Neste estudo procuramos avaliar a dimensão humana presente na Palavra de Deus. O autor sagrado está dentro de um contexto de vida cultural, e recebe os condicionamentos do seu tempo. A Bíblia deve ser lida com o espírito que foi escrita e não simplesmente vista como uma palavra literal de Deus para os homens.

In this article, I propose a unified account of systemic emergence, downward causation, and interlevel integrative explanations. First, I argue for a relational-transformational notion of emergence and a structural-relational account of downward causation in terms of both its transformational and conditioning effects. In my view, downward causation can avoid the problems traditionally attributed to it, provided that we are able to reconceptualize the notion of ‘whole’ and that form of causality in a purely relational way. In this regard, I distinguish (...) contextual or whole-to-part causation from downward causation, the latter defined by the existence of second-order structural relations. Finally, I argue that while emergence and downward-structural causation imply the in-principle failure of micro-determinism and therefore micro-reduction, they do not rule out the possibility of any type of explanation. On the contrary, they call for the development of interlevel integrative explanations. (shrink)

Entre justification et explication, entre dire et faire, la destruction. Est-ce une chose ou un événement? Un geste, une oeuvre ou une opération? Un thème ou un titre? Est-ce même bien un mot? Qu'appelle-t-on destruction? Avec Heidegger, Derrida en appelle à la destruction. Oui, à la destruction. L'a-t-on entendu? Comme Heidegger (et c'est aussi ce "comme" qu'il s'agira d'examiner ici), Derrida nomme et renomme la destruction. Il lui donne le temps et le nom, une renommée. Il la surnomme "déconstruction", par (...) exemple, ou, plus tard, "mal d'archive". Comme Heidegger, Derrida travaille, traduit et retraduit la destruction, faisant parfois comme si tous ses mots, tous les mots et les phrases qu'il propose et déploie à propos de la destruction, entretenaient des rapports sans rapport, rapports déjà trop clairs, ou encore bien obscurs. Qu'appelle-t-on destruction? Après Heidegger, Derrida s'y est attardé, lui qui parlait, encore et encore, de destination et de destruction, lui qui nous a rappelés si souvent à la destruction qui arrive, partout où elle arrive. Posons que c'était l'un de ses combats, l'une de ses longues guerres (avec lui-même, d'abord, et avec la destruction). Sera-ce finalement la nôtre? Est-il aujourd'hui temps de penser - après Heidegger, avec Derrida -, temps de combattre aussi peut-être, au moins d'écouter, la destruction qui vient? Est-il encore temps de témoigner de la destruction qui croit? (shrink)

_Blood_, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought from ancient Greece (...) to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone. (shrink)

Philosophers of well-being have tended to adopt a foundationalist approach to the question of theory and measurement, according to which theories are conceptually before measures. By contrast, social scientists have tended to adopt operationalist commitments, according to which they develop and refine well-being measures independently of any philosophical foundation. Unfortunately, neither approach helps us overcome the problem of coordinating between how we characterize well-being and how we measure it. Instead, we should adopt a coherentist approach to well-being science.

Feelings are conscious mental events that represent body states as they undergo homeostatic regulation. Feelings depend on the interoceptive nervous system (INS), a collection of peripheral and central pathways, nuclei and cortical regions which continuously sense chemical and anatomical changes in the organism. How such humoral and neural signals come to generate conscious mental states has been a major scientific question. The answer proposed here invokes (1) several distinctive and poorly known physiological features of the INS; and (2) a unique (...) interaction between the body (the ‘object’ of interoception) and the central nervous system (which generates the 'subject' of interoception). The atypical traits of the INS and the direct interactions between neural and non‐neural physiological compartments of the organism, neither of which is present in exteroceptive systems, plausibly explain the qualitative and subjective aspects of feelings, thus accounting for their conscious nature. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can accommodate populism provided that the latter conforms to (...) particular discursive norms. What the article calls a ‘liberal ethics of populism’ turns out to be closely bound up with a broader ethics of peoplehood, understood as a way of articulating who ‘the people’ are in a way that is compatible with liberal–democratic principles of political justification. Such an ethics, concludes the article, inevitably has a much wider audience than populist political actors: its addressees are all those who seek legitimately to exercise power in the name of the people. (shrink)

Is there a relation of logical consequence in natural language? Logicality, in the philosophical literature, has been conceived of as a restrictive phenomenon that is at odds with the unbridled richness and complexity of natural language. This article claims that there is a relation of logical consequence in natural language, and moreover, that it is the subject matter of the bulk of current theories of formal semantics. I employ the framework of _semantic constraints_ (Sagi in Log Anal 57(227):259–276, 2014), which (...) generalizes the Tarskian definition of logical consequence. I apply the widely accepted criterion of invariance under isomorphisms (Sher in J. Symb Log 61(2):653–686, 1996) generalized to the framework of semantic constraints (Sagi in Bull Symb Log 28(1):104–132, 2022b), combined with a theory of Glanzberg (in Metasemantics: new essays on the foundations of meaning, 2014) to delineate the relation of logical consequence in natural language. (shrink)

Downward causation exercised by emergent properties of wholes upon their lower-level constituents’ properties has been accused of conceptual and metaphysical incoherence. Only upward causation is usually peacefully accepted. The aim of this paper is to criticize and refuse the traditional hierarchical-vertical way of conceiving both types of causation, although preserving their deepest ontological significance, as well as the widespread acceptance of the traditional atomistic-combinatorial view of the entities and the relations that constitute the so-called ‘emergence base’. Assuming those two perspectives (...) with no reserves, we are condemned to confine our debate to the question of whether reified wholes can have the power to downwardly change or influence their lower-level parts, a question which seems profoundly misleading to me. I therefore propose an alternative relational ontological view, assuming a straightforward horizontal and intra-level way of representing those putative cases of cross-level causation. I finally confront two recent replies to Kim’s well-known objections to DC—Craver and Bechtel and Kistler :595–609, 2009)—, emphasizing their global positive approaches, as well as the reasons why their accounts still seem insufficient to me. I conclude arguing that both Kim’s principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and its allegation of an overdetermination in cases of DC can be surpassed by the new relational ontological perspective presented here. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Pruss proves the validity of the rule beta-2 relative to Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals, which is a significant step forward in the debate about the consequence argument. Yet, we believe there remain intuitive counter-examples to beta-2 formulated with the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. We offer a novel and two-dimensional formulation of the Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals and prove the validity of a new transfer rule according to which a new version of the consequence argument can (...) be formulated. This new transfer rule is immune to the counter-examples involving the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. However, we show that counter-examples to this new rule can also be generated, demanding that the Lewisian semantics be generalized for higher dimensions where counter-examples can always be generated. (shrink)

Focused on city-scale automation, and using self-driving cars (SDCs) as a case study, this article reflects on the role of AI—and in particular, computer vision systems used for mapping and navigation—as a catalyst for urban transformation. Urban research commonly presents AI and cities as having a one-way cause-and-effect relationship, giving undue weight to AI’s impact on cities and overlooking the role of cities in shaping AI. Working at the intersection of data science and social research, this paper aims to counter (...) this trend by exploring the reverse perspective: how do cities affect the development, and expose the present limits, of SDCs? The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, by comparing urban and nonurban environments and thoroughly examining the relationship between computer vision and city-specific sociality and form, it defines machine autonomy/automation as a function of the sociotechnical milieu in which an AI system operates. Second, and related, the paper problematizes the notion of SDCs as autonomous technologies and the role it plays in envisioning contending policy arrangements and technical solutions for achieving full driving automation. Finally, the article offers insight into a materialist and spatialized understanding of AI—namely, not as an abstract quality susceptible to replication within discrete machines, but rather as a distributed property emerging through embodied interactions among a multiplicity of agents (human, non-human, and technological) within/with their environments. (shrink)

In this article I address the issue of the ontological conditions of possibility for a naturalistic notion of emergence, trying to determine its fundamental differences from the atomist, vitalist, preformationist and potentialist alternatives. I will argue that a naturalistic notion of ontological emergence can only succeed if we explicitly refuse the atomistic fundamental ontological postulate that asserts that every entity is endowed with a set of absolutely intrinsic properties, being qualitatively immutable through its extrinsic relations. Furthermore, it will be shown (...) that, ironically enough, this metaphysical assumption is implicitly shared by all the above mentioned alternatives to Emergentism. The current article concludes that the notion of organization by itself is not enough, and that ontological emergence can only be justified by assuming a relational ontological perspective that, in opposition both to atomism and holism, defends that the existence-conditions, the identity and the causal behavior of any emergent systemic property can only be conceived, and explained, as constructed by and through specific networks of qualitatively transformative relational processes that occur between the system’s components and between the system and its environment. Additionally, I try to explain how one can make sense of the idea that an emergent phenomenon is both dependent on, and autonomous from, its emergence base. (shrink)

Generating an account that can sidestep the disagreement among substantive theories of well-being, while at the same time still providing useful guidance for well-being public policy, would be a significant achievement. Unfortunately, the various attempts to remain agnostic regarding what constitutes well-being fail to either be an account of well-being, provide useful guidance for well-being policy, or avoid relying on a substantive well-being theory. There are no theory-free lunches in well-being policy. Instead, I propose an intermediate account, according to which (...) well-being is constituted by endorsed veridical experiences. This account refers back to theories of well-being but does so as agnostically as possible. An intermediate account of well-being is meant as a policy guiding compromise between the different theories of well-being that make claims regarding what constitutes well-being. An intermediate account does as well as can be hoped for in providing a basis for well-being policy. (shrink)

Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on religion and questions of faith and their relation to philosophy and political culture. The essays discuss religious texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as religious thinkers such as Kant, Levinas, and Gershom Scholem, and comprise pieces spanning Derrida's career. The collection includes two new essays by Derrida that appear here for the first time in any (...) language, as well as a substantial introduction by Gil Anidjar that explores Derrida's return to his own "religious" origins and his attempts to bring to light hidden religious dimensions of the social, cultural, historical, and political. (shrink)

Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this respect, and go on to suggest a complementary account that stresses the central role (...) of internally democratic and participatory political parties in actualising popular sovereignty, drawing on the democratic theory of Hans Kelsen. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop...

Populist movements have become key players in European politics. These movements are readily criticized by journalists or political rivals, yet none of the common objections to populism seems to arrest their success. This article turns to normative political theory to cultivate sensitivity to problems arising from some existing arguments against populism, and to explore possible alternatives. It offers a critical reading of prototypical liberal and conservative arguments against populism, and proposes that the principles of solidarity and procedure provide good grounds (...) for a sustainable critique of populism. (shrink)

In a recent article, P. Roger Turner and Justin Capes argue that no one is, or ever was, even partly morally responsible for certain world-indexed truths. Here we present our reasons for thinking that their argument is unsound: It depends on the premise that possible worlds are maximally consistent states of affairs, which is, under plausible assumptions concerning states of affairs, demonstrably false. Our argument to show this is based on Bertrand Russell’s original ‘paradox of propositions’. We should then opt (...) for a different approach to explain world-indexed truths whose upshot is that we may be morally responsible for some of them. The result to the effect that there are no maximally consistent states of affairs is independently interesting though, since this notion motivates an account of the nature of possible worlds in the metaphysics of modality. We also register in this article, independently of our response to Turner and Capes, and in the spirit of Russell’s aforementioned paradox and many other versions thereof, a proof of the claim that there is no set of all true propositions one can render false. (shrink)

It is an open question whether well-being ought to primarily be understood as a temporal concept or whether it only makes sense to talk about a person’s well-being over their whole lifetime. In this article, I argue that how this principled philosophical disagreement is settled does not have substantive practical implications for well-being science and well-being policy. Trying to measure lifetime well-being directly is extremely challenging as well as unhelpful for guiding well-being public policy, while temporal well-being is both an (...) adequate indirect measure of lifetime well-being, and an adequate focus for the purposes of improving well-being through public policy. Consequently, even if what we ought to care about is lifetime well-being, we should use temporal measures of well-being and focus on temporal well-being policies. (shrink)

To advance current knowledge on ethical decision-making in organizations, we integrate two perspectives that have thus far developed independently: the organizational identification perspective and the ethical climate perspective. We illustrate the interaction between these perspectives in two studies, in which we presented participants with moral business dilemmas. Specifically, we found that organizational identification increased moral decision-making only when the organization’s climate was perceived to be ethical. In addition, we disentangle this effect in Study 2 from participants’ moral identity. We argue (...) that the interactive influence of organizational identification and ethical climate, rather than the independent influence of either of these perspectives, is crucial for understanding moral decision-making in organizations. (shrink)

Spoofing is the act of placing orders to buy or sell a financial contract without the intention to have those orders fulfilled in order to create the impression that there is a large demand for that contract at that price. In this article, I deny the view that spoofing in financial markets should be viewed as morally permissible analogously to the way bluffing is permissible in poker. I argue for the pro tanto moral impermissibility of spoofing and make the case (...) that spoofing is disanalogous from bluffing in at least one important regard—speculative trading serves an important economic role, whereas poker does not. (shrink)

There are three main accounts of scientific progress: 1) the epistemic account, according to which an episode in science constitutes progress when there is an increase in knowledge; 2) the semantic account, according to which progress is made when the number of truths increases; 3) the problem-solving account, according to which progress is made when the number of problems that we are able to solve increases. Each of these accounts has received several criticisms in the last decades. Nevertheless, some authors (...) think that the epistemic account is to be preferred if one takes a realist stance. Recently, Dellsén proposed the noetic account, according to which an episode in science constitutes progress when scientists achieve increased understanding of a phenomenon. Dellsén claims that the noetic account is a more adequate realist account of scientific progress than the epistemic account. This paper aims precisely at assessing whether the noetic account is a more adequate realist account of progress than the epistemic account. (shrink)

Policy-makers sometimes aim to improve well-being as a policy goal, but to do this they need some way to measure well-being. Instead of relying on potentially problematic theories of well-being to justify their choice of well-being measure, Daniel Hausman proposes that policy-makers can sometimes rely on preference-based measures as evidence for well-being. I claim that Hausman’s evidential account does not justify the use of any one measure more than it justifies the use of any other measure. This leaves us at (...) a loss as to which policy should be chosen in the non-trivial cases for which there is substantial disagreement between the different measures in their assessment of policy. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to explore whether face recognition technology – as it is intensely used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies – is racism free or, on the contrary, is affected by racial biases and/or racist prejudices, thus reinforcing overall racial discrimination. Design/methodology/approach The study investigates the causal pathways through which face recognition technology may reinforce the racial disproportion in enforcement; it also inquires whether it further discriminates black people by making them experience more racial (...) discrimination and self-identify more decisively as black – two conditions that are shown to be harmful in various respects. Findings This study shows that face recognition technology, as it is produced, implemented and used in Western societies, reinforces existing racial disparities in stop, investigation, arrest and incarceration rates because of racist prejudices and even contributes to strengthen the unhealthy effects of racism on historically disadvantaged racial groups, like black people. Practical implications The findings hope to make law enforcement agencies and software companies aware that they must take adequate action against the racially discriminative effects of the use of face recognition technology. Social implications This study highlights that no implementation of an allegedly racism-free biometric technology is safe from the risk of racially discriminating, simply because each implementation leans against our society, which is affected by racism in many persisting ways. Originality/value While the ethical survey of biometric technologies is traditionally framed in the discourse of universal rights, this study explores an issue that has not been deeply scrutinized so far, that is, how face recognition technology differently affects distinct racial groups and how it contributes to racial discrimination. (shrink)

It is a widely held principle that no one is able to do something that would require the past to have been different from how it actually is. This principle of the fixity of the past has been presented in numerous ways, playing a crucial role in arguments for logical and theological fatalism, and for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the ability to do otherwise. I will argue that, assuming bivalence, this principle is in conflict with standard views about (...) knowledge and the semantics for ‘actually’. I also consider many possible responses to the argument. (shrink)

Physicians frequently encounter situations in which their professional practice is intermingled with moral affordances stemming from other domains of the physician’s lifeworld, such as family and friends, or from general morality pertaining to all humans. This article offers a typology of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ as well as a new theoretical framework for dealing with them. We start out by arguing that established theories of professional ethics do not offer sufficient guidance in situations where professional ethics overlaps (...) with moral duties of other origins. Therefore, we introduce the moral theory developed by Christine M. Korsgaard, that centres around the concept of practical identity. We show how Korsgaard’s account offers a framework for interpreting different types of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ to provide either orientation for solving the conflict or an explanation for the emotional and moral burden involved in moral dilemmas. (shrink)

In recent times, representation theory has become one of the most productive and interesting sub-fields in democratic theory. Arguably, the most important theoretical innovation are the so-called ‘constructivist’ approaches to political representation. These approaches play a central role in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation and The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, two impressive volumes that take stock of the state of the art in representation theory. I discuss the two volumes by focusing on three broader and (...) interconnected themes: the problem that constructivism is meant to respond to, the tendency of representation theorists to expand the possibilities of representation as broadly as possible, and the normative aspects of political representation and how constructivists deal with them. (shrink)

Often institutions or individuals are faced with decisions where not all claims can be satisfied. Sometimes, these claims will be of differing strength. In such cases, it must be decided whether or not weaker claims can be aggregated in order to collectively defeat stronger claims. Many are attracted to a view, which this chapter calls Limited Aggregation, where this is sometimes acceptable and sometimes not. A new version of this view, Local Relevance, has recently emerged. This chapter seeks to explore (...) and evaluate this view. In order to do so, the chapter offers a more precise interpretation of this basic approach, calling it ‘Sequential Claims-Matching’. The chapter shows how Sequential Claims-Matching avoids problems that dog other Limited Aggregation views but suffers from difficulties and ambiguities of its own. In particular, the chapter shows that it is hard to accommodate some core Limited Aggregation intuitions around tie-break cases within the Local Relevance view. (shrink)

In recent times, representation theory has become one of the most productive and interesting sub-fields in democratic theory. Arguably, the most important theoretical innovation are the so-called ‘constructivist’ approaches to political representation. These approaches play a central role in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation and The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, two impressive volumes that take stock of the state of the art in representation theory. I discuss the two volumes by focusing on three broader and (...) interconnected themes: the problem that constructivism is meant to respond to, the tendency of representation theorists to expand the possibilities of representation as broadly as possible, and the normative aspects of political representation and how constructivists deal with them. (shrink)

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of “ends” that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian (...) Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts. The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre. At stake are issues – texts and contexts – that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost. (shrink)