This dissertation is an attempt to study Hu Shih's thought with a critical analysis of his intellectual 11fe and an evaluation of his contribution to modern Chinese mind. Hu, an outstanding Chinese scholar, is held in high esteem as a statesman, philosopher, liberal, and poet, both in his own country and abroad. He is considered one of the greatest thinkers of modern China, being instrumental in the introduction of Western scientific methods into Chinese scholar-ship. In the early twenties he initiated China's "Literary Revolution," which brought about radical reforms in Chinese writings which, up to then, formed the basis of China's education. This change has exerted a far reaching influence on the Chinese mind and revolutionized their mode of living.

Contemporary scholars of Indian philosophy are of the opinion that the Vedas are purely ritualistic. This opinion finds support in the translations and commentaries of Sayanacharya and Mahidhara, on which their scholarship is based. The interpretation of the Vedas by the above mentioned authors is against the root derivatives of the words and antagonistic to the expositions of the various hymns given by the Vedic sages and Riahia. In order to be a valid translation it has to be in conformity with the ideas and derivatives contained in Vedanga, Alteraya, Shatpatha, Brahmans, etc. Sayanacharys says that all the four Vedas em- phasize the Karmakand (rituale), only.| However, it can easily be seen that amongst the many topics, the Vedas deal with four Important ones, namely: (I) Karma, (2) Vijuana, (3) worship (upasana) sod (4) Jana. Mundak Upanisad in part says:

With the impact of feminism and other liberationist movements of the 1960s and beyond, academic disciplines have faced intensive scrutiny, and re-examination of many of their basic premises and methodologies. Art history is one such discipline. By the 1970s, feminist critique of art history and practices in the art world had brought about the feminist art movement. This movement continues today and has developed and grown in many directions. Artwriting by feminists has proliferated and the literature includes research on female artists, studies on representation of women in art, critiques of texts and other previous artwriting, and discussion on biases, omissions, inadequacies, and the nature of the discipline itself. Attempts at an overview of the movement have focused on discrete issues, events, or histories of developments. Review articles and anthologies have not adequately studied the underlying philosophical and ethical motivations of the movement as a whole. This study considers the over-arching philosophical elements implicit in feminist artwriting. Through a review of the literature, and aspects of general feminist studies and feminist philosophy, particularly ethics, I examine how they contribute to the feminist art movement, and how the movement has changed thinking, teaching and learning about the history of art.

This dissertation proposes an exploration of a variety of themes in philosophy of science through the lens of a case study in evolutionary biology. It draws from a careful analysis and comparison of the hypotheses from Bill Martin and Tom Cavalier-Smith. These two scientists produced contrasted and competing accounts for one of the main events in the history of life, the origin of eukaryotic cells. This case study feeds four main philosophical themes around which this dissertation is articulated. (1) Theorizing: What kind of theory are hypotheses about unique events in the past? (2) Representation: How do hypotheses about the past represent their target? (3) Evidential claims: What kind of evidence is employed and how do they constrain these hypotheses? (4) Pluralism: What are the benefits and the risks associated with the coexistence of rival hypotheses? This work both seeks to rearticulate traditional debates in philosophy of science in the light of a lesser-known case of scientific practice and to enrich the catalogue of existing case studies in the philosophy of historical sciences.

<p>In what is supposed to have been a radical break with neo-Hegelian idealism, Bertrand Russell, alongside G.E Moore, advocated the analysis of propositions by their decomposition into constituent concepts and relations. Russell regarded this as a breakthrough for the analysis of the propositions of mathematics. However, it would seem that the decompositional-analytic approach is singularly unhelpful as a technique for the clarification of the concepts of mathematics. The aim of this thesis will be to clarify Russell’s early conception of the analysis of mathematical propositions and concepts in the light of the philosophical doctrines to which his conception of analysis answered, and the demands imposed by existing mathematics on Russell’s logicist program. Chapter 1 is concerned with the conception of analysis which emerged, rather gradually, out of Russell’s break with idealism and with the philosophical commitments thereby entrenched. Chapter 2 is concerned with Russell’s considered treatment of the significance of relations for analysis and the overturning of his “doctrine of internal relations” in his work on Leibniz. Chapter 3 is concerned with Russell’s discovery of Peano and the manner in which it informed the conception of analysis underlying Russell’s articulation of logicism for arithmetic and geometry in PoM. Chapter 4 is concerned with the philosophical and logical differences between Russell’s and Frege’s approaches to logical analysis in the logicist definition of number. Chapter 5 is concerned with connecting Russell’s attempt to secure a theory of denoting, crucial to mathematical definition, to his decompositional conception of the analysis of propositions.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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A particularly intriguing aspect of personal identity is the staying power of the first arguments. Many of the earliest arguments have remained influential to contemporary theories, even if they sometimes go unacknowledged. One of the most prominent of those long-lived theories comes from Descartes. In this paper I establish the intellectual background, framework, and implications of Cartesian dualism. With this theory in mind I examine Derek Parfit’s We Are Not Human Beings. Despite his denial dualism’s relevance, Parfit’s argument for personal identity contains Cartesian Dualism within it. His examples, definitions, and “intuitions” are compatible, if not more supportive of the Cartesian philosophy. To have the strongest argument that we are not human beings Parfit needs dualism - even if he will not directly acknowledge it.

Each autumn, in universities from Cardiff to Sydney, young men and women in their late teens or early twenties find themselves in seminar rooms invited to discuss the writings of long-dead European males (mostly males) concerning events and situations that are no longer happening. But these young people are not history students. They are not literature students either, necessarily. They are politics undergraduates. Many of them are already political activists of some shade and some of them, when all this is over, will want to ‘go out’ into the world and make changes to it. They have come to get equipped for the dangers of real-life political action ; to get a politics degree which might make them attractive candidates for civil service positions or for an assistantship at party HQ. They are equipping for the future, they want to know about the future, and they want to be prepared for the currents in which they will soon have to swim: the networks, hierarchies and channels of influence in conjunction with which they will have to operate – present networks, today’s hierarchies and perhaps even tomorrow’s. Yet here they are, engaging not only with today’s political problems, but with yesterday’s, or with those of several centuries past; with Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and with a whole cast of authors whose works and words belong, as they soon realise, to the problems of their own time, and seem to offer very little for the solution of today’s. Even on the level of ideology, the challenges of Hobbes, of Rousseau, or of Burke to current thinking are weakened by attendant contexts that are no longer happening, by their ill-suitedness to popular revival, and by their undemocratic obsolescence…

<p>For living things, being spatial means being in some place. Beyond mere geometric containment, this being in place reveals a relational and active spatiality that arises through one’s bodily interaction with an environment. However, for human beings this engagement occurs primarily through the medium of technology, broadly construed as the production and use of artifacts. Working at the intersection of philosophy of technology and phenomenology, my project accounts for this technologically mediated spatiality. In particular, I develop extant arguments that technology is best understood as an extension and externalization of our bodies and minds into the environment. I argue that this technological extendedness generates a <i>topological</i> spatiality that is a key feature of human existence. Put differently, I show that we are more than bodies <i>in</i> space; rather, we <i>are </i>spatial <i>via</i> our relation to technology.</p>

During the period of reaction in England after the Napoleonic wars, a new generation of reformers developed, who abjured the belief in natural rights already discredited by the Jacobin excesses.1 These individuals sought a personality around whom they could center their program. Jeremy Bentham, a seemingly apolitical man, gradually became the personification of the new methodology. Crane Brinton has written, "scarcely has an English thinker left a more definite trice upon English legislation than Jeremy Bentham."2 So involved are the implications of the system and the man who introduced the new science" that interest is produced by the study itself. Largely under his name and doctrine, the English middle class moved forward to capture new political power without a revolution. 1. J. Bronowski & Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition (New York, 1960), 430. 2. Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1933), 14.