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Modern philosophy is often said to privilege rationality over received wisdom, but to some extent this is an ideal which we pursue under a measure of uncertainty. It is not always obvious what rationality requires. Nor is it clear how rationality is to be traded against other ideals. This dissertation seeks to clarify both questions as they pertain to the rationality of belief. The choice of topic is apposite, since many argue that the case of belief illustrates that what is rational and what there is most reason to do is one and the same thing. In particular, so-called evidentialists often argue that to believe what the evidence indicates is both to believe rationally and to believe what one has most reason to believe, since (i) rationality consists in responding to reasons, and (ii) only evidence that p can be a reason to believe that p. My first objective is to challenge this thesis. I do so by arguing that the class of reasons that rationalise a belief does not coincide with the class of reasons there are to have the belief all things considered. To equate the two classes would be to conflate the psychological issue of how we respond to reasons with the ontological issue of what reasons there are. My case against evidentialism does not depend on pragmatism being true, however. Even if Pascal was wrong to claim that the expected benefit of believing can be a reason to believe, it does not follow that evidentialism is true. Some non-pragmatic form of anti-evidentialism may still be true. The latter half of the dissertation explores this possibility in greater detail. There I argue that there is at least one class of beliefs which is not subject to common evidentiary strictures. When we use practical reasoning to form intentions about what to do in the future, we typically also form beliefs about what we will do. Yet, those beliefs are not based on evidence about what we will do, I argue. Typically, we do not predict what we do based on what we intend to do. Nor should we. When it is up to us whether we will perform an action, our intentions do to not carry enough weight as evidence that we must use them to predict what we will do. In the last part of the dissertation, I use this point to elucidate how we acquire self-knowledge and how belief relates to truth.

This thesis explores and makes explicit various aspects of Richard Rorty's rhetorical program for shifting our traditional conceptions of reference and truth. Rorty wants to persuade us to adopt verification (coping) semantics in place of correspondence seeking semantics. I argue against his intuition pumps by considering Keith Donnellan's remarks on description and reference and argue for a view of correspondence truth that is based on what the object, whatever the object, permits us to say. Making this point allows us to see a purposeful conflation in Rorty's work. If beliefs are true because they are justified, Rorty's fallibilistic remark that any of our beliefs may not be true (in the cautionary sense) would follow. But truths may pay because they follow (as "attributive representations") from 'unblocked' objects, or they may just pay. Thus, I suggest that Donnellan preserves William James' remark that we desire correspondence truth, an everyday explanatory notion.

In this study, I propose through the thought of Jacques Ellul that humanity has perverted the original creation. In doing so, we have constructed what I will call a Counter-Creation; a second creation. In this counter-creation, mankind has replaced the creativity and the fluidity of the original. Along with this I argue in the second chapter that we have socially constructed new gods, which I will call sacred myths. These sacred myths are unquestionable, and hold power over against humanity. In the third chapter, I depart from Ellul, and go beyond his reflections on the vanity of life, on the vanity of socially constructing the world around us. Through the story of Cain and Abel, I propose that in Qoheleth there are two types of vanities in play: One that is unrighteous and one that is righteous. In doing so, I hope to help people recognize their finitude, while not being paralyzed or being tempted to plunge into chaos due to the meaninglessness of life.

"One of the most contentious issues in aesthetics is whether or not there can be truth in art. This is so because the question of the possibility of truth in art implicitly assumes two other fundamental questions: the nature of truth and the nature of human understanding. In his treatment of truth in art, Gadamer comes down roundly on the side of the possiblity of truth in art. In this thesis, I show how Gadamer's approval of truth in art hinges on his notion of hermeneutics and his belief in art's transformative power, and propose that his account of truth in art is still a viable and creative approach to the question today. After taking a look at the Kantian, Heideggerian, and Aristotelian background with which Gadamer is operating in his treatment of truth and art, I trace where this led Gadamer, specifically in the sense of his move to have aesthetics so closely connected to hermeneutics. Through interaction with work by Mary Devereaux, I highlight some concerns over Gadamer's use of tradition and of order as a fundamental feature of the artwork, and give an account of how those concerns may be addressed."

Artistic meaning via visual art and literary fiction is debated in modern aesthetic thought. Language is a cognitive component in postmodernist aesthetic projects. This thesis investigates Maurice Merleau-Ponty's and Paul Ricoeur's writings on painting and language, respectively, whose phenomenological aim is the revelation of being in works of the imagination in tandem with Lambert Zuidervaart's approach to artistic truth which opens the lifeworld to the biotic context of the earth. For him, imaginative disclosure is integral to techno-scientific and art realms. Embodiment, natality, and expression illuminate the problematic of meaning in forms of postmodern visual art. Metaphoric imagination and metaphor are used for metaphor is a principle of articulation, not a figure of speech. Aesthetic projects connect with the lifeworld in a hermeneutic circle of meaning.

Orientador: Fatima Evora / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-10T00:08:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sant'Anna_Lucia_M.pdf: 688678 bytes, checksum: e60a2b831bacc34cd3da12a45bd0ef48 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: O presente trabalho versa sobre a questão da verdade na Suma de Teologia de Santo Tomás de Aquino, procurando levantar os principais aspectos de sua doutrina sobre esse ponto. Com esse fim, após uma breve apresentação geral da obra, faz-se um comentário literal da questão 16 da primeira parte da Suma; em seguida, apresentam-se os aspectos levantados sobre a verdade nessa questão, a saber, a relação necessária entre verdade e intelecto e entre verdade e Deus / Abstract: This study analyses the issue of truth in the St. Thomas Aquinas¿s Summa Theologiae, aiming to rise the main aspects of his doctrine on this subject. In order to achieve this a literal commentary of question 16 of the first part of the Summa is being preceded by a general presentation of the work; following those aspects: the necessary relation between truth and intelect and between truth and God are presented. / Mestrado / Historia da Filosofia Medieval / Mestre em Filosofia

Excess, Sex & Elevation is an attempt to understand the desire for truth in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Nothing is said about what truth is, but rather why it is wanted and how it is sought. Despite their different religious beliefs (Levinas a Jew, Nietzsche an atheist, Dostoevsky a Christian), the three thinkers hold remarkably similar conceptions of truth. Truth is an individual pursuit -- upwards. The self experiences a crisis of conscience upon discovering its originary excess, which is sex. The self suffers spiritually for what it is physically through the art of ascesis, turning the lust for sex into the desire for truth. And therein begins the self's elevation to the heights of truth.

Orientador: Oswaldo Giacoia Junior / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-08T08:26:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rabelo_RodrigoCumpre_M.pdf: 631068 bytes, checksum: c65f1218ec2e8e4cdcde720e293b4eee (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / Resumo: O texto visa evidenciar e depurar a função da arte no interior da análise crítica do ascetismo entendido como subseqüência do ressentimento, função essa necessariamente imbricada com a idéia de uma gaia ciência em oposição aos valores metafísico-niilistas. Conforme a tese dos escritos de Nietzsche, o tipo homem deu-se, via de regra, sob a égide dos valores negativos do ressentimento, cujo corolário é o ideal ascético, atual paradigma dominante de todas as áreas da vida humana (e de todo ¿conhecimento¿ sobre essas áreas). Contra esse processo de decadência que corresponde a um castramento do homem, a um enfraquecimento de seus impulsos positivos, criadores, apenas a arte poderá indicar o caminho para novas possibilidades de existência, posto que é a única atividade humana que exemplifica uma valoração não-asceta da existência. O espírito livre, o filósofo do futuro, tem na arte a matriz operacional que permitirá idealizar novamente o mundo, levar o homem a assumir, agora de forma consciente e plena, a função ¿divina¿ de auto-criador e modelador da vida, no espírito de Dioniso (do segundo Dioniso, o do velho Nietzsche). Ao invés do auto-apequenamento do homem, ter-se-ia, com e a partir da ¿arte¿ (isto é, com a auto-criação de cunho nobre, regida pela gaia ciência), as diretrizes para a auto-superação da vida humana atual, dando lugar e vazão a novas, ¿até agora não desejadas¿, realidades. Estas se traduzirão, por exemplo, numa grande saúde, numa grande política, numa grande razão, e mesmo numa grande seriedade; numa palavra, à existência em grande estilo, inédita na história, senão por alguns ¿acasos felizes¿. O ponto de viragem é a chamada morte de Deus, perpetrada pela própria vontade de verdade ascética, numa imensa e inédita auto-implosão que implica, inclusive, na auto-superação-supressão ou metamorfose da Filosofia em gaia ciência. Seus herdeiros diretos serão uma nova espécie de pensadores-que-sentem-e-criam, que englobarão e extrapolarão e superarão o filósofo, o artista, o médico, o legislador. Conclui-se, então, que a função da arte na Terceira Dissertação de ¿Para a genealogia da moral¿ tem lugar e se constitui no entremeio das engrenagens que movem a necessária, autoprogramada superação-supressão da vontade de verdade ascética em direção à gaia ciência. Conclui-se que na tessitura do aberto plano existencial humano há, entre arte e ciência-filosofia (Wissenschaft) uma contínua, inesgotável, instigante e produtiva tensão; uma relação, de mão dupla, entre dois pólos opostos-complementares, relação que se desdobra historicamente através de complexos tipos de formas de vida. Conclui-se que, na prática, ¿a filosofia ?na medida em que genuinamente olhe para dentro do 'abismo¿ da realidade? necessita das ilusões embelezadoras da arte a fim de não 'perecer pela verdade¿. Pois a arte constitui a melhor força de oposição contra o pessimismo negador do mundo e o maior estimulante para a vontade¿ [MAY, 1999, p. 35 (tr. pr.1)]. Conclui-se que Nietzsche quer, conscientemente, pôr em evidência e manter ativada essa relação na configuração filosofia-arte, bem como nas descrições do artista autêntico e do filósofo da gaia ciência / Abstract: The text aims to select and put in evidence the function of art in the interior of Nietzsche¿s critical analysis of asceticism, understood as a subsequence of resentment, function which necessarily imbricates with the idea of a gay science in opposition to the metaphysical-nihilistic values.As the thesis of Nietzsche¿s writings puts it, man type was given, usually, under the sign of the negative values of resentment, corollary of which is the ascetic ideal, current dominant paradigm of all human life realms (and of all "knowledge" on these areas). Against this process of decay that corresponds to a castration of man, to a weakness of its positive, creative impulses, only art will be able to indicate the way for new existence possibilities, given that is the sole human activity that exemplifies a non-ascetic valuation of the existence. The free spirit, the philosopher of the future, has in art the operational matrix that will allow idealizing the world again, to take man to assume, now in a conscientious and plain way, the ¿divine" function of self-creator and life shaper, in the spirit of Dionysus (of the second Dionysus, the one of the old Nietzsche). Instead of the self-diminishing of man, the lines of direction for current human life¿s self-overcoming would transpire with and from "art" (that is, the auto-creation of noble matrix, conducted by a gay science), giving place and outflow to new, "not yet desired", realities. These will be expressed, for example, in a great health, a great politics, a great reason, even in a great seriousness; in a word, in the existence in great style, unknown to history but for some "happy accidents". The turning point is the so-called death of God, perpetrated by the ascetic will to truth itself, an immense and unknown self-implosion that also implies the self-overcoming-suppression or metamorphosis of Philosophy in gay science. Its inheritors by right shall be a new species of thinkers-who-feel-and-create, who shall encompass and overcome and overpass the philosopher, the artist, the doctor, and the legislator. One then concludes that the function of art in the Third Inquire of "Toward the genealogy of morals" has place and constitutes itself in the in between of the gears that move the necessary, selfprogrammed, overcoming-suppression of the ascetic will to truth toward gay science. One concludes that upon the open plain of human existential tissue there is a continuum, inexhaustible, exciting and productive tension between art and science-philosophy (Wissenschaft); a double-handed relation between two opposite-complementary polar poles that historically unfolds through complex life form types. One concludes that, in short, ¿philosophy ?insofar as it genuinely looks into the 'abyss¿ of reality? needs the beautifying illusions of art lest it 'perish of the truth¿. For art constitutes the best counterforce against world-denying pessimism and the greatest stimulant of the will.¿ [MAY, 1999, p. 35]. One concludes that Nietzsche wants, conscientiously, to put in evidence and to keep activated this relation in the philosophy-art configuration as well as in the descriptions of the authentic artist and of the gay science philosopher / Mestrado / Historia da Filosofia Contemporanea / Mestre em Filosofia

I trace Jacques Derrida's notions of self and truth in Circumfession. This text paints a gruesome self-portrait depicting the inescapable violence of subjectivity. The self is born in blood. Derrida courageously confesses to being a casualty of this lovelessness. Similarly, exploring the depth of patriarchy's inscriptions requires facing the painful truth of my bleeding self. Investigating these wounds seems to reopen them, making me complicit in my own oppression. Drawing from the rich narrative of Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina, I allow feminists such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Drucilla Cornell and bell hooks to engage Derrida's notions of the wounded and wounding self. Beginning in this bloody place, they attempt to write a way-out of the disempowering systems of subjectivity to which the female self seems confined. They write in order that love will bleed some light on the struggle for empowered female subjectivity, re-writing the self as a space of love rather than violence.