Territory and history: the justification of detachment from the land as a stage in the development of human agency
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Date
2021
Authors
Toffolutti, Matteo
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Publisher
University College Cork
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Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to research the ontology of human agency that informs the
structure of most contemporary theories of territorial rights. Rather than establishing
a new normative approach to the issue of the allocation of territories to subjects, my
work focuses on a descriptive conceptual analysis of the origin of our need to
normatively justify attachment to the land. The main questions I seek to answer are:
why do we feel the need to solve the issue of our relationship with the land from a
normative standpoint? Can the very fact that such relationship appears to us as a
problem enlighten us as to the (im)possibility of solving it?
My approach to answering these questions moves from an examination of what it
means to be agents who are embedded in the outside world and who seek to live
through the outside by embedding it in their activity as they gain autonomy from it. I
then show that, in their pursuit of autonomy, agents become part of a historical
movement away from the outside. They therefore seek to justify not their attachment
to the land, but their detachment from it.
As they shift from being creatures shaped by the land to being creators of themselves
by shaping the land, agents lose their immediate connection with the outside, which
they seek to substitute with normative considerations.
Finally, I develop a philosophy of history to prove the inevitability and necessity of this
process of detachment, showing why we cannot reverse it, and arguing that the
problem of detachment is not for us to solve, but to contemplate as a fundamental
and necessary stage in our development as agents. This makes the field of territorial
rights philosophically emblematic in its ontological/historical implications even more
than from an immediately practical standpoint.
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Keywords
Agency , Philosophy of history , Territorial rights , Group agency , Extended mind , Detachment , Selfhood , Substratum theory , Bundle theory
Citation
Toffolutti, M. 2021. Territory and history: the justification of detachment from the land as a stage in the development of human agency. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.