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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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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ItemThe imperative to see the whole( 2007)The Eleatic advance over Homeric epic was to bring the phenomenon of the finitude of existence into view in terms of logos and not just mythos. In seeing that being is bound to appearance not accidentally but in essence, Parmenides confronts limits of thought which are destined for modern resurgence in the wake of the epochal dominance of the Platonic understanding of the meaning of being. The phenomenon of radical finitude reappears in the philosophy of Leibniz, shaped in part by Europe's more or less sudden discovery of Chinese culture, a culture no less ancient than its own existing on the other side of a world, the whole of which had finally been appreciated to be a globe. The European debates concerning the nature of Chinese thought reveal a struggle in the Western imagination to come to terms with this discovery, fundamental enough to be described as a "re-orientation of the occident." This reorientation leads inexorably to Kant's epochal realisation of the role of transcendental imagination in the constitution of temporality, which is an understanding of limitation constituting a confrontation with the limits of thought no less radical than Parmenides'. Having thus traced a path through philosophy's history of attempts to understand the imperative to see the whole, Heidegger's phenomenology of human finitude recounts this history in order to enable a realization of the historicity of the meaning of being itself, and is thus a project of the retrieval of these meanings, which have unfolded throughout the history of philosophy. Apprehending our own modern understanding of being in terms of production, I follow Heidegger as he attempts to think his way first back into the pre-modern understanding of being as creation, and then back again into the pre-Socratic experience of being as a balance (kosmos) of absence and presence, revealing and concealing. But this path of retrieval is found to converge not upon a pure origin in Parmenides, but rather to lead to the thought of the operation of mixture in the source of our metaphysics, and in particular upon the mixed contrasts arising in the epochal crossing of Ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon cultures from which modern Germanic languages have arisen. The significance of that fundamental fold in the history of thought mirrors the significance of the fold still underway for us today, as Western philosophy continues to come to terms with Eastern ways of thinking about being, and a cultural interaction takes place whose significance for the future is destined to become as consequential as the meeting of the Classical and Anglo-Saxon worlds in first-century Britain has been for us.
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ItemShould we live longer?( 2007)The project of medicine is to save life, yet there is a strong taboo against Promethean medicines which save life to too great a degree. The mythology of human civilisations is filled with precautionary tales regarding the doomed fate of those who seek to postpone or escape death. These taboos are not easily explained; nevertheless the popular sentiment seems to be that, at some point, it would be wrong to extend the duration of a person's life. Over the past century, the life expectancy of a North American male has almost doubled, mostly through the application of advances in medical technology. This dramatic shift in lifespan has brought about an enormous difference in how we live our lives. We can do more work, have more careers, and have more children who we can expect to outlive us. At the same time, we consume more resources, both in the prime of life, and increasingly in our old age. Though our lives have already increased in length dramatically, we are approaching a turning-point - there are many medical technologies reaching maturity which will soon offer us the opportunity to increase human lifespan. One day these technologies will extend our lives far beyond what we currently consider a 'natural' lifespan. Whether the gains are modest or dramatic, these therapies will make some difference to the lives of those who receive them. We are not facing literal immortality, but we will soon develop the technological capacity to significantly increase human lifespan and decrease the symptoms of ageing, violating the widespread taboos. If no ethical decisions are made, many of these technologies will be deployed and our lives will be extended. If there is any rational basis to the taboo against extending life, we need to discover it soon. By the same token, if these technologies will be beneficial, we need to know why. Both medical research and clinical practice are extremely focused on lifesaving interventions. Current medical practice and current research policy is blind to the effects that medicine has on longevity. This thesis attempts to assess the likely effects that existing and impending medical technologies will have on human longevity, and to assess the normative value of these effects. I begin with a review of various rationales against the use of medical technologies to extend life, which have been put forward by philosophers, biologists and politicians. Some of these arguments are dismissed here on the basis that they lack merit or that they are unanswerable, and the others are retained for analysis in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 situates the overall analysis within an evidentiary framework, by reviewing the biological processes that underpin ageing and the technologies that have been developed or proposed for combating these processes. In the light of the available evidence, I propose four archetypal health trajectories that an enhanced person's life may follow, depending on the life-extending therapies which are employed. These orthogonal archetypes locate the different extremes that may be produced by different life-extending technologies. The third chapter seeks to determine the value that each of these archetypes would have for individuals, relative to the value of a normal, un-enhanced life. To do this, I develop a quantified account of utilitarianism based on John Broome's temporal account of benefit and harm. This allows the different health trajectories to be assessed under different assumptions regarding the rate of aged decline and the badness of decrepitude. I then consider various arguments that interfere with the underpinnings of this basic utilitarian account, including several arguments which aim to show that a longer lifespan would be bad for individuals on any theory of value. Following this analysis I am able to sort the archetypal health trajectories by the degree to which they are beneficial or harmful. As a society, we are concerned mainly with the distributed effects of new medical technologies. Chapter 4 focuses on these collective effects of life-extending medicine. Therapies which are unreasonably expensive, or which produce widespread ill-effects for the population as a whole may be unethical even when they are of benefit to individuals. I assess the likely effects of life extension on basic demographic variables such as population size and composition, and draw some conclusions about the ways in which these effects determine the permissibility of different therapies. I consider the types of sacrifices which will be justified in order to obtain the different kinds of health outcomes that will be produced by the new medical technologies. Finally I address arguments against the use of longevity therapies based on egalitarian principles of justice. All technologies which aim to enhance the basic functions of human bodies face a precautionary objection, which warns against the unknown dangers of trying to improve on our biological traits which are the products of the process of evolution. Chapter 5 assesses these arguments in the particular case of enhancements which target the biological processes which underpin ageing. I give an explanation of the evolutionary sources of our ageing and mortality, and compare these sources with our needs and goals. An evaluation is made as to whether or fit nature gives us any moral imperative to preserve the status quo. Finally I am able to draw some broad conclusions about the kinds of limitations which we should place on the development and implementation of medical technologies which extend human lifespan, and whether we should work to live longer than we presently do.
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ItemThe anatomy of a minimal mind( 2007)This thesis is entitled "The Anatomy of a Minimal Mind". By a "minimal mind" I mean the simplest kind of mind that could exist. As there is widespread philosophical disagreement about what a mind is, or what mental states are, I refrain from assuming at the outset that a minimal mind has to be phenomenally conscious, or subjectively aware. 0f events in its surroundings. My objective is to identify the requirements that an organism would have to satisfy, before it could be credited with possessing a mind of any sort, however rudimentary. I then attempt to develop a detailed model of this minimal mind, using a conservative methodological approach: we should not interpret an organism's behaviour as a manifestation of underlying mental states unless doing so enables us to make better scientific predictions about its behaviour and/or explain its behaviour more fully. In section A, chapter one, I discuss the philosophical background to the contemporary discussion of minds and mental states. I defend the controversial claim that only living things can be said to have minds or mental states, and I argue that there are no convincing grounds for rejecting the common view that mental states are real phenomena. This in no way implies the more controversial view that all mental phenomena share some distinguishing feature that characterises them as mental. If, however, there is some distinguishing property which is common to all mental states, and only those states, then the two most promising philosophical candidates for this property would surely be consciousness and intentionality. I argue that the different varieties of consciousness distinguished by philosophers fail to "carve nature at the joints". I then analyse the strengths and weaknesses of three common definitions of intentionality. Lastly, I examine Dennett's intentional stance and argue that the two ways in which it can be formulated are in fact quite distinct. I propose that one of these formulations, which I refer to as the agent-centred intentional stance, can be used to help us identify creatures with minimal minds. In section B (chapters two to eight), I attempt to identify the necessary conditions for intentional agency in creatures, by examining several broad categories of behavioural and biological properties that have been proposed in the philosophical and scientific literature as relevant to having a mind, and sifting through them, all the while attempting to put together a constructive definition of a "minimal mind". In particular, I discuss sensory capacities (including discriminatory ability and perception); memory; flexible behaviour patterns; the ability to learn; self-directed movement and control; the ability to correct one's mistakes; and the ability to form concepts. Within each category of "mind-relevant" properties, I examine the different ways in which these properties are realised by different kinds of organisms, at various levels of complexity. The biological case studies that 1 discuss range from the relatively simple (viruses) to the most complex (vertebrates, especially birds and mammals). In section C, I list about a dozen detailed conditions that an animal has to meet before it can be said to possess this kind of "minimal mind", which, 1 argue, is the most basic kind of mind anything can have. Perhaps the most crucial condition is that the animal possess an internal "minimal map" by which it represents the means it has to adopt to achieve its ends, enabling it to steer itself around its environment. 1 argue that animals whose maps are of the right sort can be said to have beliefs, desires and intentions. Finally, 1 claim that these "minimal minds" come in no less than four different varieties. Operant agency, navigation using visual landmarks, tool use and the social practice of following a guide are all behaviours that manifest mental states. Although these states are not phenomenally conscious states, 1 argue that the intentionality they possess is fundamentally the same as that found in conscious mental states. In the end, I conclude that many insects and spiders, as well as octopuses and squid, and of course fish, qualify as having minimal minds.