Kant famously wrote, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." The traditional reception of Kant understands this claim as a synopsis of his views about semantic content. On the one hand, according to this reading, our concepts and the thoughts they compose would be meaningless without perception, or "intuition," to verify them and thereby provide them with content; on the other, our perceptions would have no structure and would be of no cognitive use without concepts to direct them. Against the traditional reading, this dissertation argues that Kant's many claims about the necessary relations that run between intuitions and concepts are most fundamentally of epistemological rather than semantic significance. Kant's ultimate aim was to articulate the necessary conditions that must obtain for sensibility and understanding, intuitions and concepts, to cooperate in the pursuit of theoretical knowledge of the world. This interpretation is grounded on an analysis of three puzzles that arise around the function of intuition in his theoretical epistemology. The first puzzle arises for Kant's view of the nature of the content of perception. Is perception exhaustively conceptual in structure, or is it at all an independent representational faculty? According to Orthodox Conceptualism, Kant's central argument in the Transcendental Analytic entails that perception is conceptual. It is widely agreed that, in the Analytic, Kant aims to show that certain fundamental metaphysical concepts, called "categories," including the relation of cause and effect, genuinely apply to objects. Orthodox Conceptualism argues that the categories can only be shown to apply to objects if they necessarily structure our perception of objects. Against this orthodox reading, I argue that, in fact, the success of the Analytic presupposes a strong version of Non-Conceptualism. Orthodox Conceptualism saddles Kant with a kind of error theory of categorial judgments, by showing that the categories apply only to our mind's subjective organization of perceptual experience and not to the objects of that experience. Kant is and should be a non-conceptualist about perceptual content. The second puzzle arises when we consider Kant's postulate of actuality, which claims that perception provides necessary and sufficient justification for knowledge of the reality of things. Cartesian external world skepticism challenges this principle by, in part, appeal to an inferential model of perception. On that model we are only ever immediately aware of our own inner representations and then must infer the existence of things external to those inner states. If Descartes is right, then our knowledge of the external world will always be less certain than the knowledge we have of our own minds. How exactly does Kant mean to respond to this challenge and to what extent, if any, is it successful? Traditional interpretations of Kant's "Refutation" of Cartesian skepticism argue that even our knowledge of the temporal order of our own mental states, knowledge of the kind "I saw x, then saw y," depends on our possession of certain causal information about the things that caused those thoughts and which those thoughts are about, namely x and y. While I agree that Kant aims to argue that some form of self-knowledge, which Descartes thinks can be foundational for philosophy, is mediated by our knowledge of the external world, the traditional Causal Reading falls short in a variety of ways. Kant aimed to show that the capacity to have knowledge of our existence as a time-determinable self, in an objective empirical time, depends on our capacity to make true determinations about objects in space. Objects in space, according to Kant, must be used to fix the frames of reference in which empirical time-determinations can be made. So, if it is true that we can have objective knowledge of our own existence in time, then the objects in space that we use to ground those judgments must exist. If the Cartesian wishes to challenge the capacity to objectively determine even our own existence, then he leaves himself no philosophical ground to stand on, nor any way to move forward from the bare bones of his cogito. He also thereby transforms himself into an extreme skeptic. Although Kant cannot answer this extreme form of skepticism on its own terms, I argue that he has systematic resources for dismissing it as a real threat to theoretical philosophy. Extreme skepticism is nothing more than a subject's mere longing for a kind of perspective on her own cognitive situation that is in principle impossible for her to have, given the very nature of cognition. Such a perspective is what Kant would call "noumenal" and is therefore not a genuine question for theoretical reason. The third puzzle arises when we consider Kant's Transcendental Idealism in light of his claims that "noumena" are "merely logically possible." Noumena, by definition, are paradigmatic "empty" concepts, in Kant's sense, insofar as we can never experience them, and therefore have "no insight" into their real possibility. Nevertheless a core thesis of Kant's Transcendental Idealism is that the concept of noumena somehow epistemologically "limits" our empirical knowledge to the realm of "appearances," rather than "things in themselves." Now the puzzle arises: How can a mere empty concept, the object of which we cannot even say is really possible, set any kind of restriction on the scope of our empirical knowledge? I argue that the source of the puzzle lies in "metaphysical" interpretations of the distinction between phenomena and noumena, readings which distinguish either between two worlds with two kinds of objects, or between two kinds of property of one type of object. Dissolving the puzzle, I argue, requires adopting a strongly methodological reading of the distinction, according to which the phenomenal refers to that domain of metaphysical possibility into which we can legitimately inquire, and the noumenal to that space of mere logical possibilities that falls beyond. By distinguishing between the domains of legitimate metaphysically inquiry and metaphysical possibility per se, Kant can consistently demand a theoretical agnosticism about the real possibility of noumena while at the same time showing that the concept of noumena restricts the domain of empirical knowledge.

This dissertation examines how authors textually and semiotically appropriated the dynamics of industrialization to propose new interpretations of society. Through the analysis of the rhetorical use of three images central to industrial progress: energy, work, and movement, the study focuses in particular on the symbolic and material impact of the railroad and mining boom at the turn from nineteenth to twentieth century in Spain. Symbolically, the two phenomena contributed to the reformulation of social, political, and religious tensions. Materially, they generated new forms of perception by redefining notions of time and space. I suggest that these transformations produced a paradigm shift in the conceptualization of national identity by complicating the conditions of possibility through which authors attempted to reconcile past and present in the conflict-riddled ideological transition between the remnants of the Ancien Regime and the modern State. By reformulating the idea of Spanish national modernization as an uneven or incomplete process, this research demonstrates that the concepts of nation and identity are dynamic paradigms whose continual adjustments end up being resolved in the sphere of discourse.

This dissertation is about adolescents in European literature between 1900 and the First World War who shy away from maturity. The authors discussed are Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Robert Musil, Georg Büchner, J. M. Barrie, Robert Walser, Rudyard Kipling and Witold Gombrowicz. The main argument is that the remarkable proliferation around 1900 of novels whose protagonists, by some means or other, avoid growing up is not due to a somewhat twisted affiliation to the genre of the late and ultimately failed Bildungsroman, but rather to an underestimated branch of modernism. At first glance, their strategy of retreat looks like a flinching from societal responsibility, yet the opposite turns out to be true. Instead of representing an early instance of the prolonged adolescence that has nowadays become proverbial, their recoiling from maturity entails a critique of the totalizing tendencies inherent to the ideals of Bildung and Enlighten­ment.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 52-53) Also available in print.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1968. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of History, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

The history of the Cold War has rarely been looked at through the eyes of the smaller powers, especially ones in the Balkans. Works have also often ignored the actual workings of the international socialist market, and the possibilities it created for some of these small countries. The conventional wisdom has also prevailed that the Eastern Bloc was irreversably lagging technologically, and its societies had failed to enter the information age after the 1970s, one among a myriad of reasons for the failure of socialism. Using the prism of a commodity history of the Bulgarian computer and an ethnography of the professional class that built it and worked with it, this dissertation argues that such narratives obscure the role of small states and the importance of technology to the socialist project. The backward Bulgarian economy exploited the international socialist division of labour and COMECON’s mechanisms to set itself up as the “Silicon Valley” of the Eastern Bloc, garnering huge profits for the economy. To do so, it did not hue a politically maverick road but exploited its political orthodoxy and Soviet alliance to the full, securing huge markets. Importantly, this work also shows that the state facilitated massive transfers of knowledge and technology through both legal and illicit means, using its state security and economic organisations to look to the West. This made the Iron Curtain much more porous for a growing cadre of technical intellectuals who were trusted by the regime in order to create the golden exports of the country. This transfer and mobility helped create an internationally plugged-in and fluent class of engineers and managers, at odds with most of the rest of the economy. At the same time, the Global South became an important area of exchange where these specialists competed with both nascent protectionist regimes and international firms. Using India as a case study, this dissertation shows how Bulgarian met the First World on the grounds of the Third and learned to market, negotiate, advertise, and service customers – a skillset that was then applied to its socialist dealings. Finally, the dissertation examines the domestic impact of such policies. The regime wished to use cybernetics and computing to solve the problems of its lagging economic growth, as well as usher in communism. It introduced both the widespread discourse of technological revolutions to its population, and robots and automation to some of its factories. This created both anxieties and hopes among workers, as well as vibrant philosophical debates about the future roles of humans in the information society, among both technical and humanistic intellectuals. Ultimately, however, the economic inefficiency undermined the promise and this failure was utilised by some technical managers to call for reforms, playing a hand in the end of the regime. They managed to negotiate the transfer to capitalism better than most, utilising their financial and business links, while thousands of engineers also found a better life than the vast majority of Bulgarian workers, through emigration or their possession of cutting edge skills. Using Bulgarian, Russian, Indian archives as well as interviews with living actors, the dissertation thus intervenes in both the view of the Iron Curtain as an impenetrable barrier for ideas, and 1989 as a convenient end point for communism’s legacies. It shows both the creation of new professional classes and how they were plugged into global developments, arguing that some people in the socialist bloc did enter the information age, and it is by paying attention to their actions and interests that we can get a better understanding of the developments of late socialism and its end.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 363-378). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 363-378).

published_or_final_version / Business / Master / Master of Philosophy