Instituto de Filosofia

This paper aims to examine
the nature of the situationist concept of
spectacle, especially by separating it into
its philosophical elements, in order to
check the effectiveness, from a systematic
point of view, of situationism’s radical
critique. In doing so, the main focus of
our attention will be Debord’s major
theoretical work: Society of the Spectacle.
In fact, the concept of spectacle,
repeatedly evoked in other writings, has
its most far­reaching version in that small
but great book, whose first edition was
published in 1967.

In 1882, Frege wrote to Anton Marty that his project was to prove that the fundamental laws of arithmetic are analytical in Kant's sense. The answer to this letter was signed by Carl Stumpf, who advised Frege to write about his motivations for the creation of the formal language he had introduced in his Begriffsschrift, written three years before. The Grundlagen der Arithmetik, that Frege published two years after, may be seen as his result for following Stumpf's advice. In it, Frege mentions Kant again, both as a motivation for his logicist program and as an opposer to it. In this paper, I aim to understand this two-sided influence of Kant in Frege's purposes. To do that, I present and discuss excerpts of the Grundlagen where Frege talks about Kant. I show that, after rejecting Kant's proposal that numerical judgements (like 7+5=12) are synthetic a priori, Frege has an insight on Kant's definition of analytical according to which it is possible through reason alone to achieve knowledge about objects that are neither perceived by the senses nor intuitions. It is this insight that rests on Frege's motivation for his logicist program. According to Frege's logicist program, numbers are objects known exclusively by their properties, with no connection to any representation (either sensorial or intuitional). Frege's insight allow us to think that Kant could have come to this result with his notion of analytical were he not compromised with a notion of concepts as representations that are the building blocks of thoughts. Instead, Frege proposes that new concepts can be discovered in the decomposition of thoughts, and this discovery is a task for logic alone. Being a task for logic alone is precisely Kant's sense of analytical. What Frege's insight adds to Kant's notion of analytical is, thus, that it may be a source of knowledge.

This paper is the written counterpart of a talk given at the IFILNOVA in the context of the colloquium ‘Kant | atitudes, experiências, valores’. The aim of the talk was to present my first readings of Hannah Ginsborg on Kant's aesthetics. Ginsborg defends that Kant’s proposals in the Critique of Judgement provide an insight to avoid the infinite regress created in any explanation of the grounding of the acquisition of empirical concepts on perceptual experiences. Ginsborg finds this infinite regress to be at the basis of one of the most important problems of contemporary philosophy of perception, that on the nature of perceptual contents: are they conceptual or nonconceptual? For Ginsborg, none of the sides of the dispute between conceptualism and conceptualism, or at least as they are usually taken, avoids the infinite regress. According to Ginsborg, Kant's notion of reflection offers a way out of the infinite regress by considering that in reflective judgements a subjective validity – the ‘universal voice’ – is manifest. Such an ingredient is neither a concept or a representation, but rather a norm, that is also present in perception, through what Ginsborg calls ‘perceptual normativity’. The main goal of this paper is to present Ginsborg's readings of Kant and her solution to the infinite regress of an explanation of the acquisition of empirical concepts as grounded on perceptual experience. But in the end I present a reconsideration of the map of positions within philosophy of perception as a different use to Ginsborg's perceptual normativity.

The relationship between literary criticism and poetry is nowadays a particularly puzzling one, mainly due to the overwhelming multitude of available narratives supporting the interpretative discourses. In this essay I start with a clearly functionalist definition of poetry, as the catalyzer for a brief review of the 20th century critical tradition, focusing on the effects that follow some of the most well-known “common places” in literary criticism.

This paper focuses the essays by Luciana Stegagno Picchio regarding Fernando Pessoa’s life and works, emphasizing the tension between philological interpretation and structuralist critical devices. By doing so, I expect to be able to underline the conflict opposing two different meanings of literature supported by these paradigms: between literature as the memory of a system and literature as an aesthetical item, we find some interesting possibilities of understanding the production of a language to talk about literary texts.

Starting from a historical, evolutional and functional assay of «Philology», this study proposes a detailed critical revision of this notion as a paradigm for reading literature, focusing on specific practical and discursive features raised by the philological model. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the dissolutive process undergone by values and criteria for literary analyses related to Philology, aiming at a broad understanding of the disciplinary shifting responsible for the emergence of other frameworks for critical and scholarly reading. In order to do so, a mapping of the discursive / performative identities of contemporary interpretation practices was carried out, locating them in the conceptual setting delineated by the cultural and literary studies, and underlining tendencies concerning the course of disaggregation of Philology. The results revealed strong evidence of parallelism and analogies in the evolution of paradigmatic postures along the time, all symptoms susceptible to a critical and reflexive inquiry.

A configuração actual do panorama disciplinar dos estudos literários coloca ao leitor/investigador um leque de problemas de princípio relativamente ao posicionamento crítico a adoptar perante o objecto de conhecimento (o texto, mas também já a pintura, a instalação, a peça musical). A lógica interpretativa, oscilando entre noções de uso – representações, identidades, subjectividades – e noções de autoridade – significado, intenções, origem, tradição ou cânone –, vem-se revelando insuficiente para satisfazer os requisitos de uma dinâmica intermedial e intersemiótica que resiste a ser reduzida a plasmações mais ou menos positivistas. Por outro lado, o carácter reflexivo e auto-reflexivo da criação contemporânea projecta a obra numa espiral de sentidos possíveis que se abrem sobre a condição do contemporâneo, questionando a pertença a uma época, um tempo, um espaço – esta época, este tempo, este espaço. A prática crítica surge-nos, assim, indissociável de um pensamento teórico, um desdobramento de possibilidades agenciado pelo uso que fazemos das imagens do texto. Mas na fronteira entre estes territórios insinuam-se novos problemas: como pensar com a obra, rejeitando a simulação de um desnível ontológico que tenta aliciar o leitor com a promessa de pensar a obra?
Partindo deste quadro de referências problemáticas, procuro explorar novos modos de abordagem do fenómeno artístico – e da experiência literária, em especial. Modos capazes de potenciar a dimensão vivencial da leitura, emprestando-lhe, em simultâneo, a legibilidade necessária para uma inscrição na ordem do arquivo – a faculdade de colocar o tempo presente em diálogo com o tempo da memória. Para isso, proponho uma releitura cruzada de alguns dos fragmentos de Dioptrique (1637), de Descartes, e do ensaio de Denis Diderot Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749), avaliando o potencial de algumas das suas ideias mediante confrontação com os argumentos de Donald Davidson sobre interpretação e compreensão (Radical Interpretation, 1973 e What Metaphors Mean, 1978).
Ao avançar hipóteses exploratórias de novas materializações interpretativas, espero conseguir, com esta proposta, divisar linhas de fuga possíveis para algumas das aporias e contrariedades da crítica contemporânea.

Despite the minor role played in the course of the events during the First World War, Portugal actively took part in the front lines in Flanders, in France and in the African colonies. As some authors have remarked, the nature and scale of the 1914-18 war were unprecedented in European history, mostly due to the then recent technical developments in the field of artillery. In eight poems written between 1915 and 1917 Fernando Pessoa reflects on the ongoing war, dealing primarily with the unassimilable images of extreme violence. In an article published in 1972 Georg Rudolf Lind points out the essentially dialectic condition of Pessoas’s reception of the war, by testifying his astonishment before a war where humans died without any trace of glory, as opposed to the supposed heroic value of the death in the conflicts of the past. ! Departing from some of Lind’s assumptions and proposing a close-reading of two of these poems, this paper examines to what extent the critical possibilities of this pathway set the stage for processes of rhetoricization of the image of suffering that contemporary critical theory tends to reify (particularly through concepts such as Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life”) and often applies to (non-literary) modern spaces of exclusion and migrations.

The mimetic dimension of literature produces a relationship of ambivalence regarding History, one that the principle of fiction appears to rescue, threatening, however, an unconditional return to the undecidability of metaphor itself. As a gesture of filling in the voids, the contemporary practice of interpretation presupposes the acceptance of a stock of values and entities ("reading keys") that refer to a certain level of knowledge which organizes the set of "identities" and "representations". The exhibition value of this practice is opposed to the reference value in History, in which the threshold between what happened and the narrative about what happened is reabsorbed into the archive. It is known that the ambition of the professional reader is to walk on the thin line drawn between these territories, in a work of emancipation of memories from uses and appropriations, that is, ensuring in each moment the non-ownership of the archive - the maintenance of a shared public space as a form of dialogue. But this work requires an ongoing redrawing of the articles transmitted to the contemporary. A construction (poiesis) which involves the questioning of the processes by which the allegorical story is created - the birth of the reader implies the acceptance of another history as possibility, as the deoperationalization of metaphorical narratives that exist prior to the reading act.
If we take into account the heteroglossic status of art and literature, the interpretation should be constituted as a form of resistance to the unanimism of the same (identity / s), and aspire to a method of confrontation played in time and space. Yet, I believe that, paradoxically, hermeneutics provides a vantage point for this task. By exploring the tensions between the strangeness of the text / tradition and the familiarity of elements, "the true place of hermeneutics is that in-between" (Gadamer). In a close dialogue with texts of Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag and Italo Calvino, I will here consider the possibility of an approach to the literary tradition motivated by that purpose: to welcome, in the literary document, difference as a source of creativity, i. e., a platform for the engagement of liveable singularities, through a strategy of displacement and invention of meaning within the language.

Departing from the reading of the short stories Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura (1874), Civilização (1892), and José Matias (1897), this paper seeks to characterize the aesthetic reaction of Eça de Queiroz to the major social and idiosyncratic changes of the second half of the nineteenth century. In order to do this, we propose to take as a starting point the author's position towards the implications of successive technological shocks felt at the time, and how this perception led him to reconsider the place of the intellectual amidst society: what did it meant for the characters of Eça to be "people of their own time"? How to define the contemporary in Eça de Queiroz? What elements should be considered in the interplay of forces and (dis)stresses that shape and inform the set of values where characters play their lives?
Advancing as an experimental hypothesis the hermetic nature of contemporary in modern aesthetics, we propose to explore some places of frequent revisiting of criticism in the light of new assumptions. Maybe the typological dialectics in Eça are nothing but a mask for an homogeneity of characters from which no one can get rid? Can the critique of existing social models hide a veiled apology for the sameness, or maybe it just conveys the inability to structure an alternative thought? And finally: how to write short stories, in the century of the novel? Perhaps, to a greater extent than we might expect, it is possible to understand the characters of Eça in the light of current philosophical thought. The contribution of Giorgio Agamben to a contemporary (re)reading of this trends shall be called, and we believe that it will then be possible to test a renewed understanding of the aesthetic and literary options of Eça de Queiroz.