This study identified the core knowledge gap of a lack of competitive theorizing of strategy implementation (SIMP) in the processual and resource-based views of strategy. This gap exists due to tactical perception and relative inattention to variety in strategy implementation process and related competitive implications. It is argued that strategy process and the RBV perspectives can provide complementary insights necessary to move towards competitive theorizing of strategy implementation. A grounded research is conducted to compare how strategy implementation patterns explain implementation success and how those patterns explain heterogeneity in resources management in different firm types – foreign and indigenous. Content analysis of the interview data revealed significant heterogeneity in the strategy implementation process patterns and achieved implementation success. These SIMP process patterns are categorised based on the approach towards strategy implementation as a strategic phenomenon, firm’s type, and thrust of implementation process. Important sources of variations in implementation success emerged in the Competitive and Tactical implementing patterns. Three resources management activities emerged from the data and revealed important distinctions for the heterogeneous implementing patterns. The Tactical implementing patterns showed preference of strategic actors for use of internally available resources and acquisition of ready-made resources. The Competitive implementing patterns showed a balanced approach towards resources management by pursuing optimization of resources. These resources management heterogeneities are shaped by the SIMP process pattern and revealed implementation process performance, action timing and resources optimization as the key sources of competitiveness from strategy implementation. The empirical findings refute the notion that the role of strategy implementation is only to complement as an operational process without much competitive gains. This empirically challenges the conventional conceptions of implementation to adopt and institutionalize strategy and extends to the contribution of SIMP for strategy refinements to gain competitive gains. These findings strongly support that competitive theorizing of strategy implementation is a worthwhile scholarly pursuit via using the complementary views of strategy. Future research should build on this agenda of competitive theorizing of strategy implementation using other firm types, research settings and more micro level analysis.

The thesis is guided by the question: What is the subject matter of Heidegger’s philosophy in the period of Being and Time? I start by arguing that Heidegger’s formulation of the question of being is ambiguous because the term ‘being’ is open to at least two interpretations. I claim that this ambiguity has motivated two types of reading of Heidegger’s early work. On the first reading, Heidegger’s philosophy is understood as attempting to infer metaphysical claims (claims about what-is, or being in a traditionally metaphysical sense) on the basis of claims about the structure of Dasein’s understanding. This reading typically renders Heidegger an idealist. On the second reading, Heidegger’s philosophy is taken to have no metaphysical ambitions, and thereby to be limited to elucidating the structure of Dasein’s understanding. I argue that both types of reading are inadequate and diagnose them as grounded in a Cartesian presupposition that Heidegger rejects. On the basis of direct textual evidence and a number of theoretical considerations I assert that although the second type of reading is right in that the primary object of Heidegger’s philosophy is the conditions of understanding and that the idealist reading is wrong, it is a mistake to deny that Heidegger’s philosophy has metaphysical implications. I claim that Heidegger’s exposition of the conditions of understanding involves a larger picture from the outset, a picture that delineates the relation between understanding and entities, and locates the objective in relation to Dasein. On this picture, 1) empirical entities are unqualifiedly independent of Dasein, 2) we have direct cognitive access to these entities as they are in themselves, and 3) there is no a priori unintelligible entities or aspects of entities. I address a number of potential objections to this way of interpreting Heidegger’s work.

In this essay, I relate material in the original published work – John Stuart Mill – Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books, 2007) to the claim that the central features of Mill’s thought can be seen more clearly through a biographical lens. The original contribution of the main work lies in the excavation and application of biographical material to the development of Mill’s philosophy. The poor development of Mill’s utilitarianism results in part from a lack of personal investment and aspiration. Mill’s motivation was to atone for earlier, premature assaults on Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy - rather than to develop it further. As a consequence, his mature utilitarianism is hard to integrate with his liberalism, which was where his primary interest lay. Elements of Mill’s liberalism also bear a biographical imprint. The central emphasis on self-creation in Mill’s liberal ethic results, in part, from his own ‘crisis’ and subsequent departure from the rationalist utilitarianism of his father and Bentham. Similarly, Mill’s focus on individuality stemmed in part from a concern to demonstrate he was not, himself, a ‘made man’. Openmindedness became a central liberal virtue, for Mill, following his criticism of Bentham’s (and his father’s) narrowness of thought. Character was also essential to liberty, since only those of strong character could create themselves and express their individuality, rather than succumbing to custom. Mill’s partner and later wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, had an influence on Mill’s thought. The experience of gossip and ostracism, in the years before their marriage, strengthened Mill’s opposition to the ‘despotism of custom’. More substantively, Harriet’s views on socialism, the ballot and feminism clearly influenced Mill’s own treatment. Without Harriet, he would have been a less committed socialist and feminist – and would have remained a supporter of the right to vote in secret.

The project of this thesis is multi-faceted. Starting with an examination of Kant's First Critique, it outlines the inextricable linkage between our understanding of subjectivity and a notion of space. Once such a connection has neen made, it describes the approach necessary to reorient the notions of space and subjectivity that have culminated in the postmodern cry that The Subject is Dead. This approach is named, "Cartography" and is borne out of an examination of the works of Bachelard, Deleuze and Guattari. Given the bases of the area of study, and the way that it will be studied, the next move made in this thesis is to examine the possible and desired outcomes of such an approach. Thus, from reading both Deleuze and Guattari, we will see that a Cartography will reorient that which constitutes subjectivities in such a way as to disable any effort of oppression, and it will redefine our understanding of the space constitutive of these subjectivities as a material one. In a single phrase, then, this thesis can be described thus: To provide for an understanding of a material space and vectors of subjectification, in a way that enhances their mutual construction, so that the active formation of the two can destroy that which organises the subjective oppression currently experienced.

In this thesis I shall argue (1) that for Plato ‘moral’ education, rightly understood (or ‘Platonic education’ as I shall call it), can be an effective method for cultivating virtue in non-ideal societies; (2) that Platonic education is a process that occurs (or Plato hopes might occur) through an engagement with some of the dialogues; (3) that Platonic education strongly mirrors Sokratic discourse in its aims; (4) that Plato’s whole approach to education should be understood mainly from the context of the problem of teaching virtue in imperfect societies; (5) that Plato intends some of the dialogues to serve as a propaedeutic for a possible education in virtue and not as a method for creating fully virtuous people. Lastly, (6) Platonic education is primarily concerned with human virtue, and insofar as it can support a notion or notions of civic virtue, it cannot do so unequivocally. The evidence for these claims is found not chiefly in the educational programmes and theories of the Republic and the Laws but in a number of techniques, such as protreptic rhetoric, life-models, argumentation, and myth, which Plato employs in some of the dialogues. Platonic education is specifically designed to function in imperfect societies. With this in mind therefore, an additional concern of this thesis is with whether we could imagine any of Plato’s educational principles or techniques being used to improve moral education today.

The aim of the present work is to face Heidegger’s claim that philosophy has ended. Facing this claim for us has not taken the form of creating a new method or positing a new question but that of a search for anomalies in what Heidegger decrees as finished, which is philosophy as metaphysics. In his historical confrontation with the history of thought Heidegger seems to have left out, dismissed or forgotten those authors who do not fit into his definition of metaphysics. We have chosen Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza, metaphysical thinkers who have undertaken a philosophical practice that does not intend to demolish subjectivity but actually begins without any need for it. The birth of the subject as grounding reality finds its affirmation with Descartes and inaugurates modernity that, according to Heidegger, exhausts philosophy and leads it into the arms of modern science and technology. Bruno and Spinoza respectively precede and follow the birth of modernity and of modern science, which they look at with an eye that is not that of the modern subject. Following their different approaches to philosophy, we shall also explore their relation to Renaissance Humanism, dismissed by Heidegger as a historical reiteration of the Roman world, perceived as a perversion of the Greek origin of thought. We shall show how hasty such a dismissal is. Our goal is to show not merely that Heidegger is wrong but that if Western thinking contains the seeds of its own end, it also contains the ones of a different understanding of the Western world and its achievements. The three authors will engage on the grounds of ontology, gnosiology and ethics and yet we have defined the whole enterprise of this work as an ethics overall. An ethics of thinking is a practice of thought that wishes to envisage the possibility for Western man of inhabiting his own world by understanding himself not as an isolated subject and master of nature but as the place where the unity and multiplicity of nature come to be thought at the same time.

Many philosophers have held that perceptual experience is fundamentally a matter of perceivers being in particular representational states. Such states are said to have representational content, i.e. accuracy or veridicality conditions, capturing the way that things, according to that experience, appear to be. In this thesis I argue that the case against representationalism — the view that perceptual experience is fundamentally and irreducibly representational — that is set out in Charles Travis’s ‘The Silence of the Senses’ (2004) constitutes a powerful, but much misunderstood and neglected argument against this prevailing philosophical orthodoxy. In chapter 2, I present an interpretation of Travis’s arguments that poses a dilemma for the representationalist concerning the indeterminacy and availability of perceptual content. Chapters 3 and 4 evaluate a variety of arguments in favour of such content based upon the nature of appearances, or ‘looks’, including those by Byrne (2009), Siegel (2010) and Schellenberg (2011b), each of which I find to be problematic. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 examine the relationship between representational content and phenomenal character, i.e. what perceptual experience is subjectively like, outlining some potential responses to Travis’s anti-representationalism. These include the external individuation of content and self-knowledge, and the operation of perceptual discriminatory capacities, the latter of which does not necessarily favour a representationalist account of experience. I conclude that Travis’s arguments establish substantive constraints upon the nature and role of perceptual content. Moreover, I argue that the debate centres less upon the existence of such content than its explanatory role, particularly in relation to phenomenal character and the contents of other mental states: belief, intention, thought, knowledge, and so on. This in turn highlights the need for representationalists to better clarify the role of the contents their theories posit, and why such theories constitute a better explanation of the relevant phenomena than the corresponding non-representational view.

This study compares two prevalent notions in postmodern philosophy and critical-cultural theory: the sacred and the icon. On the one hand, the sacred has often been described as the exposure to an abyssal reality that is completely foreign to human perception and control. This deeply subversive event is presented through two of its most influential thinkers, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. On the other hand, the icon marks the experience of a sensitivity to the singular selfhood of the other. It comprises a loving receptivity to its unique identity, in particular the identity of the human or divine stranger who is excluded or victimized by human narratives and structures. Intrinsic to the ethical scene, as I show through Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, is an interaction rather than a subjugation of the subject by the other. This project seeks to present the similarities and differences between the sacred and the icon. In particular, it calls for a certain relationship between them, allowing both to be observed in each other’s respective light. Both are thus re-examined through their relation to each other. Moreover, this bond is seen to be ethically significant for either phenomenon and it helps redefine the sacred and the icon in a manner that is closer to actual experience. It also perceives either one in terms of a practical efficacy. To exemplify these views, the Christian mystical experience known as the ‘passive dark night of the soul’ is explored insofar as it constitutes one of the most radical instances of the icon. Crucial to this relationship is its exposure of the possible shortcomings and misjudgements of previous conceptions of the sacred. A potential new role for the sacred is indicated: a function that is at once more ethical and constructive. Above all, the underlying concern of this study is the very nature of this interaction of the two extremes. Throughout, it shows this affiliation as dialectical by nature. Between the sacred and the icon, a process of a mutual coinciding and estranging takes place.

Summary In chapter one I reject the thesis that a relation of partial entailment holds between probability evidence and conclusion, as also the claim that the propositions of applied geometry are synthetic a priori. By way of balance, I suggest that there may be a sense in which necessary conditions of discourse transcend the distinction between a priori and empirical. In chapter two I reject the claim that logical relations in the form of intrinsic probability enter into the no-miracles argument, which I suggest is frequency-connected in its more systematic applications, so that it belongs within a system. I begin chapter three with a critique of an attempted formal probability solution to Hume’s problem, and I now suggest that inductive inference has application only within a system in which its validity is pre-supposed in its premises, a concomitant of which is that the sceptic about induction cannot stop short of global scepticism. Since my aim is to show that global scepticism is self-refuting, given that intentionality may be analysed in terms of a system, I now develop that analysis by devoting chapter four to an examination of Wittgenstein on meaning and understanding. In chapter five I reject his thesis equating meaning and understanding with use, arguing instead that they are irreducible and subject to dispositionality conditions, and in furtherance of that argument I try to solve the problem of the authoritativeness of belief avowals by showing again that there are necessary conditions of discourse. These are such that selfascribing belief, crediting oneself with understanding and with being suitably disposed, are inherent in reasoning. In chapter six I weave the threads of the previous discussion into a solution by arguing that the sceptic about induction, who is committed to global scepticism, necessarily refutes himself. In chapter seven, on the problem of other minds, I attempt a solution by modifying the arguments used against inductive scepticism.

This thesis offers a naturalist revision of Alain Badiou’s philosophy. This goal is pursued through an encounter of Badiou’s mathematical ontology and theory of truth with contemporary trends in philosophy of mathematics (mathematical structuralism) and philosophy of science (ontic structural realism). I take issue with Badiou’s inability to elucidate the link between the empirical and the ontological, and his residual reliance on a Heideggerian project of fundamental ontology, which undermines his own immanentist principles. I will argue for both a bottom-up naturalisation of Badiou’s philosophical approach to mathematics (insisting on an account mindful of the socio-biological roots of our mathematical abilities and concepts – brains to universe) and a top-down naturalisation (arguing that our best physical theories seem to indicate a collapse of the distinction between the mathematical and the non-mathematical – universe to brains). Articulating my particular understanding of what realism and naturalism should commit us to, I propose a creative fusion of Badiou’s attention to metamathematical results with a structural-informational metaphysics, proposing a ‘matherialism’ uniting the more daring speculative insights of the former with the naturalist and empiricist commitments motivating the latter.