Whether Aristotle wrote the treatises of Metaphysics with different conceptions of the science of Being in mind has long puzzled scholars. The particular question that causes them unease is whether Aristotle's enterprise in establishing the science of Being through the several treatises of Metaphysics is marked by a general science of Being, studying all departments of Being whatsoever (metaphysica generalis), or whether his investigation of this science reflects an attitude towards a special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) seeking knowledge of a special department of Being, in this case, God, and therefore should be regarded as a science that is eminently theological. In this thesis, I aim to show that Aristotle's enterprise in Metaphysics does not necessarily hinder reconciliation between the universal and the theological dimensions of the science of Being and that although Aristotle's conception of the science of Being is eminently theological it does not conflict with its also being universal. Furthermore, I aim to show that had the conception of the science of Being in Aristotle's mind not been theological, it would not be universal either.

their rejection of classical anarchism, various postanarchist thinkers adopt a position of epistemological critique and reduce their metaphysics to a minimal conception of the self and broad, common knowledge statements about politics. Morality in the form of coercive rules or obedience to norms is rejected, whilst ethics in the form of guidelines or suggestions is taken to be desirable, and even necessary, for anarchist politics. The main argument of the thesis takes up the postanarchist critique of morality, taking seriously the concerns that essentialism, universals and representation are contestable and open to fallibility, and suggests that a further contradiction exists between anarchist principles and transcendent ethical systems. As long as postanarchist metaphysics appeal to transcendence, there is a possibility for anarchist ethics to become coercive. This work s original contribution to knowledge is the introduction of immanent metaphysics as a foundation for anarchist ethics. This is done primarily through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his critique of transcendence. The argument begins by outlining Deleuze s metaphysics of difference which are to underpin the rest of the discussion on anarchist ethics. Following this, the thesis draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and others to explore the political and active aspects of immanent ethics. The final part sketches anarchist ethics in immanent modes of existence.

An ontological exploration of consciousness and how it is related to the body and other aspects of physical reality. Framed by David Chalmers' conception of "The Hard Problem", we begin from a physicalist perspective to discuss the problem of mental causation, which is the inquiry of how the mind communicates and interacts with the body. From here we examine the employment of identity reduction to functionalize and therefore physically explain mentality. We find that reductionist methods, the backbone of scientific investigation, do not work to explain conscious experience, because conscious experience is not quantifiable--it is qualitative. Thus we are left with looking for alternatives to our physicalist world-view in order to explain consciousness's place in reality. Perhaps a major conceptual revolution of how we see and understand the world is on the horizon that will allow us to finally explain consciousness.

While naturalism is said to be the oldest and most popular view among contemporary philosophers and scientists, serious and pervasive questions linger concerning its nature, norms, goals, and status. I critically assess these issues in defending a metaphilosophy of naturalism. I begin in arguing that naturalism is neither a trivial nor empty worldview suffering from a lack of cohesion or content. In support of this, I develop a typology of naturalism from which I extract three “core” commitments exemplified by nearly all forms of the doctrine. I thus provide some preliminary, non-arbitrary grounds for the naturalist to defend the thesis from many objections. In the second chapter, I address the fundamental ontological commitments of metaphysical naturalism. Problems with defining naturalism are connected to the many ways these notions are understood, and I defend account of what it is for an entity, process, phenomenon, etc. to be natural or occur naturally. In furtherance of this, I defend in Chapters 3 and 4 an analysis of nature according to its two primary senses: The first is the particular sense, as picked out in claims referring to the nature of some entity, and the second is the universal sense, as is picked out in reference to nature itself. For both primary senses, I assess various arguments for acosmism, the thesis that nature does not exist (in either sense). In response to these challenges, I argue that the concept of nature in both senses is theoretically and ontologically fundamental, and thus indispensable to philosophy and science. The penultimate chapter constitutes an analysis of the relationship between naturalism and physicalism. I argue that even if the basic principles upon which physicalism rests are true, they nevertheless highly questionable and problematic. I connect and resolve these issues with an assessment of the relations between them and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. I conclude the chapter with an account of naturalization. In the final chapter, I criticize various interpretations of the claim that metaphysics and science, are and/or ought to be “continuous.” I argue that there are deep commonalities between metaphysics and science which frustrate attempts to show that there is a fundamental distinction between them. In conclusion, I show that metaphysical naturalism is not only more rich and complex than what most of its sympathizers and detractors believe, but also that it is consistent with many theses, norms, and posits of traditional, non-naturalistic approaches in philosophy generally.

When we begin to investigate the persistence of objects through time, we find immediately that the sort of concerns embodied in Leibniz's Law cause philosophers to divide themselves into the two major camps of Purdurantists and Endurantists. What is required according to each for a given object at a given time to be identified with a given object at another time is held to be dramatically different, even while both often look to the same general sort of indicators for their answers to identity questions: identity or similarity of physical properties, including relational properties like spatial location. I believe, however, that logically prior to the problem of the persistence of objects through time will be questions regarding the composition of objects--we must have coherent notions of what an object is, what it means for parts to compose an object, and what is required for an object to be considered to exist at a single time before we can discuss the continued existence of objects at other times. I believe that posing the problem of temporal gaps for both the Perdurantist and Endurantist to solve can help us uncover reasonable answers to these more basic questions, and thereby help us judge the comparative coherence of the parent theories. Towards this goal, we investigate here some of the assumptions of persistence theories--that Perdurantists are four-dimensionalists and Endurantists are Presentists, for example--before moving on to find reasonable explanations of the composition of objects from within each theory. Important at this stage is clarifying such concepts as parthood and the present. When we at length turn our attention to the problem of gaps, it becomes useful to distinguish two sorts of gaps, each with their own difficulties: a 'gap' as a length of time during which the proper parts of an object are scattered through space, and a 'gap' as a length of time during which the proper parts of an object do not exist in space at all. My contention here is that Perdurantism, paired with four-dimensional spacetime, provides the most coherent answers to the challenges presented throughout.

Recent literature concerning laws of nature highlight the close relationship between general metaphysics and philosophy of science. In particular, a person's theoretical commitments in either have direct implications for her stance on laws. In this dissertation, I argue that an ontic structural realist should be a realist about laws, but only within a non-Whiteheadean process framework. Without the adoption of a process framework, any account of laws the ontic structural realist offers will require metaphysical commitments that are at odds with ontic structural realism. In arguing towards this aim, I adopt an attenuated methodological naturalistic stance to show that traditional substance metaphysics, of the sort neo-Aristotelians endorse, is problematic and that we have naturalistic reasons for further developing process metaphysics. I then apply this framework to develop a processual account of mereological structures and show how we can understand structures as being stable processes. In the final section, I argue that these are the kind of structures with which the ontic structural realist concerns herself. By adopting a realist account of laws the ontic structural realist can explain how these structures enter into modal and causal relations.

It is argued that physical (and not inherently psychical) properties are insufficient to constitute all else. Specifically they cannot constitute an instance (K1) of our knowledge that the number of existing things is at least one. This employs a new version of entry by entailment: Every fact as to the presence of a constituted trope is entailed by facts about the presence of the ontologically basic, where a property is ontologically basic if and only if the fact of its presence is not entailed (even allowing exhaustive definitions of all tropes in terms of their ultimate constituents) by facts about the presence of things non-identical to it. Existence is a mind-independent presence. Things can be present (to mind) as opposed to existing but must be accompanied by the presence of all of their parts and of anything else that their presence might entail. This includes some existing thing in the case that knowledge that something exists is present, since it is analytic that knowledge cannot be of what is not the case. Purely dynamical properties cannot exist apart from instances of some other property kind (on pain of regress as to what moves). Material properties can make a difference to cognitive states only in virtue of differences they can make to dynamical properties. Thus, any cognitive state present in some dynamical and material scenario must be present in an equivalent purely dynamical scenario, which cannot exist. Hence: 1) There can be no knowledge of existence, or thus trope K1, in a purely dynamical scenario. 2) There can thus neither be a trope K1 if only dynamical and material properties (and what they constitute) are present. So because there is a trope K1, there are one or more ontologically basic properties which are not dynamical or material. It is further argued that nothing ontologically basic is per se (directly and non-obscurely) conceivable except as psychicality or a categorical basis of a disposition to change or constancy (respectively, dynamism and materiality). Thus at least one ontologically basic property is either psychical or not per se conceivable. The latter proposition has less merit.

This thesis describes the way in which sound is taken up and subsequently suppressed within the visual arts. The idealisation and development of sound as a plastic material is able to be traced within the modernist trajectory, which, reflecting a set of cultural practices and having developed its own specific terminologies, comes to regard any material, or anything conceived of as material, as appropriate and adequate to the expression of its distinctive and guiding concepts and metaphors. These concepts and metaphors are discussed as already having at their bases strongly visualist biases, the genealogies of which are traced within traditional or formal philosophies. Here, the marginalising tendency of ocularcentrism is exposed, but the very nature and contingency of marginalisation is found to work for the sound artist (where the perpetuation of the mythologised 'outsider' figure is desired) but against sound which is positioned in a purely differential and negative relation. In this epistemological and ontological reduction, sound becomes simply a visual metaphor or metonymic contraction which forecloses the possibility of producing other ways of articulating its experience or of producing any markedly alternative 'readings'. Rather than simply attempting to reverse the hierarchisation of the visual over the aural, or of prefacing sound within a range of artistic practices (each which would keep the negative tradition going) sound's ambiguous relation to the binarism of presence/absence, system and margin, is, however oddly, elaborated. The strategy which attempts to suspend sound primarily within and under the mark of the concept is interrogated and its limits exposed. The sound artist, the 'margin surfer' is revealed as a perhaps deeply conservative figure who may in the end desire the suppression of sound, and who, actually rejecting any destabilising and threatening notion of 'radical alterity' anxiously clings to the 'marginalised' modernist pretence. It is the main contention of this thesis that the marginalisation of sound obscures the more pressing question of its ambiguous relation to notions of sameness and difference, and that its conceptualisation suppresses the question of the ethical. That the ethical question should (and always does) take 'precedence' over purely epistemological and ontological considerations, and that more genuinely open attitudes should be assumed with respect to sound studies are forwarded in this thesis / Master of Arts (Hons)

In this research paper for the postgraduate degree of Master of Arts (Hons) (Visual Arts), the author is proposing to investigate the relationship of Nietzsche's division of culture into two principal strains, 'The Apollonian and the Dionysiac', and its application to the art of painting. When Nietzsche wrote the 'Birth of Tragedy' in 1872, from which his division of culture emerged, it was entitled 'The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music'. Young (1992), also describes music as 'The Dionysian art' in his book 'Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art'. With consideration to changes in art and perception between the latter nineteenth and the twentieth century, a stronger argument for the inclusion of painting as 'a Dionysian art', can be formed. The author also analyses the metaphysical in art and through an examination of the nature of the Dionysiac as described in religious rites as opposed to varying analysis from Nitzsche and his critics / Master of Arts (Hons) (Visual Arts)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This research explores the possibility of a phenomenology of religion that is ontological, founded on Martin Heidegger’s philosophical thought. The research attempts to utilise Heidegger’s formulation of phenomenology as ontology while also engaging in a critical relation with his path of thinking; as a barrier to the phenomenological interpretation of the meaning of Religion. This research formulates Religion as an ontological problem wherein the primary question becomes: how are humans, in our being, able to be religious and thus also able to understand the meaning of ‘religion’ or something like ‘religion’? This study focuses on the problem of foundation; of whether it is possible to provide an adequate foundation for the study of religion(s) via the notion ‘Religion’. Further, this study also aims to explore the problem of methodological foundation; of how preconceptions of the meaning of Religion predetermine how religion(s) and religious phenomena are studied. Finally, this research moves toward the possibility of founding a regional ontological basis for the study of religion(s) insofar as the research explores the ontological ground of Religion as a phenomenon. Due to the exploratory and methodological/foundational emphasis of the research, the thesis is almost entirely preliminary. Herein, the research focuses on three main issues: how the notion of Religion is preconceived, how Heidegger’s phenomenology can be tailored to the phenomenon of Religion, and how philosophical thought (in this case, Pre-Socratic philosophy) discloses indications of the meaning of Religion. Pre-Socratic thought is then utilised as a foundation for a preliminary interpretation of how Religion belongs-to humans in our being. This research provides two interrelated theses: the provision of an interpretation of Religion as an existential phenomenon, and an interpretation of Religion in its ground of being-human. With regard to the former, I argue that Religion signifies a potential relation with the ‘originary ground’ of life as meaningful. Accordingly, the second interpretation discloses the meaning of Religion as grounded in being-human; that for humans in our being, the meaning of life is an intrinsic question/dilemma for us. This being-characteristic, I argue, can be called belief.