Thesis advisor: John Sallis / The present dissertation explores the motif of gesture and demonstrates that it encompasses the resonances between the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. My thesis specifically is that the notion of gesture articulates the problems of art and language, revealing fundamental convergences in the ways in which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty investigate a non-metaphysical approach to the sensible and question the limits of philosophy. I develop this argument by closely following Merleau-Ponty's reading of Heidegger's works in the lecture-notes from his courses at the Collège de France. I also rely heavily on Heidegger's reflections on gesture and the body as they are depicted in the Zollikon seminars, considering that some of these reflections retrieve crucial arguments from Being and Time and that they bear a significant resemblance to Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the body. In this way, I elucidate what may be called the gestural character of the work of art and language, establishing structural connections between the texts of these two thinkers. This dissertation is divided into three parts. I devote the first part to the themes of the body and gesture and show that the concept of form and the problem of perception lead to questions concerning the possibilities of a phenomenology of the body. I conclude this part by arguing that, for both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the notion of gesture corresponds to a phenomenological approach to the body as openness to the world and as an affective milieu. Departing from the arguments and comparisons delineated in the first part, in the second and third parts I examine separately the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in order to determine the settings of the notion of gesture within their respective approaches to art and language. The second part treats problems concerning the sensible character of the work of art, arguing that gestures perform a poetical disclosure of nature. In the third part I focus on questions of language and demonstrate that gestures unfold what could be called the logos of the sensible, which constitutes the primary source of language and meaning. I conclude by interpreting Heidegger's work as a gestural philosophy that emphasizes the performative dimension of language, an emphasis that is missing from Merleau-Ponty's work. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Satire is often construed as little more than an entertaining form of mockery, of which political and religious satire are only topical instances. However, trends in contemporary satire suggest that it can operate as a sui generis mode of rational discourse. I argue that recent satire often trades in undermining the exchange of coercive ideas, that in doing so it exhibits specific social/political commitments, and that it suggests ways of diminishing the harmfulness of abusive speech through practices of reading or hearing such discourse which do not permit violent ends. This argument proceeds along the following steps: First, satire’s rational function is to undermine the strength of reasons through repeating and embellishing their irrational use. Employing arguments of JL Austin and Robert Brandom, I describe satire as a way of interrupting the giving and asking for reasons by supposing expressed beliefs to have unrealistic intentions, and thus employing them toward unlikely ends. Second, political and religious satire exhibits at least two identifiable commitments which are central to classical social contract theory: that political power should be subject to the collective consent of the governed, and that those in power should not cause harm to the governed. Third, especially within liberal democratic contexts, satire can function to undermine the abuse of power by employing such coercive speech towards socially just ends. Undermining harmful speech implies an ontological consequence that one is denied the social role of perpetrator. This consequence is suggestive for the view that human identity is significantly rooted in public discursive performances; that is, satire exhibits strategies both for diminishing the effectiveness of harmful speech and creating for the perpetrator a new public role. The approach to theorizing from recent satirical trends has consequences which evoke explicitly theological themes of justice and reconciliation.

In his opus magnum Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the prominent (post)analytic Richard Rorty calls for such a philosophical inquiry, thath would rather fit under the term hermeneutics, than epistemology. Hermeneutics being the trademark term of an important movement of continental philosophy, this comes as a suprise. By examining Richard Rorty's criticism of epistemology and Hans- Georg Gadamer's concept of hermeneutics, this paper tries to find out, how much do they have in common. Source texts for this research are the topic-relatively relevant texts from the books Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Truth and Method. In conclusion, the main difference appears to lie in their answers to the hardly solveable question of importance of the very concept of truth. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Much neglected is Heidegger's latter work in favor of the fundamental ontology of Being and Time. Consequentially, conceptions of Heidegger's question of Being are oftentimes misconceived. Currently three main models have been proposed: (1) existential phenomenology, exemplified by Joseph Langan in the 1950s; (2) the popular thought of Being model in the 1960s as developed by William Richardson; (3) and in counter distinction to these unified models Joseph Kockelmans offers in the 1970s the many ways model, touting the end of systems. These misconstruals have spawned much Heideggerian dialogue, and in recent years, has had its effect upon Western continental scholarship from structuralism to post-structuralism. <br>Rather than usual conceptual models, this dissertation proposes a new model of Heideggerian scholarship seen through the lens of "Being as Saying." Neither mystical nor incomprehensible Heidegger's; unique linguistic turn negotiates the inadequacies of modern conceptions of the subject, object and cognition. Through a careful reading of Heidegger's work from 1949-1976, I trace Heidegger's utter reliance upon language as the way-making of Being, "Sprache als Be-wëgen." More originary than ordinary language, Heidegger's Being as Saying arises from Nietzsche's insights on nihilism. For Heidegger Being is no-thing, and as such reveals itself as unconcealment. We hear it as a deep, unsettling silence. From Being's two-fold character of concealing and revealing and humanity's subsequent discomfit, we derive all forms of communication, including thought and logic, even our world as a response to, and evasion from this pervasive silence. <br>Most notably Heidegger unseats the preeminent stature of thought and subject, only to reincorporate them within language. To achieve this he develops notions of Ereignis and Geviert, at once simple and complex, by which Being manifests itself, no longer through Dasein as prime discloser, but through a crossing of four regions. What emerges is a dynamic gathering-as-separated dialogue, a far richer, relational understanding of the world and the person. Heidegger's new way can best be described as a phenomenology of the inapparent, wherein Being and humanity are in a relational dialogue of unconcealing and revealing. With this insight we can reengage the Western philosophical tradition meditatively. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Philosophy / PhD / Dissertation

The Liar Paradox and related semantic antinomies seem to challenge our deepest intuitions about language, truth and logic. Many philosophers believe that to solve them, we must give up either classical logic, or the expressive resources of natural language, or even the “naïve theory of truth” (according to which "P" and “it is true that 'P'” always entail each other). A particularly extreme form of radical surgery is proposed by figures like Graham Priest, who argues for “dialetheism”—the position that some contradictions are actually true—on the basis of the paradoxes. While Priest’s willingness to dispense with the Law of Non-Contradiction may be unpopular in contemporary analytic philosophy, figures as significant as Saul Kripke and Hartry Field have argued that, in light of the paradoxes, we can only save Non-Contradiction at the expense of the Law of the Excluded Middle, abandoning classical logic in favor of a “paracomplete” alternative in which P and ~P can simultaneously fail to hold. I believe that we can do better than that, and I argue for a more conservative approach, which retains not only “monaletheism” (the orthodox position that no sentence, either in natural languages or other language, can have more than one truth-value at a time), but the full inferential resources of classical logic.

There’s a widespread conviction in the norms of assertion literature that an agent’s asserting something false merits criticism. As Williamson puts it, asserting something false is likened to cheating at the game of assertion. Most writers on the topic have consequently proposed factive norms of assertion – ones on which truth is a necessary condition for the proper performance of an assertion. However, I argue that this view is mistaken. I suggest that we can illuminate the error by introducing a theoretical distinction between the norm of a practice and its goal. In light of this distinction, we can see that proponents of factive norms tend to mistake the goal of a practice for the norm. In making my case, I present an analogy between the norms and goals of placing wagers and the norms and goals of assertion. One may place a bet and lose without being subject to criticism, while one may win and be worthy of criticism. Whether one wins or loses is irrelevant to the normative evaluation of a bet. What is relevant is whether the bet maximizes the bettor's expected value, which is a function of what might be lost, what might be gained, and how likely those prospects are, given the bettor's evidence. Similarly, I argue, whether one's assertion is true or false is not strictly relevant to the normative evaluation of an assertion. What is relevant is whether the speaker has adequate supporting reasons for the assertion, and that the necessary conventional and pragmatic features are present. However, context will determine what count as supportive reasons for a given proposition, what counts as relevant, and what count as conventional and pragmatic elements possessing that relevance. My proposed norm, the Supportive Reasons Norm, is thus sensitive to the context of assertion and shifts from context to context.

In my Thesis I investigate many of the standard accounts of knowledge. I argue that epistemic fallibilism, infallibilism, and contextualism fail as viable accounts. I defend an account of knowledge according to which 'knows' is ambiguous. More specifically, I promote an account of knowledge according to which 'knows' is polysemous. This position was advanced by Rene Van Woudenberg. At the end of my thesis, I propose an adjustment to Van Woudenberg's view that will protect his account from problematic implications.

The tradition of semantic externalism that follows Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975) is built on the assumption that the folk have essentialist commitments about natural kinds. Externalists commonly take the body of empirical data concerning psychological essentialism as support for this claim. However, recent empirical findings (Malt, 1994; Kalish, 2002) call the psychological theory of essentialism into question. This thesis examines the relevance of these findings to both essentialism and semantic externalism. I argue that these findings suggest that these theories fail to reflect folk beliefs about natural kinds and folk natural kind term usage. This leads me to propose an alternative thesis-- the Ambiguity Thesis-- that is better able to accommodate the existing body of empirical data.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Piers Rawling, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Philosophy. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 8,04). Includes bibliographical references.

Die These, sprachliche Bedeutung sei normativ, wird erklärt und verteidigt. Im ersten Kapitel wird die Fragestellung vorgestellt und von anderen verwandten Fragestellungen abgegrenzt sowie ein Überblick über die Geschichte des Themas gegeben. Im zweiten Kapitel wird das der Arbeit zugrundeliegende Verständnis von Normativität vorgestellt. Im dritten Kapitel wird das sog. Korrektheitsargument für die Normativitätsthese vorgestellt und zurückgewiesen. Im vierten bis sechsten Kapitel wird die Normativitätsthese anhand von Überlegungen zum Regelfolgenproblem, zum Begriff der konstitutiven Regel und zur Unterscheidung einer erklärenden und einer verstehenden Perspektive auf sprachliche Bedeutung verteidigt. Im siebten Kapitel wird diese Konzeption semantischer Normativität auf Sprachwissen und im achten Kapitel auf Referenz angewendet.