Can the relationship White people have with the figure of the dog, in what currently exists as South Africa, be free of antiblackness? Following instances where I saw black women who worked as domestic workers walk dogs belonging to their White employers, I write these letters addressed to you, my sister, Palesa – meditating on the dog-Human relationships as sites of racial violence. The core analytic framework and theory I employ to explore these extreme, mundane, and in-between forms of violence, is Afro-Pessimism.

The Red Junglefowl is a species of bird that was domesticated by humans around 8 000 years ago. Over time, domestication has led to changes in behavior and morphology, made possible by reduced fear of humans. Fear has been shown to affect cognitive processes, such as the way ambiguous stimuli are perceived by the individual. In this study, I observed the behavior of Red Junglefowl hens that had been selected for either high or low fear of humans to see how the early stages of domestication would affect their tendency to make pessimistic or optimistic judgements. The hens were put in a test arena where they were exposed to positive, negative, and ambiguous stimulus cues, and the time taken to approach each was measured. Hens that had been selected for low fear of humans had overall, albeit not significantly, shorter latencies to approach ambiguous cues. In other words, they were more likely to make optimistic judgements. The results were also affected by the order each stimulus cue was presented. I conclude that domestication may influence the way Red Junglefowl perceive ambiguous stimuli by reducing pessimism.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The text that I have translated below, and for which the paper that precedes it is a critical introduction, is Hagiwara Sakutarō's Zetsubō no Tōsō, a collection of 204 aphorisms which I have translated as The Flight from Despair. My introduction concentrates on Sakutarō's use of the aphoristic form in order to show how he both follows and subverts the genre's conventions. First, I concentrate on the author's goal to tackle the "everyday" matters of life through his text rather than intellectual abstractions. I also bring attention to the concision of Sakutarō's style and the protean nature of the aphorism, which occupies an ambiguous zone between poetry and philosophy. Finally, I demonstrate how The Flight from Despair is a modernist text, and that Sakutarō's brand of modernism reveals itself most distinctly through his use of irony and paradox. However, I also indicate that Sakutarō remained a maverick in the literary establishment, and that pigeonholing him into any particular literary movement is risky.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T19:20:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Alexandre Freitas Ceistutis.pdf: 889412 bytes, checksum: 2a8e71b7365fd5cabda8fb3787e3e200 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-11-24 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This work has contributed to substantiate and systematize the use of the concept of Buddhism (and some of its features) and closeness that Wagner having with this religion, whether by his writings, or even byhis Operas, great relevance and based on the readings fulfilled by the authors of this composer s philosophy, religion, and mythology among others and his life history. The work was fed by primary literature sources (Wagner s writings and his wife), as well as comprehensive secondary literature particular to the topic. It was chosen to do a discursive and comparative analysis of sources to reach the ultimate goals / Este trabalho contribuiu para evidenciar e sistematizar o uso do conceito do budismo (e algumas de suas características) e da proximidade que Wagner teve com essa religião, quer seja por meio de seus escritos, ou até mesmo através de suas Óperas, tendo por base as leituras feitas por este compositor a autores da filosofia, da religião, da mitologia e entre outros e de seu histórico de vida. A pesquisa foi feita por fontes bibliográficas primárias (escritos de Wagner e sua esposa), bem como de ampla bibliografia secundária específica para o tema. Este trabalho optou em fazer uma análise discursiva e comparativa entre fontes para se chegar aos objetivos pretendidos

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / A protagonista do presente trabalho, a Utopia, a arte do pensar-contra, foi apresentada e definida, nas sendas da Filosofia da Esperança de Ernst Bloch, como uma consciência antecipadora que não se conforma com o está-aí das coisas, com a realidade fática; e como um logos, linguagem-ação que cria furos no tempo saltando para-adiante, para o topos-outro. Negativa e Esperançosa, ela representa a verdade-de-fora: não é o irreal, pois existe. E a existência do topos de fora, o topos-outro, se justifica pelo fato de que a vida e o mundo não são sistemas fechados, porque seus horizontes estão em aberto: atravessados por possibilidades, ainda-não-são. Contra o que é estático, o que é fatal e fático, se posiciona o sonho utópico, abrindo espaços no fluxo do mesmo. Ao fazê-lo, cria duas frentes reciprocamente reais: o aqui-e-agora de quem sonha e o aqui-e-agora do sonho, o u-topos. Assim, tanto seu caráter de projeção ao porvir quanto, na sua base, o descontentamento com o atual, revelam seu comprometimento com o presente. Negando e afirmando a história, transformou-se em conteúdo e, sobretudo, forma, de Morus a Fourrier, de Marx a Orwell. E é por comprometer-se com o futuro, o presente e o passado, que, nos tempos sombrios do início do século XX, ela subverte a si mesma e faz vir ao mundo sua versão pessimista: a Distopia. Articulando e fazendo dialogarem as obras distópicas de Orwell, Aldous Huxley e Jerome K. Jerome com os pensamentos de Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Kraus e Walter Benjamin, tentamos encaminhar a pergunta originária da nossa pesquisa: é possível uma utopia pessimista? Será este pessimismo, ainda, uma Utopia?

Ce travail s’est construit en partant d’une déclaration de Ferdinand de Saussure présentant le langage comme un « milieu intermédiaire ». Ce propos de Saussure n’a d’abord existé que sous la forme orale, mais fut transcrit dans les notes de cours de ses auditeurs ; il figure finalement dans l’édition critique du Cours, due à Rudolf Engler (que l’on doit considérer comme le véritable éditeur de Saussure). Librement inspiré de la Généalogie de la morale de Nietzsche, cette étude poursuit le but d’enquêter généalogiquement sur les présupposés des principales écoles linguistiques du 20ème siècle (néo-grammairiens, structuralisme, grammaire générative, fonctionnalisme, cognitivisme à la manière de Rosch et Varela). L’enquête généalogique vise à montrer que la conception dite « théorie du reflet » a ses racines dans le pessimisme romantique. Ce nouveau positionnement devrait permettre d’élaborer une nouvelle orientation (justifiant la revendication d’une « fondation constitutive »), par le recours méthodique à la phénoménologie ainsi qu’à l’outil de la Gestalt, issue de la psychologie de même nom. Il faut voir le « milieu intermédiaire » comme métaphore équivalente aux champs sémantiques, ce qui conduit à intégrer dans ce travail un examen critique des précurseurs dans cette voie que sont Jost Trier et Els Oksaar. / This work mainly deals with a statement of Ferdinand de Saussure, describing language as « milieu intermédiaire » (which might be named in english : « intermediary mental space », in accordance to Fauconnier’s « mental space ») ; Saussure’s statement was only in spoken form, but fortunately transcribed by listeners of his lectures in Geneva. Freely inspired from Nietzsche‘s Genealogy of morals, this study means to enquire into the main XXth century linguistic schools (neo-grammarians, structuralism, generative grammar, fonctionalism, cognitive sciences as with Varela and Rosch), which should make it possible to elaborate a new orientation of this science (justifying the claim of a « fondation constitutive »). This research aims at thoroughly recasting the method through the screen of phenomenology (including recourse to the « Gestalt », of the same-named psychology). The « intermediary mental space » is to be seen as an eq! uivalent of the semantic fields, which had led me to survey – as an important part of my work - the studies of the precursors in this direction, Jost Trier and Els Oksaar, but through a critical approach of their work.

No description available.