The article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic theoretical framework for the intelligibility of the meaning of belonging, one of the most fundamental concepts in present-day cultures and societies. After defining belonging as a spatial enunciation that brings about 1) the frontiers of a space of belonging; 2) the consequent opposition between an environment of belonging and one of non-belonging; and 3) the relation between, on the one hand, the subject of enunciation and, on the other hand, the opposition /environment of (...) belonging/ versus /environment of non-belonging/, the article articulates a typology of “figures of crossing,” in which belonging is manifested through the narrative dialectics between placement and displacement. In the theoretical framework of tensive phenomenology and semiotics, four macro-regimes of belonging are singled out: “sedentary estrangement,” “nomadic belonging,” “nomadic estrangement,” and “sedentary belonging.” Moreover, four semantic paths dynamically representing the transition between these regimes are identified: “exile/invasion,” “cosmopolitanism/curiosity,” “acclimation/tolerance,” and “alienation/suspicion.” In the conclusion, the theoretical framework developed by the article is proposed as instrument for the analysis of the “rhetorics of belonging” in present-day cultures and societies. (shrink)

Scholarly dissatisfaction with Aristotle’s fallacy of accident has traditionally focused on his examples, whose compatibility with the fallacy’s definition has been doubted time and again. Besides a unified account of the fallacy of accident itself, the paper provides a formalized analysis of its several examples in Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi. The most problematic instances are dealt with by means of an internal reconstruction of their features as conveyed by Aristotle’s text and an extensive survey of their interpretation in the Byzantine and (...) Latin exegetical tradition. Carefully handled a doxographical approach, as opposed to rapid results oriented practices, proves to be most effective in that it supplies both useful albeit ordinarily overlooked insights and a comprehensive framework of reference for further investigations. (shrink)

Few arguments from the past have stirred up as much interest as Aristotle’s “Third man” and not so many texts have received as much attention as its account in chapter 22 of the Sophistici elenchi. And yet, several issues about both remain highly controversial, starting from the very nature of the argument at stake and the exact signification of some of its features. The essay provides a close commentary of the text, dealing with its main difficulties and suggesting an overall (...) interpretation of Aristotle’s discussion of the “Third Man” argument. (shrink)

Aux prises avec une archive en pleine expansion et une littérature secondaire dont la masse a atteint et, notamment depuis son tournant numérique, largement dépassé un seuil critique, l’archéologie philosophique a fait le deuil du rêve micrologique de « tout lire, tout étudier » que Michel Foucault s’était pourtant donné pour idéal régulateur en s’interdisant d’effectuer un tri en amont des « choses dites dans une culture, conservées, valorisées, réutilisées, répétées et transformées ». Il importe désormais moins de décrire la (...) totalité d’un champ que de tracer et de croiser des itinéraires. En gros, il s’agit de « raconter des intrigues », selon la formule bien connue de Paul Veyne. Arrimée à la philologie et à l’histoire des corpus, cette théâtralisation du travail philosophique n’est cependant pas arbitraire. Comme l’explique Alain de Libera dans l’un des rares propos métarchéologiques qu’il a livrés en marge de son œuvre canonique, face à l’« accumulation folle de connaissances et d’informations » qui caractérise l’environnement actuel de la recherche, « le rôle de l’historien-archéologue est d’identifier les bonnes structures ». Comment s’y prend-il ? « Il y a pour ce faire – poursuit Alain de Libera au cours du même « Grand entretien d’Actu-Philosophia » – un critère d’identification heuristique : la simplicité. La force d’une hypothèse de travail se mesure au nombre d’éléments qu’elle est capable d’intégrer et d’unifier, en un mot : de “simplifier” ». Parmi les intrigues qui ont marqué l’histoire récente de l’archéologie à vocation philosophique il y a sans doute l’« ἐπιστήμη alexandrinienne » qu’Alain de Libera a identifiée en étudiant les doctrines anciennes et médiévales de l’abstraction et qu’il a baptisée de la sorte pour souligner le rôle qu’Alexandre d’Aphrodise a joué dans sa genèse. Pour peu qu’il soit convaincu de son intérêt intrinsèque, le lecteur, surtout s’il se trouve être un antiquisant ou un médiéviste, résistera difficilement à la tentation de se demander s’il est possible de procéder à une extension – même ponctuelle – du « réseau aphrodisien » : peut-on élargir avec le même succès son domaine d’application en testant son pouvoir d’inclusion dans d’autres cas que celui de la filière qu’il était initialement destiné à synchroniser ? C’est une ébauche de simplification de cet ordre que mon hommage voudrait esquisser à partit de quelques textes qu’Alain de Libera a lui-même étudiés et selon une trajectoire parallèle à celle qu’il a lui-même tracée. (shrink)

Y a-t-il des Idées et peut-on démontrer qu’elles existent ? Parmi les protagonistes anciens de la controverse qui a opposé partisans et adversaires des Idées, Aristote mérite une attention toute particulière. De fait, si – au moment où Aristote intervient dans le débat autour de l’hypothèse des Idées – ce débat a déjà une histoire, c’est avec lui que cette histoire atteint une maturité qui est à la fois d’ordre doctrinal et doxographique. De fait, non seulement Aristote est le premier (...) à avoir défini certaines au moins des propriétés de ce qui est et se dit en commun de plusieurs, mais encore a-t-il pris soin d’inscrire ces définitions dans la continuité de l’héritage socratique dont il s’est explicitement revendiqué tout en dénonçant sa dérive aux mains des successeurs de Socrate. L’objectif principal du cycle de conférences a été d’étudier les objections qu’Aristote a formulées à l’encontre des partisans des Idées en prenant comme fil conducteur la notion de substance que sa discussion des Formes platoniciennes tantôt présuppose, tantôt mobilise explicitement. Pour ce faire, nous avons procédé à une lecture détaillée d’un certain nombre de documents, tirés aussi bien de ses écrits d’école que des vestiges de ses traités perdus, où Aristote rejette la notion d’un universel substantiel (autant dire, en l’occurrence, séparé) et s’efforce de mettre à mal les arguments que ses partisans avançaient pour prouver son existence. (shrink)

Identification is a primary need of societies. It is even more central in law enforcement. In the history of crime, a dialectics takes place between felonious attempts at concealing, disguising, or forging identities and societal efforts at unmasking the impostures. Semiotics offers specialistic skills at studying the signs of societal detection and identification, including those of forensics and criminology. In human history, no sign more than the face is attached a value of personal identity. Yet, modern forensics realizes that the (...) face can mislead and, inspired by eastern models, adopts fingerprinting. In the digital era, however, fingerprinting first goes digital, then it is increasingly replaced by facial recognition. The face is back in digital AI forensics, together with a tangle of sociocultural biases. Semiotics can play a key role in studying their surreptitious influence. (shrink)

Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in legal ontologies (...) and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated. (shrink)

Religion can bring about social harmony as well as social conflict. Religious law is a key element in both cases. Scholars can explain how religious law changes according to historical and socio-cultural context. They can also help reengineering prescriptions that cause social conflict. Changes in religious law can be explained according to a chronological rhetoric (certain agents cause certain changes) or according to a logical rhetoric (a change acquires its meaning in opposition to other possible changes). The two approaches are (...) complementary, but the semiotics of religious law predominantly adopts the second one. In both cases, the explanation of how a religious law changes and the reengineering of a religious prescription are related activities. The semiotics of religious law is particularly equipped to propose alternatives for conflicting prescriptions. However, there is a difference between showing that some alternatives exist and advocating which alternatives should be taken. Whilst the latter position is similar to that of semiotic guerrilla warfare, the former rather configures the semiotics of religious law as a therapy. Semiotic guerrilla warfare stresses the need to demystify the discourse of power that subjugates individuals or groups to a certain religious law. Semiotic therapy does not focus on demystification but on reconciliation. The task of the semiotic therapy of religious law is to show that situations of social conflict generated by certain prescriptions can be decreased or eliminated by adopting alternative paths of meaning. The semiotic therapist of religious law can be effective in showing these alternatives only if some pragmatic and semantic preconditions are met: a correct involvement with the sets of religious core values at stake and an articulated analysis of the paths of meaning to which these values give rise. (shrink)

There are an abundance of studies regarding the development of sexual identity and sexual orientation that have served as the foundational underpinnings for exploring sexual orientation development. To date, however, findings from these studies have failed to constitute a significant resource for understanding the gay man’s experience of acknowledging to himself that he is attracted to other men. By identifying the essential constituents of this experience, this existential-phenomenological study provides a starting point for further exploration. Written narrative accounts were obtained (...) from seven men who identified sexually as gay and a method of existential-phenomenological analysis was applied to reveal the prereflective constituents of the experience described. The analysis yielded a new perspective on the experience of gay men and their attraction to other men that has the capacity to change the way practising clinicians, educators, counsellors and future researchers treat and understand the Queer community. (shrink)

Tourism industry is increasingly stripping traveling of one of its most fundamental anthropological and existential values: its being a laboratory in which travelerscan temporarily experience the disruption of their regime of sedentary belonging, protected by a plan of return. According to this perspective, non-touristy travelingis one of the best ways to test the limits of one’s tolerance to cultural diversity and acknowledge, as a consequence, the identity of one’s cultural and existential‘home.’ Yet, modern and contemporary travelogues mostly extol the traveler’s (...) heroic capacity to overcome the limits of tolerance. Claiming that such emphasis stems from the colonial desire to domesticate and assimilate the world and its diversity, the article proposes to subvert this logic and to replace panoramic travelogues, dominated by the will power of subjects, with prosopopoeic travelogues, that tell the stories of how the things of the world, relics of centuries of civilization, reject travelers and their desire of domestication and conquest. As an example of this subversion, the article proposes a semiotic exploration of toilets, their variety, and their ‘cultural resistance.’. (shrink)

The essay investigates the anthropological concept of personhood from the point of view of the dialectics between two fundamental elements of the socio-cultural, linguistic, and semiotic construction of the self-identity of the human species: on the one hand, the human face and, on the other, the non-human muzzle. After demonstrating that their semantics is contrastively articulated in all Indo-European languages, and after showing that such contrast is featured also in several non-Indo-European languages, including those referring to supposedly alternative “ontologies of (...) nature”, the essay criticizes such opposition through a close reading of Lévinas, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida’s philosophical texts on the face and on animality. Ultimately, it proposes that the construction of the animal muzzle as an interface of non-personhood is instrumental to the substitution of the human victim in the sacrifice that establishes the human community. Only through eradicating the primordial stigmatization of the muzzle, however, will a non-violent foundation of human personhood and community be possible. (shrink)

Humble leadership can be described as a positive psychological feature that allows leaders to admit their limitations, be open to new ideas, and give a voice to others while also recognizing their merits. The present study (n = 268 participants) explored the persuasive effects of a female politician communicating a humble stance by considering the role emotional displays at play (joy, calmness, sadness, and anger) when discussing a moral issue (hosting immigrants). The results revealed that the politician elicited positive emotions (...) and evaluations of her competence and benevolence, especially when exhibiting a sad facial display, by contributing to the intention to accept the moral gist of her persuasive message. Overall, these ‘gendered’ effects are discussed in relation to the ‘political authenticity’, which can be perceived as high especially when the humble message is connected with several social reasons, as is the case with gender or social status. (shrink)

Few arguments from the past have stirred up as much interest as Aristotle’s “Third man” and not so many texts have received as much attention as its account in chapter 22 of the Sophistici elenchi. And yet, several issues about both remain highly controversial, starting from the very nature of the argument at stake and the exact signification of some of its features. The essay provides a close commentary of the text, dealing with its main difficulties and suggesting an overall (...) interpretation of Aristotle’s discussion of the “Third Man” argument. (shrink)

Brazilian women rely on sterilization as the main source of birth control. Sterilization has been one of the causes of the steep decline in fertility in Brazil, at least since the second half of 1970. It is hypothesized that understanding couples’ relationships might be key to explaining this high rate of female sterilizations. Possible reasons for the higher level of fertility among women in unstable unions than among women in stable ones could be the less effective use of contraceptive methods, (...) or that women in unstable unions tend to use less effective or reversible contraceptive methods. In this paper discrete time modelling of the timing of sterilization according to union histories is presented. The analysis uses the calendar data of the 1996 Brazilian DHS. It is shown that women in second or higher order unions have a lower risk of sterilization. This result should be taken into account in the analysis of the determinants of female sterilization in Brazil. (shrink)

The authors' results support a functionalist conception of working memory: a manifold repertoire of schemes/schemas (long-term memory) and a small set of general-purpose “hidden operators.” Using some of these operators I define mental (i.e., endogenous) attention. Then, analyzing two of the authors' unexplained important findings, I illustrate the mental-attention model's explanatory power. Multivariate methodology that varies developmental, task differences, and individual differences is recommended.

Cowan fails to obtain a magical number of 7 because his analysis is faulty. This is revealed by an alternative analysis of Cowan's own tasks. The analysis assumes a number 7 for adults, and neoPiagetian mental- capacity values for children. Data patterns and proportions of success (reported in Cowan's Figs. 2 and 3) are thus quantitatively explained in detail for the first time.

Using neoPiagetian theory of mental attention (or working memory), I task-analyze two complex performances of great apes and one symbolic performance (funeral burials) of early Homo sapiens. Relating results to brain size growth data, I derive estimates of mental attention for great apes, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and modern Homo sapiens, and use children's cognitive development as reference. This heuristic model seems consistent with research.

Two assertions of Halford et al. are critiqued: their claim of priority in relational complexity analysis and the sufficiency for cognitive development of their relational-complexity analysis of tasks. Critical discussion of concrete task analyses (i.e., the relational complexity of proportionality problems, of balance scale problems, and the Tower of Hanoi) serves, by way of counterexamples, to highlight problems in their method.

The article defines the research field of a semiotically oriented philosophy of digital communication. It lays out its methodological perspective, pointing out how the fake has always been at the center of semiotic research. It traces the origin of deepfakes back to the conception of GANs, whose essential semiotic workings it expounds on. It enucleates the specificities of the digital fake, especially in the production of artificial faces. It reviews the deepfake phenomenon, enunciating its most recent statistics, prevalent areas of (...) application, risks, and opportunities. It surveys the most current literature. It concludes by emphasizing the novelty of a situation in which the fake, in human societies and cultures, is produced mostly by machines. It stresses the desirability for a semiotic and interdisciplinary study of these productions. (shrink)

Do Ideas exist and can we prove it ? Do proofs of their existence have all the same value or not ? Aristotle addresses these issues in two famous documents of the controversy that pitted supporters of the theory of Forms against its opponents within Plato’s Academy : his lost work, quoted by Alexander of Aphrodisias by the title of Peri Ideon, and the lengthy thrust against Ideas that can be read, with some minor variations, in books A, chapter 9, (...) and M, chapter 4, of his Metaphysics. As we only have fragments of the first, the second being laconic and little more than a summary, there has been much speculation about the exact number and nature of the arguments for and against the Forms. Since the pioneering works of Léon Robin, Paul Wilpert et Harold Cherniss, one problem in particular has attracted the attention of specialists : what arguments does Aristotle accuse of either producing Ideas on relatives for one or of dragging in the « Third Man » for another ? Why does he consider these arguments to be more rigorous than the others ? If we are not dealing with the same arguments, how can these be more or better argued than those mentioned by Aristotle in the same breath, namely the arguments Plato’s followers took from the sciences, the one over many and the thought about things that have perished ? Through detailed analysis of texts from the Corpus Aristotelicum and Alexander’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Rationes ex machina develops a new interpretation of the controversial file of the akribesteroi tôn logôn as well as a micrological solution to the puzzle that has come to be a sort of compulsory figure of the exegesis of the Aristotelian criticism of « Plato’s Ideas ». (shrink)

The prologue of the Sophistici elenchi is as close an Aristotelian text gets to dealing with language as a subject matter in its own right, only in reverse. Language and its features bear consideration to the extent that they account for some major predicaments discursive reasoning is prone to, both as a separate and as a common endeavour. That being said, the linguistic pitfalls that trick us into thinking that whatever is the case for words and word-compounds is also the (...) case for the things and facts linguistic items stand for reveal as much about good linguistic habits and sound argumentation as they themselves are revealed by the principles and rules our argumentation goes by. In this connection, Aristotle resorted to a curious (or not so curious) analogy between words and counters which played a major role in explaining why language is such a powerful source of illusion and deception. As it happens, Aristotle accounting analogy is a case in point for showcasing the level of sophistication medieval Latin literature on fallacies achieved as early as the first half of the twelfth century. As a matter of fact, Western commentators managed to build compelling cases both in favour of and against the understanding that was to become and still is the standard story – which, of course, speaks volumes about their exegetical proficiency and technical expertise. On the one hand, trusting implicitly Boethius’ translation and well aware of his views on disputational hazards as opposed to computational reliability, they usually understood Aristotle’s comparison as if it was an analogy in name only. On the other hand, despite Boethius’ translation put them at a considerable disadvantage, Latin commentators were able to construe Aristotle’s analogy as bringing together two sets of symbolic variables (words and counters) that are neither entirely free nor entirely bound – which expose them to subtle but critical shifts in value and meaning. (shrink)

Relying on evidence from fifteen epigraphic collections and sixty-odd ancient sources as well as discussing a literature of over five hundred titles, the essay’s highly unorthodox conclusions are a case in point of the micrological ideal of achieving novelty on any given subject by way of transcribing and studying first-hand all relevant materials – edited and unedited alike. The paper’s ambition was to shed new light on one of the most intriguing analogies of the whole Aristotelian corpus, namely the comparison (...) between words and pebbles. A review of all material evidence and virtually all extant sources made short work of two related, albeit mutually exclusive, misconception about ancient reckoning boards and their workings: (1) the idea that – for all practical purposes – the abacus’ arrangement mirrored the decimal system, its columns and rows conveniently matching units, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. (2) the idea that the inscriptions on several surviving counting boards were a nuisance to the extent that, being inconsistent to a fault with the decimal system itself, they made actual calculations harder than they already were (as opposed to making them easier, as one would expect). The paper demonstrated that the first assumption – the « decimal » bias – is simply mistaken and betrays little or no awareness of the epigraphic and archaeological evidence. The paper also demonstrated that the second assumption – the « abacus riddled with complications » bias – simply defeats the purpose of resorting to the abacus in the first place and betrays a poor understanding of its practical vocation which, most assuredly, was not to add to the very problem it was meant to solve. After bulldozing its way through both misunderstandings, the essay focused on the abacus most distinctive features, that is positionality (i.e. the abacus being a positional system through and through) and hybridity (i.e. the abacus’ place value system being monetary in nature and purpose, as opposed to it being abstract and homogeneous). The final result is an interpretation that moves away from the received views by showing that the prologue of the Sophistici elenchi offers no support to the notion that, when Aristotle referred to counters, he was leaning on a kinship of sorts – or any kinship, for that matter – between abstract calculation and speech. Once we turns the pebble’s simile on its head and set it back upon its feet (Aristotle’s pebble analogy is about pebbles, what else?), it becomes clear that it presupposed numeracy all right, but it was not about numeracy itself. Moreover its goal was not to explain why computational and linguistic symbolisms succeed, but to explain how they fail – failure being the whole point; in this particular instance, failure to detect and prevent abusive value shifts affecting words and counters alike. (shrink)

Quelque nombreuses et quelque influentes qu'elles soient par ailleurs, les vues d'Aristote sur le langage se caractérisent à la fois par leur hétérogénéité et par leur marginalité. Sans faire nulle part du langage et de la signification l'objet d'une investigation autonome et méthodique, Aristote multiplie les remarques et les digressions à leur sujet, que ce soit dans ses écrits d'éthique et de politique ou dans ses traités d'histoire et de philosophie naturelle, ou encore dans ses manuels de dialectique, de poétique (...) et de rhétorique. Face à l'abondance de ces matériaux et aux difficultés qu'ils présentent du fait de s'offrir au lecteur en ordre quelque peu dispersé, «Le langage. Lectures d'Aristote» fait le choix d'indexer l'étude du langage chez Aristote sur des passages précis du corpus en ne posant aux textes aristotéliciens d'intérêt linguistique que les questions auxquelles ces mêmes textes - tantôt pris isolément, tantôt mis en relation les uns avec les autres - apportent une réponse. (shrink)

Celebrated as the equal to the great philosophers of old, namely Plato and Aristotle, whom – as Cassiodorus put it – he taught to speak Latin better than they spoke Greek, Boethius aspired to fully emancipate Roman culture from its Greek models through translations and exegesis so faithful they would leave nothing more to be desired from the original. The essay focuses on Boethius philhellenism, without complexes insofar as it had little to do either with the mixed feelings of his (...) Roman predecessors or with the plundering agenda of his Christian contemporaries. Special attention is paid to the close relationship Boethius established between word for word translations and multi-layered commentaries which he thought of and – albeit partially – carried out as part of the same scholarly endeavour. Devoid of literary pretentions as well as free from aspirations to autonomy, Boethius literal rendering and scrupulous interpretation were meant to be completely self-sufficient. Together they stand out as both the most innovative and the most conservative features of his ambitious cultural project. -/- Célébré comme l’égal des grands philosophes du passé, auxquels il aurait appris à parler Latin mieux qu’ils ne parlaient Grec, Boèce a caressé le rêve d’une émancipation radicale de la culture romaine vis-à-vis des modèles grecs qu’il se proposait de traduire et interpréter assez fidèlement pour que la comparaison avec les sources ne soit plus nécessaire. De son effort de livrer un Aristote et un Platon latins à la hauteur des originaux grecs, nous étudions l’étroite solidarité qui relie la traduction mot-à-mot des textes grecs et la restitution scrupuleuse de leur sens. Cette double tâche, que Boèce a conçue et menée d’un seul tenant, nous est dès lors apparue comme le reflet d’un philhellénisme sans complexes, tout aussi éloigné des sentiments ambivalents que nourrissaient vis-à-vis des hellènes ses devanciers romains que des efforts visant à domestiquer l’héritage classique auxquels se livraient certains de ses contemporains de même confession que lui. Affranchis de tout rêve d’autonomie, les traductions et les commentaires de Boèce se conçoivent comme parfaitement autosuffisants. Ensemble ils constituent ce qu’il y a à la fois de franchement novateur et de profondément conservateur dans son projet de faire parler Latin les sources grecques. (shrink)

« Qu’est-ce que le langage et à quoi sert-il ? » -/- « Qu’est-ce qu’un signe linguistique et en quoi consiste sa signification ? » -/- « Quels sont les effets que les expressions linguistiques produisent, les contraintes qu’il faut respecter et les précautions qu’il convient de prendre lorsqu’on les utilise ? » -/- Ce complexe de questions, dont on peut retracer l’origine dans un certain nombre de textes de l’Antiquité, oriente depuis les enjeux fondamentaux de la réflexion sur la (...) nature et le sens des expressions linguistiques ainsi que sur les conditions effectives de leur utilisation. Au fil des débats philosophiques, littéraires et autres, cette compréhension du langage s’est déclinée en une variété de manières d’entendre ce que, pour une expression linguistique ou une suite d’expressions linguistiques données, « signifier » veut dire. Les contributions de ce numéro thématique se sont concentrées sur les idées linguistiques que les auteurs de langue et culture grecque – confrontés, plus ou moins explicitement, à la question « comment penser le langage ? » – ont développées afin de rendre compte du phénomène complexe de la signification comme propriété des signes linguistiques, corrélat d’un contenu de pensée ou encore comme produit d’une pratique réglée d’échanges. (shrink)

Pour des raisons essentiellement liées à la vocation des textes où la notion de présupposition a fait son apparition, c’est la présupposition d’existence qui s’est imposée la première à l’attention des philosophes du langage. Elle a également déterminé l’orientation des débats en les focalisant sur quelques problèmes traditionnels, au premier chef desquels le problème de l’absence de référence de certaines expressions et celui des imperfections du langage naturel. Contrairement aux noms propres et aux descriptions définies, les termes qui signifient des (...) universaux ont joué un rôle très marginal dans la discussion de ce qui est présupposé par les énoncés que nous échangeons. Ce sont pourtant les noms d’espèces et de genres qui ont été associés les tout premiers à des phénomènes qui relèvent de la présupposition. Afin de montrer que cette association n’a rien perdu de son intérêt, nous avons étudié le traitement qu’Aristote réserve à la famille de paralogismes qui exploitent la similarité morphologique entre noms propres et noms communs pour rattacher la même présupposition d’existence aux uns et aux autres, alors même que cette présupposition est légitime dans un cas (celui des expressions qui désignent des choses particulières), abusive dans l’autre cas (celui des expressions qui signifient des universaux). (shrink)

One of the singularities of Latin exegesis of Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi, is that it arbitrarily brought together two families of fallacies, the «figure of speech» and the «accident», despite the fact that they are on either side of the divide between sophisms related to expression and sophisms independent of expression, a divide that lays at the heart of Aristotle’s taxonomy of sophistic arguments. What is behind this surprising identification? The talk is meant to show that it actually originates from a (...) curious mistake in Boethius’ translation of Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi, 22, 178b 36-37 which radically transformed the nature of the argument at stake. While it was originally an example of the fallacies related to the «figure of speech», Boethius’ translation wrongly brings about two arguments instead of one, both related to the «accident». This explains why authors from the Latin tradition came to think that fallacies of «figure of speech» were linked to fallacies of «accident» closely enough to ask whether they actually fell outside expression, even though it does not at first glance appear that such a possibility was allowed or even suggested by Aristotle’s text. This odd question illustrates some of the remarkable features of the medieval archive and how some of its most peculiar problems came to be. It specifically allows us to reconstruct the mechanisms through which a minor disturbance in the letter of the text leads to a whole new way of organising its exegetical material. (shrink)

Latin commentators came across the « Third Man » in Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi. The way they dealt with the argument is a fair illustration of how they were both faithful to the text and innovative in their understanding of its most challenging issues. Besides providing a detailed survey of all manuscript sources, the introductory essay shows that Latin interpretation originates from a mistake in Boethius’ translation which radically transformed the argument. The edition makes available for the first time a considerable (...) amount of new documentary evidence which made it possible to solve the riddle of the Latin « Third Man ». (shrink)

RESUMO:A hipótese desenvolvida nos leva a confrontar três textos do corpusrousseauísta: o Segundo Discurso, Júlia ou A Nova Heloísa e o extrato do Primeiro Diálogo, em que há a ficção do mundo ideal, textos que, apesar do seu estatuto genérico diferente, estão em coerência e convergência teórica. Desejamos evidenciar um aspecto da unidade problemática do pensamento de Rousseau concernente à abordagem crítica da sociedade de seus contemporâneos e sua concepção do papel das Letras e dos Espetáculos. A preocupação do filósofo (...) é de refundar a natureza humana, a fim de lançar as bases de uma nova organização social. Nessa empreitada, a ficção desempenha um papel crucial, o prefácio do Segundo Discurso o comprova: para bem conhecer o homem atual, deve-se supor o que ele não é mais. O homem do estado de natureza, ser de ficção, cujas paixões são retas e naturais, é o modelo teórico que reativa a sociedade dos seres ideais de Júlia. Dessa forma, a ficção é chamada a desempenhar um papel referencial fundamental para o pensamento social e político de Rousseau, aparecendo como um poderoso meio de ação sobre o público. O romance pode reeducar os povos corrompidos, pois, assim como o teatro, como denuncia a Carta a d’Alembert, possui os meios para perverter uma sociedade tida como virtuosa. ABSTRACT:The hypothesis that we will develop leads us to confront three texts of Rousseau’s corpus: the Second Discourse, Julie, and the extract of the First Dialogue that speaks of the pedagogical fiction of the ideal world. These three texts, despite their different types, are theoretically coherent and convergent. We intend to highlight an aspect of the problematic unity of Rousseau’s thought, an aspect which concerns his contemporaries’ critical approach to society and Rousseau’s conception of the role of letters and spectacles. Rousseau’s concern is to refound human nature in order to lay the basis of a new social organization. In this effort, fiction plays a decisive role, as the preface to the Second Discourse affirms: in order to know modern man, we must consider a hypothesis about what he no longer is. Man in the state of nature, a fictional being whose passions are right and natural, is the theoretical model that reactivates the society of ideal beings in Julie. For Rousseau, fiction is called upon to play a fundamental referential role for social and political thought, and it appears as a powerful means of action on the public. The novel can reeducate depraved peoples, because, like the theater, it also has the means to pervert a so-called virtuous society. (shrink)

Umberto Eco’s essential contribution to semiotics consisted in finding a theoretical equilibrium between deconstructive tendencies, aiming at presenting cultural habits as pure conventional but naturalized products, and motivational trends, claiming the natural fundament of constructed cultural habits. Fully comprehending and turning into analytical frame the concept of sign in Charles S. Peirce was instrumental to reach such equilibrium. In no other aspect of Umberto Eco’s semiotics it manifests itself with more evidence than in the characterization of indexes. The article seeks (...) to propose a general theorization of their semiotic nature, starting from Umberto Eco’s interpretation of Peirce. (shrink)