In many contexts, including multicultural societies and various international settings, ethical disputes arise between parties who do not share an ethical outlook. It can seem impossible for such disputes to be resolved rationally, as the parties in question will generally not take the same sorts of consideration to bear on the matter under dispute. If, however, it could be shown that there are ways of assessing an ethical outlook for correctness, neither merely by checking it for internal coherence, nor simply by assessing it by the standards of a different ethical outlook, this would mean there exist resources allowing at least some such disputes to be resolved rationally. In order to establish whether such resources exist it is necessary to consider what it is to have one ethical outlook rather than another. The existence and applicability of “thick ethical concepts” can form the basis for a defence of moral realism: a realist conception of ethical properties and moral reasons for action, and a cognitivist conception of the mental states which allow an individual (in good cases) to track ethical facts. A fresh understanding of the nature of intentional action which remedies difficulties with orthodox action theory provides additional support for this view. This realist view allows the critical force of two forms of social criticism from the German philosophical tradition to be reassessed. Nietzschean criticism by genealogy can undermine ethical views if their acceptance is shown to have come about in a way which renders continued acceptance irrational. Criticism of reification, pioneered by Lukács, can ground rejection of aspects of an ethical outlook if it is shown to involve systematic misapprehension of intentional actions as mere natural happenings. In both cases, the most faithful interpretation provides a rational resource for neutral arbitration between ethical outlooks in a context of pluralism.

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This thesis is concerned with the role of partiality and impartiality in nursing ethics. Nurses are often faced with the following challenge: should I provide care for the patient who is my patient or should I give preference to someone else in greater need of nursing care? This challenge can be characterised as a conflict between impartial and partialist moral demands on the nurse. The thesis analyses the concepts of impartiality and partiality as found in moral philosophy and then applies these concepts and their implications to the nurse-patient relationship. Some issues of particular interest to the impartiality-partiality issue have been selected to be given close examination in the thesis. These are an analogy between the nurse-patient relationship and friendship, the relation between trust and impartiality, the question about whether moral obligations can arise from physical proximity and immediacy, the relation between professional detachment and impartiality, and partiality and impartiality in care ethics. The thesis argues that the nursing role is an institutional role as well as a professional role and a role involving a close personal cooperation. Some institutional roles require a high level of impartiality, and the nursing role is one such role. Therefore, the nurse ought to show a high level of impartiality as well as being committed to the good of her particular patient. 11

Emergence is a concept which has been the subject of resurgent interest in recent years. The term is often used to describe the appearance of new macro-level properties or capabilities, which are not manifest in the individual micro-level components. Equally, it is associated with irreducibility of explanation, novelty and downward causation. Despite a long history, during which the concept has been adopted by different disciplines, there is little agreement on the real nature of emergence. This, I claim, is due to different philosophical and disciplinary perspectives as well as some lack of conceptual clarity. The aim of this thesis is not to resolve the extremely hard problem of what emergence is; rather it is to provide clearer insight into the nature of emergence. The thesis is therefore conceptual and analytical in nature. The focus of the research is pragmatic investigation of the different perspectives, apparent disputes and real-world examples associated with emergence, in order to improve understanding of both the concept and instances of emergence. My thesis is that emergence is usefully conceptualised as fuzzy with three 'dimensions' - ontological, epistemological and complexity. This leads to the proposal of a typology of emergence which supports interdisciplinary discourse on the subject and a method of defining emergence in differing contexts. Both of these, it is argued, are vital to the development of shared meaning and the ability to engage in analytical discourse across the sphere of influence for emergence. The final proposal is a framework for investigation of real-world emergents which, while neutral to disciplinary or philosophical stances, enables exploration of the key of emergents. Together, the proposals provide a conceptual scaffold for understanding both the concept and instances of emergence. This claim is assessed through consideration of classical putative emergents and real learning communities.

Parallel to the controversy about the poetic use of language that went on from about the fourth century onwards and culminated in the ninth century, in Anandavardhana's work, the Dhvanyaloka, and Abhinavagupta's commentary on it, the Locana, a similar controversy went on in India among aestheticians during the ninth and the tenth centuries about the response to and experience of emotions represented or expressed in drama andpoetry, which culminated in Abhinavagupta's phenomenology of aesthetic experience. The controversy was carried on in the commentaries on Bharata's Natyasastra which are themselves lost or still hidden undiscovered in manuscript liberaries. But Abhinavagupta summarises the controversy with amazing detachment and objectivity before presenting his own doctrine of aesthetic experience (The Abhinavabharati, second edition, Gaekwad's Oriental Series, 1956, Vol I, pp. 272 - 285). R. Gnoli has edited this summary in his book, "The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta", Second edition, pp. 3 - 22. The same controversy is presented in a few other mediaeval Sanskrit texts too. I have followed Gnoli's edition. This thesis is an exposition and an interpretation, in the light of contemporary British and American philosophical aesthetics, of the above controversy. My own comment and criticism are interspersed with exposition and interpretation. At the end of the thesis it is hoped that there emerges reasonably clearly an important analysis of, if not the, a way of experiencing emotions represented or expressed in art, and this analysis is contrasted with that implicit or presented in the contemporary philosophical literature on the topic which I have called the "orthodox" contemporary position. Finally, on the basis of my presentation of this aspect of Indian aesthetics, it is hoped that if other aspects of Indian aesthetics are also interpreted in a Western language with the help of recently developed techniques of Western philosophy a fruitful collaboration between Western and Indian aesthetics will follow and bring about a further healthy cross-fertilization of ideas.

The aim of this study is to trace the origins and development of evolutionary ideas in Dewey's writings prior to 1910. The impact of Darwinian theories of biological evolution on the development of American pragmatism is fairly well understood. What is much less clear is precisely how and in what form evolutionary ideas came to play a major role in the development of Dewey's instrumentalism. This thesis attacks the conventional view that Dewey's intellectual career followed a progressive pattern from intuitionism through Hegelianism, to a type of Darwinian evolutionary instrumentalism. It is argued that before the emergence of instrumentalism in the mid-1890s and its development over the next fifteen years or so, Dewey held a variety of Darwinian and pre- Darwinian evolutionary points of view. The evidence is that Dewey's attempts to reconcile an evolutionary tradition stemming mainly from seventeenth and eighteenth century historicist conceptions of continuity, growth and change with nineteenth century experimental developments in the natural sciences, particularly in physiology, dominated much of his early work in psychology, epistemology and ethics during the 1880s and early 1890s. It is argued that Dewey's instrumentalism did not develop as a reaction against pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories, but as an attempt to reconcile teleological and historicist evolutionary points of view with the mechanistic evolutionary presuppositions of nineteenth century physiological psychologists. The evidence is, moreover, that pre-Darwinian historicist assumptions continued to influence the mature development of Dewey's instrumentalist theories. The difficulties and contradictions that this gave rise to is of special interest in this study, particularly as it affected Dewey's educational ideas. Dewey's basic inability to disentangle historicist teleological assumptions from Darwin's theory of speciation, which emphasised the essential fallibility, contingency and temporalism of biological change, raise certain doubts about certain aspects of Dewey's pedagogical theories with which this thesis is concerned.

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