Obras de arte compósitas

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Composite works of art : philosophy of art after Plato and Aristotle

Publication . Castro, Tomás N.; Tamen, Miguel Bénard da Costa; Figueiredo, João Ricardo Raposo

How art can be talked about is both an ancient and a contemporary issue. This thesis examines how Plato and Aristotle talked about art, exploring the possibilities and limits of their philosophical positions on how reality is organized and on how parts of it can be conceptualized. Preserving the theoretical framework of these authors while the original target of their discussions is broadened out, this argument describes what happens when someone engages in art talk. This activity involves composition, not as a task of causing changes in what and how things are made of, but as a composite work of explaining what is being made of things. Art talk is an activity that makes descriptions of the importance that certain aspects of objects and actions have for a person or a community, and so it attempts to explain that relation and how attention is being paid to them. Making sense of things requires constant specification and justification, which is the composite work of conceptualizing art.

2023-01-04Doctoral thesis

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Remarks on the sole fragment of Aristotle’s lost On Prayer

Publication . Castro, Tomás N.

The only extant fragment of Aristotle’s lost treatise On Prayer [Περὶ εὐχῆς] is an excerpt from Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s On Heavens [De caelo] (ad II.12, 292b10; ed. CAG VII; p. 485.19-22 Heiberg). Simplicius’ text, however, has been poorly edited for a long time, with several textual problems being spread unconsciously by the majority of the editors of the Aristotelian fragments, and only recently the text began to be properly clarified. The fragment 49 Rose3 was repeatedly exploited to sustain and to endow with antiquity and authority theological readings with Neoplatonist features, and there is a place where the establishment of the critical text is of the utmost importance for a research in quest for the possibility of understanding God and its intelligibility. This paper discusses the context of Simplicius’ testimony, the idiosyncrasies of the textual problems, the structure of the fragment, its lexicon (e.g. ὑπέρ and ἐπέκεινα), and the hermeneutical challenges it poses regarding its authenticity and interpretation within the Aristotelian corpus.

2019Journal article

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