This thesis addresses the question of whether morality needs to be grounded in theory of human nature. I argue that it does not. Two pressures incline us towards the view that morality must be grounded in such a theory. The first of these is the thought that the absence of belief in a divine law giver creates special problems for the putative authority of moral considerations. If we are to avoid moral scepticism, so this line of thought goes, we must show how moral requirements serve or express our natural purposes. The second pressure is the observation that moral codes vary based on contexts (environmental and cultural) in ways that are too uniform to be accidental. An ethical theory is naturalistic if it denies that morality depends on the existence of God, and accommodates the intuition that morality is necessarily connected to human ends. I describe these pressures, focussing on an example of an individual (Mary) who declares themselves morally incapable of acting in a certain way. I explain why there is a problem in accommodating this modal appeal within the structures of practical deliberative inference. I then go on to describe what I take to be the distinctive features of moral experience. These include our confidence in moral requirements, their importance within our lives, their inescapability and our inability to resent them. These features are explained from the points of view of the agent and recipient, and in relation to both past and future circumstances. I then ask whether it is possible to accommodate a view of morality with these distinctive features within a non-sceptical naturalistic framework. I consider more carefully what moral naturalism requires. I distinguish between romantic and non-romantic approaches to the grounding of moral norms, and formal and material varieties of these approaches. I distinguish between romantic and non-romantic approaches to the grounding of moral norms, and formal and material varieties of these approaches. I suggest that formal non-romanticism (FNR) provides a way of grounding moral requirements which is naturalistic but which does not depend on the provision of a theory of human nature. On this view, moral necessities are sui generis and are grounded in an awareness of the presence of another human being. FNR is compared and contrasted to the dominant contemporary forms of moral naturalism. These are Kantianism, Humeanism and Aristotelianism. In general, these positions share a commitment to grounding moral claims on the deliverances of theory. Therefore I dub this family of views theoretical naturalism (TN). I explain what ’theory’ means in this context, and show how such views account for Mary’s appeal to moral necessity. Within the family of theoretical naturalism, Humeanism and Aristotelianism form a distinctive sub-set which I call rationalism. I compare and contrast their views, arguing that underlying their approaches is a shared presumption that an account of ethics is complete insofar as we have a full account of the panoply of human ends and the most effective means to their satisfaction. Having explained the various alternatives available, I show that FNR is superior to its rivals. I argue that TN in general, in virtue of its conception of the role of theory in morality, cannot accommodate the fineness of morally good deeds. Turning to the work of writers in the Wittgensteinian tradition I show how ethics is dependent on a sense of the human condition, rather than on a theory of human nature. In other words, to explain the fineness of fine deeds and the vileness of bad ones we need to aver to considerations about what it means for an individual to have been wronged, what pathos it has given our sense of life and what may come of it.

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Following the work of Popper and especially of Kuhn in the 1960s, the attention of philosophers of science has been very much concentrated on change in science. Popper's picture was of constant change ("revolution in permanence") at the level of scientific theories, but constant change in accordance with fixed methodological standards of evaluation. Drawing on Kuhn's work, however, many recent philosophers of science have held that the phenomenon of scientific change is much more radical and far-reaching than anything allowed by Popper: specifically, that there have been major changes in methodological standards during the history of science alongside changes in accepted fundamental theory. The chief problem facing this no-invariant-methodology thesis is that it seems to inevitably entail relativism. If the methods and principles of scientific theory appraisal are subject to radical change, then competing theories or research traditions may uphold competing (or conflicting) methodologies. When methodologies do conflict, how can choice between competing theories or research traditions be rationally adjudicated. How can the methods and principles for the correct appraisal of scientific theories themselves evolve rationally. Two major attempts have been made in the recent literature to construct positions which accommodate change in methodological standards while nonetheless avoiding relativism. These are the versions of methodological naturalism developed by Larry Laudan and Dudley Shapere, respectively. This dissertation examines these two positions in detail and argues that they fail: in so far as they really incorporate the no-invariant- methodology thesis they inevitably embrace relativism. I argue that the way to resolve this difficulty is to reject the no-invariant-methodology thesis. Moreover, methodological naturalists (like Laudan and Shapere) have not succeeded in giving any genuine and convincing illustration of radical methodological change.

In recent years, geography and the wider social sciences have been animated by a conceptually reinvigorated concern for materialist thought. Within cultural geography, this emerging movement - which is often referred to as a 'new' or 'vital' materialism - has sought to understand the materiality of human life in relation to the lively capacities of a more-than-human world. Contrary to entrenched humanist narratives, these new materialist trajectories refute the anthropocentric assumption that humans are metaphysically exceptional beings, defined by their capacity to transcend nonhuman nature. The following thesis contributes to these debates through an experimental engagement with the notion of a 'transcendental empiricism,' as defined in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. My contention is that, whilst current materialist trajectories accept the critique of anthropocentrism at a superficial level, they often do not go far enough in considering the implications of this critique for social science; the most radical of which is that we can no longer approach human life from the Kantian position of a transcendental subject. With Deleuze, I argue that a materialism worthy of the name must begin from the supposition of a transcendental field, that is, a plane of nature that admits of neither subject nor object. My concern, then, is to explore the implications of transcendental empiricism for contemporary materialist thought. Venturing beyond Deleuze, I find resonances of this strange empiricism in the conceptual landscapes of A.N. Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon and Felix Guattari. Taking each in turn, I show how these three renditions of nature's transcendental field generate new kinds of questions regarding the materiality of human life. I achieve this task through a range of empirical lenses, which include singular objects, technical ecologies and aesthetic encounters. I conclude the thesis by affirming the capacity for transcendental empiricism to radicalise materialist thought through its commitment to immanence.

My thesis examines the significance of Theodor W. Adorno’s recurrent reference to the Old Testament ban on making images of God: the ‘Bilderverbot’. In particular I focus on three facets of this figure that occur at prominent junctures of Adorno’s work: his ‘imageless materialism’ (Chapter One), his ‘inverse theology’ (Chapter Two) and his ‘negative aesthetics’ (Chapter Three). In each case I argue that Adorno strips the image ban of its religious associations and enlists it in the service of a broadly Marxian critique of capitalist modernity. The ban on picturing the absolute is rendered as a ban on pre-determining a future in which all historical antagonisms are reconciled. As Adorno argues, only an unflinching criticism of the present can throw into relief the contours of an ‘imageless’ Utopia. I approach Adorno’s writings with a view to his sources, many of which contain notable references to the image ban that span the history of modern German thought. They include: Marx and Lukács, Benjamin and Bloch, Kant and Hegel, as well as Hölderlin, Kafka and Schoenberg. By emphasising these elective affinities, I aim to shed light on Adorno’s singular application of the figure of the image ban to his critical project. In this regard, I hope to dispense with certain prevalent characterisations of Adorno as a quietistic aesthete advanced by critics such as Habermas, Taubes and Agamben. Far from designating a merely historical curio, I argue that Adorno’s singular appropriation of the image ban serves as a potent model for thinking an aesthetics of resistance in the present.

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The investigation of the central problem of this thesis - the status of the body in a materialism refounded in practice - is motivated by two current trends in contemporary modem European philosophy. These are, on the one hand, Judith Butler's political theory of the body, which evacuates ontological and materialist dimensions; and, on the other, the increased popularity of 'new' materialisms and speculative realism, which focus on questions concerning the inaccessibility and/or nonhuman agency of the material domain. This thesis proposes that these approaches often elide or cannot account for the status of the body and its practical activity. Butler's model renders the materiality of the body a quasi-Kantian thing-in-itself, accessible only through the materiality of the signifier; whilst, in their attempt to move beyond analyses of human finitude to access reality, certain contemporary materialist and realist approaches "theologise" the material domain in a way that sets it beyond the harnessing capacity of human practice. This thesis proposes instead that the philosophical and political questions concerning the status of the body are most productively addressed within a materialist framework that places a certain conception of 'practice' at the core of its ontology. It begins its analysis by exploring Karl Marx's innovative refoundation of materialism in an ontology of practice, situating it historically in relation to the work of his contemporary, Friedrich Albert Lange. It then considers the constitutive ambiguity of the 'metabolism' between practice and material environment within this refoundation of materialism. Showing how this ambiguity is often "resolved" or undermined by Marx, the thesis argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's later work- particularly The Critique of Dialectical Reason - allows a development of this constitutive ambiguity in Marx and a reconsideration of a diversity of practices in relation to the "situated" body. Practice in Sartre is explicitly theorised as particularised and embodied, rather than abstract and universal, such that we can think the individual subject within this reconceived practical materialism. Rediscovering the practitioner as embodied is to rediscover the diversity of the qualitative and concrete at the root of a materialist framework, allowing us to address materialist feminist criticisms of Marx and Marxist theory for its lack of a resistant individual subject.

The purpose of the essay is to arrive at a clear assessment of what the doctrine of physicalism means, as it concerns mental events and mental states; and to exhibit and adjudicate the factors which bear on its truth or falsehood. The main themes of the essay are the reduction of the mental to the physical, and the identity theory. Chapter I explains why mental language is so apparently indispensable to various theoretical enterprises, and shows why it seems impossible to dispense with mental language in favour of behavioural language. The reductive programmes of Carnap are discussed, and alternatives to them are introduced. In Chapter II two theories with a physicalistic conclusion are examined, and found wanting. The first is Putnam's theory that mental states are functional states of the organism, and that a Turing Machine table can represent the relation between mental states without implying what physical realisations they have. The second is Davidson's "proof" that mental events are identical with physical events; its main weakness lies in the premiss that the mental and the physical interact causally. Chapter III is addressed to the ontological question of what mental phenomena there are. The main conclusion is that the evidence suggests that, in a strict sense, there are no mental events. This entails that physicalism is to be best understood in terms of the truth-relations between mental and physical sentences (or equivalently, in terms of the identity either of mental properties with physical properties, or of mental facts with physical facts). Chapter IV argues that physicalism can only be coherently stated in terms of the nomological equivalences between mental and physical sentences. The arguments which obstruct the truth of this doctrine for the case in which the physical sentences have a behavioural content cannot be applied to the case in which the physical sentences have a cerebral content. One important general difference between the truth-grounds of mental sentences and the truth-grounds of physical sentences (explained in terms of a consciousness condition) provides an explanation for why a reduction of the mental to the cerebral is the only possibility open for physicalism.

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