This research aims to investigate the transformations in the processes of belief formation in contexts marked by the ubiquitous presence of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Adopting a philosophical approach, it articulates Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technics, while also incorporating recent critiques of the role of algorithms in surveillance capitalism. It is argued that algorithms not only organize and filter information but also operate as techno semiotic devices that modulate habits, stabilize beliefs, and directly affect individuals’ critical capacity. In hyper-personalized digital environments, algorithmic mechanisms tend to reinforce already consolidated patterns, thereby hindering the emergence of doubt—an element central to both the dynamics of inquiry and epistemic autonomy. The dissertation proposes that belief, understood as a habit guiding action, has been reconfigured by processes of perceptual and cognitive automation that limit openness to alterity and subjective transformation. Based on this analysis, it is contended that algorithmic systems, by suppressing the disruptive function of doubt, compromise not only freedom of thought but also the very possibility of individuation. 

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and Michel Leiris (1901–1990), when addressing the realm of life to which eroticism, the sacred, and poetry belong, make epistemological choices that share the primacy given to experience at the expense of a logical scientific approach to facts. That choice is the object of investigation here. The aim is to justify such a choice and to draw out its developments, problematizing the limits of utilitarian reason and its epistemological consequences in the field of aesthetics. Without ignoring the intellectual cooperation between them in the 1930s, we understand that historical-biographical period as the genesis of important theoretical dialogues undertaken in the following decades, which reverberate, we emphasize, from Mirror of Tauromachy (1938) to Eroticism (1957). In Bataille, unproductive expenditures, such as erotic and sacred operations, point to an unknowable domain that escapes homogeneity and its forms of knowledge production. In Leiris, this ungraspable, given in the experience of the sacred, was circumscribed from the idea of revelation. Tauromachy, in its sacred, erotic, and aesthetic aspects, becomes a privileged object of analysis as a revealing activity. Returning to the sources of both — such as Sade and Nietzsche, Nicolau de Cusa and Alfred Jarry — we find interpretive keys to understand how the unknowable of human experience is circumscribed by each philosopher’s thought, the points of convergence and divergence between Bataille’s and Leiris’s ideas. Fron this point of tangency, we investigate the possibility of communicating the unfathomable in the field of aesthetics and the arts, especially in literature. From autobiographical and confessional writing, in Leiris, to sovereign poetic language as the sacrifice of words, in Bataille, there emerges the unease in expressing that which is elided by discourse: the accursed part, the abyssal life, the continuity, the not-knowing. that contact translates into what we here call “poetics of the unknowable,” aesthetic creations that start from the idea of a profaned and convulsive beauty, tauromachic and luciferian, as thought, respectively, by Bataille and Leiris. 

This dissertation investigates the ontology of art in the philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, analyzing his perspective through the lens of debates with other philosophers of contemporary analytic aesthetics. The first part of the study analyzes the seminal article "The Artworld" (1964), in which Danto introduces the notion of the "artworld." It demonstrates how the philosopher responds to the emergence of Pop Art via the problem of indiscernibles: if an object and a work of art are visually identical, the nature of art cannot reside in their visual qualities. In the second part, drawing upon the skepticism of Morris Weitz, whose diagnosis regarding the impossibility of defining art serves as a starting point to justify the need for new theoretical formulations, Danto’s theory is contrasted with the responses of George Dickie and Nelson Goodman regarding what confers artistic status upon an object, or under what circumstances an object functions as a work of art. While Dickie favors an institutional approach and Goodman shifts the question toward symbolic functioning ("when is art?") Danto distinguishes himself by advocating for a strictly ontological and historical character, a position consolidated in his work “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace”. For Danto, the task is to understand this theoretical atmosphere and historical narrative in order to ultimately grasp how a banal object becomes a work of art.