Este trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar a experiência de construção de um curso de formação de professores de ciências e de matemática com caráter interdisciplinar. O trabalho foi desenvolvido a partir da interpretação de alguns aspectos da história da educação em ciências e matemática no Brasil que ainda se manifestam nas práticas pedagógicas e dos contextos político e social nos quais se desenvolveu a experiência de construção do Curso de Ciências – licenciatura da Universidade Federal de São Paulo. A tradição (...) de disciplinas escolares independentes e a própria formação disciplinar dos docentes do curso constituíram grandes desafios para a implantação de um curso interdisciplinar, com foco na promoção do diálogo das ciências naturais e da matemática com os desafios sociais e educacionais da atualidade brasileira. A análise aponta que nesse percurso foram enfrentados muitos desafios de ordem conceitual, estrutural e institucional, mas que o resultado (ainda em movimento) foi a organização de um curso com bases teóricas híbridas que desenvolve grande variedade de experiências de integração dos campos da ciência e da matemática e promove uma formação interdisciplinar e contextualizada. (shrink)

The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to (...) rethink the relationship between embodiment and genetics, and we argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours the extension of an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral. (shrink)

The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of 20th-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it shows that technologies aimed at fostering and regulating life did exist in classical antiquity at (...) the population scale. The article highlights zones of indistinction between natural and political processes, zoē and bíos, that are not captured by a view of destructive incorporation of or over life by sovereign power. In conclusion, the article discusses the theoretical potential of this historical evidence for contemporary debates on ‘affirmative biopolitics’ and ‘environmental biopower’. (shrink)

The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent (...) view of the gene that is making its way into contemporary biology. In my article I will use the current emergence of epigenetics and its link with neuroscience research as an example of the new, and in a way unprecedented sociality of contemporary biology. After a review of the most important developments of epigenetic research, and some of its links with neuroscience, in the second part I reflect on the novel challenges that epigenetics presents for the social sciences for a re-conceptualization of the link between the biological and the social in a postgenomic age. Although epigenetics remains a contested, hyped, and often uncritical terrain, I claim that especially when conceptualized in broader non-genecentric frameworks,. (shrink)

Resumo: Este texto tem por objetivo discutir a teoria do conhecimento em Marx e em Engels, além de pontuar os estudos que realizaram sobre a ciência. Esses pensadores do século XIX não se destacaram por elaborar reflexões filosóficas sobre o tema, tal como os modernos fizeram; para compreender o momento histórico deles, caracterizado pela produção capitalista, as preocupações orientavam-se para revisar as filosofias idealistas, considerando-as ideológicas e insuficientes para pensar o que entendiam por realidade material, social. Em contraposição, elaboraram um (...) novo pressuposto teórico pelo qual procuravam explicitar a articulação entre as forças produtivas, concebendo-as como base sob as quais se engendram as relações sociais e as ideias a elas correspondentes, bem como as lutas históricas travadas no interior da mesma sociedade. Compreenderam que o conhecimento e a ciência estão articulados com as bases materiais da produção e que cabe a eles explicar as relações. Esse modo de entender a sociedade de seu tempo mostra-se original, o que justifica estudos que tendem a buscar neles referências teóricas para explicitar as contradições atuais.: This text aims to discuss the theory of knowledge in Marx and Engels, noting as well their studies of science. These two thinkers of the nineteenth century did not stand out for developing philosophical reflections on the subject, in contrast to the moderns. In order to understand their own historical moment, characterized by capitalist production, Marx and Engels concerned themselves with criticizing and revising the idealist philosophies of their day, considering these philosophies to be ideological and insufficient for thinking about what they understood by material and social reality. They therefore developed new theoretical assumptions which sought to clarify the relationship between productive forces, understanding these forces as the basis upon which social relations and the ideas corresponding to them, as well as the historical struggles within society, were engendered. They understood that knowledge and science are articulated on the basis of material production, and saw it as their task to explain the relationship between these factors. This way of understanding the society of their time was an original one, justifying studies that seek theoretical references in their thought that are useful for understanding current contradictions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue against the received view among Unamuno scholars that Miguel de Unamuno was defending a sort of pragmatic argument for religious faith and that his notion of religious faith as “querer creer” (“wanting to believe”) is to be identified with William James’s “the will to believe”. As I will show in this paper, one of the aspects that makes Unamuno’s reasoning philosophically relevant is his ability to formulate a non-pragmatist defense of religious faith (...) without a prior commitment to the truth of any religious or theological statement and grounded in our longing for an endless existence through God’s Salvation. (shrink)

Resumo Giorgio Agamben tece a genealogia da “vida nua”, no percurso que vai do homo sacer ao Muselmann, do primeiro paradigma da política ocidental à fabricação do morto-vivo, em Auschwitz, como vida insacrificável e impunemente matável. Judith Butler segue argumento semelhante, ao desenvolver o conceito de “vida precária”, com o qual problematiza a separação entre vulnerabilidade universal e formas de produção da precariedade, a distinção entre vidas cujas perdas importam e as indignas de pranto e luto. A finalidade deste artigo (...) consiste em aproximar as concepções dos dois autores, sob a hipótese de que, em ambos, trata-se da fabricação de vidas matáveis, sobre as quais pesa a proibição do luto.Giorgio Agamben weaves the genealogy of “naked Life”, on the path that goes from Homo sacer to Muselmann, from the first paradigm of Western politics to the manufacture of the undead in Auschwitz, as an unexpendable and unpunishable killing life. Judith Butler follows similar argument in developing the concept of “precarious life”, with which problematizes the separation between universal vulnerability and forms of production of precariousness, the distinction between lives whose losses matter and the unworthy of weeping and Mourning. The purpose of this article is to approximate the conceptions of the two authors, under the assumption that in both it is the manufacture of killing lives, on which it weighs the prohibition of grief. (shrink)

Seria a escrita um remédio para a memória e a causa de sabedoria entre os homens? Essa é a questão fundamental que este trabalho pretende investigar a partir do mito da invenção da escrita presente no Fedro de Platão. A análise feita por Sócrates e Fedro, os dois interlocutores da conversação, nos conduzirá para pensar sobre uma questão que perpassa todos os diálogos de Platão, que é a natureza do saber e sua relação com a linguagem. Veremos como Sócrates enuncia (...) a diferença entre memória e recordação, mnéme e anámnesis. Tal exame conceitual se apresenta como capital para que se entenda como a alma desperta, através da linguagem, para a atividade filosófica, o que acaba sendo também uma crítica à retorica dos sofistas, logógrafos, políticos e oradores contemporâneos de Platão. (shrink)

Chapter 1st of the book. This chapter explores the fundamental ambiguity of the concept of plasticity – between openness and determination, change and stabilization of forms. This pluralism of meanings is used to unpack different instantiations of corporeal plasticity across various epochs, starting from ancient and early modern medicine, particularly humouralism. A genealogical approach displaces the notion that plasticity is a unitary phenomenon, coming in the abstract, and illuminates the unequal distribution of different forms of plasticities across social, gender, and (...) ethnic groups. Taking a longer view of the plastic body as a ubiquitous belief in traditions predating and coexisting with modern medicine will help contextualize the seeming radicalism of today’s turn to permeability and the exceptionalism of Western findings. By highlighting the complex biopolitical usages of plasticity in the past, the chapter warns against simplistic appropriations of the term in contemporary body/world configurations driven by findings in neuroscience, epigenetics and microbiomics. (shrink)

Após consolidar o fundamento objetivo da lei moral na razão pura prática, Immanuel Kant investiga o fundamento subjetivo e introduz o sentimento. De produto da razão, a lei moral será examinada como efeito sobre o ânimo, numa dialética de desprazer e prazer, da qual surge o sentimento moral. O presente artigo visa problematizar este aspecto da ética do filósofo à luz da Crítica da faculdade do juízo e dos conceitos princípio do prazer e princípio da realidade de Sigmund Freud. Ao (...) colocar em questão a relação entre sentimento de prazer e moral nos dois pensadores, indaga se no filósofo não estaria em questão a descoberta da realidade interna da heteronomia. (shrink)

Apresentação à tradução de Sobre Os anos de aprendizado de Wilhelm Meister, de Christian Gottfried Körner, por Reginaldo Rodrigues Raposo.

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in (...) nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine. (shrink)

O artigo busca principalmente descrever tanto a experiência de duas aulas em um estágio iniciado em uma escola estadual na Zona Leste da cidade de São Paulo, a interrupção das atividades no colégio durante o período da crise sanitária, quanto duas aulas do Centro de Mídias transmitidas durante o isolamento social. Do mesmo modo, a partir das descrições, sugere-se algumas discussões de caráter filosófico sobre a educação neste contexto à luz de contribuições de pensadores de língua alemã do início dos (...) séculos XIX e XX. (shrink)

Tradução de Über Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796).

This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body – that is plasticity as a form of life – is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal (...) distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought-style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community. (shrink)

A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of (...) Country and health—views that locate health not in individual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives. (shrink)

In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, from an understanding of the brain as an isolated data processor (...) to the ultrasocial and multiply connected social brain of contemporary neuroscience; and (3) changes in molecular biology, from the view of the gene as an autonomous master of development to the ‘reactive genome’ of the new emerging field of molecular epigenetics. In the second section I reflect on the possible implications for the social sciences of this novel biosocial terrain and argue that the postgenomic language of extended epigenetic inheritance and blurring of the nature/nurture boundaries will be as provocative for neo-Darwinism as it is for the social sciences as we have known them. Signs of a new biosocial language are emerging in several social-science disciplines and this may represent an exciting theoretical novelty for twenty-first social theory. (shrink)

This text slightly modified, became the first chapter of our M.A. thesis - The Tropical Phoenix: a critical note about dualism and the theory of dependency, presented to the "Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas" of the University of São Paulo. The main themes of this thesis are: I - "Philosophy of History", Marxism and "objectivity"; II - Brazilian social thinking: the theories of/about development and the apologetic Marxism: 1.º Werner Baer: conservative "objectivity" against the reformist "passions"; 2.º Carlos (...) Lessa: Industrialization as "decision"; 3.º ISEB: reformist objectivity against socialist passions; 4.º Political maturity against socialist adventures; III - Common presuppositions.Este texto veio a constituir, modificado, o primeiro capítulo de nossa tese de mestrado - A Fênix tropical: nota crítica sobre o dualismo e a teoria da dependência, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo. Trata dos seguintes temas: I - A "filosofia da história", o marxismo e a "objetividade"; II - O pensamento social brasileiro: as teorias do/sobre o desenvolvimento e o marxismo apologético: 1.º Werner Baer: a "objetividade" conservadora contra as "paixões" reformistas; 2.º Carlos Lessa: Industrialização como "decisão"; 3.º ISEB: objetividade reformista contra paixões socialistas; 4.º Maturidade política contra aventuras socialistas; III - Os pressupostos comuns. (shrink)

Nota sobre publicações recentes que revelam aspectos pouco conhecidos da biblioteca de Newton – os numerosos textos religiosos, místicos e herméticos. Os biógrafos de Newton resistiram muito até admitir que os escritos esotéricos fossem genuíno interesse do sábio e que tivessem importância para entender sua trajetória intelectual. As publicações aqui indicadas afirmam o contrário, seguindo trilha aberta por ensaio pioneiro de J. M. Keynes (1946).

The present text constitutes a summary of a talk given by the author at the III Conferência Brasileira de Educação. It is here claimed that there is a need to discuss the roots of the idea of rights of the individual and of its link, in Locke's founding thought, with property and, moreover, with the freedom and autonomy of the human person. Furthermore, a discussion is made of the liberal-rationalist assumption of the optimum allocation of social resources through the clash (...) and combination of private interests. A twofold crisis of our times: crisis of the view of a self-regulated Laplacean universe and the crisis of the belief in the optimum allocation via market. The idea of the intervention of the State in the economy does not mean a destruction of private property nor of the value law and of profit. It only attests to its survival and seeks to ensure its implementation. Can't the idea of education be analogously thought of as a social right guaranteed and allocated by the State; as an investment in "human capital"? What is the meaning of the expression "educational policy"?O presente texto constitui síntese de comunicação do autor à III Conferência Brasileira de Educação. Afirma-se a necessidade de discutir as raízes da idéia de direitos do indivíduo e seu vínculo, no pensamento fundador de Locke, com a propriedade e, mais ainda, a liberdade e autonomia da pessoa humana. Discute-se ainda o suposto liberal-racionalista de alocação ótima dos recursos sociais através do choque e combinação de interesses privados. Uma dupla crise de nossos tempos: crise da concepção de universo auto-regulado laplaceano e a crise da crença na alocação ótima via mercado. A idéia de intervenção do Estado na economia não significa a destruição da propriedade privada, da lei do valor e do lucro. Apenas atesta a sua sobrevivência e procura garantir seu desenvolvimento. Não se pode pensar analogamente a idéia de educação como direito social garantido e alocado pelo Estado, como investimento no "capital humano"? Qual o sentido da expressão - uma "política educacional"? (shrink)

This article was written in August 83, initially as a lecture at Jornada de Filosofia da UNESP. We begin with an approximation between Hegel and Marx and then we discuss the idea of work's force reproduction understood as a part of the capital. The latter is viewed as a kind of social relationship. This approach is attempeted on the basis of certain passages of Marx's The Capital and The Grundrisse as well. Finally, we interpret some nowdays developments under the point (...) of view of this "cynical anatomy".Este artigo foi escrito em agosto/83, para conferência-debate na Jornada de Filosofia da UNESP. Partindo de aproximações Marx/Hegel sobre o tema da "fatalidade histórica", passamos a discutir a reprodução da força de trabalho como parte do capital, entendido este último, por sua vez, como relação social. Este exame é feito na esteira de algumas passagens de O Capital e dos Grundrisse. A seguir, procedemos à leitura de alguns fatos contemporâneos à luz dessa "anatomia cínica". (shrink)

The author exposes some stages judged necessary for the examination of the modern theories about the economic, social and cultural changes of brazilian history. On the other hand, this movement would have in view to search the epistemological grounds of such "Brazil's explanations". This text, it must be remembered, presents it self only as a work plan.O autor expõe etapas que julga necessárias para o exame de modernas teorias a respeito das transformações econômicas, sociais e culturais da história brasileira. Por (...) outro lado, esse movimento visaria investigar os fundamentos epistemológicos de tais "explicações do Brasil". O texto corresponde, insiste-se, a um plano de trabalho. (shrink)

Na _Crítica da razão prática_, Kant desenvolve o fundamento da lei moral em seus aspectos objetivo e subjetivo. Depois de afirmar ser plausível postular a determinação da vontade tão somente por meio da razão pura em seu uso prático, foi necessário ao filósofo demonstrar como ela se torna consciente e aceitável para o agente moral. Neste passo, ele examina o sentimento de prazer e desprazer, ao qual associa, de início, a humilhação da vontade entregue ao agrado dos sentidos, de modo (...) que no sujeito emerge uma qualidade nova de sentimento, o respeito, também denominado de sentimento moral. A mesma estratégia encontra-se na terceira crítica, onde o constrangimento, desta vez, atua sobre a imaginação, impossibilitada de abarcar a imensidão sublime com o auxílio do entendimento. O desprazer daí proveniente conduz ao reconhecimento da razão como faculdade superior e, desta, ao prazer proveniente da consciência da lei moral como destinação superior. A considerar a forma como o subjetivo assimila a lei moral, pretende-se aqui pensá-la sob a hipótese de ser ela, antes, por meio do constrangimento e do desprazer, não apenas fundada na liberdade, mas também na humilhação da presunção. O argumento segue as obras de Kant sobre a ética, a começar pela _Fundamentação da Metafísica dos costumes_, em seguida, segue o caminho da segunda para a terceira crítica. Neste percurso, pretende-se examinar o lugar que o sentimento de prazer ocupa no fundamento _a priori_ da lei moral, seja na analítica da razão prática seja na analítica do belo e do sublime. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the disruptive impact of Darwinian selectionism for the century-long tradition in which the environment had a direct causative role in shaping an organism’s traits. In the case of humans, the surrounding environment often determined not only the physical, but also the mental and moral features of individuals and whole populations. With its apparatus of indirect effects, random variations, and a much less harmonious view of nature and adaptation, Darwinian selectionism severed the deep imbrication of organism (...) and milieu posited by these traditional environmentalist models. This move had radical implications well beyond strictly biological debates. In my essay, I discuss the problematization of the moral idiom of environmentalism by William James and August Weismann who adopted a selectionist view of the development of mental faculties. These debates show the complex moral discourse associated with the environmentalist-selectionist dilemma. They also well illustrate how the moral reverberations of selectionism went well beyond the stereotyped associations with biological fatalism or passivity of the organism. Rereading them today may be helpful as a genealogical guide to the complex ethical quandaries unfolding in the current postgenomic scenario in which a revival of new environmentalist themes is taking place. (shrink)

Most of the existing studies on Bourdieu and the digital regards the social and class distinctions in the use of digital technologies, thus presupposing a certain transparency of technologies themselves. Our proposal is to refer to this attitude as “Bourdieu outside the digital.” Yet in this paper, another perspective called “Bourdieu inside the digital” is developed, which moves the focus on the effects of some emerging technologies on social distinctions and discrimination. The main hypothesis is that algorithms of machine learning (...) are producers and reproducers of habitus. Although their results present a greater granularity with respect to the standard techniques of the past, these algorithms still reduce individuals to categories, general trends, classes, and behaviors. Such a reduction has flattening effects on the individuals’ self-understanding, especially in terms of identity and interaction with the social world. This is the phenomenon described in the article as the “personalization without personality,” whose consequences are both existential and social-political. This idea will be illustrated through qualitative and comparative analysis between the correspondence analysis and the multiple correspondence analysis used by Bourdieu in his works and some of those techniques that are performed today in big data analytics. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é debater temas do universo dos processos judiciais patrocinados pelo Estado brasileiro após a instauração da ditadura civil-militar de 1964, conduzidos sob a tutela da Justiça Militar, que atingiram a organização revolucionária Ação Popular, uma das mais representativas do campo político da esquerda brasileira nas décadas de 1960 e 1970. A análise utiliza a documentação sistematizada pelo projeto “Brasil: nunca mais”. Para alcançar tal objetivo, porém, a investigação vai além do exame do que está sistematizado nos (...) processos jurídicos, pois os fatos ali narrados eram submetidos ao filtro do que poderia estar contido nos processos. Além disso, há um leque de personagens atingidos com detenção, tortura, morte e desaparecimento que sequer foram submetidos ao universo judicial. Entende-se que os fatos extrajudiciais informam, mais completamente, o sentido da “Justiça” praticada pelo Estado brasileiro naqueles anos. (shrink)

Este artigo tem o objetivo de analisar a interpretação que Leon Trotsky produziu sobre a Revolução Russa. Abarcando desde o período pré-revolucionário até a fase de liderança de Stalin, as fontes são as obras de Trotsky relacionadas ao tema. Investiga-se a hipótese de que existe uma unidade fundamental na interpretação de Trotsky, assegurada por duas coordenadas. Primeira, o fio condutor da interpretação é a teoria da revolução permanente. Segunda, Outubro de 1917 é o centro de gravidade, na medida em que (...) teria confirmado os pressupostos da teoria da revolução permanente, anunciados em 1905 e traídos pelos acontecimentos do período subsequente. (shrink)

The problem of the construction of memory that faces the Afro-Brazilian population presents itself as more than a simple need for an identity connected to an original past, but in addition as essential, because for historical reasons their social reality has not yet reached the end of its struggle. The African composition of Brazilian culture is based on several sources of many origins peculiar to different African peoples. The memory people have of Africa is vague, generic, indefinite. Though the lost (...) ancestral past is multi-ethnic, multicultural Africa, the retrievable past is the one Brazil has succeeded in integrating into the construction of a new civilization: a past that can only be re-invented, a re-created memory. (shrink)

Este artigo relaciona a teoria existencialista de Sartre com os aspectos atuais da sociedade do conhecimento atrelados à educação. Para tanto o ser é tomado a partir da sua subjetividade que se estabelece na relação consigo mesmo, com o outro e com o mundo. A partir da trama dessas relações o conhecimento disseminado passa a ser filtrado e orientado entre os sujeitos. Para que haja um resgate à subjetividade, autonomia da consciência humana assentada no desenvolvimento das capacidades cognitivas e afetivas (...) de problematização e apreensão da realidade, no entanto, necessitará de uma formação global com participação crítica baseada na ação e compreensão no mundo. (shrink)

Recent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault’s legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault’s binary narrative of the Christian flock versus the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other ‘technologies of power’ in medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governmentality in modernity, we suggest a transregional and longue durée history of which the Christian pastorate was (...) merely one facet. This non-binary framework indicates that Foucault’s claim of a ‘demonic’ fusion of sovereign and pastoral power in modern politics requires significant revisitation. Finally, we claim that Foucault’s much-discussed fascination with neoliberalism may have roots in this one-sided narrative regarding the birth of the welfare-state. (shrink)

Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...) attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

The first half of this article follows Mario Bunge’s early realist moves, his efforts to articulate the achievements of theoretical physics as gains in the quest for objective truth and understanding, particularly in the context of the fights against the idealist and subjectivist interpretations of quantum mechanics that, at least until the mid-1970s, prevailed in physics. Bunge’s answers to the problems of quantum mechanics provide a good angle for understanding how his realist positions grew on the “battlefield.” The second half (...) discusses Bunge’s general conception of the scientific realist stance and confronts it with some current approaches to realism in the mainstream literature. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the concept of love —understood in the broad and Christian-inspired sense of love as agape-charis love— in relation to the animes Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. I first comment on the character of Piccolo —and how his friendship with Son Gohan— leads to him losing all his original villainous traits. I argue that the evolution of the character of Piccolo through his friendship with Son Gohan illustrates the philosophical claim that a (...) loving and giving of oneself to the other —far from being a sign of weakness— is a courageous and self-affirming exercise. The result may move the individual to an inner transformative experience that leads to the enjoyment of a renewed and authentic life that is worth living. I then argue that Son Goku’s respectful attitude towards his opponents is ultimately a loving attitude. Last, I argue that it is the inspiring and loving example of Son Goku that ultimately explains why characters such as Vegeta —who are at first presented as villains— end up losing their villainous traits after fighting against Son Goku. (shrink)

In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes, and promises of ‘biopolitics' to understand and frame global health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global histories of populations’ politics of life and health to situate present and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue for an affirmative biopolitics, that at once de-securitizes our (...) approach to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer una exposición sistemática de la propuesta filosófica de Joaquim Xirau (Figueras, 1895 – Ciudad de México, 1946), señalando así su interés filosófico al tiempo que se vinculan sus dos grandes obras ensayísticas de madurez, Amor y mundo (1940) y Lo fugaz y lo eterno (1942).

Introduction: Jai Mata Di (praise the mother goddess) -- Sutra 1: Samadhi, or yogic ecstasy -- Sutra 2: realization, or the practice of yoga -- Sutra 3: the Siddhis, or the magical powers -- Sutra 4: absolute freedom.

In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources of moral phenomena, a process here named (...) the ‘moralization of biology’. I conclude by addressing the ambivalent status of this constellation of authors, for whom today ‘morality comes naturally’: I explore both the attractiveness of their message, and the problematic epistemological assumptions of their research programmes in the light of new discoveries in developmental and molecular biology. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Unamuno was conceiving of God (and ordinary, non-religious fictional characters more generally) in realist, though non-evidentially grounded, terms. I will point out that this way of conceiving of God allowed Unamuno to claim the actual existence of God (though as a fictional, purely humanly created character) and, with this, the possibility of there being an actual relationship between the concrete religious person and God without having to dispense with his own core claim that (...) religious faith is just a subjective, though natural and thus inevitable, human reaction. (shrink)