The purpose of this study is to show transitions between verbal and visual meaning in ordinary language, based on philosophical concepts and conceptual artworks. It offers models for artistic research and collaboration in arts and science. Shared experiences in ordinary language are fundamental to this thesis and make it an accessible and trans-disciplinary study. Language as such, is approached from different practices and disciplines and becomes the central object of investigation. The research introduces a general set of mechanisms in language, stemming from the Wittgensteinian notion of the language-game. The study examines the possibility of a meeting between the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the writer Gertrude Stein in a linguistic, biographical and poetic sense. The main claim is that Wittgenstein and Stein share the understanding of language as a game, which is a fruitful principle for artistic and poetic production. Gertrude Stein developed a dimension in her writing which partly succeeds in showing this notion of creating meaning-as-practice and making sense on the ‘edge’ of conventional meaning. In this way she augments Wittgenstein’s idea of the language-game and puts it into practice, tests its limits on her own language and on the reader’s habits. The artistic works represented in this thesis are equally experimental tests of Wittgenstein’s meaning-as-use hypothesis. They put his ideas into practice. They extend the research with strategies from the arts, poetry and fiction. The methodology of the research is based on Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning as context-dependent use. This concept defines the meaning of a word by the way it is used in a specific context. This perspective is then challenged with visual artistic work. This hypothesis is tested throughout the research by applying tools and concepts from several practices, like computer linguistic tools, collaboration with writers and artists from other fields and autonomous visual and poetic work to augment the study of facts. Conceptual artworks, often produced in collaboration, function as language experiments, or language-games. The Wittgensteinian differentiation between what can be shown and what can be said is examined. The context of the research lies in the practices developed as a conceptual artist in which theoretical research informs artistic practice. This thesis, on the border between verbal and visual language, is founded upon antecedent studies in philosophy of language and the practice of Fine Arts. Against this background the research focuses on the relationship between word, context and meaning: issues of communication, ordinary language, words and their composition, context-based meaning, naming visual phenomena, examination of word-and-world-relationships and vocabularies. Main sources are the major works and biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, the critical work of Marjorie Perloff, language philosophers concerned with ordinary language and the contrastive corpus linguistic approach. The results of this research are generated by several interdisciplinary productive methods. Artworks, poetic and scientific work, all of which employ modes of language, and whose their domains overlap. Additionally, the notion of meeting acts as model metaphor for the development of a solid trans-disciplinary methodology for research between science and the arts. One major result of comparing their ideas on language is reflected in the meeting of the language used by Wittgenstein and Stein. Their meeting is materialized in the computer generated Shared Vocabulary, which is a list of words which both Wittgenstein and Stein used in their writing. It applies linguistic tools from contrastive corpus linguistics to compare their vocabularies (corpora), which offers new methods for investigating the works of the philosopher Wittgenstein and writer Stein. Generally, this thesis may act as an introduction to language as ideal fundament for interdisciplinary study. The application of the principle of the language-game (Wittgenstein) is a significant of displaying possible strategies for artists and researchers who work transdisciplinarily. The research results directly inform practice and practitioners from other fields, which means that collaboration is central to the research. It implies that language permeates every sort of research, art and its discourse. It also suggests that the meaning of words and images depend on their use, which extends the Wittgensteinian meaning-as-use hypothesis to visual language. The findings of the research on vocabularies are quite specific, but they overlap with offering simple general mechanisms of the language-game. The consequent alliance of the discussion with the language of the everyday makes the research a general contribution to everyone who is genuinely interested in language and the arts.

My argument assesses and reconfigures binary structures in Shakespeare’s plays and in Shakespeare criticism. I contend that ideas in early modern literature often exhibit three aspects, but that critics, who mostly rely upon a binary philosophical vocabulary, tend to notice only two aspects at a time, thereby “digesting” the third. My opening chapter theorizes the superimposition of triadic structures upon dyads, arguing that this new polyrhythmic strategy helps recapture an early modern philosophical perspective by circumventing the entrenched binary categories we have inherited from the Enlightenment. In Chapter Two, I examine the relationship of tyranny and conscience in Tudor politics, Reformed psychology, and Richard III. Early modern political theorists often employ a binary opposition of kingship and tyranny, and historians typically draw a binary distinction between absolutists and resisters. I argue that there were in fact three ideological positions on offer which these binaries misrepresent. As well, Reformed psychology emphasizes the relationship of the individual subject and an objective God, unmediated by community, and I propose that this opposition of subjectivity and objectivity digests the idea of intersubjectivity. In Richard III, Shakespeare interrogates the implausibility of Tudor political binaries and stages a nostalgia for intersubjective community and conscience. In Chapter Three I read the debates on value in Troilus and Cressida alongside contemporary economic writings by Gerard de Malynes on currency reform and “merchandizing exchange.” Our current models of value – intrinsic and extrinsic, use and exchange, worth and price – are emphatically binary, but the mercantile practices that Malynes describes depend upon a triadic conception of value. My contention is that Troilus and Cressida becomes a less problematic problem play when value is conceived as triadic rather than dyadic. In Chapter Four I explore early modern scepticism in connection with Coriolanus. Reading Montaigne and Wittgenstein in parallel, I distinguish between various conceptions of truth that are regularly grouped together under the blanket term “scepticism.” Then I turn to read Coriolanus as an experiment in competing modes of early modern epistemology, arguing that the play ultimately endorses the same sort of polyphonous Pyrrhonian scepticism that we find in Montaigne and Wittgenstein.

The central aim of this thesis is to argue that the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation presents a stronger constraint on what counts as a satisfactory statement of the relation between the mental and the physical than can be acknowledged within the metaphysical framework of non-reductive physicalism. Although the chief merit of non-reductive physicalism appears to be its ability to respect the irreducibility of mental concepts to physical concepts, whilst respecting the primacy of the physical ontology, I claim that its commitment to the principles of physicalism prevents that framework from being able to accommodate what I will refer to as the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation. The deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation manifests itself in the fact that the work carried out by mentalistic explanations is completely separate from the work carried out by physicalistic explanations. I claim that the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation cannot be recognised within a metaphysical framework which claims to recognise the primacy of the physical ontology because recopsing deep autonomy requires giving up the assumption that the mental must be related to the physical in the manner appropriate to discharging such metaphysical principles. I defend the claim that we can recognise the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation if we take our successful explanatory practices as the starting point of our investigation, and only then revert to the question of how best to articulate the relation between the mental and the physical. My claim is that there is an intrinsic connection between the nature of the mental and the nature of human relationships, and I therefore suggest that the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation ought to be understood in connection with the autonomous nature of human relationships. The basic ideas in this thesis are derived by combining features of Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations with features of John MacMurray’s approach to human relationships. On the basis of this combination, I argue for the more specific claim that there is an intrinsic connection between what it means to say that an individual has the capacity to think and what it means to say that he has the capacity to be involved in various types of human relationships. This connection is then used to develop a non-causal account of human action to challenge the physicalist ’s causal account, which will be used to support the claim that mentalistic explanations are autonomous with respect to physicalistic explanations in the deeper sense. I conclude by arguing that the considerations which put us in position to recognise the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation ought to constrain our statement of the relation between the mental and the physical, and I suggest that this statement should be consistent with the way in which mentalistic and physicalistic explanations carry out their work in our explanatory practices. I claim that individuals are subject to mentalistic explanations in so far as they have a life to live in the world with other people, and that individuals are subject to physicalistic explanations in so far as human beings are creatures whose life has a natural biological dimension. But rather than identifying the mental with the physical, and thereby compromise the deeper extent of the autonomous nature of mentalistic explanation, I suggest that this relation might be understood in terms of the fact that the mental is embedded in the dimension of human life which is constituted by the involvement of individuals in various types of relationshps with each other, and that the dimension of human life in which physicalistic explanations are operative is presupposed as the causal background which must be in place if individuals are to have such a life to live in the world.

The aim of the thesis is to explore Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Wilfrid Sellars’s views on intentionality. In the first chapter I discuss the account of intentionality and meaning the early Wittgenstein developed in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus. I present his idea that sentences are pictures of states of affairs with which they share a ‘logical form’ and to which they stand in an internal ‘pictorial relationship’. I argue that Wittgenstein thought of this relationship as established by acts of thought consisting in the operation of mental signs corresponding to the signs of public languages. In the second and third chapters I discuss the later Wittgenstein’s criticism of ideas at the heart of the Tractarian account of intentionality, as well as his explanations of the phenomena that motivated it. In the second chapter I examine his rejection of the idea that thinking consists in the operation of mental signs and his criticism of the idea that meaning and understanding are mental processes accompanying the use of language. In the third chapter I turn to Wittgenstein’s criticism of the idea that representations stand in an internal ‘pictorial relation’ to objects in the natural order that are their meaning. I illuminate his later views by discussing Sellars’s non-relational account of meaning, in particular his claim that specifications of meaning do not relate expressions to items that are their meaning, but rather specify their rule-governed role in language. I conclude with a discussion of the later Wittgenstein’s account of the relationship between intentional phenomena and the objects at which they are directed. In the final fourth chapter I provide a detailed discussion of Sellars’s account of thinking. I conclude with some criticisms of Sellars’s views.

This thesis examines the appeal to ordinary language as a distinctive methodological feature in the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the work of J. L. Austin. This appeal situates our language and concepts within the broader forms of life in which we use them, and seeks to ‘disenchant’ idealizations that extract our language and concepts from this broader context. A disenchanted philosophy recognizes our forms of life as manifestations of attunement: a shared common ground of understanding and behaviour that cannot itself be further explained or justified. By working through the consequences of seeing our forms of life as ultimately ungrounded in this way, the thesis illuminates the underlying importance of play to shared practices like language. The first two chapters consider the appeal to ordinary language as it features in the work of Austin and Wittgenstein, respectively. By placing each author in turn in dialogue with Jacques Derrida, the thesis draws out the importance of seeing our attunement as ungrounded, and the difficulty of doing so. Austin’s appeal to a ‘total context’ betrays the sort of idealization Austin himself opposes, whereas Wittgenstein and Derrida must remain self-reflexively vigilant in order to avoid the same pitfall. Chapter Three explores connections between the appeal to ordinary language and Martin Heidegger’s analysis of ‘average everydayness’ in Being and Time. Heidegger takes average everydayness to be a mark of inauthenticity. However, in acknowledging the ungroundedness of attunement, the appeal to ordinary language manifests a turn similar to Heidegger’s appeal to authenticity. Furthermore, Wittgenstein’s use of conceptual ‘pictures’ also allows him to avoid some of the confusions in Heidegger’s work. Chapter Four considers the nature of our ungrounded attunement, and argues that we both discover and create this attunement through play, which is unregulated activity that itself gives rise to regularity.

What does it mean to occupy the other side of what is - to “be” the nothing that lies beyond being? Or, in other words: Where yonder the End of Philosophy? Thus reads the first and final line of inquiry that we, the philosophers of this age, are impelled to pursue. Such is the case, I contend, in light of the fact that our time quite simply is that of the eschatological aftermath, the “postmodern” era where the purportedly “greatest” thinkers of our immediate past, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, have, each in his own way, already declared philosophical moratorium. Yet it seems to me there is curious and vital affinity to the philosophical legacy these thinkers, whose mark on history is, paradoxically, so wide and so deep as to be at once indelible and invisible. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to render Heidegger and Wittgenstein, each a formidable critic of the philosophical tradition, as mutually complementary voices, speaking not of an end-to-be, but on the way beyond the end-that-is-past. In writing on the disjunctive parallelism evident in their famed non-encounter, I hope to clarify the nature and purpose of contemporary philosophical practice. My principal argument is that, in locating philosophy, conceived as a thematic study of the being of what is, within language, Wittgenstein and Heidegger both came to view language itself as the pre-philosophical nothing, which, in its wordless non-identity or self-difference, presents a way beyond the word and world of traditional philosophical thinking. It is my hope that, in outlying the shared strains of their respective critical disclosures of the relation between language and philosophy, I will be able to say not the same, but something yet unsaid, addressing our time, the time after the end, as a period of continued, self-critical thinking and speaking about that which, as the difference between the spoken word and that which is, prepares the way towards an experience of the hitherto “impossible” meaning of non-being.

Memoria para optar al título de Arquitecto

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / By the 20th century the Confessions had become a “classic” of western civilization, yet it seems to elude any easy explanation and categorization. While scholars of Late Antiquity puzzled over the nature, structure, and meaning of the work, a parallel reception was occurring by some of the most original thinkers across both traditions of Contemporary philosophy, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Jaspers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean Louis Chrétien and Stanley Cavell. This study will focus on four of these thinkers, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Ricoeur and Marion, and the ways that the Confessions has influenced their attempts to address fundamental questions on subjects ranging from time and memory to history and hermeneutics, evil and the will, the self and personal identity, language and narrative, conversion, skepticism and materialism, God and onto- theology, and ultimately the very practice of philosophy itself, its autobiographical and especially its confessional character. In turn, this study also asks whether the engagements of these highly original contemporary philosophers can uncover new dimensions of this highly original work that has been read and interpreted throughout a centuries-long history of reception. The hermeneutic wager is that the past illumines the present philosophical terrain, but also that present insights allow us to read a classic text of the past with new understanding. This study will benefit from the interconnected nature of the problems that these writers confront, in their “family resemblance” of shared affinities and marked differences. Chapter One, “Scholarly Engagements: A Problematic Classic,” introduces some of the key interpretive problems which arose in the course of a century of scholarly engagements, including occasion, veracity, composition, and sources of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Chapter Two “The Early Wittgenstein: Tractatus, Testimony and Confession” discusses the confessional philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the deep affinities he shared with Saint Augustine in his life and his first major work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), despite its reception and use as a foundational for Logical Empiricism and its spirited offspring. Chapter Three: “The Later Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations as Philosophical Confession” discusses the influence of Saint Augustine on Wittgenstein’s second major work, the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which uses a quotation from the Confessions as a point of departure for his own philosophical confession of errors and temptations. Chapter Four “Saint Augustine and Gadamer: Hermeneutic Anticipations and Affinities” discusses the hermeneutical insights of Saint Augustine, through the ways he encountered or struggled with texts in the Confessions, as well as through his idea of the “inner word” which would be for Gadamer the foundation of a philosophical hermeneutics. Chapter Five, “Ricoeur: Sin, Time, Memory, and Narrative” discusses Ricoeur’s engagement with Saint Augustine on the question of evil as well as his appropriation of the Augustinian aporia of time from the Confessions as pivotal for his narrative turn. Chapter Six, “Jean-Luc Marion’s Confessions” lays out Marion’s phenomenological unfolding of the Confessions beyond and before metaphysics, offering his reading of six dimensions of the inaccessibility of the self explored by Saint Augustine in the Confessions. This study will conclude by highlighting the themes that have suggested themselves across the many readings of this classic text. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Orientador: Clélia Aparecida Martins / Banca: José Carlos Bruni / Banca: Alberto Marcos Onate / Resumo: Procuramos delimitar o âmbito de interação do humano com a realidade a partir da teoria lingüística expressa no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus e nas Investigações Filosóficas. A partir da identificação deste âmbito ontológico-lingüístico da ação humana, representadas pela tríade agir/sentir/pensar, demonstraremos como a linguagem representa a realidade a partir da afiguração. Através de contextualizações e aproximações das teorias wittgensteinianas com noções filosóficas tradicionais busca-se demonstrar a inovação do método wittgensteiniano e suas possibilidades de aplicação ao exercício filosófico contemporâneo. / Abstract: We have tried to delimit the ambit of the human's interaction with the reality starting from the linguistic theory expresses in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in the Philosophical Investigations. Starting from the identification of this ontological-linguistic ambit of the human action, represented by the triad to act/to feel/to think, we will demonstrate as the language it represents the reality starting from the representation. Through contextualize and approaches of the Wittgenstein's theories with the traditional philosophical notions, we aim for to demonstrate the innovation of the Wittgenstein's method and your application possibilities to the contemporary philosophical exercise. / Mestre

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-14T13:55:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 395304.pdf: 510170 bytes, checksum: b2868c11d4717b5e7f4642ea05bab687 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-08-01 / O presente trabalho tem por objetivo central investigar o conceito de Regras e a no??o de seguir regras na obra Da Certeza de Wittgenstein para verificar a exist?ncia de mudan?as significativas no pensamento do fil?sofo apresentada em Investiga??es Filos?ficas que justifique a id?ia de terceiro Wittgenstein. Se, do Tractatus ? Investiga??es Filos?ficas houve uma redefini??o da natureza da gram?tica, de Investiga??es ? Da Certeza, Wittgenstein redefiniu a extens?o desta gram?tica. Com a redefini??o da natureza da gram?tica, o fil?sofo prop?s os jogos de linguagem e, como todo jogo esse tamb?m est? associado ? regras. Essas regras estavam abertas ? inspe??o, o qual conferia a elas uma arbitrariedade, elas n?o tinham contas a prestar ? realidade, elas nada mais faziam do que determinar o significado e, por esse motivo, n?o eram respons?veis perante o significado. J? com a redefini??o da extens?o da gram?tica o que parece ser contingente ou parece proposi??es emp?ricas pode apresentar um status l?gico e por isso tamb?m podem pertencer ? gram?tica. Como todo jogo de linguagem que apresenta proposi??es emp?ricas ou fatos contingentes precisa ser encerrado ou transformado em um novo jogo, o jogador precisa recorrer ? id?ia de Weltbild para reestruturar as regras do novo jogo. Este trabalho prop?e que com a no??o de Weltbild ? poss?vel separar o que ? emp?rico do que ? aparentemente emp?rico e assim, poder estabelecer regras para que o jogo de linguagem aconte?a.