In the five-year period 2005-2009, Brazil dramatically reduced carbon emissions by about twenty-five percent and at the same time maintained a stable economic growth rate of 3.5% annually. This combination of economic growth and emissions reduction is unique in the world. It was driven by a dramatic reduction in deforestation in the Amazonian forest and the Cerrado Savannah. This shift empowered the sustainability social forces in Brazil to the point that in December 2009 Congress passed a very progressive law internalizing (...) carbon constraints and promoting the transition to a low-carbon economy. The Article first analyzes the Brazilian position in the global carbon cycle and public policies since 2005, including the progressive shift in 2009 and the contradictory dynamic in 2010-2012. It then analyzes the potential for a transition to a low-carbon economy in Brazil and the impact on global climate governance. (shrink)

The environmental and human rights movements have valuable contributions to make to each other. Environmentalists can contribute to the greening of human rights by getting the human rights movement to recognize a right to a safe environment, to see humans as part of nature, and to begin considering the idea that nature may have claims of its own. The human rights movement can contribute to environmentalism by getting environmentalists to recognize that they have strong reasons to support rights to political (...) participation, freedom from violence, due process of law, education, and adequate nutrition. (shrink)

One of the most important phenomena in contemporary South America has been the tendency towards more democratic systems. After protracted periods of authoritarian rule, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia appear to be heading in a more democratic direction. This process has awakened political hopes and attracted intellectual reflection, especially regarding Brazil and Argentina, the largest and most influential nations of South America. Both countries are in different moments, with different timings, in transitions which could lead to the establishment of stable (...) democratic regimes. The following will discuss a number of new social movements which have emerged under the military regimes and have been significant in the struggle for democracy. (shrink)

Emoticons and facial emojis are ubiquitous in contemporary digital communication, where it has been proposed that they make up for the lack of social information from real faces. In this paper, I construe them as cultural artifacts that exploit the neurocognitive mechanisms for face perception. Building on a step-by-step comparison of psychological evidence on the perception of faces vis-à-vis the perception of emoticons/emojis, I assess to what extent they do effectively vicariate real faces with respect to the following four domains: (...) (1) the expression of emotions, (2) the cultural norms for expressing emotions, (3) conveying non-affective social information, and (4) attention prioritization. (shrink)

Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering (...) how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, socio-historical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific socio-political contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust-rather than trust-can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the inter-relationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions come from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society. (shrink)

Munch-Jurisic’s book thoroughly describes several cases of severe distresses reported and expressed by perpetrators of tremendous acts such as mass murders. Arguing against a simplistic reading according to which these signs of distress are straightforward manifestations of some innate moral nature, and against the optimistic reading according to which they will lead to prosocial behaviors, Munch-Jursic offers compelling reasons to adopt a more complex theory of emotion. In this commentary, I aim to stress the implications of her book for the (...) debate on moral enhancement and for emotion theory in general. However, while I concur with Munch-Jurisic that emotion theory must make room for complexity and indeterminacy, I challenge her claim that motivational theories of emotion are ill-equipped to face the challenges she poses. (shrink)

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) gilt mit seiner Philosophie der symbolischen Formen als Begrunder der Kulturphilosophie. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) war lange Zeit einer der beruhmtesten franzosischen Denker und ist im Deutschen bekannt als Lebensphilosoph. Und Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) kennt man als Mathematiker und, mit Bertrand Russell, Herausgeber der Principia Mathematica, weniger als Philosophen. Doch dass sie alle drei in ahnlicher Weise eine Philosophie der Erfahrung als dynamisches System entworfen haben, das die philosophische Tradition revolutioniert und als Fundament fur die heute interessantesten (...) philosophischen Stromungen gelten kann, ist wenig bekannt. In diesem Buch wird die Originalitat und Eigenstandigkeit dieser drei grossen Philosophen gezeigt, indem ihr gemeinsamer phanomenologischer Ansatz vorgefuhrt und ausgebaut wird: die Dynamisierung der Form und die Betonung der Kreativitat, die es ermoglichen, Erfahrung als die Entstehung von etwas Neuem zu denken. (shrink)

Eduardo Arroyo, Armelle Auris, François Boissonnet, Paul HENRY, Pierre-Jean LABARRIERE, MATIEU, Gilles AILLAUD, Gérad THALMANN, Nicole MATHIEU, Jacques VIMARD, Michel QUAREZ, Leonardo CREMONINI, L'atelier d'Eduardo Arryo: Le carré blanc du ring, Rue Descartes, No. 7, Logiques de l'éthique (Juin 1993), pp. 149-168.

Arranges the work of Viola Cordova, presenting her understanding and interpretation of the interactions between people and nature.

This article investigates how much influence consumers could have in the GDR during the 1960s by means of a case study of a patient striving towards an apparently reasonable psychiatric treatment through his actions in- and outside the clinic. The patient tried to obtain an effective therapy by referring to his model socialist work and life. The former patient also subsequently acted as a consumer via different activities, both within the GDR and abroad. Finally, against the background of different theories (...) of patient and consumer history, this article will discuss how consumer historical approaches can be useful for studying a socialist state. (shrink)

A comparison between the Prolegomena of Chapter II of De iure praedae and the Prolegomena of De iure belli ac pacis leads to the conclusion that the ideas of Grotius on legal systematization have changed considerably between 1604 and 1625. Whereas Grotius starts in IPC with general principles with a rather unclear distinction between leges and regulae, in IBP he gives first the philosophical and theological basis of international law, intertwined by a concise set of general legal rules, mostly derived (...) from Roman law after its reception in Western Europe. The general outlines of legal systematization in the early-modern period are expounded. In the attempts of legal systematization the concept of subjective rights is essential. These subjective rights are not, as is sometimes assumed, a medieval renewal of legal technique, but can be found essentially already in classical Roman law of the first centuries AD.The institutional system is not yet visible in De iure praedae, it might be different for De iure belli ac pacis. Significant here are possibly the expressions ius ad bellum and ius in bello. (shrink)

Experimentation represents today a ‘hot’ topic in computing. If experiments made with the support of computers, such as computer simulations, have received increasing attention from philosophers of science and technology, questions such as “what does it mean to do experiments in computer science and engineering and what are their benefits?” emerged only recently as central in the debate over the disciplinary status of the discipline. In this work we aim at showing, also by means of paradigmatic examples, how the traditional (...) notion of controlled experiment should be revised to take into account a part of the experimental practice in computing along the lines of experimentation as exploration. Taking inspiration from the discussion on exploratory experimentation in the philosophy of science—experimentation that is not theory-driven—we advance the idea of explorative experiments that, although not new, can contribute to enlarge the debate about the nature and role of experimental methods in computing. In order to further refine this concept we recast explorative experiments as socio-technical experiments, that test new technologies in their socio-technical contexts. We suggest that, when experiments are explorative, control should be intended in a posteriori form, in opposition to the a priori form that usually takes place in traditional experimental contexts. (shrink)

The question about the scientific nature of computing has been widely debated with no universal consensus reached about its disciplinary status. Positions vary from acknowledging computing as the science of computers to defining it as a synthetic engineering discipline. In this paper, we aim at discussing the nature of computing from a methodological perspective. We consider, in particular, the nature and role of experiments in this field, whether they can be considered close to the traditional experimental scientific method or, instead, (...) they possess peculiar and unique features. We argue that this experimental perspective should be taken into account when discussing the status of computing. We critically survey how the experimental method has been conceived and applied in computing, and some open issues that could be tackled with the aid of the history of science, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that it’s not a good idea to have a theory of truth that is consistent but ω-inconsistent. In order to bring out this point, it is useful to consider a particular case: Yablo’s Paradox. In theories of truth without standard models, the introduction of the truth-predicate to a first order theory does not maintain the standard ontology. Firstly, I exhibit some conceptual problems that follow from so introducing it. Secondly, I show that (...) in second order theories with standard semantics the same procedure yields a theory that doesn’t have models. So, while having an ω- inconsistent theory is a bad thing, having an unsatisfiable theory of truth is actually worse. This casts doubts on whether the predicate in question is, after all, a truthpredicate for that language. Finally, I present some alternatives to prove an inconsistency adding plausible principles to certain theories of truth. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 688-690, August 2012.

This paper presents a case of severe uncertainty in the development of autonomous and intelligent systems in Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robotics. After discussing how uncertainty emerges from the complexity of the systems and their interaction with unknown environments, the paper describes the novel framework of explorative experiments. This framework presents a suitable context in which many of the issues relative to uncertainty, both at the epistemological level and at the ethical one, in this field should be reframed. The case (...) of autonomous robot systems for search and rescue is used to make the discussion more concrete. (shrink)