Brandom contends that the classical American pragmatists subscribe to a semantic program that is insufficiently one-sided in that it focuses exclusively on the down-stream consequences of concept application, while neglecting its upstream conditions. Focusing on passages from Peirce’s later work, I show that, while Peirce does unpack meaning in terms of the consequences of concept application, his inclusion of the consequences of denying claims involving a concept allow him to capture the inferential space that Brandom contends the classical pragmatists miss. Thus at least Peirce is one classical pragmatist who would not seem to suffer from that particular semantic blindspot.

Wilfrid Sellars contributed two papers that were dedicated to his father, Roy Wood, known as an eminent initiator of Critical Realism movement in the US. In one of the two publications, Wilfrid wrote the following lines: “there are…encouraging signs that the history of philosophy, even American philosophy, is beginning to re-assume its rightful place in the philosophical enterprise and, in particular, that the history of American realistic movement will not remain ignored.” To a reader of Wilfrid Sellars, this remark is intriguing enough. Those who grapple with Sellars’s philosophy, critical and sympathetic alike, tend to approach it from a Kantian perspective. However, when it is decoupled with the exegetical platform of American Realism, this tendency, though legitimate in itself, might turn out to lead us into an inescapable blind spot. As a glance at the main tenets of American Realists will reveal, Wilfrid Sellars was not only a Kantian philosopher who tries to avoid the myth of the given, but also a philosopher of American Realism who tries to find out “the dimension of givenness that is not in dispute.” In this talk, I’ll focus on the principal ideas of American Realism expounded by Roy Wood, and as the next step, I’ll try to delineate a route that extends from Sellars pére to Sellars fils as a philosophical heir of American Realism.

Peirce calls philosophy “cenoscopy”, that is, a view of the general. By that, he means that its aim is to provide a general view of the positive facts of human life and experience. Thus, cenoscopy begins its inquiries scrutinizing everything; experience shows us that is universal and pervasive, general and evident. The method of cenoscopic inquiry, as its very name says, rests upon the careful observation of all manifestations of usual and common experience, limiting itself to what can be inferred from it: our common-sense experiences constitute the positum of philosophical inquiry. So, the biggest difficulty in philosophical inquiry is to cope with the certainties of common-sense, which are extremely vague and general, such certainties as expressed in propositions such as “fire burns”. Such experiences inform our world view, before any scientific world view, and as such it does not occur to us we can doubt them – they acquire the indubitable status of instinctive beliefs. In fact, common-sense beliefs are the very ground of our rational certainties, thus constituting the inevitable hic et nunc from where to start any philosophical and scientific inquiry. This paper aims at presenting Peirce’s main tenets of common-sense in relation to his conception of philosophy.

This paper deals with the issue of a categorial status of lingual mentality. According to the author, the intentionality of consciousness (which means the thought orientation to an object) is an ontological foundation for lingual mentality. The nature of lingual mentality as a universal semantic category is seen in the totality of participation in the object of consciousness. Categorial semantics of lingual mentality reveals itself in the development of an initial idea which is a meaning dominant and is presented as an integral seme ‘realization of mental activity’. This and other semes in the semantic structure of lingual units (including mental verbs) indicate functionally relevant paradigmatic and syntagmatic peculiarities that allow the author to speak of lingual mentality as a semantic category.

This paper considers what distinguishes speech acts such as asserting, stating and claiming from related ones such as suggesting, hinting and conversationally implicating. The distinction cannot be that assertion et al. have a word-to-world direction of fit, since suggesting, hinting, etc., do so as well. The same point applies to attempting to draw the distinction in terms of intentions to induce beliefs, etc. Our proposal, drawing on important ideas from Dummett and Williamson, is that assertion is intimately tied to declara­tive sentences, and to the knowledge norm -albeit in a more roundabout way than they imagined. In particular, declaratives are those devices purpose-built to trigger the knowledge norm; and to assert is to achieve the level of norma­tive commitment, “normative risk”, that one would have achieved had one used a declarative.

In his 2005 paper, DeClercq observes that aesthetic terms such as ‘beautiful’, ‘elegant’, ‘harmonious’, etc. resist metaphorical interpreta­tion and argues that it is the fact that such terms cannot be involved in category-mistakes that explains their metaphorical uninterpretability. While I largely agree with DeClercq’s observation of the metaphorical uninterpret­ability of aesthetic terms, I offer both non-empirical and empirical considerations against his category-based explanation of the phenomenon. I offer the former in a longer version of this paper. In this shorter version, I offer preliminary, empirical evidence against DeClercq’s thesis that the possibility of category mistakes is what is required for metaphor judgments. I do this, in part, by relying on the work of cultural psychologist, Nisbett (2001), who found that, in general, Easterners rely less on categories and more on relational and contextual information than Westerners in making judgments and reasoning inferentially. I report the results of my cross-cultural study on metaphor, which cast some doubt on DeClercq’s thesis that it is the possibility of category-mistakes that explain the metaphorical interpretability of expressions in general.

The aim of this report is to explore, collect and classify the surface characteristics of texts which contain arguments, and in particular arguments pertaining to policy. Our interest is in the automated identification of publically presented arguments, rather than in their success or failure as arguments. We are therefore not dwelling on their validity or their soundness, but on the way they are typically expressed. Of special interest to us are the policy arguments which give reasons for and against legislation proposals. The automated identification of arguments which are to be found in the public domain is an approximate science. Nevertheless, the redeeming factor is that in building an assistant to the policy maker, the interest is in the main lines of argument that pertain to an issue, which, if significant, will not be expressed only once, in atypical logical language. The computational tool we are constructing will assist the policy maker with texts that display even minute hints that there may be some reason giving enfolded within their content.

In this paper I introduce and develop an approach to tenses and temporal expressions that is a mix between eternalism and temporalism consisting in appeal to ‘variadic operators’ (Recanati, 2002). The type of variadic operator I will be concerned with is the expansive variadic operator, which takes as input predicates of a certain adicity and yields new predicates with one additional degree of adicity. Appeal to variadic operators has proven useful in giving the semantics of several types of expressions: adverbs (McCon-nell-Ginet (1982)), prepositional phrases (Keenan and Faltz (1985)), relational terms (Barwise (1988)), etc. The focus of this paper is on tenses and temporal expressions, with the aim of showing how these are treated by appeal to temporal variadic operators. First I define the temporal variadic operator and then show how it can be used to account for simple tensed sentences (such as ‘Soc-rates sits’, ‘Socrates was sitting’ and ‘Socrates will sit’). I also give a rough sketch of how it can accommodate more complex phenomena like sequence of time, interaction between tenses and temporal adverbials, temporal anaphora, later-than-matrix and double-access readings, etc.

Owing to the inevitable parallelism between the script and the language, a series of operating terms and procedures of linguistic analysis have been introduced in the scientific study of writing. The methodological approaching between the scientific study of writing and scientific study of languages is based on a solid connection between the language and script, where the very linguistic analysis revealed the two-sided nature of the script – the internal structure conditioned by linguistic phenomena and the external form –conditioned by cultural history.

Blanchot shook the foundations of Philosophy like few others in its systematic and totalizing discourse and its close relationship with academism, appealing to the need for a new and disruptive theorizing about its role and its possibility. Refusing the title of philosopher, he called himself a writer who became interested in (literary) writing itself as an experience of the outside (dehors) and expression of a neuter, an absolutely other that resists any attempt at apprehension and discursive unification, interrupting the various discourses and deconstructing the boundaries between them. In the radicalism of his thought, philosophical discourse loses its status of superiority and its possibility of overcoming literary ambiguity, seeing itself also devoted to seeking a non-existent unity and to the condition of not-knowing and non-power, whereby philosophy should approach literature and become itself image and fragment. In this context, the literary emerges as disruption of philosophical discourse, like the other word that resists within its boundaries to interrupt the word-concept by pointing to a there where thought does not arrive, and philosophy becomes, as the poetic, an investigation into the neuter, an exercise in listening and paying attention to this Other that remains nocturnal, infinitely moving discourses and their meanings and interrupting dialectic progression.

Georg Trakl is known to be a poet that uses images of silence and one that uses as less words as possible when writing. This paper tries to examine whether it is possible to analyze this preference, following systems’ theory. For this, it examines the ways people communicate and communications bind to each other, the value of silence as negation and its anschlussfaehigkeit.

According to Merleau-Ponty, the renewal of philosophy (mainly with phenomenological and existential philosophies) has led to a new relation between philosophy and literature, from which we can assist to a real collaboration: novels are being used as real experiences inducing philosophical ideas, but without being reduced to them. This observation allows us reevaluate the possible philosophical implications of the influence of Bergson on the Greek writer Kazantzakis, envisaging a similar work to the one that did Lapoujade in his book Fictions du pragmatisme William et Henry James. Applying in our reading the requirements of this new relation between literature and philosophy, we will show that a philosophical approach of the Greek writer’s works cannot submit its understanding to an external knowledge or try to abstract ideas from the fiction as if they were really belonging to it. As an example, we will consider a new approach which would differ from the multiple theological interpretations of the Kazantzakis’ texts based on the influence of Bergson, by giving priority to the inner richness of the experience in the novel as a formal totality, from which it will be possible to complete the Bergsonian philosophical ideas rather than to come back to them.

Machado de Assis was the 19th century Brazilian writer whose work registered the nihilism with greater consistency. Despite the fact that the presence of nihilism in his works has already been recognized, the subject received little attention from critics and scholars, remaining an unexplored field. This paper aims to fill this gap in the critical fortune, and not only argue for the relevance of the subject, but also in favor of the thesis that the Brazilian writer had an acute awareness of the complex and multifaceted nature of the nineteenth-century nihilism. Attentive to the rise of nihilism in 19th century, Machado de Assis approached the problem in a critical and comic tone, contrasting their approach with the philosophical tradition seriousness. By writing with a playful pen, he used humor as one of the main principles of literary composition in his work. He enriched this feature using it as a kind of centerpiece to criticize and deride the spirit of his time, demonstrating that the problem of nihilism may be responded to with an attitude of good humor and irony.

Auden’s poems of the ’thirties bear witness to his social awareness and social commitment almost from the beginning. The great depression of the 30s gave Macspaunday, i.e., Macneice, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis, the conviction that it was the duty of poets to take sides in politics using poetry for that purpose. In the late 1920s the contemporary scene with its grave financial crisis was observed as a dark and sinister one. Auden, the leader of the group, found strong inspiration from the reading of Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud in the programme of using poetry to send messages, and create, and spread awareness among common people, whom he and his group saw as “sick” people. The ‘sick” people were for him either politically or psychologically, “sick”. Auden’s poems of 1927-1938 constitute a text with potential effects which call for actualization. Being university-educated, Auden would write in a language brilliantly witty, symbolic and allegorical. He was also an extremely reticent poet. Thus, was produced a complex poetic utterance fit for intelligent reception by a coterie of fellow poets. At the same time, he must reach out to the (lay) people, if - as a poet- he had to heal his fellow members of the society. The resultant dilemma was one from which he could not extricate himself successfully. Remembering how Wolfgang Iser raises the issue of readability of a text, leads to the question: did the contemporary readers of Auden find an easy job before them?

This article proposes a philosophical reflection about the underlying bonds between the Greek Classical Drama and Contemporary Theatre, with special attention to its concomitants in the treatment of the personal identity, the periplus towards revealed self-conscious and the self-estrangement in an alienated environment. It presents the context of Valencian Contemporary Theatre at that effect, and observes, from the point of the complex questions raised to the individual by the immigration, the possible existing parallelisms between the author’s preoccupations and some of the universal and atemporal themes in the Classic Greek Drama. It concludes pointing out the cost of autonomy implicated by the modern civic identity and suggesting its dissolution like a prosperous journey to the rediscovery of liberty and consciousness.

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida’s debate on madness was among other things revolving around the question about which of the two can better enact the dissonance that madness is: philosophy or literature? In this paper, I will briefly expose Foucault’s preference to literature, because of its ability to echo the silence of madness, and I will explain why Derrida’s faith in philosophy – in terms of its ability to ethically talk about madness – is legitimate. I will not attempt to dispute Foucault’s argument or challenge the profound tradition or connection between literary expression and madness, be this literary production about madness or most importantly literary production by ‘mad’ authors. What I will attempt to do, however, contra Foucault, is to express confidence in the ability of philosophy to engage in a similar tradition or connection. I will focus on what I call autobiographical philosophy – the philosophy in which both logos and bios are incorporated – and attempt to argue that it too provides philosophically legitimate space where what Derrida calls ‘the fiction of language’ can be enacted. The putting of the self in the work, opens up the body too to the risk of madness.

Taking as its point of departure the thesis of Roland Barthes that ‘culture recurs as an edge: in no matter what form’, this paper considers the post-romantic predicament of poetry summed up thus: that there is no unmediated vision only linguistically-mediated (stylized, symbolized-allegorized) poiesis. Against the radical innocence of ‘Why can’t everything be simple again/Like the first words of the first song as they occurred’ (Ashberry) is posed the radical modernist assertion of the ‘Illegibility of this world/All things twice over’ (Celan). This cultural edge is then viewed from a position in the domain of modernist philosophy, that of Ernest Cassirer, who argued that there is no culture in-itself as such independent of its symbolic encoding. Contrariwise to Cassirer the alternative view is posited – that of Stanley Burnshaw in his The seamless web – that poetry is actually born of a striving against the very restraining nature of culture; it is the result of a need to free the human organism from the burden of cultural constraint. Another cultural edge with this view is the constitution of a mediated second nature, which virtually re-experiences a primary nature through the projection of a third world via the poetic process. The paper will end considering of Paul de Man’s argument in The post-Romantic predicament that the problem of Romanticism – as historical movement and lived project turned on the complexity of poetic consciousness experienced as difficulty.

Pure philosophical ideas can be detached from reality and, because of that, lose their practical dimension. Literature, as Berdyaev and Bakhtin claimed, can be a way of presenting and testing those abstractions in reality created by the author. In his novels, Fyodor Dostoyevsky considered various problems and categories of philosophical type. One of them was a notion of freedom, analyzed by Russian author in two aspects: social and individual. The social aspect is really alike to the one present in ideas offered by philosophical anthropologists like Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner. In this view, freedom is being fulfilled through the world of institutions that, while constricting some of humans’ behavior, disburdens the man from too many decisions. Being free from that burden, man can fully develop his human potential. The second kind of freedom is the individual one, rooted in Russian authors’ religious world-view. Particular individual needs to make right choice between good and evil sanctify and become God-human. Those two categories of freedom interrelate creating complex vision of Dostoyevsky’s idea of freedom.

The philosophy of death in the Yakut literature as the ‘eternal’ question of human existence. In the 20th century the theme of death became one of the leading in literature. This is largely determined by the consciousness of the century, which took apocalyptic features. Decadent mood has already ruled the world at the turn of the 19-20th centuries. Everybody was waiting for some unusual events that resulted in fear. The society couldn’t explain changes in policy, economy and arising new world picture rationally. People in the 20th century, based upon the existing cultural ideas, need to re-decide the most important ideological and existential problems of human existence; they need to live, knowing about death. Writers of all the times tried to resolve “eternal” questions of life and death. National and universal are beginning in close unity in many works of the Yakut literature. Universal beginning is expressed by the national original form. The best works of the Yakut literature also express the universal problems and important questions of existence.

One of the main features of narratives is sequentiality, which is normally related to the sequence of events. In this paper, we intend to show that we can also find another source for sequentiality seen in narratives, i.e., language. In the present study, we will attempt to examine the validity of this supposition that there is strong relationship between the sequentiality we find in narratives and the sequentiality of language. Meanwhile, we will use the ideas of Paul Ricoeur and Heidegger, regarding the narrative and temporality respectively. Also, we will focus on Halliday’s ideas of language and cohesion. Halliday is a distinguished linguist known for his Functional grammar. On one side, we will review Ricoeur’s supposed parts of narratives; episodic or chronological and configurational or nonchronological. He takes episodic as the actions which are “in” time, i.e., he considers the nature of episodic aspect as the sequence of events. On the other side, we will use the idea of cohesion in Functional grammar, to prove the supposition that sequence in the nature of language is prior to the idea of sequence in actions. In fact, every action is accounted to be sequential or is narrated as a story partly, because of language; because language has this potentiality intrinsically to be sequential and express accounts of actions sequentially.