Habermas desenvolveu a teoria da ação comunicativa mostrando como os problemas de comunicação entre os falantes podem ser resolvidos a partir da própria autorreferencialidade inerente à linguagem ordinária ou, em casos mais graves, mediante os discursos racionais. Contudo, ele mostrou também que existem formas de comunicação sistematicamente distorcidas como a neurose e a ideologia, nas quais, ao contrário de Wittgenstein,que considerava não existir uma linguagem privada. Tratava-se somente de um mal entendimento sobre o correto funcionamento de nossa linguagem, pois são (...) formas reais da linguagem privada porque a reconstrução linguística da Psicanálise demonstrou que o neurótico, diante de uma situação insustentável da primeira infância, substitui o símbolo reprimido por um símbolo insuspeito que passa a ocupar o seu lugar. Origina o comportamento repetitivo do enfermo, mas que pode ser recordado de maneira constante,o que desmente também o primado que Gadamer atribuiu à hermenêutica. A comunicação sistematicamente distorcida não pode ser superada simplesmente pelo adestramento da habilidade de interpretação a partir do contexto, mas requer a passagem para discursos clínicos em que o paciente deve fazer a experiência da autorreflexão. (shrink)

In this paper, we first define the vector product in Minkowski space $\mathbb{R}_{4}^{7}$, which is identified with the space of spatial split-octonions. Next, we derive the $G_{2}-$ frame formulae for a seven dimensional Minkowski curve by using the spatial split-octonions and the vector product. We show that Frenet–Serret formulas are satisfied for a spatial split octonionic curve. We obtain the congruence of two spatial split octonionic curves and give relationship between the $G_{2}-$ frame and Frenet–Serret frame. Furthermore, we present the (...) Frenet–Serret frame with split octonions in $\mathbb{R}_{4}^{8}$. Finally, we give illustrative examples with Matlab codes. (shrink)

La contemporaneidad es facticidad sin sentido, un “espacio de crisis” donde al “ocultamiento de Dios” (teología) le corresponde “la imposibilidad del Absoluto” (filosofía), y a ambos les son correlativas la imposición de un “universo infinito e inestable” (ciencia) y la consecuente pérdida de significancia (semiótica) que implican el vacío y las ausencias. Esa contemporaneidad es asimismo preludio que inaugura la emergencia hegemónica de la efectividad (tecnología), al costo de una debacle espiritual que tiene consecuencias trágicas para la vida y la (...) convivencia humanas. El agotamiento de las dimensiones imaginarias o no de ese universo, determinadas por las repeticiones inexorables de su geografía máxima y mínima, o la imposibilidad de progresar “más allá de la inmanencia” que reitera los recorridos reales y virtuales por la materia, proyecta nefastos efectos desexistenciarios sobre una humanidad que se hunde en la facticidad sin sentido y pervierte cualquier posibilidad de conocimiento, valor y virtud. La emergencia de novedosas modalidades de subjetividad, que atentan contra la existencia colectiva de comunidades, culturas y modos de vida, tienen directa relación con originales formas de reproducción del capital (economía) y modos traumáticos para realizar el prometeico sueño de producción de poder privado (política). También influye de manera decisiva la vigencia de un sistema de poder tecnocrático que sustituye “lo real” por virtualidades e impone una “convivencia” determinada por flujos digitales efímeros e inconsistentes. Esta obra demuestra que tales cuestiones económicas o políticas, científicas o técnicas, lejos de ser contradictorias con un tratamiento teológico o filosófico de la realidad, dependen de la previa respuesta de éste a los problemas elementales que la ciencia y la tecnología deben tener por resueltos antes de aplicar sus progresos por más elocuentes que estos pudieran parecer. Y tal demostración, en el presente texto, no gira en el vacío sino que perdura fundamentada en un recorrido ejemplificador a través de las diversas culturas “occidentales” que han predominado, primero en la misión de “ordenar a la Humanidad” en el tiempo y el espacio, para luego desatar la tragedia que signa un porvenir de convulsiones y pérdidas. Un “mundo” llega a su fin y las formas y elementos que lo sostenían se degradan fungiendo una transición hacia nuevas dimensiones de un “futuro” donde el hombre será un mendigo de lo inexorable. Sólo la conciencia plena del colapso y las causas que lo generan puede abrir una herida en ese futuro a favor del ser humano, evitando la pérdida de su condición de persona y de las virtudes propias que pueden salvarlo. (shrink)

The 27th February, 2010 an 8.8 Mw earthquake upset Chile. A year after, the writer Juan Villoro published 8.8: El miedo en el espejo, a story by means of a catharsis telling his own experience throughout the earthquake. Villoro’s aim is to demonstrate that people’s psychological guaranties have fallen down together with the buildings’ walls. The Mexican writer describes his staying at the Hotel San Francisco in Santiago de Chile, which held out against the earthquake shocks but entrapped several Latin-American (...) writers as well as Villoro. All the writers were guests at the Congreso Iberoamericano de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil. Villoro book’s purpose is to reflect upon how fear impacts the human beings. (shrink)

IntroductionIndividuals with high scores of perceived stress are more likely to develop arterial hypertension than those with low levels of stress. In addition to this, AH and stress are both independent risk factors for executive function impairment and worse quality of life. Therefore, strategies to control and cope with emotional stress are of paramount importance. However, less is known about the association of PS with EF, QoL, and coping in individuals with hypertension. This study aimed to evaluate the association of (...) PS with EF performance, coping strategies use, and QoL in a sample of hypertensive patients.MethodsWe assessed a group of 45 hypertensive individuals. The EF evaluation was: Frontal Assessment Battery; Controlled Oral Word Association Test—FAS; Letter-Number Sequencing subtest from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Third Edition ; Digit Span subtest from the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. The type and frequency of coping strategies used were measured by the Brief Coping with Experienced Problems Scale. The World Health Organization Quality of Life Questionnaire Bref was applied to measure QoL. The associations of the PS with EF performance, coping strategies, and QoL were investigated using univariate and multiple linear regression models adjusted for age, sex, education, systolic pressure, and depression symptoms.ResultsIn the multivariate analyses, higher PS was an independent predictor for a lower frequency of emotion-focused strategy use. However, PS was not significantly related to EF and Qol in this sample. The lower the PS, the greater the use of emotion-focused coping.ConclusionHypertensive individuals with high PS use less frequently positive emotion-focused coping strategies. (shrink)

O livro apresenta o Método Paulo Freire, a mais importante proposta pedagógica pensada a partir da realidade do Terceiro Mundo. Apesar dos mais de vinte anos que o separam da primeira edição, o Método mantém atual a avaliação do papel da educação, o vigor de suas perspectivas e sua aplicabilidade.

The standard approach to the core phenomenology of thought insertion characterizes it in terms of a normal sense of thought ownership coupled with an abnormal sense of thought agency. Recently, Fernández (2010) has argued that there are crucial problems with this approach and has proposed instead that what goes wrong fundamentally in such a phenomenology is a sense of thought commitment, characterized in terms of thought endorsement. In this paper, we argue that even though Fernández raises new issues that enrich (...) the topic, his proposal cannot rival the version of the standard approach we shall defend. (shrink)

Here a wide distribution of meiotic machinery is shown, indicating the occurrence of sexual processes in all major eukaryotic groups, without exceptions, including the putative “asexuals.” Meiotic machinery has evolved from archaeal DNA repair machinery by means of ancestral gene duplications. Sex is very conserved and widespread in eukaryotes, even though its evolutionary importance is still a matter of debate. The main processes in sex are plasmogamy, followed by karyogamy and meiosis. Meiosis is fundamentally a chromosomal process, which implies recombination (...) and ploidy reduction. Several eukaryotic lineages are proposed to be asexual because their sexual processes are never observed, but presumed asexuality correlates with lack of study. The authors stress the complete lack of meiotic proteins in nucleomorphs and their almost complete loss in the fungus Malassezia. Inversely, complete sets of meiotic proteins are present in fungal groups Glomeromycotina, Trichophyton, and Cryptococcus. Endosymbiont Perkinsela and endoparasitic Microsporidia also present meiotic proteins. (shrink)

Experimental results in reference to Brazilian children and adults are presented in the context of current discussions about essentialism and folkbiology. Using an adoption paradigm, we replicate the basic findings of a previous article in this journal concerning the early emergence in children of a birth-parent bias. This cognitive bias supports the claim that causal essentialism cross-culturally constrains the reasoning about the origin, development and maintenance of the characteristics and identity of living kinds. We also report some intriguing differences with (...) earlier findings that speak to theoretical and methodological issues of cultural relativity. (shrink)

This article examines the evaluative nature of the folk concepts of weakness and strength of will and hypothesizes that their evaluative nature is strongly connected to the folk concepts of blame and credit. We probed how people apply the concepts of weakness and strength of will to prototypical and non-prototypical scenarios. While regarding prototypical scenarios the great majority applied these concepts according to the predictions following from traditional philosophical analyses. When presented with non-prototypical scenarios, people were divided. Some, against traditional (...) analyses, did not apply these concepts, which we explain in terms of a clash of evaluations involving different sorts of blame and credit. Others applied them according to traditional analyses, which we explain in terms of a disposition to be reflective and clearly set apart the different sorts of blame and credit involved. Still others applied them in an inverse way, seemingly bypassing the traditional components resolution and be.. (shrink)

In this book, we come to understand the author's pedagogical thinking even better, through the critical seriousness, humanistic objectivity, and engaged ...

RESUMO: Desde os primórdios dos espetáculos teatrais inteiramente musicados, estabelece-se a convenção tácita do final feliz. Desse modo, até mesmo episódios oriundos de escritores antigos, com conhecidos finais funestos, acabaram sendo transformados, acomodando a trama aos usos dos locais onde óperas eram apresentadas. Apesar de parecer uma solução fácil ou episódica, há algumas questões poéticas envolvidas, o que transparece sobretudo em alguns escritos sobre ópera, no século XVIII. A proposta deste artigo é discutir, em primeiro lugar, através de exemplos, como (...) o final feliz acontece em algumas óperas e qual a função que nelas desempenha; num segundo momento, a intenção é mostrar como a crítica italiana do final do século XVIII se mobiliza para dar conta da questão. ABSTRACT: Ever since the appearance of the first dramas entirely set to music, happy endings have emerged as a tacit convention. Even ancient myths with their sad endings were transformed, adapting plots to local customs where operas were performed. Although it may seem a facile or occasional solution, there are some important poetical questions involved which appear in certain writings on opera from the eighteenth century. The purpose of this article is to discuss, by means of examples, how the happy ending appears in some operas, and what function it has. The article also pretends to show how Italian critics of the late eighteenth century approached the question. (shrink)

Abstract: In a previous article in this journal, Daniel Kelly, Stephen Stich, Kevin Haley, Serena Eng and Daniel Fessler report data that, according to them, foster scepticism about an association between harm and morality existent in the Turiel tradition ( Kelly et al. , 2007 ). This article challenges their interpretation of the data. It does so by explicating some methodological problems in the Turiel tradition that Kelly et al. themselves in a way inherit and by drawing on new evidence (...) coming from a partial replication of their research. (shrink)

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterisation of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope which, according to them, characterises these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate (...) proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel's sense. In this article we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry. (shrink)

"Mentoring the Mentor" recreates a Freirian dialogue in a printed format. In this volume, sixteen distinguished scholars engage in a critical and thoughtful exchange with Paulo Freire. While some contributors voice appreciation for Freire's ideas and for what it means to -reinvent Freire- in a North American context, others offer sharp critiques of Freire's philosophy and, of equal importance, of the various interpretations of his work. A variety of chapters describe specific uses which have been made of Freire's ideas (...) in diverse educational contexts, from the New York City public schools to the revolutions in Guinea Bissau and Eritrea. Finally, Paulo Freire himself responds to the major issues which are raised in the volume and invites readers to share in a continuing lively dialogue about the meaning of democratic and revolutionary education. -The fundamental task of the mentor is a liberatory task. It is not to encourage the mentor's goals and aspirations and dreams to be reproduced in the mentees, the students, but to give rise to the possibility that the students become the owners of their own history. This is how I understand the need that teachers have to transcend their merely instructive task and to assume the ethical posture of a mentor who truly believes in the total autonomy, freedom, and development of those he or she mentors.- (from Chapter Sixteen, -A Response- by Paulo Freire)". (shrink)

Paulo Margutti e José Crisóstomo discutem sobre a possiblidade ou a impossibilidade de ultrapassar o representacionismo correspondentista e principalmente o eventual linguocentrismo da filosofia contemporânea, pós-virada linguística, em que parece que da linguagem pode-se passar apenas à linguagem, a cujo círculo mágico estaríamos, desse modo, inevitavelmente presos. Sendo assim, o mundo “aí fora” novamente nos escapa e o relativismo, o agnosticismo e o ceticismo de novo nos espreitam. Em Nietzsche, é a linguagem, sempre metafórica, que se adéqua aos nossos (...) modos prático-perspectivistas, corpóreos e afetivos, de “recortar” o mundo, ou é o contrário? E em Maturana, o que vem primeiro? Para Crisóstomo, para quem no começo está o ato, ultrapassamos tudo isso através de nosso emaranhamento prático com o mundo, por meio da natureza sensível criativa de nossas práticas e pela tradução de crenças em condutas. Enquanto que, para Margutti, nada disso parece deslocar a primazia incontornável da linguagem, como prática ela própria. Sobre isso, Margutti pergunta pelo suposto aproveitamento, por Crisóstomo, no seu ponto de vista prático-poiético criativo, em versão alegadamente não idealista nem dualista, da noção de autoconsciência, central no idealismo alemão. (shrink)

This paper concerns a recently discovered, puzzling asymmetry in judgments of whether an action is intentional or not (Knobe, Philosophical Psychology 16:309–324, 2003a ; Analysis 63:190–193, b ). We report new data replicating the asymmetry in the context of scenarios wherein an agent achieves an amoral or immoral goal due to luck. Participants’ justifications of their judgments of the intentionality of the agent’s action indicate that two distinct folk concepts of intentional action played a role in their judgments. When viewed (...) from this perspective, the puzzle disappears, although the asymmetry remains. (shrink)

In this volume, we have chosen to highlight the importance of education to human rights by reprinting two articles written by Paulo Freire in 1970 for the _Harvard Educational Review_. These articles contain many of Freire's original ideas on human rights and education—issues that are central to his work. Freire was a pioneer in promoting the universal right to education and literacy as part of a commitment to people's struggle against oppression. As Jerome Bruner recognized after Freire's death in (...) May 1997, Freire left as a legacy his commitment to basic human rights: "He was a brave man as well as a far-sighted one. He made us aware of our mindless cruelties, and now the challenge to all of us is to do something about those cruelties.". (shrink)

Upon its recent publication in Portuguese, Paulo Freire’s newest book became an instant success. This English translation is sure to meet with similar acclaim. In Teachers as Cultural Workers, Freire speaks directly to teachers about the lessons learned from a lifetime of experience as an educator and social theorist. No other book so cogently explains the implications for classroom practice of Freire’s latest ideas and the pathbreaking theories found in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and other treatises.This book challenges all (...) who teach to reflect critically on the meaning of the act of teaching as well as the meaning of learning. Freire shows why a teacher’s success depends on a permanent commitment to learning and training, as part of an ongoing appraisal of classroom practice. By observing the curiosity of students and the manner through which students develop strategies for learning, the teacher is helped in discovering doubts, successes, and the teacher’s mistakes. When teachers open themselves to recognize the different roads students take in order to learn, they will become involved in a continual reconstruction of their own paths of curiosity, opening the doors to habits of learning that will benefit everyone in the classroom. (shrink)

Discusses the role of education in liberating the oppressed people of the Third World.

This paper examines language practices in two services offered in the main Catholic Church in the town of Sangmelima in the South region of Cameroon. The research is motivated by the need to find out what languages are used in this church and what the terms “French service” and “Bulu service” imply in the multilingual city of Sangmelima. The informants were the priests, catechists, choir leaders, and some parishioners of this church. Three main instruments were used to collect data in (...) these two church services, i.e., interview, questionnaire and participant observation. The frame adopted for the analysis was Kouega’s structural-functional approach (2008). The findings revealed that the services in this church include 28 parts. In the French service, the languages used to realise these parts were found to be French, Bulu (Sangmelima), Ewondo (Yaounde), Fang (south of Cameroon and north of Equatorial Guinea), Fe’efe’e (Bafang), Ghomala’ (Bafoussam), and Medumba (Bangangte). In the Bulu service, on the other hand, the languages used were: Bulu (Sangmelima), Ewondo (Yaounde), and French. These languages were chosen for a variety of reasons. First, a language like Bulu was chosen because it is understood by the parishioners as it is the main language of the locality. Second, French is the official language of the territory; third, some languages like Fe’efe’e, Ghomala, and Medumba were chosen on the basis of the involvement of the speakers of these ethnic languages in the activities of the church. Fourth, the availability of printed religious materials in a language was an important factor. (shrink)

This book is a large-scale historical reconstruction of liberal legalism, from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, the moment in which the jurists forged the alliance between political liberalism and legal expertise embodied in classical private law doctrine, to the contemporary anxiety about the possibility of both a liberal solution to the problem of political justification and of law as a respectable form of expert knowledge. Each stage in the history is a moment of synthesis between a substantive and a (...) methodological idea. The former is the liberal political theory of the period, purporting to provide a solution to the problem of political justification. The latter is a conception of legal method or science, supposedly vindicating the access of the expert to the political choices embodied in the law. Thus, each moment in the history of liberal legalism integrates a political theory with a jurisprudential conception. Although it reaches the unsettling conclusion that liberal legalism has largely failed by its own standards, the book urges us to avoid quietism, skepticism or cynicism, in the hope that a deeper understanding of the fragility of our values and institutions inspires a more thoughtful, broadminded and nurtured citizenship. (shrink)

Peer-review has become increasingly important to the way scholarly journals assess whether a manuscript is suitable for publication [...].

Morality has traditionally been described in terms of an impartial and objective “moral law”, and moral psychological research has largely followed in this vein, focusing on abstract moral judgments. But might our moral judgments be shaped not just by what the action is, but who is doing it? We looked at ratings of moral wrongness, manipulating whether the person doing the action was a friend, a refugee, or a stranger. We looked at these ratings across various moral foundations, and conducted (...) the study in Brazil, US, and UK samples. Our most robust and consistent findings are that purity violations were judged more harshly when committed by ingroup members and less harshly when committed by the refugees in comparison to the unspecified agents, the difference between refugee and unspecified agents decays from liberals to conservatives, i.e., conservatives judge them more harshly than liberals do, and Brazilians participants are harsher than the US and UK participants. Our results suggest that purity violations are judged differently according to who committed them and according to the political ideology of the judges. We discuss the findings in light of various theories of groups dynamics, such as moral hypocrisy, moral disengagement, and the black sheep effect. (shrink)

La descomposición del ethos de las sociedades convencionales en la Modernidad escindió la moral y la ética, pero la filosofía del sujeto y la separación metafísica entre derecho natural y positivo conllevaron a una concurrencia entre el liberalismo que fundamentó los derechos humanos del individuo, como sujeto en pequeña escala, en la moral racional, mientras que el republicanismo ancló la soberanía popular en un pueblo, como sujeto en gran escala, que reconoce los valores éticos de la comunidad, incluso en el (...) debate entre liberalismo y comunitarismo en Norteamérica. Pero, la teoría de la acción comunicativa supera esta recurrente aporía porque posibilita una comprensión intersubjetiva del derecho como responsable por la integración social entre la racionalidad comunicativa del mundo de la vida y la racionalidad estratégica de los sistemas sociales, la política y la economía, pues permite simultáneamente la autonomía privada y la autonomía pública de manera que los agentes sociales actúen por la facticidad o la validez del derecho a nivel de las normas jurídicas, del sistema de derechos. (shrink)

Many theoretical claims about the folk concept of moral responsibility coming from the current literature are indeterminate because researchers do not clearly specify the folk concept of moral responsibility in question. The article pursues a cognitive approach to folk concepts that pays special attention to this indeterminacy problem. After addressing the problem, the article provides evidence on folk attributions of moral responsibility in the case a failed attempt to kill that goes against a specific claim coming from the current literature (...) - that the dimension of causation is part of the structure of the folk concept of moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper aims at integrating the work onanalogical reasoning in Cognitive Science into thelong trend of philosophical interest, in this century,in analogical reasoning as a basis for scientificmodeling. In the first part of the paper, threesimulations of analogical reasoning, proposed incognitive science, are presented: Gentner''s StructureMatching Engine, Mitchel''s and Hofstadter''s COPYCATand the Analogical Constraint Mapping Engine, proposedby Holyoak and Thagard. The differences andcontroversial points in these simulations arehighlighted in order to make explicit theirpresuppositions concerning the nature of analogicalreasoning. In the (...) last part, this debate in cognitivescience is applied to some traditional philosophicalaccounts of formal and material analogies as a basisfor scientific modeling, like Mary Hesse`s, and tomore recent ones, that already draw from the work inArtificial Intelligence, like that proposed byAronson, Harré and Way. (shrink)

Although theory and research on emotional intelligence in the workplace has generated high expectations and promising findings, the gap between research and practice looms large. Several lines of inquiry point to the potential benefits of EI for leaders, teams, and organizations. Yet, assessing EI remains challenging, and research focusing on group and organizational levels of analysis is still scarce. In this review, I seek to bridge the gap between research and practice by considering a broader view of EI and discussing (...) research findings with a focus on implications for assessment and training. In particular, I discuss strategies to enhance the impact of EI and leadership training, and to drive results through well-integrated organizational development initiatives. (shrink)

Existe uma aparente contradição entre a negação kantiana do direito de resistência expressa na filosofia do direito e a sua apologia à Revolução Francesa abordada na história filosófica. No entanto, esta contradição se dissolve tão logo se compreende que Kant considerou que a Revolução Francesa não constitui precisamente uma revolução, uma vez que isto implicaria que o povo retornasse ao estado de natureza com relação ao soberano deposto, mas uma reforma constitucional empreendida involuntariamente pelo próprio rei Luis XVI que transferiu (...) a soberania aos representantes do povo ao convocar os Estados Gerais, os quais não tinham a obrigação de restituí-la ao soberano anterior, em lugar disso, preferiram se declarar em Assembleia Nacional e elaborar a constituição republicana, a única conforme a vontade unificada do povo. (shrink)

The distribution pattern of the meiotic machinery in known eukaryotes is most parsimoniously explained by the hypothesis that all eukaryotes are ancestrally sexual. However, this assumption is questioned by preliminary results, in culture conditions. These suggested that Acanthamoeba, an organism considered to be largely asexual, constitutively expresses meiosis genes nevertheless—at least in the lab. This apparent disconnect between the “meiosis toolkit” and sexual processes in Acanthamoeba led to the conclusion that the eukaryotic ancestor is asexual. In this review, the “meiosis (...) toolkit” is rigorously defended, drawing on numerous research articles. Additionally, the claim of constitutive meiotic gene expression is probed in Acanthamoeba via the same transcriptomics data. The results show that the expression of the meiotic machinery is not constitutive in Acanthamoeba as claimed before. Furthermore, it is argued that this would have no implications for understanding the nature of the eukaryotic ancestor, regardless of the result. (shrink)

This article endeavours to prove that there were creation myths of human beings or certain things, but there were seldom creation myths of ontological cosmology in ancient China. This will be warranted through the distinction between the concepts of ‘to create’ and ‘to beget’, the distinction between ‘Cosmology I of creationism’ and ‘Cosmology II of begetting’, and the relationship between the One and Many. The only exception is the myth of Nüwa 女娲 as the creator of human beings, but not (...) the creator of the cosmos. Therefore, in ancient Chinese tradition, there were mainly myths of begetting rather than myths of complete creation in the sense similar to creatio ex nihilo.Contribution: Previous research frequently underscores the profound differences between ‘Cosmology I of creationism’ and ‘Cosmology II of begetting’. Based on the discussion of concepts of ‘to create’ [zao 造] and ‘to beget’ [sheng 生], this article argues that, there were mainly myths of begetting rather than myths of complete creation in the sense similar to creatio ex nihilo. (shrink)

A evolução humana é objeto de pesquisas comprometidas com diferentes agendas. Neste artigo discute-se cenários que concedem à psi-cologia de senso comum um papel central em tentativas de se retraçar tal evolução, colocando em relevo o que nos distinguiria de outras mentes animais: habilidades especiais para representar e, sobretudo, para inter-pretar. Essa perspectiva leva a sério a imagem – central a muito do que se faz em filosofia e nas ciências sociais – de que somos agentes constituí-dos em um ambiente (...) social e cultural. Estará em questão se essa imagem pode ser assimilada pela biologia evolutiva contemporânea, sem que esta abra mão dos seus pressupostos fundamentais e do seu arcabouço con-ceitual e teórico característico. Godfrey-Smith e Sterelny apostam nesse projeto, e se propõem a efetivar essa integração. Em contraste com cená-rios inatistas, que se apóiam em argumentos com base numa pobreza de es-tímulos, emerge daquele projeto um cenário no qual a evolução da mente humana interage com as nossas habilidades interpretativas. Estas habili-dades resultariam, por sua vez, de uma aprendizagem socialmente medi-ada, facilitada por um tipo particular de construção de nichos envolven-do mecanismos de herança não-genética.Human evolution is the subject of different kinds of research committed to different agenda. In this paper I will discuss various scenarios in which folk psychology plays a distinctive role in attempts to keep track of this evolution, making explicit what is distinctive about us, compared to other animal minds: special habilities for representation and, above all, for interpretation. This perspective takes seriously the image that we are agents constituted in a social and cultural environment, which is central to much of what is done in philosophy and the social sciences. I will discuss whether this image can be assimilated by contemporary evolutionary biology, without compromising its fundamental pressupositions and its characteristic conceptual and theoretical framework. Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny embrace this project and attempt to work out the details of this integration. Contrasting with nativist scenarios, which are grounded in poverty of the stimulus arguments, a scenario emerges from that project in which the evolution of the human mind interacts with our interpretative habilities. These habilities would be, in turn, the result of social learning, facilitated by a particular kind of niche construction involving non-genetic inheritance mechanisms. (shrink)