Being and Time 's ethical import has been largely overlooked or even flatly denied. This thesis shows an ethical aspect of Being and Time in Heidegger's account of Dasein. In order to show the ethical importance of this concept a number misreadings of the text must first be clarified. The first chapter of this work critiques Frederick Olafson's and Joanna Hodge's attempts to build an ethics on the fundamental ontology of Being and Time. In doing this we can see that these two failed attempts began by granting ethics far too modest a role in Being and Time.

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In modern Chinese aesthetics and literary criticism, Zhu Guangqian (1897-1986) is one of the most well-known theorists. At the same time, he is a writer renowned amongst intellectuals in China whose readable versions of his theory are enjoyed by a large number of young readers. In the 1980s, Zhu drew attention again as an influential figure through the debates over socialist alienation in Marxist humanism and “Culture Fever”. This was due not only to Zhu’s emphasis on subjectivity in Marxist theory in his late phase but also to his fundamental question of how to retain the existential integration between human nature and the world. His emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of art was at odds with prevailing contemporary views on political utility in art. In consequence, the literary theory and aesthetics of his early stage were, until the 1980s, criticised in mainland China for their idealist tendencies. Although there have been some studies on Zhu’s contributions to modern Chinese aesthetic theory and literary criticism, there has been no contemporary study of the formation and development of his thought. This thesis is, therefore, concerned to provide a detailed reconstruction and analysis of these relatively neglected aspects of Zhu’s thought throughout his life. I seek to show that Zhu offers a unique attitude towards the intellectual turmoil of Chinese ethical ideals and Western thinking derived from his education in both China and Europe and developed throughout his further studies of Western thinkers such as Bernardo Croce, Karl Marx and Giambattista Vico.

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This thesis aims to compensate for the defects in the forms of conceptualism which John McDowell (1994a) and Bill Brewer (1999) hold: it does this by analysing the conceptual structure of the content of experience using colour experience as the central case. First, the root of the debate between conceptualism and non-conceptualism, as I shall argue, is the different notions of concept and experience used by the two sides. The nonconceptualists’ notion of a concept, or conceptual capacity, has been defined very narrowly, satisfying very restricted conditions, whereas their notion of experience is much wider and more flexible, ranging from a subpersonal state to a personal level. By contrast, conceptualists are quite open to broad notions of a concept, or conceptual capacity, but seem to define the content of experience as belonging only to the personal level. Second, in order to build a bridge between these two different notions of both concept and experience respectively, I will argue that three major types of conceptual capacities can operate in experience. I call this ‘conceptual engagement’. I then suggest that we need to consider two perspectives on colour experience: namely, the functional and the expository. The former concerns ‘how experience physically works’, whereas the latter concerns “what experience has.” Both perspectives will prove useful for explaining perceptual content at the sub-personal and personal level. This distinction is required because what we call the ‘content’ of experience does not belong to just one particular stage of experience. Last, as a final supplementation of previous conceptualism, I will consider the discrimination abilities involved in perception as being themselves a type of conceptual capacity. At this point, I will adopt the notion of receptivity as used by McDowell (1994a), but deny that a conceptualist is committed to spontaneity being involved in receptivity. I will further propose that understanding discriminative abilities as perceptual receptivity could prepare the ground for taking over perceptual contents into the contents of thought. I will argue that perception could be passive and conceptual, hence separate from spontaneity.

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This thesis develops a new theory of natural kinds for the biological world, called ‘Kind Historicism’, and addresses the relationship between natural kind theorizing and scientific reasoning. Applied to natural kinds and individuals in biology, Kind Historicism provides an ontology of the biological world. Discussions of biological ontology have struggled to balance insights from scientific practice with tools from analytic philosophy, metaphysics, and ontology. Ontological questions and practical/epistemic questions are often entangled. This thesis separates the two enquires, explaining why an ontological account of ‘what-there-is’ in biology should not straightforwardly dictate scientific categories, objects, or concepts. More precisely this thesis provides, in two parts, the development of Kind Historicism in light of discussions of natural kinds, essentialism, and monism, followed by the application of Kind Historicism to the natural kind status of biochemicals and to the problem of biological individuality. Finally, the success of Kind Historicism is measured against its ability to account for ‘intrinsic heterogeneity’ and ‘theoretical pluralism’, features of the biological world and science, respectively, believed to preclude biological natural kinds.

This project is an investigation into the prospects for an antirealist theory of essence. Essentialism is the claim that at least some things have some of their properties essentially. Essentialist discourse includes claims such as “Socrates is essentially human”, and “Socrates is accidentally bearded”. Historically, there are two ways of interpreting essentialist discourse. I call these positions ‘modal essentialism’ and ‘neo-Aristotelian essentialism’. According to modal essentialism, for Socrates to be essentially human is for it to be necessary that he be a human if he exists, and for Socrates to accidentally have a beard is for it to be contingent that Socrates has a beard if he exists. According to neo-Aristotelian essentialism, objects have definitions in something like the way words do. For Socrates to be essentially human but accidentally bearded is for it to be part of the definition of Socrates that he is human, but not part of that definition that he is bearded. I argue that both are susceptible to antirealist interpretation. This thesis sets about showing that this is the case. In Chapters One and Two I investigate neo-conventionalist theories of modality, in the hope of using such a position to develop an antirealist modal essentialism. In Chapter Three I discuss the debate between modal and neo-Aristotelian essentialism and conclude that it is by no means settled. In Chapter Four I develop an antirealist neo-Aristotelian essentialism based on the mechanism of one of the neo-conventionalist accounts of modality. In Chapter Five I argue that this account is in a better position to give an essentialist theory of necessity than its realist counterparts. I conclude that, regardless of whether one is a modal or neo-Aristotelian essentialist, antirealist essentialism is a viable theory of essence that is worthy of consideration in contemporary debate.

The central theme of this dissertation is the contribution that the theory of human ontology developed by the philosopher John Searle can make to economics. Searle's account of the cognitive functioning associated with rational behaviour provides a framework within which to analyse the role of conscious and non-conscious factors in rational behaviour; the nature and functioning of discursive and tacit knowledge; and the distinction between intentional and non-intentional states. Using this framework, each of the three essays which make up the core of this dissertation examines aspects of the conception of economic agency associated with a different field in economics; critical realism, behavioural finance and mainstream microeconomics. The first essay, which looks at the critical realist conception of the human actor in Tony Lawson 's Economics and Reality, argues that Lawson leaves undeveloped the notion of tacit knowledge, failing to explain important differences between knowledge that functions by virtue of conscious reflection and that which functions tacitly. From a Searlean perspective the key omission is argued to be the technical notion of intentionality, upon which Searle develops an account of tacit knowledge. I show how this notion of intentionality evades my criticism of Lawson. The second essay examines the conception of agency associated with behavioural finance from the perspective of the human ontology proposed by Searle. The principle theme of the essay is that each of the psychological traits that behavioural finance draws on, namely prospect theory, judgmental heuristics and mental accounting, involves the interplay of both conscious and non-conscious factors. Consequently the agent of behavioural finance is a construction that is readily intelligible in Searlean terms. I argue that this finding leads to a conception of the rationality of the agent encountered in the behavioural finance literature that is quite different from the way in which it is commonly presented. The mainstream microeconomic conception of the human actor is the focus of the final essay, in which it is argued that the treatment of human knowledge on this approach neglects a number of important factors in economic behaviour. The first half of the essay uses a simple Cournot duopoly game under conditions of complete and incomplete information in order to highlight the usual assumptions about actors ' knowledge in mainstream models. On the basis of these findings the second half of the essay then considers three aspects of human agency that these models neglect: non-probabilistic forms of uncertainty and ignorance, the subjectivity of knowledge and the role of tacit knowledge.