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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Modern Western philosophy'
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Clynes, Frances. "An examination of the impact of the Internet on modern Western astrology." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 2015. http://repository.uwtsd.ac.uk/586/.
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Astrology is a feature of modern culture. While the academic study of the culture of astrology is on the increase, virtually no scholarship exists on astrology and the Internet. However a large body of literature exists on the relationship between the Internet and religion, and this literature is used as a framework for the study of astrology and Internet. This research investigates the use of the Internet by modern Western Astrologers, within the context of theories of cyberspace. It looks at how the Internet is being used by astrologers and what effects they believe it can have on astrology and its practice. The research was both quantitative and qualitative. Questionnaires were issued at astrological conferences in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. In addition sixty-five astrologers were interviewed. In the 1990s a body of literature was produced that associated the physical Internet with the virtual world of cyberspace. From this literature came claims of cyberspace as dualistic or Cartesian. My research was informed by theories of dualism inherited from the classical world, and by previous arguments that astrology is dualistic. The thesis concludes that the majority of astrologers have a dualistic view of the Internet and cyberspace; the online world of cyberspace is viewed as a mental arena in contrast to the offline, physical world. A highly positive use of the Internet is the growth of online astrological communities; connections can be made with astrologers in different parts of the world. The Internet is perceived as a source of vast quantities of astrological information of varying quality. In the views of the astrologers poor quality astrological information can have a detrimental effect on the practice of astrology in the modern Western world.
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Ely, Bonita. "Change and continuity the influences of Taoist philosophy and cultural practices on contemporary art practice /." View thesis (Appendix 3 available at UWS Library for private study and research purposes only), 2009. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/40805.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2009.A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Communications Arts, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliographies. Thesis front, chapters, appendices 1, 2 also available online at: http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/40805.
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Adams, Thomas Carter. "Conceptual investigation and the ontology of law." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0cec2db0-62e6-4273-975e-f60a39f8ea13.
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An important question for general jurisprudence concerns method: what is the right way to form a philosophical understanding of law? Exploration of this question has, in one form or another, featured as a constant part of the work of those within the discipline, and many different answers have been given. The aim of this thesis is to argue that a controversial conception of philosophical method – as an investigation into our rule-bound conceptual practices and uses of language – is the appropriate means of understanding the nature of law. The first three chapters establish the initial connection between conceptual or linguistic analysis and the ability to gain insight into the social reality of law. I argue, in chapter one, that institutional concepts have a linguistic basis and, in chapters two and three, that legal systems are borne out of the shared use of certain basic concepts on the part of those who make up their law applying institutions, i.e. the courts. To understand the rules according to which such concepts are deployed, I suggest, is to understand the essential structure of legal practice. An assumption of that argument is tested in chapter four by considering Ronald Dworkin’s famous claim that certain forms of disagreement between lawyers and judges are incompatible with a picture of law dependent upon their agreement in the use of basic legal concepts. Chapter five takes up the question of whether the account of social ontology contained in the thesis is compatible with the fact of philosophical disagreement about the nature of law. Finally, chapters six and seven discuss alternate models of theoretical success in general jurisprudence, the first inspired by externalist views of linguistic and mental contents, and the second dependent upon a naturalistic conception of philosophy.
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Whistler, Daniel. "The theological dimensions of F.W.J. Schelling's theory of symbolic language." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cc9ed6e7-d409-4550-be41-d5963a50cf9c.
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In this thesis I examine Schelling’s construction of symbolic language in §73 of his Philosophie der Kunst. I approach this construction in three ways. First, I compare Schellingian symbolic language to other contemporary theories of the symbol and language (in particular, those of Goethe, Kant and A.W. Schlegel). While Schelling’s theory of symbolic language possesses properties similar to these other theories (the identity of being and meaning, organic wholeness, the co-existence of opposites), I show that it differs in how they are interpreted. Second, I excavate the metaphysical and epistemological principles from Schelling’s philosophy of the period which underlie this theory of language. Three tenets from the Identitätssystem (as it is called) are crucial: formation, quantitative differentiation and construction. They illuminate why Schelling interprets symbolic language very differently to his contemporaries. Third, I consider the theological significance of Schellingian symbolic language. This significance is twofold. First, his theory gives rise to a conception of discourse without reference, and so to the notion of a theology without reference. On this basis, Schelling criticises Christian theology for remaining too concerned with referring to God, when what is at stake is rather the degree of intensity to which it produces God. Theology therefore stands in need of reformation. Second, the way in which theology is utilised by Schelling in order to construct symbolic language in §73 of the Philosophie der Kunst itself provides a model for reformed theological practice. I argue that Schelling conceives of traditional theology as material for intensifying the production of God. In this way, an ‘absolute theology’ is engendered which has no concern for reference or for the integrity of the theological tradition.
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Thorpe, Josh. "Here hear my recent compositions in a context of philosophy and western 20th century experimental art /." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ59209.pdf.
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Brandt, Stefan Geoffrey Heinrich. "Wittgenstein and Sellars on intentionality." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0d9c1102-17bf-493b-a1a0-aa983d277717.
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The aim of the thesis is to explore Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Wilfrid Sellars’s views on intentionality. In the first chapter I discuss the account of intentionality and meaning the early Wittgenstein developed in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus. I present his idea that sentences are pictures of states of affairs with which they share a ‘logical form’ and to which they stand in an internal ‘pictorial relationship’. I argue that Wittgenstein thought of this relationship as established by acts of thought consisting in the operation of mental signs corresponding to the signs of public languages. In the second and third chapters I discuss the later Wittgenstein’s criticism of ideas at the heart of the Tractarian account of intentionality, as well as his explanations of the phenomena that motivated it. In the second chapter I examine his rejection of the idea that thinking consists in the operation of mental signs and his criticism of the idea that meaning and understanding are mental processes accompanying the use of language. In the third chapter I turn to Wittgenstein’s criticism of the idea that representations stand in an internal ‘pictorial relation’ to objects in the natural order that are their meaning. I illuminate his later views by discussing Sellars’s non-relational account of meaning, in particular his claim that specifications of meaning do not relate expressions to items that are their meaning, but rather specify their rule-governed role in language. I conclude with a discussion of the later Wittgenstein’s account of the relationship between intentional phenomena and the objects at which they are directed. In the final fourth chapter I provide a detailed discussion of Sellars’s account of thinking. I conclude with some criticisms of Sellars’s views.
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Lappano, David James. "The edifying and the polemical in Kierkegaard's religious writings : toward a theology of encounter." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3843c702-42cb-40eb-af9b-11d5311b03d3.
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This thesis provides a theoretical framework that brings the unity of Kierkegaard’s ‘middle period’ into relief. I will analyse Kierkegaard’s writings between 1846 and 1852 when, I argue, the socially constructive dimension of his thought comes to prominence, involving two dialectical aspects of religiousness identified by Kierkegaard: the edifying and the polemical. How these two aspects come together and get worked out in the lives of individuals form the basis of what can be called a Kierkegaardian ‘social praxis’. I conclude that the tension between the edifying and the polemical can be coherently maintained in a communicative life that is also characteristic of a militant faith. This militant faith and life is presented as a critical guard against absolutisms, fundamentalisms, and intellectual aloofness; but the ‘militant’ individual is also utterly dependent, in need of edification and critique, and therefore chooses the risk of encountering others, seeking relationships out of a commitment to the development of persons and communities in co-operation. Therefore, not only does this dialectic provide readers with an important theoretical framework for understanding Kierkegaard’s ‘middle period’, but it is also a valuable resource for a constructive analysis of active social living suitable for theology in the twenty-first century.
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Ely, Bonita. "Change and continuity : the influences of Taoist philosophy and cultural practices on contemporary art practice." Thesis, View thesis (Appendix 3 available at UWS Library for private study and research purposes only), 2009. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/40805.
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The aim of this thesis is to identify in contemporary art practices the inflections that have either direct, or indirect origins in Taoism, the conceptual source of China’s principle indigenous, cultural practices. The thesis argues that the increasingly cross cultural qualities of contemporary art practice owe much to the West’s exposure to Taoism’s non-absolutist, non-humanist tropes, a cultural borrowing that has received slight attention despite its increasingly pervasive presence. This critical analysis is structured by Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome as a metaphor for cultural influences that are pluralist permeations, rather than a linear hierachy. The thesis tracks discourse between the West and China from early contact to the present, tracing manifold aspects of Taoism’s modes of visual representation in Western art. Chinese gardens, Chinoiserie, calligraphy, and their coalescence in Chinese painting, are analysed to locate Taoist precepts familiar to the West, principally citing the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, Taoism’s founder. Here Taoist philosophy, as synthesised in Western thought, is proven to be a source of identifiable innovations in contemporary art practice. For example, spatial articulation as a dominant element of expression in installation art is traced to Western artists’ exposure to the conceptualised spatiality of Sinocised artefacts. Taoist precepts are analysed in the Chinese tradition of improvising upon calligraphic characters as a key factor.This model is deployed using the skills set of studio-based research, to identify the experimental nature and degree of improvisation in Western artists’ adaptations of Taoist methods in innovative painting, then sculpture. Investigations of artworks are structured upon correlations between Deleuze’s theories of representation and Taoist theories of creativity. A thematic connection with Taoism located in contemporary art, namely, notions of continuity and change, assists this detailed unravelling of creative processes, aesthetics, metonymy and meaning derived from Taoism in global, contemporary art.
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Srinivasan, Amia Parvathi. "The fragile state : essays on luminosity, normativity and metaphilosophy." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:23b7a5c9-448d-421b-b26c-5cae3591aee3.
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This dissertation is a set of three essays connected by the common theme of our epistemic fragility: the way in which our knowledge – of our own minds, of whether we are in violation of the epistemic and ethical norms, and of the philosophical truths themselves – is hostage to forces outside our control. The first essay, “Are We Luminous?”, is a recasting and defence of Timothy Williamson’s argument that there are no non-trivial conditions such that we are in a position to know we are in them whenever we are in them. Crucial to seeing why Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument succeeds, pace various critics, is recognising that the issue is largely an empirical one. It is in part because of the kind of creatures we are – specifically, creatures with coarse-grained doxastic dispositions – that nothing of interest, for us, is luminous. In the second essay, “What’s in a Norm?”, I argue that such an Anti-Cartesian view in turn demands that epistemologists and ethicists accept the ubiquity of normative luck, the phenomenon whereby agents fail to do what they ought because of non-culpable ignorance. Those who find such a view intolerable – many epistemic internalists and ethical subjectivists – have the option of cleaving to the Cartesian orthodoxy by endorsing an anti-realist metanormativity. The third essay, “The Archimedean Urge”, is a critical discussion of genealogical scepticism about philosophical judgment, including evolutionary debunking arguments and experimentally-motivated attacks. Although such genealogical scepticism often purports to stand outside philosophy – in the neutral terrains of science or common sense – it tacitly relies on various first-order epistemic judgments. The upshot is two-fold. First, genealogical scepticism risks self-defeat, impugning commitment to its own premises. Second, philosophers have at their disposal epistemological resources to fend off genealogical scepticism: namely, an epistemology that takes seriously the role that luck plays in the acquisition of philosophical knowledge.
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Rubio, Diego. "The ethics of deception : secrecy, transparency and deceit in the origins of modern political thought." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3e92fabc-9e47-41a5-a739-00a0f67d6dcf.
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The purpose of this thesis is to reflect on the importance that deception has had on the efficient functioning of societies and the development of individuals. I attempt to do so by adopting an historical perspective, analysing the development of the notion of lawful deception during the Middle Ages and, mainly, the Early Modern Age through theological and political discourses. The scope of my investigation is pan-European. I examine sources from the major Western territories, but I pay special attention to those produced in the Spanish-Habsburg Empire, which was a major political and cultural entity during this period. My claim is that between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, the West witnessed the formation of what I call an "Ethics of Deception:" a trend of thought that, without challenging the Augustinian prohibition of lying, recognised deception as intrinsic to nature and mankind, thereby justifying its use from moral and political perspectives. I explain how this intellectual process was conducted, fostered by new social realities, and helped by the flourishing of casuistry, tacitism and neostoicism. Furthermore, I argue that the acceptance of deception contributed to the creation of a new view of the world, language and human interaction. A view that is in the very basis of some of the most characteristic features of Baroque art and that opened the door to some of the most transcendental cultural changes of the period, such as the creation of politics governed by reason rather than faith, the secularisation of social behaviour, and the emergence of the notions of individualism, privacy and freedom of thought. For these reasons, I claim that deception played an important role in the shaping of Modernity.
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Rudbøg, Tim. "H.P. Blavatsky's Theosophy in context : the construction of meaning in modern Western esotericism." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/9926.
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H.P. Blavatsky’s (1831-1891) Theosophy has been defined as central to the history of modern Western spirituality and esotericism, yet to this date no major study has mapped and analysed the major themes of Blavatsky’s writings, how Blavatsky used the concept ‘Theosophy’ or to what extent she was engaged with the intellectual contexts of her time. Thus the purpose of this thesis is to fill this gap. The proposed theoretical framework is based on the centrality of language in the production of intellectual products, such as texts—but contrary to the dominant focus on strategies, rhetoric and power this thesis will focus on the construction of meaning coupled with a set of methodological tools based on contextual analysis, intellectual history and intertextuality. In addition to an overview of Blavatsky research this thesis will map and analyse Blavatsky’s use of the concept ‘Theosophy’ as well as Blavatsky’s primary discourses, identified as: (1) discourse for ancient knowledge, (2) discourse against Christian dogmatism, (3) discourse against the modern natural sciences and materialism, (4) discourse against modern spiritualism, (5) discourse for system and (7) discourse for universal brotherhood. In mapping and analysing Blavatsky’s discourses, it was found that her construction of meaning was significantly interconnected with broader intellectual contexts, such as ‘modern historical consciousness’, ‘critical enlightenment ideas’, studies in religion, studies in mythology, the modern sciences, spiritualism, systemic philosophy, reform movements and practical ethics. It, for example, becomes clear that Blavatsky’s search for an ancient ‘Wisdom Religion’ was actually a part of a common intellectual occupation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that her critique of the Christian dogmas was equally a common intellectual trend. To read Blavatsky’s discourses as the idiosyncratic strategies of an esotericist, isolated from their larger contexts or only engaged with them in order to legitimise minority views would therefore largely fail to account for the result of this thesis: that in historical actuality, they were a part of the larger cultural web of meaning.
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Birkett, Edward John. "The tensions of modernity : Descartes, reason and God /." View thesis View thesis, 2000. http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20030411.100355/index.html.
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Neubauer, Deana. "The biosemiotic imagination in the Victorian frames of mind : Newman, Eliot and Welby." Thesis, London Metropolitan University, 2016. http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/1142/.
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This thesis traces the development of thought in the philosophical and other writings of three nineteenth-century thinkers, whose work exemplifies that century’s attempts to think beyond the divisions of culture from nature and to reconcile empirical science with metaphysical truth. Drawing on nineteenth-century debates on the origin of language and evolutionary theory, the thesis argues that the ideas of John Henry Newman, George Eliot and Lady Victoria Welby were cultural precursors to the biosemiotic thought of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, specifically in the way in which these three thinkers sought to find a ‘common grammar’ between natural and human practices. While only Lady Welby communicated with the scientist, logician and father of modern semiotics, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), all three contributed to the cultural sensibility that informed subsequent work in biology/ethology (Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), zoosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001), and the development of biosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer (1943-present), Kalevi Kull (1952-present) among others. Each of these nineteenth-century writer’s intellectual development show strong parallels with the interdisciplinary endeavour of biosemiotics. The latter’s observation that biology is semiotics, its postulation of the continuity between the natural and cultural world through semiosis and evolutionary semiotic scaffolding its emphasis on the coordination of organic life processes on all levels, from simple cells to human beings, via semiotic interactions that depend on interpretation, communication and learning, and its consequent refusal of Cartesian divide, all find distinct resonances with these earlier thinkers. The thesis thus argues that Newman, Eliot and Welby all gave articulation to what the thesis identifies as the growth of a ‘biosemiotic imagination.’ It argues that Newman, Eliot and Lady Welby envisaged a unity, or a holistic understanding, of life based on a European developmental tradition of biology, philosophy and language which was familiar to Charles Darwin himself. This evolutionary ontology called forth a new epistemology grounded in a mode of unconscious creative inference (biosemiotic imagination) akin to Charles S. Peirce’s concept of abduction. Abduction is the logical operation which introduces a new idea and, as such, is the only source of adaptive and creative growth. For Peirce, it is closely tied to the growth of knowledge via the evolutionary action of sign relations. The thesis shows how these thinkers conceptualised their own version of what I suggest can be understood as this biosemiotic imagination and the implications this has for understanding creativity in nature and culture. For John Henry Newman, it was a common source of inspiration in religion and science. For George Eliot, it lay at the basis of any creative process, natural and cultural, between which it forged a link. Similarly to Eliot, Lady Victoria Welby saw abduction as a signifying process that subtends creativity both in nature and culture.
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Stein, Sebastian. "The objectivity of freedom : a systematic commentary on the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6b709922-9487-4b90-a2b7-9b63c43b0739.
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The introduction (§§1-33) to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is the key to the work’s structure, its argumentative strategy and it functions as a foundation for Hegel’s practical philosophy in general. Its explanatory potential is best realised by situating it within the systematic context of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences and the Science of Logic. This interpretative strategy reveals that for Hegel, the true site of agency is ‘the concept’ and that particular individuals and their arbitrary activity are at best the concept’s ‘appearance’. This does not render their activity ‘false’ but describes how willing and freedom are ‘for us’ as self-conscious subjects that confront an external world. For Hegel, ‘true’ freedom in the sense of ‘self-determination to itself’ resides with the universal and singular concept that negatively unites itself with its objectivity to form what he calls the ‘Idea of the will’ or ‘right’. This interpretation contradicts the mainstream of contemporary Hegel scholarship since its proponents either deny the reality of the universal concept as agent or absolutely differentiate between the concept’s activity (subjective action) and its objective reality (norms, institutions). This prevents the interpreter from appreciating that it is Hegel’s concept that is manifest in form of particular willing subjects and their socio-political context. Since most commentators associate ‘activity’ or ‘freedom’ primarily with particular subjects, their notions of freedom are, by Hegel’s standards, either empty and fail to describe actual willing or they fall short of the standard of ‘true freedom’, viz. ‘self-determination to itself’ because their agents’ freedom depends on something that differs from the agents.1 The present commentary argues that such a dilemma can be avoided by an interpretation that attributes agency to Hegel’s concept. By determining itself to be Idea, the universal concept determines itself (as subject) to itself (as object) and rational agency and rational institutions are grasped as aspects of the same entity. This is what Hegel calls the unconditioned Idea of right or ‘objective freedom’.
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Meszaros, Julia T. "Selfless love and human flourishing : a theological and a secular perspective in dialogue." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ed84f996-fa62-4514-bdd7-0ddb2896b0a8.
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The point of departure of this thesis is derived from a modern tendency to create a dichotomy between selfless love and human flourishing. Modern attempts to liberate the human being from heteronomous oppression and the moral norms promoting this have sometimes led to the conclusion that selfless love is harmful to human flourishing. Such a conclusion has gained momentum also through modernist re-conceptualisations of the self as an autonomous but empty consciousness which must guard itself against determination by the other. In effect, significant thinkers have replaced the notion of selfless love with a call for self-assertion over against the other, as key to the individual person’s well-being. This has been matched by Christian dismissals of the individual’s pursuit of human flourishing. In the face of modern insights into the ‘desirous’ nature of the human being, modern Christian theology has equally struggled to sustain the tension between the traditional Christian notion of selfless or self-giving love and human beings’ desire to affirm themselves and to find personal fulfilment in this world. Strands of Christian theology have, for instance, affirmed a self-surrendering love at the cost of dismissing the individual’s worldly desires entirely. In this thesis, I outline this situation in modern thought and its problematic consequences. With a view to discerning whether selfless love and human flourishing can be re-connected, I then undertake close studies of the theologian Paul Tillich’s and the moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch’s conceptualisations of the self and of love. As I will argue, Tillich’s and Murdoch’s engagement with modern thought leads them to develop accounts of the self, which correspond with understandings of love as both selfless and conducive to human flourishing. On the basis of their thought I thus argue that selfless love and human flourishing can be understood as interdependent even today.
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Atkins, Zohar. "Unframing existence : an ethical and theological appropriation of Heidegger's critique of modernity." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4ddc46cd-b7be-46ad-beb4-5b51db89aaa1.
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This thesis argues that Heidegger’s thought offers crucial insights into the structural challenges that modernity poses to being an ethical and religious person. I argue that these difficulties come down to an instrumentalist conception of truth, a denial or repression of finitude as the condition of meaningfulness, and a philosophical anthropology that is both too subjectivistic and too objectivistic. Yet while Heidegger was good on the diagnosis, he was reluctant to give more than digressive and opaque prescriptions to these problems. My thesis seeks to respond to this lacuna by putting Heidegger’s critical observations in the service of articulating a positive religious ethics. To that end, it seeks to locate—as well as redefine from an ontological perspective—the human dispositions and practices that expose truth in a non-instrumental light, that show finitude as a positive condition of meaningfulness, and that reveal the essence of the human being in non-subjectivist and non- objectivist terms. I argue that these include listening and gratitude—dispositions and practices I claim should form the backbone of any religious ethics, and yet which I also claim should not be limited to those who believe in a personal, theistic God. My thesis contributes to the fields of modern theology and Heidegger Studies in four ways. First, it shows that Heidegger’s critics (such as Levinas and Adorno) are wrong to oppose ontology to ethics. Second, it shows that Heidegger’s critics (such as Marion and Jonas) are wrong to oppose ontology to theology. Third, it shows that Heidegger’s own ambivalence about the ethical and theological relevance of his thought allows for the development of a deeply ethical and theological posture. And fourth, it offers a unique, post-Heideggerian interpretation of gratitude, one in which it is understood as a structure of Dasein that is both “always already” and “not yet” operative.
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Carter, James C. "Moral religion : the later Ricoeur's hermeneutics of ethical life." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a61e7435-46a0-43dc-9dd5-d73c937bd8dd.
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This thesis engages with the later writings of Paul Ricoeur in order to understand his philosophy as a whole. A reconstruction of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of ethical life presents his significant contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion. This hermeneutics aims to elucidate a moral religion that binds humans together universally on the basis of the life they share as capable beings. To facilitate this hermeneutics, I will demonstrate that a selective reading of Ricoeur’s philosophy brings to light the pivotal role of his ‘little ethics’ in bridging his later and earlier works. The capable human (l’homme capable) in the later Ricoeur must be understood in relation to both the ‘little ethics’ and an architectonic of moral religion. Elucidating the aim (telos) of ethical life and the norm (‘moral law’) of moral religion from the ‘little ethics’ points to the significant roles of Aristotle and Kant in Ricoeur’s architectonic. Ricoeur himself defines ‘architectonic’ in Kantian terms as a critical framework, while appropriating Spinoza’s metaphysical conception of a rational striving (conatus) for life in its fullness. Core concepts taken from Spinoza, Aristotle and Kant are implicit in the present reconstruction of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Three dimensions of ethical life emerge in Spinoza’s metaphysics, Aristotle’s anthropology, and Kant’s moral philosophy, giving us Ricoeur’s architectonic. For Ricoeur, the ethical aim is grounded on a metaphysics of human capability, and the demanding nature of ‘the law’ renders religion moral. This religion assumes that the good life is the goal of human striving. But crucially, the thesis will uncover ‘the arrow of the religious’ (la flèche du religieux) as it motivates the capable subject to embrace life with and for others in just institutions. In conclusion, life is revealed as the heart of Ricoeur’s moral religion.
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Krishna, Nakul. "The morality of common sense : problems from Sidgwick." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f2ac036e-115d-4e02-b5a8-cd6ab40f0800.
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Much modern moral philosophy has conceived of its interpretative and critical aims in relation to an entity it sometimes terms 'common-sense morality'. The term was influentially used in something like its canonical sense by Henry Sidgwick in his classic work The Methods of Ethics (1874). Sidgwick conceived of common-sense morality as a more-or-less determinate body of current moral opinion, and traced his ('doxastic') conception through Kant back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the practice of Plato's Socrates before him. The Introduction to this thesis traces the influence of Sidgwick's conception both on subsequent (mis)understandings of Socratic practice as well as on the practice of moral philosophy in the twentieth century. The first essay offers a challenge to Sidgwick's understanding of Socratic practice. I argue that Socrates' questioning of his interlocutors, far from revealing some determinate body of pre-existing beliefs, is in fact a demonstration of the dynamic and partially indeterminate quality of common-sense morality. The value for the interlocutor of engaging in such conversation with Socrates consisted primarily in its forcing him to adopt what I term a deliberative stance with respect to his own practice and dispositions, asking himself not 'what is it that I believe?' but rather, 'what am I to believe?' This understanding of Socratic practice gives us a way of reconciling the often puzzling combination of conservative and radical elements in Plato's dialogues. The second essay is a discussion of the reception of Sidgwick's conception of ethics in twentieth-century Oxford, a hegemonic centre of Anglophone philosophy. This recent tradition consists both of figures who accepted Sidgwick's picture of moral philosophy's aims and those who rejected it. Of the critics, I am centrally concerned with Bernard Williams, whose life's work, I argue, can be fruitfully understood as the elaboration of a heterodox understanding of Socratic practice, opposed to Sidgwick's. Ethics, on this conception, is a project directed at the emancipation of our moral experience from the many distortions to which it is vulnerable. Williams's writings in moral philosophy, disparate and not entirely systematic, are unified by these emancipatory aims, aims they share with strains of psychoanalysis except in that they do not scorn philosophical argument as a tool of emancipation: in this respect among others, I claim, they are fundamentally Socratic.
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Crisp, Rosalind. "Solo work." Thesis, View thesis, 1998. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/29103.
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Imagine a lilly pond. Each lilly floating independently. The individual lilly is framed by the water that surrounds it. The lilly pond becomes apparent by the presence and absence of lillies. This thesis is a compilation of diverse floating articles. Not everything has been covered. I hope that the gaps revealed illuminate the edges of the work. Different writing styles have been adopted in an attempt to get closer to the complexity and ephemerality of the research -- research that has taken place in the dancing body. In presenting the written material this way, I wish to take the reader on a journey -- an experiential journey into the dance -- one that is 'like' the dance rather than an extracted description of it. I hope that the reader will 'come to their senses' and feel the materiality of the dance as I have studied it and known it in my body and with-in the bodies of the other two dancers. The framework for the research in the body has been the integration of the histories collected in our bodies -- practices, trainings, country and culture -- all of which continue to slip and slide, continually re-forming themselves and re-inventing the dancing and not-dancing bodies that we are.
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Birkett, Edward John. "The tensions of modernity : Descartes, reason and God." Thesis, View thesis View thesis, 2000. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/399.
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Reason, material objects, God, mind and body are all interrelated in Descartes' philosophy. The misapprehension of one will lead to misunderstandings in all of them. They are bound together by being part of the one God given secure universe. This allows Descartes to put forward the understanding of the universe as being one in which rational science was possible and indubitable certainty achievable. Because they are all organically related in the one meaningful system, the essential natures of these things which Descartes discovers flow into one another in their actual existence in the world. Accepting the picture of the universe as a rational place where certainty is possible, is part of what defines much of modernity as modernity. Since this is one way of ensuring certainty, modernity demands that a thing's essence should reflect its manner of existence. However this leads to modernity demanding of Descartes' philosophy that it reflect this same structure. Modernity then reads Descartes as trying to present such a picture, and consequently finds that Descartes' arguments do not work. Because Descartes' universe is God's universe, he is able to offer to humanity a very strong form of autonomy. But modernity prefers to have a less powerful form of autonomy which is independent of God, but which makes itself a servant to nature and the community of reason. This is a result of the price of entry into the rational universe through Descartes' method of doubt. As a consequence of modernity's reworking of Descartes' understanding of autonomy, and their demand that a thing's essence should exactly reflect its mode of existence, irreducible tensions develop in modernity. These are particularly obvious in the case of the relationship between science, reason and God, and between the mind and the body. This thesis addresses these tensions
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Earlie, Paul Joseph. "Derrida's return to Freud : from phenomenology to politics." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c536ba17-c846-45d1-8a57-a39a29bbd56e.
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This thesis identifies and explores a ‘return to Freud’ in the work of Jacques Derrida. Resemblances between Derrida’s method of deconstruction and the therapeutic procedure of psychoanalysis have long been a source of debate among critics. Is deconstruction little more than a psychoanalytic reading of the history of philosophy, or is Freud a Derridean avant la lettre? Revealing this dilemma to be a false one, this thesis challenges major interpreters of Derrida such as Jonathan Culler and Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak. By developing Derrida’s well-known yet little understood concept of différance, it argues that this dilemma stems from an inadequate understanding of Derrida’s treatment of time. The structure of temporality implied by différance entails that the meaning of the past is continually reconstituted in its relationship to an ever-evolving present. Far from dissolving the importance of Freud’s contribution, this structure allows Derrida to circumvent nebulous notions of ‘influence’ and ‘indebtedness’ while still engaging psychoanalysis as a key theoretical resource in his own project of deconstruction. A productive engagement with psychoanalytic theory is shown to inform every major stage of the philosopher’s career, from his early phenomenological work to his later reflections on the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Derrida repeatedly turns to Freud as a crucial interlocutor in interrogating a number of philosophical problems encountered in his own work. These problems include the nature of time, space, and memory; the role of the fictive in scientific discourse; the question of the archive; the interdependence of the psyche and technology; and the relationship between politics and the unconscious. At a theoretical level, this thesis provides a detailed account of Derrida’s notion of spacing, arguing that the unconditional belatedness entailed by différance calls us to a difficult, dual responsibility: both towards the legator of an inheritance (that is, towards the textual legacy Freud has bequeathed to us) and towards the unforeseeable future contexts in which this inheritance will require transformation. The discourse of deconstruction, it concludes, enacts a careful negotiation of these two demands.
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Symons, Suellen. "Rememories /." View thesis, 1997. http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20030909.155641/index.html.
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Kim, Kyung-ah. "Yin-Yang O-Hang and technological art /." View thesis, 1997. http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20030905.102630/index.html.
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Salam, Abdallah. "Perfect and imperfect rights, duties and obligations : from Hugo Grotius to Immanuel Kant." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:882da778-1126-4909-b38b-5ada51cc8e78.
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In this doctoral thesis, Kant's distinction between perfect and imperfect duties is examined. The thesis begins with an exploration of how the distinction originates and evolves in the writings of three of Kant's most prominent natural law predecessors: Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, and Christian Wolff. The thesis then moves on to Kant's own writings. It is argued that Kant draws the perfect-imperfect distinction in as many as twelve different ways, that these ways are not entirely consistent with one another, and that many of them, even taken by themselves, do not hold up to scrutiny. Furthermore, it is argued that Kant's claim that perfect duties always trump imperfect duties - which can be referred to as "the priority claim" - is not actually supported by any one of the ways in which Kant draws the perfect-imperfect distinction. After this critical reading of Kant's writings, the thesis then switches gears and a more "positive" project is attempted. It is argued that the perfect-imperfect distinction, even though it does not support the priority claim, is not altogether normatively neutral or uninteresting. In particular, for some of the ways in which the distinction is drawn, it is shown that the distinction yields the following normative implication: Sometimes perfect duties override imperfect duties and all other times there is no priority one way or the other. Finally, it is explained that this normative implication - which can be referred to as the "privilege claim" - translates into the following practical directive: When there is a conflict between a perfect duty and an imperfect duty, sometimes one must act in conformity with the former duty and all other times one is free to choose which of the two duties to act in conformity with. This practical directive represents the ultimate finding of this thesis.
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Cuff, Simon L. "Paul's 'new moment' : the reception of Paul in Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:aac1f812-2d61-4fa0-ac8d-e107b174e7f2.
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This thesis traces the ‘New Moment’ in Pauline reception in the writings of Alain Badiou, Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Žižek. It explores how the Pauline epistles are read and feature in their thought. An answer to the question, 'why Paul?' prompts reflection on what it is to read and understand the Apostle. An introduction sets out the writers of this ‘New Moment’ [Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, Stanislas Breton, as well as Badiou, Eagleton and Žižek] before isolating the figures of this study. The reception of this ‘moment’ by mainstream New Testament studies is considered, and with it the charge of ‘appropriation’. The concept of ‘appropriation’ is explored, and a definition arrived at, for the purpose of evaluating the readings we will go on to discover. As part of this notion of ‘appropriation’, the turn to Gadamer in recent New Testament study is surveyed. We suggest another potential hermeneutical approach that derives from Gadamer is possible. Thus, the object of this study is both an instance of, and means by which to critique the understanding of, New Testament Wirkungsgeschichte. Each of our thinkers is then considered in turn. The outline for each chapter is the same. A brief introduction to the figure with bibliographical background salient to his Pauline reading precedes some textual examples indicative of that reading. We then move to analyse the manner of that reading and certain conceptual problems which are revealed in the course of the engagement with Paul. The conclusion analyses the approaches, and reasons for turning, to Paul on the part of these thinkers. Salient differences between each thinker's reading are noted and the charge of appropriation is evaluated afresh. The implications of such readings for conventional biblical criticism are considered, and the success of an approach which explores a Gadamerean-inspired interest in reception in the manner adopted by this thesis is judged.
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Symons, Suellen. "Rememories/imagetexts." Thesis, View thesis, 1997. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/731.
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This research paper places the three Research Projects 2 DIVINE, CARNIVAL, and HER STORIES: THE WENTWORTH WOMEN against the background of memory, remaking history, play, as well as hermeneutics. It is argued that the understanding of a work of art involves participation in its meaning by the audience which is not so much a mere receiver of information as a catalyst of the work's content. This Research Paper also attempts to place the three Research Projects, which when combined are entitled REMEMORIES/IMAGETEXTS, into a feminist remaking of history (in Barbara Kruger's sense), realigning the male-oriented histories with a female presence. Questioning the 'historical document' as the authority on history, and giving alternative versions of the life of Jeanne d'Arc and the life of Sarah Cox Wentworth are some of the concerns in the Research Projects. How these three Research Projects came to be linked is that each was originally exhibited during 1995 for the Twentieth Anniversary of International Women's Year, in venues from Penrith to Paddington. Their making spans many years, and in essence comes down to a fascination with the portrayal of women throughout history.That our images of women originally derived from how women were portrayed in carnival is one of the emerging themes, and that there are a number of different memories of specific events, depending on who is remembering them, and what their (hidden) agenda entails. In moving between time zones, questioning the portrayal of 'woman as sign', and subverting the traditional sign of woman, the artist puts forward the argument that women are the producers of signs and thus not merely objects as represented by signs
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Sandel, Adam Emanuel Adatto. "Prejudice reconsidered : a defense of situated understanding." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:71727a32-9922-44c4-b926-e5fa1f4679aa.
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My dissertation draws upon ancient political philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) and 20th century hermeneutic thought (Heidegger and Gadamer) to argue that our judgment and understanding is always “situated” within a world, or horizon, shaped by the projects, practices, and traditions in which we are engaged. This means that judgment never starts from scratch. The exercise of judgment, in evaluating competing arguments in politics or law, in trying to understand a philosophical text, in deliberating about how to act in this or that circumstance, is always informed by preconceptions and commitments that we have not justified in advance. In this sense, our judgment is always “prejudiced.” But contrary to a familiar way of thinking, the prejudicial aspect of judgment is not some regrettable limitation. Certain prejudices, I argue, can actually enable good judgment rather than hinder it. The primary goal of the dissertation is to clarify the concept of prejudice and to draw out its implications for politics, ethics, and philosophy. What does it mean to reason from within the world? What room does such reasoning allow for human agency and political reform? By drawing upon Heidegger’s notion of “Being-in-the-World” and Gadamer’s notion of “horizon,” I develop the idea that our life circumstance is an intelligible perspective that informs our deliberation and judgment. Moreover, our life perspective provides the basis for a kind of situated agency. After elaborating the situated conception of understanding, I show that it is implicit in Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom (phronesis) and in Plato’s notion of dialectic. My goal is to bring out a link that is often overlooked between their philosophy and 20th century hermeneutic thought. By reading each in light of the other, we gain a deeper understanding of what it means to reason from within the perspective of our lives.
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Trimcev, Eno. "Rethinking political foundations with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:84a0c67a-a581-4011-84c6-b6b42097654b.
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The problem of understanding political foundings is situated at the nexus between political philosophy and political science. This thesis rethinks founding by asking both the philosophical question of how political order comes into being, and the political science question of how to understand particular founding moments. These two questions stimulate and structure a dialogue between the works of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. The approach of founding in all three has a common starting point: they begin from ordinary experience and outline a political science that is mindful of the phenomenality of political life. I show that Strauss’s return to ordinary experience is partial. By limiting political life to the normative claims raised in it and submitting them to philosophical judgment, Strauss moves too quickly beyond political phenomena. His account of founding, as a consequence, vacillates between understanding particular founding acts and conceiving the perfect founding moment in abstract thought. Arendt’s work decisively shifts the problem on the side of practical understanding. Yet, her ontological account of action as appearance subtly displaces her concern for understanding historical actions. I move away from approaching historical foundings as a mode of appearing in the world, by recovering an account of action as experience. On that basis, I suggest a hermeneutics of experience which approaches foundings in light of the quest for meaning. With Voegelin founding is recovered as a symbol that exists only in the quest of understanding. Founding occurs in the experience of struggle to restore a reality that has become symbolically opaque. This experience is shared by the philosopher and the political actor; therefore to understand moments of founding requires the interweaving, and not separation, of political philosophy and political science. At the end, the quest of understanding founding moments is neither derivative, nor preparatory, but encompassing the philosophical question of how order comes into being.
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Kirkpatrick, Matthew D. "Kierkegaard and a religionless Christianity : the place of Søren Kierkegaard in the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3d3d8d6b-0fa4-41f8-89e9-ded63ac8c291.
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The central aim of this thesis is to analyse the influence of Kierkegaard on Bonhoeffer. This relationship has been almost universally recognized. And yet this area has received no comprehensive study, limited within the secondary literature to footnotes, digressions, and the occasional paper. Furthermore, what little literature there is has been plagued by several stereotypes. First, discussion is often limited to Discipleship. Second, Kierkegaard has been identified as an individualist and acosmist who rejected the church, leading many to consider Bonhoeffer the ecumenist and ecclesiologist as selectively agreeing with Kierkegaard, but ultimately rejecting his overall stance. This thesis will argue that neither stereotype is true, and suggest (a), that Kierkegaard’s influence can be found throughout Bonhoeffer’s work, and (b) that although a more stereotypical perspective may be present in SC, by the end of his life Bonhoeffer had gained a far deeper understanding across the breadth of Kierkegaard’s work. The importance of this thesis is not simply to ‘plug the gap’ of scholarship in this area, but also to suggest the importance of analysing Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer together. This will focus on three specific areas. First, alongside the influence of Kierkegaard on Bonhoeffer, it will argue for the importance of using Bonhoeffer as an interpretive tool for understanding Kierkegaard. This thesis will show how Bonhoeffer adopted and adapted Kierkegaard’s work to his own situation, forcing Kierkegaard to answer questions that were not present during his own life. In this way, we are led to compare Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer as individuals, and not simply their static declarations. Secondly, against the tendency to consider Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer’s final attacks on Christendom as unfortunate endings to otherwise profound careers, it will be suggested that these attacks stand as the fulfilment of their earlier thought. It will be argued that despite their different contexts, both Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer were led to the same conclusions concerning Christendom. Thirdly, given Kierkegaard’s submission to indirect communication and his somewhat 'prophetic' proclamations concerning one who will come after him and reform, this thesis will ask whether Bonhoeffer stands as something of a fulfilment to Kierkegaard’s thought in the guise of a Kierkegaardian ‘reformer’.
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Doney, Tania Francine. "Freedom and the body : Sartre and Beauvoir on embodied consciousness." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4a16d6f2-d945-4bc6-bf3c-44698c88381c.
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Jean-Paul Sartre is not traditionally thought of as a philosopher of the body and, until very recently, little critical attention has been paid to this aspect of his work. Nevertheless, since 2005 a number of articles have begun to appear which suggest that Sartre‘s account of the body in L’Être et le Néant may be worthy of more consideration than it has thus far received – perhaps most notably Joseph Catalano‘s 2005 article suggesting that the chapter on the body is central to a proper understanding of Sartre‘s philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir is often criticised for her writing on the body in Le Deuxième Sexe, with much of the criticism suggesting that Beauvoir‘s use of existential philosophy is to blame for her failings. Yet Toril Moi argues that Beauvoir‘s claim that the body is a situation, a claim that arises from existential philosophy, is a valuable contribution to feminism. In light of these developments, it seems pertinent to look again at Sartre‘s chapter on the body in L’Être et le Néant and at Beauvoir‘s work to try to understand exactly what is meant by the body as a situation and how this concept relates to Sartre and Beauvoir‘s well-known ideas on freedom and responsibility. The aim of this thesis is to examine the importance of the chapter on the body in L’Être et le Néant and to demonstrate its relevance to Sartre‘s philosophy as a whole, to look at how Beauvoir has used Sartre‘s philosophy in her own writing and to consider the relevance of that philosophy to more contemporary writing on the body. The thesis will focus on L’Être et le Néant, Le Deuxième Sexe, and La Vieillesse with references also made to both authors‘ fictional works, to Beauvoir‘s autobiographical writings, and to more contemporary work on the body.
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Spiers, Emily. "'Alpha-Mädchen sind wir alle' (we're all Alpha Girls) : subjectivity and agency in contemporary pop-feminist writing in the US, Britain and Germany." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:21fd8597-82a0-40e7-9a21-fdcd3da27641.
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This thesis investigates models of subjectivity and agency in early twenty-first-century pop-feminist fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction accounts of subjectivity (Haaf, Klingner and Streidl, 2008; Valenti, 2007; Moran, 2011 et al.) draw on poststructuralist notions of incoherent, performative identity, yet retain the assumption that there remains a sovereign subject capable of claiming full autonomy. The pop-feminist non-fictions reflect a neoliberal model of entrepreneurial individualism where self-optimisation replaces an ethics of intersubjective relations. In exploring the theoretical blind-spots of pop-feminist claims to female autonomy and agency, this thesis sets out to demonstrate that pop-feminist non-fiction lacks an actual feminist politics. My methodology is comparative and primarily involves the close reading of a corpus of pop-feminist texts from the Anglo-American and German contexts. I utilize my corpus of current essayistic pop-feminist texts as a fixed point of reference, deeming them to be representative of a pervasive kind of contemporary postfeminist thinking. Through the employment of the first-person narrative voice the literary authors explore how subjects are constituted by discourse but also how the subject may shape her choices/actions. Subjectivity becomes a generative capacity characterised by expansive and self-reflexive negotiations between self and other. The fictional portrayal of this process prompts an imaginative and extrapolative process of identification and dis-identification in the reader which opens up a site for the exercise of critique. Through my close readings of the novels (Riley, 2002; Walsh, 2004; Thomas, 2004; Grether, 2006; Roche, 2008; Bronsky, 2008; Baum, 2011; Hegemann, 2010) I develop a model of intersubjective dependency, drawing on Judith Butler’s later work (1994, 1999, and 2005), and identify versions of this model in the 1980s-1990s work of American postmodern feminist writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill. My thesis reveals hitherto un-discussed lines of literary and critical influence on the contemporary British and German novelists emanating from Acker and Gaitskill, suggesting that their texts may be viewed as representative of a critical pop-literary interest, spanning approximately three decades and shifting across cultural contexts, in the encounter between female subjectivity and agency in the face of late-capitalist manifestations of social constraint.
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Dunlop, Joseph. "La Relève : Catholic intellectuals in Quebec, 1930-1950." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:87a80921-1aa8-4324-9afa-000b2572581b.
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This study traces the intellectual and political itinerary of the review La Relève, an influential cultural journal in 1930s and ‘40s Quebec, in order to explore broader trends within francophone Catholicism in the middle decades of the twentieth century. La Relève enjoyed a unique role as a propagator of French Catholic thought in Quebec due to its close ties with the prominent French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. In the early ‘30s, members of the Relève group espoused a militant Catholicism with conservative-minded nationalist sympathies. The group’s encounter with Maritain in October 1934, however, moved La Relève towards a more communitarian Catholicism which was open to social and religious pluralism. During the later ‘30s, the Relèvistes would display a new interest in democratic forms of politics, reflecting the larger ‘democratic turn’ evident amongst many francophone Catholic intellectuals. In examining this shift, this study argues that the progressive Catholicism embraced by La Relève remained strongly rooted in longstanding Catholic social teachings and mentalities, thereby shedding light upon the political trajectory of the larger French Catholic Revival during this period. The emergence of a ‘Left’ Catholicism in France and Quebec was the result of a gradual and often contradictory process in which new attempts to engage with pluralism, democracy and human rights were heavily influenced by the traditionally anti-liberal and anti-individualistic perspectives of Catholic social and political thought. This study also examines the social and cultural environment of Catholic intellectual engagement in Quebec during this period, focusing upon the role played by friendship in defining the experiences of the Relève circle during the 1930s and ‘40s. Initially the product of a close-knit and often cliquish group of former schoolmates, La Relève provided a forum for masculine solidarity and shared intellectual and religious pursuits. The Relèvistes' conception of friendship expanded over the course of the decade, reflecting their exposure to the ideas of the French Catholic intelligentsia, for whom the idea of friendship signalled a wider community bound together by common religious, social and political goals. During the war years, the Relève group came to play a new role within the larger francophone Catholic intellectual community, founding a publishing company which printed numerous anti-fascist Catholic authors. In the postwar period, however, contact with the European intellectual milieu diminished, as the review closed in 1948 and the Relèvistes embraced new trends in Catholic thought which ultimately distanced them from Maritain. However, intellectual engagement with French Catholic thought would continue on in Quebec through the review Cité libre, which would play an important role in shaping politics and society in Quebec and Canada during the later twentieth century.
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Herzog, Lisa Maria. "Inventing the market. Smith, Hegel and political theory." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:39eb8122-b2a3-4070-8fc2-12ed6e5568cc.
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This thesis analyses the constructions of the market in the thought of Adam Smith and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and their relevance for contemporary political philosophy. Combining the history of ideas with systematic analysis, it contrasts Smith’s view of the market as a benevolently designed ‘contrivance of nature’ with Hegel’s view of the market as a ‘relic of the state of nature.’ In two interpretative chapters these two constructions of the market are discussed within the contexts of Smith’s and Hegel’s thought. In three systematic chapters, the relevance of these different constructions for the problems of identity and community, social justice, and different notions and dimensions of freedom is discussed. The first of these chapters argues that the conceptualization of the labour market as a market place for human capital or as a locus for the development of a professional ethos has a deep impact on how one thinks about the relation between individual and community, cutting across the debate between liberals and communitarians. The second systematic chapter shows that the market can be seen either as an instrument for addressing issues of social justice or as an institution against which social justice needs to be realized: for Smith, who thinks that free markets reward virtue and equalize income, it is the former, whereas for Hegel, who holds that free markets lead to unpredictable results and exacerbate social differences, it is the latter. The third systematic chapter addresses the relation between different aspects of liberty and the market. It shows that the market offers both chances and risks for liberty in the sense of individual autonomy, and analyses the relations of the market to positive liberty in a political sense. The concluding chapter draws some broader methodological lessons, arguing for a closer integration of economic and political theory at a ‘less-ideal’ level.
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Tang, Jinhong. "Educational reform and the emergence of modern libraries in China with special reference to the Metropolitan Library of Beijing, 1909-1937." Thesis, View thesis, 2004. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/23658.
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This thesis examines the rise of modern Chinese libraries between the1840s and the 1930s in the context of educational reform, intellectual development, national regeneration and state building. It focuses on how educational reform and other factors influenced the way in which modern libraries came into being in China. It argues that the establishment of modern libraries in China was a complicated and long process, as China followed neither the “industrialisation and democracy” model of the United States nor the “modernisation” model of Meiji Japan. Modern libraries were introduced into China in the closing years of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) to facilitate educational reform and national regeneration. The Nationalist government, established in 1928, further stimulated the expansion of Chinese libraries as part of the government’s state building efforts. This thesis examines the Chinese case in the emergence of modern libraries: the case of “underdevelopment” with distinctive Chinese characteristics. To explore the factors that contributed to the underdevelopment of modern Chinese libraries as they emerged, this thesis employs a case study of the Metropolitan Library of Beijing—the predecessor of the National Library of China—between 1909 and 1937 in terms of its formation, early development, and problems. This analysis reveals that both the macro and micro factors conducive to library development were not present in China before the 1920s. Even when the conditions improved during the 1920s and the 1930s, especially during the Nanjing Decade, the development of modern Chinese libraries was far from satisfactory for various reasons, with low library consciousness being an important one. The Conclusion of this thesis outlines the continuing impediment of low library consciousness in China today.
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Ranjbar, Reza. "La perception de la philosophie occidentale moderne dans les écrits des penseurs iraniens de l’époque qâjâr." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017USPCA152.
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En Iran, la philosophie a deux histoires distinctes : l’une, dans laquelle les Iraniens jouèrent un rôle considérable, est liée à la connaissance de la pensée et plus généralement des sciences grecques, au début de la période islamique ; l’autre est liée à la rencontre des Iraniens avec l’Occident moderne et à ses conséquences culturelles, sociales et politiques. À ce moment-là, certains d’entre eux, fascinés par la puissance militaire, la discipline sociale et les innovations technologiques européennes, commencent à réfléchir sur la situation de l’Europe et à la comparer à la société iranienne. La traduction des ouvrages occidentaux suscite une réflexion sur cette comparaison. Dans cette histoire, alors que les philosophes traditionnels iraniens continuent à transmettre ce qu’ils ont reçu, certains auteurs et traducteurs se sont intéressés aux idées philosophiques modernes et parfois par la philosophie elle-même. Mais les uns et les autres n’en ont pas la même perception. À côté de rares penseurs qui évoquent la philosophie en tant que telle, on peut distinguer les deux autres groupes : l’un, enrichi intellectuellement dans un milieu traditionnel, perçoit et, plus important, développe la philosophie comme une donnée immuable conforme à la fois au régime despotique et au milieu religieux. L’autre la perçoit, sous l’influence de la pensée des Lumières, comme un engagement politique et social. Les auteurs des ouvrages critiques, qui forment ce groupe, présupposent que la philosophie est en réalité le fondement de la « civilisation » et du « progrès » en Europe. Ils attendent donc que la philosophie joue le même rôle culturel, social et politique en Iran, une attitude tout-à-fait nouvelle. L’idée de progrès de l’époque de Lumières devient en effet le « Progrès », et on la considère comme le but, non seulement de la connaissance philosophique, mais de toute connaissance et de toute production intellectuelleHistorically, the Iranians have encountered Western philosophy in two distinct streams. One happened at the beginning of the Islamic period when the Iranians got to know the Greek thought and, more generally, the Greek sciences. This made them play a considerable role in the philosophical movement of the Islamic realm. The second stream happened after the Iranians encountered the modern West and its cultural, social and political consequences. At that point, some of them were fascinated by European military power, social discipline and technological innovations. Comparing their own society with all its problems to the new Western world and its developments, they tried to know what was making such a huge difference. At this time, while traditional Iranian philosophers were busy transmitting what they had been taught, some translators and authors got into new philosophical ideas, or even the entire modern philosophy. But their perceptions of philosophy were not identical. Besides those who addressed philosophy as it really is, two other groups can be distinguished: Those who had been raised in a traditional environment, understood and more importantly reflected philosophy as a sustainable and motionless truth, in correlation with despotic power and religious norms. The other group, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, understood it as a political and social commitment. Authors of the critical works who were forming the second group, considered philosophy as the foundation of the modern civilization and development in Europe. Thus, they expected philosophy to have a similar effect on the Iranian society: a completely new attitude! For them, the idea of progress, which came through the influence of the Enlightenment and was followed by 19th century positivism, not only became “Progress” and the ultimate goal of philosophy, but also the goal of any intellectual activity
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Evans, David B. "Scepticism at sea : Herman Melville and philosophical doubt." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a842c507-0efc-4b73-9aaa-ccc36f54a7a5.
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This thesis explores Herman Melville’s relationship to sceptical philosophy. By reading Melville’s fictions of the 1840s and 1850s alongside the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I seek to show that they manifest by turns expression, rebuttal, and mitigated acceptance of philosophical doubt. Melville was an attentive reader of philosophical texts, and he refers specifically to concepts such as Berkeleyan immaterialism and the Kantian “noumenon”. But Melville does not simply dramatise pre-existing theories; rather, in works such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he enacts sceptical and anti-sceptical ideas through his literary strategies, demonstrating their relevance in particular regions of human experience. In so doing he makes a substantive contribution to a philosophical discourse that has often been criticised – by commentators including Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift – for its tendency to abstraction. Melville’s interest in scepticism might be read as part of a wider cultural response to a period of unprecedented social and political change in antebellum America, and with this in mind I compare and contrast his work with that of Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau. But in many respects Melville’s distinctive and original treatment of scepticism sets him apart from his contemporaries, and in order to fully make sense of it one must range more widely through the canons of philosophy and literature. His exploration of the ethical consequences of doubt in The Piazza Tales, for example, can be seen to anticipate with remarkable precision the theories of twentieth-century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. I work chronologically though selected prose from the period 1849-1857, paying close attention to the textual effects and philosophical allusions in each work. In so doing I hope to offer fresh ways of looking at Melville’s handling of literary form and the wider shape of his career. I conclude with reflections on how Melville’s normative emphasis on the acknowledgement of epistemological limitation might inform the practice of literary criticism.
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van, der Lugt Mara. "'Pierre, or the ambiguities' : Bayle, Jurieu and the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:02bbbbda-7fa3-4c1c-af05-99842a9217e0.
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This thesis presents a new study of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1696), with special reference to Bayle’s polemical engagement with the theologian Pierre Jurieu. While recent years have seen a surge of interest in Bayle, there is as yet no consensus on how to interpret Bayle’s ambiguous stance on reason and religion, and how to make sense of the Dictionnaire: although specific parts of the Dictionnaire have received much scholarly attention, the work has hardly been studied as a whole, and little is known about how the Dictionnaire was influenced by Bayle’s polemic with Jurieu. This thesis aims to establish a new method for reading the Dictionnaire, under a dual premise: first, that the work can only be rightly understood when placed within the immediate context of its production in the 1690s; second, that it is only through an appreciation of the mechanics of the work as a whole, and of the role played by its structural and stylistic particularities, that we can attain an appropriate interpretation of its parts. Special attention is paid to the heated theological-political conflict between Bayle and Jurieu in the 1690s, which had a profound influence on the project of the dictionary and on several of its major themes, such as the tensions in the relationship between the intellectual sphere of the Republic of Letters and the political state, but also the danger of religious fanaticism spurring intolerance and war. The final chapters demonstrate that Bayle’s clash with Jurieu was also one of the driving forces behind Bayle’s reflection on the problem of evil; they expose the fundamentally problematic nature of both Bayle’s theological association with Jurieu, and his self-defence in the second edition of the Dictionnaire. The title of this thesis comes from Herman Melville’s novel: ‘Pierre, or the Ambiguities’.
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Hill, Mark J. "Founding and re-founding : a problem in Rousseau's political thought and action." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b41e1417-05c9-4c46-bcad-f0f0bdc83dde.
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protein chemistry, unnatural amino acids, chemical biology, proteomicsThe foundation of political societies is a central theme in Rousseau's work. This is no surprise coming from a man who was born into a people who had their own celebrated founder and foundations, and immersed himself in the writings of classical republicans and the quasi-mythical histories of ancient city-states where the heroic lawgiver played an important and legitimate role in political foundations. However, Rousseau's propositional political writings (those written for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland) have been accused of being unsystematic and running the spectrum from conservative and prudent to radical and utopian. It is this seeming incongruence which is the subject of this thesis. In particular, it is argued that this confusion is born out the failure to recognize a systematic distinction between "founding" and "re-founding" political societies in both the history of political thought, and Rousseau's own work (a distinction in Rousseau which has rarely been noted, let alone treated to a study of its own). By recognizing this distinction one can identify two Rousseaus; the conservative and prudent thinker who is wary of making changes to established political systems and constitutional foundations (the re-founder), and the radical democrat fighting for equality, and claiming that no state is legitimate without popular sovereignty (the founder). In demonstrating this distinction, this thesis examines the ancient concept of the lawgiver, the growth and expansion of the idea leading up to the eighteenth century, Rousseau's own philosophic writings on the topic, and the differing political proposals he wrote for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland. The thesis argues that although there is a clear separation between these two types of political proposals, they remain systematically Rousseauvian.
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Daniel, Dafydd Edward Mills. "Conscience and its referents : the meaning and place of conscience in the moral thought of Joseph Butler and the ethical rationalism of Samuel Clarke, John Balguy and Richard Price." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:427a4657-7701-4c68-bb05-353100ee9a73.
Full textAbstract:
Joseph Butler's moral thought and the ethical rationalism of Samuel Clarke, and his followers, John Balguy and Richard Price, are frequently distinguished, as a result of: (a) Butler’s empirical method (e.g., Kydd, Sturgeon); (b) Butler's emphasis upon self-love in the 'cool hour passage' (e.g., Prichard, McPherson); (c) Butlerian conscience, where, on a neo-Kantian reading, Butler surpassed the Clarkeans by conveying a sense of Kantian 'reflective endorsement' (e.g., Korsgaard, Darwall). The neo-Kantian criticisms of the Clarkeans in (c) are consistent with (d) Francis Hutcheson's and David Hume's criticisms of the Clarkeans; (e) modern criticisms of rational intuitionism that follow Hutcheson and Hume (e.g., Mackie, Warnock); and (f) the contention that the Clarkeans occupied an uneasy position within 'post-restoration natural law theory' (e.g., Beiser, Finnis). (d)-(e) thus underpin the distinction between Butler and the Clarkeans in (a)-(c), where the Clarkeans, unlike Butler, are criticised for representing moral truth as the passive, and self-evident, perception of potentially uninteresting facts. This study responds to (a)-(f), by arguing that Butlerian and Clarkean conscience possessed more than one referent; so that conscience meant an individual's experience of his own judgement and God’s judgement and the rational moral order. As a result of their shared theory of conscience, Butler and the Clarkeans held the same theory of moral development: moral agents mature as they move from obeying conscience according to only one of conscience's referents, to obeying conscience because to do so is to satisfy each of conscience's referents. In response to (a)-(b), this study demonstrates that the Clarkeans agreed with Butler’s method and 'cool hour': natural considerations of individual judgement and self-interest were necessary aspects of the progress towards moral maturity in both Butler and the Clarkeans. With respect to (c), it is argued that Butler and the Clarkeans shared the same understanding of practical moral reasoning as part of their shared understanding of conscience and moral development. This study places limits upon proto-Kantian readings of Butler, and neo-Kantian criticisms of the Clarkeans, while making it inconsistent to divide Butler and the Clarkeans on the basis of Butlerian conscience. In answer to (c)-(f), Clarkean conscience shows that the Clarkeans were neither complacent nor ‘externalists’. Clarkean conscience highlights how the Clarkeans positioned themselves within the tradition of Ciceronian right reason and Thomistic natural law. Consequently, in both Butler and the Clarkeans, the intuition of moral truth was not the passive perception of an 'independent realm' of normative fact, but the active encounter, in conscience, with reason qua the law of God’s nature, human nature, and the created universe.
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Rasmus-Vorrath, Jack Kendrick. "The honesty of thinking : reflections on critical thinking in Nietzsche's middle period and the later Heidegger." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:effe66e1-235d-46a9-a570-b42dceb7e92f.
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This dissertation engages with contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the issue of self-knowing with respect to the notions of honesty and authenticity. Accounting for the two philosophers' developing conceptions of these notions allows a response to interpreters who conceive the activity of self-knowing as a primarily personal problem. The alternative accounts proposed take as a point of departure transitional texts that reveal both thinkers to be engaged in processes of revision. The reading of honesty in Chapters 1 and 2 revolves around Nietzsche's groundwork on prejudice in Morgenröthe (1880-81), where he first problematizes the moral-historical forces entailed in actuating the 'will to truth'. The reading of authenticity in Chapters 3 and 4 revolves around Heidegger's lectures on what motivates one's thinking in Was heißt Denken? (1951-52). The lectures call into question his previous formal suppositions on what calls forth one's 'will-to-have-a-conscience', in an interpretation of Parmenides on the issue of thought's linguistic determination, discussed further in the context of Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950-59). Chapter 5 shows how Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche contributed to his ongoing revisions to the notion of authenticity, and to the attending conceptions of critique and its authority. Particular attention is given to the specific purposes to which distinct Nietzschean foils are put near the confrontation's beginning--in Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche's second Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung (1938), and in the monograph entitled Besinnung (1939) which they prepare--and near its end, in the interpretation of Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-85) presented in the first half of Was heißt Denken? Chapter 6 recapitulates the developments traced from the vantage point of the retrospective texts Die Zollikoner Seminare (1959-72) and the fifth Book of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1887). Closing remarks are made in relation to recent empirical research on the socio-environmental structures involved in determining self-identity.
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Babík, Milan. "In pursuit of salvation : Woodrow Wilson and American liberal internationalism as secularized eschatology." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0ba3fcd9-ecbc-4789-83c9-3fdb1c290aea.
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This work reinterprets the idea of progress at the heart of Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism through the lens of secularization theory, which holds that modern philosophies of progress stand on religious foundations and represent secularized vestiges of biblical eschatology. Previous applications of this insight reveal a selective pattern: Whereas totalitarian and illiberal narratives of progress such as Nazism and Marxism-Leninism have received lavish attention and spawned extensive political religions literature, liberal progressivism has been ignored. This dissertation rectifies this neglect. Initial chapters present the biblical conception of history as the myth of salvation, introduce secularization through the writings of Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg, respectively its principal proponent and main critic, and test the limits of the concept to confirm its applicability to liberal progressivism. The main part aims secularization theory at Wilson’s idea of progress in the broader context of American liberal thought. From the 17th-century Puritan vision of a “city upon a hill” to the 19th-century doctrine of “manifest destiny”, biblical eschatology defined the way Americans envisioned history and their role in it, giving rise to a sort of liberal-republican millennialism. Wilson was no exception: Considering faith essential to authentic knowledge, he regarded history as a providential process, the United States as a divinely appointed redeemer nation, and himself as a Christian statesman performing God’s work in a fallen world. His foreign policy was fundamentally a religious mission to transform international relations according to the Bible, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of salvation. The dissertation demonstrates the eschatological foundations of his statecraft through specific examples and draws attention to their illiberal and totalizing implications. Final passages note the enduring relevance of Wilson’s principles and, based on their reinterpretation in this work, reflect critically on their suitability as a guide for future American foreign policy.
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Pryor, Sally. "Extending integrationist theory through the creation and analysis of a multimedia work of art : postcard from Tunis." Thesis, View thesis, 2003. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/746.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis consists of the production of an inter-active computer-based artwork, an analysis of its research outcomes, and an exploration of the theoretical issues that influenced the artistic practice. The artwork, Postcard from Tunis, is an Integrationist exploration of writing and its transformation at the human-computer interface. It is set in a personal portrait of Tunis, a city with a rich history of writing. The thesis starts with the theory of writing. The conventional view of real writing as representation of speech is shown to have serious limitations.Postcard from Tunis offers users who are not Arabic-literate the perception that there are actually no fixed boundaries between writing and pictures, as both are based on spatial configurations. User interaction with Postcard from Tunis, particularly rollover activity, creates a variety of dynamic signs that cannot be theorised by a bipartate theory of signs and that transcend a distinction between the verbal and the non-verbal altogether. Postcard from Tunis both extends Integrationist theory into writing and human-computer interaction and also uniquely articulates this integration of activities in a way that is impossible with written words on paper. The research asserts the validity of the Integrationist theory of writing, language and human communication and of uncoupling these from spoken words. A framework is outlined for future Integrationist research into icons and human-computer interaction.
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Panton, James. "Politics, subjectivity and the public/private distinction : the problematisation of the public/private relationship in political thought after World War II." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cb636385-aa16-44d1-abf5-2e835e62665c.
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A critical investigation of the public/private distinction as it has been conceived in Anglo-American political thinking in the second half of the 20th century. A broadly held consensus has developed amongst many theorists that public/private does not refer to any single determinate distinction or relationship but rather to an often ambiguous range of related but analytically distinct conceptual oppositions. The argument of this thesis is that if we approach public/private in the search for analytic or conceptual clarity then this consensus is correct. Against this I propose that a number of the most dominant invocations of the distinction can be understood to express public/private as an irreducibly political dialectic that mediates the relationship between the subjective and objective side of social and political life. By locating these conceptually diverse invocations within a broader and more determinate framework of the historical development and contestation of the boundaries which establish the conditions for subjectivity, as the assertion of political agency, on the one hand, and which demarcate, police and defend these particular boundaries, as part of the objectively given character of social life and institutional organisation, on the other hand, then a more determinate character to public/private can be recognized. I then seek to explore the capacity of this model to capture and explain the peculiar post-war problematisation of public/private amongst a number of new left thinkers in Britain and America.
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Xu, Shuxiang. "Neuron-adaptive neural network models and applications." Thesis, [Campbelltown, N.S.W. : The Author], 1999. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/275.
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Artificial Neural Networks have been widely probed by worldwide researchers to cope with the problems such as function approximation and data simulation. This thesis deals with Feed-forward Neural Networks (FNN's) with a new neuron activation function called Neuron-adaptive Activation Function (NAF), and Feed-forward Higher Order Neural Networks (HONN's) with this new neuron activation function. We have designed a new neural network model, the Neuron-Adaptive Neural Network (NANN), and mathematically proved that one NANN can approximate any piecewise continuous function to any desired accuracy. In the neural network literature only Zhang proved the universal approximation ability of FNN Group to any piecewise continuous function. Next, we have developed the approximation properties of Neuron Adaptive Higher Order Neural Networks (NAHONN's), a combination of HONN's and NAF, to any continuous function, functional and operator. Finally, we have created a software program called MASFinance which runs on the Solaris system for the approximation of continuous or discontinuous functions, and for the simulation of any continuous or discontinuous data (especially financial data). Our work distinguishes itself from previous work in the following ways: we use a new neuron-adaptive activation function, while the neuron activation functions in most existing work are all fixed and can't be tuned to adapt to different approximation problems; we only use on NANN to approximate any piecewise continuous function, while a neural network group must be utilised in previous research; we combine HONN's with NAF and investigate its approximation properties to any continuous function, functional, and operator; we present a new software program, MASFinance, for function approximation and data simulation. Experiments running MASFinance indicate that the proposed NANN's present several advantages over traditional neuron-fixed networks (such as greatly reduced network size, faster learning, and lessened simulation errors), and that the suggested NANN's can effectively approximate piecewise continuous functions better than neural networks groups. Experiments also indicate that NANN's are especially suitable for data simulation
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Bani-Mustafa, Ahmed. "Recursive residuals and estimation for mixed models." Thesis, View thesis, 2004. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/704.
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In the last three decades recursive residuals and estimation have received extensive attention as important and powerful tools in providing a diagnostic test of the structural change and functional misspecification in regression models. Recursive residuals and their relationship with recursive estimation of regression parameters have been developed for fixed effect models. Such residuals and estimation have been used to test the constancy of regression models over time and their usage has been suggested for almost all areas of regression model validation. These recursive techniques have not been developed for some of the more recent generalisations of Linear Models such as Linear Mixed Models (LMM) and their important extension to Generalised Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) which provide a suitable framework to analyse a variety of special problems in an unified way. The aim of this thesis is to extend the idea of recursive residuals and estimation to Mixed Models particularly for LMM and GLMM. Recurrence formulae are developed and recursive residuals are defined.
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Tagourramt, El Kbaich Abdallah. "Los límites del papel de la traducción en el tejido del pensamiento árabe en sus fases clásica y moderna." Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/671828.
Full textAbstract:
Los límites del papel de la traducción en el tejido del pensamiento árabe en sus fases clásica y moderna constituyen el tema principal de la presente investigación. En ambos periodos la traducción desempeñó una función primordial a la hora de transmitir las ideas y moldear los fundamentos del pensamiento árabe. No solo se trata de una mera operación traductora, sino también de un movimiento cultural integrado en los paradigmas del proyecto de la “registrografía” cultural árabe que tuvo lugar en los siglos VIII, IX y X, así como en el proyecto cultural de la nahḍa árabe moderna. Muchos factores ideológicos, políticos, confesionales y lingüísticos condicionaron el desarrollo de ambos proyectos e hicieron que el primero liderase constantemente la vida cultural árabe desde los albores del islam hasta la
época moderna. Por eso, la transmisión al árabe de las ciencias de los antiguos se tuvo que someter al control cultural de los salaf; del mismo modo, la traducción del conocimiento científico innovador elaborado en Europa tuvo que hacer frente a dicho control. Además, la construcción cultural en el ámbito árabe-islámico se hizo bajo la sombra del papel intermediario de otras culturas, como la siríaca y la persa en el periodo clásico o como la francesa y la turco-otomana en la época moderna. Esta diversidad cultural desarrollada entre fuerzas centrípetas y centrífugas generó fenómenos traductológicos como la apropiación del conocimiento o la arabización de los textos objeto de traducción. Asimismo, dio lugar a la aparición de nuevas corrientes como el orientalismo europeo y el occidentalismo árabe, que utilizan la traducción como recurso práctico para definir respectivamente Oriente y Occidente. Siguiendo un método analítico y crítico, esta investigación aborda el estudio de los límites de este complejo proceso traductor para aportar rasgos pertinentes que permiten entender cómo se urdieron los distintos rumbos del pensamiento árabe-islámico en sus fases clásica y moderna, sin perder de vista el patrimonio cultural de los salaf.The limits of the role of translation within the fabric of Arab thought in its classical and modern periods are the primary focus of this study. In both periods, translation proved instrumental in the transmission of ideas and played a key role in shaping the foundations of Arab thought. This was not merely about the activity of translation per se, but also about a cultural movement integrated into the paradigms of two overarching projects: the Arab cultural “registrography” of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, and the later cultural project of the Arab Renaissance or Naḥda. A host of ideological, political, religious and linguistic factors had an important impact on the two projects and led the earlier one to carry on a continuing leadership role in Arab cultural life from the dawn of Islam into the modern era. As a result, the transmission of the sciences of antiquity was necessarily subjected to cultural control by the Salaf, as were later translations of innovative scientific knowledge arriving from Europe. In addition, cultural construction in the Arab–Islamic world took place in the shadow of the intermediary role played by other cultures, such as the Syriac and Persian cultures in the classical period and the French and Ottoman-Turkish cultures in the modern era. This cultural diversity, which developed amid both centripetal and centrifugal forces, produced translation phenomena such as the appropriation of knowledge and the Arabicization of texts in translation. Similarly, it spurred the emergence of new currents of thought, such as European Orientalism and Arab Occidentalism, which employed translation as a practical resource to define the East and West, respectively. The present study, which adopts a critical analytical method, seeks to examine the limits of the complex process of translation in order to identify the traits that are important for understanding how the diverse strands of Arab–Islamic thought fit together in its classical and modern periods without losing sight of the cultural legacy of the Salaf.
تشكل إنجازات وحدود دور الترجمة في النسيج الفكري العربي قديما وحديثا الموضوع الأساسي لهذا البحث. ذلك أنه في كلتا الفترتين لعبت الترجمة دورا رئيسا في نقل الأفكار وفي وضع اللبنات الأساسية للفكر العربي عموما. لا يتعلق الأمر فقط بنقل النصوص من لغة إلى لغة وفقا للمفهوم التقليدي للترجمة، بل بحركة فكرية انخرطت أولا في مشروع التدوين الثقافي العربي خلال العصر الكلاسيكي، الذي يمتد من القرن الثامن الميلادي إلى القرن العاشر، وثانيا في بناء النهضة الثقافية العربية خلال العصر الحديث. ولا شك أن العديد من العوامل الأيديولوجية والسياسية والعقدية واللغوية قد ساهمت في إنجاز المشروعين الفكريين وجعلت من الأول أنموذجا للحياة الثقافية لدى الشعوب الناطقة بالعربية منذ فجر الإسلام إلى العصر الحديث. إذ أن نقل علوم الأوائل قديما أو ترجمة التطور العلمي المنجز في أوروبا حديثا إلى اللغة العربية كان يخضع وجوبا للراقبة الثقافية الممارسَة من طرف رواد السلف.بالإضافة إلى ذلك، يلاحظ أن بناء الثقافة العربية الإسلامية ساهمت فيه أيضا الثقافات الأخرى التي لعبت دور الوساطة اللغوية في الترجمة كالسريانية والفارسية في العصر القديم أو الفرنسية والتركية العثمانية في العصر الحديث. ووسط هذه التجاذبات الناتجة عن التعدد الثقافي، بزغت ظواهر ترجمية تستهدف الأصول لتعريبها أو لتحويلها إلى مكتسبات معرفية. كما ظهرت تيارات فكرية جديدة، كالاستشراق الأوروبي والاستغراب العربي، جعلت من الترجمة عنصرا براغماتيا يُعتمد عليه لتحديد رموز الشرق والغرب.باتباعنا لمنهجية التحليل النقدي، تسعى هذه الأطروحة إلى تقديم دراسة مفصلة لهذا السياق الترجمي المعقد لفهم تطورات النسيج الفكري العربي الإسلامي واتجاهاته قديما وحديثا، وما لعبه من دور في ذلك التراث الثقافي للسلف خلال أبرز مراحله. الكلمات المفتاحيةالفكر العربي، الترجمة ونقد الترجمة، العباسيون، النهضة، الاستشراق، الحضارة الغربية.
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Koh, Jason S. H. "Comparison of the new "econophysics" approach to dealing with problems of financial to traditional econometric methods." Thesis, View thesis, 2008. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/38828.
Full textAbstract:
We begin with the outlining the motivation of this research as there are still so many unanswered research questions on our complex financial and economic systems. The philosophical background and the advances of econometrics and econophysics are discussed to provide an overview of the stochastic and nonstochastic modelling and these disciplines are set as a central theme for the thesis. This thesis investigates the effectiveness of financial econometrics models such as Gaussian, ARCH (1), GARCH (1, 1) and its extensions as compared to econophysics models such as Power Law model, Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) and Tsallis Entropy as statistical models of volatility in US S&P500, Dow Jones and NASDAQ stock index using daily data. The data demonstrate several distinct behavioural characteristics, particularly the increased volatility during 1998 to 2004. Power Laws appear to describe the large fluctuations and other characteristics of stock price changes. Surprisingly, these Power Laws models also show significant correlations for different types and sizes of markets and for different periods and sub-periods of markets. The results show the robustness of Power Law analysis, with the Power Law exponent (0.4 to 2.4) staying within the acceptable range of significance (83% to 97%), regardless of the percentage change in the index return. However, the procedure for testing empirical data against a hypothesised power-law distribution using a simple rank-frequency plot of the data and the data binning process can turn out to be a spurious result for the distribution. As for the stochastic processes such as ARCH (1) and GARCH (1, 1) the models are explicitly confined to the conditional behaviour of the data and the unconditional behaviour has often been described via moments. In reality, it is the unconditional tail behaviour that accounts for the tail behaviour and hence, we have to convert the unconditional tail behaviour and express the models as two-dimensional stochastic difference equation using the processes of Starica (Mikosch 2000). The results show the random walk prediction successfully describes the stock movements for small price fluctuations but fails to handle large price fluctuations. The Power Law tests prove superior to the stochastic tests when stock price fluctuations are substantially divergent from the mean. One of the main points of the thesis is that these empirical phenomena are not present in the stochastic process but emerge in the non-parametric process. The main objective of the thesis is to study the relatively new field of Econophysics and put its work in perspective relative to the established if not altogether successful practice of econometric analysis of stock market volatility. One of the most exciting characteristics of Econophysics is that, as a developing field, no models as yet perfectly represent the market and there is still a lot of fundamental research to be done. Therefore, we begin to explore the application of statistical physics method particularly Tsallis entropy to give a new insights into problems traditionally associated with financial markets. The results of Tsallis entropy surpass all expectations and it is therefore one of the most robust methods of analysis. However, it is now subject to some challenge from McCauley, Bassler et. al., as they found that the stochastic dynamic process (sliding interval techniques) used in fat tail distributions is time dependent.
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Walker, Tanya L. M. "Symmetry-enhancing for a thin film equation." Thesis, View thesis, 2008. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/43978.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is concerned with the construction of new one-parameter symmetry groups and similarity solutions for a generalisation of the one-dimensional thin film equation by the method of symmetry-enhancing constraints involving judicious equation-splitting. Firstly by Lie classical analysis we obtain symmetry groups and similarity solutions of this thin film equation. Via the Bluman-Cole non-classical procedure, we then construct non-classical symmetry groups of this thin film equation and compare them to the classical symmetry groups we derive for this equation. Next we apply the method of symmetry-enhancing constraints to this thin film equation, obtaining new Lie symmetry groups for this equation. We construct similarity solutions for this thin film equation in association with these new groups. Subsequently we retrieve further new symmetry groups for this thin film equation by an approach combining the method of symmetry-enhancing constraints and the Bluman-Cole non-classical procedure. We derive similarity solutions for this thin film equation in connection with these new groups. Then we incorporate nontrivial functions into a partition (of this thin film equation) which has previously led to new Lie symmetry groups. The resulting system admits new Lie symmetry groups. We recover similarity solutions for this system and hence for the thin film equation in question. Finally we attempt to derive potential symmetries for this thin film equation but our investigations reveal that none occur for this equation.
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Rahman, Md Arifur. "On the information content of idiosyncratic equity return variation." Thesis, View thesis, 2007. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/20115.
Full textAbstract:
Research in this thesis deals with some unexplored, or only partially explored, issues relating to the information content of volatility of the idiosyncratic component of asset returns at the firm and industry-level, both in the context of developed and emerging stock markets. Specific issues we have investigated include potential role of idiosyncratic volatility of equity returns for the explanation of future stock market volatility, aggregate economic activity, cross-border information transmission, and fundamental efficiency of stock prices. Chapter 2 of the thesis presents research into the information content of firm and industry-level idiosyncratic volatility, estimated as cross-sectional volatility (CSV), for future market-level volatility in Australia. We find that CSV does contain information beyond what is already contained in the lagged market-level return shocks and has a significant positive relationship with conditional market volatility. Our analysis gives new empirical evidence that the effect of CSV is stronger in relatively stable market conditions than in more volatile market conditions. We also examine how the information content of stock turnover and aggregate company announcements compares with that of CSV, and take a novel data-driven approach to verify whether CSV captures any information about multiple common factor shocks in asset returns. The explanatory power of CSV for future market volatility remains robust even after controlling for the effects of stock turnover, company announcements and omitted factor shocks in returns. These results are in line with the theoretical models relating volatility to the flow of information to the market, and suggest that the amount of information as captured by the firm and industry-level CSV shares a common co-movement with the market-wide information flow.
In Chapter 3, unlike most other studies investigating the role of macroeconomic aggregates in explaining the fluctuations in stock market returns, we consider the possibility of reverse causality, and that using idiosyncratic volatility of industry-level stock returns in the context of Australia. Both the theories of investment and consumption under uncertainty and the models of sectoral reallocation provide rationale for the analysis. By explicitly modeling the cyclical patterns of industry-level volatility and relating it to corresponding cyclical behaviour of macroeconomic variables, we show that industry-level volatility is a leading indicator of the cyclical movements in output growth and inflation in Australia. We find complementary evidence from the multi-step Granger causality test and the impulse response analysis based on a vector autoregression of industry-level volatility, GDP growth, inflation and changes in unemployment rate. However, the forecast error variance decompositions suggest that although the industry-level volatility accounts for a significant fraction of the forecast error of inflation, this explains only a small fraction of output and unemployment uncertainties. Further analysis indicates that industry-level volatility contains better information about the future state of the economy than does aggregate stock market volatility. In Chapter 4, we explore a new but potentially important channel of crossborder information transmission between international stock markets ���� idiosyncratic volatility of stock returns. Specifically, we analyze the role of US and Japanese idiosyncratic volatility in transmitting information across three smaller but advanced Asia-Pacific stock markets – Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. We find that, similar to cross-market first and second moment return correlations, market-wide measures of IV are also highly correlated across countries. The effect of US and Japanese IV information is found to be much stronger on cross-market conditional volatility process than on the returns process. Further, we find significant contemporaneous and dynamic information transmission from IV of the US and Japan to the trading volume of other stock markets. Transmission of IV information, in general, seems to have gained momentum in the period since the Asian crisis of 1997. Overall evidence presented in this chapter is consistent with the interpretation that IV may contain information about some unobservable factors driving international stock market co-movement. In Chapter 5, we make the first attempt to understand the direct relationship between firm-specific variations in returns and firm fundamentals by analyzing firmlevel micro panel data in the context of each of a set of emerging Asian stock markets. After properly accounting for unobserved firm-specific effects, volatility persistence and potential endogeneity bias, we find that firm-specific variation of stock returns is highly correlated with, and is significantly explained by, alternative proxies of firm-specific variation of fundamentals in a majority of the emerging markets in Asia. Further analysis reveals that the observed effect of firm-specific fundamentals variation on returns variation is not indirectly driven by some other factors known to affect stock return volatility, viz., firm size, stock turnover, and leverage. Consistent with the rational approach, these results suggest that stock prices in majority of the Asian emerging markets are not devoid of fundamentals.
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Beech, Robert. "Extensions of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation using Mathematica." Thesis, View thesis, 2009. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/46572.
Full textAbstract:
The aim of this thesis is to investigate the theory of the extensions of the Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation (NLSE), concentrating on the following main points: Developing further analytical techniques and properties under relativistic conditions. This thesis demonstrates numerical techniques that can be used to form numerical codes that can be applied to the very recent need for source and industrial application of laser-driven ion sources for ion implantation. The analytical and numerical evaluations of the nonlinear mechanisms are measured utilising various techniques that include computer packages such as Mathematica(R) [Wolfram 2003]1, Maple™ 9 [2003] and C++© [Strousop 2003]. This project expands the author’s present undergraduate honours research work on the theory of Schrödinger equations. The breaking of light waves: in the course of this research the breaking of light waves was the first new phenomenon to be encountered. The highest authority on this subject [Zakharov and Shabat 1972], Prof. Zakharov, advised me [Zakharov 2004] that this topic was at that time not researched in any detail. It was envisaged that entering more fully into this area of research using Mathematica version 5 [Wolfram 2003], which had been recently released (June 2003) and which is uniquely adapted for such research, would be the most profitable direction to go. The intention was to research the behaviour of radiation from the soliton in respect of the higher order (dispersion) term in the NLSE. This research was expected to reveal its properties and consequences and possibly new ways in which this radiation can be predicted, controlled, eliminated or otherwise profitably manipulated. These results are considered vital to the uses of solitons, particularly in optical fibre telecommunications. Numerical artefacts: At this juncture the direction of the research changed in a way that had not been anticipated. The compilation and execution of Mathematica codes, now advanced to the use of new techniques and iterative methods such as the Split-Step Method, had been anticipated to clearly show the existence of secondary and possibly tertiary radiation attending the soliton. It had also been anticipated that this would confirm the theory that this radiation attended only solitons resulting from the cubic, and odd numbered, higher-order NLSE. The first assumption simply did not materialise and the second was not at all up to expectations. At best, the results coming from this line of investigation could only show that solitons derived from the even numbered, or quadratic higher-order NLSEs were in some ways fundamentally different from the odd numbered or cubic ones. These setbacks all resulted from a phenomenon, hitherto unanticipated as a problem to this program of research, namely ‘numerical artefact’ in Mathematica [Beech and Osman 2005: 1369; See Appendix I Paper 3]. This reduced Paper 3 [ibid] ‘Effects of higher order dispersion terms in the nonlinear Schrödinger Equation’ from a serious contribution in this field to a scathing criticism of the use of iterative methods in computerised mathematics.