John McDowell claims that a 'human' (as opposed to 'animal') orientation towards the world is characterised by a 'deep connection' between reason and freedom. In this thesis, I argue that McDowell cannot make good on this coincidence, since his Platonic conception of rationality serves to bind free reflection in advance. This is a problem both for the 'minimal empiricism' that McDowell aims to secure in his magnum opus, Mind and World, as well as for the ostensibly liberal, anti-scientistic 'naturalism of second nature' that accompanies it there. Ultimately, I argue that the problems that McDowell's thought is subject to can be solved by invoking the philosophy of nature (and specifically, the idea of 'natural-history') which we can find in the thought of the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor Adorno. Adorno is, I argue, able to secure the appropriate connection between reason and freedom, and thus what McDowell himself describes as a distinctively human orientation towards the world. Convinced McDowellians should therefore be motivated to, at least in this sense 'become Adornians'. The thought of McDowell and a number of his contemporaries (Brandom, Pippin) is often considered to represent a kind of 'Hegelianisation' of analytic philosophy; my arguments suggest the need for its 'critical-theoreticisation'.

This dissertation produces a systematic account of anxiety, and does so by way of interpreting the account of anxiety given to us by Kierkegaard and Heidegger. The methodology of this dissertation is such that it interprets the anxiety in Kierkegaard through Heidegger’s lens, and also interprets the anxiety in Heidegger through Kierkegaard’s lens. By this method this dissertation harmonizes the accounts of anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and in this way produces a systematic account of anxiety by way of these two authors. In particular, this dissertation argues that anxiety in both Kierkegaard and Heidegger has a particular structure: that it is ambiguous, which means that it is structurally constituted by an antipathy (a repulsion) and a sympathy (an attraction). In harmonizing Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s accounts of anxiety in this way, this dissertation produces a systematic account of ambiguous anxiety.

The aim of this thesis is to locate Nietzsche’s thoughts on epistemology within the Kantian tradition of Transcendental Idealism. Through a critical involvement with both Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, the Study will draw attention to the level of Nietzsche’s involvement with key issues in Kantian epistemology. In doing so it will put forward a reading of Nietzsche’s early ‘error theory’, Which rejects the idea that Nietzsche endorses a metaphysical correspondence theory of truth. It will instead be argued that in the early error theory Nietzsche is critiquing the discursivity of our understanding. The study will finish with a consideration of Nietzsche’s attempted rejection of the concept of the thing-in-itself through an epistemology of perspectivism. It will be argued that this rejection, much like Schopenhauer’s rejection of Kant’s inference to the thing-in-itself, ultimately fails and that Nietzsche’s perspectivism itself presupposes the ability to refer to, and make use of, the concept of reality in itself.

This work examines and attempts to overcome issues caused by the lack of formal standardisation when defining text categorisation techniques and detailing how they might be appropriately integrated with each other. Despite text categorisation’s long history the concept of automation is relatively new, coinciding with the evolution of computing technology and subsequent increase in quantity and availability of electronic textual data. Nevertheless insufficient descriptions of the diverse algorithms discovered have lead to an acknowledged ambiguity when trying to accurately replicate methods, which has made reliable comparative evaluations impossible. Existing interpretations of general data mining and text categorisation methodologies are analysed in the first half of the thesis and common elements are extracted to create a distinct set of significant stages. Their possible interactions are logically determined and a unique universal architecture is generated that encapsulates all complexities and highlights the critical components. A variety of text related algorithms are also comprehensively surveyed and grouped according to which stage they belong in order to demonstrate how they can be mapped. The second part reviews several open-source data mining applications, placing an emphasis on their ability to handle the proposed architecture, potential for expansion and text processing capabilities. Finding these inflexible and too elaborate to be readily adapted, designs for a novel framework are introduced that focus on rapid prototyping through lightweight customisations and reusable atomic components. Being a consequence of inadequacies with existing options, a rudimentary implementation is realised along with a selection of text categorisation modules. Finally a series of experiments are conducted that validate the feasibility of the outlined methodology and importance of its composition, whilst also establishing the practicality of the framework for research purposes. The simplicity of experiments and results gathered clearly indicate the potential benefits that can be gained when a formalised approach is utilised.

In this thesis we examine the method of counting BB events produced in the BaBar experiment. The original method was proposed in 2000, but improvements to track reconstruction and our understanding of the detector since that date make it appropriate to revisit the B Counting method. We propose a new set of cuts designed to minimize the sensitivity to time-varying backgrounds. We find the new method counts BB events with an associated systematic uncertainty of ±0.6%. / Science, Faculty of / Physics and Astronomy, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis is a study of the relationship between 'nature' and 'spirit' in the philosophies of F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. I aim to show that Schelling and Hegel are involved in a shared task of conceiving spiritual freedom as a necessary outcome of nature's inner, rational development. I argue that by interpreting spirit as 'emergent' from nature, the absolute idealists develop a 'third way' beyond Cartesian dualism and monist naturalism. For on the idealist account, nature and spirit are neither ontologically discontinuous, as if separated by an insurmountable 'gap', nor are they identical, as if spirit were simply a 'second nature'. Rather, according to both Schelling and Hegel, spirit emerges from nature as its ontologically distinct and non-natural telos. What makes Schelling's and Hegel's philosophies of nature so unique, however, is not simply that they present spiritual freedom as dependent upon nature, but that the ontological specificity of spirit is shown to be rationally necessary. In fact, neither the early Schelling nor Hegel is concerned with the historical emergence of spirit. Rather, both philosophers see the 'emergence' of spirit as an atemporal feature of being that must be derived through sheer reason—be it Schelling’s method of 'depotentiation' or Hegel's dialectical logic. I therefore argue that by bracketing the question of historical emergence, Schelling and Hegel each develop a distinctive logic of emergence whereby spiritual freedom is shown to be necessary thanks to the ontological structure of the impersonal, natural world. In my concluding chapter, I consider Schelling's argument in his Berlin lectures of the 1840s that the idealist logic of emergence must be supplemented with a speculative consideration of historical emergence if philosophy is to be a complete science of reality. From this perspective, it looks as though both Hegel's and the early Schelling's 'logics of emergence', despite all their promise, presuppose the idea that nature's necessary stages need not express themselves in temporal succession (as do the necessary stages of human history) in order for them to be fully realised. I conclude the thesis by suggesting that Schelling's Ages of the World was meant to overcome this apparent limit of the 'logic of emergence' without abandoning its fundamental aims. For in the Ages, nature's rationally necessary development is presented as unfolding in time, and time is understood as nothing other than the actual development of nature into spirit.

A hydraulic model of Alberni Harbour was built to study the mixing of fresh and salt water, the disposal of industrial sewage, and the result of proposed physical changes in the Harbour. The model was built to a scale of 1/1000 horizontally, and 1/84 vertically. A modified form of Lord Kelvin's tide predicting machine is used to compute the tides and thus control a pair of valves which add salt water and remove mixed water. River discharge is manually adjusted. A method of removing water samples from the operating model for chemical analysis was developed as a means of observing salinity distribution. At present the model is ready for verification and experiment. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Mechanical Engineering, Department of / Graduate