<p>In Platonic Modes of Explanation, I examine Plato's treatment of Form, matter, and telos in his theory of explanation. To focus my investigation of Plato's theory, I adopt an unorthodox approach: that of using Aristotle's critical discussions as a touchstone for developing an interpretation of Plato's doctrines. Ultimately, I conclude that Aristotle's criticism of Plato is misdirected. Contrary to Aristotle's view that Plato excludes material considerations altogether from his explanations, I argue that Plato's theory of explanation involves a sophisticated and complex account of the relationships among form, matter, and telos. </p><p>My principal focus is not on whether Aristotle's criticism is ultimately defensible; rather, I use Aristotle's criticism as a point of departure for showing how nuanced and moderate Plato's theory of explanation really is. In Chapter 2, I argue that in the Phaedo, Plato regards teleological explanations as an unattainable ideal and favors a mode of explanation involving both Form and matter. In contrast to what traditional interpretations suggest, Plato does see matter as playing an integral role in explanations of the natural world. Chapter 3 builds upon the argument that the Theory of Forms is completely separate from Platonic teleology by investigating Plato's enigmatic descriptions of the Form of the Good in The Republic. It is tempting to interpret the Form of the Good as some kind of force that directs the processes of nature in ways that maximizes the Good. This would be a convenient way of wedding teleology with the Theory of Forms. I argue, however, that the account of the Form of the Good in the Republic supports the claim that the Forms and teleology are two distinct forces at work. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the Timaeus, a dialogue in which Plato fully develops the theory of explanation he offers in the Phaedo and the Republic. I show that Plato holds that matter, Form, and telos all figure in legitimate explanations concerning the formation of the sensible world. More specifically, I argue that matter plays a central role in Plato's explanations. As a result of my investigations, I conclude that the characterization of Plato as an extreme formalist and teleologist is overly simplistic. What emerges instead is a more subtle and nuanced picture of Plato's development of explanation that is far richer than Aristotle's portrayal.</p> / Dissertation

<p>According to everyday folk psychology, our deliberate goals and intentions, together with our character traits, explain much of our overt behavior. These ways of explaining behavior are pervasive. According to many social psychologists, they are also typically false. Instead, much human behavior is controlled by psychological processes prompted through external triggers that we do not recognize and over which we have little control. Once triggered, these processes shape our behavior in profound ways. Experiments demonstrating these effects are legion, suggesting that any number of elements can have determining sway on our behavior, whether it's a simple smile (which can make cooperation among players in strategic games more likely), or the chance finding of a dime in a payphone (which can temporarily increase the probability of the finder acting altruistically), or the presence of unappealing, half-eaten foodstuffs in an experimenter's room (which makes subjects behave moralistically when responding to unrelated experimental questions). Minor details can have major impact on our behavior, and our ignorance of this phenomenon should be of moral concern. This is the focus of my dissertation.</p><p> In particular, I argue that individuals can often agree or disagree on moral issues not because of the content of their respective beliefs, but rather because of their unawareness of (and thus inattentiveness to) the subtle impact of their immediate environments--and their own mannerisms--on moral reasoning and conduct. The effects can be considerable: How long we are willing to engage in dialogue; the degree to which we find accommodation to others acceptable; the creativity we deploy in finding mutually agreeable outcomes to problems; the significance we <em>attach </em>to any problems we may have--each of these crucial factors in moral deliberation can be affected profoundly by minor variations in our conduct and our situations. Take any social encounter: Even before we share our opinions and engage in serious discussion, we are already signaling various attitudes and even content-rich information about ourselves through cues arising from our facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, forms of address, and other seemingly minor details of our comportment. These cues automatically bias how others interpret our subsequent behavior, and thereby influence how our interactions with others enfold. Attending to such minor details may seem antiquated--even priggish--from a modern perspective. Yet the influence they exert should caution us against discounting their importance.</p><p> So I throw my hat in with a philosopher who did not overlook the impact of these variables, and who viewed minding them as a vital source of moral power: Confucius (fl. ca. 6th century BCE). In the <em>Analects</em>, we find Confucius preoccupied by very minor details of one's mannerisms and their impact on others. This led Confucius to motivate norms of conduct aimed at structuring social exchanges in ways conducive to achieving interpersonal agreement or accommodation. I argue that, for our purposes today, we can reduce his various norms to just two. The first is to 'mind manners'--in other words, to be attentive to details of one's own behavior out of consideration of its impact on others; the second is to 'give the benefit of a doubt'--to discount the impact of negative first impressions in order to allow for healthy moral relationships to develop.</p><p> Abiding by these norms can foster a form of <em>ethical bootstrapping</em>--that is, lifting or prompting one another towards our joint moral ends. If the social psychological literature is true, then whether or not any individual will be able to meet her ethical aims on any particular occasion will hinge on the actions and manners of her immediate interlocutors, which in turn will hinge on her own. In being mindful of the interconnectedness of our behavior, we not only affect how others react to us, but we also thereby affect the kinds of reactions we face in turn. The bootstrapping is mutual.</p><p> The deep interconnectedness of our behavior as reflected in experimental social psychology should lead us away from thinking of individuals as trapped by aspects of their psychology and determined to act in fixed ways, come what may. Instead, individuals' behavior is highly malleable; with the right prompts, even the most recalcitrant individuals can be moved in new directions. After all, people can have flourishing or accommodating moral relationships in spite of real differences in their avowed moral commitments, and deleterious or rancorous moral relationships in spite of substantive agreement on big ticket moral items. In pluralistic societies where we <em>expect</em> clashes of norms to occur, it is vital to uncover the conditions propitious to agreement or accommodation not just at a theoretical level but a practical level as well. This begins with what we have most control over: our manners.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation identifies and assesses three criteria that are often used to evaluate consequentialist theories of morality and rationality. After introducing a distinction between straightforwardly maximizing consequentialist theories (such as act consequentialism and egoism) and indirectly maximizing consequentialist theories (such as rule consequentialism, rule egoism, Gauthiers theory of constrained maximization, and McClennens theory of resolute choice), it addresses criteria associated with the concepts of self-defeat, the publicity condition, and incoherence. It argues that (1) the thesis that the self-defeat of a normative theory is a good reason for rejecting it has several surprising and intolerable implications, (2) the publicity condition is an unreasonably demanding requirement to impose on normative theories, and (3) unlike self-defeat and publicity, the issue of incoherence is crucial to the viability of a normative theory; consequently, the incoherence of indirectly maximizing theories renders them unacceptable as accounts of moral or rational action. Although each of these conclusions is of independent interest, they are of further interest when considered together. For cumulatively they constitute a vigorous defense of straightforwardly maximizing theories and a sharp indictment of their indirectly maximizing rivals. As a result, the dissertation has direct implications for debates in both normative ethics and rational-choice theory.

Kant advertises his Critique of Pure Reason as fulfilling reasons most difficult task: self-knowledge. As it is carried out in the Critique, this investigation is meant to be scientific and fully illuminating; for Kant, this means that it must follow a proper method. Commentators writing in English have tended to dismiss Kants claim that the Critique is the scientific expression of reasons self-knowledge either taking it to be sheer rhetoric, or worrying that it pollutes the Critique with an unfortunate residue of rationalism. As a result, there is little sustained treatment of the method of the Critique in the secondary literature. Since Kant holds that the substantive insights of critical philosophy are not separable from the methodological context in which they come to light, this is a serious mistake. My dissertation corrects for this, by approaching the Critique through an examination of its method. In doing so, it yields a reading of the Transcendental Deduction that not only promises to resolve current debates about its proof structure, but also fully accounts for the Deductions pivotal role in the work as a whole.

It is often supposed that we can use mathematics to capture the time evolution of any physical system. By this, I mean that we can capture the basic truths about the time evolution of a physical system with a set of mathematical assertions, which can then be used as premises in arbitrary mathematical arguments to deduce more complex properties of the system. I would like to argue that this picture of the role of mathematics in physics is incorrect. Specifically, I shall assert: The Deduction Failure Thesis: Bodies of knowledge in physics are generally not closed under otherwise valid mathematical argument forms. The Representation Failure Thesis: We cannot assume that the state of any system, together with its fundamental laws, can be captured by some set of mathematical assertions or equations. In fact, it is more likely that the world is not representable by a set of mathematical assertions or equations than that it is. The dissertation largely consists of arguments for these two theses.

Socrates is said to have thought that what is responsible for seeming cases of akrasia is ignorance. He also seems to have freed himself, in his own life, from the distinctive kind of inner resistance that plagues the akratic. But if ignorance is responsible for seeming cases of akrasia, how, if at all, does this ignorance differ from other kinds of ignorance? And how could Socrates have possessed the kind of serene self-control that according to one plausible reconstruction of his own views could only belong to a person with the kind of knowledge that Socrates claimed not to have? In this dissertation I try to shed light on these questions and on Plato's _Protagoras_ by presenting my own Socratic-Platonic account of akratic behavior and tracing the correspondences between my account and Plato's textthe whole text, not just the most relevant part of it (352a-359a). The core idea of my account is the concept of a knowledge-oriented mode of thinking, feeling, and acting: the 'epistemic frame of mind'. To fail to inhabit this frame of mind with regard to the activity of living a human life is, I suggest, to suffer from a kind of ignorance, while to fully inhabit this frame of mind with regard to this activity, though it is not yet to possess the kind of knowledge that properly governs a human life, is nevertheless to free oneself from the kind of inner resistance that plagues the akratic.

One cant help but be struck by the range of incompatible positions that Wittgensteins philosophy, his rule-following considerations in particular, have been taken to support. For instance, according to one very popular interpretation of the rule-following considerations, Wittgenstein proves that claims about the meanings of words arent objectively true. On another interpretation, Wittgenstein shows that discourse about meaning, though without foundation, is as capable of robust truth as any. Still others argue that the Wittgenstein of the Investigations was neither a realist nor an antirealist with respect to discourse about meaning. On the contrary, according to proponents of this last interpretation, Wittgenstein rejected as nonsense both the questions that the rule-following considerations seem to pose and the answers that realists and antirealists have tried to give to these questions. This third, quietist interpretation of Wittgenstein has received increased critical attention of late. Some commentators have suggested that there is no textual basis for the quietist interpretation of the early Wittgenstein. Less has been written that purports to assess the arguments that quietists have found in Wittgenstein, early or late. In this dissertation, I assess the philosophical credentials of the quietist interpretation of Wittgenstein. In the first part, I argue that the material from Frege that inspired the Tractatus doesnt support quietism in the way that proponents of the quietist interpretation of Wittgenstein suppose. In the second part, I argue that the rule-following considerations support a position thats closely related to, but in important respects different from the one that the proponents of the quietist interpretation of Wittgenstein endorse.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) conceived of himself as the Socrates of nineteenth century Copenhagen. Having devoted the bulk of his first major work, *The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates*, to the problem of the historical Socrates, Kierkegaard maintained at the end of his life that it is to Socrates that we must turn if we are to understand his own philosophical undertaking: "The only analogy I have before me is Socrates; my task is a Socratic task." The overall aim of my dissertation is to examine and critically assess this claim, and ultimately to argue that the Socratic nature of Kierkegaard's endeavor finds its fullest expression in the activity and writings of one of his best-known literary creations, Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of *Philosophical Fragments* and *Concluding Unscientific Postscript*. The first part of my dissertation addresses Kierkegaard's own status as a Socratic figure. I examine Kierkegaard's claim that his refusal to call himself a Christian--in a context where it was the social norm to do so--is methodologically analogous to Socrates' stance of ignorance. I also consider how the use of a pseudonymous manner of writing allows Kierkegaard to employ a Socratic method. In the second part of my dissertation I focus on Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus and his claim that his contemporaries suffer from a peculiar kind of ethical and religious forgetfulness. I argue that Climacus adopts two Socratic stances in order to address this condition. In *Philosophical Fragments* he adopts the stance of someone who has intentionally "forgotten" the phenomenon of Christianity, whereas in the *Postscript* he adopts the stance of someone who openly declares that he is not a Christian. In the process, he develops a conception of philosophy that places a premium on self-restraint and an individual's ability to employ the first personal "I." As Climacus emerges as Kierkegaard's Socratic pseudonym par excellence, we obtain two significant results: a deeper understanding of Kierkegaard's conception of Socrates and Socratic method, and a compelling conception of philosophy rooted in Greek antiquity.

Though Leibnizs views about perception and representation go to the heart of his philosophy, they have received surprisingly little attention over the years and in many ways continue to be poorly understood. I aim to rectify these shortcomings. The body of the work begins with an exploration of Leibnizs proposed analysis of representation (Chapter 2). I argue that on this analysis representation consists in a kind of structural correspondence-- roughly an isomorphism--between representation and thing represented. Special attention is given to the application of this analysis to the challenging cases of linguistic and mental representation. The next two chapters concern what I take to be the central issue of the work: the nature of distinct perception. I explain the multifarious ways in which this concept figures into Leibnizs system, and argue that the three most prominent accounts of distinct perception proposed in recent decades fall short of what we should expect from an adequate theory (Chapter 3). Then, building on the account of representation defended in Chapter 2, I propose and develop an alternative theory, which I call the explicit content account (Chapter 4). It not only enjoys significant textual support, I contend, but sorts well with and sheds considerable light on the various uses to which Leibniz puts the concept of distinct perception. Finally, I argue that the explicit content account of perceptual distinctness also provides us with the correct account of the sense in which concepts (or ideas) are distinct, that is, with the correct account of conceptual distinctness (Chapter 5). In doing so I set myself against the received view that concepts are not distinct (or confused) in the same sense as perceptions. Taken together, these points paint a simpler, more comprehensive, and more enlightening picture of the Leibnizian mind than those suggested by previous work.

My objective is to provide a theory of truth that is both independently motivated and compatible with the requirement that semantic theories for truth should not demand a substantive distinction between the languages in which they are formulated and those to which they apply. I argue that if a semantic theory for truth does not satisfy this requirement, then it is unacceptable. The central claim of the theory I develop is that truth is an inconsistent concept: the rules for the proper use of truth are incompatible in the sense that they dictate that truth both applies and fails to apply to certain sentences (e.g., those that give rise to the liar and related paradoxes). The most significant challenge for a proponent of an inconsistency theory of truth is producing a plausible theory of inconsistent concepts. Accordingly, I first construct a theory of inconsistent concepts, and then I apply it to truth. On the account I provide, inconsistent concepts are confused concepts. A concept is confused if, in employing it, one is committed to applying it to two or more distinct types of entities without properly distinguishing between them; that is, an employer of a confused concept thinks that two or more distinct entities are identical. I propose a semantic theory for predicates that express confused concepts, and a new many-valued relevance logic on which the semantic theory depends. This semantic theory serves as the basis for my theory of inconsistent concepts. Given this account of inconsistent concepts and my claim that truth is inconsistent, I am committed to the view that truth is confused. I use the semantic theory for confused predicates as a semantic theory for truth. On the account I advance, a proper theory of truth requires a distinction between several different types of truth predicates. I propose an account of each truth predicate, and I advocate using them as consistent replacements for the concept of truth. The result is a team of concepts that does the work of the inconsistent concept of truth without giving rise to paradoxes.