Lines of research

Lines of research: The UFF Graduate Program in Philosophy (PFI-UFF) is organized into four lines of research. See below for more details, as well as the professors who participate in each line.

Knowledge and Language

The proposal of creating the “Knowledge and Language” line of research linked to the Graduate Program in Philosophy at UFF has as its main purpose to bring together researchers whose research projects focus, above all, on the origins of contemporary philosophy, as well as its developments throughout the 20th century. The research produced by those who participate in this line has long been gathered around themes dear to both the philosophy of language (both in its analytical and pragmatic aspects) and phenomenology (with a predominance of discussions about knowledge and the recommencement of metaphysics). These fields of study have in common, at their origin, the same starting point: the criticism of psychologism – a tendency that gained clearer contours in the last quarter of the 19th century and consists, broadly speaking, of the attempt to base logic, mathematics and philosophy on psychological states and processes. From the aforementioned criticism of psychological positions (through which the distinction between the psychological act of thinking and the ideal content of thought is highlighted), two lines of investigation emerge: the first has its bases in Frege’s mathematical logic, unfolds into the analytical philosophy of language developed by Russell and Wittgenstein, and subsequently finds subdivisions that generate, among other fields of study, pragmatics and logical pluralism; the second emerges with Husserl’s phenomenology and will have developments in the so-called “phenomenological tradition” (Heidegger, Sartre, etc.).

If both lines of investigation arise from the critique of psychologism, the discussions held within them about language and knowledge have repercussions, starting from the second half of the 20th century, on what has become known as “contemporary philosophy of mind”. Therefore, when considering the particularities of the two paths a common point of origin and a common point of arrival can be identified. The identification of such points of tangency gave us additional motivation to create this line of research.

It should also be noted that the “Knowledge and Language” line of research aims to promote, in an organized and integrated manner, production (seminars, publications, panels, etc.) among the program’s professors who participate in this line. It also intends to promote interinstitutional activities between the Graduate Program in Philosophy at UFF and other Graduate Programs, such as PPGF (UFRJ), PPGLM (UFRJ), PPGF (PUC-Rio), etc., to which some of the professors whose research projects bring them closer to this line of research are linked.

Professors
Carlos Diógenes Tourinho
Danilo Marcondes de Souza Filho
Diogo de França Gurgel
Dirk Greimann
Guilherme Wyllie
Julia Telles de Menezes

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

Although the term “aesthetics” was used by Baumgarten in his 1750 courses, the definition of aesthetics as a philosophy of art was only established by German philosophers of the early 19th century, such as Schelling and Hegel. As a theory of art, philosophical aesthetics abandoned the normative model of the tradition based on Aristotle, according to which works or genres were classified and evaluated based on timeless rules and principles, valid for any era. This normative and classificatory tendency prevailed for centuries in the European tradition. In the Renaissance and in French Classicism, a certain interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics became established as the model for the type of theory that constituted, at the same time, an answer to the question of what poetry is and an instruction on how poetry should be written in each of its genres. The poetics written by the French and Italians throughout the 16th and 17th centuries consolidated the tradition, and treatises on other arts, such as painting or sculpture, largely followed this same theoretical model.

With Diderot in France, with Hume and Burke in England, with Lessing and Baumgarten in Germany, the 18th century indicated another way of thinking about both artistic creation and the parameters for evaluating works of art. However, it was only after Kant that a new conception of art was consolidated within philosophy itself, as well as the relationship between artistic works and knowledge or philosophical reflection. The Critique of Judgment, published in 1790, is a milestone for the future developments of philosophical aesthetics. The prominent position occupied by the Third Critique is indisputable: either because the fundamental aesthetic problems found their canonical formulation in it; or because Kant constructed, with the systematic character that is peculiar to him, a definition of the type of experience that characterizes Aesthetics which is distinct from that pertinent to the spheres of knowledge and morality, but which articulates considerations relating to these two domains of philosophy; or, finally, because Kant’s work became an obligatory reference for all philosophers of art who succeeded him in the 19th century. In the Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel states that the third critique “constitutes the starting point for a true apprehension of the artistic beauty” and that the works of the other authors to be commented on are “attempts to fill the gaps in the Kantian conception of art”.

The criticism of Kant by idealist philosophers, in the field of aesthetics, is related to the idea of the superiority of natural beauty over artistic beauty. For Hegel, Kant considered the beauty produced by art to be a mere imitation of the beauty of natural things, thus continuing the classicist tradition. Therefore, against tradition and against Kantian aesthetics, the idealist philosopher proposes the valorization of artistic beauty, thought of as being superior to natural beauty. This proposal was fundamental in 19th century Germany, when Romanticism and Idealism gave artistic creation a meaning linked to the expression of fundamental philosophical questions. Especially since Schelling’s Philosophy of Art and Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, artistic genres have been conceived not as timeless norms, but as historical manifestations in which knowledge is presented in a sensible way. For Schelling, art is the most perfect objective reflection of philosophy; for Hegel, according to a systematic proposal, “the philosophy of art constitutes a necessary chapter in the whole of philosophy, and it can only be understood as a part of this whole”. Thus, opposing both the tendency of classicist poetics, which limited itself to classifying artistic genres according to their form and purpose, and the privilege of natural beauty until Kant, there was a change in the understanding of art, establishing what was called a “science of artistic beauty”, or, in other words, a philosophical aesthetic, which would find its greatest expression in the Hegelian system.

The philosophical reflection on art, however, is not restricted to the scope of modern philosophical aesthetics. The choice of the name “Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art” for this line of research aims precisely to draw attention to this fact. Its members also deal with moments in the history of philosophical reflection on art that cannot be understood based on aesthetic questions and themes in the modern sense. Thus, within the scope of the philosophy of art, these researchers investigate both Aristotle’s reflections on themes such as mimesis and catharsis, as well as the developments of the philosophical theory of art that, in contemporary thought, breaks with fundamental parameters and questions of the aesthetic tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries. The reflection on art of the 20th century radicalizes two tendencies present in the great aesthetic systems of the 19th century: (1) aesthetic experience, which had only gained its autonomy in the 18th century in relation to the two other spheres of experience – that of knowledge and that of morality, to which it had always been subordinated –, begins to be thought of, in the works of philosophers as distinct as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, as a model of experience in general, thus becoming a privileged starting point for a philosophical reflection on the ontological constitution of reality; (2) the valorization of the “world of appearances”, whose ontological dignity is restored, implies a valorization of history, and, breaking with Hegel’s teleological conception, it thinks of history as a human construction capable of being transformed based on the elaboration of other ways of narrating it, distinct from those that predominated since the invention of Western rationality/civilization, of which dialectic is the central theme in the works of thinkers such as Benjamin and Adorno.

The radicalization of these two tendencies in the works of the “philosophers of art” of the 20th century has its origins in the thought of Nietzsche. Although he recovers elements present in the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel in a new perspective, he breaks with their systematic pretension, demanding from its heirs a reflection on another way of presenting philosophical truth. This reflection on the “form of philosophy” will culminate in the choice of the essay as the privileged form for the exercise of contemporary thought and will have as its most immediate consequence a radical approximation of philosophy and Art criticism, thus marking a break with the generic elaborations which are a characteristic of the great aesthetic systems of Modernity in the name of the approach to specific works of art.

Nietzsche also introduces the more radical perception that, within the scope of aesthetics itself, the approach to certain problems was limited by the principles that originally led to the constitution of this discipline. Although he never managed to explicitly develop a systematic theory on the subject in his mature years, the philosopher reveals this concern in works such as On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), which questions the privilege granted to reception to the detriment of creation in Kant’s Third Critique. This spirit has recently encouraged several thinkers to reflect critically on the foundations of aesthetics, even leading to the conclusion that, as a derived and inessential relationship with beauty, it should be completely overcome, as was the case with Martin Heidegger.

The contemporary rupture with the fundamental questions of modern aesthetics and its systematic claim also provide a recovery, in a new, more essayistic perspective, of the themes elaborated by classical philosophy. It is true that, although derived from aisthesis, sensation or perception, the word aesthetics and the corresponding concept are not found in the Greek reflections on art. It is also true that the Greek experience with art did not delimit an autonomous field of objects nor a type of experience distinct from the others. This does not imply, however, the non-existence of a philosophy of art in ancient Greece, but rather a historical and conceptual specificity that can be interpreted in light of a perspective distinct from that which led, in Modernity, to the emergence of aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical discipline. Even though Aristotle’s Poetics particularly analyzes tragedy, it should no longer be treated in a Horatian manner as a simple manual for the composition of certain works according to timeless laws, but rather as the first philosophy of art to treat the artistic phenomenon positively, something of vital ethical and pedagogical importance.

Professors
Alexandre da Silva Costa
Bernardo Barros Coelho de Oliveira
Patrick E. C. Pessoa
Pedro Süssekind
Tereza Cristina B. Calomeni
Vladimir Vieira

Ethics and Political Philosophy

If we believe in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, we could attribute to Socrates the role of initiator of moral philosophy, that is, of a knowledge whose conditions of possibility rest on the methodical establishment, by inductive means, of universal definitions (or concepts) of virtues such as courage or justice, for example. But in fact, as we know, Aristotle himself would be given the title of founder of a moral science as an autonomous discipline, with its own method and object, detached from the basis of the metaphysical speculations of Plato’s eidos: ethics or the science of ethos (understood in its double Greek sense, of habit, constancy in action, and also character). Aristotelian ethics is an authentic science of praxis as it detaches moral knowledge from the domains of theoretical knowledge itself (associated with contemplative activity), assigning it, so to speak, the subordinate position of a knowledge that serves the communitarian activity of men. Hence, moral theory itself, in Aristotle, constitutes a part of a broader domain that embraces it and realizes it in what constitutes the properly human good: politics.

In this sense, if the Socratic teaching consisted of examining men themselves rather than concepts – leading them to an understanding of what they are –, and, in turn, if in Plato the Socratic morality of virtue had become an ontology of Good, it was up to Aristotle to circumscribe the properly human good based on the double definition of “man” as zôon politikón and zôon lógon ékhon, that is, a being who achieves his own purpose in political life and in the faculty of language, which is linked to common law and not so much to the sounds of speech (while it is up to the animal voice to signify the pleasurable and the painful, it is up to the human logos to show the advantageous and the harmful, the just and the unjust).

Since then, from Socratic-Platonic morality to the delimitation of the political status of the human being in Aristotle’s practical philosophy, the relations between philosophy and its claims to truth, moral science (or ethics) and politics, as well as between contemplative life and active life (and even in the work of the Stagirite, the final word concerns the praise of the bios theoretikós), have not ceased to raise a myriad of questions that ended up forging the conceptual instruments of our moral and political thought, and to inform our common practices.

Therefore, if we take into account the history of the reception of our tradition of moral and political thought, a particularly important chapter is the continuation, already in Late Antiquity, of the praise of the contemplative life in Augustine’s De civitate Dei, or even, in Against the Academics, Augustine’s attack on the principles of the academic skepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades. Such elements shaped, for the Middle Ages, the common idea that the most elevated, dignified human activity should take into account the imperishable kingdom of Christianity instead of the vulnerable worldly citadel, articulating it with the elaboration of a theory of divine illumination.

In this sense, Augustinian Neoplatonism extends a tradition that would only experience its setback in the early Quattrocento, a time when the traditional models of life of medieval societies, based on the praise of the contemplative life, would be shaken, among other reasons, by the “rediscovery” of the classics of antiquity (especially the political writings of the Roman consul Marcus Tullius Cicero by the humanist thinker Francesco Petrarca), contributing decisively to the recovery of the dignity and centrality of life dedicated to political matters. As for skepticism, whose sources were also recovered by Renaissance humanism, its reemergence, after approximately a millennium of its disappearance, finds one of its most fertile soils in the appropriation of Pyrrhonism and academic skepticism carried out by Michel de Montaigne, giving way to a moral skepticism that has the opposition between “culture” and “nature” as its touchstone. Furthermore, the discovery of the New World and the first contacts between Europeans and natives of the newly conquered territories raised questions regarding the importance of customs in the constitution of moral values and the right to conquest, involving authors such as Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria, both from the 16th century.

To this same panorama, one should also add the impact provided by the work of Niccolo Machiavelli, heir to Renaissance civic humanism, whose thought reflects the consequences of a long process of secularization of political reason: the autonomy granted to political activity by the author of The Prince represents its emancipation from the entire theological and moral horizon of the Christian regime, already constituting a modern political science, that is, a knowledge emancipated from every speculative system, in which the State constitutes an absolute foundation and the very thing of politics.

In a different way, one can consider that the modernity of our political thought only comes to light in the 17th century, especially in the figure of Thomas Hobbes, when the central Aristotelian notions of zôon politikón and koinônia politikè – the latter understood as the political community, as the telos or purpose of the human being in his condition as a political animal – are significantly shaken in favor of a constitutive theory of political sovereignty and natural and civil law. Thus, authors as diverse as Thomas Hobbes himself, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, to name just the most famous, have in common the rejection of the Aristotelian idea of koinônia politikè (the political community understood as a natural given) to close ranks in the affirmation that civil society, or politics, is the artificial product of a civil pact or a social contract through which men leave their natural situation of apoliticality.

If, however, one finds the modernity of our political thought in the articulation between a theory of sovereignty and a science of law which, combined, aim at a justification of the State (the ultimate foundation of political power) with a view to justifying the duty of obedience itself, in terms of our moral thought the ethics par excellence of modern times is Kantian formalism. With Kant, as we know, the execution of the transcendental philosophical program results in a deontological morality in which the objective a priori laws of practical reason are identifiable with the sphere of unconditional duties in the form of the categorical imperative, in a radical affirmation of the self-determination of the subject and the independence of the will that finds two of its most explosive challenges in Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx – the first contradicts the Kantian idea of a pure will determined by reason and conceives the terrain of Sittlichkeit as a paradigmatic place both for the critique of traditionally consecrated moral values and for the creation of new values capable of affirming and enhancing life, the only criterion for evaluating the value of values; the second, in turn, “unmasks” the formalism of Kantian morality as a false universality that naturalizes class domination, illusorily elevating the bourgeois individual to the condition of an abstract universal.

From the play of influences and articulations around the legacy of our history and of our thoughts, it is possible to discern some of the options that characterize the impasses of ethics and politics in contemporary thought. Thus, the following belong to the contemporary ambience, among other trends:

(a) the recurring attempts to deepen the critique of the “empire of reason”, or to denounce a degenerated reason in a planning rationality, by bringing together the approaches of Nietzsche, Marx, and Sigmund Freud, in order to show that their respective procedures of demystification—in the form of the genealogy of morality, the critique of capitalist logic, and the clinic—constitute the ground for our growing distrust of the ideals of autonomy, freedom, individuality, and universality (this initiative, to varying degrees and in a variety of combinations, includes Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and, in general, the first generation of the so-called Frankfurt School);

(b) efforts to revalidate the authentic meaning of “Marx’s Marxism” in order to recover the potential of its political critique and its project of social revolution, carried out especially against Stalinism and the astringed forms of pseudo-Marxism that sterilize and reify dialectics for repressive and/or apologetic purposes, resulting in a vulgar or naturalist dogmatism and materialism oriented towards economism (as is the case of the controversies involving the works of György Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Louis Althusser);

(c) in opposition to the derogation of enlightened reason and its emancipatory ideals, a set of attempts that seek to insist on the validity of ethical and political projects to some extent related to the aspirations of Kantian universalism and the normative concept of public sphere with a view to establishing a post-secular public reason (a lineage to which, among others and despite their completely non-coinciding perspectives, Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls belong);

(d) those who seek a return to the experiences and operating devices of antiquity and/or the theological tradition – whether from the understanding of the present time as a space of forgetfulness of politics, or through the genealogical study of the classical categories of law and theology – in order to then outline a critique of our modernity that seeks to reveal the paradigmatic aspects of our institutional culture and our political practices (as is the case, respectively, of the works of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben);

To this brief map of contemporary ethical and political thought, which does not intend to close the question nor constitute a rigid scheme, one could also add the central intuitions of Martin Heidegger (with his analysis of Dasein and the theme of the impersonal), Walter Benjamin (especially in relation to the theme of reine Gewalt), Carl Schmitt (with his decisionist theory of sovereignty) and the aforementioned Foucault and Deleuze (with the topics of micropolitics, discipline and control societies, biopolitics and the aesthetics of existence), among others.
In this sense, the proponents of this line of research intend to circumscribe their investigations based on thematic axes in which tradition and its dialogue with contemporaneity are collected as the critical repository of our time.

Professors
André Constantino Yazbek
Carla Rodrigues
Felipe de Oliveira Castelo Branco
Fernando de Sá Moreira
Mariana de Toledo Barbosa
Tereza Cristina B. Calomeni

History of Philosophy

We can approach in many different ways the importance of studying the history of philosophy. The most basic approach would be: it is not possible to simply do philosophy today without some reference to the History of Philosophy. The acute awareness of the heritage character of the philosophical material that still occupies the current philosopher has made it an unavoidable element. Philosophy itself, in its plurality of forms irreducible to one another, is rather the unity of an ancient Greek name copied in Latin, and from there copied in all modern European languages, and which has echoed for more than two millennia. There is no philosophical speculation that does not start from the achievements and problems inherited from the philosophical tradition. Knowing the history of philosophy is a fundamental condition for the philosopher who seeks to advance philosophical knowledge, as well as knowing the current stage of investigation of the problems and authors in his field.

On a second level, the history of philosophy itself can become for the philosopher an object of investigation in itself, whether in favor of a generic reflection on the philosophy of history (every history of philosophy presupposes a philosophy of history), or through the inevitable emergence of multiple specific, dated and localized problems of affiliations, transmissions, influences, interpretations, appropriations, assimilations, syntheses, syncretisms, resignifications, replicas, translations, versions, editions, citations, paraphrases, glosses. From a certain point onwards, every specific question of philosophy becomes a question of historical legacy.
On a third level, “history of philosophy” refers to the content of a specific legacy, that which for the modern and contemporary Westerner is in itself “history”, is in itself his past, although a past that is still in force in many ways, and for that very reason interesting. The Greco-Latin legacy, the study of which is traditionally understood as “humanities” and around which the West has always oriented its teaching and learning practices, must itself be the object of constant study and constant transmission, so that it remains alive in today’s culture, helping it in its present and future challenges, including those of overcoming Eurocentrism, of which it is itself the foundation.

The beginning of this legacy inevitably points to Homer, of whom Plato says in a proverbial tone that he “educated Greece”. And the whole question of the irruption of the first philosophy always remains linked to that of archaic and classical poetry, to Homeric, Hesiodic, lyrical, tragic, and comic poetry. This plurality of early philosophers can be organized into a series of affiliations and schools, but also as a bloc, for example, as “pre-Socratics”, since Socrates is given a special position as a watershed. But Socrates can also be seen as just another link in the Ionian trunk, a disciple of Archelaus, from the circle of Anaxagoras. This gives rise to the possibility of proposing different framework schemes for the multiple philosophers of the 6th, 5th and 4th centuries BC, according to the difference in treatment of historical sources.

Furthermore, Socrates can also be seen as this specific pre-Socratic, who is the sophist, teacher of the youth destined for politics, with his own persuasive discourse, contemporary with other great sophists, whose importance in the cultural life of his time Plato records in his dialogues, as much as his devotion to Socrates. Perhaps sophistry is the good watershed between earlier physics and the later reaction of Plato and Aristotle, whose philosophies are only well understood if understood as responses to sophistry. In any case, Socrates is also a good candidate for a watershed moment in later philosophy. Plato’s Academy can be considered just one of several Socratic schools, the one that has the best fortune in terms of transmitting the legacy, and from which the Lyceum and the Peripatetic tradition still unfold, but several other schools, less fortunate in that regard in the eyes of the modern historian, and, for this reason, called by him “minor Socratics”, also claim Socratic paternity. From at least two of them, the Cynic and the Cyrenaic, two of the most important traditions of the Hellenistic period flourish, the Stoic and the Epicurean. The skeptical tradition is also linked to a Socratic school, the Megarian school, which radicalizes Socrates’ dialectical method, producing the antitheses that the skeptic will use in his arguments.

The five traditions that emerged at the dawn of the Hellenistic period, Academy, Lyceum, Portico, Garden and the Pyrrhonian tradition, still under the Alexandrian empire, spanned the Roman period and underwent all kinds of transformations, according to the historical peculiarities of each moment. Each of these traditions knows an ancient phase (in Athens), a middle phase (in Rhodes, Pergamum, Alexandria), a new phase (in Rome), one part speaking Greek until the end, another speaking Latin, one part remaining pagan until the end, another part Christian in its late phase, although both are Neoplatonic in the end.

It is from this complex cultural universe that the lexicon and grammar of all subsequent philosophy comes. The process of emergence and growing prevalence of Christianity, rooted in the ancient world, and which culminates in the Christian Middle Ages, is an example of this complexity, since in this process this Greco-Latin lexicon and grammar were absorbed by an eschatological movement of the Jewish tradition, marked by the rupture of the coming of the supposed messiah, forming an eminently theological, that is, rational, tradition. Christianity, in its first centuries, had the need to discuss with the dominant elite of the Roman Empire in order to establish itself as a legitimate religious alternative. In addition to the clear religious syncretism that took place at the birth of Christianity, it was through a radical attempt to rationalize the dogmas of its faith that Christianity coined its logical, ethical, physical and metaphysical systems. Thus, one cannot think about the Christian religion without thinking about Christian theology (rational investigation of God and faith), just as one cannot think about Christian theology without thinking about Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Hellenistic philosophy in general, the Arab influence in the reintroduction of Aristotelianism in the West, the Jewish influence that operated in the Middle Ages, in addition to the great syncretism between the Greco-Roman and Hebrew-Christian branches that operated since Antiquity. In this sense, medieval philosophical research requires a deep dialogue with its historical influences.

Furthermore, it is through this dialogue that, on the one hand, the Middle Ages keep ancient tradition alive and, on the other, create both the very idea of Antiquity and that of a “Middle Ages” separating ancient culture from its revival in proto-modernity: the Renaissance signifies the elaboration of the great historical axis through which we continue to think about the development of the Western tradition, in games of approximations and separations, continuities and ruptures, which only make sense in relation to each other and to the ideological soil from which they spring, even though their narratives are still often perceived by us as feats, as archetypal and establishing. But if ancient philosophy is appropriated and instrumentalized by Christian philosophy, if medieval Latin or architecture will be accused of barbarity in the Renaissance, and Modernity seeks to correct the lack of practicality and method of Renaissance knowledge, it is necessary to remember that it was the process of reception underway that kept the cultural forces involved alive: transmission is constitution; the classical is, in short, the fiction of origin and model, but one should not overlook its value of truth as a symptom of the deep and powerful spiritual currents that carry us and make our history.

One can see, therefore, that since Plato and Aristotle, the first historians of philosophy (and, not just as an anecdote, the latter has been called the first Neoplatonist), philosophical practice is inseparable from a metadiscursive and diachronic consideration of its own doing, and that the hermeneutic operation characteristic of philosophizing at any time and place cannot do without a complex operation of deconstruction of the various layers of interpretation superimposed throughout history, a task to which the explicit cultivation of humanistic studies within academia greatly contributes.

In our program, a group of professors focuses on historical-philosophical research, studying not only authors and schools from a given historical period in their synchronic dimension, but also issues related to the process of legacy and appropriation in their diachronic dimension. Thus, in his current research, Professor Alexandre Costa studies the relationship between Greek mythopoetics and the writings of the first philosophers, aiming to clarify the literary dialogue between philosophers and poets in archaic and classical antiquity, from Homer to Plato and Aristotle, including the Pre-Socratics and the sophists. Luís Felipe Bellintani Ribeiro works on themes linked to ancient metaphysics, notably Plato and Aristotle, and to what would appear as a counterpoint or antipode: pre-Socratic physics, sophistry, tragedy, the philosophy of the minor Socratics. Marcus Reis Pinheiro studies authors from the Hellenistic period, such as the Stoics, as well as pagan Neoplatonic authors, such as Plotinus, and Christians, such as Origen and Evagrius, inserting them into the classical Greek tradition. Guilherme Wyllie develops his research focused on logical elements that underpin metaphysics and theology in Ramon Llull, aiming to fill an important gap in the history of medieval logic, understood from the perspective of contemporary theories of language. Professor Paulo Faitanin, in turn, studies Thomism not only in its configuration in medieval thought, but also in its relations, whether with the work of Aristotle, in the ancient world, or with what could be called current Thomism. Professor Celso Azar works with Renaissance authors to define in what senses one can speak of a Renaissance philosophy and thus rediscover its place in the history of Western thought. Professor Pedro Sussekind researches the philosophical influences of stoicism, Machiavellianism and modern skepticism in the work of William Shakespeare.

Professors
Alexandre da Silva Costa
Alice Bitencourt Haddad
Celso Martins Azar Filho
Danilo Marcondes de Souza Filho
Fabrina Magalhães
Guilherme Wyllie
Luis Felipe Bellintani Ribeiro
Marcus Reis Pinheiro
Pedro Süssekind