The introduction (§§1-33) to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is the key to the work’s structure, its argumentative strategy and it functions as a foundation for Hegel’s practical philosophy in general. Its explanatory potential is best realised by situating it within the systematic context of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences and the Science of Logic. This interpretative strategy reveals that for Hegel, the true site of agency is ‘the concept’ and that particular individuals and their arbitrary activity are at best the concept’s ‘appearance’. This does not render their activity ‘false’ but describes how willing and freedom are ‘for us’ as self-conscious subjects that confront an external world. For Hegel, ‘true’ freedom in the sense of ‘self-determination to itself’ resides with the universal and singular concept that negatively unites itself with its objectivity to form what he calls the ‘Idea of the will’ or ‘right’. This interpretation contradicts the mainstream of contemporary Hegel scholarship since its proponents either deny the reality of the universal concept as agent or absolutely differentiate between the concept’s activity (subjective action) and its objective reality (norms, institutions). This prevents the interpreter from appreciating that it is Hegel’s concept that is manifest in form of particular willing subjects and their socio-political context. Since most commentators associate ‘activity’ or ‘freedom’ primarily with particular subjects, their notions of freedom are, by Hegel’s standards, either empty and fail to describe actual willing or they fall short of the standard of ‘true freedom’, viz. ‘self-determination to itself’ because their agents’ freedom depends on something that differs from the agents.1 The present commentary argues that such a dilemma can be avoided by an interpretation that attributes agency to Hegel’s concept. By determining itself to be Idea, the universal concept determines itself (as subject) to itself (as object) and rational agency and rational institutions are grasped as aspects of the same entity. This is what Hegel calls the unconditioned Idea of right or ‘objective freedom’.

This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.

This thesis identifies and explores a ‘return to Freud’ in the work of Jacques Derrida. Resemblances between Derrida’s method of deconstruction and the therapeutic procedure of psychoanalysis have long been a source of debate among critics. Is deconstruction little more than a psychoanalytic reading of the history of philosophy, or is Freud a Derridean avant la lettre? Revealing this dilemma to be a false one, this thesis challenges major interpreters of Derrida such as Jonathan Culler and Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak. By developing Derrida’s well-known yet little understood concept of différance, it argues that this dilemma stems from an inadequate understanding of Derrida’s treatment of time. The structure of temporality implied by différance entails that the meaning of the past is continually reconstituted in its relationship to an ever-evolving present. Far from dissolving the importance of Freud’s contribution, this structure allows Derrida to circumvent nebulous notions of ‘influence’ and ‘indebtedness’ while still engaging psychoanalysis as a key theoretical resource in his own project of deconstruction. A productive engagement with psychoanalytic theory is shown to inform every major stage of the philosopher’s career, from his early phenomenological work to his later reflections on the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Derrida repeatedly turns to Freud as a crucial interlocutor in interrogating a number of philosophical problems encountered in his own work. These problems include the nature of time, space, and memory; the role of the fictive in scientific discourse; the question of the archive; the interdependence of the psyche and technology; and the relationship between politics and the unconscious. At a theoretical level, this thesis provides a detailed account of Derrida’s notion of spacing, arguing that the unconditional belatedness entailed by différance calls us to a difficult, dual responsibility: both towards the legator of an inheritance (that is, towards the textual legacy Freud has bequeathed to us) and towards the unforeseeable future contexts in which this inheritance will require transformation. The discourse of deconstruction, it concludes, enacts a careful negotiation of these two demands.

This thesis analyses the constructions of the market in the thought of Adam Smith and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and their relevance for contemporary political philosophy. Combining the history of ideas with systematic analysis, it contrasts Smith’s view of the market as a benevolently designed ‘contrivance of nature’ with Hegel’s view of the market as a ‘relic of the state of nature.’ In two interpretative chapters these two constructions of the market are discussed within the contexts of Smith’s and Hegel’s thought. In three systematic chapters, the relevance of these different constructions for the problems of identity and community, social justice, and different notions and dimensions of freedom is discussed. The first of these chapters argues that the conceptualization of the labour market as a market place for human capital or as a locus for the development of a professional ethos has a deep impact on how one thinks about the relation between individual and community, cutting across the debate between liberals and communitarians. The second systematic chapter shows that the market can be seen either as an instrument for addressing issues of social justice or as an institution against which social justice needs to be realized: for Smith, who thinks that free markets reward virtue and equalize income, it is the former, whereas for Hegel, who holds that free markets lead to unpredictable results and exacerbate social differences, it is the latter. The third systematic chapter addresses the relation between different aspects of liberty and the market. It shows that the market offers both chances and risks for liberty in the sense of individual autonomy, and analyses the relations of the market to positive liberty in a political sense. The concluding chapter draws some broader methodological lessons, arguing for a closer integration of economic and political theory at a ‘less-ideal’ level.

This thesis engages with the later writings of Paul Ricoeur in order to understand his philosophy as a whole. A reconstruction of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of ethical life presents his significant contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion. This hermeneutics aims to elucidate a moral religion that binds humans together universally on the basis of the life they share as capable beings. To facilitate this hermeneutics, I will demonstrate that a selective reading of Ricoeur’s philosophy brings to light the pivotal role of his ‘little ethics’ in bridging his later and earlier works. The capable human (l’homme capable) in the later Ricoeur must be understood in relation to both the ‘little ethics’ and an architectonic of moral religion. Elucidating the aim (telos) of ethical life and the norm (‘moral law’) of moral religion from the ‘little ethics’ points to the significant roles of Aristotle and Kant in Ricoeur’s architectonic. Ricoeur himself defines ‘architectonic’ in Kantian terms as a critical framework, while appropriating Spinoza’s metaphysical conception of a rational striving (conatus) for life in its fullness. Core concepts taken from Spinoza, Aristotle and Kant are implicit in the present reconstruction of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Three dimensions of ethical life emerge in Spinoza’s metaphysics, Aristotle’s anthropology, and Kant’s moral philosophy, giving us Ricoeur’s architectonic. For Ricoeur, the ethical aim is grounded on a metaphysics of human capability, and the demanding nature of ‘the law’ renders religion moral. This religion assumes that the good life is the goal of human striving. But crucially, the thesis will uncover ‘the arrow of the religious’ (la flèche du religieux) as it motivates the capable subject to embrace life with and for others in just institutions. In conclusion, life is revealed as the heart of Ricoeur’s moral religion.

This study traces the intellectual and political itinerary of the review La Relève, an influential cultural journal in 1930s and ‘40s Quebec, in order to explore broader trends within francophone Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century. La Relève enjoyed a unique role as a propagator of French Catholic thought in Quebec due to its close ties with the prominent French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. In the early ‘30s, members of the Relève group espoused a militant Catholicism with conservative-minded nationalist sympathies. The group’s encounter with Maritain in October 1934, however, moved La Relève towards a more communitarian Catholicism which was open to social and religious pluralism. During the later ‘30s, the Relèvistes would display a new interest in democratic forms of politics, reflecting the larger ‘democratic turn’ evident amongst many francophone Catholic intellectuals. In examining this shift, this study argues that the progressive Catholicism embraced by La Relève remained strongly rooted in longstanding Catholic social teachings and mentalities, thereby shedding light upon the political trajectory of the larger French Catholic Revival during this period. The emergence of a ‘Left’ Catholicism in France and Quebec was the result of a gradual and often contradictory process in which new attempts to engage with pluralism, democracy and human rights were heavily influenced by the traditionally anti-liberal and anti-individualistic perspectives of Catholic social and political thought. This study also examines the social and cultural environment of Catholic intellectual engagement in Quebec during this period, focusing upon the role played by friendship in defining the experiences of the Relève circle during the 1930s and ‘40s. Initially the product of a close-knit and often cliquish group of former schoolmates, La Relève provided a forum for masculine solidarity and shared intellectual and religious pursuits. The Relèvistes' conception of friendship expanded over the course of the decade, reflecting their exposure to the ideas of the French Catholic intelligentsia, for whom the idea of friendship signalled a wider community bound together by common religious, social and political goals. During the war years, the Relève group came to play a new role within the larger francophone Catholic intellectual community, founding a publishing company which printed numerous anti-fascist Catholic authors. In the postwar period, however, contact with the European intellectual milieu diminished, as the review closed in 1948 and the Relèvistes embraced new trends in Catholic thought which ultimately distanced them from Maritain. However, intellectual engagement with French Catholic thought would continue on in Quebec through the review Cité libre, which would play an important role in shaping politics and society in Quebec and Canada during the later twentieth century.

This thesis traces the ‘New Moment’ in Pauline reception in the writings of Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Žižek. It explores how the Pauline epistles are read and feature in their thought. An answer to the question, 'why Paul?' prompts reflection on what it is to read and understand the Apostle. An introduction sets out the writers of this ‘New Moment’ [Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, Stanislas Breton, as well as Badiou, Eagleton and Žižek] before isolating the figures of this study. The reception of this ‘moment’ by mainstream New Testament studies is considered, and with it the charge of ‘appropriation’. The concept of ‘appropriation’ is explored, and a definition arrived at, for the purpose of evaluating the readings we will go on to discover. As part of this notion of ‘appropriation’, the turn to Gadamer in recent New Testament study is surveyed. We suggest another potential hermeneutical approach that derives from Gadamer is possible. Thus, the object of this study is both an instance of, and means by which to critique the understanding of, New Testament Wirkungsgeschichte. Each of our thinkers is then considered in turn. The outline for each chapter is the same. A brief introduction to the figure with bibliographical background salient to his Pauline reading precedes some textual examples indicative of that reading. We then move to analyse the manner of that reading and certain conceptual problems which are revealed in the course of the engagement with Paul. The conclusion analyses the approaches, and reasons for turning, to Paul on the part of these thinkers. Salient differences between each thinker's reading are noted and the charge of appropriation is evaluated afresh. The implications of such readings for conventional biblical criticism are considered, and the success of an approach which explores a Gadamerean-inspired interest in reception in the manner adopted by this thesis is judged.

The central aim of this thesis is to analyse the influence of Kierkegaard on Bonhoeffer. This relationship has been almost universally recognized. And yet this area has received no comprehensive study, limited within the secondary literature to footnotes, digressions, and the occasional paper. Furthermore, what little literature there is has been plagued by several stereotypes. First, discussion is often limited to Discipleship. Second, Kierkegaard has been identified as an individualist and acosmist who rejected the church, leading many to consider Bonhoeffer the ecumenist and ecclesiologist as selectively agreeing with Kierkegaard, but ultimately rejecting his overall stance. This thesis will argue that neither stereotype is true, and suggest (a), that Kierkegaard’s influence can be found throughout Bonhoeffer’s work, and (b) that although a more stereotypical perspective may be present in SC, by the end of his life Bonhoeffer had gained a far deeper understanding across the breadth of Kierkegaard’s work. The importance of this thesis is not simply to ‘plug the gap’ of scholarship in this area, but also to suggest the importance of analysing Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer together. This will focus on three specific areas. First, alongside the influence of Kierkegaard on Bonhoeffer, it will argue for the importance of using Bonhoeffer as an interpretive tool for understanding Kierkegaard. This thesis will show how Bonhoeffer adopted and adapted Kierkegaard’s work to his own situation, forcing Kierkegaard to answer questions that were not present during his own life. In this way, we are led to compare Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer as individuals, and not simply their static declarations. Secondly, against the tendency to consider Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer’s final attacks on Christendom as unfortunate endings to otherwise profound careers, it will be suggested that these attacks stand as the fulfilment of their earlier thought. It will be argued that despite their different contexts, both Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer were led to the same conclusions concerning Christendom. Thirdly, given Kierkegaard’s submission to indirect communication and his somewhat 'prophetic' proclamations concerning one who will come after him and reform, this thesis will ask whether Bonhoeffer stands as something of a fulfilment to Kierkegaard’s thought in the guise of a Kierkegaardian ‘reformer’.

Much modern moral philosophy has conceived of its interpretative and critical aims in relation to an entity it sometimes terms 'common-sense morality'. The term was influentially used in something like its canonical sense by Henry Sidgwick in his classic work The Methods of Ethics (1874). Sidgwick conceived of common-sense morality as a more-or-less determinate body of current moral opinion, and traced his ('doxastic') conception through Kant back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the practice of Plato's Socrates before him. The Introduction to this thesis traces the influence of Sidgwick's conception both on subsequent (mis)understandings of Socratic practice as well as on the practice of moral philosophy in the twentieth century. The first essay offers a challenge to Sidgwick's understanding of Socratic practice. I argue that Socrates' questioning of his interlocutors, far from revealing some determinate body of pre-existing beliefs, is in fact a demonstration of the dynamic and partially indeterminate quality of common-sense morality. The value for the interlocutor of engaging in such conversation with Socrates consisted primarily in its forcing him to adopt what I term a deliberative stance with respect to his own practice and dispositions, asking himself not 'what is it that I believe?' but rather, 'what am I to believe?' This understanding of Socratic practice gives us a way of reconciling the often puzzling combination of conservative and radical elements in Plato's dialogues. The second essay is a discussion of the reception of Sidgwick's conception of ethics in twentieth-century Oxford, a hegemonic centre of Anglophone philosophy. This recent tradition consists both of figures who accepted Sidgwick's picture of moral philosophy's aims and those who rejected it. Of the critics, I am centrally concerned with Bernard Williams, whose life's work, I argue, can be fruitfully understood as the elaboration of a heterodox understanding of Socratic practice, opposed to Sidgwick's. Ethics, on this conception, is a project directed at the emancipation of our moral experience from the many distortions to which it is vulnerable. Williams's writings in moral philosophy, disparate and not entirely systematic, are unified by these emancipatory aims, aims they share with strains of psychoanalysis except in that they do not scorn philosophical argument as a tool of emancipation: in this respect among others, I claim, they are fundamentally Socratic.

En Iran, la philosophie a deux histoires distinctes : l’une, dans laquelle les Iraniens jouèrent un rôle considérable, est liée à la connaissance de la pensée et plus généralement des sciences grecques, au début de la période islamique ; l’autre est liée à la rencontre des Iraniens avec l’Occident moderne et à ses conséquences culturelles, sociales et politiques. À ce moment-là, certains d’entre eux, fascinés par la puissance militaire, la discipline sociale et les innovations technologiques européennes, commencent à réfléchir sur la situation de l’Europe et à la comparer à la société iranienne. La traduction des ouvrages occidentaux suscite une réflexion sur cette comparaison. Dans cette histoire, alors que les philosophes traditionnels iraniens continuent à transmettre ce qu’ils ont reçu, certains auteurs et traducteurs se sont intéressés aux idées philosophiques modernes et parfois par la philosophie elle-même. Mais les uns et les autres n’en ont pas la même perception. À côté de rares penseurs qui évoquent la philosophie en tant que telle, on peut distinguer les deux autres groupes : l’un, enrichi intellectuellement dans un milieu traditionnel, perçoit et, plus important, développe la philosophie comme une donnée immuable conforme à la fois au régime despotique et au milieu religieux. L’autre la perçoit, sous l’influence de la pensée des Lumières, comme un engagement politique et social. Les auteurs des ouvrages critiques, qui forment ce groupe, présupposent que la philosophie est en réalité le fondement de la « civilisation » et du « progrès » en Europe. Ils attendent donc que la philosophie joue le même rôle culturel, social et politique en Iran, une attitude tout-à-fait nouvelle. L’idée de progrès de l’époque de Lumières devient en effet le « Progrès », et on la considère comme le but, non seulement de la connaissance philosophique, mais de toute connaissance et de toute production intellectuelle. / Historically, the Iranians have encountered Western philosophy in two distinct streams. One happened at the beginning of the Islamic period when the Iranians got to know the Greek thought and, more generally, the Greek sciences. This made them play a considerable role in the philosophical movement of the Islamic realm. The second stream happened after the Iranians encountered the modern West and its cultural, social and political consequences. At that point, some of them were fascinated by European military power, social discipline and technological innovations. Comparing their own society with all its problems to the new Western world and its developments, they tried to know what was making such a huge difference. At this time, while traditional Iranian philosophers were busy transmitting what they had been taught, some translators and authors got into new philosophical ideas, or even the entire modern philosophy. But their perceptions of philosophy were not identical. Besides those who addressed philosophy as it really is, two other groups can be distinguished: Those who had been raised in a traditional environment, understood and more importantly reflected philosophy as a sustainable and motionless truth, in correlation with despotic power and religious norms. The other group, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, understood it as a political and social commitment. Authors of the critical works who were forming the second group, considered philosophy as the foundation of the modern civilization and development in Europe. Thus, they expected philosophy to have a similar effect on the Iranian society: a completely new attitude! For them, the idea of progress, which came through the influence of the Enlightenment and was followed by 19th century positivism, not only became “Progress” and the ultimate goal of philosophy, but also the goal of any intellectual activity.