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This thesis will investigate the theories of organization and the organic proposed by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. These questions have been taken up by very few scholars of Nietzsche, and even less scholars of Schopenhauer. The first chapter of this work examines the various attitudes that scholarship takes toward the terms ‘life’ and ‘organic’ in Nietzsche’s texts. We indicate the significance of the question of life in Nietzsche's thought, and analyze the causes for the proliferation of the indefinite connotations surrounding these terms amongst Nietzsche’s commentators. The first chapter catalogues the history of the terms ‘life’ and ‘organism’ in Nietzsche’s influences, writings, and interpreters. Our second chapter dissects the Kantian and Schopenhauerian theories of the organic and of organization, with the majority of the chapter focusing on Schopenhauer. We argue that Schopenhauer’s critics have neglected two key elements of his philosophy: his doctrine of the Ideas, and his engagement with French naturalists such as Lamarck and Cuvier. Schopenhauer’s theory of the organic can only be understood once these two subjects have been connected. The third chapter in this thesis works on describing the concept of organization in Nietzschean thought. To do this involves describing the untold story of the relation between Nietzsche’s theories of types and the will to power with the Schopenhauerian notions of Ideas and the will. In this chapter we attempt to reexamine the concept of the will to power by analyzing the quality of power itself. We claim that scholars have not given enough consideration to the interpretive and organizational functions of the will to power. The last chapter in this thesis formulates and defines the organic being in Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is our contention that the indispensable element to unlocking Nietzsche’s concept of the organic is the theme of ‘the hidden’ in his thought. Our claim is that the initial gestures of life can be understood as a withdrawal, as the building of a boundary, as a hiding away. This is the culmination of the thesis; a theme which has been widely ignored by most scholars will end up at the heart of the Nietzschean project.

In this thesis we are going to examine the problem of the Overhuman [Übermensch] in the work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The Overhuman is a subject the notoriety of which far exceeds its careful treatment by Nietzsche’s commentators. Nietzsche’s mistreatment by the Nazis, the simplistic association of the term with Hollywood phantasies, as well as the large number of issues that the term covers, are some of the reasons for the relative obscurity of the term. On our part, we are going to investigate our subject by examining a broad array of issues and problems that Nietzsche wishes to address through the use of the term Overhuman. We are going to argue that, following the demise of various humanist ideologies in the West (all united under the all-powerful signifier of a transcendent God), man faces the challenge of having to justify his existence on earth solely by the utilization of immanent reasons, an event perhaps unprecedented in human history. Nietzsche tries partly to exemplify and partly imagine an earth that is going to be man-made and the various challenges and problems that this process is going to entail. We will argue that the term Overhuman refers to a process whereby man rediscovers an immanent culture and the new rules according to which life on earth is to take place; we are also going to examine the new political order which is going to replace the old one, which for the most part produced man as a docile animal, unable to stand up for his own rights and demands. Furthermore, we will examine the extent of the interconnection between the human and the Overhuman, an issue of the highest importance for Nietzsche. Finally, we are going to argue for a different, non-productive understanding of time that the Overhuman inaugurates and humanity is in desperate need for. Our thesis will argue for the centrality of the notion of the Overhuman in Nietzsche’s work; indeed we will argue that this is Nietzsche’s most persistent and most widely researched problem, and we are going to argue that without an, as much as possible, holistic examination of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the researcher will be either at a loss to understand Nietzsche’s Overhuman as problematic, or he will be destined to drive himself to wrong conclusions. Our thesis will show the extent of the challenge that Nietzsche’s thinking poses to Western culture and that any further cultural development of the human is unimaginable without modern humanity first facing the issues that Nietzsche has raised through his conception of the Overhuman.

This is a study of Hegel’s critique and development of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. The main purpose of this thesis is to do justice to both of these aspects of Hegel’s complex and notoriously difficult philosophical relationship with Kant. My aim in Part I is to present in a sympathetic light Hegel’s various objections and negative response to certain Kantian doctrines. My aim in Part II is to argue that Hegel’s positive relationship with Kant does not consist in accepting and merely carrying through Kant’s transcendental philosophy, but rather in him hoping to derive from Kant clues to a superior form of logic; an understanding of how to make transcendental claims; an account of conceptual form; and a conception of philosophical enquiry as involving self-transformation. Understood in this way, we can make better sense of Hegel’s critique of Kant and also his fundamental debt to him as well.

This dissertation attempts to determine what Kant's notoriously obscure conception of things in themselves, which not only played a key role in Kant's transcendental philosophy but also proved to be a central focus for Hegel's critique of that philosophy, ultimately consists in and how it can best be understood. This suggests, I would argue, that the overall plausibility of both Kantian transcendental idealism as such, as well as Hegel's critique of Kantian transcendental idealism, turns on how the transcendental distinction between appearances and things in themselves (TD) can best be understood. It is therefore the principal aim of my dissertation to come to terms with this particularly obscure conception lying at the heart of Kant's philosophy, and to consider how it shapes Hegel's critique of Kant. To begin with, I identify four major ways of reading Kant's TD, which have all been endorsed by at least one major Kant scholar in recent years. Of these four readings, it will become clear that the methodological reading, espoused by the likes of Henry Allison, Graham Bird, and Robert Pippin, among others, is the only one that can be said to both fit the texts, and also remain systematically defensible on philosophical grounds. On the basis of the methodological reading, I then outline and assess Hegel's foremost objections to the Kantian notion of things in themselves to see if this particular aspect of the Hegelian critique is either just the result of a basic misunderstanding, on Hegel's part, of the Kantian conception of things in themselves, or perhaps an accurate representation of some inherently problematic issues Kant never fully resolved with his transcendental idealism. Ultimately, I will show that the methodological reading, in addition to being the only plausible reading of Kant's TD, is also the most promising when it comes to rebutting Hegel's critique of things in themselves in light of the fact that it prima facie averts some, but not all, of Hegel's criticisms.

Anglophone biology at the start of the twentieth century tends to be remembered as ambitiously reductionist. Yet it was also a time that saw the flourishing of a now largely forgotten Kantian tradition. Drawing on archival as well as printed sources, this dissertation charts the dissemination and appropriation of Kant's bio-philosophy in the UK and the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a tradition flexible enough to change as it encountered new institutional and disciplinary contexts, yet stable enough to unite an international community of biologists who were often in contact with each other and endorsed each others' work. The lives and researches of some representative exponents of this community are examined in detail: among the British biologists, J. S. Haldane, D' Arcy W. Thompson, E. S. Russell and J. H. Woodger; among American biologists, F. R. Lillie, E. E. Just, C. M. Child and W. E. Ritter. These men not only accepted a number of core tenets characterizing organismal biology but appealed to them in criticizing Weismann's germ-plasm hypothesis, Mendelian genetics, and other forms of what they saw as naive reductionism and simplistic mechanism. Moreover - and in contrast with the socially conservative fate of Kantian biology in its German homeland - their scientific views often became intertwined with support for progressive or leftist political doctrines, eugenics included.

The purpose of this study is to provide the beginnings of a clear account of the correspondences between the initial reception of Nietzschean ideas and selected works of modernist writing by the Anglophone intelligentsia. In particular, the aim of this study is to provide a framework for exploring the Nietzschean undercurrents in the work of such figures as George Bernard Shaw, Dora Marsden, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce. Departing from traditional studies of influence and their method, the present account will examine the correspondences between the original reception of Nietzsche's ideas and their later absorption and development in the work of these writers and intellectuals with a special emphasis on the little-magazine culture of the period. As will be shown, in such avant-garde forums as The Eagle and the Serpent, The New Age (and its predecessor the Leeds Arts Club), The Freewoman/The New Freewoman/The Egoist, one sees the cross-fertilization of Nietzschean discourses with the then-contemporary theories of social, cultural and aesthetic egoism/individualism. These periodical and artistic coteries illustrate the close relationship between the reception of Nietzschean ideas and the tradition of radical literary modernism, an intellectual and artistic milieu that was progressive, experimental, and avant-garde in nature. The aim of this thesis is to consider and examine possible ways in which the contemporary discourses of 'radical Nietzscheanism' interact with the aesthetic agendas of these periodicals in general - and the individual agendas of Shaw, Marsden, Lewis, and Joyce in particular. I attempt to contextualize the work and thought of these individuals, to situate their texts within a larger avant-garde milieu receptive to Nietzsche, and to consider the ways in which they affect and are affected by it.

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This work seeks to illuminate the issue of an agent’s complicity in their own unfreedom via appeal to the work of Martin Heidegger. A secondary aim is to demonstrate what use Heidegger’s philosophy can be put to for theorising matters, such as complicity, that resonate specifically with feminist concerns. Chapter One begins with a brief historical account of the concept of complicity as it is appealed to in a gendered context. It then moves on to examine the issue of complicity as it is implicitly articulated in contemporary literature on adaptive preferences, autonomy and self-deception, identifying what insights into the phenomenon can be drawn from such approaches. Chapter Two offers an overview of the way in which complicity manifests itself in a Heideggerean context in the phenomena of falling and fleeing. This chapter also acts as an introduction to the way in which Heidegger’s ontology incorporates the insights into complicity drawn from the contemporary literature. Chapters Three, Four and Five take a more detailed look at complicity in a Heideggerean context via appeal to the notion of disclosedness. Breaking disclosedness down into its constituent elements, Chapter Three examines the way mood accounts for the insight of the self-deception theorist that complicity involves a form of concealment. Chapter Four turns to Heidegger’s conception of understanding and the insight from autonomy that complicity must be analysed as a way of Being. Chapter Five examines discourse and the insight from adaptive preference that any analysis of an agent’s complicity in their own unfreedom must take into account the agent’s social setting. Chapter Six explores the way in which the three insights already considered can be unified in Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity qua coming to understand oneself as Dasein. Here some of the broader implications for analysing complicity via a Heideggerean ontology are also examined.