Around two hundred years ago Goethe made the statement: ‘Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena – they themselves are the theory’. This would appear to be the antithesis of the claim of certain contemporary schools of epistemological thought, that a ‘theory’ is a construction of the human mind. Yet Goethe’s scientific aims are resonant with a present day ecological need: to find a form of ‘nature study’ which springs from a desire to care for things rather than merely to explain them, which can help to create a harmony between human and non-human nature. Goethe’s approach is phenomenological in that it seeks to uncover things ‘on their own terms’; it is integral in that it embraces both art and science. A Goethean methodology is used to study four Australian native plants: Grevillea buxifolia, Scaevola remosissima, Banksia integrifolia and Kunzea ambigua. It is suggested that Goethe’s way of ‘nature study’ fulfils the contemporary need for a participatory knowing which is responsible for the thing being researched, and various possibilities are indicated for further research and application – in the biological sciences and in disciplines such as architecture, landscape design and environmental education. / Master of Science (Hons)

Biodiversity is a concept that plays a key role in both scientific theories such as the species-area law and conservation politics. Currently, however, little agreement exists on how biodiversity should be defined, let alone measured. This has led to suggestions that biodiversity is not a metaphysically robust concept, with major implications for its usefulness in formulating scientific theories and making conservation decisions. A general discussion of biodiversity is presented, highlighting its application both in scientific and conservation contexts, its relationship with environmental ethics, and existing approaches to its measurement. To overcome the limitations of existing biodiversity concepts, a new concept of biocomplexity is proposed. This concept equates the biodiversity of any biological system with its effective complexity. Biocomplexity is shown to be the only feasible measure of biodiversity that captures the essential features desired of a general biodiversity concept. In particular, it is a well-defined, measurable and strongly intrinsic property of any biological system. Finally, the practical application of biocomplexity is discussed.

Biodiversity is a concept that plays a key role in both scientific theories such as the species-area law and conservation politics. Currently, however, little agreement exists on how biodiversity should be defined, let alone measured. This has led to suggestions that biodiversity is not a metaphysically robust concept, with major implications for its usefulness in formulating scientific theories and making conservation decisions. A general discussion of biodiversity is presented, highlighting its application both in scientific and conservation contexts, its relationship with environmental ethics, and existing approaches to its measurement. To overcome the limitations of existing biodiversity concepts, a new concept of biocomplexity is proposed. This concept equates the biodiversity of any biological system with its effective complexity. Biocomplexity is shown to be the only feasible measure of biodiversity that captures the essential features desired of a general biodiversity concept. In particular, it is a well-defined, measurable and strongly intrinsic property of any biological system. Finally, the practical application of biocomplexity is discussed.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Australian National University, 2003.

No description available.

In this thesis I discuss one way in which evolutionary theory has been brought to bear on the evaluation of competing meta-normative views in epistemology. More specifically, I investigate whether normative realism in epistemology (epistemic realism) is compatible with the view that we are justified in holding many of the epistemic beliefs we hold, on the assumption that those beliefs can be explained in evolutionary terms. In Part I I discuss normativity in epistemology and meta-epistemology. I begin by drawing attention to the fact that there are very different ways of understanding which concepts in epistemology are normative and what their normativity consists in. I focus on the concept of an epistemic reason to illustrate this point. I then discuss, in some detail, how different interpretations of epistemic-normativity will affect the form which normative-realist views in epistemology can take. I conclude by drawing a taxonomy of epistemic-realist views which is mindful of the different interpretations of epistemic normativity which I distinguished. In Part II I turn to discuss the topic of Darwinian arguments against normative-realist views in epistemology. I begin by considering the form which Darwinian arguments have taken in recent metaethical literature. I argue that Darwinian arguments of a kind which is meant to raise a distinctively epistemological challenge for normative-realist views – I call those 'Darwinian-epistemological' arguments – represent a more interesting object of philosophical investigation than Darwinian arguments of a different 'metaphysical' kind. I then formulate a Darwinian-epistemological argument which targets normative-realist views in epistemology (DEA), explain how it works, and spend some time discussing its key premises. In Part III I engage with the Darwinian-epistemological challenge against realism about epistemic normativity that Sharon Street presents in her paper 'Evolution and the Normativity of Epistemic Reasons' (2009). I argue that Street’s epistemological challenge is best viewed as an instance of a Darwinian-epistemological argument of the kind I formulated (DEA). I then go on to reply to Street’s argument on behalf of the epistemic realist. I conclude that arguments with the form of DEA do not represent a serious threat for normative realist views in epistemology.

The motivating ambition of this thesis is the endeavour to think the subject anthropo-eccentrically, to free it of its conscious-agential overtones and to foreground instead the active organism in all its ecologically entangled, metabolically perspectival glory. I define the subject, in the course of the thesis, as a body productive of its own spatial and temporal fields, a body that lives its own space and time. Ecology is pluralized, made bodily. And the body itself is dynamicized and rendered porous—less an absolute limit than a variable topology separating, uniting, and enfolding organism and ecology, self and other, subject and world. I begin, in Chapter 1, with Deleuze and the rhythmic contractions that define the temporal pole of organismic subjectivity. In Chapter 2, I turn toward the way spaces are configured on the basis of the affective enaction of organismic life. This is organismic spatiality. In Chapter 3, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between the actual and virtual in order to properly theorize the way organismic abilities and environmental layouts are pre-subjectively related such that actual organismic activity individuates a field of spatiotemporal experience. And as the structure of this relation fluctuates, so too does the framework of subjective experience, the sensorimotor-perceptual affects by which experience is defined. Organismic subjectivity is, as a consequence, both relentlessly dynamic and tied irreducibly to the organization of its own world. To think this entanglement is to think subjectivity as swarm, a concept that opens this theory onto an array of new possibilities—toward, to take only one example among a range of many, a human-technological entanglement that conceives scientific apparatuses in their integration with a collectively human subjectivity. I conclude the thesis with a brief gesture toward the implications carried by the development of such possibilities. / Thesis / Master of Philosophy (MA)