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How do concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world? This is the main topic of John McDowell's Mind and World where McDowell attempts to dissolve a number of dualisms making use of a particular philosophical methodology which I identify as a version of Wittgenstein's quietism. This thesis consists of a critical analysis of a number of dualisms which McDowell attempts to dissolve in Mind and World. These include the Kantian dualism of sensibility and understanding, the dualism of conceptual versus non conceptual content, the dualism of scheme and content and the dualism of reason and nature. These dichotomies are all intricately intertwined and can be seen to be subsumed by the main topic of this thesis, namely, thinking and the world. McDowell persuasively draws attention to the unsustainability of particular philosophical positions between which philosophers have 'oscillated' such as coherentism and the given. However I claim that he does not go far enough in his attempt as a quietist to achieve peace for philosophy as traditional dichotomies such as that of realism and anti-realism still appear to exert a grip on his thinking. In this regard, 1 argue that, although McDowell’s work indicates the viability of quietism in addressing seemingly intractable philosophical positions, it would have gained by incorporating insights from European phenomenologists, such as Heidegger, who have been as intent as McDowell on reworking traditional dualisms. McDowell’s quietist methodology plays an important role in Mind and World and some of the criticism that has been directed towards his work displays a lack of appreciation of this method. I claim that a proper understanding of McDowell's version of quietism is important for a correct understanding of this text.

La presente tesis realiza una reconstrucción de la filosofía de la aritmética de Kant. La hipótesis que tenemos es que los conceptos manejados por este autor son perfectamente válidos porque encajan en la historia de la aritmética desde la aparición de los números naturales hasta los números irracionales (números con los que trabajó Kant). A nuestros modo de ver, los números tuvieron una aparición trascendental el día en el que el primer hombre vio un objeto, más aún varios, y necesitó contabilizarlos. Empezó, entonces, a hacer una marca en un lugar para cada objeto. Esto fue con el fin de tener con exactitud la cantidad de dichos objetos de su propiedad, ¿pero es posible sostener esto? La respuesta es afirmativa porque es así como surge la numeración y la forma de contar. Una huella, un trazo y, después, un número estaban en concordancia con los objetos que yacen en la realidad, pero esta explicación no es propia de la filosofía, sino de la historia de la aritmética. No obstante, es la misma filosofía que nos remite al sujeto quien, mediante sus sentidos, da cuenta de ello y, mediante su razón, reflexiona sobre ello. Además da la seguridad a futuro de la operación matemática como lo es la suma. En consecuencia, lo propio de la filosofía es la reflexión de los principios que, a partir de los cuales, se recoge en la historia la aparición, además de los números, de las operaciones, entre ellas la suma. Así bien, damos cuenta que la aparición de la suma es de carácter experiencial. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, es reflexiva, intuitiva y naturalmente lógica, así se remarca en la propia mente humana. Por ello, es que podemos realizar sumas mayores. Podemos hablar de nuevos números como son los enteros negativos (-3; -4; etc.), los racionales (3/4; 1/2; etc.) y hasta los números irracionales (√2; etc.). Por lo expuesto antes, y por la naturaleza del tema, hemos empleado como metodología de investigación la exégesis de los textos clásicos kantianos y los de la historia de la aritmética. Para esto, nos apoyamos en las interpretaciones de prestigiosos tratadistas cuyos trabajos consignamos en la bibliografía. Nuestra metodología de exposición combina el análisis de los argumentos. Por lo cual, el método empleado será el analítico demostrativo al modo exegético, ya que, a través de esta herramienta, se puede traer a la luz los supuestos reales de los conceptos que fluctúan como sustrato básico, que moran en el trasfondo de los textos kantianos, y que además se enrolan con la historia de la aritmética.

Thesis advisor: Susan Shell / Through a close reading of Immanuel Kant's late book, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, the dissertation clarifies the political element in Kant's doctrine of religion and so contributes to a wider conception of his political philosophy. Kant's political philosophy of religion, in addition to extending and further animating his moral doctrine, interprets religion in such a way as to give the Christian faith a moral grounding that will make possible, and even be an agent of, the improvement of social and political life. The dissertation emphasizes the wholeness and structure of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason as a book, for the teaching of the book is not exhausted by the articulation of its doctrine but also includes both the fact and the manner of its expression: the reader learns most fully from Kant by giving attention to the structure and tone of the book as well as to its stated content and argumentation. The Religion provides the basis not only for a proposed reenvisioning of the basis of existing religious creeds and practices, but along with this a devastating critique of them in particularly moral terms. This, however, is only half of what constitutes Kant's political philosophy of religion; Kant goes beyond the philosophical analysis of the social-political context of religion and pursues, alongside this effort, a political presentation of philosophy which is intended to relieve the reader's anxieties concerning the tension between philosophy and political life that it is in the interest of the partisans of the church-faith to encourage. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Thesis advisor: Andrea Staiti / This study concerns the nature and role of analyticity in the work of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. Its initial goal is that of clarifying the place of analytic judgment in Kant's critical project. Against the widely held assumption that analytic judgment has no role to play in the critical project, I show that analytic judgment has a precise and genuinely important role to play in the context of Kant's metaphysics. Analytic judgment has the role of clarifying our a priori conceptual repertoire and thus of making possible the synthetic a priori judgments that are properly constitutive of metaphysics. The next goal of the study is that of unifying and defending Kant's various characterizations of analytic judgment. Whereas a number of commentators have suggested that Kant is vague or ambivalent as regards the properties of analytic judgment, I show that we can extract a clear, consistent picture of analytic judgment from his work. The key to seeing this, I argue, is becoming clear on Kant's basic assumptions concerning concepts, logic, and propositional form. Subsequently, I turn to Husserl. Picking up on the fact that for Husserl, too, analyticity has metaphysical, or ontological significance, I spell out his conception of analyticity in detail. I show that analyticity for Husserl embraces two essentially symmetrical domains of law: the a priori laws of objective givenness and the a priori laws of propositional form. I then bring Husserl and Kant together. After showing that Husserl fails to capture the essence of Kant's theory of analytic judgment, and so fails to see exactly where he stands relative to Kant, I argue that what ultimately distinguishes Husserl from Kant is the claim that analytic truth is properly articulated in a purely formal context. I show that this departure from Kant has extremely significant consequences. For example, it enables Husserl to describe whole systems of judgment, such as mathematics or logic, as analytic; and it enables Husserl to defend the possibility of analytic judgments having empirical content. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis (M.A.)--香港中文大學哲學部. / Manuscript. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [1]-[2] (last group)). / Thesis (M.A.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue zhe xue bu. / 序 --- p.i／ iv / Chapter ´¡ --- 康德体系之存有論與形上學循环運動 --- p.1／72 / Chapter ´Ł --- 「越渡／反越渡」與主動解釋 --- p.73／133 / 註解 / 書目

This thesis reads radical indeterminacy into the reflective judgements of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement through points of connection between Kant's aesthetics and the philosophies and writing of Theodor Adorno and Maurice Blanchot. These re-situate the 'ends' of Kantian aesthetics in the historical situation of the 1960s and 1970s. In turn, this historicising of Kantian aesthetics reinterprets its original content. Such double reading - from Kant forwards, and back to Kant - is configured through what I call 'reversal': the indeterminacy of aesthetic reflection calls for a reverse 'reading' of itself which is not self-defeatingly determined by the aesthetic. Kant thus gives us the vocabulary for re-reading his aesthetics of reflection, and from this other indeterminacies of reflection, despite his attempt to organise and explain reflective relations through consistently with philosophical form through judgement. To read Kant outside his or any philosophy's economy, the task demanded by Adorno's theory and Blanchot's writing, asks for poetic readers and writers such as their near-contemporary, Paul Celan. They understand Celan's poetry as making legible how Kant's aesthetic might be thought reflectively, thus showing that the indeterminacy Kant attributes to reflection can be aesthetically experienced without being effaced by the philosophical judgement implying that indeterminacy. This turn back, the turn of verse, forms the hinge between Adorno's and Blanchot's dialectical and political thinking, allowing the common sense, the un-institutionalised 'we' Kant thinks ratifies aesthetic judgement, to remain negative or 'unavowable'. Aesthetics still structures the reading of poetry, but such poetry makes the indeterminate implications of Kantian aesthetics legible. 'Disconnection' becomes the organising principle for reflection and politics, implied by but now freed from aesthetic judgement, made visible by a poetry of 'reversal'. We conclude by finding the development of these ideas in two major elegists of Celan, Geoffrey Hill and Jeremy Prynne.

Dans ce travail nous élaborons une interprétation de la philosophie critique d’Immanuel Kant qui montre qu’elle donne les fondements à l’algèbre. Nous affirmons que les constructions algébriques se distinguent des constructions géométriques et qu’elles forment une théorie de la quantité pure. Dans la première Critique, l’algèbre est une méta-arithmétique qui donne les conditions de la quantification de la grandeur en général. Par conséquent, la théorie mathématique de l’épistémologie critique s’inscrit dans le projet d’algébrisation des sciences pendant l’époque moderne. Nous avons divisé notre travail en cinq chapitres. Avec le chapitre 1, nous montrons le rôle de l’algèbre dans la pensée moderne. L’algèbre, fondée dans l’arithmétique, est la théorie de la quantification des grandeurs non-déterminées. Dans le chapitre 2, nous critiquons les a priori historiques sur lesquels se basent les commentateurs de la philosophie critique pour affirmer que la construction de la quantité, chez Kant, doit nécessairement se ramener à des constructions spatiales. Dans le chapitre 3, nous montrons que le nombre est un schème pur temporel. La théorie kantienne du Schématisme transcendantal des concepts purs de la quantité suppose des relations temporelles a priori sur lesquelles se fondent la numérisation des relations spatio-temporelles. Dans le chapitre 4, en analysant les rapports entre l’Esthétique transcendantale et la Phoronomie des Premiers principes métaphysiques des sciences de la nature (1786), nous affirmons que la quantification des grandeurs spatio-temporelles est fondée sur une conception du temps absolu qui contient une métrique intrinsèque. Dans le chapitre 5, nous nous sommes concentrés sur le rôle de la synthèse pure qui génère la représentation symbolique de la quantité variable. En analysant la relation entre la temporalité et la science de la quantification, nous sommes en mesure d’expliquer et de défendre la possibilité de la construction de la variable x dans l’épistémologie critique. Nos recherchent sur les rapports entre le temps et la quantification dans l’épistémologie critique, nous permettent d’affirmer que la construction de la variable algébrique repose sur une synthèse pure temporelle qui a préséance sur la quantification spatiale. L’algèbre précède la géométrie, la chronométrie et la Phoronomie. Ce qui nous laisse dire que l’algèbre est la mathématique la plus fondamentale dans le système critique.

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This dissertation argues for the truth of two fundamental premises: that testimony is the primary source of knowledge in human beings, and that testimony accounts for the emergence and formation of human minds. The thesis argues that the human ability to perceive as…, to remember as…, and to infer as…, is due to the say-so of others. All human beings, in virtue of being sentient beings, are able to experience both the external world and their own private states of consciousness, this work contends, however, that our ability to experience as… is a consequence of our emergence in a world of epistemic transactions and encounters, the most basic of which are explicated by the epistemological notion of testimony. The work argues, then, that we live in an interpreted world – a world interpreted by those who have gone before us. The thesis argues further, that the world-view that is built within us as a consequence of the sayings of others, induces and forms human minds. The work makes a strong commitment to the Kantian categories and that philosopher’s thesis of Transcendental Idealism. On the shoulders of the Kantian a priori, however, the dissertation argues that the formation of human doxastic structures is due to what one’s epistemic elders say about what is. As such, the thesis seeks to establish a fundamental link between ontology, epistemology, and the concept of mind. The work proposes a view of the concept of truth that synthesises the Correspondence Theory of Truth, the Coherence Theory of Truth, with a theory of meaning – I name this synthesis a Unified Theory of Truth. Extensive consideration is given to the concept of evidence and the role of trust in epistemic transactions. The work concludes with a consideration of the possibility that human beings may be able to have experiences as… that transcend the ways of ‘seeing’ that are due to testimony. An explanatory theory is posited that the writings and testimonies of mystics provide evidence that human beings are capable of meaningful experiences which cannot be accommodated by the conceptual structures that otherwise make meaning possible. The dissertation is argued in seven chapters and is constructed thus: Chapter One The thesis is stated in four premises: 1. that the testimony of others, with respect to what is the case (or may be the case), is the primary source of our beliefs about what is the case (or may be the case) 2. that the testimony of others provides adequate relevant grounds for one to claim to know what is the case 3. that education is testimony 4. that the formation and emergence of mind is due to testimony Significant presuppositions are identified and discussed. A brief argument in support of the thesis is posited. Reference is made to the evolution of the argument and the overall structure and organisation of the project is elucidated. Chapter Two The second chapter is dedicated to a detailed and extensive analysis of epistemic justification. I argue that the ‘evidence condition’ of the tripartite analysis of propositional knowledge is sometimes misapplied by those who argue that its function is to verify propositions. I argue that its function is to justify beliefs and that it does not verify that p – the evidence condition ‘tracks’ the belief condition, not the truth condition. I also examine the concept of evidence itself. Chapter Three A detailed examination of the concepts of ‘testimony’, ‘epistemic dependence’ and ‘epistemic independence’ is undertaken. I argue for the centrality and primacy of testimony in the formation of beliefs and subsequently one’s doxastic structures. I argue that testimony plays a fundamental role in the process of education and that this fact points to its significance and importance in epistemic transactions and the emergence of rational and self-reflective minds. Chapter Four In the fourth chapter I advert to the difficulty encountered in (a) embracing a strong commitment to intellectual autonomy and (b) accepting the say-so of others on trust. In the light of this observation, I undertake a linguistic conceptual analysis of the concept of trust and then examine the role trust plays in the acquisition of beliefs. I argue that the concept of trust does not exclude critical appraisal, but that when one trusts, one must be disposed to act in a certain way. I argue that although trust does play a fundamental role in formation of beliefs induced by the say-so of others, this does not make impossible critical appraisal of the attestations of others. Chapter Five In this chapter I note my agreement with other philosophers that testimony is the speech-act of attesting, but put up an argument that it is also the speech-act of informing. In consequence I undertake an analysis of the concept of information and examine the mechanisms and processes which are at work that enable ‘bits’ to become information for an entity or system. I argue that because testimony is the speech-act of informing, it is involved in the actual formation of human minds and, therefore, that we can attribute to testimony a deeper purpose than merely attesting to certain states of affairs. I argue that testimony builds, for human beings, a world-view and that it plays a fundamental role in how we come to interpret the experience of being. Chapter Six In the sixth and penultimate chapter I develop my thoughts on the relationship between a priori understandings, testimony, and meaning. I argue that there is a logical relationship between belief acquisition, meaning, and the emergence of fully developed human minds. In this chapter I give consideration to the possibility of thought, belief, and the existence of mind in non-human animals and pre-linguistic humans. I argue that there are good reasons to believe that non-human animals think and maybe develop understandings, but that the possession of mind, in the sense that one can be mindful and therefore attach meaning to experience and be conscious of self, is limited to human beings. I underwrite this view by adverting to the centrality of testimony within the human condition. Chapter Seven In the final chapter of this dissertation I move to a more speculative mode of philosophising and consider whether or not there may be meaningful human experiences which are not interpreted through the conceptual schema acquired as a consequence of the say-so of others. I undertake this speculation by examining the testimony of those who claim to have perceived God directly and those who seek to speak of purported mystical experiences. I also consider some counter-arguments to my thesis that have not been examined in previous chapters. I conclude that there may be meaningful experiences for human beings that lie beyond interpretation and that concepts such as ‘ineffability’ point to our attempts to speak of experiences which transcend our doxastic structures.