“Foreknowledge, Fate and Freedom” is concerned with diagnosing and debunking a pervasive and prevalent folk intuition: that a foreknown future would be problematically, and freedom-hinderingly, fixed. In it, I discuss foreknowledge in and of itself, but also as a lens through which we can examine other intuitions and concepts: the apparent asymmetry of future and past; worries about fate and free will; notions of coincidence and likelihood; assumptions about God, time travel and ourselves. This thesis provides the first philosophical map of a region of conceptual space visited often by the folk and popular culture, and as a result ties together a host of disparate threads in the literature. I make three central claims: 1. The folk intuition is wrong in rejecting foreknowledge wholesale on the basis that it entails a problematically fixed future, and thereby undermines our freedom. 2. Foreknowledge gives rise to new problems, and sheds new light on old ones, but none of these are insurmountable. 3. The same paradoxes thought to plague backwards time travel can arise in foreknowledge cases, and can be defused in the same way. I conclude that foreknowledge is puzzling, but possible: it neither inevitably entails fatalism nor precludes free will. While its consequences may be strange, they are not sufficient to vindicate the folk intuition.

In this thesis I investigate causal inquiry in the social sciences, drawing on examples from various disciplines and in particular from conflict studies. In a backlash against the pervasiveness of statistical methods, in the last decade certain social scientists have focused on finding the causal mechanisms behind observed correlations. To provide evidence for such mechanisms, researchers increasingly rely on ‘process tracing’, a method which attempts to give evidence for causal relations by specifying the chain of events connecting a putative cause and effect of interest. I will ask whether the causal claims process tracers make are defensible, and where they are not defensible I will ask how we can improve the method. Throughout these investigations, I show that the conclusions of process tracing (and indeed ofthe social sciences more generally) are constrained both by the causal structure ofthe social world and by social scientists’ aims and values. My central argument is this: all instances of social phenomena have causally relevant differences, which implies that any research design that requires some comparison between cases (like process tracing) is limited by how we systematize these phenomena. Moreover, such research cannot rely on stable regularities. Nevertheless, to forego causal conclusions altogether is not the right response to these limitations; by carefully outlining our epistemic assumptions we can make progress in causal inquiry. While I use philosophical theories of causation to comment on the feasibility of a social scientific method, I also do the reverse: by investigating a popular contemporary method in the social sciences, I show to what extent our philosophical theories of causation are workable in practice. Thus, this thesis is both a methodological and a philosophical work. Every chapter discusses both a fundamental philosophical position on the social sciences and a relevant case study from the social sciences.

This thesis is a systematic presentation of William Desmond's philosophical system and an argument for its viability and superiority relative to dominant alternate visions, here represented by that of John D. Caputo. Desmond, I argue, provides a viable and preferable alternative to - and an alternative narrating of - the kind of late twentieth century "postmodern" anti-metaphysical frame represented by Caputo. Desmond's vision is viable in that it answers Caputo's critiques - showing that they need not be the case. Here Desmond shows how metaphysics (and ethics and religion informed by metaphysics) escapes Caputo's narration/location. Desmond defeats Caputo's defeaters in order to make Desmond's vision a possible position. On a deeper level, Desmond's vision is arguably preferable inasmuch it can be used to critique Caputo's vision - largely in that it (Desmond's vision) as it can be seen to fulfill Caputo's motivating concerns in a more satisfying manner than Caputo's own vision. It does this in two ways. First, from Desmond's vision one can see how such a "LeviNietzschean" vision tends to betray its own motivating concerns. Second, Desmond's position shows how a metaphysical vision/stance/picture (like Desmond's) is, in fact, necessary for one to fulfill these concerns (... or simply necessary, as such). In this manner, Desmond out-narrates the "postmodern" "LeviNietzschean" position, showing Desmond's as a preferable position - as possessing a broader and greater explanatory reach.

The purpose of the thesis is to consider travel relations with regard to their onto-phenomenological and semantic of possibility and to raise the question of a possible ethics of travel. In turning the notion of travel back upon its signifying conditions, a connection is established with the notion of metaphor. The metaphysical polarity between proper and metaphorical meaning is furthered onto a problematic of the couple Oikos (house, home in Greek and generally everything that constitutes a sense of the-at-home) and travel with the purpose of complicating their mutual determination and to deconstructively challenge the derivational and recuperative logic that permeates their intra-metaphysical designation. The reconsideration of the conceptual presuppositions of “travel” is carried out through the critique of what is called its hermeneutic premise, formulated here largely drawing on Paul Ricoeur. It is maintained that “travel” in its Western European conceputalisation participates in the traditions of the metaphysics if presence and logocentrism and it is on this level that deconstructive thinking takes effect. Questions related to the theme of travel, such as space, time, boundary, itinerary, event, encounter, as well as to travel writing, such as generic delimination, representation, constative reference and performative engagement, testimonial value, and the antinomy of fact and fiction, are addressed and relocated through the preoccupation with their phenomenological and tropological motifs and in particular with their generalised metaphorical and allegorical conditions, as these are designated by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, respectively. The association of the notion of travel with metaphor, and, by extension, that between Oikos and properness, will show that senses of home and away, rather than being pregiven, emerge from a scriptural condition - a structural of difference and deferral- that interrupts their reductive, totalising, monistic formulations as well as dialectical conceptualisations.

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This thesis seeks to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Wittgenstein’s approach to the problem of freedom of the will, primarily as expounded in his “Lectures on Freedom of the Will” (LFW). My overall aim is to show how Wittgenstein works to reconfigure the debates about freedom of the will so that it can be confronted as the kind of problem he thinks it ultimately is: an ethical and existential problem. Not published until 1989, the LFW have received scant critical attention. I argue that Wittgenstein’s approach is highly distinctive in a way that makes it significantly less vulnerable than its closest cousins to certain powerful lines of critical attack. Chapter One brings out the distinctiveness of the LFW, especially vis-à-vis a putatively Wittgensteinian form of compatibilism, exemplified by Kai Nielsen. Albeit in different ways, Wittgenstein and Nielsen are both concerned to show why being caused to act, e.g. by the laws of nature, does not equate to being compelled to act, e.g. against one’s will. Unlike Nielsen, however, Wittgenstein further recognises that showing the compatibility of freedom and natural laws establishes no more than the logical consistency of holding people responsible, given determinism, and so cannot itself constitute a defence of our practices. Chapter Two introduces, as a still closer comparison with Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson’s practice-based defence of interpersonal, ‘reactive’ attitudes (e.g. feelings of resentment, gratitude, etc.). I argue that the same correlation between a belief in freedom of the will and the primitive expression of ‘reactive’ attitudes/feelings is central also to the LFW. However, I further argue that certain major lines of criticism of Strawson’s practice-based defence of our current practices, familiar in the critical literature, do not in the same way threaten Wittgenstein’s defence of a broader practice-based approach, one that encompasses both reactive and non-reactive attitudes. Chapters Three and Four deal with the difficulties arising from the recognition that our most entrenched and ‘natural’ attitudes are non-reactive rather than reactive, including attitudes that are properly called ‘fatalistic’. Chapter Three develops a response to Galen Strawson’s criticism that if reactive and non-reactive attitudes are both equally expressive of human nature, then any merely descriptive approach to these attitudes will be incapable of resolving the fundamental question of which of these sorts of attitude we ought to adopt. Finally, Chapter Four examines Wittgenstein’s sustained interest in forms of life, especially religious forms of life, which appear to give equal weight to both reactive and non-reactive attitudes.

There are four positions one might take in respect of the ontological status of the physical world: physicalism, which says that the physical world is ontologically fundamental, and nothing else is; substance dualism, which says that the physical world is ontologically fundamental, but so is the human mental realm, and that these are in some strong metaphysical sense separate; idealism, which says that the physical world is constitutively sustained, at least in part, by facts about the human mental realm; and a rough collection of views I term 'compatibilism', which holds that both the physical and the mental are fundamental, but that they are not separate as in substance dualism. Of these positions, I argue mainly against the first and last. I begin by demonstrating that all forms of compatibilism are committed to a radically revisionary definition of 'mental' and 'physical', since in ordinary usage, and for good reason, the terms are taken as mutually exclusive. I formulate a definition of 'mental' according to which it means 'subjective, non-spatial, and non-quantifiable', and demonstrate that these properties are necessarily coextensive. Against physicalism, I consider a range of arguments which purport to show that physical space, as a necessary feature of the physical world, cannot be ontologically fundamental, concluding that physical space, or at least the physical space that we are interested in, must be the one which we inhabit, and that our relationship of inhabitancy of this physical space plays a constitutive role in it. Since this assumes that physical space must be in some way constituted rather than fundamental, I finish by refuting a set of strategies which attempt to show that physical space itself must be constituted.

Modernity is stuck between the potential of its emancipatory spirit and the difficulty of implementing it. This impasse has generated the need to look for a feasible form of critique that is capable of grounding reason in order to revitalize the modern project of emancipation. In this aim, the dominant strategies, intend to provide reason with a way to mediate its own comprehension:radical critique. In this regard, I evaluate Habermas’ and Taylor’s work for they are two paradigmatic and opposing examples of that strategy. I come back to them because there are still generations of thinkers that use, or can be recognized as using, the philosophical instruments shaped by them. However those instruments are structurally faulty as I demonstrate, from new perspectives, in Chapters I and II, respectively. Their failures, I argue, either open up the way to an idle repetition of the same mistakes or, (should) push us to look for an alternative approach to the modern project of emaciation as there is still the need of it. Against the impracticable option of using ill-suited tools, without having explored alternative approaches, I investigate what I take to be a re-conceptualization of the modern project of emancipation . Through Foucault’s work, with the Chapter III, I explore and then defend a project that I reckon as capable to both explain why radical critique fails, and open up a feasible new path for emancipation.

There are broadly speaking two varieties of views regarding the nature of coincident entities such as statues and the pieces of matter which constitute them. According to Monists, (some) coincident entities are identical while according to pluralists coincident entities are always distinct. The aim of this thesis is to defend the view that many cases of coincidence, including cases of temporary coincidence, are instances of identity. First, I will argue that pluralism ought to be rejected because it faces serious philosophical challenges monism avoids. Next, I will argue that monism can adequately resist the three most common Leibniz law arguments levied against the plausibility that (some) coincident objects are identical. Specifically I will argue that the best monist response to the modal Leibniz law is to adopt a counterpart theoretic account of de re modality to justify the claim that modal contexts are referentially opaque. Next, I will show how monists can resist the linguistic version of LLA by either denying the truth (or falsity) of one of the relevant premises, or by denying the validity of the argument in question. Finally I will argue that the best monist response to the temporal version of LLA is to adopt a stage theoretic account of persistence which can offer a unified account of what Michael Rea has called the 'the problems of material constitution'.

Kierkegaard is well known as a witty writer mainly occupied with Christianity. In this thesis however, Kierkegaard is depicted as a philosopher who can provide us with some new and authentic ideas about the nature of history. Kierkegaard’s approach to the problem of history is compared with Hegel’s philosophy of history and Heidegger’s view of history. Hegel’s philosophy of history is examined and analysed first and the conclusion is that we can clearly detect two main Hegelian assertions regarding history: first that reason is the main historical agent and second that human beings can fully know their past history. Kierkegaard’s arguments follow a totally different approach from that of Hegel’s. Kierkegaard argues that we cannot fully know our past history and that the crucial element in history is to decide about our future history instead of simply trying to understand our past history. It is also argued that Kierkegaard constructs human self in such a way that human beings must simultaneously create themselves and history by making decisions regarding their present and their future. It is further argued that neither Hegel nor Kierkegaard can, on their own, provide us with a total and full picture of the nature of history because Hegel on the one hand, focuses on the macroscopic view of history and Kierkegaard on the other, on the microscopic view (that is, from the point of view of the individual). This is why a possible synthesis of both views is suggested as a better way to truly understand history. Heidegger’s view of history is examined as a possible ‘existential’ alternative approach to history from that of Kierkegaard’s. The conclusion is that Heidegger cannot really offer us any help because he is either borrowing his main concepts from Kierkegaard or he is too vague.