The present paper analyses the topic of scientific discovery and the problem of the existence of a logical framework involved in such endeavour. We inquire how several non-monotonic logic frameworks and other formalisms can account for such a task. In the same vein, we analyse some key aspects of the historical and theoretical debate surrounding scientific discovery, in particular, the context of discovery and context of justification context distinction. We present an argument concerning the weakening of the discovery/justification context dichotomy (...) based on the descriptive accent contained in the non-monotonic logic perspective together with its epistemological concerns. (shrink)

Este texto é uma tradução a partir do original em latim, com uma introdução e comentários, da Dissertação sobre o estilo filosófico de Nizólio, obra escrita em 1669 pelo jovem Leibniz. Nessa obra Leibniz se ocupa com o estilo que deve ter a exposição filosófica. A introdução tem duas partes: na primeira parte se examina o contexto da aparição daquela obra de Leibniz em uma época em que não há uma distinção clara entre os limites entre a Lógica, a Retórica (...) e a Dialética. Na segunda parte é feita uma exposição do conteúdo do texto de Leibniz. (shrink)

Actualmente, la discusión sobre los problemas éticos de las nuevas tecnologías suele enfocarse en los dilemas que, de manera concreta y generalmente aislada, supone el uso de unas y otras tecnologías; frente a ello, lo que se propone en este artículo es considerar la problematicidad de nuestro entramado tecnológico, dentro de lo que podemos denominar “nuestra tecnosfera”, para, de ese modo, discutir nuestro presente como un horizonte problemático, en que se redefine el sentido ético de la realidad antropológica. De este (...) modo, y contando como referente teórico la reflexión sobre la técnica de Zubiri y de Ellacuría, proponemos la idea de “hacerse verdaderamente cargo del mundo” como medio para repensar éticamente las nuevas tecnologías (nuestras). (shrink)

This article is the result of a critical exercise that is, reading the novels of Mauricio Wacquez understanding them as a rupture and writing project. For this, our proposal takes as its starting point the methodology of stratigraphic cuts proposed by Michel Houellebecq, applying in turn the theoretical dimension of François Meyronnis contained in L’ Axe du Néant, specifically, the concept of division in writing.

Scientific representation is a currently booming topic, both in analytical philosophy and in history and philosophy of science. The analytical inquiry attempts to come to terms with the relation between theory and world; while historians and philosophers of science aim to develop an account of the practice of model building in the sciences. This article provides a review of recent work within both traditions, and ultimately argues for a practice-based account of the means employed by scientists to effectively achieve representation (...) in the modelling sciences. (shrink)

Resumo: O artigo a seguir tem como objetivo expor o pensamento hermenêutico de Friedrich Schleiermacher, levando em conta o contexto germinativo fértil de sua obra e sua influente posição filosófica, no âmbito do “primeiro romantismo alemão”. Schleiermacher renuncia a um importante fundamento transcendental a-histórico, em favor de uma compreensão situada, a qual se configura através do diálogo. A hipótese central deste artigo alerta que o desenvolvimento paralelo e sistemático das lições sobre ética, dialética e hermenêutica, em Schleiermacher, não é mera (...) coincidência, muito menos um sintoma isolado, senão que revela um projeto de caráter orgânico. Por um lado, será examinado - à luz de seus textos - o papel da linguagem como variável histórica e social para a compreensão e, por outro, algumas reflexões sobre as novas possibilidades de seu método hermenêutico e suas implicações, para a reflexão filosófica contemporânea.: The following article aims to expose the hermeneutic thought by Friedrich Schleiermacher, considering the fertile germinal context of his work and his influential philosophical position within the framework of “early romanticism”. Schleiermacher renounces an ahistorical transcendental foundation in favor of a situated understanding, which is configured through dialog. The central hypothesis of this article warns that the parallel and systematic development of the lessons on ethics, dialectics and hermeneutics in Schleiermacher is not a mere coincidence, much less an isolated symptom, but reveals a project of an organic nature. On the one hand, it is examined -in the light of their texts- the role of language as a historical and social variable for understanding and, on the other hand, some reflections on the new possibilities of his hermeneutical method and its consequences for contemporary philosophical reflection. (shrink)

Scientific representation is a booming field nowadays within the philosophy of science, with many papers published regularly on the topic every year, and several yearly conferences and workshops held on related topics. Historically, the topic originates in two different strands in 20th-century philosophy of science. One strand begins in the 1950s, with philosophical interest in the nature of scientific theories. As the received or “syntactic” view gave way to a “semantic” or “structural” conception, representation progressively gained the center stage. Yet, (...) there is another, older, strand that links representation to fin de siècle modeling debates, particularly in the emerging Bildtheorie of Boltzmann and Hertz, and to the ensuing discussion among philosophers thereafter. Both strands feed into present-day philosophical work on scientific representation. There are a number of different orthogonal questions that philosophers ask regarding representation. One set of questions concerns the nature of the representational relation between theories or models, on the one hand, and the real-world systems they purportedly represent. Such questions lie at the more metaphysical and abstract end of the spectrum—and they are often addressed with the abstract tools of the analytical metaphysician. They constitute what we may refer to as the “analytical inquiry” into representation. On the other hand there are questions regarding the use that scientists put some representations to in practice—these are questions that are best addressed by means of some of the favorite tools of the philosopher of science, including descriptive analysis, illustration by means of case studies, induction, exemplification, inference from practice, etc., and are best referred to as the “practical inquiry” into representation. The notion of representation invoked in such inquiries may be “deflationary” or “substantive”—depending on whether it construes representation as a primitive notion, or as susceptible to further reduction or analysis in terms of something else. (shrink)

In “The Toolbox of Science” (1995) together with Towfic Shomar we advocated a form of instrumentalism about scientific theories. We separately developed this view further in a number of subsequent works. Steven French, James Ladyman, Otavio Bueno and Newton Da Costa (FLBD) have since written at least eight papers and a book criticising our work. Here we defend ourselves. First we explain what we mean in denying that models derive from theory – and why their failure to do so should (...) be lamented. Second we defend our use of the London model of superconductivity as an example. Third we point out both advantages and weaknesses of FLBD’s techniques in comparison to traditional Anglophone versions of the semantic conception. Fourth we show that FLBD’s version of the semantic conception has not been applied to our case study. We conclude by raising doubts about FLBD’s overall project. (shrink)

Time passed after the commission of a wrong can affect how we respond to its agent now. Specifically it can introduce certain forms of complexity or ambivalence into our blaming responses. This paper considers how and why time might matter in this way. I illustrate the phenomenon by looking at a recent real-life example, surveying some responses to the case and identifying the relevant forms of ambivalence. I then consider a recent account of blameworthiness and its development over time that (...) purports to account for this ambivalence. Blameworthiness, on this account, consists in a psychological flaw; time matters because it brings the possibility of change in the agent, and ambivalence arises because it is hard to know to the extent of such change. This account, I argue, mischaracterises responses to the case and misidentifies the source of their ambivalence. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of emotion, I sketch an alternative approach. Our responses, I suggest, make sense within processes through which we address wrongdoing. Time matters because these processes take time and because time’s having passed raises the question whether and how the wrong has been addressed. Unaddressed wrongs can elicit ambivalence of a specific form. (shrink)

This paper reviews four attempts throughout the history of quantum mechanics to explicitly employ dispositional notions in order to solve the quantum paradoxes, namely: Margenau's latencies, Heisenberg's potentialities, Maxwell's propensitons, and the recent selective propensities interpretation of quantum mechanics. Difficulties and challenges are raised for all of them, and it is concluded that the selective propensities approach nicely encompasses the virtues of its predecessors. Finally, some strategies are discussed for reading similar dispositional notions into two other well-known interpretations of quantum (...) mechanics, namely the GRW interpretation and Bohmian mechanics. (shrink)

Two of the most well-known belief contraction operators are partial meet contractions (PMCs) and kernel contractions (KCs). In this paper we propose two new classes of contraction operators, namely the class of generalized partial meet contractions (GPMC) and the class of generalized kernel contractions (GKC), which strictly contain the classes of PMCs and of KCs, respectively. We identify some extra conditions that can be added to the definitions of GPMCs and of GKCs, which give rise to some interesting subclasses of (...) those classes of functions, namely the classes of extensional and of uniform GPMCs/GKCs. In the context of contractions on belief sets the classes of partial meet contractions, uniform GPMCs and extensional GPMCs are all identical. Nevertheless, when considered as operations on belief bases, the class of uniform GPMCs coincides with the class of partial meet contractions, but the extensional GPMCs constitute a new kind of belief base contraction functions whose characterizing postulate of irrelevance of syntax is extensionality—the same postulate of irrelevance of syntax which occurs in the classical axiomatic characterization of partial meet contractions for belief sets—rather than the postulate of uniformity—which is the irrelevance of syntax postulate used in the axiomatic characterization for partial meet contractions on belief bases. Analogous results are obtained regarding the classes of extensional and of uniform GKCs. We present the interrelations in the sense of inclusion among all the new classes of operators presented in this paper and several well known classes of PMCs and of KCs. (shrink)

I argue against an account of scientific representation suggested by the semantic, or structuralist, conception of scientific theories. Proponents of this conception often employ the term “model” to refer to bare “structures”, which naturally leads them to attempt to characterize the relation between models and reality as a purely structural one. I argue instead that scientific models are typically “representations”, in the pragmatist sense of the term: they are inherently intended for specific phenomena. Therefore in general scientific models are not (...) (merely) structures. I then explore some consequences of this pragmatist account of representation, and argue that it sheds light upon the distinction between theories and models. I finish by briefly addressing some critical comments due to Bas Van Fraassen. (shrink)

This paper argues for a representational semantic conception of scientific theories, which respects the bare claim of any semantic view, namely that theories can be characterised as sets of models. RSC must be sharply distinguished from structural versions that assume a further identity of ‘models’ and ‘structures’, which we reject. The practice-turn in the recent philosophical literature suggests instead that modelling must be understood in a deflationary spirit, in terms of the diverse representational practices in the sciences. These insights are (...) applied to some mathematical models, thus showing that the mathematical sciences are not in principle counterexamples to RSC. (shrink)

: This paper outlines a genuinely pragmatist conception of propensity, and defends it against common objections to the propensity interpretation of probability, prominently Humphreys’ paradox. The paper reviews the paradox and identifies one of its key assumptions, the identity thesis, according to which propensities are probabilities. The identity thesis is also involved in empiricist propensity interpretations deriving from Popper’s influential original proposal, and makes such interpretations untenable. As an alternative, I urge a return to Charles Peirce’s original insights on probabilistic (...) dispositions, and offer a reconstructed version of his pragmatist conception, which rejects the identity thesis. – Correspondence to: [email protected]. (shrink)

This Element has two main aims. The first one is an historically informed review of the philosophy of probability. It describes recent historiography, lays out the distinction between subjective and objective notions, and concludes by applying the historical lessons to the main interpretations of probability. The second aim focuses entirely on objective probability, and advances a number of novel theses regarding its role in scientific practice. A distinction is drawn between traditional attempts to interpret chance, and a novel methodological study (...) of its application. A radical form of pluralism is then introduced, advocating a tripartite distinction between propensities, probabilities and frequencies. Finally, a distinction is drawn between two different applications of chance in statistical modelling which, it is argued, vindicates the overall methodological approach. The ensuing conception of objective probability in practice is the 'complex nexus of chance'. (shrink)

Starting with the characterization of Baruch Spinoza’s work as a “theory of expression” and with the influence that Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy has on multinaturalist perspectivism, this article speculates on the possibility of a theory of expression for multinaturalism. First, one proceeds to raise some Deleuzian considerations on Spinozist ontology to articulate the influence Deleuze has on the manner in which multinaturalist anthropology dialogues with indigenous mythologies and cosmologies. At last, with the help of some descriptions of Yanomami cosmology, as articulated (...) by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert in The Falling Sky and of provocations raised by authors such as Jean-Christophe Goddard and Fabián Ludueña, this article will investigate the problems of dreams, images and specters a possible way to elaborate a multinaturalist theory of expression. (shrink)

El uso de las Tecnologías de la información y la comunicación ha permitido introducir mejoras en la forma como se desarrollan los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje, así como los procesos propios a la gestión y administración de las actividades académicas. Sin embargo, el índice de adopción de estas herramientas es reducido en cobertura y en profundidad. No obstante, para el uso de la herramienta Teams hay que detallar las ventajas y desventajas encontradas y finalizar con conclusiones en base a (...) las experiencias personales. Palabras Clave: software, Microsoft Teams, herramienta, ventajas, experiencia. Referencias [1]C. E. F. Pabón, «MÁS ALLÁ DE ZOOM, GOOGLE MEET, TEAMS…,» Slidesgo, vol. 1, nº 1, p. 12, 2020. [2]F. García, A. Correl, V. Abella y M. Grande, «La evaluación online en la educación superior en tiempos de la COVID-19,» EDUCATION IN THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY, vol. 21, nº 1, pp. 1-12, 2020. [3]G. Jose, C. Alfredo, G. Victor y GrandeMario, «Education in the Knowledge Society,» Ediciones Universal Salamanca, vol. 1, nº 12, p. 26, 14 05 2020. [4]E. Dans, «Educacion online: Plataformas educativas y el dilema de la apertura,» Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento, vol. 6, nº 1, p. 10, 02 03 2009. [5]A. Mauricio, A. Roberto, V. Edgar y F. Karen, «Convergencia de procesos de docencia universitaria: El uso de la aplicacion Teams de Microsoft,» ResearchGate, vol. 1, nº 1, p. 9, 21 11 2019. [6]B. Jose, L. Lina, H. Maria y J. Eusebio, «Utilización del alfa de Cronbach para validar la confiabilidad,» Engineering and Technology, vol. 11, nº 1, p. 9, 16 08 2013. [7]J.-J. a. C.-R. D. a. D. P. Monedero-Moya, «Usabilidad y satisfacción en herramientas de anotaciones multimedia para MOOC = Usability and Satisfaction in Multimedia Annotation Tools for MOOCs,» e-Lis, vol. 22, nº 44, p. 62, 2018. [8]I. Ros Martínez de Lahidalga, «Moodle, la plataforma para la enseñanza y organización escolar,» Ikastorratza, e- Revista de Didáctica, vol. 2, nº 50, p. 12, 2008. [9]D. Marlene, «Herramientas para la producción de materiales didácticos para las modalidades de enseñanza semipresencial y a distancia,» ACIMED, vol. 16, nº 2, p. 5, 2007. [10]C. Barbara, «Diseño y validación de un instrumento,» Universitat Illes Balears, vol. 4, nº 50, p. 415, 10 2006. (shrink)

This paper argues that if propensities are displayed in objective physical chances then the appropriate representation of these chances is as indexed probability functions. Two alternative formal models, or accounts, for the relation between propensity properties and their chancy or probabilistic manifestations, in terms of conditionals and conditional probability are first reviewed. It is argued that both confront important objections, which are overcome by the account in terms of indexed probabilities. A number of further advantages of the indexed probability account (...) are discussed, which suggest that it is promising as a general theory of objective physical chance. The paper ends with a discussion of the indexical character of the objective chances that are grounded in propensities. (shrink)

Background Consent policies for post-mortem organ procurement (OP) vary throughout Europe, and yet no studies have empirically evaluated the ethical implications of contrasting consent models. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel indicator of governance quality based on the ideal of informed support, and examine national differences on this measure through a quantitative survey of OP policy informedness and preferences in seven European countries. -/- Methods Between 2017–2019, we conducted a convenience sample survey of students (n = 2006) in (...) Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Denmark (DK), Germany (DE), Greece (GR), Slovenia (SI) and Spain (ES), asking participants about their donation preferences, as well as their beliefs and views about the policy in place. From these measures, we computed indices of informedness, policy support, and fulfilment of unexpressed preferences, which we compared across countries and consent systems. -/- Results Our study introduces a tool for analyzing policy governance in the context of OP. Wide variation in policy awareness was observed: Most respondents in DK, DE, AT and BE correctly identified the policy in place, while those in SI, GR and ES did not. Respondents in opt-out countries (AT, BE, ES and GR) tended to support the policy in place (with one exception, i.e., SI), whereas those in opt-in countries (DE and DK) overwhelmingly opposed it. These results reveal stark differences in governance quality across countries and consent policies: We found a preponderance of informed opposition in opt-in countries and a general tendency towards support–either informed or uninformed–in opt-out countries. We also found informed divergence in opt-in countries and a tendency for convergence–either informed or uninformed–among opt-out countries. -/- Conclusion Our study offers a novel tool for analyzing governance quality and illustrates, in the context of OP, how the strengths and weaknesses of different policy implementations can be estimated and compared using quantitative survey data. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche dizia que a transcendência e a negação da vida, próprias do niilismo reativo que caracteriza a autofagia do Ocidente, eram subprodutos do excesso de memória, plasmado em ressentimento e “espírito de vingança”. Por outro lado, o xamã yanomami Davi Kopenawa, liderança indígena e autor, junto ao antropólogo Bruce Albert, do livro _A queda do céu_, responsabiliza o esquecimento dos brancos por sua própria derrocada — derrocada que leva todos os povos não-brancos consigo, em um vertiginoso cataclisma ambiental e (...) pandêmico de dimensões planetárias que Kopenawa e os Yanomami chamam de “queda do céu”. Neste artigo, pretendemos lidar com essa equivocidade perspectiva do olvido, vislumbrando nela uma questão filosófica crucial: como compreender esse duplo cruzamento entre olvido e memória, quando saímos do discurso filosófico ocidental e partimos para o discurso de um pensador yanomami? Haveria em jogo, aqui, uma equivocidade do olvido, no sentido em que o esquecimento é outro, a depender de sua direção? (shrink)

Este artigo tem o objetivo de articular a crítica feita por Peter Sloterdijk em Esferas I, de 1998, à insuficiência da tematização do problema da espacialidade em Ser e tempo, obra de Martin Heidegger publicada em 1927, explicitando a solução que Sloterdijk oferece ao recuperar aquilo que, para ele, estava prenhe na obra heideggeriana, isto é, o desenvolvimento apropriado da questão da espacialidade. Nos reportamos primeiramente aos parágrafos em que Heidegger disserta sobre a espacialidade em Ser e tempo para servir (...) de base à crítica que Sloterdijk constrói em Esferas I. Em seguida, recuperamos certa influência teórica que Heidegger sofreu do biólogo estoniano Jakob von Uexküll e do teórico da história Wilhelm Dilthey sobre as noções de vida e mundo ambiente, junto à exposição do conceito de vida fática em Ontologia: Hermenêutica da facticidade. Por fim, a partir da relação entre vida e existência, nos voltamos à obra de Sloterdijk para compreender o que está implicado no conceito de “esfera”, via aberta, segundo Sloterdijk, a partir da rearticulação dos problemas da vida e da espacialidade nos escritos de juventude de Heidegger. (shrink)

No tratado 10 (V 1), 8, ao examinar a questão da constituição das hipóstases inteligíveis, Plotino observa que tais teses não são novas, mas há muito enunciadas pelos filósofos anteriores e notadamente por Platão. De tal modo, sua investigação acerta de tais temas constitui-se como uma exegese dos antigos e dos diálogos platônicos. No início da interrogação acerca da eternidade e do tempo no tratado 45 (III 7), Plotino observa a necessidade de examinar o que os antigos filósofos disseram acerca (...) da temática investigada, propondo um exame doxográfico a fim de que se possa obter “por si mesmo” uma compreensão adequada sobre o tempo a partir de seu paradigma, a eternidade. Nesse sentido, nossa proposta é de elaborar uma breve investigação acerca da possibilidade de articulação desses dois textos plotinianos por meio de alguns elementos presentes no tratado 20 (I 3), Sobre a dialética. De tal modo, pretende-se obter uma aproximação de alguns procedimentos metodológicos do pensamento de Plotino. Palavras-chave: Exegese, Dialética, Método Filosófico, Leitura dos Antigos, Plotino. (shrink)

Diante da pandemia do Novo Coronavírus, muitos foram os problemas levantados pela filosofia a partir do modo “imunitário” com o qual a civilização industrial lidou com a crise, e muito tem sido aventado sobre a necessidade de se repensar o sentido da noção de comunidades de apoio e de resistência. Exemplos disso não faltam; dentre os filósofos que abordaram a crise, encontram-se desde Giorgio Agamben a Paul B. Preciado, entre outros. Neste artigo, pretendemos partir da discussão sobre imunologia e paradigma (...) imunitário em Roberto Espósito para nos perguntar de que modo podemos pensar essa demanda por “comunidade” em meio a uma crise imunitária, no sentido biológico e político do termo. Temos por hipótese que, mais do que postular a oposição exclusiva dos termos, levantar a questão pela articulação deles nos abre dois modos possíveis de relação com a alteridade abissal que encontramos no vírus. (shrink)

It is widely accepted in contemporary philosophy of science that the domain of application of a theory is typically larger than its explanatory covering power: theories can be applied to phenomena that they do not explain. I argue for an analogous thesis regarding the notion of empirical adequacy. A theory’s domain of application is typically larger than its domain of empirical adequacy: theories are often applied to phenomena from which they receive no empirical confirmation.

This article provides a state-of-the-art review of the philosophical literature on scientific representation. It first argues that the topic emerges historically mainly out of what may be called the modelling tradition. It then introduces a number of helpful analytical distinctions and goes on to divide contemporary approaches to scientific representation into two distinct kinds, substantive and deflationary. Analogies with related discussions of artistic representation in aesthetics and the nature of truth in metaphysics are pursued. It is finally urged that the (...) most promising approaches—and the ones most likely to feature prominently in future developments—are deflationary. In particular, a defense is provided of a genuinely inferential conception of representation. (shrink)

These are the introduction chapters to the forthcoming collection of essays published by Springer (Synthese Library) and entitled Probabilities, Causes and Propensities in Physics.

The propensity nature of evolutionary fitness has long been appreciated and is nowadays amply discussed. The discussion has, however, on occasion followed long standing conflations in the philosophy of probability literature between propensities, probabilities, and frequencies. In this paper, I apply a more recent conception of propensities in modelling practice to some of the key issues, regarding the mathematical representation of fitness and how it may be regarded as explanatory. The ensuing complex nexus of fitness emphasises the distinction between biological (...) propensities and the probability distributions over offspring numbers that they give rise to; and how critical it is to distinguish the possession conditions of the underlying dispositional properties from those of their probabilistic manifestations. (shrink)

This paper is divided in two parts. In part I, I argue against two attempts to naturalise the notion of scientific representation, by reducing it to isomorphism and similarity. I distinguish between the means and the constituents of representation, and I argue that isomorphism and similarity are common means of representation; but that they are not constituents of scientific representation. I look at the prospects for weakened versions of these theories, and I argue that only those that abandon the aim (...) to naturalise scientific representation are likely to be successful. In part II of the paper, I present a deflationary conception of scientific representation, which minimally characterises it by means of two necessary conditions: representation is essentially intentional and it has the capacity to allow surrogate reasoning and inference. I then defend this conception by showing that it successfully meets the objections and difficulties that make its competitors, such as isomorphism and similarity, untenable. In addition the inferential conception explains the success of various means of representation in their appropriate domains, and it sheds light on the truth and accuracy of scientific representations. (shrink)

It is still a matter of controversy whether the Principle of the Common Cause (PCC) can be used as a basis for sound causal inference. It is thus to be expected that its application to quantum mechanics should be a correspondingly controversial issue. Indeed the early 90’s saw a flurry of papers addressing just this issue in connection with the EPR correlations. Yet, that debate does not seem to have caught up with the most recent literature on causal inference generally, (...) which has moved on to consider the virtues of a generalised PCC-inspired condition, the so-called Causal Markov Condition (CMC). In this paper we argue that the CMC is an appropriate benchmark for debating possible causal explanations of the EPR correlations. But we go on to take issue with some pronouncements on EPR by defenders of the CMC. (shrink)

Hermann Cohen (b. 1842, d. 1919), more than any other single figure, is responsible for founding the orthodox neo-Kantianism that dominated academic philosophy in Germany from the 1870s until the end of the First World War. Earlier German philosophers finding inspiration in Kant tended either towards speculative, metaphysical idealism, or sought to address philosophical questions with the resources of the empirical sciences, especially psychology. In contrast, Cohen’s seminal interpretation of Kant offered a vision of philosophy that decisively maintained its independence (...) from empirical psychology, without at the same time simply lapsing back into uncritical metaphysics. Cohen brought these attitudes to bear on a wide range of topics, writing systematically about epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, law, political theory, and aesthetics. His anti-psychologism became a defining commitment not only of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, founded by Cohen himself, but of orthodox neo-Kantianism more generally. Indeed, that commitment ultimately defined the philosophical context from which, in the early twentieth century, both phenomenology and logical positivism emerged. No less significant than his influence on academic philosophy, Cohen was his generation’s preeminent German-Jewish public intellectual and religious philosopher. His philosophical ethics and political theory provided the foundation for a non-Marxist, Kantian democratic socialism that informed his more popular and topical writings. He argued publicly for universal suffrage and for the rights of workers to organize democratically-constituted collectives. He also saw deep points of connection between ethics and religion, and developed a view of Judaism as a fundamentally ethical system of belief and practice. He argued that monotheism was the historical source of the idea of universal ethical laws, and thus that Judaism offered the world its first model of a universalist morality. This view of Judaism’s ethical significance ultimately informed Cohen’s public defense of the Jews’ place in Germany not only against anti-Semitic attacks, but also against the arguments of early twentieth-century Zionists. However, Cohen’s influence on Jewish thought extends far beyond debates within Imperial Germany: his late religious writings inspired a broad renewal in twentieth-century Jewish ethics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This article studies the mathematical properties of two systems that model Aristotle's original syllogistic and the relationship obtaining between them. These systems are Corcoran's natural deduction syllogistic and ?ukasiewicz's axiomatization of the syllogistic. We show that by translating the former into a first-order theory, which we call T RD, we can establish a precise relationship between the two systems. We prove within the framework of first-order logic a number of logical properties about T RD that bear upon the same properties (...) of the natural deduction counterpart ? that is, Corcoran's system. Moreover, the first-order logic framework that we work with allows us to understand how complicated the semantics of the syllogistic is in providing us with examples of bizarre, unexpected interpretations of the syllogistic rules. Finally, we provide a first attempt at finding the structure of that semantics, reducing the search to the characterization of the class of models of T RD. (shrink)

Neste ensaio, busca-se pensar de que forma a questão do niilismo é enfrentada pelo pensamento de povos indígenas das terras baixas da América do Sul: se interpretarmos o niilismo como perda de parâmetros diante da “morte de Deus”, que sentido o problema do niilismo faz para povos que não estipularam um Deus unitário como fundamento axiológico? Para desdobrar essa questão, fez-se uso da obra Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo, de Ailton Krenak, bem como de referenciais antropológicos e filosóficos (...) a respeito de temas como niilismo, sacralidade, alegria, natureza, ciência e técnica. O artigo se desenvolve em quatro partes: em I, faz-se uma breve descrição do que Pelbart denominou “travessia do niilismo”; em II, levanta-se o questionamento central deste ensaio, trazendo à tona o conceito de “sobrenatureza” como principal operador ontológico do pensamento ameríndio; em III, examina-se as diferentes relações com a alteridade “natural” entre o pensamento indígena e o pensamento ocidental; e em IV, por fim, compara-se as metáforas das “conchas coloridas”, de Nietzsche, e dos “paraquedas coloridos”, de Ailton Krenak, em um debate sobre niilismo e Antropoceno, momento em que a noção de “riso”, levantada por P. Clastres a partir de mitos chulupi, orienta a reflexão sobre o papel da “gaia ciência” no pensamento indígena. (shrink)

I defend a three-fold form of pluralism about chance, involving a tripartite distinction between propensities, probabilities, and frequencies. The argument has a negative and a positive part. Negatively, I argue against the identity thesis that informs current propensity theories, which already suggests the need for a tripartite distinction. Positively, I argue that that a tripartite distinction is implicit in much statistical practice. Finally, I apply a well-known framework in the modelling literature in order to characterize these three separate concepts functionally (...) in terms of their roles in modelling practice. (shrink)