School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemExplaining PICTA, PACER and Cotonou : trade policy in the Pacific 1996-2006(University of Melbourne, 2009)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableUniversal visions : neuroscience and recurrent chrrcteristics of world palaeoart(University of Melbourne, 2009)Palaeoart includes a diverse range of art-like manifestations, predominantly comprising rock art and portable art objects, datingfrom the Pleistocene right through to the Holocene. A fascinating aspect of palaeoart is that striking commonalities or parallels may be observed world-wide. These parallels include a range of recurrent abstract-geometric motifs and patterns, figurative subjects and themes. Similarities in the ways in which this content is executed may also be found. Despite various attempts, these commonalities have not yet been adequately explained. Positioned within a structuralist framework, this thesis considers recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as a means of understanding them. Specifically, it examines the role of human perceptual-neurophysiological universals in governing palaeoart production, and argues for a basis of artistic parallels in aspects of the evolved neurobiology shared by all normal humans. The rock art of hunter-gatherer societies constitutes more than 90 per cent of known prehistoric art, and the scope of the study is limited to palaeoart attributed to pre-European contact, pre-literate hunter- gatherer societies. The temporal scope of the study varies with the evidence discussed. The approach taken is partly informed by recent studies that have used neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activation patterns associated with the perception of different types of visual stimuli. It is further informed by a wide range of additional neuroscientific and perceptual experimentation data relevant to palaeoart imagery. The value of considering human universals as a means of answering the questions how and why the same forms recur in palaeoart around the world is addressed. The approach provides a sound alternative to simplistic interpretations such as cultural diffusion based solely on visual resemblances between the arts of widely separated regions. The examination of palaeoart in light of neuroscientific data has major implications, ultimately revealing underlying reasons for the production of certain types of imagery. Abstract-geometric motifs and patterns, animals and parts of animals, and the human body and its parts are all shown to have special roles in visual information processing. It is found that shared aspects of the human nervous system influence conscious and unconscious preferences and decisions made in the process of creating graphic imagery, and that this has given rise to cross-cultural similarities in palaeoart. Recurrent forms in palaeoart are shown to be precisely those visual stimuli that are particularly powerful triggers of neural activity and correspond with prominent areas of the visual brain. These forms of visual imagery stimulate inherent neural mechanisms that have developed during human evolution specifically for the analysis of biologically significant aspects of the visual world. Palaeoart can thus be regarded as a kind ofneuro- perceptual mirror demonstrating attributes and principles characteristic of human beings.
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ItemThis is how we live now : the lifestylization of home(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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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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ItemColonising Yolngu defence : Arnhem Land in the Second World War and transnational uses of indigenous people in the Second World War(University of Melbourne, 2008)The thesis examines the involvement in World War II of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, in the context of colonialism in the Northern Territory, and with comparative attention to the war experiences of the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea. and the Native American Navajo. Yolngu participated in the war through various avenues, including the provision of labour for white Australian war initiatives. Most notably Yolngu served as auxiliaries to non-indigenous military units such as the North Australia Observer Unit, and they also participated in the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, which was exclusively Aboriginal apart from its leadership. Rather than representing widespread white Australian appreciation of Yolngu skills or recognition of Yolngu equality, the military employment of Yolngu continued structures of ideas and practices inherent in settler colonialism in the north. The military authorities, with government endorsement, organised Yolngu to utilise their skills in defence of the colonial project that was of itself simultaneously robbing Yolngu of their land and rights. Yolngu had their own motivations to work alongside white military, and for the most part participated willingly. Analysis of oral testimony points to their courageous efforts and, unlike the non-indigenous documents, positions Yolngu as central actors in Arnhem Land during the war. Comparative analysis of other colonised indigenous peoples' involvement in World War ll�Pacific Islanders in similar units in Papua and New Guinea, and Navajo Codetalkers in the United States�highlights the existence of common colonial practices that existed transnationally, alongside indigenous peoples' own sense of agency. This study re-centres indigenous people in war narratives while demonstrating at the same time how governments' reliance on indigenous skills and labour in times of crisis did not represent a fundamental change in relations, although for white authorities there were, eventually, unanticipated outcomes from the war for indigenous peoples.
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ItemA spectroscopic and chromatographic study of the photochemical properties of daylight fluorescent paint( 2009)Daylight fluorescent pigments fade rapidly, accompanied by a chronology of colour change. Fluorescence is a photo-physical phenomenon which involves emission of light from an excited state. Fluorescent dyes thus have a high susceptibility of being promoted to an excited state; a characteristic in the case of organic fluorophores which infers vulnerability toward photo-bleaching. Multiple organic fluorescent dyes are routinely incorporated into a given daylight fluorescent pigment, to either additively fluoresce or interact through energy transfer. The organic fluorescent dyes employed invariably differ in photo-stability, and upon loss of each species of fluorophore an abrupt colour change is observed. The collective result of this fading behaviour is that in a short period of time a daylight fluorescent paint layer will be of a different hue, devoid of luminosity. As consequence it is almost impossible to colour match a faded daylight fluorescent paint layer without the hues diverging asynchronously, or ascertain the original palette of a daylight fluorescent artwork after a protracted period of time. The predicament is exacerbated by the fact that there is no standard method in cultural material conservation, of documenting daylight fluorescent colour in a painting photographically or colorimetrically. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the photochemical behaviour of daylight fluorescent pigments, to ensure best practice in the preservation of artworks that contain daylight fluorescent paint. Fluorimetrie and chromatographic analysis of the DayGlo daylight fluorescent pigment range at the constituent dye level, prior to and during an accelerated light ageing program formed the basis of the experimental. Given the limited selection of fluorescent dyes suitable for daylight fluorescent pigment manufacture, it is anticipated that the results attained for the DayGlo range will be applicable to all daylight fluorescent media encountered in cultural material. Experimental data revealed the manner in which the fluorescent dyes behind each DayGlo daylight fluorescent pigment were formulated, and provided explanation for the 1colour changes observed upon fading. A prognosis of when and why a daylight fluorescent palette experiences hue shift and the implications this has for display is presented. Methodology for imaging daylight fluorescence, identification of the constituent fluorescent dyes in a daylight fluorescent pigment and colour matching a daylight fluorescent paint layer are presented and applied in-situ, to case studies possessing a daylight fluorescent palette.
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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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