The works published by Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) between 1878 and 1889 exposed Italian culture to the most innovative European literary trend, French Naturalism, and marked a turning point in the landscape of Italian literature. While Verga’s stylistic choices are meant to create, in his own words, ‘the complete illusion of reality’ (having the author disappear from the text in order to make way for a supposedly unmediated representation), I argue that Verga’s Verist fiction ends up emphasizing precisely the ways in which people represent reality according to their own relative point of view. Since the narrative is given from the unreliable perspective of the characters, all the distortions inherent in every storytelling act become apparent. Their viewpoint is purposefully shown as being partial and informed by individual interests, feelings, and desires. These complex dynamics of representation, or misrepresentation, in Verga’s Verist production are at the heart of my enquiry. This critical focus allows me to reevaluate the traditional representation of Verism and Naturalism as backward-looking phenomena, firmly tied to a notion of art as a mirror up to nature. The present study is situated within a growing body of work (inaugurated by Luperini, Pellini, and Merola) that intends to re-frame Verga as having demonstrably paved the way for twentieth-century Modernism. The first chapter interrogates the way in which space is transfigured by characters in I Malavoglia (1881). By looking at how narratives of country vs city, past vs present are formed and shaped by the characters’ relative points of view, I argue that the novel should be read not simply as the account of the modernization of a rural village in post-unification Italy, but mainly as a study into how such oppositional narratives are formed and what aims they serve. The second chapter focuses on a specific character-type, the malevolent observer. I argue that this figure can be seen as a representation of the readers in the texts and that it is instrumental in exemplifying Verga’s skepticism toward the heuristic potential of literature. The third chapter examines the gap between reality and representation as articulated in Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) by situating Verga in a completely new intellectual framework, that of elite theory as formulated by political theorist Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). This move allows me to re-read what has become a commonplace of Verga criticism – the theatrical conception of politics in Mastro-don Gesualdo as a bitter commentary on trasformismo – as a much wider point on social history, human nature, and on the inherently slippery essence of language, on its built-in capacity to deceive and dissimulate.

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Lenka Mundevová Translation of Colloquial Language Devices in Fiction: A Century of Maupassant's Ivrogne in Czech Translation Abstract The dissertation compares the stylization of the dialogues in the French original of Maupassant's short story Ivrogne (The Drunkard), written in 1884, with five Czech translations published between 1902 and 1997. The comparative analysis is focused on the devices of colloquial language, including dialect, which appear frequently in the dialogues of the story and prove to be extraordinarily useful when interpreting Maupassant's text. The analysis of the excerpted material is preceded by the description of the basic characteristics of colloquial French and Czech, followed by the description of their stratifications. The mutual relation of the colloquial language varieties is an important prerequisite for the evaluation of the translations of colloquial language devices and their appropriateness in the individual Czech versions of Ivrogne. The paper also deals with the development of Czech aesthetic translation standards and their relation to the standard of local fiction, outlining the important tendencies of Czech fiction translation applied when colloquial devices were conveyed from French to Czech during the specified timeframe. The individual language devices used in the...

L’objectif central du présent mémoire consiste à interroger les implications générales de l’interprétation taylorienne de la sécularisation, telle que déployée dans ‘A Secular Age’ (2007), pour la philosophie de la religion. Nous soutenons que l’approche herméneutique de notre auteur, reposant sur son anthropologie philosophique, a pour effet d’arrimer de façon indissociable et originale le problème de la sécularisation avec le questionnement philosophique sur la religion. À cet effet, nous présentons la critique du naturalisme déployée par Taylor ainsi que les grandes lignes de sa ‘dialectique’ afin de clarifier l’orientation générale de sa démarche. Nous passons ensuite à une analyse de son interprétation de la sécularisation ainsi que des implications de cette dernière pour les questions constitutives de la philosophie de la religion, touchant notamment la nature de la religion, le statut épistémologique des croyances religieuses, les rapports entre foi et raison ainsi que la relation entre la religion et la science moderne. Nous terminons sur un ton plus critique en interrogeant le ‘réalisme métaéthique’ de notre auteur et en soutenant que sa position pourrait constituer la base d’un ‘récit soustractif’ plus robuste et pénétrant. / The central aim of this work is to assess the most general implications of the interpretation of secularization by Charles Taylor, as it is deployed in ‘A Secular Age’ (2007), for the domain of philosophy of religion. We argue that the hermeneutical approach of Taylor, resting on his philosophical anthropology, binds together in an original and indivisible fashion the problem of secularization and the philosophical reflection on religion. To this effect, I describe his critique of naturalism and the broad lines of his ‘dialectic’ in order to clarify the general orientation of his work. I then move to an analysis of his interpretation of secularization and its implications for the constitutive questions in philosophy of religion, notably regarding the nature of religion, the epistemological status of religious beliefs, the relations between faith and reason as well as between religion and modern science. I conclude on a more critical note with an examination of the ‘metaethical realism’ of our author and by showing that his position might best be understood as the basis for a deepened and reinforced ‘subtraction story’.

Ce mémoire propose une conception naturaliste et normative de l'axiologie scientifique contemporaine, c'est-à-dire des buts de la science et des scientifiques. Nous commençons par présenter le naturalisme en philosophie des sciences, en particulier ses dimensions scientifique, méthodologique et ontologique. Nous discutons le sophisme naturaliste et l'objection de la normativité souvent adressée aux approches naturalistes, principalement à travers le prisme de l'épistémologie naturalisée de Quine (1969). Nous illustrons ensuite ces thèmes - naturalisme, normativité, et axiologie scientifique - au moyen de la théorie de Laudan (1987), qui articule un début de théorie axiologique de la science qui se veut naturaliste et normative. Nous soulignons le caractère insatisfaisant de sa théorie, et proposons une conception plus riche et plus détaillée de l'axiologie scientifique. Nous analysons pour ce faire différents liens entre la science, l'industrie, le gouvernement et la société. Nous dégageons en particulier une tendance axiologique pragmatique de la science contemporaine. Finalement, nous ébauchons un cadre normatif instrumental inspiré de Laudan (1987)pour réfléchir sur l'axiologie scientifique. / This master proposes a naturalist and normative conception of contemporary scientific axiology, i.e., of science's and scientists' goals. We start off by discussing some naturalistic positions in philosophy of science, their scientific, methodological and ontological dimensions as well. We review the naturalistic fallacy and the normativity objection against naturalistic approaches, mostly in light of Quine's (1969) naturalized epistemology. We then illustrate these themes - naturalism, normativity, and scientific axiology - by discussing Laudan's (1987) naturalistic and normative theory of scientific axiology. We underscore the unsatisfying character of his theory, and propose instead a richer and more detailed one. In order to do that, we analyse some relations between science, industry, government and society. We identify and discuss a pragmatic axiological trend in particular. Finally, we sketch an instrumental normative framework for thinking about scientific axiology.

Social science is in crisis. The task of social science is to study “man in situation”: to understand the world as it is for “man”. This thesis charges that this crisis consists in a failure to properly address the philosophical anthropological question “What is man?”. The various social scientific methodologies who have as their object “man” suffer rampant disagreements because they presuppose, rather than consider, what is meant by “man”. It is our intention to show that the root of the crisis is that social science can provide no formal definition of “man”. In order to understand this we propose a phenomenological analysis into the essence of social science. This phenomenological approach will give us reason to abandon the (sexist) word “man” and instead we will speak of wer: the beings which we are. That we have not used the more usual “human being” (or some equivalent) is due to the human prejudice which is one of the major constituents of this crisis we seek to analyse. This thesis is divided into two Parts: normative and evaluative. In the normative Part we will seek a clarification of both “phenomenology” and “social science”. Due to the various ways in which “phenomenology” has been invented we must secure a simipliciter definition of phenomenology as an approach to philosophical anthropology (Chapter 2). Importantly, we will show how the key instigators of the branches of phenomenology, Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, and Sartre, were all engaged in this task. To clarify our phenomenology we will define the Phenomenological Movement according to various strictures by drawing on the work of Schutz and his notion of provinces of meaning (Chapter 3). This will then be carried forward to show how Schutz’s postulates of social science (with certain clarifications) constitute the eidetic structure of social science (Chapter 4). The eidetic structures of social science identified will prompt several challenges that will be addressed in the evaluative Part. Here we engage in an imperial argument to sort proper science from pseudo-science. The first challenge is the mistaken assumption that universities and democratic states make science possible (Chapter 5). Contra this, we argue that science is predicated on “spare time” and that much institutional “science” is not in fact science. The second challenge is the “humanist challenge”: there is no such thing as nonpractical knowledge (Chapter 6). Dealing with this will require a reconsideration of the epistemic status that science has and lead to the claim of epistemic inferiority. Having cut away pseudo-science we will be able to focus on the “social” of social science through a consideration of intersubjectivity (Chapter 7). Drawing on the above phenomenologists we will focus on how an Other is recognised as Other. Emphasising Sartre’s radical re-conception of “subject” and “object” we will argue that there can be no formal criteria for how this recognition occurs. By consequence we must begin to move away from the assumption of one life-world to various life-worlds, each constituted by different conceptions of wer.

Le cynisme est un mouvement philosophique qui s’est développé en Grèce à partir du IVe s. av. J.-C. autour de Diogène de Sinope. La critique moderne a souvent vu dans ce mouvement l’expression d’un naturalisme radical, une doctrine fondée sur le refus des valeurs de la vie civilisée, qui par conséquent pourrait être définie comme une “croisade contre la civilisation” ou comme un “courant anti-prométhéen”, le “feu civilisateur” étant à l’origine des maux des hommes. La morale cynique consisterait ainsi dans la proposition d’un “retour à la nature” ou d’une vie “selon la nature” (kata phusin), guidée par l’idée d’animalité et de primitivisme, c’est-à-dire d’une vie inspirée par le comportement animal ou par le modus vivendi des premiers hommes. La présente thèse a pour but de soumettre à l’épreuve des textes qui nous ont été transmis par l’Antiquité cette interprétation largement répandue du cynisme. L’hypothèse avancée ici, qui s’appuie entre autres sur l’examen de deux textes – le Discours VI de Dion Chrysostome et le dialogue du Pseudo-Lucien intitulé Le cynique, – qu’on a confrontés à d’autres témoignages, comme le livre VI des Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres de Diogène Laërce ou les lettres pseudépigraphes attribuées à Diogène de Sinope et à Cratès de Thèbes –, consiste à définir le cynisme comme la recherche d’une vie “selon la facilité” (kat’ euteleian) et la pensée diogénienne comme une forme radicale de pragmatisme, au sein de laquelle les dualismes – notamment celui qui oppose nomos et phusis – tendent à être supprimés au nom d’une morale déterminée selon les circonstances concrètes de la vie individuelle. / Cynicism is a philosophical movement which started in Greece in the 4th century B.C. around the figure of Diogenes of Sinope. Modern interpreters often understand this movement as the expression of a radical naturalism, a doctrine founded on a drastic refusal of all the values of civilized life and consequently defined as a “crusade against civilization” or as an “anti-promethean current”, identifying in the “civilizing fire” the very origin of all the troubles, vices and misfortunes that men have to cope with. Accordingly, Cynic ethics would advocate a “return to nature” or to a life “according to nature” (kata phusin), guided by the idea of animality and of primitivism, that is to say a life modeled on animal behavior or on the modus vivendi of the primitive men. The present thesis aims at questionning this widely spread interpretation of cynicism on the basis of an analysis of the texts transmitted by Antiquity. The alternative interpretation that we offer rests on the reading of two major texts: the Sixth Discourse by Dio Chrysostomus and the dialogue The Cynic transmitted under the authority of Lucian of Samosate, along with some other sources, like the sixth book of Lives and opinions of eminent philosophers written by Diogenes Laertius and the Letters attributed to Diogenes of Sinope and to Crates of Thebes. It redefines Cynic philosophy as the quest for a life “according to easiness” (kat’ euteleian) and — in modern terminology — as a radical form of pragmatism, within which dualisms – notably the one between nomos and phusis – tend to be abolished in the name of a morality conditioned by the actual circumstances of individual life.

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