This thesis is concerned with developing a new approach to reading and thinking about culture (especially US culture), which I am proposing to call Luminol Theory. Luminol Theory is a textual reading strategy that draws on both psychoanalysis and depth reading. It reveals what has been occulted and it illuminates the contemporary United States as a crime scene. I argue for the singular importance of Luminol Theory as it provides a dystopian account of contemporary culture in the US. A culture that is haunted, that is characterised by injustice and brutality, and that reads bodies as disposable. I introduce luminol as an agent of forensic enquiry that excavates and illuminates narratives, particularly crime narratives, which have been erased. This interdisciplinary intersection of theory, forensic science, and literary criticism offers a specific, contemporary textual reading strategy. I situate Luminol Theory within its origins in feminism (with particular reference to Tiqqun's theory of the ‘Young-Girl'), psychoanalysis (with particular reference to Kristevan abject-analysis, queer theory, and the field of death studies), and depth reading strategies (working through Paul Ricoeur's ‘hermeneutics of suspicion' and Michel Foucault's ‘genealogy' and ‘archaeology'). Though it draws on each of these fields, Luminol Theory is a new contribution to contemporary literary criticism. The three critical chapters investigate the contemporary Unites States as a crime scene, moving through the exploratory steps that a forensic investigation might take. The first chapter opens with a reading of the crime scene itself by embedding Colorado crime fictions within the violent history of the state. The second chapter discovers artefacts at the scene, reading textual objects for hidden meanings and reading contemporary experimental fiction from the United States as apocalyptic material, through the lens of the Book of Revelation. Just as Revelation literally reveals the cultural anxieties of first millennium Christians and their fears of impending apocalypse so too Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk and Entrance to a Pageant where we all begin to Intricate by Johannes Göransson are apocalyptic texts for the third millennium. The final critical chapter approaches the body of the dead girl at the heart of the crime scene in order to discover the aesthetic coherence between death and femininity and the violence wrought interchangeably by sexual violence and capital. The fourth section of the thesis demonstrates Luminol Theory in practice. This collection of short fictions The Dead Girl Scrolls: Unearthed Apocalyptic Fictions is modelled on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found serendipitously by shepherds in 1946 in the Qumran caves, West Bank. These scrolls contain a key to ancient languages, cultures, and narratives that were previously hidden. Later forensic analysis of the papyrus scrolls involved using UV light, a blue chemical glow that excavated layers of hidden narrative. By offering a secular version of these sacred texts, The Dead Girl Scrolls operates within a forensic imaginary; that is, it performs an empathetic and creative response to the secular aporia. It does this through offering dead women a central position that refuses to reify, objectify, or fetishise them or their bodies.

The major objective of this thesis is to provide an alternative to the predominant model of the Western urban home, arguing that it is more detrimental than beneficial to its inhabitants. In order to achieve this, it first explores the development of home through a genealogical analysis. It then considers the concepts with which it is traditionally connected, such as those of identity, safety, privacy and satisfaction, supporting that the idealised home hides numerous issues of concern (e.g. class and sex inequalities, physical and psychological violence). In order to form a more comprehensive picture, the thesis draws on different philosophical approaches discussing the idea of home, while it explores a variety of contemporary habitation and home-making practices (e.g. smart and second homes, new technologies inside the house, home and consumerism). The normative and overly-idealised domestic model, promoted in Western urban societies, is presented as detrimental both on a personal and on a social level. Therefore, alternatives are explored in Adorno's 'Hotel Room', Jameson's 'Dirty Realism' and Deleuze and Guattari's 'Nomadology'. The lack of viability characterising the abovementioned proposals leads to the examination of the Deleuzoguattarian concept of the Body without Organs; the home as a BwO provides the contemporary agents with the tools to reconstruct an autonomous space where they can recreate their personal discourse and influence the social ground accordingly. Through the analysis of home this thesis explores how and why it has been appropriated by systemic forces and highlights a very serious issue: the fact that our personal space is no longer personal. Simultaneously, a common concern of feminist and post-structuralist background is addressed regarding the process of selfredefinition and the ways to approach it. The response entails a reconstructed autonomous home with a respective influence on the public sphere.

Chance, in the sense of the incalculable, the indeterminable, names the limit of every estimation of the truth. Whereas traditional philosophical discourses aspire to transcend this limit, deconstruction affirms on the contrary its necessity; not as a higher principle that relativizes truth and renders all our calculations futile, as is commonly suggested by flippant appropriations of Derrida's work, but as a structural property within every event and every concept, every mark. Rather than a mere impediment to the pursuit of truth then, the incalculable forms a necessary correlative of the pursuit itself. Deconstruction effectively attests to and exemplifies the dependence of every philosophical discourse on its irreducible, inherent limitation. With reference to numerous commentaries on Derrida's work, Chapter 1 shows that the unconditional indeterminability of a deconstructive, methodological identity is indissociable from deconstruction's critical import. And as Chapter 2 verifies in turn, focusing now primarily on Derrida's lecture ‘My Chances/Mes Chances' and the performative aspects of his writing, deconstruction's appeal to the accidental and the idiomatic is not a call to irresponsibility and a turning away from theory; it is what ensures its remarkable theoretical consistency. Through close readings of Aristotle, Freud, Richard Rorty and William James, Chapter 3 demonstrates that any attempt to regulate chance cannot help but put chance to work instead. Not even fiction can arrest its contaminating force. Reading Derrida alongside Edgar Allan Poe, Chapter 4 posits that the commonsensical conception of chance as a deviation from the truth is bound up with an uncritical notion of literary writing as sheer untruthfulness, and hence as the site of pure chance. The constitutive pervasiveness of chance bears out, in the first place and above all, the instability of the limit that separates fiction from non-fiction, truth from non-truth.

This thesis compares the concepts presented in the Seventeenth Discussion of al-Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa with concepts currently being discussed in the field of quantum physics. Written as an attack on the neo-Platonic and Aristotelian thinking which challenged the orthodox theology of Medieval Islam, Tahafut al-Falasifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers) questions the understanding of physical reality forwarded by the philosophers of al-Ghazali's times. The Seventeenth Discussion ('On causality and miracles') in particular, with its aim of proving the possibility of miracles, questions the acceptance of notions such as necessary causality and the validity of scientific observation in the natural world. / Although several scholars have examined al-Ghazali's argument in the Seventeenth Discussion in terms of causality, observation and the nature of human conceptions of physical reality, and many others have noted the implicit potential connections between quantum theory and concepts of religiosity, only one, Karen Harding, has attempted a synthesis of the ideas put forth within these two seemingly diverse subjects. This thesis, then, carries forward from the ideas of Harding and attempts an original comparative analysis of the two. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2488. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 345-366).

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In this thesis I address the problem of the commentators' interpretations regarding Hume's philosophy of mind. Precisely what theory of mind Hume articulates is the subject of much debate among the commentators although a definitive view has, as yet, not been attributed to Hume. The issue Is, of course, complicated by the fact that Hume says so many things about mind, and these numerous and often conflictlng assertions entirely elude the commentators' endeavours to systematize them into a coherent theory. Through and examination of what I take to be three representative readings, viz., those of R.F. Anderson, C.V. Salmon, and John Bricke, I show that each interpretation cannot but fail as a systematization of Hume's views about mind into a theory, since a positive reading of Hume's philosophy of mind cannot be accomplished without either abandoning aspects of Hume's metaphysics, acknowledging that a preferred interpretation Is unable to account for certain views that Hume propounds, alleging a deeply rooted inconsistency, or all of these possibilities together. Why Hume's work eludes the commentators In this way is a problem that is examined by considering his intentions in A Treatise of Human Nature (and the Enquiries); that is, more specifically, the aim of his sceptical critique of metaphysical concepts and doctrines, his conviction as an epistemologist that our knowledqe claims are confined to the realm of experience, and his project, viz., to set the sciences on a new foundation. The whole discussion calls attention to the difficulty that is encountered in the interpretation of Hume's views about mind and its importance, for Hume scholarship, lies precisely in the endeavour to bring these problems to light via a critique of the accepted readings. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Apocryphal Theatre: Practising Philosophies is a practice-based research project that consists of examples of my theatre practice (as research) and a written thesis. In this thesis, I argue that theatre can be seen to be an act of philosophy, by tessellating Maurice Merleau-Ponty's definition of philosophy as consisting of relearning to look at the world and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's proposition that philosophy is the creation of concepts, and pointing to post-WWII theatre artists whose work both fulfill this definition of philosophy and have informed Apocryphal Theatre's work. Included is an analysis of interviews with three contemporary theatre artists, Richard Foreman, Chris Goode and Ivana Muller, which explore their relationship with philosophical ideas in their work and how that informs their ability to create acts of philosophy. In practice, the research questions that underpin Apocryphal Theatre's research in labs, rehearsals and performance, are philosophical and create the potential for collective acts of philosophy. Apocryphal's practice as research as manifest in its ongoing lab and in the two productions included as part of this thesis, The Jesus Guy and Besides, you lose your soul or The History of Western Civilisation, will be analysed for the historical and philosophical bases of the primary concepts we have created through our research and the tools with which we embody them. The concepts and tools, which are used to address the research questions, are the witness, the grid, cutting up, levels of address and levels of presence. This thesis concludes that theatre and philosophy whilst separate disciplines can overlap in such a way that acts of philosophy can occur in the theatre, and that Apocryphal's theatrical project, which is collaborative, polyvocal and in performance invites the audience to be active witness/participants in the creation of the event, can be viewed as a collective act of philosophy.

This project builds on the existing evidence that suggests that art-based interventions can be beneficial for the wellbeing of people with dementia and their carers, and explores whether such interventions can be delivered via a touchscreen tablet device using an application that allows them to view art images. Twelve pairs of volunteers with dementia and their informal carers were recruited through Alzheimer’s Society Dementia Cafés. A quasi-experimental mixed-methods within-subjects study evaluated the impact of art-viewing on wellbeing using visual analogue scales as well as exploring the experiences of participants qualitatively with thematic analysis. Quantitative results showed a significant effect for change in composite wellbeing from viewing session one to session five. Wellbeing subdomain scores showed an impact on wellbeing which tended to increase with the number of sessions. Qualitative findings were reported in relation to shifts in cognition, changes in behaviour, mood and relationships between people with dementia and their carers. These changes tended to be viewed as positive by interviewees. The results suggest that touchscreen based art interventions have the potential to provide an activity people with dementia can engage in with their carers which can benefit their wellbeing. A larger-scale controlled study would help to further determine whether wider dementia care practice implications can be drawn for clinical psychologists and other healthcare providers.