School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 77
-
ItemMoral life and philosophical requirements: exploring possibilities for moral life through a liberation from philosophical requirements( 2018)This thesis offers an examination of some ways in which moral philosophy imposes requirements on itself that often unduly limit, obscure, and distort our moral understanding, thinking, and responsiveness. Taking my motivation from Cora Diamond, I critically examine the work of some moral philosophers that I take to exemplify this kind of laying down of requirements. This examination will be taken in three broad directions, with a different critical focus in each of the chapters: a requirement that moral thinking and responsiveness ought to go on only through the use of rational capacities, to the exclusion of personally engaged responsiveness and understanding; a requirement that moral philosophers must make arguments, which can distort and obscure the meaning of complex and difficult moral realities through attempts to render dimensions of them into ‘facts’ that can be used in arguments; the assumption that moral responsiveness is primarily a matter of making ‘choices’ about how to act based on discrete options, and in which one’s moral understanding of a situation can be thought of as a matter of judgement involving the exercise of rational capacities to choose which principles or concepts are appropriate to apply to a particular situation. Each of these kinds of requirement is brought into contact with examples from elsewhere in philosophy, that I consider to offer meaningful possibilities for moral understanding and responsiveness. I attempt to illuminate the various ways in which these meaningful possibilities are limited, obscured, distorted, deflected from, and excluded through the aforementioned requirements that are laid down. Other related requirements and assumptions are drawn out from those I primarily focus on, in an attempt to show the connectedness of various kinds of requirements and how they shape philosophical pictures of moral life. This gives a better sketch of the extent of the presence of requirements in moral philosophy. I simultaneously invite consideration of a philosophical orientation to moral life that is grounded in a kind of ‘receptiveness’ that I argue is a crucial dimension of Iris Murdoch’s ‘attention’. In contrast to the kinds of outlooks that begin with philosophical assumptions and commitments and then look towards the world in which moral life takes place, this orientation begins with an openness to moral life and what possibilities might be disclosed to us through our receptiveness and attentiveness to the realities of moral life. This way of thinking re-situates moral philosophy, bringing its relatedness to moral life to the foreground so as to make philosophy responsive to life, and not the other way around. This offers a liberation from the philosophical requirements Diamond draws attention to. Moral philosophy thus becomes less of an outward pressing onto the world in ways that can unduly shape our sense of moral reality, and more of an answering to that reality. An answering that, following Murdoch, is in a spirit of justness and love.
-
Item"Our own worst enemy": Southern anti-slavery networks and rhetoric in early republic and antebellum America( 2018)This thesis examines Southern-born anti-slavery activists. By analysing one hundred anti-slavery Southerners, this thesis illuminates a deeply interconnected network of anti-slavery that was not just limited to the South, but one that intersected with Northern anti-slavery movements. This thesis examines how an individual’s personal networks shifted as a result of their public anti-slavery stance, as well as the rhetoric of the white Southern testimony to the horrors of slavery, and how these individuals were particularly valuable to wider anti-slavery movements.
-
ItemThe voice of Methodism: temperance policy in Victoria, Australia 1902-1977( 2018)This thesis seeks to examine the influence of the Methodist Church in Victoria, Australia, on public policy in the twentieth century using the issue of Temperance as a case study. Methodists had a tradition of social activism dating back to their eighteenth-century founder John Wesley. While the Church took up many causes, Temperance had become its signature concern. The secular Temperance movement in Victoria, Australia was unable to bring about significant reform so Methodist activists became the prime instigators of change and secured changes to licensing in 1906. Methodists adopted a policy of ‘unswerving hostility’ to alcohol but, unable to adapt to social change in the following years, their influence slowly diminished. It was finally eclipsed in 1965 following a Royal Commission on Hotel Trading Hours. The Church, split between those clinging to traditional values and those seeking a better way to engage the community to their point of view, lost its reforming voice.
-
ItemForeigners and propaganda: war and peace in the imperial images of Augustus and Qin Shi( 2018)This thesis comparatively examines how Augustus and Qin Shi Huangdi manipulated the portrayals of and their interactions with foreigners in their imperial propaganda, and how such propaganda then served to create or uphold their imperial self-image.
-
ItemAt water's edge: Empire, disorder, and commerce on the docks in British America, 1714-1774( 2018)Early modern British imperial commerce focused its trading operations upon the orderly extraction of wealth from its colonies. This thesis argues that a key area of this process was the urban waterfront sector in its Atlantic port-cities in the Caribbean and North America. The waterfront lies at a liminal intersection between the city and the sea, between urban history and maritime history. The essential economic function of the waterfront—as a point for the movement of shipping, offloading, warehousing, and wholesaling—necessitated effective administration and governance by the state. But insecure imperial control over wharfside flows of commodities, people, and the environment, created difficulties for the British state. By examining this area in terms of space and place, we find a funnel or ‘bottleneck’ with competing vested economic interests and significant environmental instability, which could hinder imperial processes. Examining the docks in high-traffic port-cities across the British Atlantic coast, this paper provides a microcosmic framework for viewing the insecurity and instability that plagued the eighteenth-century British Empire in its growing colonial cities. Delving into this small quarter of the city enlightens us as to how disruptions at the colonial waterfront could cause disruption to the Empire, allowing us to gain a larger understanding of the British state apparatus and its administrative and commercial difficulties and vulnerabilities.
-
ItemIntegration or separation? Educational justice requirements for the disabled( 2018)In academic political philosophy, there is currently much enthusiasm surrounding the development of integration as a requirement of social justice. The application of integration to educational policy already exists but has centred on overcoming racial and/or economic segregation. Integration as a moral ideal is yet to be fully tested with respect to the situation of disabled students, a small heterogeneous group with complex and diverse educational needs. Underdeveloped but well-intentioned skepticism about inclusion policy has arisen within education research. This thesis takes this skepticism seriously but seeks to build a constructive response. The concerns regarding integrating disabled students will be framed as a question of the just distribution of costs associated with bringing integration about. This will involve an assessment of whether integration’s costs are transitional or permanent, and whether they are necessary or contingent on institutional design. The resulting argument will posit the processes and conditions that can justly be imposed by integration, and on whom integration’s burdens ought to fall. It will be proposed that the primary duty of schools is to secure educational goods for students. Thus, integrating schools is unjust if it blocks the ability of schools to provide educational goods to the disabled. Here, a contingent justification for not integrating disabled students will arise from current non-ideal conditions. More positively, the thesis proposes that educational costs may be minimised by reforming the way in which teachers are trained. This training becomes necessary for teachers in already integrated schools as, without such training, they are unable to attend to their professional moral duties.
-
ItemEvangelists for freedom: libertarian populism and the intellectual origins of modern conservatism, 1930-1950( 2018)This thesis examines the history of rightwing anti-statist thought in twentieth- century America from 1930-1950, focusing on the works of an array of intellectuals, politicians and activists who forged a distinct synthesis of classical American individualism with a populist critique of the nascent liberal political order, a revivalist Christian apologetics and virulent anti-communism. Central to their vision was an image of the liberty of the individual and the modern administrative state as antithetical, and a conception of the social world as the sole product of the creative power of the liberated individual. Radicalized by the triumph of New Deal liberalism, these authors and activists collaborated closely with conservative industrialists to establish new individualist organizations and publications, and propagate their philosophy throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Offering a quasi-utopian vision of national spiritual and material renewal, I argue that the work of these authors embodied a distinct strand of “libertarian populism,” a novel body of thought that would, in time, form the intellectual bedrock of the “new” post-World War II American conservatism.
-
ItemComposing commands: an inferentialist semantics for subsententials and imperatives( 2017)Standard theories in philosophy of language tend to endorse three claims: 1. Representationalist notions such as truth and reference are semantic primitives; 2. Sentence level meaning is propositional; 3. The meaning of complex expressions is a function of the meaning of their constituents. This thesis develops a semantics for languages with both imperative and declarative sentences, along with constituent names and predicates, and which rejects 1. and 2. above. The key features of this semantics are: inferentialism, compositionality, and content pluralism. It is inferentialist in the sense that, contra 1., meanings are treated as inferential roles, determined by norms of use in speech acts such as asserting and commanding. This is formalised as a proof-theoretic semantics in a cut-free sequent calculus system. It is compositional in the sense that the inference rules assigned to sentences are a function of those assigned to their constituents, names and predicates. In contrast to 2., it is a kind of content pluralism. This means that declarative and imperatives sentences express different sentence level semantic types, rather than just propositions. Despite this, sameness of word meaning is preserved across these different sentence types.
-
ItemRemembering the Commune: texts and celebrations in Britain and the United States.( 2017)This thesis contends that the Paris Commune had a significant impact on late nineteenth and early twentieth century working-class communities and organisations in the U.S. and Britain. First, the thesis establishes the broader understanding of the Commune seen in large, elite newspapers from both the U.S. and Britain. Many radical authors countered this conservative opinion in their own smaller press that also hosted transnational discussion. This was a harbinger for Marx’s The Civil War in France, which came to dominate the socialist interpretation of the Commune. Marx established the Commune as a revolutionary ideal. This was further developed and became the socialist canon with works by Hippolyte-Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray and Ernest Belfort Bax. The proliferation of these works, especially Marx’s The Civil War in France, is examined with close attention to the publishers who established transnational links when printing these socialist texts. Marx’s work gained further influence through its impact on Lenin who referred to it frequently in State and Revolution and in the burgeoning Bolshevik mythology. Secondly, this thesis demonstrates how the Commune’s socialist interpretation manifested itself in both countries’ annual celebrations. These annual celebrations were a ritualised part of working-class lives which instilled the values speakers took from the Commune. Consistently, celebrating workers were exposed to idealised images of internationalism and martyrdom, as well as the idea that they were oppressed by their state. These celebrations often gave conflicting interpretations of the Commune which suited their shifting needs. By analysing their speeches, the Commune celebrations become a palimpsest, revealing these shifting objectives as speakers debated the merits of reform and revolution through the imagery of the Commune. As working-class and radical communities in both the U.S. and Britain faced state repression in the wake of the Haymarket Affair, 1886, and the Trafalgar Square Bloody Sunday, 1887, the rhetoric at Commune celebrations became increasingly violent. These celebrations were informed by the socialist canon of the Commune and through the annual celebrations in Britain and the U.S. the Commune was able to have a direct impact on lives of workers and radicals in both countries.
-
ItemThe logical structure of love( 2017)Black feminist theorist bell hooks argued that "love is incompatible with abuse". Building on that unique starting-ground, this thesis makes the argument that an unusually clear and useful definition of love can be created by tracing out the logical opposite of abuse. If abuse is the systematic eroding of a person's integrity (this thesis argues), then love - as a willed practice - can be understood as the systematic supporting of a person's integrity. This philosophical reconceptualisation of love and abuse aims to make them as hard as possible to mistake for each other, and to give us better tools to mark the difference between them.