Nuno Venturinha

Nuno Venturinha
Universidade NOVA de Lisboa | NOVA · Department of Philosophy

PhD Habil
Head of Department

About

80
Publications
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Introduction
I am Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Nova University of Lisbon. I taught as a visiting lecturer at the University of Lisbon and as a visiting professor at the Universities of São Paulo and Valencia. I have also been a visiting researcher on various occasions at the Universities of Bergen, Innsbruck, Oxford, Cambridge and Helsinki. My current research concentrates on issues belonging to epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of religion, especially in Wittgenstein.

Publications

Publications (80)
Article
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This text consists of replies to commentaries by Michael Williams, Duncan Pritchard and Javier González de Prado on my book Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018).
Article
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This paper outlines the major topics addressed in my book Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018), anticipates some possible misunderstandings and discusses issues that warrant further investigation.
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This text brings together replies to three commentaries on my Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018) written by Modesto Gómez-Alonso, Anna Boncompagni and Marcin Lewiński.
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In this paper, I first introduce the main motivations for the internalism/externalism dichotomy in epistemology and explore different accounts of epistemic justification, mostly externalist, arising from Dretske’s relevant alternatives theory of knowledge, namely the reliabilism of Goldman and Nozick, the contextualism of Cohen and DeRose, which is...
Article
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This paper focuses on Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s concept of “hinges”, as presented in her recent book Certainty in Action: Wittgenstein on Language, Mind and Epistemology. Moyal-Sharrock’s “Hinge Epistemology” proposes that basic certainties, or hinges, resist the regress problem of epistemic justification, serving as ungroun...
Chapter
This essay takes as its point of departure a remark written by Wittgenstein in his secret code on 8 December 1914. It belongs to the second of the surviving wartime notebooks and concentrates on Nietzsche. There Wittgenstein says that he is ‘strongly impressed’ by Nietzsche’s ‘hostility to Christianity’ in works such as Twilight of the Idols and Th...
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Este artigo aborda a reação de Frege a Kant e questiona uma influente interpretação, defendida por Jim Conant, de acordo com a qual Frege subscreve os princípios essenciais da filosofia de Kant, nomeadamente a sua conceção antipsicologista avant la lettre da lógica pura. Eu defendo que existem diferenças profundas de ponto de vista entre eles, as q...
Chapter
Die Verbindung von ›Glauben‹ und ›Wissen‹ hat W. in unterschiedlichen Phasen seines Philosophierens untersucht. Die erste substanzielle Behandlung dieser Begriffe findet sich im Big Typescript, genauer: im Abschnitt »Glauben. Gründe des Glaubens« des Kapitels »Erwartung.
Article
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This précis articulates the main themes of my book Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018).
Article
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This paper aims to provide an overall picture of what lies at the heart of my book Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (2018) although the examination ranges even further afield. Section 1 contrasts epistemic contextualism with what I call context-sensitive objectivism (CSO). Section 2 discusses a major strand of thoug...
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I would like first to express my deepest gratitude to all the contributors to this book symposium for taking the time to read my Description of Situations and for raising so many interesting questions and objections. I am sure that they deserve much more attention and thought than they can receive within the limited space of these replies, which wi...
Article
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This book symposium comprises a précis of Nuno Venturinha’s Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018) together with four critical commentaries on different aspects of the book by Marcelo Carvalho, João Vergílio Gallerani Cuter, Marcos Silva and Darlei Dall’Agnol, and the author’s replies.
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There has been a recent revival of interest in the relationship between Wittgenstein and von Wright’s Varieties of Goodness. In this paper, I discuss some early versions of the published text which make clear that Wittgenstein’s influence is indeed behind many claims made in the Varieties. On the one hand, there is a reaction to the Tractarian tran...
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'Philosophy in times of crisis' by Nuno Venturinha (translated by Robert Vinten from Portuguese original) is available here: https://horasis.org/philosophy-in-times-of-crisis/ The article is a critical take on Giorgio Agamben's recent pronouncements about the coronavirus crisis.
Article
Edited by Volker A. Munz and Bernhard Ritter, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2017,pp. xxv+366, £83.25 (hb), ISBN: 978-1-119-16633-7
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1. Introduction Scepticism has always been a problem for epistemology. The last decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of some innovative approaches to knowledge and justification claiming that they can allay sceptical worries. One of the most influential of these is epistemic contextualism, which builds on ‘relevant alternatives’ theories l...
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David Stern and his fellow editors, Brian Rogers and Gabriel Citron, have done a remarkable job in editing Moore's notes from Wittgenstein's lectures. The material is not wholly original but it is definitely worth looking at. Moore himself had published three articles in Mind in 1954–55 containing ‘Wittgenstein's Lectures in 1930–33’, which were la...
Chapter
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This paper concentrates on Wittgenstein's conception of translation in his early and later philosophy, with a particular focus on the distinction between sense-for-sense and word-for-word method. In his revision of the English translation of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein clearly defends a sense-for-sense approach, something that has not always been w...
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Having been influenced by authors from different backgrounds, Wittgenstein’s work discusses important issues belonging to religious epistemology and provides new insights into interreligious understanding. If in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and notebooks from the First World War it is possible to find a revival of mysticism, Wittgenstein’s so...
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This article explores different faces of the concept of assent that can be found in the history of Western philosophy. The development of this concept coincides with the shaping of epistemology and its vocabulary, with assent, belief, faith and holding for true sometimes appearing as synonyms of one another. It is not my intention here to go into d...
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In this introductory piece I summarize the aims and contents of the special section on Wittgenstein and Applied Epistemology, which consists of a selection of papers presented at the 6 th Symposium of the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Society that took place at the Nova University of Lisbon in 2017. After explaining the sense in which “applied...
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This paper explores central themes of Duncan Pritchard’s epistemology intimately related to the Wittgensteinian idea of a “hinge epistemology”. The first section calls attention to the eminently empirical character of our “hinges”. The second section focuses on Pritchard’s notion of “arational hinge commitments”, more specifically his distinction b...
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This paper explores Wittgenstein’s lifelong interest in music. The first part offers an overview of the various authors mentioned throughout Wittgenstein’s corpus, particularly in the posthumous publications Culture and Value and Movements of Thought. The second part specifically examines some of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Beethoven focusing on the...
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This paper contains a historical introduction and an edition of a hitherto unpublished manuscript of Wittgenstein's that was found among G. H. von Wright's materials kept in Helsinki. The document concentrates on British anti-Nazi propaganda and was written in 1945. Wittgenstein's criticism of this kind of propaganda, such as that promoted by Rober...
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5.1 Why a thought is invisible for Frege: Travis on the abstractedness that can be extracted from our “representing-as”—Thoughts and concepts: the “conceptual” as a referential domain, which does not possess the objectivity of the “non-conceptual”—The intermediation made by the “representing-as” as a form of judging—Travis’ rejection of any interna...
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2.1 The external and the internal world—There is more in the universe than objects and states of consciousness—Animal and human certitudes—Sosa on “animal knowledge” and “reflective knowledge”—What is peculiar to man: cultural historicity as a meta-competence. 2.2 History as science versus history as worldview—Unreliability of our information sourc...
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12.1. Ricœur and the distinction between ethical goodness and moral normativity: how one does not imply the other—The intimacy of ethics contrasts with the publicity of morality—Acquiring moral norms and ethical principles: both work in a context-sensitive way—Ethical formality as empty: morality provides the content for an application of ethics—Ac...
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9.1 Kant’s correspondence theory: the sensitive nature of cognitions that must be assumed—Space and time as fundamental intuitions—Our spatial and temporal representations do not come about by the sum of the different spaces and times we experience: their apriority—Why this does not mean, for Kant, to advance any metaphysical thesis. 9.2 The aprior...
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4.1 Bolzano and Frege—The rejection of psychologism in logic—Can there be just “signs of signs”?—Frege’s notions of “sense”, “reference” and “representation”—Our images of things as psychological—Relativity of any representations: their problematic subjectivity. 4.2 The objectivity of Frege’s “thoughts”—Importance of context—Truth-values and verifi...
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10.1 Husserl’s version of transcendental subjectivism—Challenging the self-evidence of Descartes’ ego—Factual recognitions and ontological claims: suspending all non-self-evident claims, including modal ones—Being as an appearance of validity—The decisive maintenance of the phenomenological suspension—Our natural connectionism seems to undermine a...
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1.1 Interrelatedness of words—The pronoun “I”: its systematicity—Personal identity and otherness as proto-beliefs. 1.2 Affirmative and negative sentences—The infinity that is abstractly excluded when we affirm something—Impossibility of a representational vacuum—What context allows us to conceive as meaningful—Generalization of descriptions: our mu...
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6.1 There is an apparent freedom of the will—Our actions presuppose free decisions—Is there a natural necessity in the world?—Feldman’s rejection of a contextualist solution to the problem of free will: determinism and scepticism—Wright on even-handedness and factivity—Contextualism at work: Lewis’ infallibilist view and Williams’ concerns. 6.2 Ari...
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7.1 Theoretical fragility and natural solidity of our situation—Evidence as immediate—Does it make sense to seek for a justification of evidence?—Wittgenstein and the indefeasibility of our “system of evidence”—Two kinds of doubt: their local and global epistemological effects—Certainty and security—Greco on the epistemic status of “contextually ba...
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11.1 The outer world as an ingredient of the inner world—Reconsideration of what must be naturally assumed: levels of belief—Husserl’s retrieval of Leibniz’s concept of “monad”—A plain admission: monadic otherness—Influence of Heidegger’s philosophical anthropology—Limitations of the Husserlian idea of an “open community of monads” for a social epi...
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8.1 Cartesian foundations: the role of doubt—The assumption of the ego cogito as minimal evidence—Why our faculties, including the sensitive one, can be reduced to mental faculties—Descartes’ goal: justifying the internal experience through an external order—God’s qualities: significance of existence—Difference between “formal reality” and “objecti...
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3.1 Bolzano’s understanding of the matter—Some classic views: Aquinas, Kant and Wittgenstein—Lewis’ criticism—Rapports between our cognition and the world: a question of justification—Rejection of an anthropocentric position—Varieties of intelligence. 3.2 The lack of a comprehensive perceptual apparatus or integration scheme in animals – Knowing an...
Book
This book approaches classic epistemological problems from a contextualist perspective. The author takes as his point of departure the fact that we are situated beings, more specifically that every single moment in our lives is already given within the framework of a specific context in the midst of which we understand ourselves and what surrounds...
Article
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This review discusses Uffelmann’s thesis that Wittgenstein’s conception of grammar underwent important changes in the different phases of his philosophizing. I claim that if we do not accentuate the shifts in approach and terminology that naturally exist in Wittgenstein’s thought, we can see that grammar and logic go hand in hand all along the way,...
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In this paper I begin by scrutinizing classic approaches to the question of agrammaticality, with a particular focus on Frege and the early Wittgenstein, and try to show that a further step is needed in order to adequately address this topic. I then focus on the later Wittgenstein’s treatment of nonsense-poems and claim that the failure of the Phil...
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In this very first contribution to the new section "Replies", Venturinha adresses some concerns of general interest regarding intrerpretative discussions of Wittgenstein's work, in the form of a reply to James W. Hearne and Marcos Silva. The section aims at opening up for constructive discussion on themes which have arisen in earlier issues of Nord...
Article
In this note I address two issues in Susan Edwards-McKie’s recent paper “The Cosmic Fragment: Härte des Logischen Zwangs und Unendliche Möglichkeit. Nachlass discoveries and Wittgenstein’s conception of generality and the infinite”. The first has to do with a “von Wright error” that Edwards- McKie found and that I show to have been ultimately corre...
Article
This paper explores the epistemological problem of holding something to be true while building on Wittgenstein's later philosophy. I claim that it was Frege's criticism of psychologism in logic that gave a boost to Wittgenstein's reflections on this issue, an issue that already occupies a central place in Kant's theory of knowledge. I shall endeavo...
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This paper compares the dynamic processes in Fernando Pessoa’s poetic work with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim of dynamism in philosophy. Making extensive use of their Nachlässe, the paper explores the idea of dynamic thought and its literary expression. I argue that both writers left unpublished the majority of what they wrote exactly because dynamic...
Book
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is arguably one of the most influential books of the 20th century. It threw a new light on the workings of language and mind, contributing significantly to the understanding of human knowledge. Featuring essays by internationally renowned scholars, this book explores the development of Wittgenstein's idea...
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Cet article vise à examiner la critique wittgensteinienne d’Héraclite et des idées de ce dernier selon lesquelles « tout coule » et « on ne peut entrer deux fois dans la même rivière ». Dans la première section, j’examinerai les sources et les interprétations traditionnelles de ces idées. Dans la seconde section, je discuterai le lien établi par Da...
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As is well known, Wittgenstein withdrew from philosophy after the completion of his Tractatus, only resuming work on it when he returned to Cambridge at the beginning of 1929. Then he began to write MS105, the first of a series of "volumes". From 2 to 15 February, following the method used in his 1914-17 notebooks (MSS101-103), he wrote down remark...
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When Wittgenstein died in 1951, he had published only one philosophical book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, he left behind a voluminous collection of papers, generally known as the Nachlass. According to his will, Rush Rhees, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright were given ‘the copyright in all [these] unpublished writings and also...
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In The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock writes that the book ‘stems from the conviction that there is a third Wittgenstein, a Wittgenstein who went beyond what he had achieved in the Investigations’ (2004, p. 1). As stated in her introduction, the aim of the anthology is to ‘supersede the traditional biparti...
Book
"Expressões da Analogia" é um tema suficientemente vasto e abrangente para convocar investigadores das mais diversas áreas, desde a filosofia às ciências e às artes. Com efeito, esta variedade reflecte-se no conjunto de conferências nas quais estão presentes abordagens provenientes de diferentes áreas científicas e de diferentes pontos de vista, de...
Conference Paper
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Book
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O tradicional problema do conhecimento do singular mantém-se hoje em dia: o impasse assinalado por Aristóteles prevalece na maioria das ciências actuais que lidam com casos particulares, contingentes, imprevisíveis, que escapam ao enquadramento nos modelos categoriais. Daí a necessidade de repensar modelos e estratégias aplicáveis ao caso prático,...

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