Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Power (Philosophy)'

This dissertation investigates Platonic political philosophy as a possible means for understanding the relationship between knowledge and power. Via a close reading of Heinrich Meier's early work on Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, it attempts to articulate how political philosophy in Meier's sense works, as well as to carry out in actu a piece of interpretation in accord with its characteristic approach. It finds that Meier "purifies" (kathairo) the figures of Schmitt and Strauss into the exemplars of political theology and political philosophy, respectively; that he traces postmodern relativism back to its roots in a moral-theological view associated with revelation; that he is able in this way to sharpen the distinction between political theology and political philosophy, and, more generally, between the orders of knowledge and of power; and that these orders, despite much obvious interpenetration, are incommensurable in view of their extreme cases. Further, it finds that political philosophy operates in the interrogative mode for questioning the assertions and commands of political and theological authorities, and the hypothetical subjunctive mode for protecting itself, and philosophy generally, from persecution at the hands of such authorities; in addition, it employs these modes to gain insight into its own possibility and necessity, or to progress in self-knowledge. Finally, it finds that political philosophy makes a characteristic turn (periagoge) toward the good, and that this is only justified if the good sticks to the real or if truth is somehow primary or if not everything is possible.

In his 1978 lectures at the College de France, Security Territory Population, Michel Foucault shifts his analysis of power by arguing for pastoral power as both the prelude to governmentality and as the decisive moment in the constitution of the Western subject. If the history of the Christian pastorate involves "the entire history of procedures of human individualization in the West (184)," then, Foucault argues, there has never been a revolt against pastoral power because such a revolt would be a revolt against the constitution of the self, that is to say against self-consciousness. If the revolt against pastoral power is a revolt against self-consciousness, then I argue that the psychagogic-spiritual, as opposed to rhetorical-theological, practices of religious conversion may be where counter-conducts (already understood to be subsumed within Christian pastoral power) may also overwhelm the Christian pastorate. In his conversion to Christianity Augustine employs techniques that are `overwhelming' to pastoral power, but are never actually an attempt to overcome pastoral power. In the specific experiences recalled by Augustine in his Confessions, through the various non-discrete phases of his conversion he takes up what Foucault calls counter-conducts. Through asceticism (especially in the author's struggle with conscupience); through the establishment of a new religious community (as a Manichean catechumen) through mysticism (in the doctrine of `inner illumination)'; through the exegesis of scripture (significantly in the voluntary reading of Romans 13:12-14 prior to becoming a catechumen of the Christian Church); and through eschatological belief (specifically in the a-millennial conception of the return of Christ), Augustine, author of the Confessions, emerges as a convert to Christianity. Towards Foucault's call for genealogies of pastoral power and towards the call of philosophy understood as ethico-poetic praxes of Eros captured in the phrase epimeleia heatou, this thesis will investigate Augustine of Hippo's conversion to Christianity as an enactment of Foucault's `counter-conducts.' I will argue, through exegesis of Augustine's Confessions, that this parrhesiatic document is simultaneously a narrative of psychagogic practices which reflects Augustine's profound ascesis towards Christian subjectivation as well as a document of the counter-conducts that overwhelm Christian pastoral power while never revolting against it. As a result of his pluralistic and deeply personal approach towards conversion, Augustine's recorded experiences exemplify how `new' technologies (or at least new modalities of old technologies) are established within the Christian pastorate. It is in and through the event of his conversion that Augustine also emerges as a leader of the orthodox Church and simultaneously as an instigator for later revolts against it--arguably, for example, as an inspiration for the leaders of the Protestant Reformation. If there can be no revolution against pastoral power because it is always instituting, circumscribing, and subsuming new forms of resistance on its own, then perhaps we can best understand where counter-conducts are most dangerous to the practices of power by understanding where some practices actually fail to resist power-effects, while simultaneously transforming power-relations.

There are many different ways to talk about the world. Some ways of talking are more expressive than others—that is, they enable us to say more things about the world. But what exactly does this mean? When is one language able to express more about the world than another? In my dissertation, I systematically investigate different ways of answering this question and develop a formal theory of expressive power. In doing so, I show how these investigations help to clarify the role that expressive power plays within debates in metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of language.

When we attempt to describe the world, we are trying to distinguish the way things are from all the many ways things could have been—in other words, we are trying to locate ourselves within a region of logical space. According to this picture, languages can be thought of as ways of carving logical space or, more formally, as maps from sentences to classes of models. For example, the language of first-order logic is just a mapping from first-order formulas to model-assignment pairs that satisfy those formulas. Almost all formal languages discussed in metaphysics and logic, as well as many of those discussed in natural language semantics, can be characterized in this way.

Using this picture of language, I analyze two different approaches to defining expressive power, each of which is motivated by different roles a language can play in a debate. One role a language can play is to divide and organize a shared conception of logical space. If two languages share the same conception of logical space (i.e., are defined over the same class of models), then one can compare the expressive power of these languages by comparing how finely they carve logical space. This is the approach commonly employed, for instance, in debates over tense and modality, such as the primitivism-reductionism debate.

But a second role languages can play in a debate is to advance a conception or theory of logical space itself. For example, consider the debate between perdurantism, which claims that objects persist through time by having temporal parts located throughout that time, and endurantism, which claims that objects persist through time by being wholly present at that time. A natural thought about this debate is that perdurantism and endurantism are simply alternative but equally good descriptions of the world rather than competing theories. Whenever the endurantist says, for instance, that an object is red at time t, the perdurantist can say that the object’s temporal part at t is red. On this view, one should conceive of perdurantism and endurantism not as theories picking out disjoint regions of logical space, but as theories offering alternative conceptions of logical space: one in which persistence through time is analogous to location in space and one in which it is not. A similar distinction applies to other metaphysical debates, such as the mereological debate between universalism and nihilism.

If two theories propose incommensurable conceptions of logical space, we can still compare their expressive power utilizing the notion of a translation, which acts as a correlation between points in logical space that preserves the language’s inferential connections. I build a formal theory of translation that explores different ways of making this notion precise. I then apply this theory to two metaphysical debates, viz., the debate over whether composite objects exist and the debate over how objects persist through time. This allows us to get a clearer picture of the sense in which these debates can be viewed as genuine.

Depth psychology, as a tradition originating from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, today differentiates itself from other practices of counseling psychology by claiming a special focus upon the soul and its experience of imagination. But the study of philosophy shows how the tenets of depth psychology are problematic—the anima mundi is a misunderstanding that brings about significant consequences for the practice of psychotherapy. This thesis undertakes a hermeneutic methodology by examining particular writings from philosophers Gotthold E. Lessing and Soren Kierkegaard. These works indicate the problematic character of thought that is not in accord with the beautiful, whereby a question is raised regarding how a psychotherapy that is informed by philosophy might make human life more beautiful. At the basis of these themes is the account of noetic heterogeneity and phantasia (“appearing”) in Aristotle’s De Anima, which is examined in relation to Michael Elliott’s new psychotherapy of Philosophic Psychology.