Philosophy

If you are interested in this topic, you are invited to join the discussion :
https://www.academia.edu/s/d129aef6d7?source=link

Preliminary note: the text below is an adaptation of a paper originally published in French. As it has not been written by a native English speaker, this translation may contain mistakes for which the author apologises.

Introduction

The identification of Holofernes, the pedantic schoolmaster in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, with the real-life figure of John Florio, a language tutor, writer, translator and lexicographer recognised as a prominent humanist in Renaissance England, is not a new idea and dates back to at least 1747. 
Although still debated, the theory that William Shakespeare parodied John Florio as Holofernes is based both on the similarities between this character and his presumed model, but also on the fact that Shakespeare and Florio must have known each other, since at the time this comedy was written, they had the same patron, the Earl of Southampton, and were likely to have moved in the same circle.
The inference therefore seems simple enough: Holofernes would be a parody or satirical portrait of John Florio by his young friend or rival William Shakespeare. However, this hypothesis is rather tenuous. In fact, despite the alleged proximity between the two men and the attested influence of Florio on the playwright, there is absolutely no tangible evidence that their paths ever crossed at any point in their lives.

Sections 1 & 2: Is Holofernes Florio’s parodical double?

We start by reviewing the indications, some long known, some new, that point to Florio as the model and the main source of inspiration for the Holofernes character. Then we probe into closer affinities existing between Florio and Holofernes; for instance, the latter literally expresses himself “like a dictionary”, a plausible hint at Florio's famous Italian-to-English dictionary called A World of Words, which was a well-advanced project at the time Love's Labour's Lost was composed.

Section 3: Holofernes’ mixed origins

Insofar as Holofernes can indeed be identified with Florio, new questions arise. To put it bluntly: Holofernes is not a character who arose ex-nihilo, nor was he born from Shakespeare's innate genius. His appearance in Love's Labour's Lost corresponds to specific cultural conditions.
As a matter of fact, the type of the pedantic schoolmaster and of Holofernes specifically is rooted in a two-fold tradition, Italian and Rabelaisian, which predates the Shakespearean creation. Yet, the borrowings from these two sources are difficult to account for in the case of Shakespeare, given what we know about his education, language skills and access to some specific foreign works which had not yet been translated into English when Love’s Labour’s Lost was composed.
At this point, we put forward a hypothesis, presented as such, which we fully expect to be controversial. Our hypothesis is that John Florio may have contributed to the creation of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost. Without pretending to demonstrate this hypothesis, we put it forward for its explanatory potential. It is evidently not in our intention at this stage to ask the reader to decide whether or not Florio may have collaborated in the writing of the play, or even less should he be Shakespeare's ghost writer.

Section 4: Bruno’s spectral presence in Love’s Labour’s Lost

In this section, we take up another topic that has been discussed at length in studies of Love's Labour's Lost. Yes or no, are there references in this comedy to the Ash Wednesday Supper and to Giordano Bruno's figure and ideas? It is a theory that the historian Frances A. Yates puts forward, but eventually she rejects it. However, in the light of Bruno's theories on cosmology but even more so on memory (which Yates studied in depth), those references to Bruno in the text of Love’s Labour’s Lost seem hardly questionable. Moreover, we bring forward additional evidence, based on the analysis of alliterative and anagrammatic processes at work in the comedy.

Section 5: Judas-Holofernes, a persecuted figure

This section is devoted to the play within the play (the court performance) in the comedy’s final act, where Holofernes, playing the role of Judas, is relentlessly harassed by the courtiers. While nothing forbids the reader to assume that Shakespeare authored this “baiting” scene, in the context of John Florio's life, it strikes us as the perfect answer to the personal attacks he had to suffer from John Eliot some two years prior to the writing of the comedy. Yates established that Eliot had explicitly targeted Florio in his Ortho-epia Gallica. Through an analysis of the alliterative and anagrammatic processes in this scene (V,1), we attempt to establish that Love’s Labour’s Lost contains an explicit string of references to those attacks.

Section 6: Shakespeare and Florio: the “ape” and the “master”?

If the reader acknowledges the validity of all or some of the above arguments, he or she may wish to ask: What motivation could Shakespeare possibly have had to refer in Love’s Labour’s Lost to happenings in which he was not involved, and which are of absolutely no interest to the plot? In Shakespeare's case, we find it very hard and awkward to explain. It is for this reason that we will expand the hypothesis that Florio contributed to the creation of the Holofernes character, to include contributing more broadly to the play’s composition.
However, since clues (whether they are many or few, convincing or not) do not constitute an evidence, we looked to see if the answer to our questions could be found in Holofernes's own words. By analysing the alliterative and anagrammatic processes in the passage (IV,2) where Holofernes portrays himself, we came to discover that 1) Holofernes may not be Shakespeare’s parody of Florio as we thought it was, but possibly a grotesque and extravagant self-portrait, and 2) that the schoolmaster cryptically but unambiguously denounces Shakespeare as an "ape", an accusation of imposture often thought to have followed the man from Stratford throughout his life and of which there is, in our opinion, indisputable support in Holofernes’ speech.

in L’Ouvert n°8, Paris, 2015, pp. 88-105.
Il semble que, dès lors qu’il n’est pas question d’une causalité physique et mécanique, c’est-à-dire homogène, la causalité décrit une ambiguïté fondamentale : d’une part le principe ne peut être dit tel s’il n’est possible de marquer aucune hétérogénéité de la cause à l’effet ; de l’autre il faut bien que quelque continuité caractérise la relation des deux termes. Or le concept heideggérien de « différence ontologique » semble en propre spécifier le premier aspect de ce paradigme. « L’Être » se définit par le fait que précisément il n’est rien de ce qu’il fonde, rien d’« étant ». Or à l’issue de la différence ontologique, l’Être est identiquement posé comme « Rien », non seulement « rien-d’étant »  mais « transcendance » comme telle. Cette « transcendance » est sans doute ce qui, de l’héritage heideggérien, marque le plus durablement Henri Maldiney, dont toute l’œuvre consiste à reformuler le « ex- » de l’existence et à faire apparaître ce qui, tant du côté de la spontanéité que de la passivité de la « présence », marque une transcendance irréductible, un « fondement » « impossible » ou « critique ». Que ce soit par radicalisation des thèses heideggériennes ou franche critique, Maldiney propose une compréhension a maxima de la transcendance, posée comme « ἀρχή ».  C’est là donc ce qui peut donner matière à un rapprochement avec Plotin, qui affirme qu’« étant la nature qui engendre toutes choses, l'Un ne peut être aucune d'elles » . L’exigence de fonder l’ontologie appelle la mise à l’écart de toute détermination ontologique, dans l’élaboration d’une hénologie. C’est le schème de l’ἀρχή lui-même qui paraît commander une « dénivellation ontologique »  et motiver une sortie hors de l’appareil conceptuel propre à l’ontologie. Chez Plotin, « le multiple ne vient pas du multiple ».  En un sens, la causalité, au sein d’une démarche qu’on qualifiera de fondationnelle, s’élabore par différence. L’affirmation plotinienne d’un principe de l’être lui-même « au-delà de l’être » et excédant toute « position » exige que nous éprouvions la réalité de son rapprochement avec la philosophie d’Henri Maldiney.

Dans Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Jacques Rancière suit « les métamorphoses du geste philosophique qui sépare ceux qui sont voués au travail de ceux qui sont destinés à la pensée » : non seulement  l’organisation de la cité mais l’ordre symbolique qui l’accompagne dépossèdent les groupes opprimés de leur identité et de la possibilité même de l’interroger. Quelle articulation Rancière fait-il entre sa lecture de l’organisation de la cité platonicienne et une critique de la science sociale contemporaine ? En analysant de quelle façon la sociologie de Bourdieu radicaliserait en la naturalisant l'inégalité que pose Platon sous la forme d'un "noble mensonge", je voudrais appliquer la notion d' "acte discursif" à la constitution de l'inégalité et d'identités autres et moindres. Si le « conflit politique », chez Rancière, est « conçu comme symbolisation spécifique de l’altérité », le mythe platonicien est propre à restituer l'inégalité à son origine arbitraire, à faire surgir, du « social », le lieu d’un litige propre à la « politique ».

My MA thesis delves into notions of the "lived body" (Leib) in three main thinkers of the 20th century continental philosophy. All of the three provide distinct accounts, as opposed to the mind-body dualism, though with limitations. Heidegger describes Dasein as being bodily instead of having a body, which to dissolve the body-object into the ecstatic temporal structure of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, through its projection as the “there” that orients always into the future that always comes back to its situatedness and facticity. Heidegger distances Dasein’s bodily nature (Leiblichkeit) from Husserl’s Body Proper (Leib) of the transcendental Ego by emphasizing the co-determination between the lived body and the world in the “there”, not “I-here”. But the asymmetrical relation between Dasein in the world and the lived body in its loss-of-the-world needs further clarification—in the face of Dasein’s shared corporeality (Körperlichkeit) with animals, the world-poor. Given this aporia between the corporeal and the lived bodies (Leibkörperlichkeit), Merleau-Ponty’s account of the lived body (le corps) acknowledges this duality in human bodily experience, and questions the Cartesian cogito precisely based on the pre-personal existence of the body as the background preceding and destabilizing the subject’s intentional act. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the pre-personal body, later developed into the ontology of flesh, further dissolves subjectivity into a general, anonymous and incarnated Being. However, his project of hyper-reflection, though aware of its own cognitive limits, faces challenges as a philosophy that starts from the hand of the man. This intuitionism is an age-old problem of Western philosophy, so claims Derrida, who insists upon the aporia: touch is possible only by not touching. He demonstrates the auto-hetero-affection discloses the untouchable other constitutively haunting the Body Proper, exemplified by the event of Nancy’s heart transplant and the Nancean vocabulary “the technē of bodies”. However, this also predicts the limit that deconstruction never touches, exceeds or invades—a new language of deconstruction departs from, but stays in contact with a metaphysical desire for touch, and thus always already live in the aporia of touch.

This paper is presented at the Nietzsche-Kolliquium in the philosophy department, University of Freiburg in Germany. Written and presented in German, the paper discusses a methodological question concerning genealogy as a critical approach which is seen in Nietzsche's work and  pursued in the late Foucault. The question unfolds as such: can genealogy, as a critical approach, be transcultural ?

In this paper, I will first show that the notion of budongxin (不動心) does not fit into the existing categorisations of asceticism in the occidental tradition. Then, I will demonstrate how the notion nevertheless underpins a morality that controls and regulates desire in a way that boosts the fulfilment of one’s nature. Based on this notion, I propose a new way of categorising asceticism that is not only relevant to the critique of modernity, but also indispensable as a potential alternative to certain post-modern perspectives in regard to critiques of capitalism.

This paper explores the reception, the translation and the adaptation of Goethe's Faust in modern China, since the late nineteenth century up to the present. Written and presented in French, the paper looks into the influence of this transnational work that has played a crucial part in the shaping of modern and contemporary Chinese literature. In particular, the figure of Faust with its Confucian interpretations in translations and theatrical adaptations leaves its mark in the course of Chinese literary history, amounting to a response from the artistic and literary society to the fast-paced modernisation in China.

Le corps (Leib) est un fil conducteur pour la pensée nietzschéenne. Nietzsche est le premier penseur-bien avant la phénoménologie de Husserl-qui contredit le concept métaphysique du corps-objet (Körper). Il propose une notion du corps en faveur de la vie (Leib), et cette notion se débarrasse du dualisme métaphysique. Dans Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, Nietzsche relie le corps (Leib) directement et explicitement à la vie (Leben) et pour la première fois, Nietzsche fait du corps une figure centrale pour la philosophie, par rapport à l'âme ou à l'esprit. Pour le Zarathoustra de Nietzsche, le corps (Leib) est la plus grande raison de tout, alors que l'esprit n'est que son « instrument et jouet ». 1 Contrairement à la conception de l'esprit éternel dans la tradition métaphysique et chrétienne, l'esprit ou « les âmes », dans la parole de Zarathoustra, sont « aussi mortelles que les corps ». 2 En effet, l'esprit sous la plume de Nietzsche se transforme entre les métamorphoses du chameau, du lion et finalement, de l'enfant, comme s'il est, a priori, corporel. 3 En ce sens, l'esprit dans la perspective de Nietzsche ne semble pas du tout supérieur au corps, mais plutôt dérivatif du corps (Leib), mortel et métamorphosé. De plus, Nietzsche considère le corps (Leib) en tant que point de départ d'une invention du Soi. Il souligne l'importance du corps pour la sagesse : « Par-delà tes pensée et tes sentiments, mon frère, il y a un maître puissant, un sage inconnu, qui s'appelle le Soi. Il habite ton corps, il est ton corps ». 4 En ce sens, différent du corps vécu (Leib) dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, le corps nietzschéen (Leib) ne se dépend pas de l'intention du soi-que Husserl appelle l'Égo-qui s'exclue du monde physique. Au contraire, le corps nietzschéen est-précédant la conscience-le point de départ pour l'invention du Soi : le devenir du Soi qui n'est pas encore. En d'autres termes, Nietzsche implique la primordialité du corps (Leib) préconscient en tant qu'un point de départ essentiel pour la philosophie. Cette notion du corps (Leib) est monumentale et inventive, parce qu'avant Nietzsche, il existe dans la tradition de la philosophie, une négation du corps-la négation de tout ce qui est physique,

Nietzsche is the first thinker who contradicts the metaphysical concept of the bodyobject (Körper). He proposes a notion of the body (Leib) that breaks away from the metaphysical dualism and relates itself to life (Leben). This notion considerably challenges the negation of the body in the western philosophical tradition. Nietzsche traces the genealogy of this negation-which he calls asceticism-while his critique is limited to the ascetic ideal of the metaphysical and Christian traditions. Nevertheless, in Foucault's late work, asceticism lies in the process of truth telling (repentance, transgression, etc.) through constitutive practices that take place in the flesh (la chair). In consideration of asceticism as culturally and historically contextualised, I approach the problematic within a genealogical framework. By tracing the provenances of asceticisms, I search in Mencius's and Zhuangzi's work what would be "unthought" in the European ascetic tradition, so as to show the limit of genealogy as a critical approach as well as the alternatives to notions of asceticism, as construed by genealogists-particularly, by Nietzsche and Foucault.

This work is an essay on the reference of names in language and thought. According to the Theory of Direct Reference, nowadays dominant in philosophy of language, the semantic content of a proper name is directly its referent (Chapter 1). Nevertheless, despite its current fame, this theory must face two major difficulties, familiar since Frege and Russell: the Co-Reference and the No-Reference Problems. The traditional response to these problems consisted precisely in abandoning Referentialism in favour of a version of Descriptivism according to which the semantic content of a proper name would be, not its referent, but a descriptive condition (Chapter 2). However, it is also this traditional version of Descriptivism that the arguments offered by the pioneers of modern Referentialism—including Kripke, Putnam, and Kaplan—have largely discredited (Chapter 3). The theoretical tools developed within the framework of possible worlds semantics enable to restate the problems generated by Referentialism in terms of the opacity of linguistic intensions and Modal Illusions (Chapter 4). At this stage, our semantic theory of names seems to have reached a dead end: on the one hand, modern Referentialism recreates the problems which classical Descriptivism was meant to solve, but, on the other hand, this kind of Descriptivism appears to be refuted by the argumentation of new Referentialists. A common reaction, then, has been to devise more complex semantic theories purporting to combine Referentialism with crucial features from Descriptivism. However, a careful examination reveals that the various versions of this strategy fail (Chapter 5). Another type of reaction, also ecumenical, has been to draw a distinction between two kinds of contents which would be associated with names and the sentences in which these occur: while the first kind of content would be descriptive, the second would be referential. The Two-Dimensionalist framework has received several interpretations (pragmatic, semantic, metasemantic); but a new construal, metasyntactic, is defended in this work (Chapter 7). The metasyntactic interpretation of Two-Dimensionalism allows for a radical gap between language and thought: while the thoughts of their users can remain descriptive, names are supposed to achieve direct reference by themselves, and independently of the mental states of their users. Hence, names must be regarded as objects living in the external world, on a par with other ordinary objects like trees or chairs, and not as mental objects. An Externalist metaphysics of names is then submitted, as well as a corresponding epistemology, according to which external names are described in the mind through a description of their reference (Chapter 7). The general strategy pursued in this work amounts to combining a Theory of Direct Reference in language with a Descriptivist (hence, Internalist) account of thought. Also, certain influential arguments—notably devised by Burge—intended to support Mental Referentialism (hence, Externalism) beyond Linguistic Referentialism, are rejected; it is moreover argued that a Non-Descriptivist conception of the mental is incapable of securing the introspective transparency of thoughts, which, however, seems indispensable, among other things in order to solve and even pose the Co-Reference and the No-Reference Problems (Chapter 8).

I argue that two notions of essential indexicality may have been conflated, due to a confusion between two notions of perspective. In one sense, my perspective on the world is the viewpoint from which I perceive the world. In another sense, it is what I perceive from my viewpoint. I suggest that in some cases the second sense is not reducible to the first, so that there may be a notion of essential indexicality which is not fundamentally egocentric.

Robert Stalnaker contrasts two interpretations, semantic and metase-mantic, of the two-dimensionalist framework. On the semantic interpretation, the primary intension or diagonal proposition associated with an utterance is a semantic value that the utterance has in virtue of the actual linguistic meaning of the corresponding sentence, and that primary intension is both what a competent speaker grasps and what determines different secondary intensions or horizontal propositions relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. The metasemantic interpretation reverses the order of explanation: an utterance has the primary intension it has because it yields the secondary intensions it yields relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. In these possible worlds, the semantic facts can be different: the metasemantic interpretation is metasemantic in the sense that the secondary intensions are determined relative to possible worlds considered as actual given the meanings the expressions have there. Stalnaker holds a causal picture of the reference of names, according to which names have no meaning over and above their unique referent, and therefore maintains that the semantic interpretation is not an option. He thus endorses the metasemantic interpretation , while insisting that this interpretation does not, contrary to what he originally thought, yield any account of a priori truth and knowledge. My double aim in this paper is to show (i) that the metasemantic interpretation, as sketched by Stalnaker, is not compatible with one natural understanding of the causal picture of reference, on which names are rigid because they have their original bearers essentially, and (ii) that a third kind of interpretation of the framework is available,

The canonical arguments against the description theory of names are usually taken to have established that the reference of a name as used on a given occasion is not semantically determined by the qualitative descriptions that the speaker may have in mind. The deepest moral of these arguments, on the received view, would be that the speaker's narrow mental states play no semantic role in fixing reference. My central aim in this paper is to challenge this common understanding by highlighting that the same argumentative schemas can be adapted to undermine a related non-description theory, according to which the reference of a name as used on a given occasion would semantically depend on broad mental states of the speaker. Once this is realised, it becomes evident that the falsity of the description theory is not the deepest lesson of the canonical arguments, but only a consequence of the deepest lesson. The most fundamental moral is that the speaker's mental states, whether narrow or broad, do not always determine linguistic reference.

John Perry has devoted most of his recent work to the development of what he calls a reflexive– referential theory of utterance content. The theory has two main motivations. The primary purpose of the theory was to offer a new solution in the old controversy between referentialists and descriptivists. The second application of the theory, emphasized in the recent collaboration with Kepa Korta, is to yield a satisfactory compromise in the contemporary debate between minimalists and contextualists. The key idea is that, by acknowledging that any utterance conveys not a single content but a plurality of contents, we can do justice to the intuitions and arguments put forward by all descriptivists, referentialists, minimalists and contextualists at once. The theory recognizes two different kinds of contents, referential and reflexive. The referential content of an utterance u containing a proper name or an indexical expression involves an individual, as the referentialist urges; and, as the contextualist claims, usually that referential content plays the role of what is said by u. In addition to this referential content, u also conveys a variety of other contents: reflexive contents. Each of these corresponds to a different content about u itself, given different facts about u. Perry treats the various reflexive contents of u as descriptive contents, and argues, on behalf of the descriptivist, that some of these capture the cognitive value of utterances like u containing referential terms. Finally, and to pacify the minimalist, one of the reflexive contents of u corresponds to a minimal content, determined independently of context, in virtue of linguistic conventions alone. This paper offers a critical survey of the reflexive–referential theory, highlights its merits, and also points to some of its potential weaknesses.