School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe treatment of the mentally ill in Victoria, 1850-1887 : a study of official policy and institutional practice(University of Melbourne, 1979)
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ItemActs and agency( 1973)The central concern of this thesis is to begin to explicate the concepts of action and agency. I commenced research on this thesis with an interest in the notion of Responsibility but found myself constantly pressed back to more fundamental questions about the nature of action itself. It seemed to me that a lot of the literature concerning itself with these questions was unsatisfying because of an unquestioned assumption that the same approach had proved useful in analysing such physical phenomena as causality could be used to analyse such mental phenomena as action. Accordingly, I commence my inquiry by establishing what I take to be the the approach to problems in the philosophy of mind. I argue moreover that this approach is unique to such problems. I then go on to apply this approach in elucidating the concept of action. I claim no completeness for the analysis I offer. I am conscious of leaving several important questions untouched. I do however, regard what I have done as a useful beginning to the solution of further problems in the philosophy of action. For example, I regard any theory of action inadequate to which cannot incorporate the notion of motivation on the one hand and the phenomenon of weakness of will on the other. Nevertheless, I have not taken opportunity in the present work to show how my theory can fulfil this demand. What I have briefly indicated is how my theory would apply to questions of Ethics. One feature of the theoretical framework within which my work has been done should be mentioned: this is my conviction of the unity of all creation. By this I mean only that I do not take the existence of mental phenomena to signal the existence of a realm of being different in kind from the physical or material realm. There are not two or more kinds of existents; rather the stuff of reality belongs to but one metaphysical category. What precisely this 'Materialism' will mean and what its implications are for the philosophy of mind will vary as between various approaches and problems and I take it that such a basic statement of materialism does not solve by flat any of the questions that current debates about physicalism or central-state materialism encompass. Rather it states the basic direction into which I would like to see those arguments go end the conclusions I would like to see them reach. If they should reach only conclusions incompatible with this basic position and if no error should be found In them, then I should be obliged to abandon my materialist position. I hold this conviction more as an article of faith than as the outcome of formal philosophical thought since I do not believe that a complete philosophical justification can be brought forward in support of it, although the idea has been given currency precisely by attempts at such a justification. Lastly, I wish to acknowledge the assistance that Dr. Graeme Marshall has given me. In the role of supervisor to my thesis work he has constantly shown me new directions for research and enlivened my thinking with ideas which are now inextricably bound up with my own.
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ItemUniversals and predication( 1970)
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ItemMoral appraisal & human needs( 1974)
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ItemPolitical and educational ideals( 1970)
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ItemThe resemblance theory( 1971)The resemblance theory is an attempt to analyse what it is for a number of things to be the same in a certain way. According to this theory, to say of a number of things that they have the same quality - e.g., they are red, or that they are the same kind of thing r: e.g., they are boxes, or that they stand in the same. relation to some other things - e.g., they are above them or come before them or better than them, is to say that the things concerned resemble one another in certain ways. As one might expect, objections to the resemblance theory come in a variety of ways. Generally they can be divided into two classes .. those concerned with the nature of the terms of the resemblance relation, and those concerned with the relation of resemblance itself. I shall begin the list of objections with a brief account of those in the first class. (1) It is an essential feature of any analysis that the notions to be analysed do not re-appear in their own analysis. Take as an example a number of red things a, b, c. Now if we are required to give an analysis of what it is for these things to be red, it would be most unsatisfactory to say that the redness of a, b and c consists in the fact that the redness of a resembles the redness of b, which in turn resembles the redness of c, and so on. Thus if the resemblance theory is to avoid circularity, the terms of any resemblance relation cannot be the qualities under analysis. Possibly then they may be other qualities, but since the theory purports to analyse any quality, those other qualities would eventually be subject to a similar analysis. Hence in the long run the theory must insist that the terms of resemblance relations cannot be qualities. At this point it encounters the objection that the terms of any resemblance relation are primarily qualities, and that when we speak of resemblances between things we are using the word "resemblance" in a derived sense. That is, to speak of a resemblance between two things a and b is to speak of a resemblance between some of the qualities of a and some of the qualities of b. (2) Secondly,: there is the class of objections which are directed towards the notion of resemblance itself. The relation of resemblance provides what might be called a structural model by means of which we can understand what it is for a number of things to be the same in a certain way. That is according to the resemblance theory, a fact such as "a, b, c (three things) are red" can be understood more clearly when we think of it in terms of a certain kind of relation linking a, b and c to one another. Now this relation of resemblance presents us with the following three problems. (1) The relations of resemblance which link all and only things of one kind, in virtue of which they are of that ki?d, must be distinguished not only from the resemblances that link all and only things of some other kind, but also from those resemblances, if there are any, which are not part of an elucidation of the notion of being the same in some way. Concerning the first of these two distinctions, advocates of the resemblance theory must state what they mean by saying that things of the same kind resemble one another in a certain. way. To say, e.g., that a number of things are red means that these things resemble one another is not enough. Suppose a and b to be 'two things which are both red and round. Since "a and b are red" does not mean what is meant by "a and b are round", it is clear that "a resembles b" as an analysis of the first of these two propositions must be distinguished from "a resembles b" as an analysis of the second. (2) For the resemblance theory to be successful, resemblance must be a relation, just as being on top of and being next to are relations. But it has been argued that resemblance lacks one of the characteristics necessary for anything to be called a relation -. that of having a definite number of terms. (3) If the resemblance theory is to be an elucidation of what it is for a number of things to be the same in some way, then the relation "resembles" itself must be capable of being understood sufficiently well without any further analysis: it must be possible to regard this relation as being primitive. There are, however, two objections to this possibility, (a) It is argued that the notion of degrees of resemblance can be understood only if it is analysed as the relative positions of resemblance terms in an order. (b) One of the most celebrated objections to the resemblance theory is that put forward by Russell, who argues that in terms of the theory the relation "resembles" cannot be primitive. For "resembles", just as much as "being red", "being to the left of" etc. is a way in which occurrences can be the same, So the theory must be able to account for this way of being the same as well as the others. But if we do this we have to say that the fact of a particular occurrence being a resemblance is analysed in that it is related to certain other occurrences by occurrences of the sort we are trying to analyse. Such an analysis, Russell argues, leads to an infinite regress. On the other hand the remaining alternative is to say that Resemblance, alone, is a universal. But then we would have little excuse for excluding any other universal, and so we might as well give up the resemblance theory in favour of a theory of universals. Having set out what seem to be the main objections to the resemblance theory, the remainder of my discussion will be spent in answering them.
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ItemAnalyticity in the mind-body problem( 1971)In western philosophy two groups of distinctions seem to have appeared at different times in protean forms from antiquity to the present. The first group may be loosely labelled under the one heading, the mind-body distinction : the second group, the analytic-synthetic distinction. The purpose of this investigation is to see to what extent these distinctions have influenced one another.