School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemWho's playing our song ? : the development of the Australian musical 1900-2000(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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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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ItemNietzsche's conceptions of philosophy : an essay in interpretation( 2007)No doubt one of the most tangible ways of making an introductory first approach to an individual philosopher's conception of philosophy is via his major themes. Can one argue with the suggestion that philosophy, however else one may think of it, has in its history almost invariably crystallised around a number of themes? I have two in mind - the themes of reason and truth. If it can be agreed that philosophy has, since its inception, made reason and truth the object of its discursive efforts, the locus of its institutionalised accounts, the vehicle for generating a sense of the questionable, wondrous and sublime, then perhaps we can use them to arrive at a first approximative understanding of the individual philosopher Nietzsche's conception of his enterprise. An answer to the question "What does Nietzsche provide us with in the w?y of thematic treatments of reason and truth?" suggests itself immediately. What he gives us are self-conscious, radical interpretations of the two, self-conscious interpretations in the sense that he is at pains to point out the interpretative moment of his dealings with reason and truth, in the sense, in other words, that he points to himself in giving his readers his accounts and is never far from allusions to his own partiality as someone giving an account; radical interpretations in the sense that his interpretations are intended to violently undercut other sorts of interpretations of reason and truth that he takes to be prevalent in the history of philosophy, both at the level of style and the not entirely separable level of content. To the extent that it is possible to talk about Nietzsche's overall picture of reason, we can say that he thinks of it, in dramatic contrast to the thinkers of the tradition, as a surface phenomenon of human life, often indeed as a vagrant surface phenomenon, almost, I should like to say, as a point of concealment for less than inspired men. Truth, to the extent that he can bring it into thematic focus, is for Nietzsche primarily a lived quality of human experience, the product of men's most active and vital experiences of life in the world, that which must be striven for and struggled with as well as that which stands in need of ongoing creation To the extent that he can bring it into focus truth might be said to be something along these lines for him. The caveat is crucial because there exists for Nietzsche, and that by virtue of his radicalism, the possibility that the topos "truth" can no longer be brought into thematic focus in a philosophically meaningful way. Nietzsche, at least some of the time, would prefer to speak of individual truths rather than truth as a whole, if by the latter we understand an account of the basic nature of reality, the underlying constitution of man or cosmos or man-in-relation-to-cosmos. A distinction emerges that will be of some significance as far as our division of the material to be considered as part of our investigation is concerned - the distinction between Nietzsche's sense of the philosophical past and his hopes for the philosophical future; his diagnosis, on the one hand, of the self-conception of individual past philosophers, distinct philosophical epochs and past philosophy as a whole and, on the other hand, his prognosis for the future of philosophy. On the diagnostic front we note a feature of Nietzsche's attempts to address the question "What did philosophy think of itself as achieving in the past?" This is Nietzsche's equal propensity to give highly particularised textual renditions of individual philosophers' self-images (- where the question of a philosophical self-image connects seamlessly with that of an intellectualised self-conception -) and to venture grand generalisations about the entire philosophical past. The impression this gives many readers can no doubt be disconcerting. The inalienability of the individual philosophical personality is affirmed almost at the same time as Nietzsche seeks to compress the history of philosophy into a unity underpinned by a core of motives and motivating self-delusions. On the prognostic front we note the prominence of the philosophical personality of Nietzsche himself in determining philosophy's future possibilities. What philosophy is for Nietzsche in this future-oriented sense seems to revolve around the question of what he himself can make it into. Considerations along these lines can turn in the direction of sheer megalomania and do so increasingly as Nietzsche approaches the end of his sane, philosophically conscious life. Yet even in the absence of the titanic urge to view himself as the crux of philosophical history, even when he isn't brandishing his philosophical hammer or shouting his Promethean defiance into the heady regions occupied by the Gods of the Philosophical Pantheon, Nietzsche nonetheless holds to the possibility of creating philosophy anew himself.' In order to bring into view other key thematic facets of the philosophical conception of a new Nietzschean type of philosopher, together with a sense of how the thematic concerns of such a philosopher emerge from the background of Nietzsche's thinking about past philosophy, we must venture some improvements to our list of philosophical themes. Before doing so, let us insist on the indissolubility of the diagnostic and prognostic aspects of Nietzsche's thinking about the nature of philosophy. Diagnostic and prognostic tendencies are inextricable. Nietzsche's determination to open up new philosophical possibilities follows from his perception of what he took to be the acute insufficiency of past philosophy's conception of itself. Or, to put it in a way which seems more appropriate to the unquiet spirit of Nietzsche's philosophy - Nietzsche believed that the fashioning of new philosophical self-images was dependent on a vast and hearty preliminary act of philosophical destruction, viz. of the false, hollow or hackneyed self-images of the philosophical past. Nietzsche's later thought and writing is full of the drama, the pathos, he takes to be attendant on this task of destruction. And the way he cane to conceive of his own project on the model of a process of radical destruction, a process to have its consummation in radical philosophical renewal, provides one of the main variables in the development of his own self-conception. The more radicalised the self-conception, the more obscure to him the depths of what he shares with, indeed owes to, the philosophical past. As well as being one of the main variabilities that shape Nietzsche's sense of himself as a philosopher, it strikes me as one of the main vicissitudes of Nietzsche interpretation. In its simplest form we can grasp the problem involved by surveying the thematic ground that Nietzsche shares with those philosophers whose treatment of individual themes he becomes more and more intent on subverting or annihilating.
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ItemAbsolute time before Newton( 2007)This thesis provides a new analysis of early contributions to the development of the theory of absolute time-the notion that time exists independently of the presence or actions of material bodies and has no material cause. Though popularly attributed to Newton, I argue that this conception of time first appeared in medieval philosophy, as a solution to a peculiar theological problem generated by a widespread misrepresentation of Aristotle. I trace the subsequent evolution of the theory of absolute time through to the seventeenth-century, and argue that Newton, if anything, retreats from a full endorsement of the doctrine. Unlike absolute space, absolute time was absent from the philosophy of the Greeks, entering Western thought in the thirteenth century. Absolute time was first proposed as a negative thesis in response to a perceived irreconcilability between the popular theory of time, then seen as Aristotle's, that time was an attribute or effect of the motion of the primum mobile, and Biblical evidence from Joshua X 13, in which Joshua commands some heavenly motion to stop, but time continues. A pivotal moment in the development of theories of absolute time came at the close of the Scholastic period, in 1597, when the Jesuit philosopher Francisco Suarez built on these earlier ideas about time and proposed a theory of absolute time startlingly similar to the later absolutism of the neo-Epicurean atomistic philosophers. While Suarez's theory of time was dualistic, and he proposes one kind of time that is unmistakably Scholastic, his tempus imaginarius, which he describes as an infinitely extended immutable temporal flux that exists independently of material being, is very much of the early modern period. It is, however, in the work of Pierre Gassendi, the well known founder of seventeenth century neo-Epicurean atomism, that we see the first, and arguably the only, fully fledged theory of absolute time. Gassendi implanted absolute time into the Epicurean dualism of bodies and the void of absolute space. For Gassendi, time and space are truly absolute, and are ontologically prior to all other existing things-even God. Gassendi also removed the locus of God from changeless and atemporel extramundane eternity to our everyday world of change and decay, a radical move. I close the thesis with an investigation of the absolute time of Isaac Newton. Ironically, given that Newton is the most well-known absolutist, he in fact retreated from the true absolute time proposed by Gassendi, and instead described time as an affection of substance. For Newton however, following Henry More, this substance was not some mundane body or motion, but the spatially and temporally extended substance of God.
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ItemMediating risks : investigating the emergence of court ADR through the risk society paradigm( 2007)In the US, England and Australia alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has been increasingly employed as integral component in the handling and disposal of garden-variety civil cases. This thesis examines the quality and character of changes brought about through the uptake and continued use of ADR in the courts, a configuration that I refer to as Court ADR, in non-family law cases. Ulrich Beck's risk society paradigm provides the theoretical lens through which those changes in the courts are to be understood. In short, Beck claims that institutions and individuals' relationships to those institutions are transforming in contemporary societies, a transformation that is organised by and around risk. According to Beck, these transformations, while partial and incomplete, describe how the fundamental structures that generate and maintain society redound and confront their very foundations, a process that Beck refers to as reflexive modernisation. Moreover, individuals' relationships with institutions are caught up with such transformations. Beck describes this through his concepts of individualisation, whereby individuals are increasingly invited to make decisions regarding particular risks, which are simultaneously enabled and constrained by expert systems. I argue that these two central risk society conceptualisations - reflexive modernisation and individualisation - provide an informed theoretical framework for understanding those transformations in certain US, English and Australian courts as they relate to Court ADR. With the institutional emergence of Court ADR, and the growth of court-sponsored mediation in particular, the rationale underlying its development and continued use can be understood through the risk society paradigm. In terms of reflexive modernisation, the process of producing legal goods as they take shape in a judgement has and continues to produce negative side-effects, including expense, delay, undue complexity and limited accessibility to the courts themselves. One result is the emergence of Court ADR, which provides new procedures to structurally address many of those negative side-effects generated when legal goods are produced through processed that are oriented around adversarial adjudication. The emergence of Court ADR evidences the qualities and characteristics of individualisation insofar as litigants are invited into new decision-making spaces, inclusive of court-sponsored choices over whether arbitration or mediation might be more appropriate to handle and dispose of the case, as well as the attendant decisions once mediation, arbitration or other alternative processes are selected. Moreover, while litigants' entry into these spaces is enabled by legal actors and systems, they are simultaneously constrained. In short, Beck's risk society paradigm provides clarity with respect to how those alternative practices themselves have been legalised when used to handle and dispose of garden variety civil cases in the US, English and Australian courts.
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