My research paper is an investigation of the discourse of gender in relation to the work of Michel Foucault, Susan Bordo, Judith Butler and the artists Louise Bourgeois, Fiona Hall, Jo Spence and Neil Emmerson. I have applied Foucault's notion of the formation, necessity and operations of discourses as the basis from which ideas can be articulated, and the context within which notions of gender are formulated and challenged. I examine the processes in discourses, such as the imposition of disciplines to control the subject, which in turn are inscribed in the body of the subject by the subject, as they begin to perceive and define themselves in terms of the disciplines. I use this theory on the relationship between discourse-power-knowledge to analyse my work and that of the artists mentioned. The work of each artist is discussed in terms of the discourse of gender and the basis from which they critique its power, its effects on bodies and forms of representation through a marginal discourse. For the purposes of my work, the conclusion reached is that to disrupt the discourse of gender entails a continual questioning and awareness of its 'truths,' processes and effects. Description of Studio Work: The three major works examine the power and operations of the discourse of gender on bodies and how marginal discourses subvert these constructions. My works in paper, printmedia and metal, in two dimensions and three, reflect the effects through forms that seek to question limitations and extend our conception of male and female bodies. The wall piece, Out of Order, re-configures symbols and signs from the discourse of gender as a means of disrupting notions that gender is immutable. A swirling red line is woven through a densely layered mass of horizontal broken lines. The addition of symbols, X and Y chromosomes, numbers and other tokens of gender, appear at various points in this marginal discourse on conception of 'bodies.' Mammaphone, which accompanies Out of Order and Bullrushes, consists of an enlarged breast LP playing on a turntable. The 'tracks' are a litany of terms for the breast from slang and maternal discourses. The turntable that 'hosts' the LP sits on top of a stylised 'flight recorder's black box,' which suggests the hidden discourse on gender. Bullrushes, is an arrangement of 20 phallic-like forms each on a flexible metal rod that sways with the passage of air around the work. The work presents male bodies as durable, delicate and vulnerable despite the norms of the masculine discourse. The intention is to put into process an interrogation of the effects of gender on bodies and the possibilities for re-thinking the discourse of gender.

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My research paper is an investigation of the discourse of gender in relation to the work of Michel Foucault, Susan Bordo, Judith Butler and the artists Louise Bourgeois, Fiona Hall, Jo Spence and Neil Emmerson. I have applied Foucault's notion of the formation, necessity and operations of discourses as the basis from which ideas can be articulated, and the context within which notions of gender are formulated and challenged. I examine the processes in discourses, such as the imposition of disciplines to control the subject, which in turn are inscribed in the body of the subject by the subject, as they begin to perceive and define themselves in terms of the disciplines. I use this theory on the relationship between discourse-power-knowledge to analyse my work and that of the artists mentioned. The work of each artist is discussed in terms of the discourse of gender and the basis from which they critique its power, its effects on bodies and forms of representation through a marginal discourse. For the purposes of my work, the conclusion reached is that to disrupt the discourse of gender entails a continual questioning and awareness of its 'truths,' processes and effects. Description of Studio Work: The three major works examine the power and operations of the discourse of gender on bodies and how marginal discourses subvert these constructions. My works in paper, printmedia and metal, in two dimensions and three, reflect the effects through forms that seek to question limitations and extend our conception of male and female bodies. The wall piece, Out of Order, re-configures symbols and signs from the discourse of gender as a means of disrupting notions that gender is immutable. A swirling red line is woven through a densely layered mass of horizontal broken lines. The addition of symbols, X and Y chromosomes, numbers and other tokens of gender, appear at various points in this marginal discourse on conception of 'bodies.' Mammaphone, which accompanies Out of Order and Bullrushes, consists of an enlarged breast LP playing on a turntable. The 'tracks' are a litany of terms for the breast from slang and maternal discourses. The turntable that 'hosts' the LP sits on top of a stylised 'flight recorder's black box,' which suggests the hidden discourse on gender. Bullrushes, is an arrangement of 20 phallic-like forms each on a flexible metal rod that sways with the passage of air around the work. The work presents male bodies as durable, delicate and vulnerable despite the norms of the masculine discourse. The intention is to put into process an interrogation of the effects of gender on bodies and the possibilities for re-thinking the discourse of gender.

Thesis (doctoral)--Friedrich-Alexander-Universität zu Erlangen.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Breslau.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Breslau, 1916. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [vi]-viii).

Some philosophers dispute the claim that there is a notion of logical necessity involved in the concept of logical consequence. They are sceptical about logical necessity. They argue that a proper characterisation of logical consequence - of what follows from what - need not and should not appeal to the notion of necessity at all. Quine is the most prominent philosopher holding such a view. In this doctoral dissertation, I argue that scepticism about logical necessity is not successful. Quine's scepticism takes three forms. Firstly, he is often interpreted as undermining, in his classic paper 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', the very intelligibility of notions such as meaning, necessity, and analyticity. If the notion of necessity is meaningless, it is clear that ascriptions of logical necessity are also meaningless. In the thesis, I defend Quine's criticism of these notions by situating it in its historical context and emphasising that the real target in those writings is not the intelligibility of these notions as such, but only their Platonistic interpretation. I agree with Quine that a good theory about meaning, necessity, or analyticity must avoid such an ontological commitment. Secondly, Quine advocates, in the same paper, a holistic picture of knowledge and claims that in this picture, ascriptions of logical necessity are superfluous. I then show that holism a la Quine is committed to admit the necessity of statements of logical consequence. Thirdly, there is Quine's substitutional account of logical consequence (as exposed in his (1970)). He contends that this theory makes no use of logical necessity, thus showing its superfluousness. I show that any plausible account of logical consequence needs to appeal to logical necessity, thus undercutting Quine's claim - and, more generally, undercutting scepticism about logical necessity.

This dissertation explores the interplay of grammar and context in the interpretation of modal words like ought, necessary, and need. The empirical foci of the discussion are patterns in the use of strong and weak necessity modals in conversation, and the interpretation of syntactically and semantically versatile modals like need in the various grammatical configurations they appear in across languages. It is argued that a sensitivity to collective commitments in a conversation is necessary for understanding certain aspects of modal strength, in particular the traditional distinction between strong and weak necessity modals (exhibited by must and ought to in English). It is proposed that strong necessity modals can only reference priorities that are presupposed to be collectively committed to, whereas weak necessity modals are evaluated with respect to a mixed bag of priorities, crucially including ones that are presupposed not to be collectively committed to. A domain restriction approach to weak necessity is adopted, following a demonstration that it is superior to a number of probabilistic alternatives. Modal verbs and adjectives that take both infinitival and nominal complements are shown to pattern alike across languages in requiring a teleological, or goal-oriented interpretation when their complements are not infinitives (but rather noun phrases or certain Complementizer Phrases). This limitation is lifted with infinitival complements, showing that transitive configurations of certain intensional verbs are not semantically equivalent to the infinitival configurations of the same verbs. A result of this research is a fine grained analysis of the differences between closely related necessity modals and attitude verbs.

A great deal of attention has been paid to Kant's claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that all theoretical attempts to demonstrate the existence of God must necessarily end in failure. What has received considerably less attention is the fact that throughout his pre-Critical period, i.e., the period prior to the 1781 publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant develops a unique argument in support of the possibility of such a demonstration. It is obvious that the Critical Kant can no longer maintain the validity of the argument which he presents in The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763); however, it is not obvious exactly how Kant proves that this argument cannot succeed. This thesis is concerned with providing an explanation of the change in Kant's view concerning the possibility of providing a theoretical demonstration of the existence of God. / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy