This thesis has the following aims. First, to show that Deleuze can be situated clearly within the post-Kantian tradition. This is achieved through an analysis of the relations between Kant's transcendental idealism and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism. Second, to explore the criticisms of representational theories of difference which can be found in the work of Deleuze and Hegel. Representational theories are best understood as theories which rely on a logic which is governed by relations between entities which pre-exist those relations. Deleuze argues that these logics presuppose the formal equivalent of a homogeneous space within which these relations can be construed. Hegel similarly understands representation as the utilisation of finite categories which rely on the fixity of the subject of predication. The third aim is to provide a rigorous explication of some of the key themes of Deleuzian ontology, particularly in relation to the problem of representation. This will involve looking at the logic of multiplicities, which attempts to provide a theory of difference that is non-oppositional. This logic will be clarified through a discussion of Deleuze's use of modern geometry, and his analysis of the foundations of the calculus. The fourth aim will be to contrast Deleuze's solution with that of Hegel, particularly with respect to their relationships to Kant and the calculus. This is achieved through the Deleuzian distinction between finite and infinite representation, the latter in Deleuze's view characterising the Hegelian attempt to bring the idea of transition into representation itself. Finally, having shown where Deleuze and Hegel differ in their respective projects, the thesis will explore whether either of these philosophies has the resources to provide a refutation of the other with reference to the dialectic of force and the understanding in the henomenology of Spirit, and the problem of the one and the many.

The thesis argues that we should be optimistic about the prospects for sufficientarianism, the view that securing enough is an important part of justice. I begin by noting the different kinds of sufficientarianism that have been advocated and the objections that they are vulnerable to. I then ask whether these objections apply to all, or only some, versions of sufficientarianism. To answer this question I characterize sufficientarianism generally, highlighting its main claims, and I argue that sufficientarianism can avoid these objections. I then argue that we can and should re-examine the prospects for sufficientarianism, so understood, by exploring two lines of argument. The first line of argument claims that sufficiency principles will be indispensable where we have certain reasons which can support a shift, I call these sufficientarian reasons. The second line of argument claims that sufficiency principles will be indispensable where there are clashes between values and where once one value is realized to a certain extent the importance of promoting that value further shifts relative to the other value. In Chapter Two I argue that a sufficientarian reason to live under the conditions of freedom supports the principle of sufficient autonomy, and in Chapter Three I argue that this principle should have an extensive role in our thought. In Chapter Four I argue that the principle of the good enough upbringing provides us with the most plausible resolution to the conflict we encounter between children and parent’s interests when we consider the distribution of the right to rear children. I also show that this principle should have an extensive role in our thought. I conclude that we should be optimistic about the prospects for sufficientarianism because there are at least two indispensable sufficiency principles and they should have an extensive role in our thought about important practical debates.

My thesis explored the conceptual and evaluative reasons behind Nietzsche's critique of truth. I narrated the changing relation between our will to truth and the problem of nihilism. I argued that Nietzsche understands truth in terms of a practice which affects its practitioners. To explicate the practice of truth which Nietzsche advocates I explored its continuities, and crucial points of opposition, with a Platonic practice of truth. I claimed that cultivating new habits in how we pursue truth allows the nihilistic form of the will to truth that Nietzsche criticises to be overcome. I offered a reading of the will to power as an interpretation that is both employed in and justified by Nietzsche's practice of truth. In the context of Nietzsche's interpretation that the world is will to power a new practice of truth is potentially transformative. Given Nietzsche's interpretation that the human is made up of various wills to power, which include drives, practices, and habits, a cultivation of new practices and habits can bring about the overcoming of modern man demanded by Nietzsche's critical philosophy. I argued that this process of overcoming through the practice of truth is instantiated in the potential free spirit's gradual emancipation from the Ascetic Ideal. Those with sufficient strength to follow their intellectual conscience will experience a deepening of nihilism that is potentially liberating. These emancipated spirits have the space to experiment in order to find their own values and overcome the nihilism of the Ascetic Ideal. The possibility of such transformation can be seen to connect the distant goal of the Übermensch with human possibility and allow it to serve as the "sense of the earth".

The goal of this thesis is to explore the possibility of applying Hans Robert Jauss' hermeneutic of reception theory to biblical interpretation. The traditional methods employed in biblical interpretation involve a two-way dialogue between the text and the reader. Reception theory expands this into a three-way dialogue, with the third partner being the history of the text's interpretation and application. This third partner has been ignored by biblical interpreters but recently the need to include this has gained some attention. In the first part of the thesis, the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer will be examined in order to provide the philosophical hermeneutical framework for reception theory and its significance for biblical studies. In the second part, this framework will be fleshed out by Hans Robert Jauss' conception of reception theory. Jauss not only builds upon Gadamer's work but his literary hermeneutic provides a model which is applicable to the biblical text and its tradition of interpretation. In the final part, the parable of the Wedding Feast in Matthew 22:1-14 and its Wirkungsgeschichte will be considered as a case study.

This thesis evaluates a variety of important modern approaches to the study of the mind/brain in the light of recent developments in the debate about how evidence should be used to support a theory and its constituent hypotheses. Although all these approaches are ostensibly based upon the principles of scientific realism, this evaluation will demonstrate that all of them fall well short of these requirements. Consequently, the more modern, co-evolutionary theories of the mind/brain do not constitute the significant advance upon more traditional theories that their authors take them to be. There are two fundamental elements within my discussion of the relationship between evidence and the constituent hypotheses of a theory. Firstly, I shall demonstrate that the traditional veil-of-perception issue has a wider relevance than that which has historically been attributed to it, since it is the paradigm case of an attempt to construct a two level theory on the basis of evidence tha~ does not adequately support either hypothesis. This interpretation of the issue can be represented by constructing a semantically inconsistent tetrad. It is shown that similar tetrads can be constructed for each of the theories of the mind/brain discussed in this thesis. Secondly, I shall argue that the theories discussed all employ a variety of the bootstrap strategy. This strategy is a relatively recent development in the philosophy of science, which suggests a way in which the same evidence can be used to generate both a general and a specific hypothesis within a theory without violating the constraints of scientific realism. However, I contend that recent use of this strategy in the investigation of mind is largely unsatisfactory as a result of a neglect of structural as well as more informal influences upon the kinds of evidence employed to support the hypotheses contained in the theories. The thesis is divided into three major sections. The first (Section A) discusses the influence of the motivations of the individual theorists upon their arguments and provides a critical discussion of the issues of the veil-of-perception and bootstrapping. The second section (Section B) comprises a detailed examination of a range of modern theories of the mind/brain and critically analyses their success. The final section (Section C) draws together general conclusions and methodological consequences of the detailed analysis of the nature of realism and evidence in the philosophy of mind.

This thesis has two principal aims: to demonstrate the centrality of memory to the philosophy and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno, and to assess its philosophical significance. Although in recent years Adorno's work has been the object of increased scrutiny within Anglo-American philosophical circles, as yet little sustained attention has been devoted to the concept of memory within Adorno's oeuvre. However, in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer proclaimed that it is "by virtue of this memory of nature in the subject" that "enlightenment is universally opposed to domination. "Given that all of Adorno's work is concerned to redeem enlightenment from domination, the importance of a philosophical interpretation of the concept of memory is pivotal for an engagement with the legacy of Adorno's thought today. It will be argued that, for Adorno, memory always operates in relation to reification. The construal of this relation enjoins the consideration of a number of significant categories within Adorno's work: notably tradition, experience, mimesis and utopia; and further, it serves to situate and distance Adorno from those thinkers - Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Benjamin - with whom he incessantly engages. Finally, by focusing on the relation between memory and reification, one can gauge the stakes of the Habermasian critique of Adorno, for it is Adorno's understanding of reconciliation (utopia) as the "remembrance (Eingedenken) of nature in the subject" that is the crux of the agon between Habermas and Adorno. I will argue that it is Habermas's failure to fully engage with the ramifications of Adorno's concept of memory that vitiates his critique, and indeed, that this failure provides the means for an Adornian critique of Haberman. It will be argued that memory is not an object of Adornian thought, but rather, that it provides the utopian texture of that thought.

No description available.

What is the relation between philosophical analysis and sociological method? Sociology has traditionally looked to Philosophy to provide either an indubitable epistemic foundation for its practices or alternatively to legislate invariant criteria of scientificity which might guide the social sciences in questions of methodology. But has Philosophy itself such an autonomy from the developing knowledge domains of the different sciences,natural and social? A structural analysis of philosophic discourse in the twentieth century reveals as a key element of recent philosophic'al thought a central anthropologism. This study traces the rupture in philosophic thought which has occurred with the dissolution and collapse of classical epistemology and the emergence in turn of a radically new mode of philosophizing based on a recognition of the centrality of social reality to ontological judgement and epistemological critique. Just as the analytic epistemOlogy of the seventeenth century can be seen as an accommodation by Philosophy to the emergence and development of the empirical natural sc~ences, so the appearance of 'conversational' epistemology can be viewed as Philosophy's attempt to think'the implications for the nature of knowledge-in-general of the emergence and subsequent development of the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century. The key theoretical instance which demarcates classical epistemology fram the anthropologistic philosophy since the 1920's is its inability to accommodate the category of intersubjectiv:itJY successfully within its egological structure. Contemporary philosophy, phenomenological, analytical, pragmatist and marxist, is forced to grapple with the new awareness of man's essential sociality. This has profound implications for epistemology. The question of the relationship of philosophical analysis to sociological method must be re-addressed in the light of the revealed epistemic proximity of the two disciplines. What sort of philosophical critique, we ask, is possible and appropriate in an age of sociological reason and historical method?

To date, there is no universal and coherent theory concerning the nature or the function of time. Furthermore, important and unresolved controversies raging within both philosophy and the natural sciences apparently indicate that there is little hope of constructing a single, unified theory. Even so-called "folk" theories of time, embedded within different cultural traditions, show no common elements, and therefore can not provide a pre-theoretical description of time, towards which an explanatory framework could be constructed. This lack of consensus indicates that the concept as it is currently being used is ill defined, and, at the very least, needs to be considerably revised. The conceptual disarray surrounding time has aided and abetted the arguments of certain thinkers, especially Ricoeur, working within the phenomenological tradition who make de principe claims that there can not be a single theory of time. My intention is not to try and to produce a concept of time that was capable of unifying all these different elements. Rather, Ricoeur's arguments and those of others working in the phenomenological tradition dissatisfied me. I believed that their arguments were informed by a myopic, muddled and positively 19th Century understanding of the scientific project. Hence, my aim is to show that Ricoeur's claim will not stand up to scrutiny, and that there are no principled arguments against the possibility of a unified theory of time. We examine the major arguments against unification in general, and also with particular reference to theories of time, such as Husserlian phenomenology, conventionalism, instrumentalism, anti-reductive positions in general, as well as the specific problem of reducing subjective experience to objective description. We demonstrate that none of these objections constitutes a watertight a priori argument against a unified theory of time. Furthermore, we demonstrate that recent developments in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind have made such a unified theory a plausible goal. We argue that post-positivist philosophy of science, with its emphasis on research programmes, the co-evolution of theories and super-empirical rational support, opens the way for new types of evidence to be brought to bear on questions about time. Also, recent developments in the brain sciences mean that a neurologically plausible and fully naturalised analysis of our experience of time is being developed. Although much work in this direction has begun, we argue that it is fragmented, partly through the limitations of our current knowledge, but more particularly through an inadequate background of coherent philosophical thought. This has lead both philosophers and scientists to attempt grand metaphysical answers to muddled philosophical questions which threaten the progress which natural science and the philosophy of science have offered in the second half of the twentieth century.

What follows is the transcript of an inquiry which takes itself as its object: an inquiry into its own inquiry. It opens out of a mere marking of its questioning, `?', and proceeds by questioning that mark, and the progress of its inquiry as transcription of something `open' into marks and questions - such transcription itself marked as only one thing open to the `writer'. Each successive attempt to transcribe into words the opening transition into `words', `text', `book', from some textually marked `context' in which the transition is open, simply leads into a questioning of each such attempted transcription, the bringing of its terms `into question'. The first section of the inquiry closes having marked out an internal `logical' space and time of these opening questions, coordinated around the initial question of marking a question: so many `dimensions' of lines of questioning `question' - in particular the external `physical' dimension of a `space' and `time' in which marking or transcription is (physically) open, and a `poetic' or figural dimension in which that `external' physical open-ness or space provides, like the `internal' logical space of logical, physical and poetic questions, and `image' for those three coordinate dimensions in whose textual and contextual interplay their transcription into a logical space and time of questions is open.