Open Access

This thesis investigates a selection of nineteenth-century handcrafted Indian souvenir objects housed in the Ethnological Collection of Lübeck, and connects them to the context of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, and to the broader global networks of European tourism within which they were produced and circulated. Focusing on those objects especially neglected in museum research as tourist memorabilia, on account of their serialised production or European stylistic influence, this thesis examines the colonial structures that promoted their production and enabled their mobility between India, Germany, and Britain. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach to object research, it moves beyond the biographies of the collectors, and questions how the production of such objects for European tourists offers us access to a further dimension of colonial intervention in India. Throughout the nineteenth century, Indian handicrafts were increasingly woven into the global and political power relations playing out on the colonial stage, in a categorically asymmetrical way. This thesis addresses four specific issues: first, it argues that a history of Indian handicrafts was reframed by colonialism to fit its discourse, often ignoring intermingling artistic influences and exchanges between and across pre-colonial kingdoms, in the quest to define and fix an ‘India’, and a unified idea of Indian art. Second, it argues that handicrafts played a role in the systems of colonial knowledge production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that sought to legitimise colonial rule. Third, it demonstrates how the representation of crafts at international exhibitions and world fairs allowed the British to construct a curated vision of India for their European audience. And fourth, it argues that orientalist scholarship used print media to enact particular forms of visual encoding and textual discourse in order to reconfigure handicrafts to maintain India’s alterity. These imaginations of India generated a popular, exoticised appreciation for Indian material in the West. My thesis argues that this increased demand for objects was answered by their serialised production, and adherence to certain forms and styles to ensure their commercial viability. By connecting the objects to the contexts of their production, my original contribution to knowledge is the development of a critical framework by which to review hybrid, souvenir, and tourist art from the Indian subcontinent. The findings of this thesis contribute to the fields of Indian handicraft history, South Asian art-history, postcolonial museum anthropology, and research practices for material culture from colonial tourism contexts.

This paper offers a partial defence of the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies. Unlike Epicurus and his present-day advocates, this defence relies not on a hedonistic or empiricist conception of value but on the concept of ‘existential’ value. Existential value is agent-relative value for which it is constitutive that it can be truly self-ascribed in the first person and present tense. From this definition, it follows that death (post-mortem non-existence), while perhaps bad in some respects, cannot be an existential harm for the one who dies. This paper argues that existential goods are central to any explanation of why life appears good to us from a self-interested perspective, which means that death is not bad in the very respect in which life is most saliently good (from that perspective). A corresponding error theory shows why this truth is easily overlooked and explains why we tend to think that death is significantly worse than it really is.

he present paper argues that, despite appearance to the contrary, Kierkegaard’s writings offer promising argumentational resources for addressing the problem of evil. According to Kierkegaard, however, in order to make use of these resources at all, one must necessarily be willing to shift the battleground, so to speak: from a third- to a genuine first-person perspective, namely the perspective of what Climacus dubs Religiousness A. All (yet also only) those who seek deliberate self-annihilation before God—a God in relation to whom they perceive themselves always in the wrong—shall discover the ideal that an unwavering and in fact unconditional thankfulness (namely, for being forgiven) is to be considered the only appropriate attitude towards God and as such both necessary and sufficient for coming to terms with evil and suffering, at least in the life of someone making that discovery. I will argue that Kierkegaard’s (non-)pseudonymous writings provide reasons, at times unwittingly, for adopting the perspective of Religiousness A; however, I will also and ultimately argue that the principle of infinite thankfulness as a corollary of that perspective flounders when it comes to making sense of (the eschatological implications of) the suffering of others.

One of the central themes of this essay is the contrast between two notions of conceivability, which, as a first approximation, may be circumscribed in terms of the distinction between what is rationally imaginable (imaginative conceivability), as opposed to what is rationally believable (doxastic conceivability, i.e. the dual of indubitability). In recent years, the philosophy of conceivability has been dominated by the question whether conceivability, in some suitable sense, entails possibility. This essay shifts focus toward the question whether imaginative conceivability entails doxastic conceivability; and in the last two chapters addresses the question whether possibility entails conceivability, in either of the two above senses. Much of the discussion will focus on the characteristic truths of classical first-order logic with identity, and in particular on singular existential sentences, i.e. sentences stating the existence of some respective individual. Once suitably regimented, sentences of this kind figure as theorems in classical first-order logic. According to the received view, this circumstance is a mere artifact resulting from simplifying stipulations in the formal semantics of first-order logic, and should not be taken as an indication that singular existential sentences are logically true in any substantial respect. Although this caveat is legitimate as far as it goes, it will be suggested that in one important but unduly neglected sense of logical truth, true singular existential sentences are not just true, but indeed logically true. In particular, it will be argued that the proposition expressed by the negation of a singular existential sentence fails to be doxastically conceivable. The claim is discussed in semantic, pragmatic, epistemological and logical respect and defended against foreseeable objections extracted from a variety of philosophical views ranging from skepticism to disquotationalism, temporalism, descriptivism, the causal theory of reference, as well as coarse- and fine-grained conceptions of propositional content. Also discussed are the claim’s ramifications for traditional notions of analyticity and apriority. Two equally legitimate notions of analyticity will be distinguished, one strictly stronger than the other, and true singular existential sentences will be found to be weakly if not strongly analytic. As regards apriority, it is argued that if true singular existentials are not a priori, then, since they are indubitable, some propositions are indubitable even if not a priori. Conversely, if all indubitable propositions are a priori, then, since true singular existentials are indubitable, they are a priori, and presumably many of them will have to be countenanced as novel examples of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori. Either consequence would be of significance, the former to epistemology in general, the latter to the epistemology of existence in particular.