Each autumn, in universities from Cardiff to Sydney, young men and women in their late teens or early twenties find themselves in seminar rooms invited to discuss the writings of long-dead European males (mostly males) concerning events and situations that are no longer happening. But these young people are not history students. They are not literature students either, necessarily. They are politics undergraduates. Many of them are already political activists of some shade and some of them, when all this is over, will want to ‘go out’ into the world and make changes to it. They have come to get equipped for the dangers of real-life political action ; to get a politics degree which might make them attractive candidates for civil service positions or for an assistantship at party HQ. They are equipping for the future, they want to know about the future, and they want to be prepared for the currents in which they will soon have to swim: the networks, hierarchies and channels of influence in conjunction with which they will have to operate – present networks, today’s hierarchies and perhaps even tomorrow’s. Yet here they are, engaging not only with today’s political problems, but with yesterday’s, or with those of several centuries past; with Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and with a whole cast of authors whose works and words belong, as they soon realise, to the problems of their own time, and seem to offer very little for the solution of today’s. Even on the level of ideology, the challenges of Hobbes, of Rousseau, or of Burke to current thinking are weakened by attendant contexts that are no longer happening, by their ill-suitedness to popular revival, and by their undemocratic obsolescence…

In the always connected and fast-paced modern world we live in, questions about who we are, what our values are, and how to act are more pertinent than ever. What better way to reconcile these questions than turning to a seemingly out of touch 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche? Interestingly enough, Nietzsche lamented that his contemporaries would never understand his work; similarly, he thought of his own work as directed towards ‘philosophers of the future.’ As any present moment passes and as history progresses, we, in a sense, run away from ourselves. This projecting of oneself into the future is unavoidable. Could one ever strictly pin down oneself in such a way to eliminate this problem of time? Of course not! This is an absurd question. What we should really be asking is can we at least exist in a way that is at one with the movement of time and the immediacy of modern technology? The purpose of this paper is to illuminate what would be involved in the task of figuring out how to authentically be-alongside-oneself in this way, qua Nietzsche. However, once we, if successful, are able to achieve a mode of being-alongside- ourselves, it is fruitless, in a sense; we are always being thrown into the future and are therefore no longer alongside-ourselves as such. This is why we shall pivot at the end of this paper in order to suggest how it is possible to orient our being- thrown-into-the-future in the most useful and timely way.

Thesis (M.S.)--North Carolina State University. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 33-39).

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This thesis explores the question of history’s future as a research discipline in the academy and the question of the discipline’s function in ‘pure’ inquiry. Central to the notion of research is the notion of discovery of new knowledge, but what constitutes new historical knowledge rather than simply more historical information is not clear. As the idea of research (which is understood to mean the discovery and creation of new knowledge) is central to the idea of the modern university, the future of history as a research discipline in the research university would seem to depend on the discipline being clear on its research function. Further complicating resolution of this question is the fact that the funding of research is informed by science and technology paradigms where research is defined as ‘pure basic research’, ‘strategic basic research’, ‘applied research’, and ‘experimental development’. / Curiously, what these classifications mean for the humanities generally and history in particular, remains unexamined—despite the fact that professional survival depends on the academic convincing sceptical funders of the relevance of humanist research. Do historians do basic research? If basic research is inquiry at the edge of understanding, how, and by whom, is the edge defined? In the first decades of the University of Berlin—the institution that formed the model for the modern research-university—the edge was defined through philosophy and history. Hegelian systematic philosophy, Fichtean philosophy of the subject, and the philosophical historicism of such thinkers as Ranke, Niebuhr, Ast and Boeckh was concerned with the subject’s knowledge of knowledge: there lay the edge. By the end of the nineteenth century no discipline was foundational. Epistemological ‘advance’ had resulted in not only the split of knowledge into that derived from humanities or ‘spirit’ studies (Geisteswissenschaften) and that from science studies (Naturwissenschaften), but also the proliferation of disciplinary specialization that further entrenched the dichotomy. / In the twenty-first century, inquiry’s edge has moved on. Climate change, environmental degradation and biological and genetic engineering have posed wholly new existential questions. The Archimedean point from where the edge is viewed is no longer anthropocentric. Society and nature are inextricably connected. The physical and the spiritual can no longer be considered separately. When ‘we’ can either be manufactured or artificially enhanced the notion of autonomy and self-fashioning takes on a different hue in postmodernity than in modernity. There is now an increasing but unsatisfied need for more interdisciplinary and holistic knowledge. Unfortunately, no effective models or processes exist to enable this need to be met. This thesis explores ways in which the deficiencies might be overcome and explores academic history’s possible location within a future integrated-knowledge schema.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the inhabitants of some parts of Europe and the North American colonies were confronted with proto-state institutional arrangements. In certain cases, they responded ambivalently. That ambivalence is at the heart of what I will call the 'limited government tradition'. The tradition's adherents thought that long historical experience, not to mention the events of their own times, provided ample evidence of the corrupting effects of power on those who wield it. Power-holders, left to their own devices, are likely to succumb to the temptations of power by exercising it arbitrarily. Where they are able to do so comprehensively and systematically, the upshot is tyranny. How, then, to ensure that state power is constituted in a manner that is inhospitable to tyranny? The tradition envisaged a range of measures, including a distinctive vision of 'the Rule of Law'. The Rule of Law would both define and enforce certain limits on state power. This study argues that the tradition's hostility to political absolutism is based on moral foundations which apply with equal force to economic power. The tradition ought to examine the modern constitution of economic power to determine whether it is hospitable to arbitrariness and tyranny. If such an examination is undertaken, we learn that modern economic power poses the kind of moral dangers that the tradition's Rule of Law project is designed to combat. However, the tradition assumes that it need not treat economic power as even a potential target of the Rule of Law. I will call that assumption the 'Consensus'. This study's first major aim is to explain the origins and stubbornness of the Consensus. Its second major aim is to persuade readers that the Consensus is mistaken: the tradition must regard economic power as, at least, a potential target of the Rule of Law.

This dissertation is an exploration of relationships between fiction and history as illuminated by historiographic fiction in general and the historiographic novel in particular. Here the term historiography is employed particularly in several of its many meanings: as the study of the materials and techniques of history, the study of what it means to be a historian, and the study of the philosophy of history. All of these are comprehended in the larger definition of issues pertaining to the writing of history. Four twentieth-century novels are presented and analyzed as historiographic novels. The common element in analysis of all the novels is the examination of historiographic material encoded in narrative, plot, characters, theme, structure or style. Each analysis focuses on one historiographic assumption or problem and brings in perspectives of historians or theorists of history as well as non-novelistic, critical perspectives of the authors themselves. E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910) is analyzed as an imaginative exposé of causality in historical thinking. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946) is presented as a gloss on Isaiah Berlin's critique of Leo Tolstoy's second epilogue to War and Peace. Several essays by philosopher Eric Voegelin provide the theoretical framework for a historiographic analysis of Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978). The historiographic reading of Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) turns on the convergence of tensions between natural and human history with conflicting ideas of what constitutes revolution. In the process of these analyses, the study establishes general properties of the historiographic novel, as opposed to related categories (historical novel, nonfiction novel, and historiographic metafiction, for example). The isolation, description, and examination of historiographic novels as a category of history is offered as a contribution to the debate about the relationships, respectively, between narrative and objectivity, and experience and representation.

Transhumanism is a movement dedicated to radically changing the human condition through technology, including by extending lifespan in one of three ways: (1) a biological approach that focuses on reducing the effects of aging, (2) a cybernetic approach that focuses on replacing the body with mechanical equivalents, and (3) a digital approach that focuses on reproducing human minds within computers. This dissertation focuses on the third way, digital immortality, because digitality can serve as a framework for further human enhancement that goes beyond mere life-extension, and thus has nearly unlimited potential to transform the human condition, and also because some forms of digital immortality are already technologically feasible. The dissertation examines transhumanist ideas of digital immortality from three perspectives. First, it employs the lens of theological anthropology to evaluate transhumanist arguments for how and why it is possible to reconstruct a person’s behavior patterns, and perhaps consciousness itself, in a machine. Second, it uses the lens of eschatology to examine the relationship between these immortality scenarios and the technological singularity, including the rise of superintelligent artificial intelligence. Third, it applies the lens of the philosophy of history to examine transhumanist ideas of evolution and the necessity of perpetual cycles of human enhancement to keep pace with AI and future generations of posthumans. The dissertation uses the anthropologies, eschatologies, and philosophies of history constructed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Jürgen Moltmann to create a framework for comparing Christian theology and transhumanist philosophy. The dissertation concludes that the real conflict between Christian theology and transhumanism is over supernaturalism, the degree to which God intervenes and directs human activity in history. As a result, transhumanists can find common theological ground with Christian naturalists as they pursue the religiously charged questions that transhumanists are asking about the essential nature, purpose, and destiny of humanity.

This study begins by reviewing the literature on community education, identifying two major strands, the progressive, exemplified by Elsie Ripley Clapp, and the conservative. The literature on citizen participation in planning, especially land-use planning, is reviewed and again two major forms are identified, the strong and the weak. A third review chapter examines relationships between education, planning, and democracy. A survey of environmental and planning professionals is used to create a starting list of categories for further qualitative research. Two towns are chosen for their small size, their rural character, their recent history, and their open Town Meeting-Board of Selectmen form of government. This form of local government, peculiar to New England, includes a local legislative body responsible for local law and taxation open to all registered voters, together with an executive branch. Citizens of these towns are therefore empowered by definition on at least one level to act regarding local political and economic conditions. Recent records of planning board meetings are examined and compared with the survey of professionals, resulting in the addition of several categories. The results of two series of community meetings is recorded, and there is a discussion of barriers to participation. The results of a survey of citizens in the two towns, the most successful aspect of the study, and one which again resulted in several more categories being derived, is then reported. The results of this triangulated study are summarized and discussed in the final chapter, which includes a discussion of the stimulation of motivation for participation. This discussion is based on the proposition that a reasonable expectation of positive action resulting from participation is a precondition for the stimulation of motivation. This realization of this expectation may be hampered by the powerful effects of outside political and economic forces but may be facilitated through increased self-reliance for basic needs satisfaction, enabling further empowerment. A final note concerns the implications for local government of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which could allow citizens formerly unable to participate increased access to participation in decision making.

The main aim of this thesis is to present an account of Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy and to demonstrate its relevance to contemporary issues in the methodology of the history of philosophy both insofar as Hegel still has interesting things to say to contemporary historians, and insofar as an understanding of Hegel's views helps us understand later developments in the historiography of philosophy. In the first chapter, I present the conceptual scaffolding which enables us to compare Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy with contemporary approaches to the history of philosophy. I also criticize some of the myths that have developed around Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy. In the second chapter, I present the principles that constitute Hegel's evaluative framework: coherence or non-contradiction (in relation to the concept of Aufhebung), concreteness, systematicity, autonomy, and the use of clear conceptual language in philosophical discourse. Aside from these formal principles, I also identify a substantive philosophical thesis which Hegel seems to use in order to evaluate development in the history of philosophy, namely, the identity of thought and being. In the third chapter I attempt to attenuate the tension that exists between Hegel's methodological prescriptions, especially the claim that we should be on guard against anachronistic readings and that critique should be internal, with the manner in which he seems to consistently read past philosophers through his own system. I suggest two perspectives which can help attenuate this tension. First, I emphasize that Hegel is trying to write an anti-individualistic history of philosophy, where philosophical systems are presented as public culture achievements and the individual idiosyncrasies of philosophers are suppressed. Second, I show how Hegel's semantic and epistemic holism helps us make sense of the way that he approaches the history of philosophy. In the fourth and final chapter I discuss Hegel's conception of the relationship between philosophy and its socio-cultural milieu, and based on this discussion, I show that Hegel did not think that there is continuity in the kinds of problems that philosophers have been interested in, and that he thought that the main purpose of the history of philosophy is to provide metaphilosophical reconstructions and justifications of shifts in the kinds of problems that philosophers have been interested in. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / In this thesis I attempt to fill in a gap in Anglophone scholarship on Hegel by presenting an account of a much neglected aspect of Hegel's system, namely, Hegel's account and conception of the history of philosophy. I begin by attempting to dispel some misunderstandings that have distorted the Anglophone reception of this aspect of Hegel's thought, and by emphasizing the importance of understanding Hegel's views on the history of philosophy if one wishes to understand later developments in the historiography of philosophy. I then present the principles by which Hegel evaluates development in the history of philosophy, and I attempt to attenuate some of the tension which seems to exist between Hegel's methodological prescriptions and his actual practice as a historian of philosophy. I conclude with an account of Hegel's views on continuity in the history of philosophy, and their relation to contemporary views on continuity in the history of philosophy.