New Atheism is a neologism that is explicitly linked to four public intellectuals: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. At the heart of this movement are the five books these four atheists have written specifically on the topic of religion. Throughout the New Atheist literature science is conceptualized as the most powerful force for secularization in the modern era. This thesis is a textual discourse analysis of the New Atheist literature, with a primary focus on how the themes 'secularization' and 'science' are framed. It will explore how notions of secularization and science often bleed into each other, with science being portrayed as necessarily opposed to religion. It will also highlight the New Atheists' similarities and diversities of opinion on these matters, as well as examine where their stances are located in the broader debates concerning the so-called secular/religious divide and the interactions between science and religion.

La présente thèse vise à démontrer que la pensée de Friedrich Nietzsche peut légitimement être interprétée comme une réflexion philosophique et critique de la biologie de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle et de ses courants darwinistes émergents. Dans le premier chapitre, il est question de présenter comment les darwinismes anglo-saxon et allemand ont constitué les conditions de possibilité de la pensée nietzschéenne. Il s'agit de démontrer comment, d'un côté, les théories de Charles Darwin, de Friedrich Lange et de Herbert Spencer formèrent sa pensée des années 1870, et de l'autre, comment ses lectures intensives des darwinistes allemands tels Wilhelm Roux, William Rolph et Karl von Nageli (sans négliger l'influence du notoire Ernst Haeckel), effectuées entre 1881 et 1886, ont profondément marqué ses conceptions du corps, de la santé, de l'hérédité, de l'évolution, de l'être humain, de la vie et de la subjectivité. Le deuxième chapitre est pour sa part consacré à la démonstration de la genèse biologique et critique de la théorie de la volonté de puissance. Il s'agit de mettre en évidence la nécessité pour Nietzsche de développer une critique néo-kantienne du matérialisme et de la conception mécaniste afin de réinterpréter de façon crédible les descriptions des biologistes au sein d'une ontologie de la volonté de puissance. C'est à partir de ces démonstrations que la " grande politique " de Nietzsche et ses propositions eugénistes sont finalement interprétées et critiquées.

The political term "totalitarian" (totaliltario) was coined by Italian Fascism in 1925, and adopted almost simultaneously as a pejorative by the regime's opposition. This language of the Italian stato totalitario was soon adopted by the theorists of National Socialism to describe the German totale Mobilmachung and totale Staat. Postwar discussions continued to categorize Fascism by its own "totalitarian" myth of identity--of the group, race, or nation as self-constituting subject. Some other, more politically ambiguous features, however, may be discerned in fascist discourse than this "totalitarianism" which served as both fascism's narcissistic boast, and its critique. First, fascist rhetoric attempted to exclude those mimetic elements which threatened its presumed autonomy, while repressing its own implicit mimetic structure. The fascist "chameleon" represents the symptomatic re-emergence of this repression, the eruption amid a discourse of identity and autonomy of a personified figure of mimicry and deceit. The first part of the dissertation examines various accusations, denials, and examples of political chameleonism in the writings of Sorel, Gramsci, Gadda, and Malaparte, and confronts this paradigm with that of the fascist "narcissist" or "peacock" (pavone). The camaleonte/pavone relation introduces a discussion of imitation, narcissism, and identification in Freud's theorization of individual and group identity, and leads to a more directly political consideration of the relation between chameleonism, fascism, and democracy. Second, "totalitarian" regimes also characterized themselves as states in motion, referring both their "dynamism" and "modernity," and to their promotion of communication and transportation media. But this term also implies a destructuring kinetic logic contradictory to the totalitarian goal of national identity. The second part of the dissertation describes the ambiguity of political "movement" in Bertolucci's filmic rendition of Italian Fascist architecture, in the Futurist "style of movement," and in the relation between Bewegung and Bewegtheit in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Despite what may be considered the critique of fascism begun in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger's overlooking of the ambiguity of the book's own "movement" illustrates the inconclusiveness of the gesture by which he, as well as those who have formally identified fascism and totalitarianism, have separated their own practice from their historical object.

In contemporary theoretical discourse the concept of responsibility is often found in the intersection of attempts to rethink ethics of difference, enlightened notions of human agency, as well as questions of accountability. This dissertation complicates the terms of these discussions by exploring the meaning and implications of theorizing responsibility politically. In doing so, this study disentangles the question of responsibility from formulations that privilege accountability and from those associated with deconstructive and ontological paradigms. Accordingly, I formulate a critical theory of responsibility that without ceasing to be material and critical and without erasing the “subject,” is responsive to claims of Identity/Difference, otherness, and suffering captures the political dimension of these questions. Responsibility is thus partly redefined as the need to politically respond to a certain predicament both as an individual as a member of different collectivities, face the burdens of acting collectively, and assume the obligations involved as a collected collectivity that is vigilant in relation to the forms of power it generates, as well as of its uses. Stated differently, rather than to approach responsibility only from an ontological, or “analytical” outlook, I propose to look at political responsibility from the perspective of critical theory by considering the historical experience of genocide in the aftermath of Auschwitz. In its conceptual aspect, this dissertation combines careful interpretative work on major political thinkers in the twentieth-century with a critical engagement with the works of anthropologists, historians, literary critics, and philosophers. Chapters on the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, Adorno's dialectical-constellational critical theory, the Great War and the political theory of catastrophe, on the dialectic of enlightenment and its entanglement with late modern despotism and the historical coupling of violence and civilization, the critical import of historicism for a ethico-political historical consciousness, and universal history, frame the bulk of the dissertation. These chapters aim at constituting what Theodor W. Adorno, following Walter Benjamin, called a “constellation” of concepts and narratives that seek to illustrate the complexities of theorizing responsibility politically, without aiming at exhausting the question.

This dissertation explores the import of Lacan's theory in critical cultural studies and examines its special contributions to an understanding of structure, ideology, and identity, especially concerning about relevant issues of ideology and identity in the condition of postmodernity. Although terms of contemporary postmodernism, such as cultural diversity and heterogeneous ideological formation, have entered our language, together with their legal and political imports, many theoretical questions and difficulties in fact still remain. By focusing on the theoretical discussion, this project tries to examine how Lacan's thinking, with philosophical and conceptual nuances, offers an alternative to reconsidering the issues of epistemological questionability and postmodernist skepticism, and the way a structure for him is formed. In addition, Lacan's formulation of psychoanalytic theory is specially illuminating in reading the notions of ideology and identity, since the psychoanalytic notion of unconscious can provide more comprehensive accounts of psychic economy that resides at the deepest level of human reality. As this work presents, Lacanian conceptual tools—such as desire, fantasy, and anxiety—constitute a new plane, a non-discursive dimension beyond the discursive discussions in widespread debates over ideology and identity. In considering cultural phenomenon in contemporary “politics of identity,” this study also investigates the political significance of Lacanian thinking through which current issues on multiculturalism, racism, and fundamentalism can be properly explained.

Bayesian Epistemology is a general framework for thinking about agents who have beliefs that come in degrees. Theories in this framework give accounts of rational belief and rational belief change, which share two key features: (i) rational belief states are represented with probability functions, and (ii) rational belief change results from the acquisition of evidence. This dissertation focuses specifically on the second feature. I pose the Evidence Question: What is it to have evidence? Before addressing this question we must have an understanding of Bayesian Epistemology. The first chapter argues that we should understand Bayesian Epistemology as giving us theories that are evaluative and not action-guiding. I reach this verdict after considering the popular ‘ought’-implies-‘can’ objection to Bayesian Epistemology. The second chapter argues that it is important for theories in Bayesian Epistemology to answer the Evidence Question, and distinguishes between internalist and externalist answers. The third and fourth chapters present and defend a specific answer to the Evidence Question. The account is inspired by reliabilist accounts of justification, and attempts to understand what it is to have evidence by appealing solely to considerations of reliability. Chapter 3 explains how to understand reliability, and how the account fits with Bayesian Epistemology, in particular, the requirement that an agent’s evidence receive probability 1. Chapter 4 responds to objections, which maintain that the account gives the wrong verdict in a variety of situations including skeptical scenarios, lottery cases, scientific cases, and cases involving inference. After slight modifications, I argue that my account has the resources to answer the objections. The fifth chapter considers the possibility of losing evidence. I show how my account can model these cases. To do so, however, we require a modification to Conditionalization, the orthodox principle governing belief change. I present such a modification. The sixth and seventh chapters propose a new understanding of Dutch Book Arguments, historically important arguments for Bayesian principles. The proposal shows that the Dutch Book Arguments for implausible principles are defective, while the ones for plausible principles are not. The final chapter is a conclusion.

Drawing on seminal texts and lesser known works, this dissertation brings the political theory of Hannah Arendt into the company of several key debates in democratic theory. Though she is most renowned for her theory of political action, it is my contention that Arendt’s concept of World can productively change the very terms by which democratic politics is most often understood and questioned. World, in this case, refers to physical and symbolic matters of commonality that are constructed by and for humans. This project begins with a genealogy of that traces its development of World through Arendt’s own biography including her experience as a female philosopher decades before the feminist movement, German Jewish refugee, and immigrant living in the United States. The following chapter explores the shortcomings of Arendt’s concept of political action, arguing in particular that it limits and forecloses democratic political possibilities. The third chapter brings World to bear on the question of whether unity or difference is necessary for the consolidation of the demos, a well-mined debate in democratic theory that the conceptual terms of World can alter and amend. The final section uses the concept of World to contest the popular depiction of globalization that Thomas Friedman champions in his well known works. This is in service of an argument that World can offer a productive critique of the destructive aspects of globalization, particularly the narrative of capitalist inevitability that often undergirds them.

A careful reading of Hobbes' philosophical writings reveals that this author forwards no fewer than three distinct conceptions of the pre-political situation which he labels "the natural condition of humankind," or "the state of nature." By examining the relevant passages from The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes' three principal works of political philosophy, I demonstrate that Hobbes' state of nature should not be interpreted as a single invariant concept but rather as a series of three distinct heuristic or expository models. Further, I claim that distinctions between Hobbes' various conceptions of the state of nature reflect differing background assumptions concerning such factors as the prevailing degree of group stability and the level of abstractness with which representative human beings are characterized. After establishing this framework, I examine why Hobbes chose to include three distinct conceptions of the state of nature within his writings, and explore the relationship which appears to obtain among these three conceptions. I next examine the manner by which each of Hobbes' three types of commonwealth, namely commonwealth by institution, commonwealth by preservation and commonwealth by acquisition, can be understood to arise from each of Hobbes' three conceptions of the state of nature. In this section, I focus my analysis upon the transitions which occur when the unencumbered and isolated individuals who inhabit the state of nature (in its various forms) enter into the social contract by "transferring" their respective rights of nature to the sovereign of their incipient commonwealth. Moreover, I examine Hobbes' explanation of why each subject incurs an obligation to obey his sovereign's decrees and I address the apparent difficulty of maintaining the subjects' allegiance to their sovereign in light of Hobbes' portrayal of human beings as passionate and predominantly self-serving creatures. I conclude by arguing that given Hobbes' characterization of humans as passionate and predominantly self-serving creatures, one can probably not expect commonwealths to arise in the manner that Hobbes describes, and one can certainly not expect such commonwealths, if established, to endure for any substantial period of time.

A sympathetic reviewer has noted that the best a critic of Rorty can do is to compare his views invidiously to alternative views. Taking this advice to heart, I contrast Rorty's social and political views to Dewey's, and then to an alternative account which I elaborate. My standards of comparison are two liberal ideals than which, according to Rorty, none others are higher. These are: (1) amelioration of suffering, and (2) leaving people alone to pursue their own visions of personal perfection. In Chapter One, I point out that there are significant differences between Rorty and his alleged progenitor, Dewey, notably when it comes to their respective conceptions of how to harmonize personal freedom with public responsibility. Unlike Dewey, Rorty advocates abandoning the attempt to fuse the public realm of altruism and the private realm of sublimity by means of one all-encompassing theory. In Chapter Two, I argue that the existing liberal democracies Rorty is concerned to defend bear little resemblance to his democratic utopia, in which "the quest for autonomy is impeded as little as possible by social institutions." I introduce an alternative vocabulary, according to which political institutions, broadly conceived, traverse nearly the entire length and breadth of the private sphere in the north Atlantic democracies. In Chapter Three, I argue that existing liberal democracies fare little better with reference to Rorty's public ideal of ameliorating suffering than they did with reference to his private ideal of making room for self making. Then I suggest an alternative setup which I believe to be more promising for purposes of ameliorating suffering. In the final chapter, I argue that Rorty's private role as ironist and his public role as self-described apologist for bourgeois liberal democracy are not so much incommensurable as they are incompatible. The better he fulfills one role, I argue, the more seriously he compromises the other.

Is there an epistemological and/or practical basis for an ethic of history at the close of the twentieth century? This dissertation focuses upon selected works within the tradition of Western metaphysics that have allowed such a question to become both recognizable and problematic today. The problematic aspects of such a question become readily apparent. For it gives rise to the idea of a world-history—of a teleological historical process—which is all but unanimously considered to be of contemporary relevance only as a reminder of why the present defines itself as a “postmodern” age. Furthermore, the concept of an ethic of history evokes the thought of the Kantian moral law which Georg Lukàcs described as early as 1914 as a depleted source of illumination that no longer serves as “the map of all possible paths.” But along with the philosophy of history as conceived by Herder, Hegel and Marx, the present has inherited a critique of that tradition whose origins lie in the Kantian system. Chapter 1 explores how Kant presents an ethic of history that is in fact deprived of the kind of objective or empirically verifiable measure capable of providing something like a road map for human action. For Kant the task of enforcing an unwritten and unrepresentable law is therefore conferred upon the human imagination. Chapter 2 then focuses upon how Kant's critique of reason regulates the necessary yet potentially boundless and debilitating power of the imagination by instituting a theological supplement to the moral law. The very phrase “theological supplement” indicates that an unorthodox theological concept has thereby been introduced in order to establish and valorize a limit to the capacities of the human will. Can such a limit be represented “atheologically”? This is the question underlying chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3 Friedrich Schiller's program for an “aesthetic education” is interpreted as a supplement to the moral law that ends up by all but displacing it. Chapter 4, in turn, argues that Friedrich Nietzsche's attempt to displace the moral law succeeds in revitalizing it.