The concept of the highest good is important to Kant because it serves to connect his rationalist ethics to religion. However, this concept entails a paradoxical treatment of the concept of happiness which some commentators believe strains Kant's rationalism. After discussing and assessing previous approaches to this problem in Kant's ethics, I develop a different line of argument against it. I draw upon Nietzsche's theory of valuation to demonstrate how Kant's treatment of reward and punishment, and, hence, of happiness, diverges from his rational principles. Such a line seems to prove more decisive than previous efforts, as I furthermore argue. This Nietzschean approach also suggests a novel perspective on the relation between Kant and Nietzsche.

This dissertation addresses the problem of raising consciousness in Walter Benjamin's writings, which focuses on the problem in his major early works, and in his later writings on photography, film, and mimesis generally. It is a closely-read interpretation, following Benjamin in his attempt to present a historical-philosophical treatment of the literature he was examining. However, it moves away from Benjamin's methodology at critical moments, presenting its own reading of the raising of consciousness as a problem not only for political theorists, but for those interested in the philosophy of history as well. The chapters focus on Benjamin's key major early works, the untranslated "Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism," his dissertation, and the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities. It contains a lengthy chapter on Benjamin's famous Trauerspiel book, and two on mimesis and the essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. The dissertation casts these works in a different light, one under which they have not been examined previously: this light bears the shadow of Kant. Although this is not a dissertation on Benjamin and Kant, the place of the subject and its historicity is considered when contemplating the raising of consciousness at stake in each individual chapter. The question of temporality is present in each case, and marks the presence of Kant as the figure who attempted so articulately to bridge reason and history. Benjamin realized this, and so his attention to consciousness and its temporality is so keen in all of his writings. Conclusions are always difficult to enumerate, especially when a work sees itself as necessarily unfinished. It is the opinion of this author that it is evident, in each chapter, both how Benjamin wrote about raising consciousness, what that meant in each case examined, and how this author interjected to highlight, stress, and invent new ways to read what is often so terribly obscure.

Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968) was a social scientist, religious reformer, photographer and Christian humanist who devoted his life to the study of Chinese urban and rural society. Gamble made four sojourns to China between 1908 and 1932. He served as research secretary for the Beijing YMCA and the Mass Education Movement at Dingxian. As a volunteer member of Princeton-in-Peking, he conducted major social-economic surveys of urban and rural north China, helped establish community service programs in Beijing, and pioneered in the teaching of sociology and social work in China. During his tenure, Gamble also used his camera to build up a visual archive of 5,000 black-and-white photographs which successfully captured the images of China during those critical years in its history. Through Gamble's life and work, the dissertation looks into the institutional history of the Princeton University center in China from 1906 to 1949, during which time its chief work was first to organize and operate the YMCA and then to run the Princeton School of Public Affairs at Yenching University. This study also seeks to analyze how Princeton-in-Peking, under the influence of both the Social Gospelers and institutional economists at home and the forces of reform and revolution in late Qing and early Republican China, shifted the focus of its efforts first to community service and social work and later to higher education in the social sciences. For the first time in the history of Christianity in China, Association work in Beijing demonstrated to the officialdom and the upper classes of the new Republic, that Christianity and the Chinese culture might not be incompatible. The motto of the May Fourth Movement, "To save China through science and democracy," and the missionary ideal of "Saving China through Christianity" for a time seemed to be united under the common goal of social uplift and reconstruction for the new Republic. In a very significant way, Sidney D. Gamble and Princeton-in-Peking reflected the rich intellectual and cultural interactions between the West and China in general and the United States and China in particular.