The aim of the present study is to demonstrate the nature of the relation of Russell's political philosophy to the other areas of his work, both popular and professional. The nature of the relation can be demonstrated, however, only if two premises are accepted: (1) that Russell has a political philosophy, and (2) that his political theory is related to the other branches of his philosophy. [...]

Thesis (PhD) -- Macquarie University, Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, Dept. of Sociology, 2008. / Bibliography: p. 233-248. / Academic vessels: STS and HPS -- SSK : scientism as empirical relativism -- Latour and actor-network-theory -- Tensions and dilemmas in science studies -- Kuhn - paradigm of an uncritical turn -- Critical theory of technology: Andrew Feenberg -- Critical theory and science studies: Jürgen Habermas -- Concluding remarks: normativity and synthesis. / Science Studies is an interdisciplinary area of scholarship comprising two different traditions, the philosophical History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) and the sociological Science and Technology Studies (STS). The elementary tension between the two is based on their differing scholarly values, one based on philosophy, the other on sociology. This tension has been both animating the field of Science Studies and complicating its internal self-understanding. --This thesis sets out to reconstruct the main episodes in the history of Science Studies that have come to formulate competing constructions of the cultural value and meaning of science and technology. It tells a story of various failed efforts to resolve existing antimonies and suggests that the best way to grapple with the complexity of the issues at stake is to work towards establishing a common ground and dialogue between the rival disciplinary formations: HPS and STS. --First I examine two recent theories in Science Studies, Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Both of them are found to be inadequate as they share a distorted view of the HPS-STS divide and both try to colonise the sociology of science with the tools of HPS. The genesis of this colonizing impulse is then traced back to the Science Wars which again is underpinned by a lack of clarity about the HPS-STS relationship. This finding further highlights the responsibility of currently fashionable theories such as ANT that have contributed to this deficit of understanding and dialogue. / This same trend is then traced to the work of Thomas Kuhn. He is credited with moderate achievements but recent re-evaluations of his work point to his culpability in closing the field to critical possibilities, stifling the sociological side and giving rise to a distorted view of the HPS-STS relationship as seen in SSK and ANT. Now that the origins of the confused and politically divided state of Science Studies is understood, there is the urgent task of re-establishing a balance and dialogue between the HPS and the STS sides. --I use two important theoretical threads in critical theory of science and technology to bring clarity to the study of these interrelated yet culturally distinct practices. Firstly I look at the solid line of research established by Andrew Feenberg in the critical theory of technology that uses social constructivism to subvert the embedded values in the technical code and hence democratize technology. --Secondly I look at the work of Jürgen Habermas's formidable Critical Theory of science that sheds light on the basic human interests inside science and technology and establishes both the limits and extent to which social constructivism can be used to study them. --Together Feenberg and Habermas show the way forward for Science Studies, a way to establish a common ground that enables close scholarly dialogue between HPS and STS yet understands and maintains the critical difference between the philosophical and the sociological approaches that prevents them from being collapsed into one indistinguishable entity. Together they can restore the HPS-STS balance and through their shared emancipatory vision for society facilitate the bringing of science and technology into a democratic societal oversight, correcting the deficits and shortcomings of recent theories in the field of Science Studies. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / vii, 248 p

May the state, from a liberal point of view, operate laws and institutions that impede the mobile lifestyle of nomadic Roma and Travellers, or should the state take steps to accommodate their nomadic way of life? This is the essence of the problem of Roma and Traveller itinerancy and the question that is at the heart of this three-partite dissertation. The first part of the dissertation looks at public policy in France and the United Kingdom and describes the six public policy problems that constitute the problem of Roma and Traveller itinerancy. These problems concern the education of children, the French travel permits system, the legal conditions for voter registration and for GP registration, the housing benefits system, and the public provision of halting sites. The second part looks at liberal political theory. It suggests that contemporary liberalism divides into two strands that take different views on the entitlements of cultural and religious minorities, and it provides a detailed outline of the prime articulations of each approach, namely the multiculturalist liberalism of Kymlicka and the classic neutrality liberalism of Barry. The third part investigates what the two said liberalisms imply for the six policy problems from part 1. These analyses suggest that the two liberalisms have slightly diverging implications for the halting sites problem, the housing benefits problem and the problem of GP registration. They suggest furthermore that the two accounts converge on the question of voter registration and agree that the voter registration system must accommodate nomads, and may not make the possession of a fixed residence an absolute condition for voter registration. And the analyses suggest finally that the two liberalisms also converge over the education question and the travel permits question, but here support polices that are potentially inimical to Roma and Traveller itinerancy. The broader implications of these findings are that liberalism is potentially, but not necessarily and not intrinsically, inimical to Roma and Traveller nomadism, and that the disagreement between classic neutrality liberalism and multiculturalist liberalism is weak insofar as public policy is concerned.

The purpose of this thesis is to reflect on the importance that deception has had on the efficient functioning of societies and the development of individuals. I attempt to do so by adopting an historical perspective, analysing the development of the notion of lawful deception during the Middle Ages and, mainly, the Early Modern Age through theological and political discourses. The scope of my investigation is pan-European. I examine sources from the major Western territories, but I pay special attention to those produced in the Spanish-Habsburg Empire, which was a major political and cultural entity during this period. My claim is that between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, the West witnessed the formation of what I call an "Ethics of Deception:" a trend of thought that, without challenging the Augustinian prohibition of lying, recognised deception as intrinsic to nature and mankind, thereby justifying its use from moral and political perspectives. I explain how this intellectual process was conducted, fostered by new social realities, and helped by the flourishing of casuistry, tacitism and neostoicism. Furthermore, I argue that the acceptance of deception contributed to the creation of a new view of the world, language and human interaction. A view that is in the very basis of some of the most characteristic features of Baroque art and that opened the door to some of the most transcendental cultural changes of the period, such as the creation of politics governed by reason rather than faith, the secularisation of social behaviour, and the emergence of the notions of individualism, privacy and freedom of thought. For these reasons, I claim that deception played an important role in the shaping of Modernity.

Demanding Taxation, disciplining, and even at times requiring the sacrifice of life, the State is undoubtedly one of the most influential and important structures within a subject's existence. Nonetheless, despite these great demands, very few subjects actually choose or construct the State they inhabit. On the contrary subjects rather find themselves born into these great structures which transcend their existence. Consequently understanding how subjects come to learn about, and relate to, these great structures they are thrown into is vital for both an understanding of politics and the human condition generally. In this thesis I will explore an alternative approach to investigating the subject and State relationship: The ‘Subjective approach'. Inspired by the thought of Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the aim of this approach will be to explore the encounters that the subject has with the State, what perception of the State is given to subjects in these encounters, and how the relationship between subject and State grows out of such encounters. The aim of this thesis is therefore to provide prolegomena to such an approach. I shall aim to outline why such an approach should be considered for investigating subject and State relations, and explore how one may begin articulating such an approach.

At least since the time of Aristotle, it has been widely accepted that “man is by nature a social animal”. We eat, sleep, talk, laugh, cry, love, fight and create in ways that integrally depend on others and the social norms that we collectively generate and maintain. Yet in spite of the widely accepted importance of human sociality in underlying our daily activities, its exact manifestation and function is consistently overlooked by many academic disciplines. Cognitive science, for example, regularly neglects the manner in which social interactions and interactively generated norms canalise and constitute our cognitive processes. Without the inescapable ubiquity of dynamic social norms, any given agent simply could not cognise as a human. In this thesis, I aim to use a range of insights – from phenomenology, social psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and gender studies – to clarify the role of sociality for human life. More specifically, the thesis can be broadly separated into three parts. I begin (chapters 1 and 2) with a broad explanation of how human agents are fundamentally tied to worldly entities and other agents in a way that characterises their ontological existence. In chapters 3 and 4, I criticise two recent and much-discussed theories of social cognition – namely, we-mode cognition and participatory sense-making – for failing to make intelligible the social constitution of human existence. In the later chapters (5-7), I then propose foundations for a more satisfactory theory of social cognition, as well as explicating a view of human selfhood as ‘biosocial', such that even the autonomy of biological bodies is socially codified from a human perspective. Taken together, the aforementioned chapters should contribute to calls for a new direction in social cognitive science, whilst also yielding novel insights into the nature of human selfhood.

Several commentators have argued that the focus within political theory in recent decades on abstraction rather than 'reality' has left it with has nothing to say to political actors. On these grounds, some have even expressed concern regarding the discipline's future. As a reply to these concerns, I introduce in this thesis the scholarship and political career of the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Cacciari shares many goals with Anglophone political theorists, but neither his scholarship nor his practice have engaged in the kind of intellectual abstraction which they now find so troubling. Drawing from Cacciari's philosophy, political career, and interventions as a public intellectual, I show how his understanding of real-world conflicts and contradictions begins with a commitment to what I call his 'geophilosophy of the archipelago', which regards the foundations of human knowledge to be irreducibly plural. A commitment to irreducibly plural foundations means that philosophers and political actors must discard what Cacciari views as 'enchantment' with the possibility of ultimate or absolute resolution of all political discord. In return, however, he argues that hopeful political engagement is still possible, because political actors remain able to cope in material and semiotic terms with the complex realities they face. I suggest that serious consideration of Cacciari's example of recognising irreducible plurality, coupled with a disenchanted engagement with both the material and the semiotic dimensions of political life, offers a compelling alternative orientation to the world that may suggest new ways forward in political theory.

We are living in the information age and this has had an effect on both science and theology. Our understanding of the fundamental role of information has increased significantly. One can even say that information has become an overarching metaphor in the world of science. This dissertation gives an overview of the impact of the information-based scientific world-view on the dialogue between science and theology. The study investigates the metaphorical use of information concepts to secure a better understanding of God's action in the world and the role that information plays in the processes of life. The focus is on the role of biological information, and its relation to divine action is investigated. The scientific importance of information and the possible impact of information concepts on the science and theology dialogue of the future are discussed. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M. Th.(Systematic Theology)

A presente tese tem por finalidade refletir sobre princípios pedagógico-filosóficos para o ensino da ciência na etapa intermediária da educação escolar. Considerando que tanto a prática educativa quanto a prática científica são práticas sociais mediadoras do processo de produção, e que, portanto, não se pode pensá-las fora de um método que as integre dialeticamente a partir de determinantes que estão dados no campo da economia política, procurou-se investigar aqui qual é o estatuto hoje reservado à ciência no quadro de valores introduzidos pela economia política neoliberal e os efeitos dessas mudanças sobre o que se prescreve para a formação científica no ensino médio brasileiro a partir da última reforma educacional (LDBEN/1996). Tratou-se de sublinhar aqui as conexões que foram se firmando entre os processos de universalização da forma-mercadoria e as mudanças introduzidas no regime de produção do conhecimento, que vai cada vez mais sendo moldado pelos objetivos e prescrições do capital. Tendo por referência o materialismo histórico-dialético, o objeto desta tese foi delineado de modo a refletir o processo de constituição da produção da ciência em dois âmbitos distintos: o da macro-política, presidido hegemonicamente pelas instituições ligadas ao capital, a partir da década de 1990, e o da relação epistemológica que subjaz à prática científica contemporânea, assinalando a co-relação entre estes processos e os seus nexos causais. Para dar contas destas relações, procedeu-se a uma investigação histórica e filosófica que teve por objetivo mostrar como o conceito de natureza cunhado pelas mãos dos primeiros cientistas no século XVII futura matriz da noção de ciências da natureza tal como ela é tomada hoje no currículo , assentado numa distinção fixa entre juízos de fato e juízos de valor, deve seu conteúdo a um processo que é finalmente econômico e social. Por meio desta crítica pode-se estabelecer os vínculos entre a economia política, o viés institucional da ciência e o universo da epistemologia. Concluiu-se que há uma relação necessária entre o novo registro institucional de produção do conhecimento, garantido por um estatuto regulatório afinado com as demandas do neoliberalismo, e o novo estatuto epistemológico, assinalado por uma ênfase nos pressupostos do realismo científico ingênuo. Esta relação se projeta sobre o ensino da ciência na forma de uma intensificação de seu teor tecnicista, e dentre as suas características destacamos duas: 1) o conceito de natureza, tomado no ensino das ciências como uma abstração des-historicizada; 2) o mito da unicidade científica, isto é, a crença de que só há uma ciência: a que formulará, numa linguagem única e inequívoca, a verdade do real. Para finalizar, fizemos alusão a dois programas educacionais que, a nosso ver, avançam rumo a novas formas de ensino na medida em que refletem a experiência de um grupo de educadores e alunos com os princípios da educação politécnica: o do Instituto de Educação Josué de Castro (IEJC/ITERRA) e o da Escola Politécnica de Saúde Joaquim Venâncio (EPSJV/Fiocruz). / The purpose of the present dissertation is to ponder over the pedagogical-philosophical principles of the act of teaching science in the middle stage of school education. Considering that both the educational and the scientific exercises are social exercises that interpose the production process, and that, therefore, one cannot think about them without a method that integrates them dialectically taking in consideration variables that are given in the political economy field, I attempted to investigate here which is today the statute reserved to science in the set of values introduced by the neoliberal political economy and the effects of this shift over what is prescribed for the scientific education in the Brazilian high school since the educational reform. This dissertation highlights the connections that emerged between the universalization process of the merchandise-appearance and the changes introduced in the system of knowledge production, which becomes gradually more shaped by the goals and prescriptions of the capital. Using as reference the historical-dialectical materialism, the object of this dissertation was chosen in a way to reflect the creation process of science production in two different ways: that of macro-politics, since the 1990s hegemonically presided by the institutions associated with the capital, and that of the epistemological relation that lies underneath the contemporary scientific exercise, emphasizing the correlation between these processes and their causal nexus. To deal with these relations, I conducted a philosophical and historical investigation that had as main purpose to demonstrate how the concept of nature invented by the first scientists of the 17th century future reference of the conception of natural science as it is applied to the school program -, based in a rigid distinction between fact judgments and value judgments, owns its content to a process that is mainly economical and social. Through this critic I tried to establish the bonds between the political economy, the institutional bias of science and the universe of epistemology. I concluded that there is a necessary relationship between the new institutional register of knowledge production, guaranteed by a regulatory statute consonant with the needs of neoliberalism, and the new epistemological statute, marked by an emphasis in the given concepts of the naïve scientific realism. This relationship projects itself over the science teaching in the shape of an intensification of its technical substance, among which two deserve to be highlighted: 1) the concept of nature, applied to the science teaching as an a-historical abstraction; 2) the myth of the scientific unicity, that is, the belief that there only is one science: the one that will formulate it, in a language that is unique and inequivocal, the truth of the reality. To finish this dissertation, I mentioned two educational programs that, in my point of view, progress toward new ways of teaching science as they reflect the experience of a group of teachers and students with the principles of the polytechnical education: the Instituto de Educação Josué de Castro (IEJC/ITERRA) and the Escola Politécnica de Saúde Joaquim Venâncio (EPSJV/Fiocruz).

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2012-02-02Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:03:49Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 fariasjunior_jp_dr_fran.pdf: 1545468 bytes, checksum: e44c351d749902fc2b79e19f75334afc (MD5) / Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) / A investigação se propõe analisar as obras De Regno (Ao imperador, sobre a realeza) e De Providentia (Aos egípcios, sobre a providência), ambas de autoria do filósofo norte-africano Sinésio de Cirene, supostamente escritas no momento em que participa da embaixada em Constantinopla, entre 397 e 400 d.C., a serviço de sua cidade nativa, Cirene, na província da Líbia Superior/ Cirenaica, norte da África. No centro de nossa investigação, encontram-se as estratégias discursivas e os topoi retóricos empregados por Sinésio para a construção de um ethos político favorável não só à construção de uma imagem de si que se ajusta ao papel do filósofo na política imperial, mas também à representatividade política de famílias abastadas na administração imperial, haja vista seu envolvimento e o de sua família nos quadros político-administrativos do Império Romano. A proposição de uma análise retórica pelo viés da construção do ethos político pode nos oferecer informações sobre as estratégias empreendidas por aristocratas da África romana tardia para se firmar no cenário político romano / The research aims to analyze the works De Regno (To the emperor, on the royalty) and De Providentia (To the Egyptians, on Providence), both written by the North African philosopher Synesius of Cyrene, who wrote them supposedly during his participation in the embassy in Constantinople between 397 and 400 AD serving his native city, Cyrene, in the province of Lybia Superior/Cyrenaica, North Africa. In the center of our research are the discursive strategies and rhetorical topoi used by Synesius to the construction of a political ethos in favor not only of the building of an image of himself that fits the role of the philosopher in imperial policy, but also of the political representation of wealthy families in the imperial administration, considering his involvement and his family’s involvement in political and administrative cadres of the Roman Empire. The proposition of a rhetorical analysis by the bias of the construction of political ethos can offer information on the strategies undertaken by aristocrats of the late Roman Africa who sought to establish themselves in the Roman political scene