The combined use of computers and telecommunications and the latest evolution in the field of Artificial Intelligence brought along new ways of contracting and of expressing will and declarations. The question is, how far we can go in considering computer intelligence and autonomy, how can we legally deal with a new form of electronic behaviour capable of autonomous action? In the field of contracting, through Intelligent Electronic Agents, there is an imperious need of analysing the question of expression of consent, (...) and two main possibilities have been proposed: considering electronic devices as mere machines or tools, or considering electronic devices as legal persons. Another possibility that has been frequently mentioned consists in the application of the rules of agency to electronic transactions. Meanwhile, the question remains: would it possible, under a Civil Law framework, to apply the notions of “legal personhood” and “representation” to electronic agents? It is obvious that existing legal norms are not fit for such an endeavouring challenge. Yet, the virtual world exists and it requires a new but realistic legal approach on software agents, in order to enhance the use of electronic commerce in a global world. (shrink)

Robustness is a significant constraint in machine learning models. The performance of the algorithms must not deteriorate when training and testing with slightly different data. Deep neural network models achieve awe-inspiring results in a wide range of applications of computer vision. Still, in the presence of noise or region occlusion, some models exhibit inaccurate performance even with data handled in training. Besides, some experiments suggest deep learning models sometimes use incorrect parts of the input information to perform inference. Active image (...) augmentation is an augmentation method that uses interpretability methods to augment the training data and improve its robustness to face the described problems. Although ADA presented interesting results, its original version only used the vanilla backpropagation interpretability to train the U-Net model. In this work, we propose an extensive experimental analysis of the interpretability method’s impact on ADA. We use five interpretability methods: vanilla backpropagation, guided backpropagation, gradient-weighted class activation mapping, guided GradCam and InputXGradient. The results show that all methods achieve similar performance at the ending of training, but when combining ADA with GradCam, the U-Net model presented an impressive fast convergence. (shrink)

This explorative study contributes to the theoretical debate on political incivility beyond the domination of Western-centric approaches while connecting the bodies of literature in political philosophy and media research. It offers empirical evidence of Bolsonaro’s delegitimizing criticisms and uncivil expressions toward the press, some specific news outlets, and individual journalists during the first two years of his presidential mandate in Brazil. It concludes that Bolsonaro displayed the complete repertoire of the defining elements of political incivility in liberal democracies vis à (...) vis the delegitimization of the press. He also unprecedently pushed the limits of civility in political discourse by employing the entire arsenal of verbal manifestations of impoliteness. (shrink)

This Article defines four distinct conceptions of cruelty found in underdeveloped form in domestic and international criminal law sources. The definition is analytical, focusing on the types of agency, victimization, causality, and values in each conception of cruelty. But no definition of cruelty will do justice to its object until complemented by the kind of understanding practical reason provides of the implications of the phenomenon of cruelty. -/- No one should be neutral in relation to cruelty. Eminently, cruelty in criminal (...) law, a human-created phenomenon, vigorously calls for responses in the form of preventive and corrective action on the part of private and public actors. It is in this sense that cruelty is a problem of practical reason, one of action preoccupied with its legal or moral obligations, rational grounds, value commitments, and actual consequences. -/- However, the connection between conceptions of cruelty and the implications practical reason can draw from the correct application of a conception of cruelty to phenomena in the world remains too detached to be able to capture and explain people's actual experiences both of seeing cruelty in the world and of confronting the question of what to do about cruelty and how to address its cultural and institutional aspects. Something is missing. -/- What is missing is the integration of conceptions of cruelty and the practical reason implications of detecting cruelty in the world into normative models which operate as meaning matrixes for cognition, meaning, and action. This Article undertakes this explanatory task through an exercise of reconstructing seminal philosophical ideas about cruelty. The result is that the four conceptions of cruelty are placed within three distinct normative models, which ultimately render intelligible legal conceptions of cruelty and legal reactions to it. (shrink)

O artigo retomou pesquisas realizadas anteriormente no Médio Vale de Jequitinhonha, Minas Gerais, pelo Projeto Pólos de Cidadania, com vistas à prevenção da exploração sexual comercial de crianças e adolescentes. De especial importância foram as entrevistas realizadas com 34 jovens apontados por ent..

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)

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)

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)

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)

O que colocou o funcionalismo no centro do debate em torno do problema mente-corpo nos últimos trinta anos parece ter sido a sua capacidade de conciliar intuições fisicalistas com uma espécie de não-reducionismo: se por um lado postula-se a existência de entes físicos somente, distribuídos em uma ontologia estratificada, por outro não se falha em explicitar uma distinção real entre as propriedades de entes capacitados a sentir e representar. A superveniência mente-corpo aparentava esclarecer essas intuições dos fisicalistas não-redutivos. Vários dos (...) trabalhos de Kim em torno dessa relação, em especial aqueles publicados antes do fim da década de oitenta, sugeriram a superveniência como uma possível, e promissora, elucidação do estado de coisas em torno do problema da relação entre a mentalidade e o físico. Nos últimos anos, contudo, Kim apresentou um dilema, expressando com bastante pungência que a causação mental revela-se ininte-ligível, valendo ou não valendo a superveniência mente-corpo. Por conseguinte, a superve-niência deixa de compor uma possível solução para o problema, passando a constituí-lo. Como tal conceito de superveniência mente-corpo estende-se naturalmente a uma região de intersecção entre todas as posturas não-reducionistas minimamente fisicalistas, as preo-cupações de Kim, se de fato justificadas, sugerem algo de bastante grave com o fisicalismo não-reducionista. Defenderemos neste trabalho que, apesar do problema da exclusão causal ser genuíno, ainda é cedo para concluirmos a falsidade do fisicalismo não-redutivo. (shrink)

Review of Kim, Jaegwon. Philosophy of Mind.

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.

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)

Aristotle says that a fallacy of accident takes place whenever something is held to belong in the same way to an object and to its accident (SE 5 166b28-30). The Received View among interpreters takes “accident” (συμβεβηκός) in that connection to stand for any predicate that is not identical to its subject, and makes the fallacy consist in mistaking predication for identity. Such an analysis, however, gives “accident” a meaning otherwise unattested in the corpus; makes all cases of the fallacy (...) inconclusive, whereas inferences of the same kind are warranted (with a qualification) at different places in the corpus; does not cover cases which in Aristotle’s view fall under the fallacy of accident, for which a different analysis and solution must be provided; and does not square with Aristotle’s own solution in terms of sameness or difference in substance and being. This chapter presents a new take on the subject, grounded on Aristotle’s expressed views in the Sophistical Refutations and other works, according to which the fallacy takes place whenever a substitution of co-extensives, or even of necessary equivalents, makes reciprocation fail to (necessarily) hold between relata. (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)

Cet ouvrage propose une réinterprétation originale du rôle cognitif du Je pense kantien qui se veut pertinente pour la phénoménologie et pour la philosophie actuelle de l’esprit. L’étude du rapport entre temporalité phénoménale et cognition catégoriale constitue le fil conducteur de cette recherche. Elle mène à la question capitale du statut ultime du Moi, du sens du Je du Je pense. Que désigne-t-il : un épiphénomène contingent, une représentation sui generis, une métareprésentation, un acte indéconstructible, un événement fonctionnel, une forme (...) logique ? Recèle-t-il une véritable unité ou plutôt une multiplicité productrice d’unité ? Représente-t-il une identité réelle ou un changement identifiable, un référent vide ou ‘saturé’ ? La réponse à toutes ces questions dépend notamment de la façon de concevoir l’efficacité du Je, c’est-à-dire de l’articulation entre inconscient cognitif, conscience de soi et conscience de quelque chose en général. En pensant Kant avec la philosophie moderne et contemporaine, l’auteur tente d’élucider l’instabilité inévitable du passage critique à un Cogito postmétaphysique. (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)

The paper starts with a distinction between kinds of description that can be proposed for a populational dynamics, including a ‘Darwinian’ description, in terms of variation, inheritance and differential fitness, engaging the entities that make up the relevant population. It follows with a categorization of different kinds of cultural populations and an investigation of the most general conditions that have to be fulfilled for an evolutionary and Darwinian dynamics to take place in those populations, especially in the population comprised by (...) the cultural traits themselves. We make salient some approaches to the evolution in the human lineage, such as dual inheritance theory and memetics, that place cultural evolution at the center of their scenarios. In this way, those approaches contribute to the development of a general theory of cultural evolution, and we compare them, in this respect, with other approaches. Those confrontations grant also illustrations of the analogies between biological evolution and cultural evolution, as well as failures in the analogy. (shrink)

Verifica-se um fértil intercâmbio entre filósofos e biólogos, de modo especial nas investigações contemporâneas sobre a evolução humana. Avalio, inicialmente, o compatibilismo como postura filosófica, que coloca em evidência a possibilidade de que hábitos de interpretação, com base numa psicologia de senso comum, tenham desempenhado um papel na evolução em nossa linhagem. Essa hipótese pode lançar luz sobre dilemas que surgem na construção de uma teoria que pressuponha a interação entre modalidades genética e cultural de herança. Para que a cultura (...) desempenhe essa função, é necessário que evoluam capacidades especiais para a aprendizagem social, que estariam associadas a capacidades para interpretar o comportamento de agentes. Num registro metafísico, discuto as condições para que grupos culturais possam ser considerados indivíduos no sentido de unidades de seleção. Num registro metodológico, eu analiso também o emprego de modelos matemáticos em tentativas de se construir cenários plausíveis para a evolução que nos tornou humanos. (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)

The first volume in a landmark commentary on an important and influential work of ancient philosophy This is the first volume of a groundbreaking commentary on one of the most important works of ancient philosophy, the Enneads of Plotinus—a text that formed the basis of Neoplatonism and had a deep influence on early Christian thought and medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This volume covers the first three of the six Enneads, as well as Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, a document in which (...) Plotinus’s student—the collector and arranger of the Enneads—introduces the philosopher and his work. A landmark contribution to modern Plotinus scholarship, Paul Kalligas’s commentary is the most detailed and extensive ever written for the whole of the Enneads. For each of the treatises in the first three Enneads, Kalligas provides a brief introduction that presents the philosophical background against which Plotinus’s contribution can be assessed; a synopsis giving the main lines and the articulation of the argument; and a running commentary placing Plotinus’s thought in its intellectual context and making evident the systematic association of its various parts with each other. (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 book, we come to understand the author's pedagogical thinking even better, through the critical seriousness, humanistic objectivity, and engaged ...

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)

Resumo: Johann Gottfried Herder, à semelhança dos seus contemporâneos, reflectiu sobre a linguagem e, em 1772, publicou o Ensaio Sobre a Origem da Linguagem, que, no ano anterior, lhe valera a distinção da Academia de Berlim para melhor ensaio. No entanto, ainda hoje, muito do seu pensamento é desconhecido, ignorando-se, por isso, que algumas das modernas abordagens da filosofia contemporânea, da antropologia filosófica ou mesmo da sociobiologia estão já aí enunciadas, nomeadamente nas narrativas decorrentes da enunciação das quatro leis naturais. (...) Mais do que a justificação sobre a origem da linguagem, o ensaio do filósofo permite ainda compreender a natureza humana, inserindo no coração da antropologia filosófica a sua génese, e contrariando, se não mesmo confrontando, dessa forma, a tradição divina dessa atribuição. Assim, num primeiro momento, far-se-á uma análise genérica da obra, ressaltando as teses fundamentais que permitirão o estabelecimento do diálogo com algumas das abordagens filosóficas contemporâneas. De seguida, admitindo a possibilidade de um cenário de singularidade tecnológica, tal como enunciado por Irving John Good, Vernor Vinge ou Ray Kurzweil, verificar a plausibilidade e a validade das teses de Herder, no que concerne ao alcance da linguagem e à natureza humana, e de como isso poderá constituir uma fronteira de resistência.: Johann Gottfried Herder, like his contemporaries, reflected on language and in 1772 published the Treatise on the Origin of Language, which in the previous year had earned the distinction of the Berlin Academy for best essay. However, even today, much of his thought is unknown, ignoring the fact that some of the modern approaches of contemporary philosophy, philosophical anthropology or even sociobiology are already stated there, namely in the narratives resulting from the enunciation of the four natural laws. More than justifying the origin of language, the philosopher’s essay also allows us to understand human nature, inserting its genesis at the heart of philosophical anthropology and contradicting, if not even confronting in this way, the divine tradition of this attribution. Thus, at first, a generic analysis of the work will be carried out, highlighting the fundamental theses that will allow the establishment of a dialogue with some of the contemporary philosophical approaches. Then, admitting the possibility of a scenario of technological singularity, as stated by Irving John Good, Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil, to verify the plausibility and validity of Herder’s theses regarding the scope of language and human nature and how this could constitute a frontier of resistance. (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)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

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)