Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse Introduction. As Rosenberg remarks, " Understanding ... is evidently difficult to understand" (in this volume, p. 29). ...

This text contains contributions from two Kant conferences which took place in Leuven and Cerisy-la-Salle in 1993.

Classical aesthetics sees the experience of the beautiful as an anthropological necessity. But, in fact, the beautiful is rather the central category designating classical art, and one can question the relevance of this category considering contemporary art. The reference term most frequently used for contemporary art is interesting: works of art solicit the interests of my faculties (the cognitiveintellectual, the pragmatic community-oriented moral, the affective aesthetic faculties). It is interesting to notice that the categories of the beautiful and the ugly (...) have an axiological-moral value. It looks as if the qualities of contemporary art works are judged according to the intensity of the impact on the interests of our faculties. It reveals important, in this respect, to distinguish the ugly from the sublime and the monstrous. Kant’s Third Critique is of some importance in defi ning these categories. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Certaines maximes énigmatiques dÉpicure nous parlent de l'essence du plaisir en termes de concentration et d'ex-centration, de condensation et d'ex- tension, d'implosion d'explosion. Un certain épicurisme chez Kant lui fait dire la même chose, là où le sentiment vital est invoqué dans l'expérience esthé- tique. Le plaisir esthétique est mis en rapport avec la tensivité, le corps, la vie, le corps-en-vie. Toutefois, le plaisir, dans la tradition épicurienne, semble être l'inter- face de eros et aisthèsis, d'une érotétique et d'une esthétique, (...) le corps-en-vie étant un corps-désir et un corps-sensation. Lucrèce, en bon épicurien et en préfi- gurant un certain Merleau-Ponty, évoque dans sa poésie géniale la vérité des sens, celle du corps-sensation défini à partir de la " sensation globale " du corps .Some enigmatic maxims of Epicurus discuss the essence of pleasure focusing on terms like concen- tration and excentration, condensation and extension, implosion and explosion. The epicurist tendency in Kant makes him saying similar things. He mentions " vital feeling " in his determination of the aesthetic experience. Aesthetic pleasure then is related to " tensivity ", the body and life, the living body. However, pleasure, in the Epicurean tradition, seems to be the interface o/eros and aisthèsis, of a erotetic and an aesthetic, because the living body is at the same time a body-desire and a body-sensation. Lucretius, as a good Epicurean and announcing Merleau-Ponty, writes in his genial poem about the truth of the senses, the truth of body-sensation defined from the point of view of the " global sensation " of the body. (shrink)

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as (...) well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)

This essay deals with the difficulty of understanding understanding, taking the understanding of natural language fragments as a paradigm.

De grammatologie als wending van de wijbegeerte.--Het gramma en de ontwrichting van de taal.--Over de 'notie' van grens.--Over de 'notie' van schriftuur.

This text contains contributions from two Kant conferences which took place in Leuven and Cerisy-la-Salle in 1993.

Les lois générales gouvernant la formation des théories sont valable dans la pragmatique comme partout ailleurs où se manifeste l'ambition théorique. La méthodologie adequate, ici come ailleurs, est plutôt celle de la reconstruction et de la découverte que celle de la description et de l'interpretation. Il faut que la noyau théorique, évalué par les critères internes d'adéquation, de cohérence et de simplicité, ait une dynamique reconstructiviste d'expansion. La question à résoudre n'est pas: quel est l'object de ma science, mais bien (...) plutôt: comment est l'object de ma science si ma théorie a de telles propriétés, une telle structure interne? Telle est d'ailleurs le perspective qui oriente le présent volume. (shrink)