Philosophers and bioethicists have mostly given up on human dignity. As a concept, dignity has seemed obscure and unintelligible, or forbidden because of its connection with theology. Here I take a fresh look, and identify two families of dignity concepts: dignity as arche and dignity as telos. Arche draws on the idea of an origin or source, as in ‘archetype’ or ‘archeology.’ Dignity as arche refers to the qualities inherent in a being that is the source (the arche) of our (...) duties to that being. Dignity as telos is the endpoint (telos) that we try to promote in our patients and in ourselves. I illustrate these ideas using examples from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book for young readers, A Little Princess. Identifying these two families of dignity concepts helps to identify the dignity-related tasks for psychotherapists. These are to help patients recognise, connect with, and respect their own dignity as arche, and to help them realise their own dignity as telos. Revisiting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps us to see how these tasks also apply to the broader goals of healthcare. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper reassesses the importance of the Benedictine monasteries of St Benoît of Fleury and St Mesmin of Micy (both on the outskirts of Orléans), and the Cathedral of Chartres for the early diffusion of Arabic learning concerning the astrolabe, and it relates this diffusion to that of the judicial astrology of ‘Alchandreus philosophus’ and the astronomical tables of the Preceptum canonis Ptolomei. Evidence is given for the fact that already, by the turn of the millennium, the elements were in (...) place for a corpus of a new, mathematically based, practical science of the stars, consisting of works partly of Arabic and partly of Greek inspiration. This corpus was progressively revised and inspired, in turn, further translations from Arabic, until it reached its most mature form in the mid-twelfth century. Until recently, scholarship has tended to concentrate on the cathedral schools of North-east France and Lotharingia, and the monastic schools of South Germany, and to see Gerbert d'Aurillac, the Archbishop of Reims, as the pivotal figure. While these schools were undoubtedly important in the diffusion of the new science of the stars in the eleventh century, it is argued that a key role in the initial stages of the diffusion was played by the interrelated centres of Fleury, Micy and Chartres at the beginning of the century, and Gerbert may not have contributed as much as has been believed. Additional sections are devoted to the authorities in this corpus, ‘King Ptolemy’ and ‘Alchandreus’. A reworking of the Arabic material on the construction of the astrolabe by Ascelin of Augsburg was copied into this corpus. The text has previously been known from only one manuscript; a new edition, from five manuscripts, is provided here, together with a translation and commentary. (shrink)

This article explores the idea of community and ‘internal concord’ in a radically divided, post-independence Haiti. As the country negotiated the process of decolonization from France, Haitian political writings and speeches repeatedly returned to the problem of how a truly united Haiti might be envisaged. These reworkings of the idea of community were instrumental in the work of postcolonial nation-building in Haiti in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet the publication of Haiti's Rural Code in 1826 gives a (...) different perspective on the process of national construction of community through work, particularly agricultural labour. The article seeks to look beyond the ideals of unity and Concordia which were being vigorously proclaimed at the time, in order to understand the impact of questions of work and worklessness on political discourse surrounding the idea of postcolonial community in nineteenth-century Haiti. (shrink)

This article presents some previously unpublished evidence of Isaac Casaubon’s studies of Islamic coins preserved in his notebooks. The notes show Casaubon’s attempts to decipher the coins, as well as the European-wide efforts of a group of scholars, including Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in France, Thomas Erpenius in the Netherlands and John Selden in England, to make sense of Arabic epigraphic inscriptions, attributions and titles on coinage; and it reveals the contribution to these efforts of a former enslaved person and (...) dragoman of the Republic of Venice, two Lebanese Maronites, a Turkish diplomat and an enslaved Moroccan at the port of Marseille. In particular, this study analyses Casaubon’s attempts to read, translate and decipher a group of Islamic coins, including a Norman coin, an Abbasid coin, an Ottoman coin, a stone seal amulet, an Artuqid coin and a contemporary Moroccan coin. It provides annotated Latin texts and modern English translations of Casaubon’s notes, along with Archbishop James Ussher’s comments on them; and it offers a potential identification of the coins. The article demonstrates that the coins were treated more as vehicles for the inscriptions they bore than as artefacts in their own right and confirms that the earliest approaches to understanding Islamic material culture in Europe were mediated through the Arabic language. Casaubon’s notes on Arabic and Turkish coins are among the first and most comprehensive studies of Islamic material culture of the early modern period. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much research into conceptual engineering in connection with feminist inquiry and activism, most notably involving gender issues, but also sexism and misogyny. Our paper contributes to this research by explicating, in a principled manner, a series of other concepts important for feminist research and activism, to wit, feminist political identity terms. More specifically, we show how the popular Conceptual Spaces Framework (CSF) can be used to identify and regiment concepts that are central to feminist research, focusing (...) especially on feminism in France. According to the CSF, concepts can be represented geometrically, as regions in similarity spaces. A particular strength of the CSF framework is its empirically-focused methodology, which allows researchers to infer the boundaries of concepts from empirical data, thus eliminating the need to strongly rely on intuitions about meanings. This is shown to be especially valuable for the explication of concepts relating to feminist political identity, given that the intuitions of feminist scholars and activists about what would appear to be core concepts in the area tend to be poorly aligned or even conflicting. We report the results from an empirical categorization study conducted among French feminists and show how they support the view that the CSF can contribute to both the conceptual engineering project and our understanding of the structure of social reality. (shrink)

The paper presents both new data and a new analysis of the semantic and pragmatic properties of the class of absolute scalar adjectives within an extension of a well-known logical framework for the analysis of gradable predicates: the delineation semantics framework . It has been long observed that the context-sensitivity, vagueness and gradability features of absolute scalar predicates give rise to certain puzzles for their analysis within most, if not all, modern formal semantic frameworks. While there exist proposals for solving (...) these puzzles within other major frameworks , it has been argued that some of their aspects are particularly challenging for the analysis of absolute scalar predicates within the delineation approach. By combining insights into the relationship between context-sensitivity and scalarity from the DelS framework with insights into the relationship between tolerance/similarity relations and the Sorites paradox from Cobreros et al.’s Tolerant, Classical, Strict framework, I propose a new logical system, called Delineation TCS , in which to set analyses of four classes of adjectival predicates. I argue that this new framework allows for an analysis of absolute scalar adjectives that answers these challenges for delineation-based frameworks, while still preserving the heart of the Klein-ian approach. (shrink)

This paper develops a formal model of the subtle meaning differences that exist between grammatical alternatives in socially conditioned variation and how these variants can be used by speakers as resources for constructing personal linguistic styles. More specifically, this paper introduces a new formal system, called social meaning games, which allows for the unification of variationist sociolinguistics and game-theoretic pragmatics, two fields that have had very little interaction in the past. Although remarks have been made concerning the possible usefulness of (...) game-theoretic tools in the analysis of certain kinds of socially conditioned linguistic phenomena :645–668, 1977; Dror et al. in Lang Linguist Compass 7:561–579, 2013; in Lang Linguist Compass 8:230–242, 2014; Clark in Meaningful games: Exploring language with game theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, among others), a general framework uniting game-theoretic pragmatics and quantitative sociolinguistics has yet to be developed. This paper constructs such a framework through giving a formalization of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of variation using signalling games and a probabilistic approach to speaker/listener beliefs of the kind commonly used in the Bayesian game-theoretic pragmatics framework :3–44, 2016, for recent overviews). (shrink)

In the wake of colonial fragmentation and genocide, Indigenous ‘Khoisan resurgence’ movements in South Africa have mobilised subversive forms of authenticity, including heteroglossic and inventive translanguaging from fragments of Khoekhoegowab. In our analysis of video ethnographic texts produced in collaboration with the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council (GKC) in Hankey, the birthplace of Sarah Baartman, we explore how memory, language politics, and environmental activism are interwoven in acts of linguistic citizenship that constitute the ‘rememorying’ of a history that has remained persistently obscured. (...) We argue that rememorying advances a politics of reminding which counters the Rainbow Nation’s institutionalised politics of forgetting, as well as anthropological accounts that consider Indigenous activist invocations of history as merely ‘therapeutic’. Through an engagement with the memory activism of the GKC, we identify how reconstructing word-histories, reliving historical traumas, retelling histories of sites of memory, seeing oneself mirrored in one’s ancestors, and the nexus of land, memory, and time form the basis for shared meaning-making, bringing impetus, focus, and intergenerational continuity to struggles for environmental and land justice. (shrink)

This paper presents a new style of semantic analysis for slurs: linguistic expressions used to denigrate individuals based on some aspects of their identity. As an illustration, the author will focus on one slur in particular: dyke, which is generally considered to be a derogatory term for lesbians. The author argues that not enough attention in the literature has been paid to the use of dyke by members of the target group, who can often use it in a non-insulting manner; (...) secondly, the author argues not enough attention has been paid to the use of the “neutral” form, lesbian, which is generally treated as having a simple, clear meaning, such as “engage[s] in same-sex sex”. Following McConnell-Ginet, the author argues that taking into account all the uses of both dyke and lesbian requires a new semantics and pragmatics for both terms. More specifically, the author proposes that dyke and lesbian are associated with different sets of personae: abstract identities or stereotypes. Dyke is associated with an anti-mainstream persona, which the vast majority of speakers views negatively; whereas, lesbian is associated with a mainstream persona, which many speakers view favourably. The author proposes that the semantic puzzles associated with dyke and lesbian can be resolved through the combination of a theory of these personae and a theory of how listeners’ beliefs about their interlocutors’ ideologies affect utterance interpretation. (shrink)

In this book, Hodgson presents a clear and compelling case against today's orthodox mechanistic view of the brain-mind, and in favor of the view that "the mind matters." In the course of the argument he ranges over such topics as consciousness, informal reasoning, computers, evolution, and quantum indeterminancy and non-locality. Although written from a philosophical viewpoint, the book has important implications for the sciences concerned with the brain-mind problem. At the same time, it is largely non-technical, and thus accessible (...) to the non-specialist reader. (shrink)

In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh approach to the question of free will, contending that close consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows that together they give us free will, in a robust and indeterministic sense, and in a way that is consistent with what science tells us about the world.

This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the power-knowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, we believe it to be a problematic category, especially in Western (...) knowledge production about Indigenous people. Our reasons are that the term conflates the use of history with its recovery, unfairly maligns Indigenous knowledge keepers as self-serving and uninterested in the truth, and introduces an insidious binary which has unwelcome discursive effects, in that longer chains of equivalence ultimately place Indigenous storying and knowledge keeping on the other side of an epistemological divide from “proper” history-writing. (shrink)

This paper explores the adult mindfulness landscape, secular and Buddhist, in order to inform an approach to the teaching of mindfulness in secondary schools. The Introduction explains the background to the project and the significant overlap between secular and Buddhist practices. I explain what mindfulness is and highlight a number of important practical differences between the teaching of mindfulness in the adult world and in schools. ‘Balancing Calm and Insight’ looks at mindfulness through a lens infrequently explored in the therapeutic (...) literature, and suggests that a slight shift in the centre of gravity towards Calm might be appropriate. ‘Defining Objectives’ considers how difficult it is to clearly articulate the objective of mindfulness in schools given a new context in which it functions as neither clinical application nor spiritual practice. A range of alternatives is considered. ‘Building a Scaffolding’ explains the importance of context in both Buddhist and secular practice. To succeed, mindfulness should be nested within a broader framework of understanding, or what Kabat-Zinn calls a ‘scaffolding’. I suggest that perhaps the best ‘scaffolding’ for mindfulness in schools is its sense of possibility. ‘Ethics and Community’ describes how ethics are more important in secular mindfulness than they at first appear. The shape ethics might take in a school context is considered, then an assessment of the role of the teacher and what equivalent there might be for what Buddhists call sa?gha, or Community. (shrink)

This article reassesses the reasons why Toledo achieved prominence as a center for Arabic-Latin translation in the second half of the twelfth century, and suggests that the two principal translators, Gerard of Cremona and Dominicus Gundissalinus, concentrated on different areas of knowledge. Moreover, Gerard appears to have followed a clear program in the works that he translated. This is revealed especially in the Vita and the “commemoration of his books” drawn up by his students after his death. A new edition (...) of the Vita, Commemoratio librorum and Eulogium, based on all the manuscripts, concludes the article. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History. By John Van Seters. The Hidden God: The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament. By Samuel E. Balentine. Theodicy in the Old Testament. Edited by James L. Crenshaw. Ce Dieu censé aimer la Souffrance. By François Varone. Evil and Evolution, A Theodicy. By Richard W. Kropf. ‘Poet and Peasant’ and ‘Through Peasant Eyes’: A Literary‐Cultural Approach to (...) the Parable in Luke. By Kenneth Bailey. The Biblical Foundations for Mission. By Donald Senior and Carroll Stuhlmueller. New Testament Foundations of Ministry. By Colin Kruse. Church, Ministry and Unity. By James E. Griffiss. Theology of Ministry. By Thomas Franklin O'Meara. Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology. By Colin E. Gunton. I believe in the Holy Spirit. By Yves Congar. Between Jesus and Paul. By Martin Hengel. From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and its Background. By Frances Young. Alan of Lille: The Frontiers of Theology in the Later Twelfth Century. By G.R. Evans. Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. By Clarissa W. Atkinson. Church, Politics and Society: Scotland 1408–1929. Edited by N. Macdougall. Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. Collected Essays, Volume II. By Frances A. Yates. Seven‐Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentury, 1483–1983. Edited by Peter Newman Brooks. Ökumenische Erschliessung Martin Luthers. Edited by Peter Manns and Harding Meyer. Luther's Ecumenical Significance, An Interconfessional Consultation. Edited by Peter Manns and Harding Meyer, in collaboration with Carter Lindberg and Harry McSorley. States of Mind: A Study of Anglo‐Irish Conflict 1780 to 1980. By Oliver MacDonagh. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth‐Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter Reform. By Gregory L. Freeze. Pusey Rediscovered. Edited by Perry Butler. Between Two Worlds: George Tyrrell's Relationship to the Thought of Matthew Arnold. By Nicholas Sagovsky. The Concept of Glaubenslehre. By Walter E. Wyman, Jr. The Existence and Nature of God. Edited by Alfred J. Freddoso. Faith and Reason. By Anthony Kenny. Logic and The Nature of God. By Stephen T. Davis. Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality. By Josef Fuchs. Morality and Conflict. By Stuart Hampshire. Realism and Imagination in Ethics. By Sabina Lovibond. Intentionality. By John R. Searle. Philosophical Papers, I: Practical Reason. By G.H. von Wright. Philosophical Papers, II: Philosophical Logic. By G.H. von Wright. A Model of Making: Literary Criticism and its Theology. By Ruth Etchells. The Return of the Goddess: Femininity, Aggression and the Modern Grail Quest. By Edward Whitmont. The Power of the Poor in History. By Gustavo Gutierrez, translated by Robert R. Barr. The God of the Xhosa. By Janet Hodgson. Our Hymn Tunes: Their Choice and Performance. By Donald Webster. The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan. By William Morgan. An Introduction to Plato's Laws. By R.E. Stalley. Plato's Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved. By Kenneth M. Sayre. Plato's ‘Parmenides’: Translation and Analysis. By R.E. Allen. Politics in the Ancient World. By M.I. Finley. (shrink)

Considers the literary genres in which logical texts were written in the post-classical period. Articles describe the kinds of texts that were written and the implications for educational practices, as well as the continuities and developments between one language culture and another.".

From Galileo to the Bhopal tort litigation, Scopes to OncoMouse®, Lysenko to the lie detector, the agonistic and alethic forum of the courtroom has offered unique opportunities to witness science and scientists being made and unmade. Evolving legal systems have consistently been forced to draw on (or defensibly away from) scientific knowledge, scientific methods, and scientific experts in the pursuit of truth and justice. At the same time, courts—in many ways the original site for the production of social facts—have to (...) a significant extent shaped both the theories and the practices of knowledge production central to the emergence of modern science. This Focus section draws together a set of scholars at work on these borrowings and aims to stimulate more research in an important and fast‐expanding area of scholarship. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, the Precautionary Principle (PP) has become popular in discussions of public policy, especially in relation to health and environmental policy. Though there are a number of different versions of the principle, the genesis of the idea is that it is better to be safe than sorry. In terms of public policy, proponents of the PP argue that being safe means that, if there is a possibility of harm from a new activity or novel technology, even (...) if the scientific evidence concerning the harm is absent or uncertain, precautionary actions should be taken. In one version or another, the PP has been incorporated into a number of laws and treaties. Yet arguments for the PP are unconvincing, the PP itself is vague and when enacted in law, results in arbitrary regulations that pose a threat to human welfare. As a result, the PP should be rejected as a basis for public policy. (shrink)

An analysis of the interpretation of Christian theology that is found in G. W. F. Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Peter C. Hodgson argues that these lectures are among the most valuable resources from the nineteenth century for theology as it faces the challenges of modernity and postmodernity.

'Plain' persons tend to accept that free will exists and is inconsistent with determinism, but this commonsense position is widely debunked by professional philosophers and cognitive scientists. In this special issue of the _Journal of Consciousness Studies_ David Hodgson defends a simple, robust account of the plain person's position on free will, and intends it to support equally robust views of personal responsibility for conduct. In a lively debate his ideas are discussed and challenged by ten philosophers and scientists (...) of varying opinions, including Robert Kane, Henry Stapp, and veteran philosopher of mind J.J.C. Smart, with a response by the principal author. (shrink)

John Rawls famously holds that the basic structure is the 'primary subject of justice.'1 By this, he means that his two principles of justice apply only to a society's major political and social institutions, including chiefly the constitution, the economic and legal systems, and (more contentiously) the family structure.2 This thesis — call it the basic structure restriction — entails that the celebrated difference principle has a narrower scope than one might have expected. It doesn't apply directly to choices that (...) individuals make within the basic structure. Individuals can live up to the demands of justice simply by obeying whatever rules are set by, and by doing what is necessary to sustain, the basic .. (shrink)

Peter C. Hodgson explores Hegel's bold vision of history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Following an introductory chapter on the textual sources, the key categories, and the modes of writing history that Hegel distinguishes, Hodgson presents a new interpretation of Hegel's conception of freedom. Freedom is not simply a human production, but takes shape through the interweaving of the divine idea and human passions, and such freedom defines the purpose of historical events in the midst (...) of apparent chaos. Freedom is also a process that unfolds through stages of historical/cultural development and is oriented to an end that occurs within history (the 'kingdom of freedom'). The purpose and the process of history are tragic, however, because history is also a 'slaughterhouse' that shatters even the finest human creations and requires a constant rebuilding. Hegel's God is not a supreme being or 'large entity' but the 'true infinite' that encompasses the finite. History manifests the rule of God ('providence'), and it functions as the justification of God ('theodicy'). But the God who rules in and is justified by history is a crucified God who takes the suffering, anguish, and evil of the world into and upon godself, accomplishing reconciliation in the midst of ongoing estrangement and inescapable death. Shapes of Freedom addresses these themes in the context of present-day questions about what they mean and whether they still have validity. (shrink)

The history of dynasties and the reigns of kings can be shown to conform to certain recurring astrological configurations or periods of years in the past and can be extrapolated into the future. The various recurring periods are provided, as they are described by Abu Ma‘shar in his Book on Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), and then the application of these doctrines to Bohemian history is illustrated.

In the West, it is widely believed that, since Africans lack an emotional experience with romanticism and transcendentalism, they do not possess the philosophical prerequisites necessary to protect wilderness. However, the West’s disdain for African systems of thought has precluded examination of customary African views of wilderness. Examination of ethnographic reports on Kenya’s Highland Bantu reveals a complex view of phenomena that the West generally associates with wilderness. For the Bantu, wilderness is an extension of human living space, and through (...) concerted social action rather than individual initiative, it is, or at least can be, dominated by society. Wildlife is unnatural and alienated from human society, which is natural. Because wilderness is, consequently, understood to be fearsome and hostile, it is not a place that can provide inspiration or self-actualization. Almost all forests have a special spiritual relationship with humankind, and some trees have a special relationship with God. Althoughtraditional Bantu thought is contrary to a concept of wilderness as conserved, managed space filled with tourists and recreators, it does embrace a concept of wilderness as wildlands. The Bantu have gone to considerable length to develop an approach to wilderness that minimizes individual contact while requiring association with wilderness as a social activity. Population growth and want of vocational opportunities continue to thrust Highland Bantu into wilderness as a fundamental and traditional survival technique. (shrink)

Peter C. Hodgson engages the speculative reconstruction of Christian theology that is accomplished by Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and provides a close reading of the critical edition of the lectures. He analyses Hegel's concept of the object and purpose of the philosophy of religion, his critique of the theology of his time, his approach to Christianity within the framework of the concept of religion, his concept of God, his reconstruction of central Christian themes, and his placing (...) of Christianity among the religions of the world. Hodgson makes a case for the contemporary theological significance of Hegel by identifying currently contested sites of interpretation and their Hegelian resolution. (shrink)

Gers (Biol Philos, 2011) provides a positive and constructive view of the project to generalise Darwinian principles in Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen’s Darwin’s Conjecture. We note considerable overlap with his work and ours, and also with important recent work of Godfrey-Smith ( 2009 ), which Gers cites extensively. But we also note that there are differences in research objectives between Gers and Godfrey-Smith, on the one hand, and ourselves, on the other. Gers and Godfrey-Smith focus on the elucidation (...) of the most general principles possible. Our aim is to derive principles that are sufficiently abstract to span the natural and human social worlds, and then add additional principles to help understand the Darwinian evolution of human society. Furthermore, Gers and Godfrey-Smith critique a replicator concept that is different from ours. Once these points are made apparent, the criticisms are essentially disabled, and we end up in a position with different but complementary and overlapping research projects. (shrink)

The value of rational choice theory for the social sciences has long been contested. It is argued here that, in the debate over its role, it is necessary to distinguish between claims that people maximise manifest payoffs, and claims that people maximise their utility. The former version has been falsified. The latter is unfalsifiable, because utility cannot be observed. In principle, utility maximisation can be adapted to fit any form of behaviour, including the behaviour of non-human organisms. Allegedly 'inconsistent' behaviour (...) is also impossible to establish without qualification. This utility-maximising version of rational choice theory has the character of a universal 'explanation' that can be made to 'fit' any set of events. This is a sign of weakness rather than strength. In its excessive quest for generality, utility-maximising rational choice theory fails to focus on the historically and geographically specific features of socio-economic systems. As long as such theory is confined to ahistorical generalities, then it will remain highly limited in dealing with the real world. Instead we have to consider the real social and psychological determinants of human behaviour. (shrink)

The central claim of Kant's political philosophy is that rational agents sharing a territory can justifiably be forced to live under a state; they have, in Kant's words, a duty of right to leave the state of nature. Perhaps something along these lines is entailed by any theory of state legitimacy, but the point raises special difficulties for Kant. He believes that rational agents have a right to freedom; that is, he believes that a rational agent's external freedom - her (...) ability to set and pursue ends for herself without being subject to the choices of others - can justifiably be restricted only for the sake of external freedom itself. To establish that human beings can be forced to join a civil condition, it will therefore not do to show that the state promotes security, prosperity or any other such value: Kant has to show that human beings living side by side need a state to be free. (shrink)

Hanks has defended a novel account of what propositions are. His key argument against Soames' rival view is that predication is not neutral. According to Hanks, predication is essentially committal. I show that Hanks' argument for this conclusion raises problems for his own account of questions and orders.

O artigo desenvolve uma leitura em paralelo de dois textos: um trecho de _Der tolle Mensch_ e a parábola _Ein commentar_. Não procurando realizar uma análise comparada, procura-se apontar algumas aproximações e alguns distanciamentos. Como mediadores desta tentativa de leitura, utilizamos uma carta de Walter Benjamin e os comentários de Modesto Carone sobre a parábola de Kafka.

Russellians can have a no proposition view of empty names. I will defend this theory against the problem of meaningfulness, and show that the theory is in general well motivated. My solution to the problem of meaningfulness is that speakers’ judgements about meaningfulness are tracking grammaticality, and not propositional content.

I propose a version of the act‐type theory of propositions, following Hanks and Soames. According to the theory, propositions are types of act of predication. The content of a sentence is the type of such act performed when that sentence is uttered. A consequence of this theory is that the structure of the content of a sentence will mirror the structure of that sentence. I defend this consequence of the theory from two important objections. I then argue that this theory (...) is well motivated because it can be part of a theory of what is said. (shrink)

Sentences in context have semantic contents determined by a range of factors both internal and external to speakers. I argue against the thesis that semantic content is transparent to speakers in the sense of being immediately accessible to speakers in virtue of their linguistic competence.