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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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.