This thesis takes up a rights-based perspective to discuss a number of issues related to the problem of permissible harm. It appeals to a person’s capacity to shape her life in accordance with her own ideas of the good to explain why (i) her death can be bad for her, and why (ii) each of us should have primary say over what may be done to her. The thesis begins with an investigation of the badness of death for the person who dies. If death is bad for us, this helps explain the wrongness of killing. The thesis defends the deprivation account—i.e. the idea that death is bad for us when and because it deprives us of good life—against two Epicurean challenges. It adds that death is also bad when and because it thwarts our agency. Next, the thesis deals with the logic of our moral rights to non-interference. It proposes a conception of rights according to which the stringency of our rights derives from and is justified by the rational aspect of our human nature. It argues that this conception of moral rights solves the paradox of deontology. While our rights to non-interference are stringent, they are not absolute. The thesis considers two possible exceptions to the general rule that it is impermissible to harm an innocent person against her consent. First, using an actual case from WWII, it investigates the circumstances under which a government may expose some parts of its population to an increased risk of harm in order to decrease the risk to others. Second, it considers the permissibility of self-defence against an innocent threat. It argues that the potential victim of an innocent threat has a justice-based reason to treat her own interests as on a par with those of the threat.

In this study I argue that Richard Rorty’s anti-representationalist philosophy arises from a misguided belief that realists are compelled to argue that we need a single and exclusive “mirror-like” form of representation to capture reality. I argue that Rorty fails to appreciate the fact that realists do not have to absolutely identify reality with a particular mirror-like representation of it and nor do they have to fall prey to an invidious distinction between reality and the various ways that we do represent it. I argue that we need not associate realism with the kind of absolutism that Rorty associates it with. To illustrate this I challenge Rorty’s attempt to claim that Nietzsche also rejects realism and interpret Nietzsche’s perspectivism as a form of realism. I also challenge Rorty’s anti-representationalism in the context of his political philosophy. In order to do this I assess the role that Rorty assigns to the poet in his liberal utopia by examining the work of Sylvia Plath and Tony Harrison. I also discuss the various positions that Hilary Putnam has adopted in order to explore different possibilities within realism and representationalism. I conclude that Putnam’s internal realism concedes too much to Rorty and that his earlier external realism is a better alternative.

In spite of his claim to have established with certainty and without omission the many transcendental grounds of experience, there is something fundamental pertaining to every possible experience which the ‘critical’ philosophy of Immanuel Kant fails to explain. The obstacle blocking the path to a solution is the critical method itself and the ingenious but misguided orientation which informed the Kantian enterprise from its inception. Kant compared this new orientation to ‘the first thoughts of Copernicus’ and indeed, ever since, ‘The Copernican Revolution in Philosophy’ has stood as title for that seismic shift in philosophical consciousness. Yet it is to Copernicus that we owe our problem and it is the Copernican world–view, acknowledged by Kant to be ‘true’, which requires us to reverse his dictum that ‘objects conform to our cognition’. The necessity for this rests on the most basic of observations: human beings – together with their faculties of apprehension – travel through space and time in a non–apprehensible way, implying that spatiotemporality exists independently of the observing subject since it is in virtue of this true movement alone that all apparent motion is generated, which appearances, however, ‘contradict’ the reality. The ‘something’ which Kant cannot explain, therefore, is the phenomenon of observer motion (in contrast to observed motion, the most his approach accommodates) since his ontological denial regarding space and time and his equivalence thesis in respect of ‘experience’ and ‘objectivity’ requires that he discount this phenomenon on principle. In determining, therefore, the ontological and epistemological implications of the opposing Copernican principle that it is our cognition that conforms to objects, it is argued that space and time are transcendentally real and the apprehending subject physically (rather than ‘empirically’ or ‘noumenally’) constituted, leaving the reader with a simple choice: Kant or Copernicus, but not both.

The thesis tries to define and explain the rudiments of a 'nonphilosophical' or 'non-decisional' theory of materialism on the basis of a theoretical framework provided by the 'non-philosophy' of Francois Laruelle. Neither anti-philosophical nor anti-materialist in character, non-materialism tries to construct a rigorously transcendental theory of matter by using certain instances of philosophical materialism as its source material. The materialist decision to identify the real with matter is seen to retain a structural isomorphy with the phenomenological decision to identify the real with the phenomenon. Both decisions are shown to operate on the basis of a methodological idealism; materialism on account of its confusion of matter and concept; phenomenology by virtue of its confusion of phenomenon and logos. By dissolving the respectively 'materiological' and 'phenomenological' amlphibolies which are the result of the failure to effect a rigorously transcendental separation between matter and concept on the one hand; and between phenomenon and logos on the other, non-materialist theory proposes to mobilise the non-hybrid or non-decisional concepts of a 'matter-without-concept' and of a 'phenomenon-without-logos' in order to effect a unified but non-unitary theory of phenomenology and materialism. The result is a materialisation of thinking that operates according to matter's foreclosure to decision. That is to say, a transcendental theory of the phenomenon that licenses limitless phenomenological plasticity, unconstrained by the apparatus of eidetic intuition or any horizon of apophantic disclosure; yet one which is simultaneously a transcendental theory of matter, uncontaminated by the bounds of empirical perception and free of all phenomenological circumscription.

This thesis argues that key aspects of Deleuze's philosophy can be explained by looking closely at his relationship to Leibniz. By confining itself to the particular context and set of terminology which Leibniz's philosophy provides, it hopes to avoid many of the dangers of a more general, and necessarily abstract, interpretation or reconstruction of Deleuze's philosophy. I identify, across Deleuze's career, three distinct, important engagements with Leibniz. In each of these, I argue, Deleuze presents Leibniz as an ambiguous figure, caught somewhere between two opposing tendencies. On the one hand, Deleuze characterises Leibniz's philosophy as the last attempt by theology to ground an ordered world, demonstrated by his preoccupation with questions of harmony and sufficient reason, as well as his insistence that to each kind of problem there must respond a rational principle (the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, and so on). But on the other hand, beneath this conservative, theological sentiment, Deleuze also discerns the obscured outlines of a philosophy shot through with dynamism, whose 'dizzying creation' of principles and Baroque complexity reveal an alternative, radicalised image of Leibniz. I argue that from this second, radical Leibniz, Deleuze takes two ideas, returning to them again and again in order to express key aspects of his own philosophy. First, Deleuze believes he has found in Leibniz's theory of 'incompossibility' a concept of difference which is not reducible to a form of opposition between two identities. This theory becomes a crucial component of Deleuze's account of a subrepresentational transcendental field. Second, Deleuze draws on Leibniz's theory that individual monads clearly express a certain region of the world in order to explain how the singular points or events which populate this transcendental field are expressed or actualised by individuals. Explaining how Deleuze appropriates and uses these two ideas provides a narrow point of access into one of the most important areas of his philosophy. At the same time, however, I show that eventually there is always a point where Leibniz's conservative, theological commitments force Deleuze to leave him behind. I thus argue that it is precisely Leibniz's ambiguous status for Deleuze which makes an investigation into their relationship so fruitful: by not only explaining Leibniz's positive influence on Deleuze, but also pinpointing the precise grounds for their eventual divergence, we can better articulate Deleuze's own philosophical priorities.

The principle aim of this thesis is to provide an account of the nature of health. The starting-point is that health is a normative concept: health implies a standard or norm in relation to which an organism’s state is evaluated. Many philosophers take this to imply that health must be defined in subjective terms. They either think health consists in a certain type of subjective experience (e.g. Canguilhem, Fulford), or that health is relative to subjective values and goals (e.g. Nietzsche, Korsgaard, Nordenfelt). I argue that subjective definitions of health fail to capture the essential properties of health and attempt to show that health is something normative and yet entirely objective. This would imply that there are normative facts in the world, and to support this claim I turn to debates in contemporary meta-ethics. I develop a meta-ethical theory according to which a subset of non-moral goods is grounded in objective features of living beings, and argue that this meta-ethical theory opens the possibility for an objective account of health. I then proceed to develop a theory of health that aims to capture what it means for any living to be healthy. I argue that the concept of health latches onto organisms’ capacities (or dispositions): the greater an organism’s range of capacities (or quantity of dispositions), i.e. the more it is capable of doing, the healthier it is. The norm relative to which an organism’s range of capacities is measured in evaluations of health, I go on to argue, is the maximum range of capacities possible for the species. Accordingly, an organism is healthy if it is capable of performing all species-specific activities. A closer analysis of this claim yields the formal definition that health consists in a multiplicity of potential activity vis-à-vis factual limitations set by the species. This definition of health is defended against various objections and potential counterexamples. In the context of human health, I attempt to show this definition of health captures both physical and mental dimensions of health; that it establishes a direct link between health and individual autonomy; and that it supports a Nietzschean account of ‘the greathealth’—the idea that being able to give up the concern for one’s health constitutes a superior kind of health. In the conclusions, I reflect on whether this conception of health could function as an ethical ideal, and consider the form that a health-based ethics could take.

This thesis examines Nietzsche's philosophy as a response to Kant. I show that Kant, as interpreted by Nietzsche, dissociates epistemology and metaphysics. According to Nietzsche, the consequence of this dissociation is the collapse of Kant's transcendental epistemology into a sceptical idealism, which disables the making of positive metaphysical claims about the nature of reality. I argue that Nietzsche overcomes the dissociation of epistemology and metaphysics by rejecting Kant's distinction between constitutive, empirical knowledge and regulative, metaphysical belief. Furthermore, I show that Nietzsche rejects, what he considers to be, Kant's formalistic constitutive epistemology in favour of a regulative and interest-directed account of knowledge. I argue that Nietzsche adopts an internal realist epistemology that stipulates that our epistemic claims must be justified from within our perspectival practices of justification but that such claims must be subject to a realist constraint. Moreover, I propose that Nietzsche is justified, from within these epistemic parameters, in putting forward metaphysical claims about the nature of reality. The thesis is structured in four chapters. Chapter one examines Nietzsche's appropriation of Kant. Chapter two takes up the issue of Nietzsche's perspectivism in the context of his concerns with the issues of justification and truth. The penultimate chapter examines the emergence of Nietzsche's internal realism in his early writings. Finally, chapter four examines Nietzsche's will to power thesis where I contend that the metaphysics of the will to power is both facilitated by and compatible with his perspectivism.

The thesis is an attempt to develop a speculative (Hegelian) critique of the ethical and political questions raised by Jean-Francois Lyotard's book The Differend. I have argued that these questions are dependent upon the reading of Kant's three Critiques, and his political essays, which Lyotard develops in The Differend's four `notices' on Kant, and that it is this reading which opens up his concept of difference (`heterogeneity') to the possibility of a speculative critique. Chapter one comprises an examination of Lyotard's attempt to establish speculative thinking's dependence upon a metaphysical idea of the self as the possibility of ethical sublation. I have argued that Lyotard's appropriation of Adorno's idea of "Auschwitz" as blocking dialectical sublation, fails to recognize the speculative significance of the concrete conditions which produced the historical emergence of Nazism. The following three chapters are concerned to develop the argument that Lyotard's misrepresentation of the spirituality of Hegel's philosophy, conditions his reading of the critical philosophy as disclosing the possibility of a spontaneous (ethical) judgement of difference. Chapter two argues that Lyotard's claim to show critical subjectivity to be a `litigation' of self-conscious faculties, fails to recognize the actual lack of unity which characterizes Kant's `transcendental unity of apperception'. The exclusion of `otherness', which Lyotard claims is disclosed and suppressed in Kant's notion of cognitive experience, actually necessitates concrete selfrecognition. In chapter three, Lyotard's attempt to abstract an ethical `obligation without conditions' from Kant's critical morality is interrogated. I have argued that the aporias constituted through the spontaneity of practical reason, are reinforced through Lyotard's concept of `ethical time'. The final chapter develops a speculative approach to the notions of ethics and politics which Lyotard abstracts from the Third Critique. I have argued that the notion of an `unpredetermined' judgement which Lyotard articulates in the final sections of The Differend, constitutes a subjective `culture' which is ultimately non-ethical and apolitical.

This thesis develops a radical Nietzschean approach to social change. Its subject area is how social entities – for example, institutions, practices, norms, values, cultures – are reproduced or transformed. Its ethical and political starting point is one of resistance to capitalism. Its philosophical starting point is the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Its approach is eclectic, reading Nietzsche with post-Nietzschean philosophy and work in developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, feminist theory, and more. The thesis starts with Nietzsche's conception of history in On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche sees social transformation resulting from multiple contingent encounters of bodies with diverse ‘modes of valuation’ and forms of life. This view opposes the universalist approach Nietzsche calls ‘English Genealogy’, which runs from Hume through Darwin down to contemporary liberal ‘cultural evolution’ theories. The middle part of the thesis investigates Nietzsche's views on social processes following two main strands: the ‘psycho-physiology’ of sub-individual drives he develops in Dawn and other texts of the ‘free spirit’ period; and his encounter with Darwinism. These chapters offer accounts of mimetic and performative incorporation of values; of normalisation and subjectivation; and an ‘ecological’ approach to social evolution drawing on multi-dimensional accounts of heredity, Developmental Systems Theory, and Felix Guattari's conception of ‘the three ecologies’. The last part of the thesis applies these ideas to today's social struggles. It uses Nietzsche's Genealogy to understand technologies of domination at work in contemporary capitalism, alongside Foucault's work on power and Judith Herman's study of psychological trauma. The concluding chapter looks at how Nietzsche's thought can help develop projects of resistance to capitalism, drawing on James Scott's study of the ‘weapons of the weak’, and feminist debates on identity. Working with Nietzsche on resistance both brings out the power and takes us to the limits of his philosophy of self-transformation.

Intentional actions are those which are performed because the subject sees something tobe said for performing them; the subject sees performing the action “in a positive light”. Intentional actions are therefore susceptible to a distinctive kind of explanation, which explains them as intentional; that is, which accounts for them in terms oftheir unique property, of being performed because the subject sees that there is something to be said for doing so. Practical reasoning is the process of figuring out what there is reason to do; that is, what actions are best supported by the considerations available to the subject. To put it another way, practical reasoning is the process of figuring out which actions there is the most to be said for; so practical reasoning explains intentional action “properly”, i.e., in terms of its special properties. Many philosophers, loosely following the lead of David Hume, have argued for a close connection between desire and intentional action. If desires explain intentional actions properly, then they must do so through practical reasoning; that being the case, how do they do it? Another sizeable group of philosophers, the anti-Humeans, have argued that desires cannot explain intentional actions properly; they claim that desires are not the right sorts of things to appear in the premises of arguments, do not count in favour of any action, do not constitute evaluations of any action, and are in any case too fickle and lawless to take part in distinctively normative forms of explanation. The central question in this thesis is, what is the role of desire in practical reasoning? I put forward a characterisation of desire which explains how some desires can explain intentional actions properly, and leaves the question open whether all intentional actions are properly explained by desires.