School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemEvaluating emotions( 1996)Emotions have been a topic of interest to both philosophers and non philosophers for quite some time. Emotions constantly figure into our lives by affecting how we act, what decisions we make, and how we see the world. Nevertheless, despite their frequency and our general familiarity with them, when it comes right down to it, do any of us really have a clear idea of what an emotion is? This can be a very troubling question insofar as it forces us to closely examine the true nature of emotions. Many people take it for granted that emotions are a common and simple phenomena. However, mistaking commonality for simplicity is an error of the grossest kind. Emotions definitely have a structure. The difficult task is to accurately identify and explain that structure. This is my objective in chapter one. In chapter two, after establishing what I think an emotion is, I change course slightly by asking: "What role do emotions play in our respective lives?". That is,. how do emotions fit into human life, and is this a good or a bad thing? In many ways I see the second chapter as being an attack on the unsophisticated notion that emotions are necessarily antagonistic to reason. A notion which places reason and rationality extremely high up on the scale of importance, and quite naturally allocates emotions to a rather low position. In the end, the aim of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to enhance our understanding of the internal structure of emotions, while on the other hand, it attempts to clarify and consequently affirm the importance of emotions.
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ItemOn moral diversity( 1996)On one level, the notion of moral diversity is unproblematic, it is simply an acknowledgement that there exists in our world, usually because of differences in religion or culture or ideology, a number of different moral perspectives -this is simply an observable fact. The difficulty with moral diversity appears under a different consideration, that is when there is a dispute over a particular moral issue with the different sides apparently holding different opinions as a result of their having different moral perspectives. In such cases, one may adopt any of several attitudes, two of which are important to my discussion. One attitude is to maintain that there is a final solution to the dispute and that one or more of the sides must ultimately be mistaken, i.e. there is a unique moral solution to a moral issue and there is a possibility of agreement amongst the disputants -unless the people involved are stubborn, or confused, or simply refuse to see the truth of the matter. The assumption here is that there is a unique, ascertainable and communicable moral truth to any moral issue; there is no such thing as moral diversity, there are only moral disagreements. This position would maintain that there are apparently diverse moral positions in the world only because some are mistaken and others though look different are actually the same; if we all work at it, some day we shall have universal moral agreement.
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ItemAn account of subjectivity, as a groundwork of an empiricist account of our knowledge of the external world( 1996)The foundations of an empiricist proof of the existence of the external world are laid out in two papers by G E Moore: "Some Judgements of Perception", and "Proof of an External World". The proof is peculiarly empiricist because of its insistence on the conceptual relations between the concepts used to describe sense experience and those used to describe external things, such that the proof of the external world is itself an empirical matter. A detailed empiricist account of our knowledge of the external world is given by A J Ayer in his The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, The Origins of Pragmatism , and The Central Questions of Philosophy. While the treatment in the Foundations is quite phenomenalistic, adopting the view that belief in the external world just is belief in the occurrence of certain patterns of sense experience, the account given in the two later works is realist in flavour. This thesis elaborates an empiricist account of subjectivity as a basis for semantics and epistemology. I advocate a direct realist account of perception, but leave the nature of the external entities we perceive an open question. My intention is to provide a framework in which Moore's and Ayers exhibitions of the warrants of our belief in the external world can be clearly and convincingly stated. After introducing the context of my empiricism, in Chapter One I sketch an empiricist semantics. A key feature of this is its assumption that it is possible to compare a belief to an experience, both in associating empirical meanings with concepts, and in warranting judgments. Resting as it does on this experiential foundation, anti-skeptical empiricism is opposed to all coherentist accounts of the warranting of belief. In Chapter Two I consider the reasons offered by Donald Davidson and John McDowell for rejecting the possibility of comparison of beliefs to experiences, and argue that they offer no convincing reasons for their rejection of experience as a source of evidence and a basis for meaning. I also argue that McDowell does not succeed in distinguishing his anti-foundationalism from Davidson's coherentism. In Chapter Three I indicate what I consider to be the difficulties that Davidson's coherentism faces. These difficulties with coherentism constitute evidence for the merits of the empiricist alternative, and lead naturally into Chapter Four's brief defence of a version of the cogito. In Chapter Five I develop the empiricist conception of subjectivity in detail, constructing the concepts needed to give an account of our knowledge of the external world on a purely subjective basis. Using these concepts, Chapter Six explains how it is possible to compare beliefs and experiences, thus answering the question put to empiricism by coherentism.
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ItemPublic perceptions of organisational offending: an analysis of attitudinal change between 1986 and 1994( 1996)In 1986 the Australian Institute of Criminology conducted one of the most far reaching surveys of public attitudes towards crime conducted in Australia. As one part of a broader study of white collar crime, a replication of the 1986 study was undertaken in metropolitan Melbourne in 1994. This thesis focuses upon organisational crime and presents a comparison of current attitudes held by the Victorian public with those held by the Australian community in 1986. Underlying this comparison is the proposition that community attitudes towards white collar crime, and organisational crimes in particular, have hardened throughout the period. The findings of this analysis suggest that for the most serious of white collar crimes - those organisational offences leading to physical harms - community attitudes have indeed hardened in some ways. These findings raise several important implications for current judicial policy towards organisational crime, as well as white collar crime generally.
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ItemWomen candidates: the 1996 Victorian local government elections( 1996)Recent reforms to local government in Victoria, Australia may have a range of consequences either unintended or unseen. This research focuses on the critical relationship between women and this new local government. The theoretical significance of women’s representation in local government concerns the extent to which women have equal representation in public decision making about local economies and social and community affairs. Previous research identifies women’s access to direct representation in government as being complicated by a number of factors although researchers agree that the best chances of electoral success for women lie with their tier said to be closest to the people: local government. This study is unique in the Australian examination of these issues in that, through replicating an extensive North American study, it explores the nature of candidacy rather than the characteristics of those successful at the polls. Using a survey of all women candidates for the Victorian local government elections, this study achieved a very high response rate. The resultant findings confirm those of the North American study, establishing a direct relationship between the number of women who stand and the number of women elected, confirming the electoral appeal of women. Of particular relevance is the question of incumbency or for the purpose of this study, prior successful candidacy. Women were found to have a much greater chance of success if they had prior standing as a local councillor. This study also suggests that rather than the particular qualities of the candidate, resources such as campaign budget and volunteers are influential on the outcome at polling day. The study concludes that the most effective strategy for achievement of equal representation for women in local government by the turn of the century, more effective than any political party attempts to date, will be the strategy that secures candidacy for 2000 women by the year 2000.
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ItemSticking to the land: a history of exclusion on Kangaroo Island, 1827-1996( 1996)In 1827, English ex-sailor Nathaniel Walles (Nat) Thomas and Aboriginal Tasmanian Betty were living at Antechamber Bay, in what later became the Hundred of Dudley, Kangaroo Island. They were among the several pre-colonial settlers who had come through the Bass Strait opened up by sealing and whaling industries from the turn of the nineteenth century. When the South Australia Company landed on Kangaroo Island in 1836, there were approximately five Tasmanian Aboriginal men and eight European men, some of whom, like Nat, had small farms of crops and stock. Nat and Betty appear to have been the only parents within this population of 1836 and the only Kangaroo Island pre-colonists to whom the descendants can trace their genealogies today. Their two surviving children, Mary born 1833 and Hannah born c.1839, married South Australia Company settlers; Mary married William Seymour in 1849 and Hannah married Thomas Simpson in 1860. Mary and William remained living near Nat Thomas at Antechamber Bay with their son and two daughters. William worked as a third keeper at the near-by Sturt Lighthouse, Cape Willoughby from 1852-1858. By 1885, however, Mary, by then widowed, moved to Penneshaw. There her son Joseph, a stone-mason, was married and had three daughters, whilst her eldest daughter Emma was married to local labourer Frank Barrett and had four sons and two daughters. The year they married, Hannah and Thomas took up a small lease of land near Penneshaw, known pre-1883 as Hog Bay, and Thomas, previously a Lincolnshire butcher, became the district postmaster. They had seven surviving sons and three daughters. At the age of nineteen, their eldest son, Nathaniel, inherited fifty-one acres of freehold land from his grandfather on his death in 1879. He and his brothers William, Thomas and Stephen worked on increasing this holding and, by 1893, were partners in over eleven thousand acres of land spanning south from Antechamber Bay to Cape Hart. Stephen Simpson also owned one hundred and eighty acres of suburban blocks in Sapphiretown, a township further west, and a forty acre section in Penneshaw where he lived. Nathaniel was a Justice of the Peace and he and his brothers Thomas and William councillors for the District of Dudly. The Simpsons had become an established family; they had houses, land and positions of influence. They could not, however, marry into the other established families. The colonial pastoralist families who had taken up leases on the Hundred of Dudley, predominantly in the 1850’s and 60’s found the pre-colonial descendants unacceptable on the grounds of their Aboriginal ancestry. Having met the colonial families on every other front- acreage, power and respectability-marriage; the mixing of black and white blood, proved the ultimate boundary the pre-colonial descendants could not penetrate. Chapter two discusses the marital frontier between colonised and coloniser, a barrier which was suppressed in daily and mundane interaction but tacitly expressed in forbidden or broken engagements. As one colonial descendant explained, “no-one would make a fuss until you start [sic] to talk of marrying one’. It was not that the second and particularly third or filial pre-colonial looked black; it was that they carried a contaminant gene. Interviews with colonial descendants expose that there was fear that mixed blood would create the “throw-back”. Far less fantastic, however, was the feat that marriage into an Aboriginal pre-colonial descendant family would lead to their own exclusion. While blood expresses the basic contamination, however, it only operates within a place. When the third and filial generation of pre-colonial descendants left Kangaroo Island for the mainland, where their ancestry was not known, they were able to marry. It is, therefore, evident that race is defined not only genetically, but by place, a notion more fully developed in the discussions of pre-colonial descendants ownership and loss of land in chapter one.