This thesis is a study of aboutness. It defends the claim that we have singular thoughts about ordinary objects and argues that an essential part of how we do so is by maintaining singular representations. This proposal allows us to avoid traditional, unsatisfying conceptions of the scope of singular thought while restoring the sense in which such thought is a distinctively epistemic achievement. Reconnecting the study of aboutness with epistemology promises to alleviate the sense of directionlessness in the contemporary literature, offering a firmer grip on the phenomenon along with new, systematic resources for its investigation. Chapters 1-2 explore the effects of contextualist machinery on orthodox views about singular thought. It is widely thought that if there is to be a plausible connection between the truth of a de re attitude report about a subject and that subject's possession of a singular thought, then there can be no acquaintance requirement(s) on singular thought. Chapter 1 shows that this view rests on a faulty picture of how we talk about attitudes. Indeed, the truth of a de re attitude report cannot be taken to track the singular/non-singular distinction without collapsing it. A new, contextualist picture is needed. That there must be a distinction between singular and non-singular intentionality is emphasized in Chapter 2, where a key explanatory role for singular thought - brought out by a thought experiment due to Strawson - is examined. I show that the role does not call for any distinctive kind of mental content. Once we abandon the two widespread views questioned in Chapters 1-2, our grip on the phenomenon of singular aboutness is loosened: it is not constitutively tied to the kinds of attitude-reporting data or mental content by which it is often assumed to be revealed. Where are we to look for insight? What makes something the object of a singular thought? According to Russell, it is a datum of intuition that singular thought involves a kind of knowledge; a theory of aboutness will precisify the intuitive notion of 'knowing which thing one is thinking about' in order to capture this demand in a philosophically revealing way. If Russell is right, teasing out this connection to knowledge will allow us to see what it takes for a particular thing to be the immediate subject matter of thought. Chapter 3 discusses Evans's theory of this kind. Chapter 4 examines recent work by Dickie. While serious concerns emerge in each case, insights recovered are used to precisify Russell's requirement, leading to a novel picture of singular representation and the epistemic character of this achievement. While the chapters follow a narrative, providing an extended rationale for the proposal in Chapter 4, each may be read in isolation by those familiar with the philosophical issues. For those who are not, the Introduction provides sufficient background.

My dissertation applies narrative theory and ordinary language philosophy to two major works bookending medieval English literature: Beowulf and Le Morte Darthur. Capitalizing on the descriptive power of narrative theory's lexicon, I outline the aesthetics, rhetoric, and other effects on the reader when these medieval writers depict transgressive movements--theoretically termed metalepsis--across borders in the story world, and over boundaries separating that world from our own. I often find that spatial transgressions, as they are visualized in narrative terms, entail or simultaneously occur with a breakdown of the fourth wall separating fiction from its audience. Malory's Sir Lancelot crosses into a spiritual world in pursuit of the Holy Grail only to arrive at an awareness of his existence as narrated fiction. My dissertation argues that moments like this, first analyzed through narrative theory, challenge the reader to recognize the fictional character's force of life, and in so doing expand the imagination to reconsider those metaphysical distinctions that have long rendered the nonhuman inferior. Those distinctions are unnecessary and often senseless, I argue. The ethics of reading fiction that I propose seeks the acknowledgment of limits to knowledge, to what we can claim to know about literature, its characters, and, indeed, our fellow human beings. Given that they are constructed by our ordinary language use, fictional characters are the essence of the other. Fictions, then, and as Stanley Cavell would agree, serve as testing grounds for our capacities of acknowledgment. I argue that both the Beowulf poet and Malory fashioned fictional worlds that preserve a secular heroism from potentially hostile contexts. In the process, these medieval narratives show us that fictional characters move us as a matter of ordinary language--our ordinary interactions with narrative: they play a significant role in our lives that cannot be reduced to any particular theory. There is no need for recourse to ontological, or theological, frameworks to invest them with some unutterable or mysterious meaning. They matter as a matter of course.

The question of the relation between religious experience and Christian belief in God is addressed in radically different ways within contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. In order to develop an answer which avoids the pitfalls of the ‘analytic perception model’ (Alston, Yandell, Swinburne) and the ‘overlinguistic’ model for interpreting Christian religious experience (Taylor, Lindbeck), this thesis offers an approach which combines a phenomenological study of feelings, conceptual investigation of Christian God-talk and ‘belief’-talk, as well as theological, sociological and anthropological perspectives. At the centre of the interpretation developed here is the phenomenological category ‘existential feelings’ which should be seen, it is suggested, as a theologically and philosophically central aspect of Christian religious experiencing. Using this contemporary concept, a novel reading of F. Schleiermacher’s concept of ‘feeling’ is proposed and several kinds of Christian experiencing interpreted (like the experiences of ‘awe’, ‘miracle of existence’, ‘wretchedness’, and ‘redeemed community’). By way of a philosophical understanding of Christian believing in God, this study offers a critical interpretation of the later Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘religious belief’, combining Wittgensteinian insights with Paul Tillich’s notion of ‘dynamic faith’ and arguing against Wittgensteinian ‘grammaticalist’ and ‘expressivist’ accounts. Christian beliefs about God are normally life-guiding but nevertheless dubitable. The nature of Christian God-talk is interpreted, again, by combining the later Wittgenstein’s insights into the grammatical and expressive roles of God-talk with Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on linguistic innovation and Roman Jakobson’s perspective on the functions of language. Finally, the claim which connects phenomenological, conceptual and theological strands of this study is a recognition of a ‘religious belief-inviting pull’ of the relevant experience. Christian religious belief-formation and concept-formation can be seen as stemming from ‘extraordinary’ existential feelings, where the resulting beliefs about God are largely but not completely bound by traditional meanings.

Orientador: Gabbi Junior, Osmyr Faria / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-13T15:15:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marques_BeatrizSorrentino_M.pdf: 793198 bytes, checksum: f5135824464f5b2dac819b554ce05c8d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: A distinção entre pessoas e coisas materiais, para P. F. Strawson em seu livro Individuals, guia a discussão sobre o que são pessoas e como as identificamos e nos referimos a elas. No entanto, a tentativa de fazer esta distinção chama a atenção para a necessidade da reflexibilidade do si mesmo, capaz de identificar si mesmo e outros como sendo pessoas. Paul Ricoeur explicita em seu livro Soi-même comme un autre como a designação de si desenvolve a compreensão da noção de si mesmo. A referência aos particulares de base que auxiliaria em sua distinção de coisas ocorre na linguagem, entretanto, ao levar em consideração atos de fala, que remetem à capacidade de designar a si na interlocução, surge a necessidade de considerar a ação como o principal aspecto que diferencia pessoas de coisas, como Strawson aponta em sua teoria. A ação expõe a distinção entre a espontaneidade com a qual o agente interfere no mundo, por meio de seu corpo, e a ocorrência de eventos de acordo com leis da natureza. Assim, a ação traz a dimensão da ética para o agente ao apontar o seu poder de agir. Por fim, a narrativa ajuda a designar uma ação ao seu agente, pois a ação faz parte da trama que o agente constrói, e contar algo é contar quem fez o que numa história em que o personagem apresenta uma constância. Dadas estas considerações, o presente estudo avalia dois casos de narrativas literárias para constatar se os seres não humanos que as compõem são pessoas ou não / Abstract: For P. F. Strawson, in his book Individuals, the distinction between persons and material things guides the argument over what persons are and how we identify and refer to them. However, tryning to point out the distinction calls atention to the need of the self's reflectivity, capable of identifying onself and another as persons. Paul Ricoeur elucidates in his book Soi-même Comme un Autre how self ascription develops our understanding of the self. The reference to basic particulars that should help distinguishing things happens through language, though, when we consider speech acts, which refere to the self designation capacity in interlocution, we realise the need to consider action as the key aspect which distinguishes persons from things, as Strawson poits out in his theory. Action exposes the distinction between the agente's spontaneous interference in the world, through his body, and the ocurrence of events in acordance with laws of nature. By way of his power to act, action brings to the agent a ethical dimension. Narrative helps ascribing an action to it's agent, since the action is a part of the plot the agent constructs, and to tell something is to tell who did what in a narrative where the character presents constancy. Based on these considerations, the present essay studies two literary cases to decide if the non-human beings preset on these narratives are persons or not. Key Words: Basic Particulars, Oneself, Intentional Action, Self-ascription, Own Body / Mestrado / Filosofia / Mestre em Filosofia

Orientador: Roberto Akira Goto / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-22T11:51:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lima_FlavioLourencoPeixoto_D.pdf: 1826329 bytes, checksum: dec26e2ad596aa1d55719e1a5231bcfd (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: esta pesquisa procura pensar as errâncias da vida memorizando-as na e com a linguagem. Errâncias à maneira de acontecimentos que se estendem para além da denotação, estabelecendo trilhas para a educação filosófica e literária dos sujeitos, tomadas como fundamentos para demonstrar que tanto a literatura quanto a filosofia permitem que a prática educativa abra um diálogo com o mundo vivido. Abriguemo-nos de pronto na escrita e na linguagem como princípios por meio dos quais adquirimos conhecimentos e os comunicamos, adotando como categoria o conceito de palavra enquanto presença metonímia, considerado e operado intrinsecamente na linguagem viva, tornando-a plano de contiguidade no agenciamento de sentidos que se reverberam, na construção do ato educativo enquanto fazer referencial, literário, filosófico. / Abstract: This academic research discuss about reproducing memories of life memorizing them in and with language. Wandering in the way of events are extended beyond the denotation, establishing trails for education, philosophical and literary subjects, taken as grounds to demonstrate that both literature and philosophy allow educational practices open a dialogue with the lived world. For this research we are taken writing and language as principles by which we acquire knowledge and communicate, as a category and also adopting the concept of metonymy considered intrinsically and operated in living language, making the contiguity of meanings that reverberate in the construction of the educational act as referential, literary, philosophical. / Doutorado / Filosofia e História da Educação / Doutor em Educação

Is language a tool of empire or is empire a tool of language? This thesis examines the cultivation of Carolingian hegemony on a pan-European scale; one defined by a renewed interest in the study of language and its relationship to Carolingian eagerness for moral and spiritual authority. Intended to complement previous work on Carolingian cultural politics, this thesis reiterates the emergence of active philosophical speculation during the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Prior research has ignored the centrality of linguistic hermeneutics in the Carolingian literate programme. This thesis addresses this lacuna, demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between spirituality, language, and politics within the Carolingian world. The work appropriates prior investigations into the connection of semiotics and Christian philosophy and proposes the development of a renewed interest into ontology and epistemology by Carolingian scholars, notably Alcuin of York and Theodulf of Orléans. The correlation between linguistic philosophy and spiritual authority is confirmed by the 794 Synod of Frankfurt, at which accusations towards both the Adoptionist movement of northern Spain and the repeal of Byzantine Iconoclasm were based on the dangers of linguistic misinterpretation. The thesis also explores the manifestation of this emergent philosophy of language within the manuscript evidence, witnessed by the biblical pandects produced by Alcuin and Theodulf. Desire for the emendation of texts, not to mention the formation of a uniform script (Caroline Minuscule), abetted the larger goal of both infusing a text with authority (both secular and divine) and allowing for broader spiritual and intellectual understanding of a text. Increasing engagement with classical philosophy and rhetoric, the nature of Carolingian biblical revision, and the cultural politics as seen at the Synod of Frankfurt depict the primacy of language to the Carolingians, not only as a tool of imperialism, but the axis of their intellectual and spiritual world.

This study claims that formally experimental novels written in the early twentieth century place urgent, if often implicit, demands for acknowledgment upon their readers. Scholars have long held that the economic and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century led novelists to doubt language’s referential capacities. But, even as signal modernist works by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment; they treat words as tools for recognizing and responding to the inner lives of others. Stanley Cavell finds such a vision of language in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), a work Cavell describes as “modernist.” This dissertation demonstrates that Wittgenstein’s interest in acknowledgment emerges via his negotiation of the same historical forces with which literary modernism grapples: industrialization, World War, cross-cultural encounter. I argue that modernist representations of consciousness offer readers a way of hearing what Wittgenstein calls “the silent soliloquy of others,” giving us words by which we might adopt an attitude of acknowledgment toward the otherwise unvoiced inner lives of socially marginalized figures. Chapter One considers the crisis of reason that convulses early twentieth-century Britain and demonstrates how Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) critique excessive commitments to rationality as counterproductive to the acknowledgment of politically disenfranchised citizens. Chapter Two discusses Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929): three texts that, I show, cast traditional Victorian marriage as an unsatisfying form of intimacy and depict speakers hesitant to acknowledge their desires for alternative, same-sex modes of intimate relation. Chapter Three examines Faulkner’s portrayal of capitalist modernization in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), arguing that characters in these novels insist on the immitigable privacy of their experiences and struggle accordingly to gain acknowledgment from family members. Chapter Four reads Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) as two texts that represent the psychological experience of having one’s humanity go brutally unacknowledged under Jim Crow. / 2020-11-07T00:00:00Z

Comment penser la construction et la déconstruction du genre dans le langage ? Je montre que la philosophie du langage ordinaire — et notamment la théorie austinienne des actes de parole — peut soutenir une approche constructiviste et éclairer le rôle du langage dans la construction sociale du genre. La naturalisation du genre repose à la fois sur une représentation du langage — comme simple reflet du réel et comme « capacité » inégalement partagée — et sur des pratiques linguistiques ordinaires et scientifiques. Penser cela implique de dépasser la stricte dichotomie de l’idéologique et du matériel, pour analyser ensemble la construction et la représentation du genre dans des pratiques discursives et non-discursives. La théorie butlerienne de la « performativité du genre » permet de penser à la fois la construction du genre et sa contingence, sa possible déconstruction. Mais quel est notre pouvoir transformateur ? Si montrer qu’un phénomène n’est pas naturel ne suffit pas à le détruire, analyser sa force ne nous réduit-il pas à l’impuissance ? Pour répondre à ces questions, j’étudie des pratiques discursives de lutte. Je montre le pouvoir transformateur de pratiques de subversions et d’actes de parole insurrectionnels, qui font usage de la performativité du langage pour transformer les conditions sociales encadrant l’efficacité des discours. Je montre que ces pratiques déconstruisent le genre et produisent des collectifs de lutte, pour insister sur ce qu’une approche radicalement constructiviste du genre ouvre comme possibles pour le féminisme et l’action collective. / How is gender constructed and deconstructed in ordinary practices of language? First of all, I demonstrate that ordinary language philosophy – and more specifically the austinian theory of speech acts – can lay the ground for a constructivist approach and help to understand the role of language in the social construction of gender. I show that gender is naturalized both by our representation of language itself – as a mere reflect of reality and as an unequally shared “capacity” – and by ordinary and scientific practices of language. Understanding this idea involves going beyond the dichotomy of ideological and material, in order to analyze construction and representation of gender together in both discursive and non-discursive practices. Butler’s theory of gender performativity makes it possible to understand both construction and deconstruction, or the contingency of gender. But does not highlighting the strength of this construction lead to deny our power and agency? To answer this question, I study feminist discursive practices. I highlight transformative power of subversions and insurrectional speech acts. I analyze discursive practices of denaturalization that challenge both social and discursive orders, and practices that use language performativity to change the social conditions that give power to speech acts. These practices deconstruct gender and produce political and collective subjects: a radical constructivist approach to gender thus opens rich perspectives for feminism and collective activism.

Na presente tese de doutorado, apresentamos nossas investigações acerca do Mestrado Nacional Profissional em Ensino de Física (MNPEF) enquanto dispositivo de política pública de formação continuada de professores. O desenvolvimento de nossa pesquisa foi fundamentado na articulação dos quadros conceituais da Sociologia da Ação Pública e da Filosofia da Linguagem do Círculo de Bakhtin. Nessa perspectiva, nosso esquema geral de investigação consistiu na análise bakhtiniana de uma complexa cadeia de enunciados oriundos dos modos de regulação que delimitamos no interior do MNPEF, notadamente, a regulação de controle e a regulação autônoma. Assim, concentrados nos primeiros 21 Polos Regionais (PR) do MNPEF criados em 2013, nosso objetivo foi estudar os modos de regulação desse programa, descrevendo e analisando a existência dos modos de regulação de controle - estruturas concebidas para coordenar e orientar as ações dos atores sociais - e dos modos de regulação autônoma, relativos à forma como esses atores convivem e (re)ajustam essas orientações. O corpus de nossa pesquisa foi construído, por um lado, pautado na regulação de controle e uma cadeia de documentos referentes tanto ao contexto específico do MNPEF, quanto o contexto amplo da pós-graduação nacional, e, por outro lado, no âmbito da regulação autônoma, por trabalhos de conclusão oriundos das primeiras turmas e por entrevistas realizadas com professores que atuam em distintos PR. Nossas investigações apontam o MNPEF como um dispositivo de política pública multirregulado, balizado sobretudo pelas regulamentações da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) para os cursos de Mestrado Profissional em Ensino (MPE) e pelos órgãos administrativos nomeados pela Sociedade Brasileira de Física (SBF), entidade coordenadora do programa. Ao olharmos para o MNPEF como uma ação pública, identificamos a coexistência de modos de regulação de controle e de regulação autônoma. Contudo, não identificamos nenhum elemento que potencialmente ilustre ações conjuntas no âmbito nacional do MNPEF, mas apenas alguns indicativos de ações conjuntas que influenciam exclusivamente o contexto local dos PR, caracterizando, assim, processos de microrregulação local. / In this work, we show investigations about the Mestrado Nacional Profissional em Ensino de Física (MNPEF) as a public policy for formation of Physics teachers. For the development of our research, the theoretical-methodological framework was constructed based on the sociology of public action and the Bakhtin’s Circle philosophy of language. Therefore, we created a general research scheme that consisted of the analysis of a complex chain of statements derived from the modes of regulation of MNPEF, notably, the control regulation and autonomous regulation. Thus, concentrated in the first 21 Regional Poles (PR) of the MNPEF, created in 2013, our objective was to study MNPEF's modes of regulation, describing and analyzing the control regulation - structures designed to coordinate and guide the actions of social actors - and the autonomous regulation, concerning the way in which these actors reinvent the orientations about the program. The corpus of our research was built, on the one hand, based on the control regulation and a chain of documents referring to the specific context of the MNPEF and to the broad context of the national post-graduation, on the other hand, based on the scope of autonomous regulation, by works of conclusion coming from the first classes and by interviews with teachers who work in different PR. Our research indicates that the MNPEF is a multiregulated public policy device, mainly based on the regulations of the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) for the Professional Master's in Education (MPE) courses and by the administrative bodies appointed by the Sociedade Brasileira de Física (SBF), which coordinates the program. When we look at the MNPEF as a public action, we identify the coexistence of modes of regulation of control and autonomous. However, we do not identify any element that potentially illustrates joint actions at the national level of the MNPEF, but only some indicative of joint actions that exclusively influence the local context of PR, thus characterizing processes of local micro-regulation.

No description available.