Não viajo sem livros, nem na paz, nem na guerra… pois não se pode dizer o quanto eu me repouso e demoro nessa consideração de que eles estão ao meu lado para me darem prazer quando preciso e em reconhecer quanta ajuda eles me trazem à vida. É a melhor provisão que tenho encontrado para esta viagem humana e sinto uma pena extrema das pessoas inteligentes que deles se privam.
Michel de Montaigne, in ‘Dos Três Comércios’
No Citador
Podia ser «apanhadores de berbigão». Mas «catadores» dá mais ideia de «catar», procurar, esgaravatar em busca de…
Cocklepickers, Blackrock, Dunkalk Bay, Louth, Ireland
“The Cocklepickers” was installed and unveiled on the promenade in December 2018. The piece was created by local artist Micheál McKeown and comprises a woven stainless steel group of two cocklepickers from the early 1900s on a sculpted concrete base resembling the surface of Blackrock beach.
“Cocklepickers were once synonymous with Blackrock and were a familiar sight on the beach. Cocklepicking can be traced back to medieval times as is evident from the middens and mounds of cockle shells still to be found in the area. During the famine (1845-1852), cockles were the only source of food for many of the indigenous families of the Blackrock area, who owe their survival to them.”
Para os interessados, há um portal de identificação de Aves de Portugal [esta lista compreende 465 espécies de aves e está apresentada por ordem alfabética]. Os nossos selos retratam algumas das espécies.
Foto aqui
Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein nasceu em Viena, dia 26 de abril de 1889 e morreu em Cambridge, dia 29 de abril de 1951. Austríaco, naturalizado britânico, foi um dos principais autores da filosofia do século XX. Estudou engenharia aeronáutica em Berlim e Manchester e depois, por influência de Frege, virou-se para a filosofia. Foi para Cambridge, onde conheceu Bertrand Russel. No início da I Guerra Mundial, alistou-se voluntariamente nas forças austro-húngaras e foi enviado para a frente russa, em 1916. Feito prisioneiro em 1918, em Itália. O Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus foi escrito nos anos da guerra, parcialmente nas trincheiras. Depois da guerra, passou cerca de dez anos como professor numa escola primária e jardineiro num mosteiro numa pequena aldeia austríaca. Regressou à filosofia, integrou o Círculo de Viena, voltou a Cambridge por influência de Ramsden, em 1929. Apresentou o Tractatus como tese doutoral e tornou-se professor no Trinity College. Entre 1936 e 1937, viveu na Noruega, começando a escrever o que viria a ser Philosophical Investigations. Em 1939 foi apontado para a cátedra de Filosofia, em Cambridge, onde ficaria até 1947. Entre 1948 e 1951, dividiu o seu tempo entre Dublin e Cambridge – finalizou Philosophical Investigations em 1944 e On Certainty em 1951.
O seu pensamento é geralmente dividido em duas fases – a que se costuma chamar primeiro Wittgenstein e segundo Wittgenstein. A cada um desses períodos corresponde uma obra – na primeira fase, o Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, datado de 1922, mais centrado nas condições lógicas a que o pensamento e a linguagem atendem para poder representar o mundo; à segunda fase, pertence a obra Investigações Filosóficas, publicadas postumamente, em 1953, e em que Wittgenstein avança sobre temas da filosofia da mente.
Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Biography and Bibliography
Sentimos que, mesmo depois de serem respondidas todas as questões científicas possíveis, os problemas da vida permanecem completamente intactos.
Os limites do meu conhecimento são os limites do meu mundo.
A dificuldade é compreender a falta de fundamento das nossas convicções…
Filosofar é como tentar descobrir o segredo de um cofre: cada pequeno ajuste no mecanismo parece levar a nada. Apenas quando tudo entra no lugar a porta se abre.Humor não é um estado de espírito, mas uma visão de mundo.
Born in 1889, Wittgenstein came from an extraordinarily wealthy but tragically dysfunctional Viennese family. He made friends and enemies with equal alacrity. He travelled widely. As well as regular journeys between England and Vienna, he visited and lived for periods in Ireland, Norway, Russia, the US and, in the UK, Cambridge, Manchester, Swansea and Newcastle. At various times, he was an engineer, a sculptor, a photographer, a school teacher, a hospital technician and, of course, a fellow in philosophy at Cambridge. He knew almost every great figure in the intellectual culture of the first half of the twentieth century. He gave away his fortune and, several times, gave up philosophy. He published only one book in his lifetime – the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and claimed that this work solved all the (essential) problems of philosophy. But his later work appears to disown much of it. His reputation is based on the huge collection of manuscripts and notes known as the Nachlass, together with accounts made by others of lectures he gave. Published in various forms, the central work is the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953). But later edited collections of remarks such as Zettel, On Certainty and Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics and others are also of enormous importance.Consisting of seven propositions, all but the last with multiple sub propositions, the Tractatus is austerely beautiful but severe and technically demanding.
One way to approach it is to see the book as the ultimate distillation of a particular historically dominant conception of ourselves: first and foremost, we are conscious thinkers. Only after are we active, embodied, speaking agents. Before we communicate, we must first have something to communicate. We must first be capable of true and false thoughts about the world: to be able to think about things, and combinations of things – what, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein calls “states of affairs”. Some of these states of affairs obtain and some do not. The actual world consists of all the states of affairs – combinations of things – that obtain: the facts. (Hence “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”.) But we can also represent to ourselves what does not obtain – the merely possible – and, as well as thinking what is true, we can think falsely.
We can see Wittgenstein’s question in the Tractatus as: how is this possible? What must be the case if we are able to have such true and false thoughts of the world? What must be the case if the world, is by us, thinkable?
His answer is that the world, language and thought must share a common form of elements and their possible arrangements. Wittgenstein calls this “logical form”. Elements in our representations of the world, true or false, stand in the same relationship to each other as the elements that constitute states of affairs. Reality, language and thought mirror each other. It follows that if we think or say anything meaningful, then what we think or say must be capable of being true or false. For only then will it picture or represent a possible fact. Otherwise what we say or think will be senseless. There must also be a mechanism (which the Tractatus describes) for allowing more complex meaningful thoughts and statements to be generated from more primitive ones.
In articulating his account of how it is that we can think and speak at all, the Tractatus gives expression, sublime and exact but not wholly original, to a conception of ourselves that was arguably already latent in our intellectual culture. A conception of ourselves as representing beings – minds – which can represent the world to ourselves, think and say things that are true or false, and can have reliable means of acquiring truths about the world – which we call science. This picture of the nature of mind, and hence of ourselves, continues to be the default conception in the cognitive sciences. Minds are representational engines.
But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree). But then, according to the Tractatus, in ethical thought, I am not representing how the world is one way rather than another. So strictly speaking, ethical talk will make no sense. Still, according to Wittgenstein, we are ethical beings. The ethical is real. Teaching us how to live in the light of that thought was, Wittgenstein believed, the true aim of the Tractatus.
This general constraint on what can be meaningfully said also applies to what philosophers have wanted to claim over the millennia. For philosophers make claims not about what happens to be true, but what must be. But if the account offered in the Tractatus of how thought is possible is correct, then such claims, not being capable of being false, are strictly meaningless. We might think of it this way: I can use chess notation to describe the actual position on a chess board. But I cannot use chess notation to say how chess notation represents any such chess position. That shows itself in the way the notation works. Of course, I can use English (or any other natural language) to say or teach how the chess notation works. But when we want to explain not chess notation, or any particular natural language but language (and thought) itself, that recourse to another medium is not available. There is only the showing left.
With the relentless honesty that characterized all his thinking, Wittgenstein applies this thought to the Tractatus itself. For the relationship between thought and the world that the Tractatus articulates is not one among all the facts there are. It is a condition of there being any thinkable facts. Philosophy as envisaged by the Tractatus is therefore a futile attempt to say what cannot be meaningfully said but which can only show itself. So, philosophy, insofar as it is possible at all, cannot be a body of doctrines. It must be an activity. It must aim not, like science, at truth and knowledge, but only at clarity and, with the achievement of that clarity, peace. This is why Wittgenstein claims that the propositions of the Tractatus are like rungs on a ladder. We use them to climb up to a position where we can see things as they are, where we can “see the world aright”. But then we throw the ladder away.
In the years that followed – which have been examined and documented in immense detail by scholars – Wittgenstein came to abandon and replace much of this conception of language and thought while maintaining a great deal of its spirit. Perhaps it was because Wittgenstein had been able to give such complete expression to the earlier conception that only he was able to see, so deeply and so clearly, where it came from, how it failed, what should be kept and what replaced.
This new conception of ourselves – of language and of mind – is articulated in his masterpiece, widely regarded as one of the two or three greatest works of philosophy in the Western Tradition, the Philosophical Investigations. The work consists of 693 numbered remarks of varying length (with a second part whose exact relationship to the main body is a matter of scholarly controversy). In contrast to the Tractatus, the Philosophical Investigations, can, indeed must, be read first hand. It contains almost nothing that might be called technical and mentions only a very few other philosophers by name. But as Wittgenstein wrote: “It will be easy to read what I will write. What will be hard to understand is the point of what I say”.
Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become. He sought to uncover the deep undercurrents of thought that had produced this attitude. He feared it would lead not to a better world but the demise of our civilization. That perhaps explains his deep unpopularity today. It is for the same reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of modern times.
As três primeiras pagelas, emitidas pelos CTT, relacionadas com a temática de 25 de Abril de 1974, surgem no período de 18/12/1974 a 23/4/1975, marcadamente influenciadas pelo espírito e acção do M.F.A. – Movimento das Forças Armadas. O desenho é do artista Victor Ribeiro.
10º aniversário
20º aniversário, em 1994
30º aniversário
40 anos da Revolução do 25 de Abril de 1974, emissão filatélica comemorativa com dois selos tendo por base fotografias “© E. Gageiro”.
“A Hora da Liberdade”, Joana Pontes (1999) – sobre a operação militar do 25 de Abril, passo a passo, momento a momento, mais coisa menos coisa, a reconstituição realizada para a SIC por Joana Pontes, com argumento seu, de Emídio Rangel e Rodrigo Sousa e Castro.
Meus senhores, como todos sabem, há diversas modalidades de Estado. Os estados sociais, os corporativos e o estado a que chegámos. Ora, nesta noite solene, vamos acabar com o estado a que chegámos! De maneira que, quem quiser vir comigo, vamos para Lisboa e acabamos com isto. Quem for voluntário, sai e forma. Quem não quiser sair, fica aqui!
Salgueiro Maia aos seus colegas de armas da Escola Prática de Cavalaria, na madrugada de 25 de Abril de 1974
O 25 de Abril foi, para todos nós, o fim da ditadura. Os heróicos militares que prepararam e executaram a revolta realizaram um acto de libertação de si mesmos, mas consigo mesmos quiseram libertar Portugal inteiro. (…) Hoje vivemos na sequência de uma revolução conseguida sem sangue, que nos abriu caminhos de liberdade. Para que os possamos percorrer é indispensável o respeito absoluto das liberdades públicas e dos direitos cívicos, que vamos vendo infelizmente postos em causa.
Francisco Sá-Carneiro
O’Connel Street, Dublin
O Dia Mundial do Livro e do Direito de Autor foi instituído pela UNESCO em novembro de 1995, procurando fomentar o gosto pela leitura e, simultaneamente, homenagear a obra daqueles que, pela escrita, têm contribuído para o progresso social e cultural da Humanidade.
23 de abril, dia em que nasceu e morreu William Shakespeare e morreu Cervantes.
“Quando celebramos livros, celebramos também atividades – escrever, ler, traduzir, publicar – que nos preenchem e realizam; e nós celebramos, fundamentalmente, as liberdades que os tornam possíveis.
Os livros estão presentes na interseção de algumas das liberdades humanas mais indispensáveis, nomeadamente a liberdade de expressão e a de publicação.
Estas são liberdades frágeis que enfrentam muitos desafios, desde os direitos autorais à diversidade cultural, até às ameaças físicas que pairam sobre os autores, jornalistas e editores em muitos países em que essa liberdade é negada, ainda hoje, quando escolas são atacadas e manuscritos e livros destruídos.”
Audrey Azoulay, Diretora-Geral da UNESCO (a propósito do Dia Mundial do Livro e do Direito de Autor 2018)
Há muitos, muitíssimos leitores que não gostam de que se os obrigue a pensar, e que querem que se lhes diga o que já sabem, o que já têm pensado.
Miguel de Unamuno
da série «um dia passo por lá» – Valência, Café Ubik
Vi uma notícia Street Art for Book Lovers: Dutch Artists Paint Massive Bookcase Mural on the Side of a Building
Bookcases are a great ice breaker for those who love to read. What relief those shelves offer ill-at ease partygoers… even when you don’t know a soul in the room, there’s always a chance you’ll bond with a fellow guest over one of your hosts’ titles. Occupy yourself with a good browse whilst waiting for someone to take the bait.
Now, with the aid of Dutch street artists Jan Is De Man and Deef Feed, some residents of Utrecht have turned their bookcases into street art, sparking conversation in their culturally diverse neighborhood.
De Man, whose close friends occupy the ground floor of a building on the corner of Mimosastraat and Amsterdam, had initially planned to render a giant smiley face on an exterior wall as a public morale booster, but the shape of the three-story structure suggested something a bit more literary.
Fui ver ao Google Maps: Utrecht, esquina da Mimosastraat e Amsterdamstraat
e depois a imagem do mural.
Fabuloso…
The trompe-l’oeil Boekenkast (or bookcase) took a week to create, and features titles in eight different languages.
Look closely and you’ll notice both artists’ names (and a smiley face) lurking among the spines.
Design mags may make an impression by ordering books according to size and color, but this communal 2-D boekenkast looks to belong to an avid and omnivorous reader.
Some English titles that caught our eye: Sapiens – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Keith Richards’ autobiography Life – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Pride and Prejudice – The Little Prince – The World According to Garp – Jumper
Conversamos?!... 
