A poesia de Paulo Leminski (1944/1989), escrita no Brasil entre os anos 60 e 80 do século XX, revela uma constante atitude de experimentação que abre caminhos para o questionamento da relação entre pensamento, mundo e linguagem. Ao refazer a trajetória do autor e analisar o modo de criação de seus jogos de linguagem, pretendo revelar a lógica de sua poética, voltada para a materialidade do signo lingüístico. Como poeta e ficcionista, redator publicitário, letrista de música, crítico e tradutor, a matériaprima e o objeto de Leminski é sempre a linguagem verbal em suas mais variadas dimensões. Nesse período, entre os anos 60 e 80, em que as teorias sobre os signos e sobre o discurso começam a dominar os estudos literários, a poética metalingüística e reflexiva de Leminski surge como um campo de experiência de limites ainda não testados ou pouco testados por outros poetas. O conceito da poesia como texto literário, como expressão de uma linguagem escrita, veiculada em livros e destinada a um público erudito, passa a ser também por ele questionado. Para Leminski, a poesia faz parte da semiótica, do mundo dos signos que engloba todas as outras formas de manifestações artísticas, de informação e de comunicação. Poesia é também linguagem gráfica, sonora e verbal, que busca uma lógica própria para expressar pensamentos e formas de vida. Esta pesquisa vai focalizar alguns aspectos da teoria da linguagem e da teoria literária evidenciados, em diversos níveis, na prática poética leminskiana. São questões pertinentes ao contexto de diferentes correntes contemporâneas de pensamento que apontam a linguagem como o lugar privilegiado em que se dá a atuação do sujeito e a criação dos sentidos. / The poetry of Paulo Leminski (1944-89), written in Brazil between the 1960s and the 1980s, displays a constant attitude of experimentation that opens up possibilities for questioning the relationships between thought, world and language. By retracing the development of his career as a writer and analyzing the ways in which he created his language games, I set out to discover the logic of his poetics and its links to the materiality of the linguistic sign. As a poet and author of fiction, but also as a producer of advertising copy, song lyrics, literary criticism and translations, Leminski always took verbal language in its many different dimensions as his object and raw material. In the period discussed (1960s, 70s and 80s), when theories of signs and discourse predominated in literary studies, Leminski developed his metalinguistic and reflexive poetics as a field for experiencing and experimenting with limits that other poets had not yet tested at all or only very marginally. He also questioned the concept of poetry as literary text, as the expression of a written language conveyed in books to a learned audience. For Leminski poetry was part of semiotics, of the world of signs that encompasses all other forms of art as well as information and communication. Poetry is visual language and sound as well as verbal language, pursuing its own logic to express thoughts and life forms. My research focuses on some aspects of the theory of language and of the literary theory evinced at various levels by Leminskis poetic practice. The questions raised are pertinent in the context of different contemporary currents of thought which consider language a privileged field for the operation of the subject and the creation of meaning.

W. von Humboldt introduit une pensée romantique du langage, s’éloignant ainsi des interprétations nées chez les philosophes grecs. La langue est considérée digne d’une étude philosophique sérieuse.Plus tard, les courants contemporains du langage élaborent de nouveaux rapports entre langue et réalité. La tradition herméneutique et, principalement, le tournant linguistique donnent une clé de compréhension des philosophes du vingtième siècle. En outre, la lecture constructiviste de Derrida est aussi considérée mais ses atouts sont finalement contestés en estimant l’argumentation de Marion.Dans ce cadre, les philosophies de Heidegger, Lévinas et Wittgenstein sont abordées, d’abord dans une étude du rapport entre langue et être et ensuite dans des problématiques discrètes qui illuminent le sujet.Au fil du texte, la question sur l’indicible et sur les limites du langage est toujours présente et guide le récit.Les analyses faites sur des œuvres principales des trois philosophes ainsi que des critiques faites à ce propos signalent tant le rejet de l’héritage métaphysique traditionnel et de sa conception du langage que des nouvelles façons de considérer le rôle du langage dans la philosophie contemporaine. Pour chaque philosophe, en dépit des différences, la langue devient centrale et sa source se trouve en elle-même.Ces analyses mènent à l’affirmation qu’il n y a pas de place pour un indicible proprement dit dans leurs pensées. Au contraire, le tournant vers le langage a pris le chemin vers une dicibilité totale. / W. von Humboldt introduced a romantic approach to language, far from the interpretations which originated with the Greek philosophers. Language is considered worthy of serious philosophical study.Later, new relationships between language and reality would develop from contemporary thought about language. The hermeneutics tradition and, mainly, the linguistic turn provide a key to understanding the philosophers of the twentieth century. The text also considers a constructivist reading of Derrida but such a reading is ultimately weakened by Marion’s argumentation.In this context, the philosophies of Heidegger, Levinas and Wittgenstein are discussed, first in a study of the relationship between language and being, then in terms of more specific issues which help to throw light on the subject.In the course of the text, the question of the unsayable and of the limits of language is always present and guides the discourse.Analyses of major works of the three philosophers and their critics show a rejection of inherited metaphysical conceptions and the consequent views of language as well as new ways of looking at the role of language in contemporary philosophy. For every philosopher, despite their differences, language becomes central and its source is found in itself.These analyses lead to the assertion that there is no place for a proper unsayable in the thought of the three philosophers. On the contrary, the turn towards language has forged a path to a full sayability.

Naturalizing the Unity of Consciousness: can neuroscience explain a fundamental feature of subjectivity? Martin Vraný Abstract The aim of the dissertation is to analyze the concept of the unity of conscious- ness as an explanandum for natural sciences and assess how good an explanation do leading neuroscientific theories of consciousness provide. The motivation be- hind this project is the idea that it is the unity which poses the greatest challenge for the scientific quest for consciousness. I argue in the Introduction that the reason why some theories of consciousness lead to what Dennett calls Cartesian materialism is precisely because they fail to address the problem of the unity of consciousness. If we had a good understanding of the unity of consciousness and its place in nature, we could more easily avoid the tendency to devise accounts of consciousness that are homuncular in disguise. In chapter 2 I analyze various aspects in which consciousness is thought be unified and conclude that two such aspects are particularly challenging for natu- ralizing the unity and that they cannot be treated separately. They are the unity of conscious contents at a time and the unity in the sense of a single subject having conscious contents and being able to reflect on them. Chapter 3 describes main conceptual and...

This doctoral dissertation aims to give a comprehensive and contextual account of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor. The dissertation is organized around the central claim that Aristotle’s definition of metaphor in Chapter 22 of the Poetics, as well as his discussion of it in Book III of the Rhetoric, commit him to what I call a vertical theory of metaphor, rather than to a horizontal one. Horizontal theories of metaphor assert that ‘metaphor’ is a word that has been transferred from a literal to a figurative sense; vertical theories of metaphor, on the other hand, assert that ‘metaphor’ is the transference of a word from one thing to another thing. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the dissertation itself has five chapters. The first chapter sketches out the historical context within which the vertical character of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor becomes meaningful, both by (a) giving a rough outline of Plato’s critical appraisal of rhetoric and poetry in the Gorgias, Phaedrus, Ion, and Republic, and then (b) showing how Aristotle’s own Rhetoric and Poetics should be read as a faithful attempt to reform both activities in accordance with the criteria laid down by Plato in these dialogues. The second and third chapters elaborate the main thesis and show how Aristotle’s texts support it, by painstakingly reconstructing the relevant passages of the Poetics, Rhetoric, On Interpretation, Categories and On Sophistical Refutations, and resolving a number of interpretive disputes that these passages raise in the secondary literature. Finally, the fourth and fifth chapters together pursue the philosophical implications of the thesis that I elaborate in the first three, and resolve some perceived contradictions between Aristotle’s theory of metaphor in the Poetics and Rhetoric, his prohibition against the use of metaphors in the Posterior Analytics, and his own use of similes and analogical comparisons in the dialectical discussions found in the former text, the De Anima and the later stages of his argument in the Metaphysics. In many ways, the most philosophically noteworthy insight uncovered by my dissertation is the basic consideration that, for Aristotle, all metaphors involve a statement of similarity between two or more things – specifically, they involve a statement of what I call secondary resemblance, which inheres to different degrees of imperfection among things that are presumed to be substantially different, as opposed to the primary and perfect similarities that inhere among things of the same kind. The major, hitherto unnoticed consequence I draw from this insight is that it is ultimately the philosopher, as the one who best knows these secondary similarities, who is implicitly singled out in Aristotle’s treatises on rhetoric and poetry as being both the ideal poet and the ideal orator, at least to the extent that Aristotle holds the use of metaphor to be a necessary condition for the mastery of both pursuits. This further underscores what I argue in the first chapter is the inherently philosophical character of the Poetics and the Rhetoric, and shows the extent to which they demand to be read in connection with, rather than in isolation from, the more ‘central’ themes of Aristotle’s philosophical system.

In this thesis, I aim to motivate a particular philosophy of mathematics characterised by the following three claims. First, mathematical sentences are generally speaking false because mathematical objects do not exist. Second, people typically use mathematical sentences to communicate content the truth of which does not require mathematical objects to exist. Finally, in using mathematical language in this way, speakers are not doing anything out of the ordinary: they are performing straightforward assertions. In Part I, I argue that the role played by mathematics in our scientific explanations is a purely expressive one, merely allowing us to say more than we otherwise would be able to about, or yielding a greater understanding of, the physical world. Mathematical objects to not need to exist for mathematical language to play this role. This proposal puts a normative constraint on our use of mathematical language: we ought to use mathematically presented theories to express belief only in the consequences they have for non-mathematical things. In Part II, I will argue that what the normative proposal recommends is in fact what people generally do in both pure and applied mathematical contexts. I motivate this claim by showing that it is predicted by our best general means of analysing natural language. I provide a semantic theory of applied arithmetical sentences and show that they do not purport to refer to numbers, as well as a pragmatic theory for pure mathematical language use which shows that pure mathematical utterances do not typically communicate content that implies the existence of mathematical objects. In conclusion, I show the hermeneutic fictionalist position that emerges is preferable to any alternative which interprets mathematical discourse as aimed at describing a domain of independently existing abstract mathematical objects.

I examine the difficulties that several philosophers of language are liable to encounter in their attempts to provide an account of the connection between truth and assertion. I then attempt to provide an account of this connection. The analysis is concerned chiefly with difficulties which consist in elucidating the conceptual connection between truth and assertion in a way that respects certain linguistic intuitions while at the same time rendering the concept of truth amenable to a semantic interpretation. The proposed view suggests one way in which we might go about meeting the theoretical demands implicit in addressing this concern, among others, demonstrating the extent to which a theory of truth should be regarded as belonging to the province of epistemology. Insofar as semantical considerations figure into such a theory, a more systematic investigation of the interface between epistemology and natural language semantics is recommended. The solution to many problems at this interface, I argue, lay in an analysis of judgment.

<div>Philosophers who affirm the existence of propositions contend that the contents of declarative sentences, beliefs, doubts, and so on are entities (the things picked out by the term “propositions”), and that these entities have truth-values. Unsurprisingly, there’s rampant disagreement among those philosophers about sorts of things are called “propositions”. Propositions have been identified with sui generis abstract objects, interpreted facts, properties, and types of cognitive acts (this is not an exhaustive list). Despite this debate, most agree that propositions are representations (this is how they come to have truth-values), and that propositions are not to be identified with token mental representations. I agree that propositions are representations, but argue that propositions are mental representation tokens. The view I defend has sparse contemporary support, but has an impressive pedigree—ancestral views were widely popular in the late medieval, and early modern periods. In this dissertation I argue at length against contemporary criticisms that this view is still credible.</div><div>In chapter one, I defend a mentalist semantics; that is, I argue that linguistic representation is parasitic on mental representation: for a sentence to mean that p is for it to express (or be conventionally used to express) the thought that p. Once this is established, I argue in chapter two that mental representations (as opposed to non-mental ones) are ideal candidates to serve as the contents of sentences and propositional attitudes. I compare my preferred view, that propositions are token mental representations, against rival views (sorted into two groups) and show that a cost benefit analysis of each favors my position. In chapter three, I start exploring what these mental representations might be like. I argue that they’re structured entities whose constituents are modes of presentation of the things represented. I decline to analyze the relation which unites these modes of presentation, but argue (contra some contemporary philosophers) that this relation is not predication. Finally, in chapter four, I argue against the widely popular view that propositions have the things they’re about as constituents. I show that such a view cannot accommodate thoughts about nonexistent entities. I propose that the modes of presentation which are constituents of propositions are non-descriptive, but criticize the mental file conception of non-descriptive modes of presentation.</div>

<p>Autumn 2021</p>

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A philosophical analysis of the thesis of the metaphysic of the non-dual that "the world we are confronted with is nothing but words, words, words" is a difficult one upon which to embark. The difficulty does not lie in assuming this argument, but in examining it from the opponent's position. It is equivalent to an evaluation of the New York Giants in Brooklyn. If we assume the thesis of the metaphysic of the non-dual, finding the proper arguments and quotations to substantiate its claims, all that we would be doing is claiming a victory for "our side” when, indeed, no battle had been fought. The issue is not that what has been said can be said, but that there is a validity in the arguments and a truth in the assertions. As pleasant as it might be to find quotations to support this thesis, it would have little value if our sources were all one-sided. To return to an earlier analogy, if the issue were whether the Giants have the better team, we certainly should not confine our inquiries to only Giant fans. The issue is quite simple and clear. One must find in even the Brooklyn fans a tacit agreement that the Giants are a superior team. Or, putting our playful analogy aside, one must find in even the strongest antagonist's thesis a large place for the final pronouncement upon the nature of the phenomenal world of the metaphysic of the non-dual. The advantages are of course obvious even though it might be a more difficult task. But this is always the role of the mythical hero. If we momentarily forget that the weapons are only paper and typewriter and the armor, rhetoric, we can then, perhaps, see the correspondence. The present fashion in philosophy or at least the most vocal and vociferous, is the forthright denial of metaphysics as a valid intellectual pursuit - even in principle. It is with this school that we encounter our first difficulties. Thus, if we can discern in their writings - the critics of the metaphysic of the non-dual and mysticism - a metaphysical bias as well as either an implicit or explicit use of what, for the moment, we may call typifying reality as a word structure, then we can claim not only a victory, but an ally even if they may prefer a disguise. Again, if we are fortunate enough to see this pattern with the concomitant parts we have mentioned, then it would be interesting, if one is not interpolating too far, to utilize this as a tool for analytical purposes in other kindred fields to see if a general thesis could be maintained to substantiate the non-dualist's claim where the critics might not have lingered. Thus, if the same form can be discovered, an underlying thought process may be discerned that well may prove interesting as well as provide a way of handling thought while escaping the dangers of dogmaticism. If so, this may be the analogue to the non-dualist's thesis presented in a rational context. A word of caution, however. One must recall the Platonic dictum to joke seriously and sport in ernest.