[pt] A pergunta pela essência da técnica moderna consiste em um dos principais eixos do pensamento de Martin Heidegger, perpassando toda a sua trajetória, a partir da constatação do decurso da metafísica ocidental como história do esquecimento do ser e concretizando-se na caracterização como Gestell do modo de desencobrimento da totalidade dos fenômenos na época atual. A presente pesquisa percorre um arco cronológico de temas da obra do autor cruciais a esse respeito, estruturando-se em três momentos. O primeiro trata da gestação da problemática, sendo mencionada a importância da analítica existencial em relação à noção posterior de história do ser e abordada a concepção do autor sobre o niilismo. A seguir, encontram-se expostos os termos específicos do diagnóstico elaborado sobre a técnica moderna, concentrando-se o texto no esclarecimento da noção de Gestell enquanto enquadramento técnico que converte o ente em fundo de reserva. Finalmente, são elencados traços do possível contraponto contido nas ideias tardias de outro pensar e habitar poético. / [en] The questioning, regarding the modern technique essence, consists in one of the main aspects of Martin Heidegger s thought, being recurrent in his whole trajectory, since the ascertainment of the western metaphysics course as the history of the forgetfulness of being, being fulfilled in characterization of the discloseness of phenomena in the current era as Gestell. The present work covers a chronological arch of themes in the author s work. They are crucial in this regard, and they are organized in three moments. The first one covers the development of the problematic, in which the importance of existential analysis in relation to the later notion of the history of being is mentioned, and the author s conception about nihilism. Subsequently, the specific terms of the diagnostic drafted over the modern technique are exposed, and the text focuses on the enlightenment of Gestell notion as technical enframing that turns beings into standing reserve. Finally, features of a possible counterpoint restrained in later ideas of an other thinking and poetic dwelling are shown.

[pt] Esta dissertação analisará o status da matéria (hýle) no sistema filosófico de Plotino e suas consequências divergentes. Primeiramente, partindo da análise da hierarquia das hipóstases, buscar-se-á identificar o lugar ocupado pela matéria dentro do sistema plotiniano e a singularidade deste conceito na filosofia de Plotino. A partir daí, tratar-se-á da natureza e da função da matéria em relação à constituição dos seres sensíveis, tendo em vista o ordenamento das hispóstases, baseando-se, sobretudo, nos dois principais tratados que abordam o tema: Sobre as duas matérias (II 4 - 12) e Sobre o que são e de onde vêm os males (I 8 - 51). Compreendendo, então, as dificuldades que surgem na própria filosofia plotiniana com relação à noção de matéria e, até mesmo, suas aparentes contradições, investigar-se-á o problema da geração/origem da matéria. Uma vez que Plotino não deixou em seus escritos um posicionamento definitivo sobre essa questão, utilizar-se-á a análise crítica das teses dos principais comentadores como uma tentativa de compreender as dificuldades e até mesmo apontar possíveis soluções para esse problema. / [en] This dissertation will analyze the matter s status in Plotinus philosophical system and its divergent consequences. Initially, starting from the analysis of the hierarchy of the hypostasis, one will identify the place occupied by matter within the plotinian system and the singularity of this concept in Plotinus philosophy. Thenceforth, one will treat the nature and function of matter in relation to sensible beings constitution, having in mind the order of the hypostasis, basing it, above all, on the two main treatises that broach the subject: On the two matters (II 4 - 12) and On what are and whence come the evils (I 8 - 51). Then, understanding the difficulties that arise within plotinian philosophy itself concerning the idea of matter and even its seeming contradictions, one will investigate the problem of generation/origin of matter. Once Plotinus have not left a definite position about this subject, one will use the critical analysis of the que main scholars as a way to try to comprehend the difficulties and even to point out possible solutions to this problem.

Two dominating lines of criticism regarding the detective novel have perpetuated the misconception that detective fiction before the 1960s was a static and monolithic form unworthy of critical study. First, critics of the traditional detective story have argued that the formulaic nature of the genre is antithetical to innovation and leaves no room for creative exploration. Second, critics of the postmodern detective novel have argued that the first literary experiments with the genre began only with post-World War II authors such as Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Paul Auster. What both sets of critics fail to acknowledge is that the detective fiction genre always has been the locus of a dialectic between formulaic plotting and literary experimentation. In this dissertation, I will examine how each generation of detective story authors has engaged in literary innovation to refresh and renew what has been mistakenly labeled as a sterile and static popular genre. / English

Faith in the Possibility of Personal Transformation: Variations on a Theme in Religion and Corrections in the United States tracks the lived and historical connections between faith in the possibility of personal transformation and incarceration in the United States. Based primarily on ethnographic research at the Berkshire County House of Correction (BCHC), a medium security prison in Massachusetts for men as defined by the state, this dissertation documents how anticipation around personal transformation is narrated, embodied, and deployed behind bars—with particular attention to rehabilitation programming, religious services, and parole hearings. Situating these contemporary phenomena against a backdrop of North American religious history and penal reform, my work shows how the rehabilitative ideal of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries tried to motivate the transformable prisoner but keep intractable ones locked away for good. Such distinctions were and continue to be coded along intersections of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality. Attending mainly to influences across penal reformers, American metaphysical religionists, and Christianity, my project contends that the people who have volunteered, worked, and lived in the American prison have helped create what many people in the United States, today, may simply think of as “spirituality,” even as it is a shapeshifting category that has developed through multifarious dynamics of power. Across an introduction, conclusion, six body chapters, and a methods appendix, this project shows how rehabilitative and religious programs encourage incarcerated people to embrace the possibility of redemptive personal transformation, through meaning-making modes and embodied disciplines that are usually articulated under the banner of spirituality. This dissertation ultimately shows that these mutually reinforcing programs at once offer solace and pragmatic life tools that some incarcerated people combinatively embrace, while also spiritualizing and naturalizing the state’s prerogative to incarcerate. The spiritual creativity of incarcerated people and group facilitators notwithstanding, faith in the possibility of personal transformation can place the onus for change on individuals, releasing from obligation the systems that have collectively disenfranchised the incarcerated. Through a long view of American religious and penal history, faith in the possibility of personal transformation harmonizes with romantic yearnings in American culture, surfacing a startling conviction: that prison is the most exemplary place for personal change. / 2026-09-09T00:00:00Z

In this paper I present, and offer a solution to, a heretofore unacknowledged textual puzzle that arises from Margaret Cavendish's use of inconceivability to make claims about what is metaphysically impossible. On the one hand, Cavendish asserts that objects or events she cannot conceive of are impossible in nature (i.e., inconceivability entails impossibility in nature). On the other hand, she writes that there are some things that exist or occur in nature that are inconceivable to humans (i.e., inconceivability does not entail impossibility in nature). Put simply, Cavendish seemingly contradicts herself. This textual puzzle not only threatens to undermine Cavendish's philosophical method; it also calls her opposition to human exceptionalism into question. By asserting that what is inconceivable to her is impossible in nature, Cavendish implies by contraposition that she can conceive of everything that is metaphysically possible. In so doing, she seems to make an exception at least for herself: though she believes that other parts of nature cannot conceive of everything in nature, she implies that she can. Ultimately, I argue that Cavendish thinks we can sometimes tell why something is inconceivable. In some cases, something is inconceivable because it lies beyond the limits of humans' mental capacities. In other cases, something is inconceivable because it is contradictory. This interpretation solves the textual puzzle, as it is consistent for Cavendish to maintain that some objects and events in nature are beyond our mental limits and that we can derive the impossibility of some object or event in nature from its contradictoriness. My interpretation preserves Cavendish's opposition to human exceptionalism, moreover, as no part of nature can conceive of contradictions. That is, Cavendish's claim is not merely that what is inconceivable to her is impossible in nature, but rather that what is inconceivable to her and to every other part of nature is impossible in nature. / Master of Arts / Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth century philosopher, makes two seemingly contradictory claims throughout her philosophical works. On the one hand, she implies that if something is inconceivable to her — that is, if she cannot form a mental picture of it — that thing is impossible in nature. On the other hand, she writes that there are plenty of things that exist or occur in nature which are inconceivable to humans. A textual puzzle therefore arises: Cavendish seems to simultaneously maintain (1) that something is impossible in nature if she cannot conceive of it, and (2) that something is not necessarily impossible in nature if she cannot conceive of it. In this paper, I propose that Cavendish believes humans can at least sometimes determine why something is inconceivable. That is, we can at least sometimes diagnose our inability to form a mental picture of something. In some cases, Cavendish thinks, we cannot form a mental picture of something because of our limited, human mental capacities. (We might think, for example, that this is why we cannot form a mental picture of all the colors butterflies see.) In other cases, we cannot form a mental picture of something because that thing is contradictory. (We might think, for instance, that this is why we cannot form a mental picture of an apple that is both red all over and not red all over.) I further argue that Cavendish only asserts that something is impossible in nature if it is inconceivable because it is contradictory. On my account, the textual puzzle I presented above is in fact not so puzzling. Cavendish thinks that if something is inconceivable because it is contradictory, then it is impossible in nature. She also thinks that there are plenty of things in nature that we cannot conceive of because of our limited human mental capacities. Thankfully, these two claims are not in tension.

No description available.

O objetivo deste trabalho é comprovar a criação de um gênero híbrido e inovador - a prosa poética - , ligada ao jornalismo e à literatura do final do século XIX. Esta pesquisa analisa a prosa poética de Raul Pompéia, a partir de textos selecionados como corpus, publicados no periódico, A Gazeta da Tarde, de 21 a 29 jan. 1986. Paralelamente comparamos os textos equivalentes em sua versão de livro, publicados pela primeira vez em 1900, comentando também o conjunto das Canções sem metro. / The main objective of this work is to compare the creation of a hybrid and new genre - the poetic prose -, by Raul Pompéia, related to journalism and literature at the end of the XIX century. This research analyses the poetic prose written by Raul Pompéia, by selecting texts as its corpus, published in the periodic \"A Gazeta da Tarde\", from January 21st to January 29th, 1986. At the same time we have compared the equivalent texts published on book for the first time in 1900, also discussing the other texts which form the whole group.

This thesis examines in four parts a collection of philosophical arguments dealing with war. The conclusions drawn are that war is a definable and applicable concept, that above the level of biological reactions war is the result of beliefs, that an objective distinction exists between aggressive and defensive actions, and that war is only justifiable in the protection of core rights. The first part analyses competing definitions of war. It is argued that the concept of war is philosophically appropriate and captures the conceptual common denominator between particular wars. The essence of war is defined as “a condition of open-ended violence”. Part Two explores the causal relationships between metaphysical and epistemological beliefs and war. It is held that war cannot be explained away as an unalterable fact of the universe, hence deterministic explanations fail in favour of the conclusion that wars are the product of ideas and ideas are volitionally obtained. The third part continues an exploration of determinist accounts of war and examines how various theories of human nature attempt to explain why war occurs. For methodological purposes human nature is trisected into biological, cultural, and rational aspects. Theories that attempt to interpret war using only a single aspect are inadequate, for each aspect must logically presuppose the existence and hence the influence of the others. It is concluded that human wars are the product of ideas, but ideas are distinguishable between tacit and explicit forms. Tacit forms of knowledge evolve through social interaction and sometimes have unintended consequences; war on the cultural level can be the product of human action but not of human design (Ferguson), hence attempts to abolish war by reason alone are bound to fail. Part Four assesses the application of ethical and political reasoning to war. It is argued firstly that morality, in the form of universalisable core rights and socially generated general rules of conduct, must not be removed from the sphere of war. Secondly it is concluded that the ideal just government exists to protect rights, from which it will follow that defensive wars and wars of intervention to protect rights are morally supportable.

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.

Le travail de Wittgenstein exemplifie la transcendance dont se nourrit la philosophie. En effet, la recherche de fondements à notre langage, par la mise en œuvre d'un idiome logique, génère des préoccupations ontologiques insondables. De même, le désir de créer une grammaire purement descriptive révèle l'arbitraire des critères de l'ordinaire. Enfin, la négation quasi obsessionnelle d'une intériorité active ne fait pas obstacle à son retour dans les thèmes de la volonté, du silence et de l'éthique. L'Éthique dite ineffable et la volonté, dans le sens de Schopenhauer, s'imposent comme les invariants d'un Sujet en marge d'un monde dit sans valeur dans lequel, logique, éthique et esthétique ne peuvent se dire. Ici, le silence de Wittgenstein ouvre sur un non-dit éloquent. En recherchant des fondements ou des règles à notre langage, tout en expulsant certains objets hors du dicible, Wittgenstein exprime le désir de mettre en place un point de vue synoptique sur notre forme de vie. Mais en fait, il se retrouve prisonnier des entrelacs qui relient l'immanence et la transcendance.Ces investigations ne peuvent être dissociées, chez ce contemporain de la naissance de la psychanalyse, d'une attitude tendancielle à la sublimation des problèmes philosophiques sur fond de crise identitaire. Son attitude face aux choix, sa difficulté à donner un assentiment, son rapport ambigu au religieux, au mystique et à l'identité, sont soulignés comme les points aveugles de son expression. Ces thèmes révèlent une transcendance intrinsèque à son œuvre et une résistance forte de la métaphysique.Le travail de Wittgenstein est pris ici comme un exemple paradigmatique de la philosophie analytique, philosophie entrée en conflit contre l'abus d'expressions métaphysiques accusées de nous livrer aux illusions trompeuses. / Wittgenstein's work exemplifies transcendence which feeds philosophy. The search for foundations to our language, by the implementation of a logical structure generates unfathomable ontological concerns. Similarly, the dream of a purely descriptive grammar reveals the arbi-trariness of criteria of the ordinary. Finally, the obsessive denial of an active interiority does not preclude his return to willpower, silence and ethical themes. Ethics, as ineffable, and will, in the sense of Schopenhauer, are invariants of a philosophical subject on the sidelines of a world without value, in which, the logical, ethical and aesthetic could not be said. Here, Witt-genstein's silence opens on an eloquent unsaid. Searching for foundations or rules to our lan-guage, while expelling some objects in the indescribable, Wittgenstein expressed the desire to provide a synoptic view of our form of life. In fact, he finds himself prisoner of interlaces between immanence and transcendence.These investigations cannot be separated with this contemporary of the birth of psychoanaly-sis, a trend attitude to the sublimation of philosophical problems on substance of identity cri-sis. His attitude to choice, his difficulty to give consent, his ambiguous report to the religious, the mystic and identity are underlined as blind expression points. These themes reveal an in-herent transcendence in his work and the resistance of the metaphysical.Wittgenstein's work is seen as a paradigm of analytic philosophy, philosophy came into con-flict against the abuse of metaphysical expressions accused of deceptive illusions for us.