<p> This dissertation puts American philosophers and social reformers, Jane Addams (1860&ndash;1935) and John Dewey (1859&ndash;1952), in conversation with contemporary social and political philosopher, Iris Marion Young (1949-2006), to argue that an account of deliberative equality must make conceptual space to name the problem of &lsquo;communicatively structured deliberative inequality&rsquo;. I argue that in order for participatory democracy theory to imagine and construct genuinely inclusive deliberative spaces, it must be grounded in a relational ontology and pragmatist feminist social epistemology. </p><p> The literature has largely developed deliberative inequality in terms of access (e.g., participation costs) and &lsquo;impoverished capacities&rsquo; for political participation (e.g., political-process illiteracy; public debate skills). This literature has failed to appreciate the <i>communicative </i> dimensions of deliberative inequality. Individuals who occupy historically stigmatized social groups may participate at a communicatively structured disadvantage in participatory forums not because of their own impoverished capacities, but because of the identity-prejudiced stereotypes <i> of their interlocutors</i>. </p><p> Chapter 1 situates Young&rsquo;s communicative democracy in contemporary deliberative democracy literature and shows the inadequacies of liberal individualism, assumed by much of traditional deliberative theory, for naming and addressing the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality. Chapter 2 draws on literature in feminist and resistance epistemologies as well as the social identity approach within contemporary social psychology theory to flesh out the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality. Here, I provide a relational ontology of prejudice and examine it&rsquo;s impact on one&rsquo;s epistemic and deliberative standing. Chapter 3 draws on the work of Addams and Dewey to develop a relational ontology of political agency as well as the pragmatist feminist epistemology of communicative democracy. </p><p> Addams and Dewey, like Young, saw exclusion as a serious social and political problem, and they looked to democratic norms and practices as a resource for social justice. Thus, Chapter 4 looks to Addams and Dewey&rsquo;s writings and Addams&rsquo;s leadership at Hull House as a resource for communicative democracy, and more particularly, for addressing deliberative inequality and imagining and constructing inclusive deliberative spaces in light of the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality.</p><p>

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Emancipation tends to be understood almost self-evidently as a process that occurs over time. The core gesture of Ranciere's philosophy, as this dissertation argues, aims to challenge this view. It does this by emphasising spatiality in different ways over forms of temporalisation. While time generally functions as a form to order differences and directedness, space, as a broad abstract sphere, allows Ranciere to avoid such determinations and affirm egalitarian coexistence as such. Therefore, the logic of rupture at work in Ranciere's conception of emancipation is best understood not as a break in the temporal course of history, but rather as a break from time, as a dimension which is able to hold together a given course of things. As a theoretical background of this notion of emancipation lies Althusser's reconceptualization of historical time around the idea of rupture, while its main politico-historical coordinates lie in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As will be shown, Ranciere's thought also bears affinity with the French Revolution seen through the question of the realization of eternal rights in the historically constituted reality. The logic of rupture which is played through space and time as different dimensional spheres provides a specific understanding of the vexed relation between eternal rights and historical time. While space and time always co-imply each other in human experience, it will be shown that Ranciere draws from the discrepancy between them to think a kind of timelessness immanent to historical temporality. As this thesis argues, we should recognise in this logic an attempt to think something like the Kantian noumenal dimension, as the realm of practical reason as such, without fettering it by temporal constraints. This philosophical radicality - characteristic of the current of French Maoism close to Ranciere - nevertheless ends up in a disappointing modesty when it comes close to actual practice. Thus, when emancipation is designed to reject in its principle any organisational discipline over time, the temporal order of things is left mainly to the 'police', while any emancipatory process is readily cancelled by the very logic it puts to work.

Alain Badiou's philosophy is a consequential attempt to make the idea of generic existence intelligible with purely formal means. The aim of this thesis is to show how Badiou develops a mathematical ontology to think the idea of generic politics after the failure of Maoism and to demonstrate the limits of this approach. My thesis follows the chronology of Badiou's work, and I distinguish four periods : early work that includes the 'novels' 'Almagestes' (1964) and 'Portulans' (1967), and the yper-Althusserian theoretical texts of the mid- to late-1960s; Maoist theory that includes the pamphlets of the 1970s; 'Theory of the Subject' (1981); and finally, the Platonism of 'Being and Event' (1988) and 'Logics of Worlds' (2006). In chapter 1, I argue that, although Badiou's early novels have barely received any attention in recent reception of his work, they are important to understanding the development of his formalism out of a literary concern with the aesthetic whole and how this can serve as an image of political action. In chapter 2, I focus on Badiou's theory of the late 1960s and reconstruct his axiomatic interpretation of Althusserian theory, the distinctive move of which is the substitution of the mathematical category of set for the notion of object. The argument of chapter 3 is that the logic of anxiety in Badiou's political pamphlets of the 1970s circulates around the reality of communism, and that 'Theory of the Subject' is best understood as an attempt to circumvent this through a partial return to mathematical formalism. Inchapter 4, I argue that the ontology of 'Being and Event' replaces history with a logic of retroaction whose model is set-theoretical forcing and that the supplementary logic of appearance in 'Logics of Worlds' is ultimately nothing more than an extension of this mathematical formalism.

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This thesis discusses how Guo Xiang’s Commentary (hereinafter referred to as “the Commentary”) shapes our understanding of the Zhuangzi in regard to the usage of imputed words (yuyan 寓言). In order to discuss it, two issues have to be examined first: imputed words in the Zhuangzi, and comparison of the Commentary’s and the Zhuangzi’s usages of imputed words. As for the first issue, I argue in Chapter 1 that imputed words, echoing the Zhuangzi’s indeterminacy, can be regarded as metaphors. The rhetoric and persuasive purposes of imputed words help these words serve as purveyors to allow readers to perceive implicit meanings and understand unfamiliar concepts that are usually difficult to be articulated with direct language. However, there is always a gap between readers’ perception and author’s intended meaning, and I use Gricean account to examine imputed words to prove it. As for the second issue, I argue in Chapter 2 that Guo Xiang uses less imputed words in the Commentary, and he introduces new concepts to articulate the original texts. I hold that Guo’s interpretation may guide readers to understand the Zhuangzi relatively straightforwardly, but Guo also promotes his own philosophical views in the Commentary, and the new concepts he introduces are not necessarily mirroring Zhuangzi’s original implicit meaning, which is not acceptable. The final chapter discusses the reason why Guo uses this interpretive approach and how the Commentary influences people’s understanding of the Zhuangzi. In this chapter, I examine the Commentary in the scope of intellectual history of Han Dynasty and Wei-Jin Dynasty, and relate it to contemporary scholars’ views as well. To conclude, I hold that Guo’s approach is unacceptable, not only because it deviates from Zhuangzi’s intended meaning, but also because it fails to “balance the ‘teaching of names’ and the ‘self-so’”.

In this thesis, I explore answers to three central questions: (i) what are beliefs, (ii) why do we have them, and (iii) how should we interpret doxastic correctness, the principle that it is correct to believe that p if and only if p? The first question has a long history in philosophy of mind, and in various forms can be dated at least as far back as David Hume. For that reason, I refer to the problem as Hume’s Problem. As I interpret the question, the main difficulty with accounting for what beliefs are, is in distinguishing them from forms of acceptance, where acceptances are understood as regarding-as-true attitudes—these include assuming, supposing, guessing, and (propositional) imagining. I take this technical use of ‘acceptance’ from Velleman (2000). The second question I interpret as a biological question about why we, as organisms with beliefs, have beliefs. Answering this question depends on how we answer the first question, in the sense that, in explaining why we have beliefs, we are explaining why we have an attitude that meets the conditions that we set for beliefs to meet. And the third question is largely about the important relation between belief and truth; why is it that, as believers, we emphasise the apparent platitude that a belief is correct if and only if it is true? To address these questions, I consider three different theoretical approaches to understanding beliefs. Specifically, I discuss teleological theories, normative theories, and a functional theory. For various reasons, I argue that teleological accounts fail to provide satisfactory answers to the three central questions (Part I); that normative accounts also fail to answer our central questions (Part II); but that a functional account, appropriately understood, can provide answers to these questions (Part III). In particular, I argue for what I call the doxastic effects thesis, which defines belief according to the effects beliefs have (or their outputs); and I propose that we interpret the components of this thesis as functional statements. The doxastic effects thesis allows us to answer Hume’s Problem, by proposing necessary and sufficient conditions for beliefs to meet; and interpreting these conditions as functions allows us to explain, at least in part, why we have beliefs. Concerning doxastic correctness, I argue that our commitment to the principle has arisen as a social construct, and therefore should be given (what I call) a thin reading; as opposed to the substantive reading that we get on the teleological and normative accounts, such that doxastic correctness states an essential fact about belief. Finally, in Part IV, I extend the first question, what beliefs are, to a third doxastic attitude. Namely, suspended belief (suspension). I argue that one further advantage of my functional theory of belief is that it can account for suspension as a doxastic attitude, unlike the teleological and normative alternatives.

What am I? There are a number of possible answers: I am a person, a mind, a human animal, a soul, part of a human being (e.g., a brain), I do not exist, and even more. Philosophers have been asking this for thousands of years and were not satisfied. In the contemporary analytic tradition, philosophers are attracted to a naturalistic, scientific ontology hence a materialistic personal ontology that matches the huge success in scientific discoveries. They think that we are material objects. However, their views do not match our intuition about some cases regarding our survival. Also, the possibility of an afterlife is eliminated. In my thesis, I explain the shortcomings of current philosophical theories, and develop a better account. I propose the Conscious Subject View, according to which (1) I am a subject of experience, a mental entity whose essential property is to be conscious, and (2) Subjects have haecceities, a property that makes an object a different object from other objects even if they are qualitatively identical with it. I provide two arguments for the claim that we are essentially subjects. The first is the Essentiality Argument. I first define an egoistic concern as one such that necessarily, my concern about X can be egoistic if and only if I exist and persist as X. Furthermore, I argue that necessarily, I can be egoistically concerned with an entity E if and only if E is numerically identical with my subject of experience. I then conclude that we are essentially subjects of experience. My second argument, which I call the Argument of Persistence, is that we have the intuition that we persist only when there is the gradual replacement of the brain. I argue that the best candidate to explain this intuition is that we persist as subjects of experience. I further offer a conceivability argument for the claim that haecceity of the subject determines its persistence. I defend a mentally-oriented proposal regarding our nature by examining the essential properties of our existence. It solves most of the problems with the materialistic personal ontology and shows the theoretical advantages of a long-neglected approach.

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