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The development of Greek and Roman historiography is difficult to describe. So many ancient histories are lost and those that survive are hardly representative. In this thesis I argue that despite these difficulties some historiographical trends remain discernible, and examine three such fundamental changes to the ancient historian's craft. First, I trace a change in the historian's rhetoric of truthfulness. From the first century BC onwards, historians invoked their lack of partiality in their pursuit of their readers' trust. By contrast, the historians of the fifth and fourth centuries BC highlighted not the absence of any biases but their authorial accuracy. Second, I examine the way in which the 'rise and fall' pattern, found in different forms across Classical Greek historiography, no longer easily applies to the state of Rome. In the histories of Rome, at least from the first century AD, greatness remains dangerous for individuals but no longer for the state. Conceptions of Rome's eternity open up new historiographical possibilities. Third, I argue that comparisons become common in the histories of the Late Roman Republic and Principate. Individuals and events are described as reincarnations of previous ones. Such explicit typologies are rarely found in Classical Greek histories. These historiographical changes call for explanations. The textual and genre-specific approach to ancient historiography, which studies ancient histories with little regard to events outside of the narratives, offers no help. I turn to major historical events, long-term cultural changes, new intellectual movements, and changes specific to the ancient historians and their position within society, to explain the changes to historical narratives identified above. I aim to demonstrate that, and describe in detail how, the concerns and shape of ancient historiography are determined by history.

This study focuses on the collection and interpretation of English material magic by English museums in the modern era. Based on a survey of English amulets in English museums, the thesis addresses the question 'how have museum collections of English popular magic materialised relations between people and things in practice?' Melding two academic perspectives - historical interpretations of English magic and analyses of ethnographic collections - it contributes to both fields of study. Theoretical approaches from material culture studies, museology, anthropology and history are used. Building on four areas of current academic concern - magic, modernity, materiality and museums - the thesis explores four themes: changing attitudes to magic, shifting attitudes to the material world, the growth and definition of academic disciplines, and relationships between amateurism and professionalism. The thesis' temporal scope extends from 1850 to the present, with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when most of the collections were amassed, and on their re-interpretation in the second half of the twentieth century. Taking English amulets as its starting point, the thesis examines why and how these have been juxtaposed with artefacts from the rest of Britain, Europe and the world. It investigates networks of institutions, people, objects and ideas which formed and were formed by the collections. The study pivots around a number of key case studies, both of people who collected and interpreted amulets and of institutions that assembled them. Institutions encompass the Pitt Rivers Museum, Folklore Society, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Brighton Museum, and Museum of Witchcraft and Magic; individuals include General Pitt-Rivers, Edward Burnett Tylor, Frederick Elworthy, Edward Lovett, Henry Balfour, Alfred Cort Haddon, Herbert Toms, Beatrice Blackwood and Cecil Williamson. The thesis concludes that collections of English material magic have materialised relations between people and things in specific and significant ways.

By the 1580s, Western European writers were discussing atheism with increasing urgency. The Greek term ἄθεος and its Latin equivalent atheos had largely fallen out of use since the decline of the Roman Empire. When these terms were readopted in the early sixteenth century, first by writers in France and soon after in Germany, Italy, and the British Isles, they immediately gained currency, becoming central to political, religious, and literary discourses. This thesis examines writing about atheists and atheism in sixteenth-century England from the 1560s to the early seventeenth century. Rather than seeking historical evidence for rising levels of 'real' atheism during this period, this thesis explores the role of literature in 'inventing' atheism as a cultural category. I use 'unbelief' to refer to lack of belief in the existence of God or gods and argue that 'atheism' is a conceptualisation of unbelief explicitly developed to attack and discredit unbelievers. Following an initial survey of the histories of atheism and unbelief, I examine the objectives and rhetorical strategies of three forms of writing in which the development of early modern conceptions of atheism is most visible. Firstly, dialogues with fictive atheists written by John Lyly, George Gifford, and Philip Sidney; secondly, the religious polemics of William Whitaker, William Rainolds, and Henry Smith; and finally, dramatic representations of atheism by Christopher Marlowe. These chapters demonstrate that atheism is a hostile designation of unbelief which emerged in response to post-Reformation anxieties about religious division and the recovery of ancient philosophies of unbelief, such as Epicurean annihilationism and Stoic pantheism. Ultimately, this thesis shows how literary techniques that allow motives and inner convictions to be inferred as 'character' and 'voice' contributed to the emergence of the atheist as a powerfully imagined cultural presence in dialogues, plays, and polemics.

This thesis argues that Martensen should be considered a key interlocutor for Kierkegaard in the debate about how philosophy and theology should relate. It will be shown that whereas Martensen develops what can be termed a dialectic of unity-in-difference, in which the differences between philosophy, theology, and religion enable a higher unity between these spheres, Kierkegaard develops what can be termed a dialectic of similarity-in-dissimilarity, which underlines the incommensurable gap between philosophy and Christianity. However, it will be argued that Kierkegaard’s conception of the relationship as similarity-in-dissimilarity leads to a richer dialogical space between the spheres that keeps the dialectic in continual tension, whereas Martensen’s emphasis on unity and epistemological clarity ultimately leads to a break-down in the dialectic he aims to express, as the philosophical sphere is sublated into the religious standpoint and thereby the dialogue cannot be sustained. In contrast, Kierkegaard’s clear-cut separation of the spheres and insistence on the continued distance between them prevents the reduction of either sphere as their difference and respective integrity remains intact. The question of the proper relationship between philosophy and Christianity thereby helpfully frames the dispute between Kierkegaard and Martensen. Yet this thesis also suggests that the dissimilarity between Martensen and Kierkegaard might be said to consist to some extent in their similarities. Without considering Martensen as a central opponent for Kierkegaard in this debate, our understanding of Kierkegaard’s separation of the philosophical and religious spheres will be impoverished. When viewed in conversation with and, in particular, as polemic against Martensen, we see the full force of the sophistication, innovation, and nuance of Kierkegaard’s formulation of his position.

This thesis examines the intellectual origins of the ideological system underlying the political practices of the Stalinist state. The Stalinist state is understood here as the regime which had superseded the earlier, transitional, Bolshevist state born as a result of the 1917 October revolution. The latter lasted for slightly over ten years. Its successor emerged in the course of a second transitional period which started sometime around late 1927 - early 1928 and came to a close four years later. Each of these two phases of the Soviet project had its own set of distinctive features, and the differences between the two can be observed in all areas of life. While the transition from the Bolshevist to the Stalinist state is well researched, it is, at the same time, insufficiently conceptualized, except in the field of cultural studies, within which this work was done, first and foremost, by Vladimir Paperny and Boris Groys. However, the change was all-embracing and was not limited to matters of culture. It was also sweeping: the revolutionary Marxist ideology, the very ideological foundation of the Bolshevist state, was replaced by something far different. The cornerstone of Stalinist state ideology was the concept of "socialism in one country", which is known to have been first proposed by the German social democrat Georg von Vollmar in 1870. This thesis argues that this core Stalinist idea goes back to more remote times and originates in the political economy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as found in his 1800 treatise "The Closed Commercial State". The thesis traces the route Fichte's ideas travelled through the 19th century: first, from Fichte to Ferdinand Lassalle, then along the perplexed trajectory of the German Social‐Democratic Party's ideological evolution, to the Second International and finally, to post-revolutionary Russia. It was established in the course of research that, contrary to what was previously thought, Stalin was familiar with the abridged Russian translation of Georg von Vollmar's 1880 pamphlet on the "Isolated Socialist State": the copy of this text with numerous marks was found in Stalin's archive. The copy dates from December 1926, when the concept of "Socialism in one country" was already being widely discussed. However, close reading of Vollmar's treatise and Lenin's 1915 article "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe" suggests that while Stalin was drawing upon the sole relevant paragraph from Lenin's article, this paragraph in turn, originates directly from Vollmar. Moreover, close scrutiny of Stalin's marks points to the serious possibility that Vollmar's ideas had a long-term impact on the principles of the Soviet pre-war foreign policy and the relationship between the USSR and the Comintern.

Of late, risks of human extinction (or so-called 'existential risks') have become the target of an emerging field of scientifically serious study. We are now increasingly conversant with increasingly distal and severe futurities. Such a dynamic, of incremental entanglement with futurity, typifies the growing edge of modernity. Yet this dynamic is not itself without a history. Or, we have been being swept up in the future for quite some time now. This thesis attempts to supply the history of the incipience of this dynamic, by interrogating the Enlightenment bases and beginnings of our grasp of human extinction and existential risk. In so doing, it hopes to begin to supply a richly recollective dimension to the field of 'future studies'. Indeed, the story of how we came to be aware of our extinction invokes not only the history of rationality but also the rationality of history, inasmuch as recollecting the idea's Enlightenment provenance unveils study of X-risk to be a question of 'enlightening' in an integral and indissociable sense, which thereby contextualizes today's investigations on the topic as a vital continuation of the as-yet-unfinished project of Enlightenment and its tenacious task for the human race. Accordingly, the thesis argues for the uniquely scientific and modern provenance of the idea of human extinction, as opposed to the perennial tradition of religious eschatology. In short, where apocalypse secures a sense of an ending, extinction anticipates the ending of sense. As different in kind, not degree, they are utterly different in origins. Prospective grasp of our extinction first emerges, in the eighteenth-century, due to the maturation of three key scientific vocabularies. These included the emergence of the geosciences, the consolidation of demography and political arithmetic, and the development of a rigorous and mathematized notion of risk and uncertainty. Suitably, some of the first prognoses upon our extinction emerge from such fields. Yet, these empirical vocabularies were necessary but not sufficient for the foment of future forecast concerning extinction threats. Grasp of existential risk didn't merely require breakthroughs in description of fact alone: it additionally demanded in-step reflections upon the propriety and position of value and reason as such. In other words, we had to first realize the cosmos isn't imbued with inherent justice and value, which required self-reflection upon the nature of normativity as much as ground-level empirical inquiries. Acknowledgment that our values would not be persistent and ongoing features of the natural world independently of our stewardship and guardianship of them was requisite before we could be at all motivated to preemptively protect them against an extra-judicial nature. In short, we had to discover that sapient value is cosmically precarious before we could appreciate that it was cosmically precious, and, through this, be summoned to the modernity-defining tasks of prediction, mitigation, and strategizing. This. then, was the incipience of our hyper-modern tendency to become incrementally entangled in the future. Insofar as extinction therefore required philosophical reflection as much as empirical investigation, Immanuel Kant emerges as a key figure throughout. It was Kant, after all, who influentially defined Enlightenment itself as humanity's progressive undertaking of responsibility for itself: and it is the conviction of this thesis that today's increasing awareness and sensitivity to existential risk is just part and parcel of this still-ongoing task and trajectory. For, one is only responsible for oneself to the extent that one is receptive to the perils one faces, and, thereby, is in the first place motivated to become responsive to such hazards. And, in this sense, it ultimately becomes possible to contextualize today's emerging field of existential risk studies as consolidating from out of this progressive historical sweep, stretching all the way back to the Enlightenment and Kant's question 'What is Enlightenment?'. The conclusion, then, is that, in order to care about X-risks, we first had to separate 'fact' from 'value' so as to understand the stakes involved in the prospective 'fact' of the end of all 'value'. Only through this were we summoned to the tenacious tasks of forecast and foresight. And, ultimately, it is solely by undertaking such responsibility for ourselves, via acknowledging the utmost risk facing us, that we begin to earn security and hope.

This thesis studies Anglophone discourses of conquest in seventeenth-century British political debates. It focuses on the development and deployment of conquest arguments across a series of moments during the first half of the seventeenth century. No such study has thus far been undertaken. The present thesis, therefore, aims to offer the first substantial treatment of early modern Anglophone discourses of conquest. It is structured around four case studies, spread out over four main chapters, each examining an extended moment of importance in the development of conquest arguments. These four chapters are flanked by the Introduction and the Conclusion & Epilogue. The Introduction delimits the topic under investigation, surveys the relevant modern literature and explains the methodological approach. Chapter 1 looks at ideas of conquest in the context of James I's accession. It shows how debates over conquest emerged from the reception of James's political thought against the backdrop of his accession and the Anglo-Scottish union debates. Chapter 2 considers conquest discourse during the last stages of the union debates and as part of an ancient constitution narrative that developed in their wake. Chapter 3 investigates uses of conquest arguments in the civil war of the 1640s. It focuses on the pamphlet debates of 1642/3 and conquest rhetoric as part of Leveller conceptions of the Norman Yoke. Chapter 4 concentrates on conquest arguments in the Engagement controversy of 1649-51 and looks at how conquest theories developed during the Engagement's pamphlet debate. Finally, the Conclusion & Epilogue summarises the main findings and demonstrates that the conquest theories that had been developed over the course of the century came to be used in the years following the Revolution of 1688/89.

This thesis is a biography of an individual, Suprakash Ray. Born in the Borishal district of eastern Bengal in 1915/1918, he died in a hospital in Calcutta in 1990. Suprakash Ray was the most widely recognised of the many pseudonyms used by Sudhir Bhattacharya: the others were Bijan Sen and Kafi Khan. He was an anti-colonial terrorist as a teenager (1930s), a Communist partisan organiser in the tramworkers' union in Calcutta (1930s and 1940s), and a history-teacher in a Calcutta school who split away from the Communist parties and wrote extensively on history and politics (1950s and 1960s). He had been sparsely mentioned in a few political and intellectual works. Beyond direct reference, his ideas and statements find solidarity in radical Communist partisans and platforms across twentieth century in the territory of the colonial and the Indian state and beyond. The primary thread emerging from this enquiry into his life and works is a largely suppressed truth - that there was a well-developed Communist thought of history and politics in this territory that was separate from Marxist historiography and political economy. This separation was an antagonistic procedure - where the Communist party leadership and centralised bureaucracy ratified Marxism as an evolutionary scheme which stifled subjective initiatives of ordinary partisans for immediate local application of the Communist programme or the egalitarian maxim. History of Communism in this territory is thus split into two. The leadership and party bureaucracy wanted to activate the absolute finitude of the Communist partisan in the face of the inexorable dual forces of history and (the Indian) state. The partisans were forced to embrace the role of conscience-keepers of planned industrial progress and parliamentary representative system initiated by the Indian state. The ordinary partisans affirmed the right to rebel against the colonial and the Indian state and wagered on infinity and immortality in the face of counter-revolutionary power. While the ordinary partisans declared the comprehensive possibility of a prospective metaphysics capable of enveloping present actions and drawing strength, in future, from what those actions would produce; the horizon of the party leadership was a greater technocratic role for Communists in the macroeconomic management of the lives of the citizens of India. The ordinary partisans were punished, excommunicated and criminalized by the leadership and the Indian state in equal measure. The 'ordinary Communist partisan' was a rare and obscure appearance, yet always consistent and self-declarative in broad sequences of time. Through Suprakash Ray - who thoughtfully designated himself as an ordinary Communist partisan rebelling against the leadership - we attempt to grasp the subjectivity of the ordinary Communist partisan. The extant literature on the history of Communism in the relevant territory pays scant attention to the internal registers, ideas and categories that subjectivated the Communist leadership and the ordinary partisans. A close and interiorised study of the statements and partisan political situations within which Suprakash Ray thought and acted can begin reversing such condescension where inventive subjects are invisibilised under the towering careers of the state, nation, society, culture and economy. Biography here becomes a microhistorical enterprise of apprehending singularity without flinching, without taming it and recombining it with the history of structures. The core contention of this thesis is that a biography can be written in interiority, there can be a thought of subjectivity in subjectivity. A basic survey of the philosophy of individuation indicates that a biography need not be an additive, epistemological or critical project. But what follows is also not entirely exegetical. The politics and the thought of history Ray upheld also featured in consistent and collective wagers of armed squads, local governments of liberated zones, partisans, platforms, partisan editorial collectives, thinkers, writers and empathisers in and around the Communist parties in the territory of the colonial and Indian state. The partisan universalism of Ray's thought demands and ekes out for itself evident and difficult solidarity (with statements of ordinary partisans) - and equally evident, non-negotiable antagonism (with the Communist leadership's statements). A specific use of previously unused party documents, letters, programmes, publications, avant garde literary and theoretical tracts and some academic works stabilise, unpack and oppose the stands and decisions of Ray throughout the thesis. A curated genealogy of such documents is presented in the bibliography. This literature is particularly complex. The leadership deserted Communist categories in its discourse with the Indian state and its citizens. But it did indeed retain those categories while dealing with inquisitive or recalcitrant ordinary party members. In other cases - the 'Communist' epithet was used to distinguish the Communist parties from other statist parties committed to the Indian state and its parliamentary elections, while the ordinary partisans were dissuaded by using the language of general history and structures. The attention towards Suprakash Ray's statements and deployed categories leads to a new (in terms of the extant secondary literature on history of Communism in the relevant territory) identification of the variegated layers and truths of Communist documents from the colonial past and nationalist present.

In the early 17th century, Aristotelian ideas about the passions came under scrutiny. The dominant, if not only, understanding of the passions before that time came from Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas split most of his main passions into opposing pairs - love/hate, joy/sorrow, fear/bravery etc. Aquinas described the opposite of desire as 'fuga seu abominatio (flight or abomination).' Although grappled with by earlier philosophers such as Duns Scotus and Thomas Cajetan, it was not until the 17th century that thinkers attempted to challenge Aquinas's opposite of desire. This thesis looks at five writers who used a variety of terms, often taken to be near-synonyms of disgust in the historiography - Thomas Wright, Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More and Isaac Watts - and challenges that view. Each of these men wrote works that, at least in part, attempted to understand the passions and each had a different understanding of Aquinas's opposite of desire. The thesis uses a corpus analysis to investigate uses of the words each thinker chose as an opposite of desire and then examines each writers' influences, experiences, and intentions, to analyse their understanding of the opposite of desire. Secondly, these various opposites of desire appear to bare a family resemblance to modern disgust. All are based upon the action of moving away from something thought of as harmful or evil, and all have an element of revulsion alongside the repulsion. This has led to much of the historiography of these sorts of passions making the assumption that these words simply referred to disgust. This thesis argues that these opposites of desire are not the same as disgust; the differences outweigh the similarities.

This thesis discusses Descartes' conception and negotiation, in the period from 1637 to 1648, of the responsibilities arising from teaching. His concerns spring particularly from the teaching of sceptical arguments, and from his efforts to maintain his project's integrity as his followers take it up. My argument is twofold: that such responsibilities were a persistent and prominent concern through this crucial period in his career, and that they offered terms of criticism within which major early responses to his work, friendly and hostile, were formulated. In Chapter 1, I show how these concerns shape the Principia. Chapter 2 argues that Descartes' conception of his responsibilities are rooted in a widespread early modern conception of the risks of scepticism, and that they are visible, within the Discours, in his remarks about exemplarity and publication, as well as in the actual business of publishing the text. In Chapter 3, these concerns are linked to a positive conception of the gains Descartes hoped to secure for his students against pressures within Aristotelianism. Finally, in Chapter 4, I show that Descartes' critics mobilise this understanding to frame early attacks on the interactions between Cartesianism and existing scholastic institutions. In closing, I suggest three directions in which to develop historiographical issues raised in the thesis.

The present DPhil research attempts to develop an appropriate method for the historiography of ideas by taking into consideration cultural, linguistic and socio-political limitations and obstacles to free thinking in a predominantly closed society like Qajar Iran. By applying such a method the study then investigates the history of the idea of freedom in Iran during one of the most important periods in the evolution of this concept. The research method is grounded in a hermeneutical interpretation of Collingwood's logic of question and answer. It also employs MacCallum's meta-theoretical frame of analysis which states that freedom is always of something (an agent or agents), from something (conditions), to do something (actions). Using this methodological framework, the research shows how most locutions about freedom uttered in the last century of the Qajar period were formed within the horizon of the question of decline and were somehow related to remedy such situations. It then explores how late Qajar interpretations of the three variables of freedom manifest themselves in the socio-political life of early 20th century Iran. During the first constitutional period (August 1906-June 1908), the major concern of the first majlis was to establish the rule of law. In legislating the constitution and its supplement, the majority of the majlis believed that the main obstacle to freedom was arbitrary rule. Therefore, they endeavoured to restrain the government’s illegal and arbitrary interferences in the people's freedom. However, they did not develop a rational criterion for identifying legitimate and justifiable legal interferences. During the second constitutional period (July 1909– February 1921), the main concern of the second majlis was to restrain chaos and to strengthen the central government in order to put an end to domestic insecurity and foreign threats. To rectify such a situation, the majlis empowered the government to interfere even in the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution. As a result, the situation began to turn from chaos towards arbitrary rule. The research also argues that in most of their interpretations of the aim of freedom, constitutionalists considered an action permissible only if it was compatible with public interest as well as the material and spiritual progress of individuals and society. Theoretically, the aim of freedom could not have been the doing of an action that harmed another person or violated his/her freedom. Furthermore, 'the right to be wrong,' even if it harmed no one, was never defended. Nonetheless, in practice, freedom turned into chaos and licence in both the first and in the second constitutional periods. Finally, this study investigates how the Iranian pioneers of the freedom-seeking movement responded to the question of the eligibility of the agent of freedom, and the question of the equality of agents in having freedom. Iranian society was taking its first steps in experiencing the rule of law and had a long way to go to rectify its discriminatory culture and to establish equal rights. In such conditions, accepting a set of equal fundamental rights for all Iranians should be considered a great achievement for the constitutional movement.

Thomas S. Kuhn claimed that the meanings of scientific terms change in theory changes or in scientific revolutions. In philosophy, meaning change has been taken as the source of a group of problems, such as untranslatability, incommensurability, and referential variance. For this reason, the majority of analytic philosophers have sought to deny that there can be meaning change by focusing on developing a theory of reference that would guarantee referential stability. A number of philosophers have also claimed that Kuhn’s view can be explained by the fact that he accepted and further developed many central tenets of logical empiricism. I maintain that the genesis of Kuhn’s meaning theorising lies in his historical approach and that his view of meaning change is justified. Later in his career he attempted to advance a theory of meaning and can be said to have had limited success in it. What is more, recent cognitive science has unexpectedly managed to shed light on Kuhn’s insights on the organisation of information in the mind, concept learning, and concept definition. Furthermore, although Kuhn’s critique of Putnam’s causal theory of reference has often been dismissed as irrelevant, he has a serious point to address. Kuhn thought that the causal theory that works so well with proper names cannot work with scientific terms. He held that conceptual categories are formed by similarity and dissimilarity relations; therefore, several features and not only one single property are needed for determination of extension. In addition, the causal theory requires universal substances as points of reference of scientific terms. Kuhn was a conceptualist, who held that universals do not exist as mind-independent entities and that mind-dependent family resemblance concepts serve the role of universals. Further, at the beginning of his career, Kuhn was interested in the question of what concepts or ideas are and how they change in their historical context. Although he did not develop his theorising on this issue, I demonstrate that this is a genuine problem in the philosophy of history. Finally, Kuhn argued that scientists cannot have access to truth in history because we cannot transcend our historical niche, and as a consequence, the truth of a belief cannot be a reason for theory choice. Instead of truth, we can rely on justification. I also discuss Kuhn’s idea that problem-solving is the main aim of science and show that this view can be incorporated into coherentist epistemology.

This dissertation examines the return of an emphatic understanding of natural history in German literary texts from the Weimar Republic and the post-war period. Natural history in these texts emerges as a paradoxical temporal scheme that allows for deciphering the present and divining the future by reconstructing the remote past in disciplines as diverse as geology, ecology, and genetics. Specifically, I survey the frequent references to nonhuman time embedded in philosophical and literary texts from the 1920s-1970s through the trope of the Kreatur: a “creaturely” condition that inscribes “nature” within new forms of temporality conceptualized in analogy with Earth's phenomena. As I argue, Modernist articulations of “the creature” propose a conceptual interrelation of evolutionary time, the cosmos, and political events that, in philosophical texts collected in the Weimar-era journal Die Kreatur (1926-1930), literary criticism by Walter Benjamin, and poetry by Paul Celan, describes both human and non-human vulnerability to catastrophic violence. As a figure of human dispossession whose range spans mental distress, corporeal frailty, and poverty, the Modernist creature offers a useful index for theorizing our temporal perception of the environment today. Overall, the creaturely trope functions as a means for displacing anthropocentric historical narratives and for offering a new perception of the environment that draws on deep geological time. Focusing on its framing through deep time, I reconstruct a cultural history of the creature based on the emergence of deep time in philosophical practices.

The overarching claim I advance here is that to understand Kant’s political thought, it is ‎necessary to understand his philosophical anthropology. This I demonstrate by examining Kant’s ‎conceptual relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Besides the introduction and ‎conclusion, the dissertation follows a fourfold topical division into philosophical anthropology, ‎philosophy of history, political philosophy, and ethics.‎The dissertation begins with the intellectual and historical context in which Kant developed ‎his novel ‘pragmatic’ approach to anthropology and the unique features he identified in the ‎human species. These include three rational predispositions: the technical, the pragmatic, and the ‎moral, which, through social interaction and history, respectively develop into culture, ‎civilization, and morality. Crucial is Kant’s positing of a moral teleological end for the human ‎species (Bestimmung). The anthropological analysis of the human species leads Kant to the ‎conclusion that cosmopolitanism is intrinsic to its character, and that its Bestimmung lies in a ‎‎‘cosmopolitically united’ system—a universal moral community. For it to fulfill its cosmopolitan ‎Bestimmung, it is incumbent upon humanity to first eliminate the chief impediment to its ‎progress—namely, the perpetual state of war between states. This it will achieve primarily ‎through rational political institutions; states ought to first reform themselves into republics and ‎then establish a “Federation of nations” (V�lkerbund) as a guarantor of perpetual peace.‎ Here I make an intervention in a long-standing debate within Kant scholarship over the ‎ostensible oscillations he made regarding his preferred form of cosmopolitical government. I ‎claim that Kant’s anthropology demonstrates that the universal moral community can only be ‎constituted under the condition of a singular universal political community—therefore, the ‎V�lkerbund must ultimately coalesce into a “World-republic”. To this end, I further advance the ‎argument that, far from being antithetical to his cosmopolitan vision, nation-states are, in three ‎major ways, conducive to it on Kant’s own terms: since, (1) they prevent global tyranny, (2) their ‎common idioms provide the most solid foundations for republics, which eventually (3) makes ‎them amenable for cosmopolitical unification. The upshot, however, is that although nationalism ‎has a cosmopolitan role to fulfill, cultural diversity has only secondary value for Kant—it is ‎merely a particular means to a universal end. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the ‎immense amount of time that humanity must traverse for it to fulfill its moral Bestimmung.‎

Focusing on the unquestioned basis of the Silk Road as an enlivening historical concept, I suggest that conversations about China’s rising power miss the complexity of its peculiar diplomacy, which has been used to legitimate and justify a foreign policy project referred to as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). This dissertation makes a case for the Silk Road Redux, or a revival of ideas of connection circulating across infrastructural, technological and multimedia components that began to re-present the development of China’s incorporation into modern world system as well as its central role in the transnational network of supply chains. Combining global history, geopolitics, infrastructure, development, cultural and media studies, I position the Silk Road as an analytical category to better understand the BRI and modern China.This in-depth study of historical texts, blueprints and physical objects, suggests the necessity to reconsider ideas about great power relations and soft power globally. I argue that the Silk Road has become an ambient and social aesthetic to be reprised in a larger project of worlding China. This approach allows me to develop an understanding of an ambitious power, which manifests itself in the material world as well as promotes, legitimizes and justifies its physical presence globally. This dissertation is composed of four chapters, a prologue and an epilogue. The Prologue begins with the 1907 Peking-Paris race that sets the stage for an enduring desire to shrink distance, conquer hostile terrain, and provide the possibility of achieving the unattainable. The Introduction describes the BRI, positions it within the current literature in relation to the Silk Road, as well as sketches the air of romance and mystique associated with the cultural heritage of ancient connectivity. Chapter I focuses on the BRI’s antecedent by exploring the various ways in which divergent ideas, meanings and memories of worldliness formed a collective dream that connected vast geographies and survived centuries. Chapter II interrogates the journey the Silk Road idea took to become a cultural imaginary – from the birth of the concept in 1877, I sketch the movement of the Silk Road idea across global circuits of geological knowledge. Chapter III traces the circulation of the Silk Road imaginary in both political and popular discourse to eventually became an icon of cosmopolitan connectivity. Chapter IV focuses on the BRI as its own agent and actor in the production of a persuasive and plausible ontology of connectivity legitimated with spatial imaginations, drives and ambitions. The Epilogue furthers scholarly conversation of BRI’s opaque nature by suggesting that the plasticity of the initiative provides new optics to capture the socio-political, economic and cultural forces at play and well as invites further research into the plasticity of the BRI framework. In the Conclusion, I summarize the argument, specifically the Silk Road positioned as a global cultural imaginary and the repercussions of BRI’s malleable political mechanism, which offers a unique opportunity to better understand modern China as a rising and distinctively ambitious global power.

Maud Oakes (1903-1990) was an American painter, anthropologist, and a student of Carl Jung. This thesis offers a close reading of two of her ethnographic texts based on fieldwork conducted in Todos Santos Cuchumat�n, Guatemala between 1945 and 1947. It then considers Maud’s legacy in Todos Santos in light of the extensive ethnographic canon that has developed in the town from the 1940s to the present day. Finally, I turn to her break with anthropology in the 1950s and subsequent research and writing on analytic psychology. Maud’s unique position in mid-twentieth century American culture points to convergences and divergences between intellectual currents that are often analyzed through an artificial disciplinary isolation, thereby obscuring their common ties.

This dissertation investigates how discourses and practices of political spirituality contributed to forming an idea of México as a national entity in the early nineteenth century. During the struggles for Novohispanic Independence from 1810 to 1821, there was little consensus on what the new nation would be named. Writers, historians, and political figures used names such as “Anáhuac,” “América,” “la América Mexicana,” and “El Imperio Mexicano,” each conveying different political ambitions. The dissertation tracks the emergence of the idea of ‘México’ in texts produced during the era of the Bourbon Reforms in New Spain and the period of the Novohispanic insurgency. Against the analysis of the prominent symbols and cultural tropes pertaining to México as mythical or ideological construct, I argue instead for the centrality of political spirituality, which in my account designates the means of finding novel ways of governing oneself and others and discerning different ways of articulating what is true or false. Political spirituality, I argue further, enabled the emergence of new subject formations such as the ‘Americano’ insurgent and of the independent ‘Mexicano.’ Along with forming subjects, political spiritualities subtended the transformations of concepts that would allow those subjects to recognize and affirm the idea of México. This interdisciplinary inquiry brings together studies of political history, religion, the history of ideas, and philosophical anthropology. Approaching the emergence of the idea of Mexico through the lens of political spirituality allows me to draw on contemporary theories of the proper name and the concept as a way to tie spiritual practices to material conditions, discursive frameworks, and practical exigencies. This project contributes to a body of historical scholarship on the role of religion and religious discourse in the emergence of the Mexican nation and state. By exploring spirituality as a practice that is not intrinsically religious, this project seeks to shed light on different ways in which spiritual discourses and practices produce material effects. The dissertation represents an initial step toward a fuller genealogy of the idea of Mexico, its potentialities, promises, and limitations.

Abstract: This thesis is an attempt to locate Hobbes’ civil philosophy in the context of his theory of science, which is a theory primarily about how to acquire the knowledge of causes and effects. By working through the reasons why Hobbes praises geometry, this thesis will explain why he believes that philosophy needs to begin with definitions, how the geometers’ use of definitions has brought certainty to their subject, and what other subjects must do in order to have the same certainty. While the first chapter deals with the overt reasons why Hobbes praises geometry, we will see that the proper use of definitions alone is not enough to raise any subject, even geometry, to the rank of a ‘science.’ In the chapter following, I will show, in detail, how Hobbes’ reconceptualization of geometry as the study of motion provides the starting point for his theory of science, which, on the deductive model of Euclidean geometry, aims to demonstrate ‘universal rules about the properties of things’ from the knowledge of their cause and generation—which is to say, from the motions by which they are produced (DCo, IV, 7). The exposition of Hobbes’ geometry in the second chapter will be framed as an investigation into his belief that we can give scientific demonstrations only of subjects that we make for ourselves. The third and final chapter will provide an interpretation of how civil philosophy can be considered as a science within the scope of the motion-based theory of science presented in De Corpore. We will conclude that while Hobbes’ civil philosophy cannot be considered to be a science apart from the idiosyncratic theory of De Corpore, the fittingness of the label does not affect the content of the theory, which, when mapped on to his theory of science, reveals a depth and complexity of thought of which any one of Hobbes’ texts provides only a partial indication.

This Doctoral Dissertation explores the transition that took place in the eighteenth century from the figure of the king as the symbolic representative of the nation to the recently created category of the citizen as the new national metaphor all over the western world. The necessity of creating a positively racialized model of citizen that would serve as a symbolic representative of the nation followed the racial zeitgeist of the time, dictated by imperial expansion together with the creation of new systems of thought such as scientific racism, geographic determinism, or phrenology. Spain, former hegemonic power during Early Modern Europe, was expelled from Modern Europe in the eighteenth century, being displaced for the first time to a racialized southern European periphery at a time when race matched power. Intellectual battles fought through the first stages of the Printed Press and the Encyclopedia, used propaganda to build or destroy national identities. Through an extensive study about foreign views of Spain by France, England, and Latin America, and their reception in Spain, this doctoral dissertation explores Spanish attempts to dislocate Northern European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries epistemologies by creating alternative networks of knowledge and proposing a model of empire where race was not used as a political ideology, with the aim of re-branding itself in the new nation-building landscape of the time.

Today Amazonia faces two major threats: The first is ecocide in the form of deforestation, which contributes to global climate change and is adding to the list of organisms that are casualties of “the sixth great (and human caused) extinction” of flora and fauna in Earth’s history. Meanwhile the twin menace of ethnocide endangers the continuation of indigenous human cultures in the area as state-sanctioned so-called development encroaches on native territories and lifeways. In order to begin a broader conversation within the history of ideas that seeks to examine these questions: what and where is Amazonia, and how has Amazonia changed over time? This is explored through a process of monumentalism by cultural selection, or more directly, the privileging of certain ideas and memories rather than other competing (and indigenous) memories, conceptions, or visions. It is the central argument that the power to appropriate and refashion (the power to remember) these memories are central to the process of historical, ecological, and cultural change in Amazonia from thousands of years ago until 2017. Finally, it is hoped that by better understanding this process, that Amazonia and its people’s rights may be better understood, respected, and continue to flourish.

Over the twentieth century and into the present, theorists of secularization and political theology have explored ways that theological arguments have shaped the social, ethical, economic, and political imaginaries of the modern West. In many of these studies, the doctrine of providence has come under scrutiny alongside related theological debates over of the nature of divine sovereignty, glory, the will, and the significance of immanent life in relation to divine transcendence. While it is often taken for granted that the Calvinist branch of Protestant reform likewise had a decisive impact on the shape of the modern West, there has been no extended treatment of Calvin's writing on providence, or related doctrines, which engages these arguments about secularization.

"Reading and Reception in Early Modern England" contends that early modern subjectivity was invented in the indeterminate space between reader and text, and defined within, around, and against the textual encounter. Early modern debates about reception were, I argue, also debates about the powers of the subject. Questions about freedom of choice, imaginative autonomy, self-evaluation, and the relationship between sensation and thought were all key aspects of an ongoing early modern conversation about receptive experience. The poets and critics upon whom I focus interrogated, debated, and revised the contours of private mental experience through a dense, contradictory, and ever-evolving discourse of literary reception. The literary sphere offered these poets a range of unique theoretical possibilities: in its embrace of indeterminacy and its liberation from the constraints of the normative and the polemical, literature functioned as an arena of radical conceptual free play. Thus the poets I consider were able to establish reception as the fundamental act of the early modern subject while depicting, at the same time, the contradictions, inconsistencies, and elusive aspects of a receptive theory still under development. Between 1580 and 1670, English poets and critics engaged in a reconsideration of the powers, limitations, and responsibilities of the reader, a reconsideration that culminated in a new emphasis on critical engagement as the first duty of the receptive subject. The mid-seventeenth-century reader, earlier the receptive object of somatic appeal, was newly re-imagined as a self-conscious arbiter of poetry’s content. The emergence of this self-sufficient readerly ideal meant that anxiety about internal self-regulation and the proper limits of bodily experience, which had dominated writing about poetry and the self during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, shifted to the realm of public interaction, where the central concerns about selfhood became questions about the proper exercise of judgment in a social world. By making new claims for the autonomy of the reader, the poets upon whom I focus shaped sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas about perceptual experience, intellectual freedom, and the powers of the self.

CATHARINE MACAULAY AND THE LIBERAL AND REPUBLICAN ORIGINS OF AMERICAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONLISA THOMASABSTRACTThis dissertation utilizes the history of ideas to explore the philosophy of Catharine Macaulay, an eighteenth-century historian and philosopher, for application to contemporary American Public Administration. Macaulay's view of human nature is paradoxical. Her characterization of man as corrupt and seduced by power is countered by her view that man is perfectible and capable of good works. The darker side of Macaulay's vision supports government that checks power through the expansion of democracy, advocates the separation of powers, and adheres to the rule of law. In this respect she resembles a Lockean liberal. The more magnanimous side of Macaulay reveres ancient Greece and Rome, believes man is capable of civic virtue, and values the role of education in creating leaders. In this respect she resembles a classical republican. Combined, these visions offer a unique model of public administration. A Macaulay model of public administration rests its authority with the people. It uses the practice of administration as a check on power by the use of administrative discretion and the encouragement of citizen participation. The model advocates a generalist rather than a technical education for public administrators. Finally, the model includes the practice of benevolence, the belief that democratic values of justice, liberty, and equality are to be protected in the daily practice of Public Administration.

William Turner remains an understudied figure of Reformation scholarship. He was a dedicated doctor, scientist, and Lutheran reformer. This thesis examines Turner and his place in the history of ideas. It looks closely at his three editions of A Comparison Betweene the Olde Learnynge and the Newe (1537, 1538, 1548) and explores how these texts fit into the history of ideas and reflect the larger religious debate occurring in England in the 16th century. It also explores Turner's connection to the German reformer Urbanus Rhegius. I argue the connection between these two men and their writings function as a microcosm of the Reformation.