Cette thèse cherche d’abord à confronter les prétentions respectives des méthodes phénoménologique et analytico-linguistique classiques à fournir chacune une explication de la connaissance a priori des nécessités d’essence qui soit aussi dépourvue que possible de présupposés et de pétitions de principe. Le problème précis autour duquel se noue cette confrontation est celui de la possibilité des vérités a priori matérielles. Dans un premier temps, nous proposons une lecture et une résolution méréologiques de ce problème en termes husserliens de touts composés des parties dépendantes, qui permet mieux de rendre compte des tels ensembles que la méréologie atomiste qui caractérise la plupart des ontologies formelles « analytiques » ; et nous proposons ce faisant une compréhension de la méthode d’intuition eidétique comme analyse méréologique. Dans un second temps, nous appliquons cette analyse à la méthode phénoménologique elle-même, comprenant la réduction transcendantale comme une variation méréologique sur l’a priori matériel de la corrélation qui caractérise la structure même de la relation entre l’ego et le monde, ce qui nous oblige de voir cette structure à son tour comme un tout concret intuitionnable dont les parties subjective et objective ne sont que des moments absolument dépendants, sans aucun privilège accordé au pôle sujet de cette structure. Ainsi, ce n’est qu’à la stricte condition que la phénoménologie se « désubjectivise » qu’elle puisse à la fois réfuter un certain nombre de dogmes analytiques et empiristes et fonder sa propre méthode dans une absence comparative de présupposés. / This dissertation takes as its point of departure a polemical comparison of the respective claims of the phenomenological and classical analytic-linguistic methods to provide an account of a priori knowledge of essential or necessary truth that is as free as possible of presuppositions and circular reasoning. The precise problem around which this confrontation crystalizes is the one concerning the possibility of material a priori truths. First, we propose a mereological interpretation of and solution to this problem in the Husserlian terms of wholes composed of dependent parts, which allows for a better account of such wholes than does the atomistic mereology that characterizes most “analytic” formal ontologies, and we propose an understanding of the method of eidetic intuition as mereological analysis. Secondly, we apply this analysis to the phenomenological method itself, understanding the transcendental reduction as a mereological variation on the material a priori of correlation that characterizes the very structure of the relation between the ego and the world; this obliges us to see this structure in turn as an intuitable concrete whole whose subjective and objective parts are merely absolutely dependent moments, without privileging the subject-pole of this structure. In this way, it is only on the strict condition that phenomenology “desubjectivize” itself that it might at once refute a certain number of analytic and empiricist dogmas and ground its own method without recourse to unnecessary and untenable presuppositions.

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.

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.

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.

<p>This paper studies the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his years (1920–26) as an elementary school teacher in remote Niederösterreich, Austria. The paper gives a survey of his life, and also a brief account of three of his main works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Attention is given to his alphabetical word list, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, published for educational use in elementary schools. The study is focused on Wittgenstein’s educational practise, and establishes a connection between his experience as a teacher and his late philosophy.</p>

This paper studies the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his years (1920–26) as an elementary school teacher in remote Niederösterreich, Austria. The paper gives a survey of his life, and also a brief account of three of his main works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Attention is given to his alphabetical word list, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, published for educational use in elementary schools. The study is focused on Wittgenstein’s educational practise, and establishes a connection between his experience as a teacher and his late philosophy.

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In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein explicitly opposes his own method of philosophical investigation to that of Socrates, who will not accept a list of examples even as a preliminary answer to his 'what-is-x' question. Relying on Meno and the Seventh Letter however, I will provide an interpretation of Plato's epistemic priority principle that does away with the assumption that what Socrates seeks is the uniquely correct definition of x. Following the work of Fransisco J. Gonzalez, I will argue that the philosopher seeks knowledge of x itself and that this knowledge is non-propositional. An interesting result is that Plato and Wittgenstein turn out to have extremely similar conceptions of philosophy. In particular, I argue that the distinction between doxa and episteme in Plato should be understood along the lines of Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing.

Teilw. zugl.: Augsburg, Universiẗat, Habil.-Schr., 2003.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Committee on the History of Culture, March 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.