In crucial places in his path of thought, Martin Heidegger appeals to the notion of an insoluble enigma as a way of elucidating that thought, to such an extent that the enigma goes to the very heart of that thinking. All the words that are central to that thinking, the words that Heidegger uses to point towards the possibility of appearance and disclosure, are marked by this figure of the insoluble enigma. Whether writing about the opening of a world that art is, or the happening that is figured as Ereignis, Heidegger resorts to the enigma to illuminate his thinking. But what does it mean to inscribe an enigmatic insolubility into one’s very thinking and what kind of explanatory power can such a figure have? To answer these questions, this thesis traces the thought of the enigma through a series of readings of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, his 1942 lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘The Ister’ and Sophocles’s Antigone, and his writings on the poem of Parmenides. Beginning with a consideration of the enigma of art, it moves on to the enigmatic activity of the river in Hölderlin’s poem and how this gives rise to the enigma of the here and now, before moving on to the enigma of the uncanny in Antigone and the law of becoming homely in being unhomely; the place of the law itself becomes critical here. Finally, via Parmenides’s saying that thinking and being are the same, the enigma is identified with Heidegger’s rethinking of the ancient Greek thought of aletheia and traced, from there, to the givenness of being as es gibt and Ereignis.

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This thesis investigates the role that the concept of nature plays in green politics. Nature, in the green literature, is usually assumed to refer to the nonhuman environment. But critics of this way of thinking about nature argue that humans exist in such interconnected networks with their environments that environments cannot be divided into categories of human and nonhuman. These criticisms suggest that we should abandon talking about nature and concentrate instead on investigating the complex relationships we share with our environments. But even in the light of these criticisms the idea of nature does seem to articulate something important about green politics which cannot be communicated by just investigating the relationships that we share with our environments. I turn to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to make sense of this concept of nature. Heidegger makes numerous references to the unfolding of nature and the earth in his works. His philosophy has thus been used to make sense of what is at stake in taking care of our environments. In mainstream green readings of Heidegger, nature is understood as referring to the spontaneous growth of a nonhuman nature. However, I will approach nature in Heidegger's work differently, divorcing these concepts of nature and the earth from descriptions of the material growth of nonhuman natural beings. This allows us to understand the importance of the idea of nature in green politics. Paying attention to nature is important not because it allows us to address environmental crisis, but because it allows us to stop thinking that we can represent things through calculations and to think of them as mere resources. This thesis proposes thinking of green politics as having two separate goals, the goal of protecting nature and the goal of protecting the environment.

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The primary source for the biography is Baader's correspondence, nearly all of which is contained in the fifteenth volume of his collected works or in the four volumes edited by E. Susini. This material is predominantly religious and philosophical rather than personal in content, a factor which influences our presentation in two main respects. Firstly, it becomes necessary to introduce what may seem an inordinate number of personalities in order both to describe Baader (as 'the sum of his relations'), and to set his works as well as his life within an historical context. Secondly, the character of the letters often requires that motive be sought, if at all, in Baader's philosophical religion, making this to some extent a life of his ideas. This need not be artificial or unbiographical, inasmuch as Baader's mystic Romanticism disdained the separation of philosophy and action, or religion and life. Whatever 'coherence' is discernible in Baader's life is provided by an incessant striving not only to propagate but in fact to institutionalize the principles of his mysticism. This attempted meeting of 'the ideal and the real', often in the form of religious and political polemics, appears as a major theme in each of the three main sections into which Baader's life is here divided: 1) the years 1765-1814, leading from his education and religious background to his professional life as a mining engineer and public theosopher; 2) 1815-1824, the era of the Holy Alliance and of Baader's major theocratic and ecumenical activities; and 3) 1825-1841, beginning with Baader's advocacy of Catholicism and ending with his renewed ecumenical designs. The Second Part of this dissertation deals particularly with Baader's writings from 1786-1814, here called generally his Naturphilosophie. Our intent is to elicit the prime motive which they share with Baader's mature theosophy, and we state that to be an intuited unity of 'spirit' and 'nature'. These terms are Baader's own, and it is the definition of their relation – tending to be also that of ideal and real, soul and body, mind and world, God and creation – that the mystic makes his major task. The project appears first in his diaries, where in reaction to the mechanistic view of nature he extends the enthusiasm of the religion of feeling to include an intuitive appreciation of nature as the World-Soul. The Herderian analogical identification of the self as microcosm with the physical universe is Baader's initial method, which he gives a more detailed application in the thesis that discovers the World-Soul in the qualitative chemical heat-substance as a kind of Stoic 'technikon fire' (chap. 1). Departing not from the atomistic but from the 'dynamic' theory of matter for which Kant's metaphysics and theory of science had rather strangely prepared a way (chap. 2), Baader next produces an a priori refutation of natural necessity by proving for chemical and mechanical phenomena an underlying spontaneity and thereby an analogue of human freedom and life (chap. 3). In our fourth chapter, while taking note of Schelling's comparable effort to join 'religion and science' or the metaphysics of mind and of nature, we observe the mingling of Idealist terminology and mystic symbolism that marks the remainder of Baader's works, and we encounter as well the primary assumption of his doctrine of nature; for by his 'squared triangle' he has traced all natural organization and spontaneity to a source of life in the Divine. There follows a presentation of the doctrine of the organism wherein life stood as the realized unity of 'spirit' and 'nature' and as the paradigm for understanding the physical universe in all of its particulars and as a lawfully ordered whole. By way of a concept of organic teleology, Baader finds natural analogues to human moral purposiveness, and a means of re-establishing a theosophical teaching that knows all of creation to take part in the mystic return to God. Throughout this fifth chapter, reference to his contemporaries is intended to suggest why Baader would consider Boehme's vitalist metaphysics relevant to common Romantic concerns. Ending our Second Part, we introduce Jacobi's objection that any self-consistent philosophy purporting to have knowledge of the Deity and a religious understanding of nature leads ineluctably to pantheism. To this statement of the case for a separation of Wissen und Glauben, Baader replies that the intellect must be engaged in devotion, that 'the self is the other' or religious man needs not merely the 'supernatural' God but needs to know the divine presence in nature, and finally that the reconciliation of 'spiritualism' and 'naturalism' that Jacobi's other-wordly mysticism deemed impossible had already been achieved by Boehme. Because theosophy claims knowledge as well as faith, we begin our Third Part by reviewing the main arguments of Baader's mystic epistemology. While repeating without critical spirit the traditional ciphers for divine illumination, he calls upon preternatural experience in order to show that theosophy can fulfil even the rational criteria for 'knowledge'. The protean theme of 'reunion of religion and science' takes on other forms in Baader's desire to make belief philosophical through a speculative thinking that will take religious symbol and mystery as its given items of knowledge, and in his confrontation with the 'scientific' philosophy in which irreligiosity had assumed two different guises: the 'egocentric' Criticism that had declared the absolute independence of human thought, and the Hegelian system that would supersede religion and subsume it within its own categories. Baader's theosophy, his 'onto-theology' (chap. 2) joins 'spirit and nature', morality and natural knowledge, by discerning in the internal structure of the Deity a metaphysical law that defines both freedom and the general form of the panorganic universe. Expressed by the symbol of a fire in which darkness is overcome by light, this 'dialectical' law by which Boehme is to have laid the foundation for a resolution of all metaphysics, functions identically to the doctrine of the organism as a mediation of opposites. It generates the speculative concept of the self-created Trinity (or rather the Quaternary), the analogous concept of the Deity as the ideal organism, and the crucial concept of Baader's Boehmian theosophy: that of the eternal nature of life. The symbolical archetype of life, this mediative term acts at once as the divine 'substance' or 'body' ensuring the absolute concrete reality of God, and as a center of qualities and forces providing the creative model and power. The creation of the world of particulars is then pictured as the extension and articulation of that ideal life by the process of God's self-alienation and His 'return' to Himself through reflection on His image incarnate in the organic form of the created individuals, and of the creation as a whole. After characterizing the theosophical manner of signifying the dynamic structure of that eternal nature in 'this' vitalistically-perceived universe – which Baader carries out mainly by defining life as an expression of 'spirit' or freedom in synthesis with inorganic 'nature' as the contrary which it overcomes – we return to the problem of pantheism. Knowing the danger that he runs by admitting the irreducible quality of life, Baader restricts his identification of the eternal nature and the objectified universal life of the created individuals or their World-Soul. Distinguishing the 'substance' or Wesen, he maintains that the God of the eternal nature, enjoying unique independence, is entirely perfect prior to the creation of individual 'substances', and creates not from need but from love and the desire to increase perfection.

Hegel's discussion of the development of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit has often been used as a model for political liberation. Political philosophy and feminism in particular, often assume that the precondition for political change is the subject's autonomous position. This is an assumption coloured by Kojeve's reading of Hegel. Kojeve's interpretation of the Hegelian narrative has, in turn, influenced feminist theorists of self, such as Simone de Beauvoir, J essica Benjamin, and Luce Irigaray. Since these feminist theories of self approach Hegel through Kojeve they establish a subject that seeks her identity through the parameters of masculinity. However, Kojeve's focus on the autonomous self resembles the Cartesian legacy of the Cogito ergo sum rather than the Hegelian subject. This becomes clear if we read Hegel's criticism of Descartes' Cogito as wholly isolated from the social world; a criticism in turn, due to Kojeve's Cartesian inheritance, that can be extended to Kojeve's reading of He gel's Phenomenology. Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity (as a theory of 'self) is often seen as proposing a subject robbed of its autonomy and agency. Butler has been criticised on these grounds by Martha Nussbaum, Seyla Benhabib, and Allison Weir. This thesis places gender performativity alongside Hegel's theorising and aims to localise a subject that clings to ideais of detachment, yet can only realise its separated identity through the attachment to the other. A longing for recognition functions as a motivating factor for the re-enacting of norms of detachment. Feminist politics such as Nussbaum's, Benhabib's, and Weir's thus share with Kojeve certain conclusions regarding the political agent. Reading Butler's theory of gender performativity alongside Hegel's theorising enables a critique of the feminist political quest for the autonomous subject; a quest that renders the feminist dismissal of Butler's theory of gender performativity itself an example of masculine gender performativity.

This thesis is a study of Leibniz's ideas on the structure of ontological entities, and implicitly on the structure of the natural world. Since Leibniz even in his very late writings appears ( 0 allow for complex as well as simple individuals, the thesis examines without interpretive prejudice the distinct kinds of entity, aggregates as well as genuine individuals. that feature on Leibniz's mature ontological views starting from around the time of the Discourse on Metaphysics in the mid-1680s. Since aggregates have unity at least in the minds of perceivers, they feature - as apparent entities and from a particular point-of-view - as part of the extended Leibnizian ontology, even though quo unities they may not be part of absolute reality. Apart from making use of general mereological notions, my assessments are focussed on Leibniz's axiomatic ontological constraints and the marks of genuine composition. They are unity and infinity. I will draw sustained attention to Leibniz's diverging compositional analyses before and after the introduction of the monad. I submit that in the middle years his approach is primarily deflationist in view of the aggregate thesis and the arguments against Cartesian matter. From the 16905 and onwards, the compositional approach turns constitutive and foundationalist, when Leibniz's analytical explorations in to the ultimate structure of reality reach their final step in the decompositional analysis and terminate in the first elements in the order of things. The monad is Leibniz's metaphysical atom and the bedrock of reality. But with the introduction of the monad and the new compositional approach that proceeds from simple to complex beings, also a new set of problems emerges. The question is how to build a bridge between the extended-body realism that is part of the animals-with in-animals view of the middle years, and the world of unextended monadological ultimates that shape Leibniz's apparent phenomenalism of the late years. Acknowledging the explanatory lacuna in Leibniz's ontological system of how [0 reconcile and connect the beings from the two compositional strands, the thesis concludes on an agnostic note

I argue that Nietzsche's work brings into question one-sided accounts of emotional phenomena and the means by which we are to investigate and evaluate them. Through a provisional and questioning, rather thari systematic, vocabulary Nietzsche advances ideas about the dispositional and standing character of emotional phenomena and how these are shaped by cultural forces. On the one hand, then, Nietzsche shows the limits of a narrowly conceived naturalism in accounting for emotional phenomena, because of its tendency to reduce or remove the influence of culture. But, on the other hand, in opposing the idea that emotional phenomena can be reduced to physiological events, Nietzsche does not simply take up the cognitivist view that emotions just are judgements. Instead, he produces a revised account of the meaningfulness of emotional phenomena, one in which a plethora of other dimensions are also integrated. In rejecting narrowly naturalistic readings ofNietzsche, I also argue that he cultivates a herrneneutic and semiotic approach to the investigation of emotional phenomena, one that has significant affinities to the literary psychology of authors such as Stendhal and Dostoyevsky. In this way, I claim, Nietzsche's work articulates an historical and contextual analysis of emotional phenomena. Finally, I also address the intrinsically evaluative aspect ofNietzsche's discussion of emotional phenomena. Nietzsche produces a genealogical account of Western culture within which various emotional phenomena are located. This narrative concerns emotional phenomena as they relate to personal and communal decadence. In understanding what decadence is, and how it arises, I argue that Nietzsche produces a framework within which different emotional phenomena are to be assessed.

In Being and Time Heidegger posits Dasein's Being as essentially Being-with-Others. However, he only occasionally refers to Dasein's sociality, and throughout Being and Time there are sections where Heidegger seems to be setting out a more robust social structure which would allow us to understand how this Being-with-Others takes place. For example, he talks of solicitude (Fiirsorge) in both division I and II, as well as more oy~dy in §74 of division II where he talks of the community of authentic people (das Volk), but he never expands on these. It will be the purpose of this thesis to ask precisely how we might understand, what he calls, 'the various possibilities of community a well as of society'. Clearly an account of Dasein's sociality must take into account its different modes of Being- with-Others: i.e. indifferent, inauthentic, and authentic. But it is not apparent how Heidegger envisages the development of those social possibilities and what he ultimately sees them as amounting to. I will argue that understanding sociality and community in Being and Time presents us with three formulations that show a tension between authenticity and community. The first is a minimal form of community, conceived as one where Dasein has an inauthentic relation to the Other. The second is a more substantial form where Dasein becomes authentically bound together in a shared 'Destiny'. This conception will be shown to be in tension with the first one. This will lead me to ask whether we can envisage a third option that arguably avoids this tension between a generation of authentic Dasein and those inauthentic ones. I will question whether a viable 'third way' is to posit a formulation where authenticity depends on community, or rather where 'community' is not only compatible, but is a necessary condition of authenticity.

Up until now, Schopenhauer, Adorno and Merleau-Ponty have not been compared extensively. I seek to fill this lacuna, not only discussing the similarities between their theories, but also defending a moral outlook - in contrast with Kant and Korsgaard - that results from their observations on the vulnerability of the body. By approaching Adorno from a Schopenhauerian perspective, I furthermore seek to emphasize the often overlooked naturalistic tendencies of the former's thought. With reference to Elaine Scarry's observations on pain, I show that each author in a different way focuses on a corporeal dimension that Merleau-Ponty calls 'flesh'. This dimension makes us vulnerable to suffering and provides us with the capacity to experience empathy with other suffering (human and non-human) bodies. In Schopenhauer's view, this dimension is almost always overshadowed by an overpowering striving that results in egotistic behavior, and, in Adorno's view, by a pathological entwinement of self-preservation and instrumental rationality, which he connects to the origins of the modem self. I show that both thereby argue that the self is engulfed by a whole that is 'false' - respectively metaphysical and historical in nature - and that undermines the autonomy of the subject. Although Schopenhauer and Adorno hereby deemphasize the motivating role of reason, since it is, in their view, enslaved to self-preservation, I show that especially Adorno still defends its critical and reflective dimensions. By partly returning to Merleau-Ponty's observations on the flesh, I then argue that Schopenhauer and Adorno, against this negative background, describe a yearning for metaphysical experiences of embeddedness - mainly embodied in various forms of art, but also in natural beauty - that contains a strong somatic dimension. Adorno, furthermore, links some of these experiences to a hope for a utopian future in which social conditions are organized in such a way that unnecessary suffering is no more. With Schopenhauer, however, I argue that the naturalistic tendencies of Adorno's thought acutely problematize these utopian ideas.