This research explores the extent of the shift in the Turkish state’s discourse towards the Kurds’ language rights and the sources of resistance to their recognition under the successive AKP governments between 2003 and 2015. Examining this issue, I explore 1) the true nature of the Kurds’ language-related rights in lights of the relevant key points in the political theories of language rights; 2) the extent of the shift in the AKP’s Kurdish policy towards the Kurds’ language rights; 3) the sources of resistance to the Kurds’ language rights in the state discourse in view of the competing rationales behind language rights from both the state’s and minority groups’ perspectives; 4) whether the AKP’s Kurdish policy aims to contain the Kurds’ language rights or accord it greater recognition. The thesis concludes that the Turkish state discourse towards the Kurds’ language rights under the successive AKP governments between 2003-2015 primarily aimed to contain potentially far-reaching consequences of the Kurds’ language rights.

The aim of this thesis will be to give an elucidation of Nietzsche’s ideal of the post-moral autonomous individual: to give a picture of what Nietzsche takes such an individual to look like, and to show how this picture relates to some of Nietzsche’s most fundamental philosophical concerns. Overall, my argument will be that autonomy, or rather the degree of autonomy that a person possesses, is a function of the power of that person in relation to the other people and forces, and of their ability to extend their will over long periods of time. Moreover, the achievement of the highest degrees of autonomy, and by extension the achievement of the greatest levels of power, requires imposing (whether intentionally or not) an ethic upon one’s actions and one’s self. There are several features that this ethic must have if it is adequately to perform its function: it must be self-chosen rather than simply picked up from one’s surroundings, it must act to give unity to the most diverse collection of collection of drives and affects possible for the person who holds it, and it must be well tailored to fit their specific natural constitution. In order to establish this I will focus on four main issues: the significance of the sovereign individual of GM II: 2, the role of ethics/values in Nietzsche’s ideal of autonomy, the relation between Nietzsche’s deflationary account of consciousness and his views of freedom, and the notion of unity at play in Nietzsche’s writings. I will also offer some thoughts on the coherence of Nietzsche’s ideal of autonomy with his thoughts on life-affirmation.

The utility of functional accounts of language development in establishing the emergence of generalised verbal behaviour in children with autism was evaluated through a programme of research that also investigated ways in which interactions between speaker and listener behaviour can be manipulated to maximise the effectiveness of language-based interventions. Firstly, the Early Behavioural Intervention Curriculum (EBIC) was developed as a comprehensive framework for delivering Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention (EIBI) to children with autism. Secondly, the effectiveness of the EBIC was evaluated through analysis of process data collected during the Southampton Childhood Autism Project (SCAmP). Two subsequent studies provided further controlled investigation of the emergence of naming at the single-word level, the first in vocal children with autism, and the second in non-vocal children with autism who sign. Lastly, research was carried out to evaluate teaching procedures developed to establish complex conditional discriminations in children with autism on the basis of joint control by two types of speaker behaviour. Overall, findings reported indicate that the EBIC provides an effective framework for EIBI in autism, that theoretical accounts of naming and joint control provide a practical basis for developing effective procedures for teaching verbal behaviour to children with autism, and that functional accounts of language development provide effective means of establishing both generalised verbal behaviour and other key life skills in children with autism

The thesis reconstructs Hume’s conception of character. Character is not just an ethical concern in Hume’s philosophy: Hume emphasises the importance of character in his ethics, aesthetics and history. The reconstruction therefore pays attention to Hume’s usage of the concept of character in his clearly philosophical works, the Treatise of Human Nature and the two Enquiries, as well as his less obviously philosophical works, the Essays, Moral, Political and Literary and the History of England. The first main thesis is that Hume’s conception of character includes multiple heterogeneous elements. These include passions, habits, natural abilities and possibly general rules. These elements are combined to form a coherent character through social organisation and conventions. The elements underpin character attributions, but it is argued that Hume is not concerned with identifying elements with character traits, as he is interested in characters as a whole rather than individual traits. The second main thesis is that the character of judges is central to Hume’s philosophy. Hume’s most sustained character of a judge is to be found in the essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. Close examination of this essay with particular attention to the character of the true judge reveals that such judges should not be conceived of as ideal, as some commentators on the essay have supposed. It is further argued that the true judge can be used, with some modifications, as a template for the moral judge, which Hume requires for his moral philosophy but never fully articulates. The two theses are mutually supporting in that the judges examined in accord with the second thesis are conceived of in terms of the first thesis, i.e. they are conceived of by Hume as characters constituted by heterogeneous elements. The first thesis receives support from the second thesis, as the reality of the elements supposed in the first thesis is undermined by a failure to appreciate the importance of judges as characters in Hume’s philosophy.

In this thesis I offer an interpretation of Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism. I argue against interpreting Schopenhauer’s pessimism as if it were merely a matter of temperament, and I resist the urge to find a single standard argument for pessimism in Schopenhauer’s work. Instead, I treat Schopenhauer’s pessimism as inherently variegated, composed of several distinct but interrelated pessimistic positions, each of which is supported by its own argument. I begin by examining Schopenhauer’s famous argument that willing necessitates suffering, which I defend against the misrepresentative interpretation advocated by Ivan Soll. I also offer a metaphysical reading of Schopenhauer’s claim that no amount happiness can compensate for the mere fact of suffering, based upon his negative conception of happiness. I proceed by analysing Schopenhauer’s criticisms of two prominent optimists, Leibniz and Rousseau. I attempt to salvage something of Schopenhauer’s counterargument against Leibniz that this is the worse of all possible worlds, and I also examine Schopenhauer’s claim that the optimistic metaphysics of a priori rationalistic philosophy cannot cope with the evidence of meaningless suffering. In the case of Rousseau, I interpret Schopenhauer’s brief objection to Rousseau’s assumption of original goodness, by means of an examination of Schopenhauer’s conception of the contrary doctrine, original sin. Next I consider the metaphysics of Schopenhauer’s account of eternal justice. After defending it against a number of objections, I argue that the nature of his version of eternal justice, which he admits constitutes a justification for suffering, does not conflict with the fact that he so strongly condemns Leibniz’s and Rousseau’s optimistic justifications for suffering. Finally I assess whether and to what extent Schopenhauer’s ethics of salvation are either pessimistic or optimistic. I conclude that the mere fact that salvation is possible is not necessarily a cause for optimism, but that Schopenhauer’s doctrine of salvation is made partly optimistic by the higher form of cognition that he describes as part of it. I also argue that Schopenhauer’s views on the essentially mystical nature of the state of salvation ultimately commit him to being neither positively optimistic nor positively pessimistic about salvation. I conclude overall with some brief remarks about the meaning of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, and how in spite of its diverse nature, it is able to lay down a singular challenge to all future philosophers concerned with the question of suffering.

The debate on the development of Labour politics has become more complex and it is accepted that local economic, social and political experiences are crucial to an understanding of the growth of Labour and the decline of the Liberals. The majority of regional and local studies have concentrated on the north or London. This study tries to redress the balance by looking at how and why Labour politics developed in Southampton. The economic background is considered including the dominance of port related industry and the extent of trade union organisation. The influence of socialist groups and the character of local Liberalism is examined and it is argued that Labour had made a significant political advance by 1914. Despite some wartime divisions, Labour was able to unite around the material interests of the working class and after the war consolidated its position developing a neighbourhood organisation and moving away from a purely trade union based organisation. Labour began to secure more working class wards but this was an uneven process. They faced opposition in the form of an anti- Labour alliance of Liberals and Conservatives first at local and then at parliamentary elections. Restrictions on the municipal franchise excluded parliamentary electors and this was likely to affect potential Labour voters in marginal wards. Throughout the whole period Labour highlighted the material issues of unemployment and housing which helped to establish them as the party of working class interests.

The subject of this thesis is Friedrich Nietzsche’s methodology, the genealogical mode of inquiry, which came to fruition in On the Genealogy of Morals. The precise nature of the genealogy, as a mode of inquiry, is a site of contest amongst scholars, with the central debates pivoting around four questions which arise upon considering the methodology: (1) what is the critical import of Nietzsche’s genealogical mode of inquiry? (2) What form of critique does it take? (3) To whom does Nietzsche address his reflections? And (4) what role, if any, does history play in Nietzsche’s genealogical narratives? Accordingly, this thesis seeks to offer and to defend answers to the central questions that are generated by the consideration of Nietzsche’s methodology. In order to get a foothold into these debates and to provide the boundary within which these disagreements occur the first chapter has as its object of inquiry an examination and evaluation of Nietzsche scholars’ responses to these issues. In chapter two I defend my interpretation against these rival views, and contend that the genealogy takes the form of an immanent critique, and that it is intended, at least, to reach all of Nietzsche’s contemporaries. The adage “genealogy is history correctly practiced” is treated in the remaining three chapters, in which I attempt to morph what appears to be at present an uninformative formulation into an informative one by arguing that for Nietzsche historiography is best seen as a form of artistry. And, this I submit, serves to shed light upon the genealogical mode of inquiry, and to shape the boundary by which the equation of genealogy as methodology with history becomes instructive. 3.

The goal of this dissertation is to offer a practice-based account of intentionality. My aim is to examine what sort of practices agents have to engage in so as to count as talking and thinking about the way the world is – that is, what sort of practices count as representational. Representational practices answer to the way the world is: what is correct within such practices depends on the way things are, rather than (only) on the attitudes of agents. An account of representation must explain how such objective standards of correctness are introduced in human practices: one must explain how the world gets to have a say in what is correct in human discursive practices. Roughly, my proposal is that human discursive practices become responsive to the way things are by virtue of involving practical interactions with the world. The outcomes of these interactions depend on the way the world is and the evaluation of such outcomes contributes to determining which moves within the practice count as correct. Due to our practical engagement with the environment, thus, the world gets to constrain discursive practices. In order to flesh out my proposal, I develop a practice-based characterization of intentional or representational content. On this sort of approach, expressing intentional contents is seen as a matter of playing a certain role in relevant practices, rather than as a matter of engaging in some word-world relation. The expression of content, thus, is explained in terms of use. In particular, I adopt an inferentialist perspective, according to which discursive moves express contents because of their role in practices of giving and asking for reasons. I investigate how practical engagement with the environment introduces friction with the world in these practices of giving and asking for reasons. One of the main conclusions reached in the dissertation is that defeasibility is an essential feature of objective representational practices – so that attributions of representational correctness are revisable in an open-ended way. The discussion of defeasible reasoning – and of the way in which defeasibility shapes human representational practices – is a central point of this dissertation.

The aim of this prosopographical study of female revolutionaries in Russia was to examine the part played by women at different stages in the revolutionary process and their individual life cycles. The starting-point is 1870 because it was in that decade that the revolutionary movement reached mass proportions. The study stops at the end of 1917 when the Bolshevik party seized power and brought to an end the revolutionary activities of most former activists. In the course of the research a biographical database for 1,200 women has been compiled which was analysed to establish patterns among female revolutionaries and to identify factors which united or divided them. Most of the data for the study was acquired from primary sources such as autobiographies and biographies, memoirs, document collections. Some of the best autobiographical material came from Moscow archives: Rossisiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (RTsKhlDNI), Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskovskoi oblasti and Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Okriabr'skoi revoliutsii i sotsialisticheskogo stroitePstva Moskvy (TsGAORSSM). Finally, two biographical dictionaries/encyclopaedias were of special significance to the present study - Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii, edited by V.Nevskii and Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo politicheskikh katorzhan i ssyl 'no-poselentsev. They contained short biographical notes on hundreds of Russian women revolutionaries. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. The introductory chapter explains my approach to the research and the use of statistical and other data in compiling the database, the use of primary and secondary sources and the work on the tables that appear in the main body of the thesis. Chapters two, three and four consider the lives of revolutionary women between 1870 and 1889, 1890 and 1904, and 1905 and 1917 respectively. These chapters include comparative analysis of groups of women as well as individual case studies in the set time periods. The concluding chapter asssesses the study's findings and compares them to those of Barbara Evans Clements' Bolshevik Women and Beatte Fieseler's Frauen aufdem Weg in die russische Sozial-Demokratie, both published in 1995. It also briefly considers the political activities of women under the new Bolshevik regime. Overall, the study illustrates that women's involvement was more widespread and significant to the entire revolutionary movement than had been acknowledged so far. In particular, it shows that women workers as well as female intellectuals were capable of independent thinking and performing courageous acts. Some exceptional individuals from their ranks became role models for their younger or less experienced comrades.

This thesis investigates Schopenhauer's Spinozism in relation to the topics of the self and ethics. It aims to show that a recognition of the parallels between the two philosophers is illuminating in terms of understanding and interpreting Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Such a recognition brings to the fore philosophical resources in his system which are otherwise under-exploited, helps to solve interpretive puzzles and provides a new vocabulary with which to more adequately delineate key Schopenhauerian concepts. Chapters one and two address the metaphysics of the self in the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Spinoza, arguing that neither thinker accepts the Cartesian dogma that the self is to be identified with the mind; each insists upon the self’s embodiment and its integration into reality at large. Each, too, offers an explanation of how, in spite of this, individuals can be picked out both physically (within the spatio-temporal realm) and in virtue of their possession of an eternal nature or essence. A comparative analysis of these explanations forms the basis of the second chapter. The thesis then turns to the subject of ethics and salvation. Chapter three shows that their shared determinism bequeaths Schopenhauer and Spinoza a common problem regarding the viability of practical ethics. It demonstrates that Schopenhauer’s philosophy boasts the resources for an ethics along the lines of Spinoza’s and that his rejection of them generates explanatory and metaphysical puzzles for the Schopenhauerian. Both systems culminate in an account of blessedness or salvation. The final chapter proposes that the differences between these accounts are best understood in the light of Schopenhauer’s epistemological and metaphysical pessimism – and again, enumerates some of the challenges that result for an interpreter of his philosophy. The thesis concludes with an indication of further work which could usefully be performed both in terms of interpreting Schopenhauer’s philosophy and of situating it with reference to established philosophical traditions.