This dissertation concerns the role of analogy in Kant’s “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment”, especially the role of analogy for the formation of the concept of a natural end ... Show moreThis dissertation concerns the role of analogy in Kant’s “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment”, especially the role of analogy for the formation of the concept of a natural end (Naturzweck). A ‘natural end’ is a ‘regulative concept’ of the reflective power of judgment, that is, a heuristic device that enables us to make sense of the seemingly end-directed and self-organizing character of living beings. Kant’s description of the concept of Naturzweck appeals to the analogy with our “causality in accordance with ends”. However, he is not clear at all what “causality in accordance with ends” means in this context. The philosophical literature on Kant has typically—and predominantly—conflated this analogy with the traditional analogy from design. On this reading, Kant is drawing an analogy between artifacts and living beings. My proposal is that the best way to construe this analogy is not by identifying it with the old argument from design, but rather with our own reason in its “technical use”. That is to say, the analogy with our causality in accordance with ends does not establish a relation of identity between organisms and artifacts, but between organisms and technical reason itself. Show less
This dissertation addresses the different use of the same philosophical model: immanent teleology. In this work Aristotle, the founder of the study of final causes, is put in relation with the... Show moreThis dissertation addresses the different use of the same philosophical model: immanent teleology. In this work Aristotle, the founder of the study of final causes, is put in relation with the modern French evolutionary thinker Henri Bergson, the philosopher of time. The dissertation tackles the two ways of understanding final causality in regard with the structure of their arguments (analogy, perfection and regularity) and it also shows the way in which these arguments are applied to different fields of knowledge (from embryology to anthropology, from anthropology to cosmology). Show less
Emphasizing on the key role of polysemy in forming the lexicon is the main goal to be achieved in this dissertation. The paper suggests a qualitative evaluation of polysemy in comparing it with... Show moreEmphasizing on the key role of polysemy in forming the lexicon is the main goal to be achieved in this dissertation. The paper suggests a qualitative evaluation of polysemy in comparing it with other relations that form the lexicon. The research confirms that the polysemic links must not be modeled independently from derivation or conversion. This evaluation leads us to reveal that the boundary between polysemy and conversion is porous. The properties of analogy has been used to compare the relations. They are the links that connect lexis which form the objects of a comparison. Wolof, an Atlantic language in West-Africa, is studied. This language provides a fertile breeding ground for the explorations. A large scale of different morphological processes form the lexicon (like suffix derivation, derivations from consonant alternation and conversion by changes in nominal class morphemes). The descriptive contribution of this research is to explore the semantic fields of artifacts and emotions in Wolof lexicon. The methodology applied here is to describe both the meanings of the lexical units and the semantic links by which they are connected by a unique metalanguage. That unique metalanguage is called the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), which is applied here to Wolof. Show less
Political philosophy is not only a form of theory, but also a practice. If we wish to learn something about politics, therefore, we should focus not only on its propositional content, but also on... Show morePolitical philosophy is not only a form of theory, but also a practice. If we wish to learn something about politics, therefore, we should focus not only on its propositional content, but also on its performative meaning. This dissertation offers a reconstruction of the propositional contents of the writings of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt while bringing these into discussion with their performative meanings, such as polemical forms of reasoning, analogical and metaphorical uses of language, and hidden assumptions that become manifest as soon as people start acting upon them. First, it is demonstrated that Popper prescribes a conception of politics that is modeled after science, while he performs a polemical conception of politics. Next, it is shown that Strauss is aware of the performative condition of philosophy, whereas his way of framing it in terms of the mutually hostile opposition between phi losophy and politics and his remedy of the art of writing amount to an unrealistic escape from it. Finally, it is argued that Arendt not only shows to be aware of the contingent character of human action, but also develops forms of political thinking that do justice to it. Show less
This paper focuses on Empedocles’ fragment B23, in which the author analogically relates the generation of living species from four elements to the art of painting, whose productions result from... Show moreThis paper focuses on Empedocles’ fragment B23, in which the author analogically relates the generation of living species from four elements to the art of painting, whose productions result from the mixing of a limited number of pigments. The first part of the article deals with the heuristic dimension of the analogy in the context of a cosmological poem, more specifically with the correspondence between comparans and comparandum . Within this relationship, a grammatical and theoretical problem concentrates my attention: while the subject and the verbs of the fragment are plurals, the painter’s procedures are conveyed in the dual form. These duals have frequently been interpreted as allusions to the two cosmic principles of Empedocles’ doctrine, Love and Strife. Building on Oliver Primavesi’s recent interpretation of the cosmic cycle, according to which Love is the only principle responsible for the production of living species, even during the period of Strife’s domination, I propose to interpret the duals as an allusion to Cypris’ hands, a personification of Love’s demiurgical powers. As a result, the reading I suggest is compatible with the two main interpretations of Empedocles’ zoogony (single/double). In the second part of the paper, I examine the relation that the painters analogy entertains with two contemporary discursive forms that also happen to thematize the question of representation: the lyric tradition, namely Simonides and Pindar, on the one hand, and the philosophical poem of Parmenides, on the other. Show less
The Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’ sheds light on the complexity of one of the salient analogical changes that occurred in the Italian language, viz. the elimination of the alternation between the... Show moreThe Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’ sheds light on the complexity of one of the salient analogical changes that occurred in the Italian language, viz. the elimination of the alternation between the stressed diphthongs [jE] and [wO] and the unstressed monophthongs [e] and [o], respectively, within a limited group of inflectional and derivational paradigms. Historically, the monophthong–diphthong alternation was the consequence of a pan-Romance diphthongization process that affected the Late Latin low mid vowels in stressed positions. The relatively recent levelling of this alternation has led to a great deal of variation: in some cases the alternations are maintained while in others they have been eliminated. The first aim of the present study was to scrutinize durational aspects of Italian diphthongs and monophthongs in general. The second aim was to examine to what extent the variation caused by analogical levelling of the monophthong–diphthong alternation, attested in written sources, also occurs in the spoken language. To investigate these issues, a series of production experiments was carried out with native speakers of Italian. The final aim was to provide a coherent phonological treatment of the insights provided by the experiments within the framework of Optimality Theory.The book is intended as a contribution to experimental phonetics and phonology. It introduces an exciting tool for language-variation research, the speech-shadowing technique, and discusses recent phonological approaches to phenomena such as glide formation, analogy and paradigm uniformity. Therefore, this study is of interest to both phoneticians and phonologists, as well as to linguists with a special interest in Italian. Show less