Abstract
This thesis pursues an understanding of the meaning of democracy when democracy is taken as a meaningful term by virtue of being a proper word in our language, the notion of meaning involves both ''what does x mean'' and ''what do we mean by x", and (3) we must include and account for the tension between "x is a democracy'' and ''x is being democratic''. The thesis treats as an assumption that the meaning of democracy cannot be satisfied without satisfying and above. It is the task of the thesis to show that these conditions require the introduction of a general notion of affecting or affective relations, and that a path to these kinds of relations is available through (a) the understanding and rejection of atomism, (b) the notion of separate things as things in fields, and (c) a rejection of physicalist reductionism that permits real meanings for each field.
Veselka, Van Kenneth (1999). An attempt to determine a basis for affective democratic fields. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -1999 -THESIS -V48.