue that the explanatory pluralism encountered within the daily practice of cognitive scientists has an essential normative dimension. The task of this thesis is to demonstrate that pluralism is an appropriate standard for the general explanatory project associated with cognitive science, which further implies defending and promoting the development of multiple explanatory schemas in the empirical study of cognitive phenomena.

This is a study of a privately owned, publically funded nursery for children before they start school. It was instigated by a desire to acquire a detailed understanding of the nursery, in terms of the actions of adults and children, at a time of rapid expansion in childcare provision to support working mothers and disadvantaged children in the UK. Field notes collected primarily through observation over a two year period, in an ethnographic manner, form the core of the material contained in this thesis. They are presented to illustrate the ‘everyday’ actions of adults and children. A range of theoretical ideas, associated with a social constructionist perspective, are used to offer a possible interpretation of the meaning or significance of these commonly occurring patterns of behaviour. Initial analysis highlighted the controlling actions of adults. As the study progressed, it became evident, as others have noted in similar contexts, that young children were able to develop and define a relatively distinct life for themselves in the confined and constrained environment. Later stages of this study revealed the way in which individuals created, as was intended, relatively unique but, possibly, limiting forms of existence. Specifically, this information maybe of interest to early childhood students and practitioners working with young children but the intention was to make this material accessible to a wider range of interested parties. It is hoped that those who read it will give some thought to the relevance or desirability of this type of experience for children, before they begin school in the UK, while acknowledging the localised features of the context, the author’s background and assumptions as well as the limitations attributed to the chosen methodological approach.

Coastal fishing communities in northern Mozambique have distinctive history, politics and livelihoods that make them physically and socially peripheral. This is evident in relation to lack of the access and ownership of natural resources, social opportunities such as education, access to information and decision making means and the influence of cultural-hereditary characteristics of coastal society. The thesis examines learning in Lunga, the key institutions, their roles and importance. Drawing on Mamdani’s concept of bifurcated state, it outlines the historical background of the formal education system that is a necessary frame for understanding many specific problems of education in contemporary Mozambique. In this setting, the thesis reflects on formal, traditional and Islamic education and their different forms of valorisation in the past and present. The study examines the coastal habitus – the problems of life on the periphery, and the social, political and physical distance. From there, it probes deeper into the relations between competing institutions promoting certain distinctive aspects of coastal life, describing production of the local and the global (national). The main focus of the thesis is the characteristic, ambivalent and strained relations between the schooling and coastal habitus, being the manifestation of the tension between local and global spaces. This thesis discusses these questions and related educational practices as culturally mediated responses to the collective uncertainty and marginalization. It describes the community's struggle over the relative value of schooling versus village-based knowledge and skill acquisition necessary for the community members to live within their structural constraints. Furthermore, it points towards questions of political power, suggesting that coastal society's ambivalence about the utility of schooling may be seen as one of the dilemmas of citizenship in contemporary Mozambique. It demonstrates that ambivalent meanings attached to schooling are shaped by their cultural history and their attempts to maintain their livelihoods in the context of political marginality.

This thesis seeks to shed light on what I claim is a neglected aspect in the writings of later Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin. I badge this the ‘unity problem’. Many interpreters tend to underestimate, or ignore, this important aspect, and to focus instead on what I will call the ‘compatibility problem’. The compatibility problem focuses on cases where philosophers say something which we would not say in ordinary language, or when philosophers violate its rules. According to this reading, Austin and Wittgenstein show philosophers that this is a source of traditional philosophical troubles. I argue for a different reading. My claim is that Austin and Wittgenstein think, instead, that in some specific cases philosophical trouble arises because philosophers look for one common thing in all cases where the same word is used. The aim in these cases is not to identify strings of words that we would not ordinarily say, rather it is to show that looking for something common to all cases in which we use the same word is problematic. This is the ‘unity’ problem. I will examine how both philosophers characterise the unity problem, and how they demonstrate that there is something misleading in looking for one common thing in all the cases in which we use the same word. This constitutes what might be termed the ‘theoretical’ part of the thesis. Alongside this, I will examine key examples of Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s application of this ‘theory’ to their treatment of specific philosophical problems. These applications constitute some of the central examples in their writings, such as ‘understanding’ for Wittgenstein, and ‘truth’ for Austin. I will argue that their work on these examples does not fit comfortably into the framework of the compatibility problem, and is better viewed through the lens of the unity problem.