D.Litt et Phil. (Philosophy) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

This dissertation addresses the problem of raising consciousness in Walter Benjamin's writings, which focuses on the problem in his major early works, and in his later writings on photography, film, and mimesis generally. It is a closely-read interpretation, following Benjamin in his attempt to present a historical-philosophical treatment of the literature he was examining. However, it moves away from Benjamin's methodology at critical moments, presenting its own reading of the raising of consciousness as a problem not only for political theorists, but for those interested in the philosophy of history as well. The chapters focus on Benjamin's key major early works, the untranslated "Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism," his dissertation, and the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities. It contains a lengthy chapter on Benjamin's famous Trauerspiel book, and two on mimesis and the essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. The dissertation casts these works in a different light, one under which they have not been examined previously: this light bears the shadow of Kant. Although this is not a dissertation on Benjamin and Kant, the place of the subject and its historicity is considered when contemplating the raising of consciousness at stake in each individual chapter. The question of temporality is present in each case, and marks the presence of Kant as the figure who attempted so articulately to bridge reason and history. Benjamin realized this, and so his attention to consciousness and its temporality is so keen in all of his writings. Conclusions are always difficult to enumerate, especially when a work sees itself as necessarily unfinished. It is the opinion of this author that it is evident, in each chapter, both how Benjamin wrote about raising consciousness, what that meant in each case examined, and how this author interjected to highlight, stress, and invent new ways to read what is often so terribly obscure.

This dissertation analyses export control programs in the Western state system. The main focus is Western alliance collaboration on East-West technology transfer controls through COCOM. It examines post-1945 intra-alliance and intra-national perspectives on the relationship between East-West trade and Western security. Within four historical periods (1949-1964, 1965-1979, 1979-1989, 1989-1991) four questions are addressed: (a) How does the structural distribution of power and the nature of United States leadership affect collaboration on the form, the nature, and the enforcement of controls? (b) How does the nature of global economic competition affect Western alliance states' collaboration on and Western firms' compliance with export controls? (c) How does the nature and the distribution of power in intra-national politics on this issue affect United States policy and multilateral collaboration? (d) How does the nature of changing images and representations of security and threats to security affect United States policy and the nature of collaboration? The project thesis is that a multi-factor analysis is necessary for an appropriate understanding of the dynamics of discord and consensus over the terms of the Western alliance export control program. To conduct such an analysis the project draws on four theoretical frameworks: modified structural realism, a market explanation, institutionalism and discourse analysis. The study is a contribution to the literature on international relations theory, particularly the role of ideas in international policy collaboration. It draws on work in theories of language and discourse and microeconomic theories of contested exchange. The dissertation concludes that emerging opportunities regarding overall global security will result in a transformation of Western collaboration from East-West export control to a multi-directional technology transfer management system. The problems with this transformation and issues that must be addressed in a broader-based program (such as: the proliferation of missile, nuclear, and chemical weapons and environmental management) are considered.

Philosophers traditionally engage with metaphysical questions at the frontiers of physics by treating theories as putatively fundamental and complete. While this interpretative strategy sits uneasily with the limited success of past theories, it breaks down with the failure of our best current theories, Quantum Field Theories (QFTs), to consistently describe the world on the smallest scales. My dissertation examines how physicists' reconceptualization of successful theories as effective theories affects the epistemological and semantic foundations of the interpretative practice in physics. Chapter 1 offers a detailed analysis of renormalization theory, the set of methods that underwrite physicists' construction of empirically successful QFTs. Chapter 2 demonstrates that effective theories are not merely the only candidates left for scientific realists in QFT but also worth interpreting in realist terms. Chapter 3 shows that effective theories stand as a challenge for traditional approaches to scientific representation and realism in physics. I suggest that indexing truth to physical scales is the most promising way to account for the success of effective theories in realist terms. Chapter 4 develops the referential component of this proposal by taking a detour through the problem of referential failure across theory-change. I argue that to reliably assess referential success before theory-change, we need to index reference-fixing to the limited physical contexts where a given theory is empirically reliable.

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Cognitive science of science attempts to explain a range of phenomena familiar to philosophers of science, such as theory choice and scientific discovery. The appeal to cognitive science may be seen as an attempt to naturalize the philosophy of science. I examine and criticize several of the most important contributions to this new field. I argue that an unrecognized common defect of this work is its reliance on an explanatory approach that takes individuals’ cognitive capacities as its units of analysis. I introduce the term "cognitive individualism" to identify this position, and conclude by examining the position in detail and sketching alternative approaches to naturalizing philosophy stressing the social dimensions of science. In Chapter 1 I briefly describe the field of cognitive science, and outline the empirical resources it can provide a philosopher of science. I then outline key themes of current cognitive science of science. In the next four chapters I critically examine the work of four prominent cognitive scientists of science: Herbert Simon, Paul Thagard, Ronald Giere, and Paul Churchland. All share the same goals of naturalizing philosophy of science by using the empirical resources of cognitive science. I show that all four accounts ignore the important social nature of science, and share an adherence to cognitive individualism. In the final chapter I develop the notion of cognitive individualism in detail. I show that relying on empirical evidence from work in cognitive psychology on human judgment, and work in the sociology of science is more fruitful for explaining science than the current cognitive individualist approach. I conclude with several theses that act as guidelines for future research in naturalized philosophy of science. / Ph. D.

The contributions of Gaston Bachelard to the history and philosophy of science are not very well known in the United States. This thesis traces the particular characteristics of Bachelard's epistemology within the context of early twentieth century French culture and science. Bachelard began his career in philosophy comparatively late in life and although his background in mathematics and physics was reflected in his philosophical approach to science, he belonged more to the French intellectual avant-garde than to the traditional philosophies of positivism and pragmatism defended by the Third Republic. Bachelard's writings represent an important contribution to a new vocabulary in epistemology, and they influenced scholars such as Georges Canguilhen, Alexandre Koyré, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. His works definitely deserve wider exposure, as they easily connect with problems that American scholars pursue today in Science Studies. / Master of Science

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

My model-theoretic realist account of science places linguistic systems and the corresponding non-linguistic structures at different stages of the scientific process. It is shown that science and its progress cannot be analysed in terms of only one of these strata. Philosophy of science literature offers mainly two approaches to the structure of scientific knowledge analysed in terms of theories and their models, the "statement" and the "non-statement" approaches. In opposition to the statement approach's belief that scientific knowledge is embodied in theories (formulated in some (first-order) symbolic language) with direct interpretative links - via so-called "bridge principles" - to reality, the defenders of the non-statement approach believe in an analysis where the language in which the theory is formulated plays a much smaller role than the (mathematical) structures which satisfy that theory. The model-theoretic realism expounded here retains the notion of a scientific theory as a (deductively closed) set of sentences, while simultaneously emphasising the interpretative role of the conceptual (i.a. mathematical) models of these theories. My criticism against the non-statement approach is based on the fact that merely "giving" the theory "in terms of' its mathematical structures leaves out any real interpretation of the nature and role of general terms in science. Against the statement approach's "direct" linking of general theoretical terms to reality, my approach interpolates models between theories and (aspects of) reality in the interpretative chain. The links between the general terms of scientific theories and their interpretations in the various models of the theory regulate the whole referential process. The terms of a theory are "general" in the sense that they are the result of certain abstractive conceptualisations of the object of scientific investigation and subsequent linguistic formulations of these conceptualisations. Their (particular) meanings can be "given back" only by interpreting them in the limited context of the various conceptual models of their theory and, finally, by finding an isomorphic relation between some substructure of the conceptual model in question and some empirical conceptualisation (model) of relevant experimental data. In this sense the notion of scientific "truth" becomes inextricably linked with that of articulated reference, as it - given its model-dependent nature - should be. / Philosophy, Practical & Systematic Theology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Philosophy)