Four experiments tested three competing theories of metaphor comprehension: comparison, categorization, and career-of-metaphor. The findings shed light on key mechanisms involved in metaphor processing and conceptual combination. They show that some novel tropes are privileged in metaphor over simile form, and others may express different interpretations in simile and in metaphor form. These results speak against the assumption that metaphors and similes are interchangeable, thus providing support for the categorization model. A unifying account of metaphor comprehension is proposed, along with (...) a discussion of implications for conceptual combination. (shrink)

Since Aristotle, many writers have treated metaphors and similes as equals: any metaphor can be paraphrased as a simile, and vice-versa. This property of metaphors is the basis for psycholinguistic comparison theories of metaphor comprehension. However, if metaphors cannot always be paraphrased as similes, then comparison theories must be abandoned. The different forms of a metaphor—the comparison and categorical forms—have different referents. In comparison form, the metaphor vehicle refers to the literal concept, e.g. 'in my lawyer is like a shark', (...) the term 'shark' refers to the literal fish. In categorical form, 'my lawyer is a shark', 'shark' refers to an abstract (metaphorical) category of predatory creatures. This difference in reference makes it possible for a metaphor and its corresponding simile to differ (a) in interpretability and (b) in meaning. Because a metaphor cannot always be understood in terms of its corresponding simile, we conclude that comparison theories of metaphor are fundamentally flawed. (shrink)

This article aims at analyzing the relationship between intertextual and autobiographical memory in Georges Perec and Radu Cosaşu’s writings, revealing several of their characteristics, similarities and paradoxes. Starting from the assumption that almost every book Georges Perec ever wrote, carries the stamp of his struggle to construct a plural identity, and that for Cosaşu the identity “quest” is central, too, I intend to demonstrate that obliquity represents in both situations a key-concept. Moreover, when reading their childhood recollections, Georges Perec’s notes (...) on his journey to London or Radu Cosaşu’s account of his puzzling travel to Moscow in 1968, we notice that the strategy of the oblique glance gradually generates a sort of “industrial production” of screen-memories or rather the memory of a whole generation. Besides, we can envisage the possibility of understanding their exploration of the “infra-ordinary” as an occasion for reconsidering the various interplays between writing and remembering, intertextuality and imagination, or - as Perec puts it - between “space as inventory” and “space as invention”. (shrink)

Since Aristotle, many writers have treated metaphors and similes as equals: any metaphor can be paraphrased as a simile, and vice‐versa. This property of metaphors is the basis for psycholinguistic comparison theories of metaphor comprehension. However, if metaphors cannot always be paraphrased as similes, then comparison theories must be abandoned. The different forms of a metaphor—the comparison and categorical forms—have different referents. In comparison form, the metaphor vehicle refers to the literal concept, e.g. ‘in my lawyer is like a shark’, (...) the term ‘shark’ refers to the literal fish. In categorical form, ‘my lawyer is a shark’, ‘shark’ refers to an abstract (metaphorical) category of predatory creatures. This difference in reference makes it possible for a metaphor and its corresponding simile to differ (a) in interpretability and (b) in meaning. Because a metaphor cannot always be understood in terms of its corresponding simile, we conclude that comparison theories of metaphor are fundamentally flawed. (shrink)

The article conveys the portrait of a man for whom understanding was a matter of the highest spiritual intimacy, a man who continuously disregarded his possible engagement in the public life as a philosopher, finally a man whom we find, in the twilight of his life, concerned with the intricate tension between the “muteness” of philosophy (as being able “only” to double life by means of rational discourse) and religion. Alexandru Dragomir’s portrait is portrayed in comparison to another important Romanian (...) philosopher, Constantin Noica. The comparison is not accidental, since they both come to represent two paradigmatic ways of making philosophy: traditional ontology (centered around Descartes – Kant – Hegel) vs. modern phenomenology (centered around Husserl – Heidegger). (shrink)

The article conveys the portrait of a man for whom understanding was a matter of the highest spiritual intimacy, a man who continuously disregarded his possible engagement in the public life as a philosopher, finally a man whom we find, in the twilight of his life, concerned with the intricate tension between the “muteness” of philosophy (as being able “only” to double life by means of rational discourse) and religion. Alexandru Dragomir’s portrait is portrayed in comparison to another important Romanian (...) philosopher, Constantin Noica. The comparison is not accidental, since they both come to represent two paradigmatic ways of making philosophy: traditional ontology (centered around Descartes – Kant – Hegel) vs. modern phenomenology (centered around Husserl – Heidegger). (shrink)

Iritări cotidiene -- Actualităţi, inactualităţi -- Mici exerciţii de memorie -- Despre patosul real al interogaţiei religioase -- Neliniști (politice) -- Bazarul naţional -- Privitor ca la teatru -- Unele perplexităţi.

Andrei Plesu, Comedii la portile Orientului (Farces at the Orient’s Gates) Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2005.

Although Plesu started his career as an art historian, he soon came under the influence of Constantin Noica, a major Romanian thinker who had tried to combine Platonism with a rather idiosyncratic form of existentialism. Plesu was briefly a minister for culture in the first post-revolutionary Romanian cabinet, and thereafter worked as an editor and as an educator; he is currently the president of a small private graduate international college in Bucharest. He is the author of a number of books (...) in which he draws intriguingly from material in art, religion, philosophy, and sometimes politics. The current volume, his most recent, is a case in point. (shrink)

The encounters of the Romanian philosopher C. Noica with his youger disciples - Gabriel Liicean, Andrei Pleșu, Sorin Vieru et alii - in the transylvanian Carpathian mountains, in the Păltiniș resort were perceived by Noica’s followers as a real philosophical school and an idealistic alternative to the compulsory marxist ideology. In spite of that, the orthodox thinker and literary critic N. Steinhardt took it as a way of avoiding the tough reality of communism and a negation of the Christian religion. (...) Therefore, he criticised that option and the pretention of the “Păltiniș School” to create a viable alternative to the officially imposed marxist vision. Steinhardt’s article received critical answers not only from the members of the so-called School, but also from another thinker and literary critic, Adrian Marino, who thought that both Noica and Steinhardt are wrong and the younger thinkers should act against Nicolae Ceaușescu’s agressive dictatorship by meas of civic and democratic activity. The study tries to emphasize the existence of more than one alternative to the communist ideology in Romania’s 1980s, generally considered as a frozen epoch for free philosophical and politically relevant discussions. (shrink)

Contemporary thinkers have not been hesitant to talk about the end of religion, the end of philosophy, or the end of morality. In such a context, our society is based on what Lipovetsky calls a minimal ethics. We live at the crossroads of two types of discourses: one proclaiming moral decadence, and another that speaks about the revival of morality. The fact that ethical maximalism quits the contemporary scene does not necessarily mean that it leaves a complete vacuum. The emptiness (...) opens towards the manifestation of ethical creativity in the space of minimal ethics. In public space, and in administrative ethics, the secularization of ethics offers the possibility of feeling comfortable with promoting a form of moral relativism that does not alienate people from the sensation of ethical certainty that offers existential comfort through its firm values. (shrink)