This thesis is about the relationship between a belief being justified and it being true. It defends a version of the view that the fundamental point of having a justified belief is to have a true one. The particular version of that view it defends is the claim that belief is subject to a truth norm – i.e. a norm or standard that says that one should believe something if and only if it’s true. It claims that belief being subject to such a truth norm can explain which beliefs count as justified and which do not. After introducing the idea of a truth norm (Ch. 1), the argument of my thesis involves two main stages. Part One of the thesis (Chs. 2-3) contains the first stage, in which I argue that my way of arguing for a truth norm, on the basis of its explanatory role in epistemology, is much more likely to be successful than a more popular way of arguing for a truth norm, on the basis of its explanatory role in the philosophy of mind. Part Two (Chs. 4-7) contains the second stage, in which I argue that the truth norm can indeed explain justification in the way I’ve outlined. I do this by answering four criticisms that have been made of the claim that belief is subject to a truth norm. These criticisms claim that a truth norm should be rejected because, in turn, a truth norm cannot guide belief formation (Ch. 4), because a truth norm prescribes believing all the truths (Ch. 5), because a truth norm never prescribes suspending judgement (Ch. 6), and because a truth norm in some cases prescribes making problematic trade-offs of having one false belief for the sake of having many true beliefs (Ch. 7). I argue that all of these criticisms fail. But it is through answering these criticisms that we can see the contours of a defensible explanation of justification in terms of the truth norm.

This thesis concerns the nature of knowledge-how, in particular the question of how we ought to combine philosophical and linguistic considerations to understand what it is to know how to do something. Part 1 concerns the significance of linguistic evidence. In chapter 1, I consider the range of linguistic arguments that have been used in favour of the Intellectualist claim that knowledge-how is a species of propositional knowledge. Chapter 2 considers the idea that sentences of the form ‘S knows how to V' involve a free relative complement, and the relation between this claim and the Objectualist claim that knowledge-how is a kind of objectual knowledge. Chapter 3 argues that Intellectualism about knowledge-how faces a problem of generality in accounting for the kinds of propositions that are known in knowledge-how, which is analogous to the generality problem for Reliabilism. Part 2 turns to philosophical considerations, offering an extended inquiry into the point of thinking and talking about knowledge-how. Chapter 4 considers why we should want to work with a concept of knowledge, isolating two hypotheses: i) that thinking and talking about knowledge-how helps us to pool skills, and ii) that thinking and talking about knowledge-how helps us to engage in responsible practices of co-operation. Chapter 5 criticises the former hypothesis by arguing against the suggestion that there is a knowledge-how norm on teaching. Chapter 6 offers an indirect argument for the latter hypothesis, arguing for a knowledge-how norm on intending. Part 3, which consists of chapter 7, offers a positive account of knowledge-how which takes into account both philosophical and linguistic considerations. According to what I will call the Interrogative Capacity view, knowing how to do something consists in a certain kind of ability to answer the question of how to do it.

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This thesis considers how Kleist and Hoffmann’s fiction might be considered as responding to the perceived shortcomings of enlightenment. The two writers, despite the barriers of literary categorisations, have a striking affinity in their sense that notions of truth and knowledge are intertwined with social and political agendas, rather than forming part of some natural teleology. The thesis breaks new ground in viewing the texts within a more expansive discourse context as literary interventions within a broad, cross-society engagement with enlightenment, in its various streams and factions. The texts studied, I argue, represent thought experiments, not merely reflecting and re-articulating the influences of literary peers and historically significant events, but instead testing the real-world application of key enlightenment ideas. The driving force for this thesis is the need to locate their work more rigorously in relation to enlightenment thought of their time than has previously been attempted. This is not so much a question of retrieving past influences, as one of viewing their work as being in dialogue with contemporary thought. Moving away from attempts using Kleist’s letters to theorise the relation between Kleist and Kant, this investigation instead turns to aspects of Kant’s philosophy to illuminate the texts. Hoffmann’s relationship to enlightenment, too, is explored beyond the prism of Romanticism. Taking a more comparative approach than previous work on the two writers, I identify not only thematic commonalities, but also a parallel aesthetic, in which multiple narratives coexist and where ‘truth’ is manufactured by the dominance of one particular narrative. The notion of 'MÃ1⁄4ndigkeit', central to Kant’s famous definition of 'Aufklärung' offers a useful guiding concept for the investigation and captures the emancipatory promise of self-realisation and the positive trajectory of human progress at the heart of the miscellany of moral and political theories and philosophies collectively known as ‘enlightenment’. The latter refers not to the historical period, but rather to a process of intellectual emancipation and an assemblage of ideals and values. As an intellectual movement, enlightenment was not, as is often assumed, monolithic, but encompasses conflicting notions of reason, freedom, and how its goals were to be achieved. Not only are the certainty and consequences of this intellectual emancipation evaluated in the texts, but I have also identified a radical questioning of the paradigms of thought which condition our understanding of narratives. Both Kleist and Hoffmann’s texts are narratively complex, often with shifts in focalisation, jumps in time, occasionally, figures whose identity changes leave the reader uncertain whether they are dealing with more than one character, and depictions of events which resist clarification through conventional understandings of time, space and causality. This project seeks to reconcile these ‘blind spots’ with a broader critique of enlightenment, in which absolute knowledge is shown to be illusory and truth simply reflective of constellations of power. The spatiotemporal and causal frameworks foundational to rational understanding and used to make sense of the world are revealed to be inadequate.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T16:17:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Vinicius Vieira Brito.pdf: 472153 bytes, checksum: a2a08b1c939d6d252302d0c7b467d0b6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-06-13 / Dada a importância atual de se tomar o corpo como objeto de reflexão, analisaremos, nesta dissertação, o surgimento do conceito de corpo na obra do filósofo francês Michel Foucault. Mas ao contrário dos estudos sobre ele, que discutem o corpo sobretudo em Vigiar e Punir e na História da Sexualidade, delimitaremos como objeto o corpo na obra O Nascimento da Clínica, livro que faz uma história do surgimento do corpo-organismo com a emergência da medicina moderna, mais precisamente com a anatomia e fisiologia de Bichat. As dissecações feitas por este médico, no final do século XVIII, possibilitaram às ciências da vida o afastamento do legado de Descartes, que concebe o corpo como uma máquina. Ao traçar esta descontinuidade que culminou com o advento do corpo com órgãos, Foucault provoca uma cisão na história da relação da filosofia com o corpo, que era sempre pensado em referência ao corpo-alma de filosofia cartesiana.

Subjekt ist die folgenreiche Selbstbeschreibung des modernen Menschen, mit der sich dieser als Grundlage von Erkenntnis und als Ursache von Handlungen setzt. Die historischen Ursprünge dieses selbstreferenziellen Verständnisses gehen nicht zuletzt auf Descartes'' Verankerung der Selbstgewissheit des 'Ich' im eigenen Denken zurück und finden in Kants Verortung der Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von Erkenntnis im apriorischen Denkapparat eine paradigmatische Begründung. Seit der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts erfährt der emphatische Subjektbegriff eine Kritik und wird dezentriert. Insbesondere feministische und postkoloniale Kritiken verweisen auf die inhärente Gewaltsamkeit von Subjektivierungsweisen und deren Begründungen in sexistischen und rassistischen Klassifikationen.

Der Beitrag befasst sich mit Theaterinszenierungen und -produktionen aus einer epistemologischen, philosophischen und kulturtheoretischen Sicht vor einer historischen Perspektive. Dabei wenden neue transdisziplinäre Ansätze für die Analyse und Interpretation des Theaters, wie strukturale und poststrukturale Methoden vorgestellt bzw. Theater im Kontext transversaler, transkultureller, transmedialer zu behandeln. / The article deals with theater productions and stagings from an epistemological, philosophical and cultural-theoretical point of view in front of a historical perspective. New transdisciplinary approaches for the analysis and interpretation of theater, such as structural and poststructural methods, are presented and theater is treated in the context of transversal, transcultural, transmedial. / El artículo aborda las producciones y puestas en escena teatrales desde un punto de vista epistemológico, filosófico y teórico-cultural en una perspectiva histórica. Se presentan nuevos enfoques transdisciplinarios para el análisis y la interpretación del teatro, como los métodos estructurales y postestructurales, y se trata el teatro en el contexto de los enfoques transversales, transculturales y transmediales.