The aim of this thesis is to show that a familiar hermeneutical movement from suspicion to affirmation of rational meaning, as a reader reflects on a narrative, is, in part, grounded in the narrative's rhythmic structure which mediates a sonorous condition of being appropriated by the reader. This hermeneutical process involves the reader in appropriating the temporal perspective (or the 'implied author's' or Other's viewpoint) which creates a 'space' for reflection in which a provisional conceptual unity is made possible, but subject to continuing movement from suspicion to affirmation. It is shown that this relationship between Self and Other is dialectical, and mediated by the textual modes of metaphor and narrative. Particular examples of poetry and prose are examined, and the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac in the 'Authorised Version' of the Bible is analyzed in detail in an attempt to show how the reader, imaginatively inhabiting the world of the text, is involved in a process in which there is an 'instant' of letting go Self reflection; and there is affirmation of reasonable hope that the narrative may be rationally understood. In an attempt to address the critical issue of validation of rational meaning to show that affirmation may be given reasonable hope, the analogy of juridical legality is examined, particularly with respect to Aristotle's notion of phronesis. The analysis draws upon the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur with particular regard to his theories of metaphor and narrative, and the role of the creative imagination. It also makes use of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the lived body in terms of a dialectical relationship between its material objectivity and its phenomenological aspects, especially, with respect to sonorous being and corporeal intentionality. From the discipline of literary criticism, Northrop Frye's notion of prose rhythm in his Anatomy of Criticism is employed to identity this key mediatory characteristic.

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My thesis explores alternatives to the orthodox model of decision theory. I criticise it by focusing on motivations that, for different reasons, I believe should not be labelled as a consequence. I start by describing what I call the orthodox theory of choice. I describe both the theories proposed by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944), and Savage (1954). This is followed by a discussion of the individuation strategy, and, in particular, John Broome’s proposal of an individuation by justifiers (Broome (1991)). I then focus on the Allais’s problem, and on how individuation can be employed to solve the problematic situation in which it puts orthodox decision theory. I argue against the practice of using this strategy as a general solution to cases such as the Allais’s problem. I then extend the concerns raised by the Allais’s problem to motivations that do not concern probabilities. I focus on dynamic decision making, and on a property of certain actions that arises from the passage of time: hope. This is interesting because it is no longer the probabilities that affect the decision maker, but an element that is not even represented in the standard model, namely time. I then describe the Kreps and Porteus’s model (Kreps and Porteus (1978)) for a preference for the timing of the resolution of uncertainty, where a preference for either early or late resolution of uncertainty is modelled explicitly. I show how making time an explicit part of the model allows one to model utility as depending on something other than consequences, while not violating dynamic consistency. I use the above case to claim that in some contexts - for example, if the decision maker is deciding for herself, and time is passing - it is preferable to model concerns that do not quite fit the label of a consequence explicitly, because the benefits of doing so surpass the costs. This seems to indicate that decision theory should be moving towards a pluralist approach, where different models are used depending on the decision context.

What is persistence? This is the most general question in this dissertation. According to current standard theories of persistence (i.e. endurantism, perdurantism, and exdurantism), an object persists by 3-D objects being located or existing at more than one time. That is, they understand persistence in terms of location along a fourth dimension. In this dissertation, I offer a new alternative framework for persistence, which is based on the Flux-first view proposed by Stephen Barker. In this new idea, persistence is not connected with locations long the fourth dimension. Rather, it is understood in terms of irreducible transition along the fourth dimension. That is, a concrete object persists not by being located at more than one time but by irreducibly transiting along the fourth dimension.

This thesis focuses on two related though different topics: first, the metaphysics of dispositions; second, the relation between dispositionalism and time. For this reason, the thesis is divided in two main parts: the first part concerns the first topic, and the second part concerns the second. The aim of the project is to argue that dispositionalism faces two different problems: first, there is no viable metaphysics for dispositional properties; second, there is no viable theory of time that can fit in a dispositional framework.

The first part of our thesis will explore the nature and history of the development of Hegel’s reconciliatory self-determining philosophical science, by demonstrating how Hegel radicalises and reformulates the essence of skepticism as the principle of determinate negation. We will attempt to elucidate precisely why the persistence of external skepticism represents nothing more for Hegel than abstract dogmatism and philosophical naivety. In the second part of our thesis we will concentrate upon early 19th century post-Hegelian skeptical responses to Hegel’s speculative idealism. We will argue that Schelling, Feuerbach and Kierkegaard all attempt to disrupt what they see as the oppressive self-satisfaction of Speculative Reason by elaborating a skeptical attack upon Hegelianism in the name of the particular. Each thinker attempts to articulate a skeptical opposition to what they respectively argue to be Hegel’s illegitimate effacement of the particular within the totality of speculative reason itself. They each seek to return to an irreducible point of entry take Hegel back with them, to take him back ‘outside’ of the system of reason and return him to the particular. We will begin by analysing Schelling’s attempts to confront Hegel with the ‘Real Being’ he accuses Hegel of effacing from the very beginning through the illegitimate identity of thought and being. We will then examine Feuerbach’s attempt to deconstruct Hegel’s dialectic of sense certainty in an effort to return Hegel to the irreducible sensory quality of Being. We conclude this part with an analysis of Kierkegaard’s arguments for what he understands as the ‘paradox’ of faith. We will show that Kierkegaard’s efforts are aimed at bringing Hegel into proximity with this paradoxical faith in order to demonstrate his failure to comprehend the true nature of faith. The skeptical attacks of all three thinkers will be rigorously examined in the light of Hegel’s understanding of the relationship between skepticism and philosophy that we will have outlined in the first part of our thesis. Our aim will be to show precisely how and why they ultimately fail to articulate a radically heterogeneous skeptical position with regard to Hegel’s speculative idealism. By demonstrating the precise nature of their failure we will set the scene for our discussion of Levinas’s skeptical relation to Hegel in the third part of this thesis. It will be our contention that Levinas successfully elaborates a response to Hegel’s speculative reason that clearly continues upon the trajectory initiated by the three 19* century post-Hegelian skeptics that we have examined, and that what ultimately marks his success in articulating a genuinely heterological thought will be the extent to which he precisely avoids the failures we have identified.

Philosophical discussion of the value of knowledge, inspired by Plato’s seminal discussion in the Meno, typically focuses on the question why it is better to know that p than to have a mere true belief that p. This question is notoriously difficult to answer in a satisfactory way. I argue that the difficulty we experience in trying to solve this problem is a symptom of the fact that we are approaching issues about the value of knowledge in the wrong way. Beneath the traditional problem there lurks a more fundamental issue about the aim of enquiry, namely, why should an enquirer who wants the truth about whether p aim to find out (i.e. acquire knowledge of) whether p, and not merely aim to arrive at a true belief about whether p? Identifying respects in which knowledge is superior to mere true belief is only one way of trying to answer this question, and, I argue, it is difficult to see how this approach to the question can succeed. An alternative is called for. Central to my alternative proposal is the idea that an enquirer will not have arrived at so much as a belief about whether p until he takes himself to have acquired knowledge of whether p. It is because this is so that an enquirer cannot make life easier for himself by merely aiming to arrive at true beliefs instead of knowledge. I justify this proposal by developing an account of belief according to which outright belief involves a disposition to judge that p, where judging that p is distinct from merely supposing that p for the sake of argument or guessing that p.

Hierarchies of evidence are an important and influential tool for appraising evidence in medicine. In recent years, hierarchies have been formally adopted by organizations including the Cochrane Collaboration [1], NICE [2,3], the WHO [4], the US Preventive Services Task Force [5], and the Australian NHMRC [6,7]. The development of such hierarchies has been regarded as a central part of Evidence-Based Medicine (e.g. [8-10]), a movement within healthcare which prioritises the use of epidemiological evidence such as that provided by Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs). Philosophical work on the methodology of medicine has so far mostly focused on claims about the superiority of RCTs, and hence has largely neglected the questions of what hierarchies are, what assumptions they require, and how they affect clinical practice. This thesis shows that there is great variation in the hierarchies defended and in the interpretations they are, and can be, given. The interpretative assumptions made in using hierarchies are crucial to the content and defensibility of the underlying philosophical commitments concerning evidence and medical practice. Once this variation is been identified, it becomes clear that the little philosophical work that has been done so far affects only some hierarchies, under some interpretations. Modest interpretations offered by La Caze [11], conditional hierarchies like GRADE [12-14], and heuristic approaches such as that defended by Howick et al. [15,16] all survive previous philosophical criticism. This thesis extends previous criticisms by arguing that modest interpretations are so weak as to be unhelpful for clinical practice; that GRADE and similar conditional models omit clinically relevant information, such as information about variation in treatments’ effects and the causes of different responses to therapy; and that heuristic approaches lack the necessary empirical support. The conclusion is that hierarchies in general embed untenable philosophical assumptions: principally that information about average treatment effects backed by high-quality evidence can justify strong recommendations, and that the impact of evidence from individual studies can and should be appraised in isolation. Hierarchies are a poor basis for the application of evidence in clinical practice. The Evidence-Based Medicine movement should move beyond them and explore alternative tools for appraising the overall evidence for therapeutic claims.

The thesis is intended to contribute to the growing understanding of the indispensable role played by phenomenal consciousness in human cognition, and specifically in making our concepts of the external world available. The focus falls on so called observational concepts, a type of rudimentary, perceptually-based objective concepts in our repertoire — picking out manifest properties such as colors and shapes. A theory of such concepts gets provided, and, consequently, the exact role that perceptual consciousness plays in making concepts of this sort available gets settled. In the first half of the thesis, observational concepts get construed as a special type of recognitional concepts. On an analogy with perceptual demonstratives, having such concepts would involve having non-trivial knowledge of their reference. The experiential basis of such concepts would, among other things, provide for such constitutive knowledge. The theoretical background relevant to the hypothesis gets provided in the first chapter. A defence of the hypothesis follows in the second. In the second half of the thesis, care is taken to distinguish among two ways in which the constitutive knowledge of the reference of an observational concept could be fleshed out. In the third chapter, perceptual experience is shown to provide the basis both for knowledge of observational properties by acquaintance, and for knowledge of the essence of such properties — provided that knowledge of essence gets construed in the right, modest way. It might be natural to take knowledge by acquaintance to be the sort relevant to observational concept possession, especially given that in the case of perceptual demonstratives this is the role likely played by experience. However, this initial impression proves to be mistaken. The constitutive knowledge of the referent of an observational concept turns out to consist in the capacity to determine a priori the essence of the respective property. To show this, an argument gets provided in the penultimate fourth chapter, based on the key role played by experiences of instances of observational properties in optimal viewing conditions in enabling the possession of the respective observational concept.

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