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<p>No abstract provided.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Descartes and the followers of his new mechanistic physics were subject to condemnation as a result of a reaction against his philosophy on the basis that it could not adequately explain the miracle of the Eucharist. Descartes, however, firmly believed that he could give an explanation of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist which was not only consistent with his physics and metaphysics, but which was also consistent with the orthodoxy demanded by the Church. His explanation exploited the ambiguity of the language adopted by the Council of Trent, yet rejected the Aristotelian philosophy traditionally relied upon to explain the miracle. Descartes' explanation of transubstantiation remained provocative to his scholastic contemporaries not because it was internally inconsistent, but rather because Descartes attempted to overthrow the whole of traditional philosophy. Descartes' confidence in his own explanation of the sacred rite ultimately obscured the long and troubled history of the issue from him, leading him to believe that he could win converts to his philosophy by publishing his own theory of the Eucharist. Consequent to this excursion into theology, Descartes' philosophy came under fire and was condemned in part because it could not give a traditional explanation of the Eucharist. / Master of Arts

A concepção de matéria que emerge da dinâmica leibniziana é interessante pelo modo em que junta e contrapõe aristotelismo e mecanicismo. Embora Leibniz freqüentemente use um vocabulário aristotélico, às vezes parece reorientá-lo inteiramente para emoldurá-lo aos seus conceitos, enquanto outras o utiliza de maneira a sugerir não somente uma continuidade lexical, mas também conceitual. Leibniz retém do aristotelismo a noção que nos corpos há um princípio ativo e atual, do qual resultam sua substancialidade e potência de produzir efeitos, e, ademais, que há uma causa final atuante na natureza, como os aspectos potencial e teleológico da força viva indicam. E se é verdade que ele rejeita a noção cartesiana que a extensão é a essência dos corpos, entretanto, mantém que magnitude, figura e movimento são necessários para uma descrição dos fenômenos naturais. / The conception of matter that emerges from the leibnizian dynamics is interesting by the way in which joins and opposes Aristotelism and mechanicism. Although Leibniz often uses an Aristotelic vocabulary, sometimes he seems to reorient it totally for to frame it to its concepts, while others utilizes it of manner to suggest not only a lexical continuity, but also conceptual. Leibniz retains of the Aristotelism the notion that in the bodies there is an active and actual principle from which results their substantiality and potency to produce effects, and, besides, that there is a final cause acting in the nature, as the potential and teleological aspects of the live force indicate. Moreover, if it is true that he rejects the Cartesian notion that extension is the essence of the bodies, however, maintains that magnitude, figure and motion are necessary for a description of natural phenomena.

This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the ‘second-person’ pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-'you.' It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the ‘you’ is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particular—or a combination of these—so that readers find ‘second-person’ utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the ‘second person’ as a special case of narrative ‘person’ that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-‘you’ neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianism’s hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. The Protean-‘you’ form of ‘second-person’ narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought. Rather than founding a notion of ‘second-person’ narrative and narrative ‘person’ generally on Cartesianism's ‘self-ish’ logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S, Peirce's notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce's proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because 1 will argue that the effects of Protean-‘you’ arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism's hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subject—the subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative. Most discussions of ‘second-person’ narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism's notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the analysis of ‘second-person’ narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the ‘second-person’ pronoun. Two principal functions of ‘second-person’ textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun's reference in much ‘second-person’ fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function. Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a ‘you’ can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all ‘second-person’ narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the ‘second person's’ outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and ‘natural’ discourse that employ the ‘second-person’ pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one's self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of ‘second-person’ discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the ‘system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of ‘mutual knowledge’ produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world’. All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read-that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read-into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of ‘person’ is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critic’s recourse to ‘person’ is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning-which this thesis in fact does-must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority. Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about ‘second-person’ narrative propose that the ‘second person’s’ most striking effects derive from the constitution of an ‘intersubjective’ experience of reading in which the subject positions of the ‘you’-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism's fixed, authoritative modes of subjectivity, Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn's novel ‘Almost You’, at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the ‘you’ and the novel's narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-‘you’ in ‘Almost You’ is discussed in terms of ‘second-person’ intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism's hegemony of ‘person’. I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more ‘old fashioned’ if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the ‘second person’s’ often startling ambiguities. This is Keats's notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ I suggest that Protean-‘you’ texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of ‘Almost You’, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-‘you’ discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers’ experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of ‘second-person’ narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cretinism’s experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-‘you’ discourse anises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cretinism’s notion of self. Protean-‘you’ involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, protean-‘you’ leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them. I go on to propose that Protean-‘you’ narrative's lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative actuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing, hocusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative ‘person,’ I argue that narrative ‘person’ is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, Within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ modes no less than for the ‘second.’ Where ‘second-person’ narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of tantalization, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cretinism’s hegemony of ‘person.’ It may be that the most significant insights ‘second-person’ narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject-a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative ‘person,’ the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.

Many scholars have studied the role and function of history during Baroque and Renaissance in Europe. However, they often ignored that the challenges put out by the new religious, political and scientific reforms made the philosophy of history an ideological battlefield. Aiming to better understand the dynamics of the conflict in the field of history-thinking during the period 1580–1661, the definition of the Jesuits’ historiographic canon (coherently implemented at a European level) is the main goal of this research. The study of a symbolic and representative case of Jesuits’ method of history making has been defined as the object of this thesis. The emblematic case studied in this work is the historical production of the Lithuanian Jesuit Albert Wijuk-Koialowicz. The thesis demonstrates that the Jesuits, during the period 1580–1661, had actually elaborated an historiographic canon as an answer to the spread of the new scientific method and the dissemination of new moral and political values. This canon was based on the methodological theories of Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza and on the unionist prescriptions of Antonio Possevino. We proved that the canon was consistently implemented beyond the geographic limits usually attributed to the European intellectual debate with examples from Spain (J. de Mariana) to Lithuania (A. W. Koialowicz). Finally, we concluded that the historical production of A. W. Koialowicz could be described as a representative example of the implementation... [to full text] / Daugelis mokslininkų studijavo istorijos vaidmenį bei reikšmę Europoje Baroko ir Renesanso epochose, siekdami suprasti reformacijos ir kontrreformacijos bei naujosios mokslo galios įtaką istoriniam mąstymui. Naujųjų religinių, politinių ir mokslo reformų iškelti iššūkiai istorijos filosofiją iš esmės pavertė ideologinės kovos lauku. Siekiant geriau suprasti konflikto dinamiką istorinėje mąstysenoje 1580–1661 m. laikotarpiu, pagrindiniu šio tyrimo tikslu išsikeltas siekis apibrėžti jėzuitų istoriografinį kanoną. Be to, siekiama parodyti, kad šis kanonas radikaliai skyrėsi nuo ekleziastinio ir buvo nuosekliai įdiegtas visoje Europoje nuo Ispanijos iki Lietuvos. Tyrimo objektas – reprezentatyvus ir simbolinis jėzuitų istorijos kūrimo pavyzdys – lietuvių jėzuito Alberto Vijūko-Kojalavičiaus istoriniai veikalai. Disertacijoje parodoma, kad jėzuitai 1580–1661 m. laikotarpiu, duodami atsaką naujo mokslinio metodo plitimui ir naujų moralinių bei politinių vertybių sklaidai, sukūrė savą istoriografinį kanoną. Jo pagrindu tapo Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza‘os metodologinės teorijos ir unionistinės Antonio Possevino idėjos. Remiantis pavyzdžiais, apimančiais šalis nuo Ispanijos (J. de Mariana) iki Lietuvos (A. Vijūkas-Kojalavičius) įrodyta, kad kanonas buvo nuosekliai diegiamas nepaisant geografinių ribų, kurios dažnai ribojo Europos intelektualinius debatus. A. Vijūko-Kojalavičiaus „istorinę produkciją“ galima būtų apibūdinti kaip reprezentatyvų šio istorinio kanono diegimo pavyzdį. Tai... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

A concepção de matéria que emerge da dinâmica leibniziana é interessante pelo modo em que junta e contrapõe aristotelismo e mecanicismo. Embora Leibniz freqüentemente use um vocabulário aristotélico, às vezes parece reorientá-lo inteiramente para emoldurá-lo aos seus conceitos, enquanto outras o utiliza de maneira a sugerir não somente uma continuidade lexical, mas também conceitual. Leibniz retém do aristotelismo a noção que nos corpos há um princípio ativo e atual, do qual resultam sua substancialidade e potência de produzir efeitos, e, ademais, que há uma causa final atuante na natureza, como os aspectos potencial e teleológico da força viva indicam. E se é verdade que ele rejeita a noção cartesiana que a extensão é a essência dos corpos, entretanto, mantém que magnitude, figura e movimento são necessários para uma descrição dos fenômenos naturais. / The conception of matter that emerges from the leibnizian dynamics is interesting by the way in which joins and opposes Aristotelism and mechanicism. Although Leibniz often uses an Aristotelic vocabulary, sometimes he seems to reorient it totally for to frame it to its concepts, while others utilizes it of manner to suggest not only a lexical continuity, but also conceptual. Leibniz retains of the Aristotelism the notion that in the bodies there is an active and actual principle from which results their substantiality and potency to produce effects, and, besides, that there is a final cause acting in the nature, as the potential and teleological aspects of the live force indicate. Moreover, if it is true that he rejects the Cartesian notion that extension is the essence of the bodies, however, maintains that magnitude, figure and motion are necessary for a description of natural phenomena.

The conception of René Descartes as the arch-rationalist has been sufficiently exploded in recent literature; however, there is still a large lacuna in our understanding of how empirical research and experimentation fits within his philosophy. My dissertation is directed at addressing just this problem. I contend that Descartes’ famed method is not a singular monolith but instead two interdependent methods: one directed at metaphysical and epistemological truth, while the other directed at empirical questions and contingent facts of the world. I claim there is evidence for this position not only in his actual scientific practice, but also in the rhetorical structure of the Discourse on Method and the Principles of Philosophy. In exploring the empirical side of Descartes’ method, I show how his unusual system produces a system of experiment designed to serve both as a discovery and verification tool at the same time. As a further application of my interpretation, I argue that the Passions of the Soul and Descartes’ ethical theory expressed in his correspondence must also be seen as part of his two-fold methodology. Instead of attempting to cast Descartes as a virtue ethicist or deontologist, as is normally done, I emphasize that Descartes’ ethics is centered on the mind-body union, and therefore, includes an empirical element as well. The end result is an ethics that requires a detailed study of mechanics, anatomy, physics, as well as medicine. Lastly, I show how this methodology can help us understand the works of some of his early followers: Claude Gadroys and Jacques Rohault. Both of these philosophers not only serve to ground my interpretation, but also to highlight aspects of Cartesian that have often been passed over. I show how the experimentalism of Jacques Rohault goes beyond the epistemological boundaries set up by Descartes, as signifies a new direction that will ultimately eclipse the Cartesian school of thought. In the case of Claude Gadroys, I present a concrete example of the exploitation of the over generality of Cartesian principles. In so doing, I show that while Descartes’ experimentalism was intended to rule out the possibility of occult causes, he in fact created a system that allowed for them, only under a different guise.

This dissertation is a set of three essays connected by the common theme of our epistemic fragility: the way in which our knowledge – of our own minds, of whether we are in violation of the epistemic and ethical norms, and of the philosophical truths themselves – is hostage to forces outside our control. The first essay, “Are We Luminous?”, is a recasting and defence of Timothy Williamson’s argument that there are no non-trivial conditions such that we are in a position to know we are in them whenever we are in them. Crucial to seeing why Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument succeeds, pace various critics, is recognising that the issue is largely an empirical one. It is in part because of the kind of creatures we are – specifically, creatures with coarse-grained doxastic dispositions – that nothing of interest, for us, is luminous. In the second essay, “What’s in a Norm?”, I argue that such an Anti-Cartesian view in turn demands that epistemologists and ethicists accept the ubiquity of normative luck, the phenomenon whereby agents fail to do what they ought because of non-culpable ignorance. Those who find such a view intolerable – many epistemic internalists and ethical subjectivists – have the option of cleaving to the Cartesian orthodoxy by endorsing an anti-realist metanormativity. The third essay, “The Archimedean Urge”, is a critical discussion of genealogical scepticism about philosophical judgment, including evolutionary debunking arguments and experimentally-motivated attacks. Although such genealogical scepticism often purports to stand outside philosophy – in the neutral terrains of science or common sense – it tacitly relies on various first-order epistemic judgments. The upshot is two-fold. First, genealogical scepticism risks self-defeat, impugning commitment to its own premises. Second, philosophers have at their disposal epistemological resources to fend off genealogical scepticism: namely, an epistemology that takes seriously the role that luck plays in the acquisition of philosophical knowledge.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T17:27:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Renato Fanti.pdf: 828003 bytes, checksum: 3e213bba325ca24cf9ccb50e72ac6fc1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-05-27 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This work aims to address some aspects of the concept of clearness in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), as opposed to the one consolidated view in the History of Philosophy, known as Rationalism, undertaken by René Descartes (1596-1650). It presents a brief exposition of what the latter meant by this concept. Next we will approach the historical context in which Peirce was inserted, highlighting the characters for the current scientific paradigm, the one presented by him at the meetings at the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge (1872), as an analysis of his Phenomenology, considered fundamental to situ-ate the concept that he intended to elaborate. Turning then to the Cartesian Critical Spirit, thus branded by Peirce, we will refer to Descartes substantial contributions which brought about a new scientific and philosophical vision, thus disrupting with the prevailing Scholastic attitude, and to the concept of Carte-sian intuition, when we will be ready to tackle Peirce s essay How To Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), which contains his Pragmatist Maxim, and which advances the author s concept of clarity. Finally, we will also supply an example of such scientific clarity as exposed in his essay, Three Types of Reasoning (1903) / A presente dissertação pretende abordar alguns aspectos acerca do conceito de Clareza de ideias na obra de Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), em con-traposição à visão consolidada na história da Filosofia conhecida como Racio-nalista, empreendida por René Descartes (1596-1650). Para tanto, apresenta uma breve exposição do que este último entendia por tal conceito. Em seguida, faz uma abordagem do contexto histórico no qual Peirce estava inserido, sali-entando os caracteres referentes ao paradigma científico vigente e por ele a-presentado nas reuniões do Clube Metafísico em Cambridge (1872), bem como uma análise de sua Fenomenologia, considerada fundamental para situar o conceito que busca trabalhar. Passando, então, à crítica ao Espírito do Cartesi-anismo, assim denominada por Peirce, referindo-se às substanciais contribui-ções de Descartes na inauguração de uma nova visão científica e filosófica, que rompia com a predominante postura Escolástica, e ao conceito de Intuição cartesiano, para, em seguida, ocupar-se do texto Como tornar claras as nossas ideias (1878), no qual surge a máxima do pragmatismo, que se defende ser uma espécie de afirmação do conceito de clareza para o autor. Para finalizar, apresentar-se-á um exemplo de clareza científica explorado no texto Os três tipos de raciocínio (1903)