How we read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has a huge influence on how convincing we find the parts of which it is composed. This thesis will argue that by taking its arguments and concepts in isolation we neglect the unifying architectonic method that Kant employed. Understanding this text as a response to a single problem, that of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgement, will allow us to evaluate it more fully. We will explore Kant's attempts to relate the a priori and the synthetic in the Introduction, Metaphysical Deduction and Analytic of Principles of the Critique of Pure Reason. Having developed this reading at length we will be able to reassess Kant's relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze's critique of Kant and his tendency to make selective use of his work has so far characterised their relations. However, by reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in terms of its unifying method we will open up a new means of relating these two thinkers. Whilst Deleuze rejects many key Kantian concerns and concepts he embraces his methodological concern with the ability of problems to unify our thought. The problem-setting and forms of argument that emerge within Kant's architectonic method will be related to Deleuze's account of experience. This thesis will contribute to both Kant and Deleuze studies on the basis of the reading of the Critique of Pure Reason it will present. By showing how Kant's text is to be read as a whole we will be able to challenge the conclusion that the arguments he makes ultimately rely upon a notion of 'subjective origin'. The problem of accounting for 'the actual' through its relation to 'the virtual' in Deleuze's thought will be re-assessed on the basis of his newly established relation with Kant. Understanding Kant's method in the Critique of Pure Reason will be shown to strengthen both his own account of experience and that offered by Deleuze.

My thesis situates itself within the field of the Philosophy of Worldviews. Specifically, it aims to address the normative question of what the task should be of such a philosophy when faced with the problem of conflicting beliefs between religious worldviews. To answer this question, I turn to the procedure of aporetical analysis, in short, aporetics. Firstly, aporetics offers a distinct method of consistency restoration within inconsistent sets on the basis of thesis rejection and thesis modification. Secondly, aporetics leads to an understanding of the availability of aporetic exits on the basis of epistemic criteria. On the one hand, this leads us to opt for an orientational monism/pluralism, which steers the middle course between the epistemic stances of exclusivism and pluralism. On the other hand, it allows us to identify epistemic criteria for worldview acquisition on the basis of three distinct superclasses. These superclasses can be derived from Jürgen Habermas' validity claims, and applied to the self-understanding of contemporary theories of religion.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a systematic account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of value by examining his exemplars. It will be argued that these exemplars represent his favoured evaluative practices and therefore illustrate what I will call his evaluative ideals. The thesis will be structured in three chapters, each examining a different exemplar that emerges from a particular period of Nietzsche’s work. Proceeding in this way will allow me to examine what I take to be three strands of his philosophy of value; the critical ideal through the exemplar of the Free Spirit, the ethical ideal through Zarathustra, and the meta-ethical ideal through the exemplar of the Future Philosopher. These standpoints, it will be claimed, reflect Nietzsche’s central insights about what we should value and the way in which we should value, and are in this sense his evaluative ideals. Moreover, in doing so I will also attempt to provide some key insights on Nietzsche’s reasons for his evaluative preferences, as given through these exemplars as evaluative ideals.

This thesis examines the cognitive attitude of belief, taking belief to be the attitude people take to what they think is true. Can this attitude be analysed in terms of mental occurrences or events? The theories of Hume, Ogden and Richards, and Brentano are examined and criticised for faults peculiar to each of them. Occurrence theories are rejected generally for failing to account satisfactorily for implicit and unformulated beliefs. Is belief then a disposition to act? Behaviourism is discussed in the version presented by R. B. Braithwaite and shown to provide neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the attribution of belief. Behaviourism is criticised for its general tendency to reduce speculative concerns to practical. Belief, along with attitudes such as hope, is shown to differ from occurrent mental events and states, although sharing with such states a degree of epistemological privacy. How is belief to be identified? Belief of individuals is shown to be founded on each individual's acceptance of public criteria for and attitudes to truth. Wayward beliefs are possible only given that the individual shows in other ways that he grasps these criteria and attitudes. This theory brings out the strengths of both associationist and behaviourist accounts. The object of belief is shown to be a proposition rather than the concrete sentences or statements assented to. In this theory, propositions are thought of in terms of the understanding of the believer rather than as timeless, abstract entities. Attempts to give an extensional account of belief-objects fail because of referential opacity; they also have problems in that two people, particularly if they come from different cultural backgrounds, may assent to the same statement and mean different things by it. Moral beliefs and belief in people and things are shown sometimes to include attitudes of emotive commitment and other feelings which can be distinguished from cognitive belief. The relationship between the long term and largely unformulated attitude of belief and explicit acts of judgment or assent is examined. These assents are constitutive of belief, in that a person making an assent thereby forms his belief on the subject. This is because of what we are doing when we actually judge that something is so. Theories which postulate unconscious, as opposed to unformulated beliefs, and theories which suggest that we know what we believe by introspecting our internal states are rejected. The relationship between belief and the will is discussed. Descartes' account of this relationship in his fourth Meditation is partially defended against criticism made by J. L. Evans, on the grounds that it shows us we ought to make ourselves responsible for our assents. In assenting, we accept certain standards for judgment; we should become conscious of this in order to make ourselves responsible for what we believe. The undesirability, but not the impossibility of having logically inconsistent beliefs is demonstrated. Beliefs naturally tend to form themselves into a coherent picture of the world. But we learn to believe through entering such a system. The influence of the context of belief on individual beliefs is examined in examples taken from the history of science and common sense. Belief systems also influence the way evidence is seen and interpreted. But these factors are shown not to lead necessarily to sceptical or relativistic conclusions.

In this dissertation I defend the claim that Nietzsche’s middle period can be read as presenting a theory of cultural flourishing that has as its foundation the project of incorporating truth. The consciously experienced world is the product of a number of interpretive processes operating below the level of consciousness. The intentional structure of experience is universal to human beings, but the content of the resulting world is determined by inherited norms and inculcated associations. Culture in one sense refers to these inherited rules, but in another to the specific worlds that individuals are presented with as a result of them. The experienced world is relative to the interpretation employing in producing it, but experience is structured such that the world is presented as mind-independent. That is, the world is perspectivally constituted, even if each perspective presents its own world as the only one. This claim is what Nietzsche means by ‘truth’ in the project of incorporating truth. To incorporate this amounts to a refusal to commit to any one perspective dogmatically, which translates into the activity of continually altering one’s experienced world. This is achieved by reordering the framework that forms culture. But this is not done because truth has absolute value that demands that it be incorporated. Rather, it is done in the name of health, which for Nietzsche amounts to realising to the greatest extent possible the inherent forces that govern all living things. Continually changing perspectives introduces diversity into one’s existence; being able to maintain an identity in the face of this diversity is a demonstration of the strength of one’s vitality. This balance of stable identity and maximum diversity is constitutive of great health at the individual level and at the cultural level. Since incorporation at the individual level employs the cultural framework, the activity involved automatically has the capacity to affect culture at large. Certain great individuals, who themselves exhibit great health, are conscious of this relation to culture and they use it both to maintain cultural diversity and to unite the community around and ideal that helps engender cultural health. That ideal is science.

This thesis seeks to understand the nature of and relation between science and philosophy articulated in the early work (1953-1968) of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It seeks to challenge the view that Deleuze’s metaphysical and metaphilosophical position is in important part an attempt to respond to twentieth century developments in the natural sciences, claiming that this is not a plausible interpretation of Deleuze’s early thought. The central problem identified with such readings is that they provide an insufficient explanation of the nature of philosophy’s contribution to the encounter between philosophy and science that they discern in Deleuze’s work. The philosophical, as opposed to scientific, dimension of the position attributed to Deleuze remains obscure. In chapter 1, it is demonstrated that this question of philosophy’s contribution to intellectual life and of how to differentiate philosophy from the sciences is a live one in Deleuze’s early thought. An alternative, less anachronistic interpretation of the parameters of Deleuze’s early project is offered. The remaining chapters of the thesis examine the early Deleuze’s understanding of the divergence between philosophy and science. Chapter 2 gives an account of Deleuze’s metaphilosophy, alongside a reconstruction of his largely implicit early understanding of science. The divergent intellectual processes and motivating concerns that account for Deleuze’s understanding of the differentiation of science and philosophy are thus clarified. In chapter 3, Deleuze’s use of mathematical and physical concepts is examined. It is argued that these concepts are used metaphorically. In chapter 4, the association between modern science and the Deleuzian concept of immanence that has been proposed by some Deleuze scholars is examined and ultimately challenged. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the significance of Deleuze’s early work for contemporary debates concerning the future of continental philosophy and the nature of philosophy more generally.

My thesis demonstrates that, despite a number of impossibility results, a satisfactory and coherent theory of population ethics is possible. It achieves this by exposing and undermining certain key assumptions that relate to the nature of welfare and personal identity. I analyse a range of arguments against the possibility of producing a satisfactory population axiology that have been proposed by Derek Parfit, Larry Temkin, Tyler Cowen and Gustaf Arrhenius. I conclude that these results pose a real and significant challenge. However, in the absence of further evidence I reject the conclusion that they imply that the value of populations is either not precise or not transitive. Instead, I expose some fundamental assumptions behind these results. One key assumption is that something can only make a life better or worse if it makes that life better or worse for the person living it, i.e. it raises or lowers the ‘welfare level’ of that life. Although intuitively highly plausible, this assumption ignores the possibility that perspectives other than that of the person living a life may be relevant for evaluating the components of that life and that these should be incorporated into our all things considered judgements. I argue that episodes within a person’s life that are strongly psychologically connected may have a special normative significance, particularly if these episodes involve such things as the enjoyment of ‘the best things in life’ or the experience of great suffering. We have reason to assign an all things considered value to such strongly psychologically connected phases of a person’s life, where this value is not exhausted by the contributions these make to the welfare level of that person’s life as a whole. It follows that our all things considered evaluations of populations are often underdetermined by information about the welfare levels of the lives they contain. However, in certain cases, most notably in that of ‘the Repugnant Conclusion’, there is nevertheless sufficient information provided by the welfare levels of persons’ lives to allow us to infer facts about these components that make an all things considered difference to these evaluations. I argue that a failure to acknowledge these facts is the cause of the aforementioned impossibility results and that once they are taken into account it is possible to produce a satisfactory theory of population ethics.

There is little doubt that Salomon Maimon was both highly respected by, and highly influential upon, his contemporaries; indeed, Kant himself referred to Maimon as the best of his critics. The appraisal and reformulation of the Kantian project detailed in Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy played a significant role in determining the criteria of success for post-Kantian philosophy, and was thus crucial to the early development of German Idealism. Key aspects of Maimon’s transcendental philosophy remain, however, relatively obscure. In particular, it remains unclear to what degree Maimon’s skepticism is internal to the Kantian framework, and how this skepticism is related to Maimon’s so-called dogmatic rationalism. The central aim of this project is to present Maimon’s as a distinct form of post-Kantian skepticism: one which poses significant problems for Kant’s theoretical project and which motivates a reformulation of the critical framework. In Kant’s eyes, pre-Kantian forms of skepticism are insufficiently critical insofar as they involve a commitment to transcendental realism. By contrast, I argue that Maimon’s skepticism does not involve a commitment to transcendental realism and that it strikes at the heart of Kant’s critical project insofar as it constitutes what I term ‘critical’ as opposed to merely ‘empirical’ skepticism. I further argue that Maimon’s rationalism provides the materials for a response to this form of skepticism. This thesis contributes to contemporary debates in the history of philosophy concerning the nature of Maimon’s coalition system and its relation to German Idealism, but also provides an alternative perspective on contemporary problems in the philosophy of perception concerning, in particular, the possibility of non-conceptual intentional content.

Husserlian Essentialism is the view, maintained byEdmundHusserl throughout his career, that necessary truths obtain because essentialist truths obtain. In this thesis I have two goals. First, to reconstruct and flesh out Husserlian Essentialism and its connections with surrounding areas of Husserl's philosophy in full detail – something which has not been done yet. Second, to assess the theoretical solidity of the view. As regards the second point, after having presented Husserlian Essentialism in the first two chapters, I raise a serious problem for it in Chapter 3. In the remainder of the thesis I endeavour to solve the problem. In order to do so, I propose to amend both Husserl's theory of essence and his theory of predication. The bulk of the emendation consists in working out an account of essence and an account of predication that do not presuppose, or in any way imply, the claims that: 1) for a universal to be in the essence of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal; 2) for a universal to be truly predicated of an object, either the object or one of its parts must instantiate the universal. These claims, notice, apart from being what gets Husserl in trouble, are well entrenched not only in Husserl's, but in most theories of essence and predication (at least in those that feature universals). It is thus interesting to see what an alternative option may be – even regardless of the Husserlian setting in which I work it out.

We are responsible for some things but not for others. In this thesis, I investigate what it takes for an entity to be responsible for something. This question has two components: agents and actions. I argue for a permissive view about agents. Entities such as groups or artificially intelligent systems may be agents in the sense required for responsibility. With respect to actions, I argue for a causal view. The relation in virtue of which agents are responsible for actions is a causal one. I claim that responsibility requires causation and I develop a causal account of agency. This account is particularly apt for addressing the relationship between agency and moral responsibility and sheds light on the causal foundations of moral responsibility.