School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemNo Preview AvailablePlato's teaching method in its historic context(University of Melbourne, 1966)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAspects of organised amateur music in Melbourne, 1836-1890(University of Melbourne, 1968)
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ItemThe concept of responsibility( 1969)All of the questions that are raised in this study about the nature and the conditions. of moral responsibility have been considered before. However, they have not often been considered together. They are considered together here, and an attempt is made to draw out some of the relations between them. This makes possible a treatment of moral responsibility that is to a. degree systematic; and it makes it possible for some of the central issues about moral responsibility to be seen in a somewhat fresh light. I wish to express my gratitude to that Australian Government for providing a Commonwealth Postgraduate Award which enabled me to undertake this enquiry. I also wish to thank the many people, and especially the members of the Department of philosophy at the University of Melbourne, who have been generous with their time and their advice. Above all, my thanks go to. Dr. Mary McCloskey, who has subjected all my work to the most searching scrutiny, and whose comments and criticisms have been invaluable.
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ItemFree play : a study of one characteristic of our response to beauty through the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller( 1967)Our pleasure in beautiful things is both invigorating and relaxing. It is invigorating because we learn something new, that a certain form exists in nature, or may be imposed upon it by man. This is not learnt as a piece of information - it is an experience which moves us one step further in our search for order In the chaos of our experience. Intellectual pleasure arises from the discovery of order, too, either through dividing our experience into segments, or through putting them back together again. But the discovery of intellectual order may bring us no closer towards realising how physical and mental characteristics are united in the human personality. Now pleasure in beautiful things is neither purely intellectual nor purely physical. Beautiful thoughts are rare, and beautiful touches do not exist. I want to show how an experience of beauty is a model for, and a foretaste of, a more ultimate synthesis between the mind and the physical world. Pleasure in beautiful things is also relaxing, because it allows us to enjoy being ourselves. For the time being, we do not worry about achieving anything, or learning anything. Some experiences of beauty make great demands on our powers of comprehension, but somehow this is relaxing rather than exhausting. There is pleasure in the very exercise of these powers in appreciating beauty, arid, moreover, we cannot be forced into it. It is the pleasure of freedom, through which a fuller self-realisation is possible, because we are not tied to a particular task. This experience is best characterised as one of free play, as opposed to work and other serious occupations. Freedom here is not to be confused with the more solemn freedom of the moral sphere. Nevertheless, because the pleasure of free play, like moral feeling, may be communicated to others and even required of them, a study of free play is illuminating for our understanding of moral freedom. This essay aims at following these ideas through the two books which first gave the currency. They are Kant's Critique of Judgement and Schiller's letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.
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ItemThe men called 'Sophists'( 1967)
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ItemKarl Barth and the concept of analogy( 1967)A philosophical examination of the use of the concept of analogy in the theology of Karl Barth - with particular reference to some of the problems in explaining religious knowledge and language.
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ItemThe Jansenist conflict( 1967)"Pascal was a Jansenist.", "Port-Royal was a Jansenist convent.". These facts are known quite widely. They may arise in conversatlon, often baffling all present, or appear as passing comments, in some lecture or general work of history or literature. But what was Jansenism? Who were the Jansenists? My own approach to Jansenism began at this level of honest curiosity, and the initial investigation soon destroyed my own preconception of Jansenism as merely a strict, form of Catholic life. I discovered that these Jansenists lived and died as members of the Catholic Church, and that most of them lived in union with the Holy See. However, at the same time Jansenists were involved in a bitter conflict with the authority of both Church and State, a conflict which spanned the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, a struggle, in which not one drop of Jansenist blood was shed. At this stage, my investigation into Jansenism became The Jansenist Conflict. Having settled, for the most part, the turmoil, of my own "Jansenist conflict", I wish to thank Mrs Anne Patrick of the Department of History in the University of Melbourne, and M. Antoine Denat of the Department of French Language and Literature in the University of Melbourne. Without their guidance, advice and concern, this work would have been impossible. Looking through the bibliography, I see a debt of gratitude to the Librarians and their assistants of the Baillieu Library in the University of Melbourne, the Leeper Library in Trinity College Melbourne, the Fisher Library in the University of Sydney, and Saint Mark's Library and the Australian National Library in Canberra. With regard to sources, I also thank Mr Peter Tronson of East Melbourne for providing me with a rare edition of the letters of his illustrious ancestor, M. Louis Tronson of Saint-Sulpice. Finally, I thank Rev. Dr Marry Marshall O.G.S. for his help with rare source material during his own research at the Institut Catholique in Paris. I also than him for setting me on the path which led to The Jansenist Conflict.
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ItemAn examination of some problems in religious epistemology( 1968)It is my intention in this thesis to decide whether or not it is reasonable to believe the claims of theism, (and since the only brand of theism with which I am acquainted is Christian theism the discussion will necessarily devolve upon that brand, which is what British Philosophers have always meant by theism anyway.) The question is important because of the importance of the beliefs in shaping the lives of men and communities, and since so many men base their conduct on an appeal to some kind of belief in God and since religion takes up so much of the resources of time and money of this community it is of interest to know whether belief in God is reasonable. If it is reasonable the effects are significant. If it is not, I think it is important to say that it is unreasonable. The question arises in the first place because of the preponderance of literature Which claims that no rational can or need be supplied for belief in God and because of the large number of people who hold their belief on non-rational, or irrational grounds. The following quotation from the article "Beginning all over again" by Howard Eugene Root in Soundings illustrates my aim. "At one time or another people are inclined to say reason can only take you so far. Reason is thereby likened to a railway line which takes one to a frontier station. There the line ends, where all have to get off the train. There are people about who tell us what the country is like on the other side of the frontier and it sounds very unlike what we know on this side. But this is where public conveyance ends. It is not even clear how we. can get to the other side. From the railway terminus we cannot see across the frontier. Do we go on foot? Some have tried this and never come back. Others have come back and reported that there is nothing on the other side at all. Still others have come back and made detailed reports. Yet how diverse and contradictory those reports seem. But what is the matter with the railway line? they not extend it beyond the frontier? If it can take us this far, why not a mile or so, further? How do we know that trains will not run over there until we have tried?" The requirements for intelligibility and verifiability will be foremost in the discussion and two possible theories will be considered in the search for a satisfactory epistemology: that based on the non-rational and that based on analogy with other minds. It is my intention to indicate, on the basis of the discussion, criteria which need to be met by any proposed religious epistemology for it to be acceptable and to indicate possible approaches to the problem of demonstrating that the assertions of theism are significant and verifiable.
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