The basic assumption present in these articles is that naturalism is highly compatible with a wide range of relevant philosophical questions and that, regardless of the classical problems faced by the naturalist, the price paid in endorsing naturalism is lower than that paid by essentialist or supernaturalist theories. Yet, the reader will find a variety of approaches, from naturalism in Moral Philosophy and Epistemology to naturalism in the Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind and of the Aesthetics.

Espinoza Lolas, Ricardo; Fernández, Jorge Eduardo y Toscano, Alberto Hegel hoyBarcelona: Herder, 416 p.ISBN 9788425444272.

O artigo trata do modo como as pesquisas genealógicas de Nietzsche e de Foucault, opondo-se aos pressupostos metafísicos, engendram relações ético-políticas que escapam ao apelo de qualquer normatividade ideal ao realizar a crítica do presente. Partindo da recusa no pensamento nietzscheano da oposição de valores que forja origens sublimes desligadas da imanência das disputas mundanas, exploramos como a reconstrução das invenções históricas de valores induz à demanda por uma construção afirmativa de si mesmo. Em um segundo momento, o artigo se (...) ocupa das ressonâncias e desdobramentos da genealogia de Nietzsche no pensamento foucaultiano, analisando, principalmente, como a tarefa do diagnóstico do presente transforma a filosofia e sua forma de atuação. Por fim, concluímos com uma possibilidade de afirmação de um modo de vida outro na reflexão de Foucault sobre o movimento gay. (shrink)

This article explores negotiations over the humanistic versus mechanized components of care through an ethnographic account of digital phenotyping research. I focus on a US-based team of psychiatric and engineering professionals assembling a smartphone application that they hope will analyze minute changes in the sounds of speech during phone calls to predict when a user with bipolar disorder will have a manic or depressive episode. Contrary to conventional depictions of psychiatry as essentially humanistic, the discourse surrounding digital phenotyping positions the (...) machine as a necessary addition to mental health care precisely because of its more-than-human sensory, attentional capacities. The bipolar research team likewise portrays their app as capable of pinpointing sonic signs of mental illness that humans, too distracted by semantic meaning, otherwise ignore. Nevertheless, the team members tasked with processing the team’s data must craft and perform a selectively attentive machinic subject position, which they call “listening like a computer”: a paradoxical mode of attention and inattention. By tracing the team’s discursive and on-the-ground enactments of care and attention as both humanistic and machinic, I tune a critical ear to the posthuman promises of digital phenotyping. (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)

El texto ofrece dos propuestas: el cosmopolitismo institucional y el cosmopolitismo de la responsabilidad. El primero, como sugiere el término, confía en el mantenimiento de las instituciones jurídicas y políticas, pero éstas deben reestructurarse para responder a las nuevas exigencias de la sociedad contemporánea. El cosmopolitismo de la responsabilidad subraya la importancia de construir efectivamente deberes y espacios de rendición de cuentas para todos los actores nacionales e internacionales. Como resultado, se vislumbran propuestas como la diligencia debida en el contexto (...) de los desastres climáticos o incluso las violaciones estructurales de los derechos humanos. Además, el concepto de rendición de cuentas se alinea con los estudiosos de las teorías decoloniales, en las que los conflictos raciales y religiosos plantean importantes desafíos al cosmopolitismo crítico. La cuestión central es descubrir si el cosmopolitismo -unido por neologismos que surgen para expandir el campo lingüístico hacia nuevos conceptos para nuevas realidades- puede encontrar alternativas a la falta de efectividad de los derechos y deberes humanos a nivel nacional e internacional. El método utilizado fue la hermenéutica fenomenológica porque no hay interpretación sin comprensión. (shrink)

In Ockhamist branching-time logic [Prior 67], formulas are meant to be evaluated on a specified branch, or history, passing through the moment at hand. The linguistic counterpart of the manifoldness of future is a possibility operator which is read as `at some branch, or history (passing through the moment at hand)'. Both the bundled-trees semantics [Burgess 79] and the $\langle moment, history\rangle$ semantics [Thomason 84] for the possibility operator involve a quantification over sets of moments. The Ockhamist frames are (3-modal) (...) Kripke structures in which this second-order quantification is represented by a first-order quantification. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the notions of modal definability, validity, and axiomatizability concerning 3-modal frames which can be viewed as generalizations of Ockhamist frames. (shrink)

A completeness theorem is established for logics with congruence endowed with general semantics (in the style of general frames). As a corollary, completeness is shown to be preserved by fibring logics with congruence provided that congruence is retained in the resulting logic. The class of logics with equivalence is shown to be closed under fibring and to be included in the class of logics with congruence. Thus, completeness is shown to be preserved by fibring logics with equivalence and general semantics. (...) An example is provided showing that completeness is not always preserved by fibring ligics endowed with standard (non general) semantics. A categorial characterization of fibring is provided using coproducts and cocartesian liftings. (shrink)

Este artigo se propõe a analisar o primeiro estágio do desenvolvimento da área de pesquisa em filosofia da psicanálise no Brasil, apresentando e descrevendo os trabalhos fundadores de seus pioneiros, produzidos entre a segunda metade dos anos 1970 e o início dos anos 1990. A seguir, ele discute e procura elucidar a ideia de uma “epistemologia da psicanálise” que domina este período inicial, propondo um conjunto de quatro argumentos para proporcionar uma visão mais sistemática de suas principais teses, a saber, (...) os argumentos analítico, defensivo, conciliatório e indutor. Como conclusão, é apontada a pesquisa que ainda é necessária para se obter um panorama mais abrangente deste movimento da história intelectual brasileira. (shrink)

This open access book discusses individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to vaccination from the perspective of philosophy and public health ethics. It addresses the issue of what it means for a collective to be morally responsible for the realisation of herd immunity and what the implications of collective responsibility are for individual and institutional responsibilities. The first chapter introduces some key concepts in the vaccination debate, such as ‘herd immunity’, ‘public goods’, and ‘vaccine refusal’; and explains why failure (...) to vaccinate raises certain ethical issues. The second chapter analyses, from a philosophical perspective, the relationship between individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to the realisation of herd immunity. The third chapter is about the principle of least restrictive alternative in public health ethics and its implications for vaccination policies. Finally, the fourth chapter presents an ethical argument for unqualified compulsory vaccination, i.e. for compulsory vaccination that does not allow for any conscientious objection. The book will appeal to philosophers interested in public health ethics and the general public interested in the philosophical underpinning of different arguments about our moral obligations with regard to vaccination. (shrink)

People’s awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as “change blindness”, phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can (...) adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed. (shrink)

ENTREVISTA COM PROFESSORAS (ES) DE FILOSOFIA DO ENSINO SUPERIOR DO CEARÁ – BLOCO IICom: Cristiane Maria Marinho, Francisco José da Silva, Camila do Espírito Santo Prado de OliveiraPor: Antônio Alex Pereira de Sousa, Paulo Willame Araújo de Lima.

The branching-time logic called Peircean by Arthur Prior is considered and given an infinite axiomatization. The axiomatization uses only the standard deduction rules for tense logic.

Temporal logic is one of the many areas in which a possible world semantics is adopted. Prior's Ockhamist and Peircean semantics for branching-time, though, depart from the genuine Kripke semantics in that they involve a quantification over histories, which is a second-order quantification over sets of possible worlds. In the paper, variants of the original Prior's semantics will be considered and it will be shown that all of them can be viewed as first-order counterparts of the original semantics.

In the tree-like representation of Time, two histories are undivided at a moment t whenever they share a common moment in the future of t. In the present paper, it will first be proved that Ockhamist and Peircean branching-time logics are unable to express some important sentences in which the notion of undividedness is involved. Then, a new semantics for branching-time logic will be presented. The new semantics is based on trees endowed with an indistinguishability function, a generalization of the (...) notion of undividedness. It will be shown that Ockhamist and Peircean semantics can be viewed as limit cases of the semantics developed in this paper. (shrink)

In just the last decade, many conference proceedings have been published on Plato’s Timaeus and its influence on the history of philosophy. The present vo­lume, which is the result of a symposium held at Seoul National University in September 2011, testifies to the enduring and widespread interest the Platonic dia­logue is able to elicit. The nine studies here collected by Euree Song center on the figure of the demiurge as maker of the world and they all deal with authors who, (...) while having di... (shrink)

Il n'est pas fruit du hasard cette rencontre qui a précédé l'édition de ce livre. Les rapports entre philosophes français et catalans viennent de loin. Le XIXe était modèle des "voyages philosophiques". Est parmi les plus connus celui de Cousin en Allemagne. Moins connus, mais également fructifères étaient ceux des philosophes exilés qui partirent sous les régimes de persécutions pour trouver en France non seulement un lieu d'accueil, mais également l'opportunité de confrontation de leurs idées avec celles des philosophes français. (...) De la même manière, certains exilés de la commune avaient trouvé un lieu d'accueil dans la Barcelone révolutionnaire des années républicaines. Ces rencontres n'ont jamais totalement fini de se produire au long du XXe siècle, période au cours de laquelle l'exil avait constitué la manière d'échapper à une morte sûre dans l'Espagne de la guerre civile. La période actuelle vit une nouvelle revitalisation des échanges, et ce livre en est un exemple."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This major publication is a history of the semantic tradition in philosophy from the early nineteenth century through its incarnation in the work of the Vienna Circle, the group of logical positivists that emerged in the years 1925-1935 in Vienna who were characterised by a strong commitment to empiricism, a high regard for science, and a conviction that modern logic is the primary tool of analytic philosophy. In the first part of the book, Alberto Coffa traces the roots of (...) logical positivism in a semantic tradition that arose in opposition to Kant's theory that a priori knowledge is based on pure intuition and the constitutive powers of the mind. In Part II, Coffa chronicles the development of this tradition by members and associates of the Vienna Circle. Much of Coffa's analysis draws on the unpublished notes and correspondence of many philosophers. The book, however, is not merely a history of the semantic tradition from Kant 'to the Vienna Station'. Coffa also critically reassesses the role of semantic notions in understanding the ground of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge and questions the turn the tradition has taken since Vienna. (shrink)

The basic notions in Prior’s Ockhamist and Peircean logics of branching-time are the notion of moment and that of history (or course of events). In the tree semantics, histories are defined as maximal linearly ordered sets of moments. In the geometrical approach, both moments and histories are primitive entities and there is no set theoretical (and ontological) dependency of the latter on the former. In the topological approach, moments can be defined as the elements of a rank 1 base of (...) a non-Archimedean topology on the set of histories. In this paper, it will be shown that the topological approach, and hence the other approaches, can be reconstructed in a framework in which the basic notions are those of history and of relative closeness relation among histories. (shrink)

The basic notions in Prior's Ockhamist and Peircean logics of branching-time are the notion of moment and that of history. In the tree semantics, histories are defined as maximal linearly ordered sets of moments. In the geometrical approach, both moments and histories are primitive entities and there is no set theoretical dependency of the latter on the former. In the topological approach, moments can be defined as the elements of a rank 1 base of a non-Archimedean topology on the set (...) of histories. In this paper, it will be shown that the topological approach, and hence the other approaches, can be reconstructed in a framework in which the basic notions are those of history and of relative closeness relation among histories. (shrink)

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion (...) is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. (shrink)

Portugal ranks fourth among countries with the highest rate of overweight population, considering that 67.6% of the Portuguese population over the age of 15 is overweight or obese. To our knowledge, limited studies have investigated students’ attitudes toward physical education in Portugal. Such research is necessary because it can provide valuable insights for policy and application in the curriculum development for physical education, which may eventually increase participation in physical and sports activities. This study analyzed students’ attitudes toward physical education (...) (PE) according to sociodemographic variables, including grade level, socioeconomic status, and gender, and their participation in extracurricular sports activities and respective PE grades. The sample comprised 476 high school students (from the 7th, 8th, and 9th-grade levels) from five public schools located in Portugal. The Students’ Attitudes toward Physical Education Questionnaire was adapted and validated for use with Portuguese students as a two-factor model. Findings show that students generally have a moderately positive attitude toward PE. However, students’ positive attitudes tend to decrease throughout high school, which is particularly significant in the 9th grade. Furthermore, students’ attitudes are influenced by gender, extracurricular sports practice, and grades. These findings may help stakeholders reflect on how to frame PE in a more meaningful way to create a solid foundation for maintaining an active lifestyle throughout life. Implications for further research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, wherein individuals need to understand, memorize, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing—only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (_N_ = 1,080 participants) (...) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain setup. The second experiment (_N_ = 1,200 participants) used the same material, but participants were asked whether or not they would share the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network or with their friends, in their favorite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorization and reproduction are involved in the transmission—as in oral transmission—than when they are not—as in online sharing. Negative content seems to be reliably favored in both modalities of transmission. (shrink)

O presente artigo busca situar o leitor em alguns dos debates atuais acerca da memória episódica no âmbito da filosofia da memória. A memória episódica consiste na capacidade de lembrar daquilo que o sujeito vivenciou ao longo de sua vida. Um dos maiores problemas em filosofia da memória é estabelecer o que é uma memória episódica, e distingui-la de outros estados mentais, como a imaginação. As principais teorias que visam resolver tal problema são a Teoria Causal da Memória e a (...) Teoria Simulacionista da Memória. Causalistas insistem que deve haver um vínculo causal entre uma experiência vivida pelo sujeito no passado e a memória dessa experiência. Simulacionistas, em contrapartida, sustentam que tal vínculo causal não é necessário, pois uma memória é o resultado de um processo de simulação que combina elementos de várias memórias para formar um cenário que representa a experiência passada. Outro debate em filosofia da memória trata dos objetos da memória episódica, nele busca-se descobrir com o quê entramos em contato quando lembramos de um evento passado. Nesse debate as posições filosóficas mais defendidas são o Realismo Indireto e o Realismo Direto; o primeiro afirma que entramos em contato com representações do evento passado, já o último sustenta que entramos em contato diretamente com o evento passado. Esse artigo apresenta também teorias da psicologia sobre consolidação de memórias episódicas e a teoria da Mental Time Travel, afim de embasar o leitor, respectivamente, acerca dos mecanismos formadores da memória e do debate sobre a função da memória episódica. (shrink)

Spartan institutions were pictured as a model of political stability from the Classical period onwards. The so-called Spartan ‘mirage’ did not involve only its constitutional order but also social and economic institutions. Xenophon begins hisConstitution of the Lacedaemoniansby associating Spartan fame with thepoliteiaset up by Lycurgus, which made the Laconian city the most powerful (δυνατωτάτη) and famous (ὀνομαστοτάτη)polisin Greece (Xen.Lac.1.1). In Aristotle'sPolitics, in which the assessment of Sparta is more complex and nuanced, one finds a critique of contemporary Spartan institutions (...) as well as praise for Lycurgus as a great lawgiver who established the laws of Sparta (Arist.Pol.2.1269a69, 2.1273b20). Most other ancient sources often remark upon the unchangeable features of some Spartan institutions as a key aspect of Spartan εὐνομία. Thucydides maintains that, after a long period of war andstasis, the Dorians established excellent laws and Sparta employed the same constitution for more than four hundred years (Thuc. 1.18.1: τετρακόσια καὶ ὀλίγῳ πλείω ἐς τὴν τελευτὴν τοῦδε τοῦ πολέμου ἀφ᾽ οὗ Λακεδαιμόνιοι τῇ αὐτῇ πολιτείᾳ χρῶνται). (shrink)

The association of resilience-related factors with frailty is a recent research topic. Dispositional optimism and context sensitivity are two psychological factors that differently contribute to individual resilience. This study aimed at investigating whether dispositional optimism and context sensitivity might contribute to a multifactorial model of frailty, together with established relevant factors such as cognitive and physical factors. This cross-sectional study involved 141 elderly outpatients aged ≥65 years, who were referred to the Geriatrics and Multidimensional Evaluation Clinic of the University Hospital (...) of Messina. We used the following measures: the Mini-Mental State Examination to screen for global cognitive functioning; 4-m gait speed and handgrip strength to measure physical performance; a 35-item Frailty Index to evaluate patients’ frailty status; the revised Life Orientation Test to gauge dispositional optimism; and the Context Sensitivity Index to measure context sensitivity. We found that LOT-R, CSI, and MMSE were all significantly associated with FI. Gait speed was only marginally associated with FI. The present study showed a novel association of dispositional optimism and context sensitivity with frailty among elderly outpatients. These preliminary findings support a multidimensional approach to frailty in which even peculiar psychological features might provide a significant contribution. (shrink)

We describe a form of moral artificial intelligence that could be used to improve human moral decision-making. We call it the “artificial moral advisor”. The AMA would implement a quasi-relativistic version of the “ideal observer” famously described by Roderick Firth. We describe similarities and differences between the AMA and Firth’s ideal observer. Like Firth’s ideal observer, the AMA is disinterested, dispassionate, and consistent in its judgments. Unlike Firth’s observer, the AMA is non-absolutist, because it would take into account the human (...) agent’s own principles and values. We argue that the AMA would respect and indeed enhance individuals’ moral autonomy, help individuals achieve wide and a narrow reflective equilibrium, make up for the limitations of human moral psychology in a way that takes conservatives’ objections to human bioenhancement seriously, and implement the positive functions of intuitions and emotions in human morality without their downsides, such as biases and prejudices. (shrink)

We argue that individuals who have access to vaccines and for whom vaccination is not medically contraindicated have a moral obligation to contribute to the realisation of herd immunity by being vaccinated. Contrary to what some have claimed, we argue that this individual moral obligation exists in spite of the fact that each individual vaccination does not significantly affect vaccination coverage rates and therefore does not significantly contribute to herd immunity. Establishing the existence of a moral obligation to be vaccinated (...) despite the negligible contribution each vaccination can make to the realisation of herd immunity is important because such moral obligation would strengthen the justification for coercive vaccination policies. We show that two types of arguments—namely a utilitarian argument based on Parfit’s Principle of Group Beneficence and a contractualist argument—can ground an individual moral obligation to be vaccinated, in spite of the imperceptible contribution that any single vaccination makes to vaccine coverage rates. We add a further argument for a moral obligation to be vaccinated that does not require embracing problematic comprehensive moral theories such as utilitarianism or contractualism. The argument is based on a “duty of easy rescue” applied to collectives, which grounds a collective moral obligation to realise herd immunity, and on a principle of fairness in the distribution of the burdens that must be borne to realise herd immunity. (shrink)