Thesis advisor: Olivier Boulnois / Thesis advisor: Stephen F. Brown / The Dissertation Text has Three Parts. Each paragraph is referred at the end to the Part it summarizes. My dissertation places Saint Anselm’s Ontological Argument within its original Neoplatonic context that should justify its validity. The historical thesis is that Anselm’s epistemology, underlying the Proslogion, the Monologion and De Veritate, was a natural, often unaccounted for, reflection of the essentially Neoplatonic vision that defined the pre-thirteenth century mental culture in Europe. (Introduction and Part I) This thesis is shown through the reception of Anselm’s argument by 27 XIIIth-XIVth century thinkers, whose reading of it exhibits a gradual weakening of Neoplatonic premises up to a complete change of paradigm towards the XIVth century, the first reason being the specificity of the Medieval reception of Aristotle’s teaching on first principles that is the subject of Posterior Analytics (Part II), and the second reason being the specificity of the Medieval reception of Dionysius the Areopagite (Part III, see sub-thesis 4 below). The defense of this main historical thesis aims at proving three systematic sub-theses, including a further historical sub-thesis. The Three Systematic Sub-Theses: 1) The inadequacy of rationalist and idealist epistemology in reaching and providing apodictic truths (the chief one of which is God’s existence) with ultimate ontic grounding, as well as the inadequacy of objectivistic metaphysics that underlies these epistemologies, calls for another, non-objectifying epistemic paradigm offered by the Neoplatonic (Proclian theorem of transcendence) apophatic and supra-discursive logic (kenotic epistemology) that should be a better method to achieve certainty, because of its ability to found logic in its ontic source and thus envisage thought as an experience and a mode of being in which it is grounded. Within such a dialectic, there cannot be any opposition or division either between being and thought, or between faith and reason, faith being an ontic ground of reason’s activity defined as self-transcendence. The argument of the Proslogion is thus an instance of logic that transcends itself into its own principle – into ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’. Such an epistemological vision is also supported by contemporary epistemology (Russell’s Paradox and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem) (Introduction and Part I) 2) In virtue of this apophatic and supra-discursive vision, God’s existence, thought by human mind (as expressed in the argument of the Proslogion), happens to be a common denominator between God’s inaccessible essence and the created essence of human mind, so that human consciousness can be defined as ‘con-science’ – the mind experiencing its own being as co-knowledge with God that forges being as such. (Part I) 3) However, God’s existence as a common denominator between God’s essence and the created essence of human mind cannot be legitimately accommodated within the XIIIth-XIVth century epistemology and metaphysics because of the specificity of relation between God’s essence and His attributes, typical of Medieval scholasticism and as stated by Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas. If this relation is kept, while at the same time God’s existence is affirmed as immanent to the human mind (God as the first object of intellect), God’s transcendence is sacrificed and He becomes subject to metaphysics (Scotus’ nominal univocity of being). In order to achieve real univocity between the existence of human thinking and God’s existence, one needs a relation between God’s essence and His attributes that would allow a real participation of the created in the uncreated. The configuration of such a relation, however, needs the distinction between God’s essence and His energies that Western Medieval thought did not know, but that is inherent to the Neoplatonic epistemic tradition persisting through the Eastern Church theologians and Dionysius the Areopagite up to Gregory Palamas. (Part III) Another Historical Sub-Thesis: 4) One of the reasons why Medieval readers of Anselm’s Proslogion misread it in the Aristotelian key, was that they did not have access to the original work of Dionysius the Areopagite, in which the said distinction between God’s essence and His energies is present. This is due to the fact that the Medievals read Dionysius through Eriugena’s translation. However, Eriugena was himself influenced by Augustine’s De Trinitate that exhibits an essentialist theology: in fact, it places ideas within God’s essence, which yields the notion of the created as a mere similitude, not real participation, and which ultimately makes the vision (knowledge) of God possible only in the afterlife. Since already with Augustine the relation between grace and nature is modified (grace becomes a created manifestation of God, instead of being His uncreated energy), God’s essence remains incommunicable. Similarly, God’s existence is not in any way immanent to the created world, of which the created human intellect is a part, so that it remains as transcendent to the human mind as is His incommunicable essence. This should explain why for the Medievals analogy, and eventually univocity, was the only way to say something about God, and also why they mostly could not read Anselm’s Proslogion otherwise than either in terms of propositional or modal logic. (Part III) The dissertation concludes that whilst Anselm’s epistemology in the Proslogion is an instance of Neoplatonic metaphysical tradition, the question of the possibility of certainty in epistemology, as well as the possibility of metaphysics as such, depends on the possibility of real communicability between the immanence of human predicating mind and the transcendence of God’s essence through His trans-immanent existence.

The puzzle that drives this study is why Thailand pursued a proactive foreign policy towards greater powers during the Second World War. The main literature on Thai foreign policy-making generally suggests that Thailand is traditionally passive vis-à-vis greater powers. Oftentimes, it is believed that the fate of Thailand is subjected to the dictate of great powers. The empirical cases of Thailand during the Second World War suggest otherwise. How could a conventional understanding of Thai foreign policy make sense of Thailand’s war against France in 1940-41? Similarly, how could one understand Thailand’s defiant behaviours vis-à-vis Japan in 1941-44 despite the latter’s greater military capabilities and influence? This thesis employs the approaches of ontological security and status concern to interpret Thai proactive behaviours during the wartime period. It argues that concerns for status and recognition from the great powers were the primary motivations of Thailand’s proactive behaviours. In order to discern material and ideational motives of the Thai foreign policy-makers, this research heavily relies on archival research and utilises documents which were formerly considered to be classified. This methodological quest is to establish and enhance the credibility of the argument presented in the study.

This is a thesis about managing multiplicity. It analyses how people working in municipalities are managing, controlling, and caring for the complex and contradictory world they live in. Building on more than 100 interviews and observations, the thesis examines the multiple realities of those who work in public sector organisations. By studying (1) the work of managers on different organisational levels, controllers, professionals responsible for the care of others and, to a lesser extent, politicians; (2) the management control systems that are used in the work, and (3) the ongoing debates and legislations directed towards the management of care practices, the thesis makes an effort to analyse how the realities of these individuals; those active in controlling and caring, are constructed. The thesis makes several contributions to the literatures on management control and public management. Where earlier studies are either based on a functionalist conception of management control and public management (in which performance measures and control systems are tools in the hands of managers, that enable them to control other practices), or focused on understanding how control contributes to the construction of reality (making reality ontologically coherent, and therefore controllable), the present thesis argues that management can be approached and analysed as a practice devoted to managing ontological multiplicity, rather than as an activity devoted to control other practices or making reality controllable. By using the concept of ontological politics, the thesis shows that control often fails to make reality controllable, which makes the practice of management reliant on alternative ways to manage. The alternative to control that is analysed in the thesis is care, and the thesis argues that care could be seen as a way to manage, rather than as something that should be controlled: care is complementary to control when it comes to management. The thesis explicates how management by care is done in relation to management by control, and how they may become resources for each other in managing the complex and contradictory public sector. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Accepted. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

The following dissertation is a study of the "ontological proof' for God's existence, specifically of the controversy concerning this proof from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. As the title indicates, the primary theme is Hegel's defense and reformulation of the proof. I argue for a metaphysical interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, by showing that one of Hegel's chief goals in the Logic is to provide a demonstration for the thesis that "necessary existence belongs to God's nature." I conclude that while Hegel offers a coherent and informative account of this thesis, his analysis does not overcome one of the principal shortcomings of the ontological proof, namely, that the argument involves an appeal to intuition. The ontological proof is thus, if in some sense valid, not persuasive. The discussion of Hegel is preceded by a detailed analysis of Descartes' formulation of the proof. I argue that Descartes consistently defends his argument by appealing to metaphysical and epistemological doctrines as premises, so that the proof represents a conclusion of his entire philosophical system. I also provide a lengthy treatment of Kant's objections to the proof, and I conclude (1) that most of his arguments are repetitions of older objections and (2) that even his best arguments are question-begging. I show that Hegel sides with Descartes, and against Kant, on every relevant issue, and that Hegel's metaphysical system brings Descartes' assumptions to their ultimate consequences. In the concluding chapters I examine some of the problems that underlie the theoretical philosophies of Kant and Hegel. I argue that Hegel fails to show that Kant's philosophy is self-refuting, and that Kant's critique of the ontological argument is consistent with the basic principles of his philosophy. The shortcoming of Kant's view is merely that he fails to justify some of those principles. In the final chapter I argue that any transcendental critique of the ontological argument, or of metaphysics in general, is doomed to failure.

Ontological Security Studies have been grounded on the ideas of Giddens (1991a,b). It describes how humans can face challenges of the modern world without being overwhelmed by anxieties. Since then many scholars such as Steele (2008) and Mitzen (2006) have developed his ideas furthermore. However, ontological security still lacks in terms of gender aspects (Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2016), individual security seeking (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2016) or the role of community rather than the state to secure ontological security (Berenskoetter, 2012). This thesis focusses on all three themes when analysing how women use mechanisms to strengthen their ontological security within the online community. Feminism is a strategy for women to build a common identity. Women used the #metoo to share their experience of sexual harassment and anxieties in a gender-hierarchical power system. Human development and security is not only physical security but includes living in freedom of fear, want and in dignity. Threats which challenge systems of believe, such as living in an equal world or living without fear, lead to ontological insecurity. Therefore, women look out for new routines which provide security. Drawing on existing scholarship, this thesis aims to undercover if digital feminist activism can be a source for women to gain ontological security when the state fails to provide it. A social constructivist approach is followed within the research. The aim is to acknowledge the experience and practices of the different perspectives: by female activists and women opposed to feminist movements. Therefore, the empirical basis of this study contains 198 Twitter posts which are sampled out of 6679 posts. A content analysis helped to understand the dynamics of online behaviour and furthermore, puts it into the context of their everyday experience.

This thesis articulates a critique of scientific naturalism from the perspective of John Dewey. Scientific naturalism can be defined by two explicit, metaphysical commitments, one ontological and one epistemological. Implicit to these commitments is a further commitment concerning the nature of human experience. This understanding of human experience can be described as epistemic reductionism because it reduces the whole of experience and all empiricism to epistemology. Scientific naturalism is the orthodox position for most contemporary, Anglo-American philosophy. Many philosophers within this tradition are dissatisfied with scientific naturalism and attempt to critique scientific naturalism from the perspective of "liberal" naturalism. One major objection from the liberal perspective concerns the ontology and placement of moral qualities: where are moral qualities to be placed in a scientifically naturalistic ontology? However, due to the fact that liberal naturalists share with scientific naturalists a commitment to an epistemically reductionistic understanding of the nature of human experience, liberal naturalism fails to adequately address the placement problem.

Text comparison is a key step in many natural language processing (NLP) applications in which texts can be classified on the basis of their semantic distance (how similar or different the texts are). For example, comparing the local context of an ambiguous word with that of a known word can help identify the sense of the ambiguous word. Typically, a distributional measure is used to capture the implicit semantic distance between two pieces of text. In this thesis, we introduce an alternative method of measuring the semantic distance between texts as a combination of distributional information and relational/ontological knowledge. In this work, we propose a novel distance measure within a network-flow formalism that combines these two distinct components in a way that they are not treated as separate and orthogonal pieces of information. First, we represent each text as a collection of frequency-weighted concepts within a relational thesaurus. Then, we make use of a network-flow method which provides an efficient way of measuring the semantic distance between two texts by taking advantage of the inherently graphical structure in an ontology. We evaluate our method in a variety of NLP tasks. In our task-based evaluation, we find that our method performs well on two of three tasks. We introduce a novel measure which is intended to capture how well our network-flow method perform on a dataset (represented as a collection of frequency-weighted concepts). In our analysis, we find that an integrated approach, rather than a purely distributional or graphical analysis, is more effective in explaining the performance inconsistency. Finally, we address a complexity issue that arises from the overhead required to incorporate more sophisticated concept-to-concept distances into the network-flow framework. We propose a graph transformation method which generates a pared-down network that requires less time to process. The new method achieves a significant speed improvement, and does not seriously hamper performance as a result of the transformation, as indicated in our analysis.

Text comparison is a key step in many natural language processing (NLP) applications in which texts can be classified on the basis of their semantic distance (how similar or different the texts are). For example, comparing the local context of an ambiguous word with that of a known word can help identify the sense of the ambiguous word. Typically, a distributional measure is used to capture the implicit semantic distance between two pieces of text. In this thesis, we introduce an alternative method of measuring the semantic distance between texts as a combination of distributional information and relational/ontological knowledge. In this work, we propose a novel distance measure within a network-flow formalism that combines these two distinct components in a way that they are not treated as separate and orthogonal pieces of information. First, we represent each text as a collection of frequency-weighted concepts within a relational thesaurus. Then, we make use of a network-flow method which provides an efficient way of measuring the semantic distance between two texts by taking advantage of the inherently graphical structure in an ontology. We evaluate our method in a variety of NLP tasks. In our task-based evaluation, we find that our method performs well on two of three tasks. We introduce a novel measure which is intended to capture how well our network-flow method perform on a dataset (represented as a collection of frequency-weighted concepts). In our analysis, we find that an integrated approach, rather than a purely distributional or graphical analysis, is more effective in explaining the performance inconsistency. Finally, we address a complexity issue that arises from the overhead required to incorporate more sophisticated concept-to-concept distances into the network-flow framework. We propose a graph transformation method which generates a pared-down network that requires less time to process. The new method achieves a significant speed improvement, and does not seriously hamper performance as a result of the transformation, as indicated in our analysis.

This thesis covers research in two disjoint research areas: The ontological model program (formerly hidden-variables program) for quantum theory has a long and noble tradition in the quantum foundations literature. By postulating a physical reality beyond the quantum state, we gain intuition on quantum phenomena and also come to understand constraints on realist interpretations of quantum theory. Bell's theorem tells us that such an underlying reality must be non-local, while the Kochen-Specker contextuality theorem abuses the classical notion that measurement should simply reveal pre-existing properties of reality. Recent research programs suggest that it is beneficial to view the quantum state as representing purely information. We show that the only current model which does this in a satisfactory manner is unable to reproduce all the statistics of quantum measurements. A recent generalization of the notion of contextuality has allowed for proofs of contextuality which differ from the original Kochen-Specker notion. We add a new result which shows that measurements in a model where the quantum state represents information must be contextual. Additionally, we refine the generalized notion of contextuality into strong and weak forms in order to parse the relationship between new and old results. Entanglement resource theory is a highly successful investigation of the usefulness of entanglement for information processing tasks. In this thesis we apply the ideas from entanglement resource theory to another resource: state distinguishability. We show analogies between distinguishability resource theory and entanglement resource theory. In particular, the analogy includes: measures which are monotonic under a class of transformations; units of a resource; and bounds on measures in terms of the amount of the unit resource needed to form states and the amount of unit resource that can be extracted from states. We show that the pairs of states which can be reversibly converted into \emph{classical states} are exactly the pairs of simultaneously diagonalizable states. Lastly, we characterize the trace-distance distinguishability of formation on a qubit system.

This thesis covers research in two disjoint research areas: The ontological model program (formerly hidden-variables program) for quantum theory has a long and noble tradition in the quantum foundations literature. By postulating a physical reality beyond the quantum state, we gain intuition on quantum phenomena and also come to understand constraints on realist interpretations of quantum theory. Bell's theorem tells us that such an underlying reality must be non-local, while the Kochen-Specker contextuality theorem abuses the classical notion that measurement should simply reveal pre-existing properties of reality. Recent research programs suggest that it is beneficial to view the quantum state as representing purely information. We show that the only current model which does this in a satisfactory manner is unable to reproduce all the statistics of quantum measurements. A recent generalization of the notion of contextuality has allowed for proofs of contextuality which differ from the original Kochen-Specker notion. We add a new result which shows that measurements in a model where the quantum state represents information must be contextual. Additionally, we refine the generalized notion of contextuality into strong and weak forms in order to parse the relationship between new and old results. Entanglement resource theory is a highly successful investigation of the usefulness of entanglement for information processing tasks. In this thesis we apply the ideas from entanglement resource theory to another resource: state distinguishability. We show analogies between distinguishability resource theory and entanglement resource theory. In particular, the analogy includes: measures which are monotonic under a class of transformations; units of a resource; and bounds on measures in terms of the amount of the unit resource needed to form states and the amount of unit resource that can be extracted from states. We show that the pairs of states which can be reversibly converted into \emph{classical states} are exactly the pairs of simultaneously diagonalizable states. Lastly, we characterize the trace-distance distinguishability of formation on a qubit system.