Celso Vieira

I am a postdoctoral researcher at UFMG-Brazil. My studies are focused on the relations between ontology, language and epistemology. The interconnected treatment of these subjects by the ancients are the perfect ground to find insightful theories that may be hidden behind apparent ingenuity. In my masters I attempted to prove how the order of words in Heraclitus conveyed his conception about the order of the world. I identified what I called a ‘bow composition’. A peculiar adaptation of the ring composition made by Heraclitus in which he adds the twist of using opposite terms at the extremities of the composition. During my PhD I worked with Plato’s Cratylus to find a theory of language having names and not sentences as its core. Relying on the platonic ontology of Ideas a fractal conception of language was hypothesized. It is fractal because the etymology of the names has the basic name + verb (or subject + action) structure that repeats itself at the sentence level and so on.

I also recently translated the Cratylus (Paulus, 2014). The translation is unique in its effort (sometimes too forced, I admit) to render the pervasive etymological puns of the text into Portuguese. Currently I am working with the reception of Heraclitus in connection to Protagoras’ man is the measure by Plato and Aristotle. The aim is to trace which and of what sort (if any) are the seeds of relativism in Heraclitus’ thought.