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What is the role of philosophy in education? This timeless question may best be answered by examining Plato's earliest dialogues in which he makes a case for philosophy as the centerpiece of education. I call this effort Plato's project for education and interpret the Apology, Crito, Charmides, Laches, Ion, Hippias Minor, Euthyphro, and Lysis as an integrated attempt to promote philosophy as education in ancient Athens. Plato accepted arete (excellence, virtue) as the proper goal of education, but his interpretation of arete as a distinctly moral quality required a new approach to education. Plato recognized that the quality in a doctor that makes her aim at what is good for her patient is distinct from the skill that enables her to choose the most effective treatment. Against traditional education, which emphasized social standing, professional skill, and the accumulation of information, Plato focused on the moral dimension of human beings and prescribed philosophy as a means for developing it. Memorization of information and tuition in practical skills may help us in our particular crafts, but it does little to improve us morally. This task must be undertaken separately through examination and reflection. Success will be judged not by one's peers, or even by one's government, but by the gods themselves who adhere to a universal idea of goodness. Plato's conception of arete as the health of the soul precipitates a new approach to education that focuses on philosophy and presents Socrates as its hero and martyr. Health of the soul, like health of the body, is something that requires constant labor and attention, and yet may never be perfected. In Plato's project, the ignorant Socrates and the dialogues themselves become indirect teachers by exhorting students to care for their souls and to appreciate the task. The promise that arete can be achieved through the pursuit of moral wisdom is given in the words and actions of Socrates. Like his ancient friends, the reader struggles to understand Socrates and from this struggle emerges philosophy: the love and pursuit of wisdom; the proper education for arete.

The dissertation develops and demonstrates a new Marxist approach to analyzing interactions between education and class. This new approach, overdeterminist class theory, uses an antiessentialist logic and a surplus-labor concept of class. It is thus distinguished from other political economy approaches to education. Chapter 1 is an introduction. Chapter 2 critically reviews the relevant literature, which includes Dewey, Bowles and Gintis, and Althusser. Chapter 3 demonstrates the new approach by analyzing several illustrative cases. In addition, it indicates the importance of the concept subsumed class process for analyzing the interactions between class and the nonclass process of education. An important point of this chapter is that the securing of educational conditions of class engenders new contradictions as it alleviates others. Chapter 4 analyzes the recent U.S. education crisis in terms of the complex relationships between the capitalist class process and education. The analysis supports several conclusions. First, the rhetoric of the mainstream discourse tends to reduce education's social importance to its structural role in enhancing economic competitiveness. Second, the education crisis resulted from the historically complex interaction between education and the capitalist class process. Third, the education crisis has motivated the emergence of many innovative relationships between education and class, and these new relationships in turn engender new contradictions.

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The emergence of the international debt crisis in the 1980s is typically explained through exogenous shocks to the global economic system, first generating excess liquidity and then creating conditions which render previously attractive lending operations unprofitable. Thus, the international debt crisis is explained as a historical accident, driven by exogenous changes in the global markets. In fact, however, this debt crisis was not a unique occurrence, but rather the last event in a sequence of debt crises. Latin America alone has now experienced a total of five severe crises since the early 19th century. The central argument of this dissertation is that all these crises are characterized by the same structural forces which drive borrowing countries to take on an excess amount of capital, while commercial lenders are driven to engage in excessive lending. On the borrowing side, populist behavior was pervasive during the borrowing binges throughout history. Political leaders made use of the availability of capital from abroad to soothe social dissatisfaction at home and to strengthen their alliances in order to improve their leadership position. In fact, during the 1970s, borrowing volumes almost invariably increased substantially during periods of political instability or at times of elections. In a formal approach, such behavior can only be captured by substituting the political leader as crucial decision-making agent for the standard planner, typically used in economic modeling. A game-theoretic sequential equilibrium model is used to reveal the incentives for the politician to borrow beyond the socially optimal level. On the lending side, commercial creditors can consistently be separated into leaders and followers, be it in the form of investment banks and bondholders or money-center banks and small regional banking houses. Invariably, the leaders derived additional benefits from the lending operations which did not accrue to the followers. It therefore paid for the leaders to expand the lending volume, and required them to convince the followers of the profitability of these loans. A formal model based on informational asymmetries resulting from the segmentation of the banking industry during the 1970s shows the tendency to lend in excess of the social optimum.

This thesis investigates Plato's analogy between virtue and crafts, a comparison made extensively in the early dialogues. I first detail the model of technical knowledge that Plato uses as a paradigm of knowledge. An application of this model shows the inadequacies in some claims to know or to teach virtue. Applying the model to the Socratic dictum, 'Virtue is knowledge' enables us to understand what such knowledge is about. Such knowledge is identified as 'self-knowledge' and is the product of philosophy. Philosophy is thus revealed as the craft of virtue, directed at the good of individuals. One problematic aspect of the analogy between virtue and crafts is the possibility of misuse. Virtue conceived as self-knowledge enables Plato to explain both why such a craft cannot be misused and why it alone can be the basis for benefiting others.

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O filme Blow-up desloca os seus espectadores para uma situação de aporia: nossos sentidos são capazes de apreender o real tal como ele é, ou, pelo contrário, falseiam a realidade? O nosso conhecimento do mundo possibilita somente uma percepção limitada e carregada de valores? Este relativismo acompanhou o debate acerca da epistemologia e as ciências ao longo do tempo e passou por um afunilamento agudo na contemporaneidade. Para lançar luz sobre o tema, Nietzsche é um autor privilegiado e incontornável no sentido de elaborar uma perspectiva a respeito do conhecimento histórico. Ao mesmo tempo, Blow-up é uma metáfora epistemológica da filosofia nietzscheana. Logo, essa relação entre ficção, história e filosofia vai muito além do mero espelhamento e incide diretamente na maneira que se compreende as condições metodológicas e teóricas de pesquisa do historiador e, por conseguinte, da escrita da história. / Blow-up is a film that brings its viewers into contact with a situation of aporia: are our faculties capable to grasp what is real as it really is, or, do they distort reality? Does our knowledge about the world only permit a limited perception charged with values? This relativism accompanied the debate about epistemology and the sciences over time and went through a severe process of change in contemporaneity. Therefore, Nietzsche is a privileged and an unavoidable author, in the sense of elaborating a perspective on historical knowledge, to cast light on the subject. At the same time, Blow-up is an epistemology metaphor of the nietzschean philosophy. Consequently, the relationship among fiction, history and philosophy goes beyond reflecting because it affects directly on how research methodological and theoretical circumstances of the historians are understood, as well as how history is written.

The Saṅgītanārāyaṇa, attributed to the Gajapati king Nārāyad nadeva of Parlākhimidi but almost certainly composed by his guru Kaviratna Purud sottamamisra, is the most extensive surviving Sanskrit treatise on music to have been composed in the eastern region of India now known as Orissa. The treatise contains four chapters, gītanirnaya (on vocal music), vādyanirṇaya (on instruments), nāṭyanirṇaya (on dance and the mimetic art), and śuddhaprabandhodāharaṇa (sample compositions of the śuddha and sālaga varieties). The thesis contains a critical edition of the first, second and fourth of these chapters with an English translation, commentary and introduction. Though the whole text was issued in a printed edition by the Orissa Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1966, the new edition offers substantial revisions and corrections to the published version. Eleven manuscripts have been examined; these are in Nagari, Bengali and Oriya scripts and are held in collections in Orissa, in other South Asian libraries, and in two British libraries. All of the manuscript evidence has been presented in a critical apparatus and in a section of supplementary textual notes. The commentary examines the technical contents of the work in detail and places the treatise within its Eastern Indian context. Special attention is drawn to certain subjects, for instance the account of compositional forms and metres, which represent a regional tradition, but all topics are placed also against the background of Sanskrit musicological traditions from other parts of India; some topics in the traditional sastra are thereby re-examined. In the introduction, the historical setting of the work is assessed, and the manuscript evidence is summarised. The proposed stemma codicum shows two groups of manuscripts, one from Orissa and one based in North India; manuscripts discovered in the future are expected to fit into one of these two.