My interests lie in consideration of conceptions of authenticity and inauthenticity from the perspective of ethical theories which conceive of the good for man with reference to human nature and concomitant beliefs regarding the most appropriate realisation of human capacities. Here, I find particular interest in the philosophical styles embodied by the existentialist and Lebensphilosophie movements. Such approaches sit outside the traditional frames of reference provided by deontological and utilitarian approaches to ethical reasoning and yet do I shall argue, share significant similarities with ancient aretaic styles of ethics. Here, I take Aristotle to represent those aspects of ethical thought which are quintessentially of this period of intellectual history. I find not merely points of comparison but a fruitful way in which to re-examine the thought of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Scheler, Heidegger and Sartre with reference to styles of ethical enquiry which place primacy upon an objective conception of happiness which centres upon the appropriate realisation of human capacity understood with reference to Aristotle's Function Argument. I argue that phenomenological analysis shares a conception of self-perspicuity in which the agent reflects upon the full contents of their conscious experience. By this means, certain self-delusions which impede entry into the ethical life, may be removed. Additionally, whilst Aristotle's 'non-law' conception of ethics shares with existentialist thought an understanding of the human situation and its normative concerns in isolation from dualistic and theistic metaphysical speculation, such philosophy is still able to provide clear and objective ethical standards - standards often lacking within existentialism. For instance, whilst Nietzsche's pronouncement of the 'death of God' signals the death also of Christian morality, we find that such philosophy is not without normative implications and in fact can be derived to a large degree from assent towards a radical and more severe ethical self-discipline. Indeed, central certainly to the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre is an understanding of the role of self-deception in the human condition. Here a useful distinction may be made between those types of self-deception which may be understood as structural that is to say which are representative of an essential characteristic of human being at the abstract level - and those types of self-deception which may be described as 'motivated' or 'psychological' which relate to more specific types of self-deceptive engagement. I believe it is useful to examine both Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre through the lens of such interpretation, I find for instance that it is of use to examine the early Sartre as having a purely structural interpretation of bad faith (described by Jeanson as 'natural' bad-faith) whilst moving towards a psychological account in his later work, an account which has more specific moral implications with the possibility of 'willed conversion' to authenticity (Santoni). Additionally with Nietzsche, we also find a similar distinction between a self-deception which is in some sense preconditional and a motivational account of self-deception in which the agent infused with ressentiment falsifies reality in favour of subjective needs which are ultimately destructive of life-enhancement. In this sense the vicious individual can be said to have achieved merely a false optimum, and moreover, false from an objective standpoint.

This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the dialectic of conscience within Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It aims to show that Hegel provides a fundamental role for conscience within the state and, thus, that Hegel preserves the right to subjective freedom within ethical life. In doing so, it aims to unite divided opinion on the role of conscience within Hegel’s political philosophy and to further disarm the charge that Hegel’s state advocates repressive or authoritarian political structures. In order to pursue this argument, this thesis first examines the emergence of conscience within the morality section of the text. It presents the moral conscience as the fruition of subjective freedom; as possessing the right to produce its own convictions and determine for itself what is good. However, it then continues to highlight the necessarily formal nature of the moral conscience and claims that, because of this formality, the content of conscience is always contingent. As such, the moral conscience is always in danger of willing evil; and it is precisely this danger that necessitates the move into ethics. The moral conscience is sublated by the true, ethical conscience. This thesis presents its own reading of the Aufhebung from the moral conscience to the true conscience of ethical life, which it believes properly reflects the dialectical progression of freedom within the text. It argues that, during the process of Aufhebung, the essential moments of moral conscience are retained and only the negative aspects are lost. In particular, it claims that conscience’s right to produce its own convictions (and, thus, the right to subjective freedom) is preserved within ethical life, but that the contingency of conscience is not. As such, true conscience (unlike the moral conscience) wills the good both in and for itself. This does not mean that true conscience cannot make mistakes. But it does entail that true conscience cannot put its own convictions beyond criticism. For this reason, this thesis also maintains that the formal conscience of morality, in its non-aufgehoben form, has no place within the ethical realm. This thesis locates true conscience’s function in the disparity between the actual and the existing state. It argues that, in recognising the rational principles inherent in society and by transforming the existing world to conform more faithfully to these principles, true conscience plays an essential role in keeping the state in line with its own, rational essence. However, it also maintains that this type of immanent critique extends only to reform, and not to not radical, social criticism. The thesis concludes by describing true conscience’s role in the legislative power.

My thesis focuses on Nietzsche’s ethics. More precisely, its main objective is to explore Nietzsche’s substantive ethical framework in a comprehensive, detailed, and systematic manner. Furthermore, the thesis also attempts to examine the epistemological, non-ethical ground of the Nietzschean substantive ethics. Also, it deals with Nietzsche’s critique of conventional morality, and explains Nietzsche’s criticism of morality in terms of his substantive ethics. The central argument of the thesis is, very briefly, that Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole does have a distinctive, substantive ethical system. Its constitutive elements or contents, being coherently related, are rich, complicated, and concrete. The major category Nietzsche employs in his ethics is the notion of ‘value’ understood as merit or desirability; he is not much concerned with the right or obligatory. Nietzsche views some human qualities, abilities and states and a style of life as noble and desirable for us. Specifically, the creative way of life, creative capacity, self-discipline, the capacity for ‘self-commanding’, knowledge, health, strong affectivity, and vitality constitute the core of Nietzsche’s evaluative standard. Moreover, a variety of dispositions, such as honesty, solitude, courage, and magnanimity, position themselves within his theory of value and are posited as crucial virtues. Finally, my thesis aims at analysing these particular contents of Nietzsche’s substantive ethical system and to examine how the system as a whole works. As such, the thesis is fundamentally an exposition based upon Nietzsche’s own texts, especially, his later works including Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist.

The thesis argues that the notion of film consciousness deepens a wide-range of philosophical issues in ways which are only accessible through film experience. These issues, directly related to the continental tradition, deal with consciousness, experience, intentionally and meaning. We look to the implications of the initial acts of film reproduction as it creates 'images' of the world which reconceptualise vision in terms of space, time and dimension. We move from ontology to experience and examine an aesthetic form with radical implications for spectator consciousness. These issues are explored from two philosophical positions. Firstly, phenomenology, especially Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Secondly, the work of Gilles Deleuze who presents the most penetrating insights to date into film consciousness and its repercussions for thought and affectivity. The focus of this study is to draw together these two philosophical positions, showing their fundamental differences but also similarities where they exist. This approach is rarely attempted but the belief running through this thesis is that film is one arena which is invaluable for making such comparisons. It is argued philosophically that film writes large key phenomenological concepts on intentionality, time-consciousness and the relation of the lifeworld to the predicative. In terms of Deleuze, film is shown as a unique artform which in allowing us to link otherwise casts light on Deleuze's own complex system of thought. Chapters 1-3 are concerned with phenomenology and detail the role of film in terms of the lifeworld, intentionally, reduction and the transcendental in a way which has not been attempted elsewhere. The linking chapter on time (4) is used to introduce the work of Henri Bergson and its influence both on phenomenology's inner time-consciousness and Deleuze's fundamental categories of film movement and time imagery. The final two chapters look at the way film is reconfigured through montage and the implications of this for film's unique expression of movement and time.

This thesis seeks to make a contribution to the history of modern continental philosophy by establishing a structural link between the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue that this link lies in the question of truth: both thinkers criticise the traditional concept of truth as objectivity. However, they both find in the existence of this very concept a problem that its rejection alone does not solve. What is it in our natural axistence that gave rise to the notion of truth? It is this questioning which I call the "question of truth". I locate three ways in which the question of truth informs Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty's thoughts. Firstly, both thinkers propose a genealogy of the concept of "truth," one in which they suggest that our natural existence is structured in a pre-objective way: existing means making implicit truthclaims. Further, they each explain the appearance of our belief in truth in terms of a radicalisation of this implicit attribution of truth (Chapters I and IV). Secondly, both thinkers seek to recover the pre-objective ground from which truth as an erroneous concept arose. They propose strikingly similar methods to do so (Chapters II and V). This ground, once uncovered, must be examined. This investigation leads both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty to ontological considerations. They both ask how we must conceive of a Being whose structure allows for the existence of the belief in truth, or as I argue, error. As a conclusion, I suggest that both thinkers' investigations of the question of truth lead them to conceive of Being in a similar way, as the process of self-falsification by which indeterminate Being presents itself as determinate (Chapters III and VI).

The conflicting visions of eighteenth-century society offered by J. C. D. Clark and the historians of the English Enlightenment are here used as a means by which to examine aspects of the public spheres of Birmingham. Whilst it was a town of conviviality and consumption of culture, these activities were suffused with a serious purpose born of religious conviction. The concept of the Inquiring Sort has been developed to describe this aspect of Birmingham Society. A case study has been made of Freemasonry in Birmingham, as an example of a group within the Inquiring Sort. The public sphere of ideas and learning, in which the Inquiring Sort spent leisure time, included lectures, libraries, bookshops and debating societies. The spaces in which they moved, marked both by places of fashionable consumption and places of cultural consumption, have been mapped and their world of books and texts analysed. The role of religious inquiry is a key thread in these areas. The roles played by ideas and learning in three elements of Birmingham industry are examined: gaining skills through the printed word, the marketing of goods and the place of fashion. Knowledge of the self is seen to be key in each case. Religion in eighteenth century Birmingham is explored, focusing particularly on the previously under-researched Established Church there. Finally, the reaction of the Established Church to controversial ideas, particularly to the radical Unitarianism of Joseph Priestly, is analysed. It is argued that disputes over such ideas were central in the development of hostilities in the town during the 1780s, which culminated in the Church and King riot of 1791.

The main purpose of the following inquiry is to emphasise the importance of a phenomenon long neglected by the majority of the human sciences, the artefact; each one of us, no matter what age, sex or culture, is in contact with artefacts every moment of our lives yet despite this they have received scant attention. The study begins by outlining a definition of the artefact, highlighting those characteristics which, in combination, ensure its centrality to social life before, through a discussion of Popper's ideas, proceeding to see how material culture can be conceptualised as meaningful. In order to understand how meaning becomes attached to the artefact the notion of objectification will be analysed and, consequently, so shall the importance of both the type of activity and the physical nature of the materials involved in the artefact's production. Picking up on the theme of materiality this aspect of material culture will be shown to pose major problems to any interpretation of the artefact along semiological lines; language and material culture are evinced to possess fundamentally distinct characteristics which make comparisons between them far from straightforward. These differences will be analysed further, concentrating specifically on the role of context in the establishment of meaning. This leads on to the proposal that our understanding of artefacts can occur on three levels; three forms of knowledge are thus described of which a linguistically formulated type constitutes just one kind. The penultimate chapter tackles the ways in which artefacts affect us, how they are active elements in our relationships with them; therefore, a dialectical position is postulated in which both artefacts and agents take part. Finally, the study concludes by stressing some of its wider implications and suggests a few of the practical situations to which it can be applied.

This dissertation seeks to substantiate the thesis that Nietzsche's physiological thinking constitutes a radicalisation of Kantian critique. To this end it attempts to mark out some of the salient points of the latter project and to examine the ways in which it falls short of its own potential radicality. In chapters one and two the categories of relation - in which Kant articulates his theory of the temporal connection of phenomena explicitly - are traced through the Analytic and Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason and are read against the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding which implicitly contains another theory of time. Since the Critique of the Teleological Faculty of Tudgerment complements Kant's theory of the temporal cohesion of phenomena, the third chapter offers a reading of it under the aspect of its relation to the wider project of critique. Chapter four draws together the multiple strands around which Kantian critique can be shown to mutate into Nietzsche's philosophical physiology and the theory of temporality implicit in it. Finally, Nietzschean physiology is presented in terms of his thinking of the becoming of matter, in terms of the will to power as eternal recurrence.

Heidegger perceives a naivety at the heart of Greek metaphysics to which he believes philosophy has remained prey throughout its history. This consists in having taken the understanding of being appropriate to the activity and experience of production [ποίησις] as the basis for understanding being in general. What such a interpretation lacks above all is a conception of human being as that which, distinct from the work, engages in productive activity. Only if such a conception were secured in contradistinction to the understanding of being derived from the work could, in Heidegger's view, ontology itself be placed on firm footing. By way of a response, Heidegger undertook a critical appropriation of Aristotle's practical philosophy and of the concept of πραξις in particular. This was to provide the basis of an account of Dasein. However, the outcome of the appropriation was problematic in two respects. First, Aristotle's own presentation of πραξις as the horizonal structure of teleological activity is dogged by incoherencies arising precisely from the influence exerted on the language of metaphysics by the experience of ποίησις. Indeed, the extent of this influence renders the language of metaphysics intrinsically ill-suited to the articulation of πραξις. Heidegger's appropriation of the figure of the end-in-itself must therefore be accompanied by an attempt to wrest it from the dominant conceptual structures of production. Second, insofar as the terms in which Heidegger couches the ontological determination of Dasein are taken from the language of practical philosophy, there arises a formal parallel between the transcendence of Dasein and possible structures of activity. Such a parallel invites the supposition that Dasein's transcendence may be enacted or accomplished in its comportment in and towards the world. Although I shall be concerned primarily with the first of these problems, the second remains a constant consideration and recurs explicitly at several junctures. Drawing on Heidegger's reading of Metaphysics Θ, I argue that he sought to secure an ontological interpretation of χίνησις, δύναμις and ένέργεια from which the influence of production had been displaced. Specifically, this hinges on the idea of finite appropriation as the essence of δύναμις. In addition, Heidegger emphasises the way in which each potentiality is related to the manner of its accomplishment. As an activity that is an end in itself, πραξις, is therefore understood as an activity of finite appropriation whose end is the very movement of appropriation itself. As such, it constitutes a repetition of the essence of δύναμις and of the transcendence of Dasein insofar as it is understood to be constituted by δύναμις.

The thesis presents the hypothesis that the systematic theology of Paul Tillich (1886-1965) offers significant new benefits towards church unity. The methodology used in pursuit of this aim, is a critical analysis of Tillich's early and late thought. Tillich' s work was influenced by the German philosophical and theological schools and came to expression in American academia in his publication Systematic Theology. The results of this analysis reveal Tillich's consistent commitment to the concept of Gestalt. This finding has been broadened to include the concept that the strength of ecclesial unity is dependent upon the understanding that every ecclesial denomination is an effective element in the constituency of the whole Church. This argument is supported by a deconstruction of Tillich' s system that is keyed into the hermeneutical theories of Gadamer and Derrida. The system is then reconstructed in terms of a new Gestalt that turns on the hypothesis that there is a relationship of synthesis between philosophy and theology within the Tillichian system, rather than the complementary relationship that Tillich claims. This conclusion is based upon the system being perceived as being founded upon the Western classical philosophical and theological traditions. A critique of Tillich's incorporation of modern existential hermeneutics into this system is made principally in relation to the existentialist thought of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre. A hermeneutic of Tillich' s existential critique serves to highlight the questions that result from existential disruption rather than to label him as an existentialist per se. The system is thus moved forward into the post-modern context under new hermeneutics. An analysis of Tillich's ecclesiology reveals that this is both eschatological and Trinitarian in nature. The relationship between Tillich's system and ecclesiology is brought into dialogue by means of their being expressed in terms of an ecclesiological circle. These hermeneutics are compared and contrasted with the ecclesiologies of Zizioulas and Haight and the published ecumenical documents of The World Council of Churches in order to reveal their commonalties. When the system has thus been applied to the current ecumenical dialogue, then it becomes apparent that the raison d'etre of Tillich's system is the Church and the raison d'etre of the Church is the system. The squaring of Paul Tillich's ecclesiological circle is thus made complete.