Oliver Tolle

Academic Background

• 2016 Postdoctoral Research at the Federal Fluminense University, UFF
• 2014 Assistant Professor in Philosophy, University of São Paulo
• 2008 PhD in Philosophy at the University of São Paulo
  Title: Aesthetic Light: The Science of the Sensible of Baumgarten between Art and Enlightenment
• 2003 Master’s Degree in Philosophy at the University of São Paulo
  Title: Translation, followed by introduction and notes, of the Architecture chapter of Hegel’s Aesthetics Courses
  Supervisor: Prof. Victor Knoll
• 1999 Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy at the University of São Paulo

Current Research

The Faculty of Composing in German Empirical Psychology
How to rid Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s discipline of aesthetics of its contamination with the Aristotelian-scholastic vocabulary and mitigate the dogmatic effects of his propensity to seek laws of universal value? It is to this question that Johann Gottfried dedicates himself to in a series of texts published in the 1760s and 70s. In them, Herder recognizes the effort of the Baumgartenian science of the sensitive to delimit the reach of each of the lower faculties of knowledge and his discovery of the fingere as a specifically poetic faculty, but questions the conditions of its applicability, since the Latin author’s emphasis on an abstract and metaphysical discourse makes the concepts ─ though duly grounded ─ too far from what they would like to explain, namely, the sensory origin of human knowledge and the practical problems arising from it. Now, in place of abstract concepts, Herder defends the symbolic nature of language, which is more in accordance with this shift from the problem of knowledge to its sensory origin, although it can only now develop within the confines of an anthropology.

Oliver Tolle