School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemDisturbance : bodies, disease, art(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemArt that matters : identity and contemporary art in Australia(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemCultures of violence : republican Rome and the Mexica(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemCultures of violence : republican Rome and the Mexica(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemAn analysis of teleological theories of mental content( 2006)The concern of this thesis is with the following question: in virtue of what do a human agent's beliefs and desires have the contents that they have? In this thesis, we will argue that there is a theory that provides an answer to this question. In the Introduction, we lay down a set of adequacy criteria for a successful theory of content. These are: the naturalism criterion, the criterion of accounting for the content of each and every mental state type, and the criterion of solving the misrepresentation, indeterminacy, and disjunction problems. We then narrow down the list of candidate theories that can provide a satisfactory answer. The theories that emerge as the two best candidates to deliver a successful theory of content are the teleological theories of content put forward by David Papineau, and Ruth Millikan, respectively. The central notion in teleological theories is that of biological function. In Chapter One, we introduce the etiological account of function to which these theories subscribe. We then address two challenges to the biological respectability of the etiological account, and conclude that the account is able to overcome them. In the course of the chapter, we also lay down a set of adequacy criteria for the successful application of etiological accounts to teleological theories. In Chapter Two, we introduce the main features of Papineau's teleological theory, as well as flagging some potential areas of concern for his theory. In Chapter Three, we address two objections to Papineau's theory -the 'Swampman' objection, and the problem of accounting for the contents of `novel' beliefs and desires, respectively. We conclude that the theory fails to overcome the second of these objections, and therefore, that it drops out of the running to deliver a successful theory of content. In. Chapter Four, we introduce Millikan's very different theoretical framework. We address some preliminary worries for the theory, as well as flagging the theoretical resources that she deploys in responding to objections. In Chapter. Five, Millikan's theory is put to the test against, six different objections. The majority of these are directed at her theoretical framework, while the others are directed at independent theses - adaptationism, metaphysical realism - to which her theory is committed. We conclude that her theory has the resources to overcome each of these objections. The final conclusion of the thesis is that Millikan's theory. delivers a successful theory of content, because it meets the criteria of adequacy and overcomes a number of serious objections.
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ItemThe work of conservation on Aboriginal lands : complex bandicoots and their transformations( 2006)In this thesis I account the lived work of environmental scientists by following bandicoots and other specimens from their generation in the field into various enterprises for conserving nature. The particular group of conservation scientists that are the focus of my study have their work enriched but also complicated by the fact that the estates in the Northern Territory that the scientists seek to conserve through their scientific work are owned by Aboriginal people. In 1993 conservation scientists found a trace of the golden bandicoot, Isoodon auratus, in dog faeces on Marchinbar Island; a remote and far flung island off the northern coastline of Australia that is owned by Aboriginal people. Until this finding, the conservation scientists had presumed the golden bandicoot to be extinct in the Northern Territory of Australia. The conservation scientists set about obtaining information about the golden bandicoot from the Aboriginal landowners, who in this region refer to themselves as the Yolngu, and followed this ethnozoological inquiry with field studies on the islands. In 1994 the golden bandicoot was reborn to conservation science using advice from the Yolngu owners of the island: to use charred native honey in their traps. Aboriginal people and their knowledge was crucial in these and subsequent episodes of conservation science fieldwork. But Aboriginal knowledge was an uneasy fit because of the assumption that bandicoots are a simple natural entity that can be universally known experientially, free of context and Yolngu traditions. Recounting this episode sets the scene for the central questions in this thesis: How do conservation sciences know entities like bandicoots? What is the nature of the entities that are known and worked with in the conservation sciences? In three separate sub-studies I examine in ethnographic detail the work conservation scientists do in field studies on Yolngu land. I describe how material transformations of bandicoots and other specimens are made in zoos, and finally, how discursive transformations are made in conservation science texts, and how these discursive bandicoots participate in institutional frameworks devised for supporting conservation work in Australia. By describing in detail the lived world, tools and traditions of scientists at work on islands, and tracing the transformations of the bandicoot and other specimens of the conservation sciences, I unsettle the notion that bandicoots are simple natural entities. I reveal entities such as bandicoots as complex social-natural entities, gaining their currency and potency as they are made mobile and transformed by the tools and traditions of conservation science. These entities are constituted in a chain of socio-material translations that give concepts in the conservation sciences particular meanings, meanings the scientists can be certain of. I show how entities are made as at once simple and complex by the assiduous work of the scientists: nourished in spaces for assembling knowledge about nature that required enormous work, resources and commitment of the scientists. In my conclusion I suggest how these insights into scientific entities might help imagine Aboriginal communities and their knowledge traditions participating more fully in conservation science.
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ItemBernard Williams's moral psychology project( 2006)Bernard Williams's important and controversial contributions to moral philosophy invite misunderstanding. Confusions are apparent in many critics' views of his aim and their understanding of his position's resources, resulting in mistaken views about both the implications of his arguments and the strongest lines of critical response. Williams did not provide a unified, comprehensive picture of his complex, nuanced position. In the absence of such a picture, and subject to certain preconceptions about moral philosophy's role and aim, it can be difficult to appreciate his thought, especially if we do not read him holistically. The most profitable approach recognises that Williams aims to articulate and execute a new style of moral psychology, trying to make sense of human beings in a realistic, naturalistic way and treating ethical concepts non-reductively. I will map his project's rationale, explain in detail how he pursues it, and clarify the implications seminal and controversial accounts he gives. I analyse Williams's methodological approach, characterising it as a non-reductive, naturalistic moral psychology project. His key insight is that for moral philosophy to speak realistically to and about human concerns and motivations, it must be able to make sense of individuals. To reveal this claim's implications, I compile Williams's scattered comments to assemble a unified account of his notion of character. I then re-evaluate 'Persons, character, and morality', clarifying his aim and revealing the enduring significance of this piece for moral philosophy. Using this as background, I offer a new approach to reading 'Practical necessity', further clarifying the notion of character. I then clarify the full extent of Williams's resources by integrating this picture with his notion of identification, and the concomitant psychological structures underpinning ethical agency revealed in his analysis of shame. I then revisit the controversial 'Internal and external reasons' and Williams's account of blame, which are more comprehensible and plausible than has previously been appreciated when set against the backdrop of the comprehensive account that I have developed. These resources were always available, but have been under-utilised in many critical discussions due to a failure to see the importance of a unified, holistic view of his moral psychology.
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ItemThe concept of interest in Kierkegaard's moral psychology( 2006)The category of interesse, "interest," has been regarded in the critical literature as one of the more marginal terms employed in Kierkegaard's account of the experience of moral selfhood. However, careful attention to the way Kierkegaard uses the term in his phenomenology of consciousness shows the term to pick out something both distinctive and fundamental to the structures of experience and the ontology of selfhood Kierkegaard develops. Through consideration of the identification of consciousness with "interestedness" in Johannes Climacus, a specific sense of interesse as a non-thetic, immediate self-referentiality built into cognition emerges. Interesse is not a thought about a specific object, but a self-reflexivity that attends all thought without the self thereby becoming the object of thought.. The structure of consciousness itself allows interesse to qualify consciousness teleologically, such that the achievement of interested (that is, implicitly selfreferential) thinking becomes the implicit goal of consciousness. It is this teleology that is evident when interesse re-emerges in the Climacan writings in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript's many formulations regarding the self's "impassioned," "personal," "infinite" interest in its eternal blessedness. Interest provides a teleological direction to thought by investing all thought with implicit reference to (and coordination by) the self's highest ends. The trichotomous structure of consciousness is mirrored in the trichotomous structure of selfhood developed in The Sickness Unto Death, and accordingly the structurally given nature of interesse is to be found in this structure as well. The self's self-relation, which is taken to be constitutive of selfhood, is not composed of temporally distinct cognitions of self-relation, but is rather implicit in every intentional thought of actualised selfhood. This sense of immediate self-referentiality is then shown to play, a crucial role in Kierkegaard's account of ethical imagination and moral vision. Interesse allows the self to experience immediately its genuine co-identity with its imaginatively posited selves; as such it allows the self to maintain a connection with what it imagines and so allows imagination to fulfil functions necessary to moral agency rather than being carried away into the "fantastic." Explicating interesse in this way throws into relief Kierkegaard's emphasis upon a language of self-recognition. This language (and the related descriptions of the failure of such self-recognition) expresses a particular model of moral psychology, one that is teleologically qualified such that vision and volition become increasingly co-extensive. The use of mirror metaphors, most notably in For Self-Examination are also shown to describe a selfreflexive mode of apprehension of morally compelling situations, exemplars or texts. Finally, this understanding of interesse is shown to be central to Kierkegaard's repudiation of the Epicurean counsel of indifference towards death. The aspect of interesse as an immediate experience of co-identity allows Kierkegaard to secure a sense in which we can become, contra Epicurus, copresent with our own death. This allows for useful Kierkegaardian interventions into modern debates on the harm of death.
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ItemNietzsche's philosophy of time( 2006)In this work I offer a new interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence. Most prior writers on the topic have attempted to understand the thought as a cosmological or metaphysical thesis, or as a moral imperative. My thesis is that the idea is but one facet of a broader public action by which Nietzsche hoped to introduce the reader in a bodily compelling way to the possibility of seeking out generally unrealised modes of being. In order to motivate my interpretation, and so as to elaborate on the specific modes of being Nietzsche urges, much of the present work is spent giving very close readings for certain of his early texts. I take the central text for understanding the significance of the idea of recurrence to Nietzsche's philosophical project more generally to be the surreal sequence, from the third part of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, entitled "Of the Vision and the Riddle". To make sense of this very obscure chapter I spend much of the thesis examining the texts preceding it that Nietzsche himself prepared for publication. Nietzsche, particularly in his Zarathustra but in his other works too, makes great use of imagistic tropes. It is my contention that, whilst Nietzsche is unsystematic in his use of terms, he is consistent in his use of images. Further, I hold that we can usefully fill out the images he employs by seeking their antecedents in the philosophical cannon. The readings I present here proceed in large part by comparing Nietzsche's texts with works by Plato, Schopenhauer and Descartes, because in these works I find images excitingly similar to those used by Nietzsche.
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ItemNegotiating nationhood in multi-ethnic Germany( 2006)In their interactions with students who were immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, teachers at the Gesamtschule (comprehensive secondary school) in Osnabruck during the 1998-1999 school year took for granted that these students could not be German. The teachers assumed and expected that their Auslander (foreigners / non-citizens) and Aussiedler (German re-settlers from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: literally, those who "settled out") students would be other than German, or ambiguously German. Nonetheless, the teachers expected them to be participatory German citizens and not to be other than supposedly liberal Germans. These contradictory assumptions and expectations existed concurrently and informed each other. This study of one people's views and constructions of others acknowledges the role played by both categorisations of others and group identification in processes of identity formation. In focussing on the teachers' social categorisations of their Auslander and Aussiedler students, I have contributed to knowledge of the role played by social categorisation of others in the nationhood and national identities of Germans in the late twentieth century. Enmeshed in an understanding of nationhood as indigeneity, the teachers sometimes stereotyped their Auslander and Aussiedler students as Turkish machos, Russian-speaking gang members or polarised them as liberal or fundamentalist. These categorisations were variously reinforced or challenged in the teachers' interpretations of their interactions with them. Reified stereotypes were evident and reinforced when the teachers' interpretations sought to represent others in terms that were familiar, and hence a great deal of potential cultural difference was avoided so as to render the foreign comprehensible. Stereotypes were unsettled when the teachers aimed to understand others on the others' own terms and allowed cultural difference to, challenge shared assumptions. While the teachers typically operated with an essentialist understanding of culture they frequently implied a processual understanding of culture. Despite my subjects' assumptions and expectations that their Auslander and Aussiedler students were other than German or ambiguously German they expected them to be active German citizens. This expectation and others - that they learn the German language, conform to civic and democratic values, and participate in German public life - constituted a form of liberalism, but a liberalism which was sometimes ethnicised. The teachers sometimes assumed liberalism to be essential to some ethnic groups and not to others.