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This thesis aims to highlight the logical and grammatical 'messiness' of religious beliefs and utterances, taking its inspiration from Wittgenstein's later thought. I begin, in Chapter 1, by looking at a neglected strand in Wittgenstein's later thought, in which he lays stress on the messiness of logic and grammar. I show that this messiness can be seen as being comprised of four qualities: variety, indeterminacy, mixed ness, and fluidity - each of which I characterise. Because people's beliefs and utterances can be various, indeterminate, mixed, and fluid, it is hard to describe their logics or grammars without distorting them by forcing them into inappropriately rigid categories. Wittgenstein therefore suggests a novel method for the illumination of beliefs and utterances with messy logics and grammars - namely, the method of putting forward simple examples, to act as centres of variation and objects of comparison. These simple examples are used to throw light on the different aspects of the messy beliefs and utterances under investigation, without trying to definitively pin-down their logics or grammars. I examine these aspects of Wittgenstein's thought in his later writings in general, and in is remarks on religion in particular. The core of my thesis - Chapters 11 and III - applies this method of simple examples in two case studies of religious beliefs and utterances: belief in a good and loving God, and belief in miracles. In each of these cases I apply Wittgenstein's method in order to show that religious beliefs and utterances in both these areas come in both informational and non-informational varieties; and they are often indeterminate, mixed, or fluid, between those two quite different varieties. Thus, while one person may hold a falsifiable belief in a good and loving God, another person may hold an unfalsifiable form of the belief, and yet a third person may hold a form of he belief that is indeterminate or flu id between the two, or a mixture of them. Having shown that religious beliefs and utterances are often logically and grammatically me1sy, in Chapter IV I respond to some possible objections, and then discuss the nature and significance of this messiness. I grant that logical and grammatical messiness can sometimes be epistemic and linguistic vices; but I also show that indeterminacy, mixedness, and fluidity can sometime be epistemic virtues in religious beliefs - for they can be integral to religious growth, the natural dialectic of religious life, and other such key aspects of a deep religiosity. In my conclusion - Chapter V - I locate my contribution within the context of contemporary philosophy of religion, particularly in relation to the opposed writings of Richard Swinburne and DZ Phillips. Finally, 1 explain why an appreciation of their logical and grammatical messiness is integral to the project of understanding religious beliefs and utterances, and therefore also to the project of evaluating them.

There is a small body of literature on Wittgenstein's house - the Palais Stonborough or Kundmanngasse- which has attempted to establish a link of some kind with the philosopher's writing and an understanding of architecture. However, this literature has generally misapplied Wittgenstein's philosophy. In order (Q locate a more convincing account, this dissertation offers an original reading indebted to the contemporary interpretation of Wittgenstein known as the "new Wittgenstein". Emphasizing and valuing grammatical investigations of language-use and its adequacy in describing the world, this reading undermines metaphysical or dualist accounts, as well as universals characteristic of essentialist accounts. With regards to architecture discourse, this reading yields a critique of theory-use in the architecture discourse since Modernity, through its valuation of everyday language-use over metaphysical constructions. Reading architecture through this new Wittgensteinian lens circumvents the restrictive post-Enlightenment dualists' paradigm that underlies metaphysical construction , and instead provides a holistic view of architecture.

This thesis provides a critical examination of James Frederick Ferrier’s philosophy that was published during his lifetime.  I will consider his philosophy in its historical context with particular emphasis attached to the relationship between Ferrier’s philosophy and that of his immediate predecessors: the Scottish School of Common Sense. I will also look at the development of his idealism, especially in relation to Berkeley but also in terms of his contemporaries and the later British Idealists. In this way I will assess the development of the philosophy of mind in the Scottish philosophical tradition during the mid-nineteenth century. Ferrier is an idealist who develops his philosophy principally through his negative reaction to the philosophy of his common sense predecessors and by reworking the philosophy of Berkeley. There are similarities between Ferrier’s philosophy and the Scottish tradition of common sense. Yet, this is purely in terms of a shared agenda because he rejects the methods and the focus of common sense philosophy in favour of an idealist system of metaphysics. What I will show throughout the course of this thesis is that although Ferrier cannot be considered as a common sense philosopher he works within the parameters of the Scottish philosophical tradition; a tradition in which common sense played a large part.

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The thesis explores the role of human understanding in R.G. Collingwood's philosophy. I examine four major areas: the role of psychology, the unity of mind (i.e. unity of thoughts and emotions), the role of art and the case of fairy tales as a source of historical knowledge. These themes taken together expound a coherent way to see human understanding: with psychology Collingwood suggests the form that human understanding cannot assume the unity of mind is Collingwood's idea of how we experience an activity, that is, as an undivided whole of emotions and thoughts (and in some respects sensations or feelings too), that exist in every activity as elements that cannot be distinguished or separated. When we come to the forms that an activity can take I argue, using art and fairy tales, that human understanding in Collingwood's system should be seen as a shift from the knowledge of the united spirit (as propounded in <italic>Speculum Mentis</italic>) to the knowledge of the historical consciousness. The knowledge of the united spirit is achieved through a dialectic scale of the different forms of experience, which individually, in isolation from one another, are not epistemologically valid. In the historical consciousness the forms of experience are epistemologically autonomous and are found within history, all being manifestations of the historical mind.

In spite of the evident centrality of philosophical 'realism' in Collingwood's autobiographical account of his own intellectual development, his critique of 'realism' has hardly been investigated as a central theme in his philosophy. Collingwood's arguments against contemporary 'realism' and his stated move beyond 'idealism' have mostly been treated as a minor question subordinate to other questions. By contrast, I have tried in this thesis to reconstruct Collingwood's philosophy as a critical development of the realism/idealism dispute of his day, focusing on his less known early published and unpublished philosophical writings. This has enabled me to clarify his unique definition of 'realism' in terms of a dualistic framework, and understand his philosophy as an attempt to overcome such dualisms in the realms of philosophy. This approach ultimately highlighted the aim of Collingwood's reform of philosophy as the better understanding of the human mind and action. By employing the 'historical' and 'internal' method of analysis, I firstly illustrated how the idea of 'dualism' became an issue in the realism/idealism dispute as it emerged in early twentieth-century British philosophy. This was followed by a biographical sketch in which I demonstrated that Collingwood's educational background was perfectly equipped to refute the 'realist' philosophy in the dispute. Historically contextualising thus, I chronologically restored the formation of his critique of 'realism' as his attempts to synthesise dualisms in logic (subject/predicate), ontology (abstract/concrete), epistemology (subject/object), and ethics (theory/action) during the period between Religion and Philosophy and An Essay on Philosophical Method. Finally, I argued that Collingwood's critique of 'realism' crystallised in his notion of duty, which embodied his characterisation of philosophy as both 'normative' and 'descriptive'. Throughout, I presented a systematic and sustained picture of Collingwood's early philosophy, identifying and unfolding the fertile implications of his critique of 'realism' for his principal concern with the human mind and action.

Common sense, affirmed Ferrier, can neither be set aside nor taken for granted by philosophy. Rather, it must be converted into philosophy, and this "by accepting completely and faithfully the facts and expressions of common sense as given in their primitive obscurity, and then by construing them without violence, without addition, and without diminution into clearer and more intelligible forms". In the period under discussion, the early nineteenth century, the attempt to elucidate the phenomena of mind and their linguistic moulds came under the title of 'mental science' or 'analysis'. More specifically, the process envisaged for this science was inductive, what Dugald Stewart would call a dual operation of analysis and synthesis or Cabanis the method of decomposition and recomposition. Agreement on the use of such a procedure for the philosophy of mind or on the details of the technique employed was never unanimous: in the case of the latter, it had first to be established whether the 'scientist' was dealing at the outset with 'simple' or 'compound' phenomena and whether he was to proceed from the known to the unknown or vice versa. Beneath this controversy lay the roots of an earlier separation between the 'analysis of nature' (wherein our representations are viewed as scattered across the linear board of their presentation, and so distantly and only vaguely related) and the 'analytic of imagination' (which arranges and orders the disparate segments of temporal presentation into a simultaneous table of comparative representations). Michel Foucault, whose distinction this is, argues that these two directions of analysis begin to converge towards the end of the eighteenth century. But the moment of convergence, being fraught with difficulties for those at the intersection, is less than happy. This uneasiness of mind accounts, moreover, for the strain of conversion in 'Common Sense' philosophy. Nevertheless, where the struggles at the juncture are most intense, there is a commensurate heightening of philosophical awareness. Faintly visible in the first inquiries of Thomas Brown (1778-1820) into causality and volition, it reaches a crescendo in his more mature reflections on memory and attention, the nature of consciousness and reflection itself. Emerging with this apprehension, and giving it depth, is Brown's sensitivity to the feelings of selfhood and his belief in the recovery, however imaginary, of the individual's past. That sense of an order to be captured and restored, combined with a recognition of the affections which, more often, reap the havoc of human nature, create in his writings the sort of excitement associated not with the resolution of dilemmas, but with a prolonged, agonizing and continual tension. The subsequent discussion moves towards as it is moved by that realization.

Conversational implicature is (roughly) the practice of conveying one thing by saying another. Philosophical and linguistic work on the topic has been dominated by the approach proposed by Paul Grice — the Gricean framework, as I call it — according to which implicatures can be calculated from principles of cooperative behaviour. The framework faces numerous objections and counterexamples, however, and this thesis reassesses it in the light of recent work in the area. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the topic, provide a detailed exposition of the Gricean framework, and highlight a problem concerning the role of speaker intentions in implicature. Chapter 3 sets out some problems for Grice’s approach and argues that we can address them by reinterpreting his framework as a normative one. It proposes some revisions to the framework to make it more compatible with this reading and shows how the tension in Grice’s view of speaker intentions can be resolved. Chapter 4 then argues that, despite its attractions, the revised theory has a serious flaw, being unable to establish norms of implicature that are speaker-independent. The chapter proposes instead an intention-centred account, which abandons the requirement of calculability and allows a direct role for speaker intentions, while still preserving a normative element. Chapter 5 looks at neo-Gricean theories, which use Gricean principles to explain a range of supposedly context-independent implicatures. It sets out some problems for neo-Griceanism, comparing it with rival approaches and surveying relevant experimental evidence. The chapter concludes that implicature is more context-sensitive than neo-Griceanism allows and that general principles have at best a limited role in its explanation. Chapter 6 draws some conclusions, arguing that implicature is less rational than Grice supposed and more dependent on context and speaker intention. It also offers some speculations about the social role and ethics of implicature.