<p> In his 1978 lectures at the College de France, <i>Security Territory Population</i>, Michel Foucault shifts his analysis of power by arguing for pastoral power as both the prelude to governmentality and as the decisive moment in the constitution of the Western subject. If the history of the Christian pastorate involves "the entire history of procedures of human individualization in the West (184)," then, Foucault argues, there has never been a revolt against pastoral power because such a revolt would be a revolt against the constitution of the self, that is to say against self-consciousness. If the revolt against pastoral power is a revolt against self-consciousness, then I argue that the psychagogic-spiritual, as opposed to rhetorical-theological, practices of religious conversion may be where counter-conducts (already understood to be subsumed within Christian pastoral power) may also overwhelm the Christian pastorate. In his conversion to Christianity Augustine employs techniques that are `overwhelming' to pastoral power, but are never actually an attempt to overcome pastoral power. In the specific experiences recalled by Augustine in his Confessions, through the various non-discrete phases of his conversion he takes up what Foucault calls counter-conducts. Through asceticism (especially in the author's struggle with conscupience); through the establishment of a new religious community (as a Manichean catechumen) through mysticism (in the doctrine of `inner illumination)'; through the exegesis of scripture (significantly in the voluntary reading of Romans 13:12-14 prior to becoming a catechumen of the Christian Church); and through eschatological belief (specifically in the a-millennial conception of the return of Christ), Augustine, author of the Confessions, emerges as a convert to Christianity. Towards Foucault's call for genealogies of pastoral power and towards the call of philosophy understood as ethico-poetic praxes of Eros captured in the phrase epimeleia heatou, this thesis will investigate Augustine of Hippo's conversion to Christianity as an enactment of Foucault's `counter-conducts.' I will argue, through exegesis of Augustine's Confessions, that this parrhesiatic document is simultaneously a narrative of psychagogic practices which reflects Augustine's profound ascesis towards Christian subjectivation as well as a document of the counter-conducts that overwhelm Christian pastoral power while never revolting against it. As a result of his pluralistic and deeply personal approach towards conversion, Augustine's recorded experiences exemplify how `new' technologies (or at least new modalities of old technologies) are established within the Christian pastorate. It is in and through the event of his conversion that Augustine also emerges as a leader of the orthodox Church and simultaneously as an instigator for later revolts against it--arguably, for example, as an inspiration for the leaders of the Protestant Reformation. If there can be no revolution against pastoral power because it is always instituting, circumscribing, and subsuming new forms of resistance on its own, then perhaps we can best understand where counter-conducts are most dangerous to the practices of power by understanding where some practices actually fail to resist power-effects, while simultaneously transforming power-relations.</p>

This thesis presents and critically assesses the aesthetic theory of the contemporary German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, in particular his ideas of the intersection of philosophical aesthetics and contemporary culture. The three aspects of his ideas which frame this discussion and which I present in the first chapter are his project for reconfiguring aesthetics as a study of sensory perception, his characterisation of postmodern culture as aestheticised, and his conception of a new focus for aesthetics, the anaesthetic or imperceptible. Welsch's ideas intersect with several key issues in philosophical aesthetics which I outline in the second chapter, namely the status of the sensory and its relationship to the quality of indeterminacy, the subjective and cognitive nature of the aesthetic experience, the idea of the aesthetic as an epistemological ground that is in some way distinct from rational or conceptual knowledge, and finally the aesthetic characterised as an essentially modernist quality of defamiliarisation. The interlocutors here are Alexander Baumgarten, Kant and the Russian Formalists. This is followed in the third chapter by a more focussed discussion of Welsch's ideas on the sublime, a crucial aesthetic category which offers a theoretical background to his ideas on anaesthetics. Welsch reads the sublime as pivotal to the aesthetics of Adorno and the aesthetic thinking of Lyotard, and the main argument in this chapter compares the postmodern fascination with diversity or heterogeneity as values in themselves with a more ideologically informed conception of the cognitive and social function of modern and postmodern art as challenging existing modes of perception. I also read the limit experience of the sublime as a model for the modernist aesthetic of defamiliarisation. A critical discussion of Welsch's own variant of the sublime, the anaesthetic, follows in chapter four. The key issues here are the tensions between Welsch's disparate uses of the term, the ideological implications of each variant, and to what extent each allows a re-engagement of indeterminacy with everyday culture, or tends towards a more autonomous aesthetic. The final two chapters apply Welsch's ideas and the issues raised to examples of art, specifically drama, that operates at the limits of perception. The aim here is to assess whether Welsch's sensory terms offer the articulation of art and contemporary culture, or whether with some modifications they might. An overarching concern of the thesis is to distinguish between the transcendental significance of the aesthetic and its more marginal validity as cultural intervention.

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This thesis falls into two distinct parts. The first gives an account of the economic and social factors which contributed to the emergence of the new post- Cartesian world order in early nineteenth-century Germany and attempts to ground the German response to the French theories of mimesis in this broader context. The second, larger, part engages in an analysis of the philosophical aesthetics of the critic and writer Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and the Idealists Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, paying particular attention to the notions of musical closure embedded in the their usage or intimation of the terms autonomy, ontology and the ideal. To this end, this thesis attempts to analyse the relationship between the organic structures of early nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie and aesthetic approaches to music from that same period.

OBJECTIVE: To appraise the patients’ aesthetic awareness following an implant restoration in the anterior maxilla as compared to dentists and laypeople. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Patients (n=139) restored with an implant-retained crown in the anterior maxilla were invited to rate their satisfaction. Projected magnified images of the crowns were appraised by dentists (n=8) and laypeople (n=6) in room settings. The laypeople judged also printed 10x15cm photographs. Differences in the levels of satisfaction between the actual patient, dentists, and laypeople were compared. PES/WES and Jemt papilla scores were also assigned. RESULTS: Laypeople were less critical than the dentists when judging from printed photographs and vice versa when same images were magnified and projected onto screen. CONCLUSION: Patient satisfaction and awareness of aesthetic appearance following an implant treatment in the aesthetic zone appears to differ from dentists’ and laypeople’s observations. Laypeople’s evaluation is influenced by the method used for appraising the aesthetic outcomes.

This thesis develops and defends a new version of an old view known as literary cognitivism, which holds that the merit of a literary work as such sometimes depends on its cognitive merit. The newness of my view lies in the way it recommends we think about the cognitive merits of a literary work as they relate to its literary merits. Whereas some cognitivists identify the cognitive merit of a literary work with the truth of its themes and others with its capacity to provide certain non-propositional forms of knowledge, I propose that the cognitive dimension most relevant to literary value is the extent to which it provides certain forms of justification for its themes. In particular, I emphasize two ways in which a literary work can justify its themes: one, by providing evidence that its themes are the products of an intellectually virtuous mind and, two, by expressing its themes within a richly coherent framework of beliefs. I argue that the literary-evaluative significance of these two forms of justification is implicit, in the first case, in literary critical judgments that refer to a work’s didacticism, and, in the second case, in judgments that refer to a work’s thematic coherence. Insofar as it bears on these sources of justification, I contend, the truth or falsity of some non-thematic propositions can be relevant to literary value, though truth is generally not relevant at the thematic level.

This thesis develops and defends a new version of an old view known as literary cognitivism, which holds that the merit of a literary work as such sometimes depends on its cognitive merit. The newness of my view lies in the way it recommends we think about the cognitive merits of a literary work as they relate to its literary merits. Whereas some cognitivists identify the cognitive merit of a literary work with the truth of its themes and others with its capacity to provide certain non-propositional forms of knowledge, I propose that the cognitive dimension most relevant to literary value is the extent to which it provides certain forms of justification for its themes. In particular, I emphasize two ways in which a literary work can justify its themes: one, by providing evidence that its themes are the products of an intellectually virtuous mind and, two, by expressing its themes within a richly coherent framework of beliefs. I argue that the literary-evaluative significance of these two forms of justification is implicit, in the first case, in literary critical judgments that refer to a work’s didacticism, and, in the second case, in judgments that refer to a work’s thematic coherence. Insofar as it bears on these sources of justification, I contend, the truth or falsity of some non-thematic propositions can be relevant to literary value, though truth is generally not relevant at the thematic level.

This thesis addresses the escalation of interest in the senses, across a range of media technological contexts, dating from the mid 1990s. Much of this discourse has focussed on the experiential, particularly intense, multisensory experience of the present. As there are numerous discourses on the senses, technology and affect individually, my concern is to examine some of the intersections between these, in order to reconsider the contemporary significance of aesthetics in media contexts. I develop a ‘hyper/aesthetic’ approach to try to think about aesthetic relations with technology in a nuanced way, opening up a space from which to investigate a variety of relations with technology. Walter Benjamin’s work on the senses and modern technology is useful in this, as is that of two of his commentators, Susan BuckMorss and Miriam Hansen. In providing the outlines of a hyper/aesthetic approach in this thesis, I am, in particular, seeking to complexify understandings of audience reception and meaningmaking, to return some ambivalence to conceptions of the sensory encounter with technology. Hyper/aesthetics is a term that draws together ambivalence, doubling, virtuality, unfamiliarity, innervation, and moving beyond, all concepts that are relevant to the senses and subjectivity. In close readings of case studies drawn from the areas of advertising, computer gaming practices, and new media art, I argue that as well as critiquing their claims to newness, it is also important to attend to the ways in which particular relations with technology exceed or refuse the logic of instrumentality. In particular, these cases consider the emerging aesthetic experiences that technologies of computer gaming and new media art facilitate, and the new subjective possibilities that follow from each. Approaching these studies hyper/aesthetically enables me to go beyond other accounts in appreciating the more experimental character of some of these relations with technology. I particularly focus on the effects and affects generated by encounters with the unfamiliar, including that which is considered strange, ‘unnatural’ or ‘inhuman’, and critically appraise the significance of encounters such as these for the manner in which subjectivity is conceived.

Through the lens of a realist conception of artworks as artefacts, this research investigates the underlying ontological constraints governing children’s aesthetic understanding in art. Challenging structural conventions of research into aesthetic development in art, a realist philosophical framework provides a neutral space within which the ontological basis for children's aesthetic concepts of pictorial meaning and value can be analysed, and developmental differences mapped. The study employs an analytical schema which brings together analytical tools borrowed from Feldman's ‘ontic dumping’ and Wollheim's twofolded ‘seeing-in.’ This schema is used to classify qualitative changes in concepts of pictorial value and meaning in three groups of children aged 6, 9, and 12, and two teachers, as employed in the experimental curation of an exhibition of portrait paintings. The curatorial policy developed by children from each group, in justification of their choice of eight pictures and accompanying exhibitions, are interpreted using quantitative and qualitative methods. Characteristic-to-defining shifts from na??ve accounts to more autonomous aesthetic judgements of value are identified relative to the ontological stance children adopted in their critical reasoning about the portraits they chose. Findings include differences in the level of conceptual integration in justification of portraits chosen, differences in the breadth and autonomy of identity brought to bear in choices of portraits, but few differences in the representational abstraction of the images chosen by different age groups. The authenticity of the experimental tasks, as well as the rich characterisation of the developmental differences described in the study have significance for pedagogical explanations of critical practice in art education.