UM PERCURSO POSSÍVEL PARA O CONCEITO DE ENUNCIAÇÃO / A possible route to the concept of enunciation

O presente artigo tem como objetivo traçar um percurso histórico para a constituição do conceito de ‘enunciação’ tal como é postulado pela Semântica da Enunciação e mapear como e quando este termo aparece nos livros teóricos e sob quais características. Optou-se, através de pesquisa bibliográfica, por percorrer um trajeto teórico até o ano de 2018, partindo da década de 1660 do século XVII. O percurso é marcado pelos postulados de Antoine Arnauld, Claude Lancelot, Pierre Nicole, Gottlob Frege, Michel Bréal, Ferdinand Saussure, Pierre Guiraud, Mikhail Bakhtin, Stephen Ullmann, Émile Benveniste e chega a Oswald Ducrot e Eduardo Guimarães. Esta análise destaca Bakhtin e seu círculo, que postularam bases enunciativas a partir de Saussure e outros autores; Benveniste, que traz discussões importantes e pertinentes ao tema ora estudado; Ducrot, que estuda Saussure e Bakhtin, avançando em conceitos como locutor, alocutor, dentre outros; e Guimarães por mostrar desdobramentos importantes da teoria de Ducrot e aprofundá-la no sentido da Semântica Enunciativa. Voltamos a atenção para estes autores por entendermos que os mesmos, na contemporaneidade, são referências para o uso do termo ‘enunciação’. Compreender como uma noção teórica toma forma possibilita-nos refletir sobre a constituição da Semântica em diferentes perspectivas. Nosso corpus, formado pelas obras completas ou parciais destes autores, constitui acervo importante para a análise que empreendemos. Esta produção integra as atividades do Grupo de Pesquisa Educação e Estudos de Linguagem (GedEL/UNEMAT).

The Correspondence with Arnauld

Leibniz’s correspondence with Antoine Arnauld took place in his so-called “middle period”: it began in February 1686 and ended in March 1690, when Leibniz wrote his final letter to Arnauld. The exchange was initiated by Leibniz, who sent Arnauld a short summary of his most recent philosophical composition, the “Discourse on Metaphysics”, and asked Arnauld for his opinion. The ensuing correspondence is an excellent source of information about Leibniz’s views in the middle period: it contains a thorough, clear, and surprisingly systematic presentation of many of his most important philosophical doctrines. This chapter focuses on what we can learn from these letters about Leibniz’s theory of complete concepts, his account of body and substance, his doctrines about causation, and finally his theory that minds have a special status in God’s plan.

Leibniz's Key Philosophical Writings

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the modern period, offering a wealth of original ideas in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical theology, among them his signature doctrines such as substance and monads, pre-established harmony, and optimism. This volume contains introductory chapters on eleven of Leibniz’s key philosophical writings, covering youthful works (“Confessio philosophi”, “De summa rerum”), seminal middle-period writings (“Discourse on Metaphysics”, “New System”), to masterpieces of his maturity (“Monadology”, “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese”), as well as his two main philosophical books (New Essays on Human Understanding, and Theodicy), and three of his most important philosophical correspondences, with Antoine Arnauld, Burcher de Volder, and Samuel Clarke. The chapters, written by internationally renowned experts on Leibniz, offer clear, accessible accounts of the ideas and arguments of these key writings, along with valuable information about their composition and context. By focusing on the primary texts, these chapters enable readers to attain a solid understanding of what each text says and why, and give them the confidence to read the texts themselves. Offering a detailed and chronological view of Leibniz’s philosophy and its development through some of his most important writings, this volume is an invaluable guide for those encountering Leibniz for the first time. However, the chapters also contain much material that will enrich the understanding of those already familiar with Leibniz’s ideas.

Nicolas Malebranche

Nicolas Malebranche (b. 1638–d. 1715) was a Parisian-born French philosopher and Oratorian. In 1660, Malebranche entered the Congregation of the Oratory—a Catholic order founded by Pierre Bérulle in 1611—and was ordained in 1664. As relayed by his first biographer—Yves André—in the same year as being ordained, Malebranche discovered a copy of René Descartes’s Treatise on Man in Paris and upon reading it was so ecstatic that he experienced violent heart palpitations. Ultimately, Malebranche developed a philosophical and theological system that was intentionally an amalgam of Cartesianism and the thought of Augustine of Hippo. He is among the preeminent continental rationalists of 17th century Europe along with the more well-known thinkers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. While one must be careful to not import too much into this categorization as it can at times obscure more than it illuminates, rationalism is roughly the view that persons can have some substantive knowledge independent of any sensory experience. Malebranche’s magnum opus—The Search after Truth—was first published in 1674–1675 and underwent numerous editions with substantive additions called Elucidations. Arguably his other greatest work—the Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion—is a beautifully written dialogue and a relatively concise account of his mature worldview first published in 1688. He is especially well known for defending three distinctive positions: (1) Occasionalism, (2) the view that we “see all things in God” (the Vision in God), and (3) a highly original Theodicy. All three of these positions are described in their respective section headings in this entry, but, in brief, occasionalism is the view that only God has true causal power; the Vision in God is the view that ideas, which Malebranche uses in a technical sense and are essential to our perception, are in God; and a theodicy is an (attempted) reconciliation of the existence of evil with the existence of an all good, all knowing, and all powerful God. Malebranche was also active in many controversies, not the least of which was his decade long public dispute with the Jansenist theologian Antoine Arnauld. This often bitter and heated debate was one of the premier intellectual events in Europe in the latter half of the 17th century. Malebranche published his final work, Réflexions sur la prémotion physique, in 1715 and died on 13 October of that same year at the Oratory in Paris.

Port-Royal Mantığı’nda Tasımsal Geçerliliğin Saptanışı

Antoine Arnauld ile Pierre Nicole’ün Mantık veya Düşünme Sanatı – daha iyi bilinen takma adıyla Port-Royal Mantığı – kitabı, geleneksel terim mantığının gelişim tarihinde en az iki bakımdan önemli bir aşamayı temsil etmektedir. Birincisi, bu kitap, “eski” mantığı, René Descartes’ın bilgi ve varlık anlayışınca belirlenmiş olan modern felsefeye ayarlı hale getirmekte ve sonraki dönemlerin mantıkçıları için terim mantığının terminolojisini bir dereceye kadar yeniden tanımlamaktadır. (Terminolojiyle ilgili nokta, en belirgin olarak Immanuel Kant’ın mantık yazılarında takip edilebilmektedir.) İkincisi ve daha önemlisi, bu kitap, kategorik tasım kuramında geçerlilik denetimi/saptaması için kullanılan ve Aristoteles’e dayanan standart kanıtkuramsal yaklaşım yerine, Ortaçağlarda geliştirilmiş, daha çok semantik yönelimli olduğu söylenebilecek alternatif bir yaklaşımı ana öğreti olarak sunmaktadır. Bu yaklaşımda, geçerli tasım biçimleri, kategorik önermelerde geçen terimlerin semantik bir özelliği olan dağıtım fikrini merkeze alan az sayıda kural yoluyla tespit edilir. Bu yazının asıl amacı semantik yönelimli bu yaklaşımın özünü Port-Royal örneği üzerinden aydınlatmaktır. Öncelikle, Port-Royal mantıkçılarının ilgili kuralları geçerli tasımsal biçimleri saptamak için nasıl uyguladıkları, bağlantılı bazı kavramların ve sorunların ışığında, ayrıntılı olarak açıklanmaktadır. Sonra da Port-Royal mantıkçılarının (belki de Aristoteles’i izleyerek) altık tasım biçimlerini eleyişlerinin, semantik yönelimli yaklaşımın ruhuna uygun olmayan bir tutum oluşturduğu, dolayısıyla da Port-Royal Mantığı’nın bu yaklaşımın arı olmayan bir örneklemesi olarak görülmesi gerektiği savunulmaktadır.

Antoine Arnauld

Nicknamed “the Grand Arnauld” by his contemporaries, Antoine Arnauld was a central figure in the intellectual life of the seventeenth century. This chapter presents a synthetic overview of the various aspects of Antoine Arnauld’s relationship to Cartesianism: his first exchanges with Descartes (in the Fourth Objections and correspondence), the “Port-Royal Logic”, and the numerous texts that he composed in the last years of his life, especially in his discussions with Malebranche, Leibniz, and the partisans of the doctrine of the “vision in God”. The chapter attempts to specify to what extent there is a “philosophy of Antoine Arnauld” and to determine whether Arnauld should be considered a “Cartesian” thinker.

The Protestant and the Pelagian

One of the longest and most acrimonious polemics in the history of philosophy is between Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche. Their central disagreements are over the nature of ideas, theodicy, and—the topic of this paper—grace. We offer the most in-depth English-language treatment of their discussion of grace to date. Our focus is one particular aspect of the polemic: the power of finite agents to assent to grace. We defend two theses. First, we show that as the debate progresses, the differences between Arnauld and Malebranche become, surprisingly, less pronounced—despite mutual accusations of Pelagianism and Calvinism. Our second thesis is developed to explain the outcome of the first. We argue that the employment of different methodologies to interrogate the relationship between efficacious grace and human power prohibits any possibility of reconciliation between Arnauld and Malebranche.