Porchat sobre o argumento da loucura

Abstract

This essay is divided into two parts. In the first, I briefly return to the progress of Porchat's philosophy, pointing to some of his remarkable discoveries in articles collected in “Towards Scepticism,” a collection of 2007, with publications from 1969 to 2005. My first goal is to contextualize the article “Of the Madness Argument”, the article that closes the collection, within the work of the philosopher. In the second part, which begins with a review of the Madness Argument, I propose an analysis in which Porchat's argument is translated into sceptical, anti-Cartesian, anti-ultra-rationalist arguments, comparing, for example, to Hume’s, but in which the text is also presented as a procedure, practice, therapy, contemporary and original. In this interpretation, it sympathizes with the philosophies in which Porchat recognizes a fascination with what he calls “absolute”, accompanies them through their symptomatic tribulations, and leads them to a sceptical resolution. I nevitable are the questions: what can this “absolute” mean? how is the therapeutic procedure conducted? to what sceptical result does it take? Here, in my hypothesis, I find in the argument of madness to consist of rather a mode or trope of scepticism, which comes to redeem philosophical practices inclined to senseless “transmundane spaces”, bringing them back to the rich variety of worldly experiences which constitute true philosophies, according to Porchat.