This paper is an introduction on the Causal Theory of Memory, one of the most discussed theories in philosophy of memory in the present days. We begin with Martin & Deutscher’s formulation of the theory, in which the authors present three criteria in order for a given mental state to be considered an instance of memory, amongst them, the famous causal criterion, which stipulates that a memory must be causally connected to the past experience. Subsequently, we discuss if these criteria (...) are necessary and sufficient for memory and we present two theories that complement these criteria with an epistemic and a phenomenological criterion, i.e., the Causal Epistemic Theory and the Causal Autonoetic Theory. We then introduce the concept of memory traces, which are, according to Martin & Deutscher, the causal link between the memory and the past experience which created this memory; we present the model of traces as structural analogues and the model of distributed traces and discuss the problems which arise for each of these models of traces. Afterwards we focus on the concept of causality and present the Causal Procedural Theory, which offers a different conception of causality that does not focus on the memory traces, but on causal process itself. Lastly, we present the theory called Discontinuism, a theory about the relation between memory and imagination, which follows directly from the Causal Theory of Memory. (shrink)
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 and died in Cambridge in 1951. He studied engineering, first in Berlin and then in Manchester, and he soon began to ask himself philosophical questions about the foundations of mathematics. What are numbers? What sort of truth does a mathematical equation possess? What is the force of proof in pure mathematics? In order to find the answers to such questions, he went to Cambridge in 1911 to work with Russell, who had just (...) produced in collaboration with Whitehead (1861-1947) Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), a monumental treatise which bases mathematics on logic. But on what is logic based? Wittgenstein's attempt to answer this question convinced Russell that he was a genius. During the 1914-8 war he served in the Austrian army and in spare moments continued the work on the foundations of logic which he had begun in 1912. His war-time journal, Notebook s 1914-16 (1961), reveals the development of his ideas more clearly that the final version, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, which he published in the early 1920s. (shrink)
Introduction and discussion of a new German edition of the Bellicorum Instrumentorum Libri cum figuris et fictitijs literis conscriptus, Monaco di Baviera, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Icon. 242. This manuscript is the machine book of Giovanni Fontana. Fontana describes siege engines and inventions such as a magic lantern and a rocket-propelled device.
This book explores the sources of modern British liberalism through a study of the Edinburgh Review, the most influential and controversial early nineteenth-century British periodical. Founded by a group of young Scottish intellectuals in 1802, the Review served as a principal channel through which the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment gained wider currency, and did much to popularize the doctrines of economic and political reform. As Dr Fontana shows in this lucid and keen analysis, the first thirty years in (...) the life of the Review clearly display the new social and economic problems confronting European society in the aftermath of the French Revolution. (shrink)
A finished sketch for a light-and-shadow projection device by the Paduan mechanical artisan Johannes de Fontana (c.1395–1455), in his manuscript book of drawings now known as Liber Bellicorum Instrumentorum, depicts a machine for communicating ideas or information through spectacle. The manuscript is fairly well known, and this sketch is just one of many interesting images worthy of study in its 70 leaves. A couple dozen manuscripts of the mechanical arts from this period survive, the best-studied of which fall into (...) the “Sienese school” and the “German school.” Fontana falls outside these, for he had far less influence than the Sienese. His work also is too early, it seems, to count in narratives directed toward the flowering of technological illustration in the sixteenth century. Of his images of subjects other than hydraulic and military machines only one deep study has been made, concerning two of the automata, although the present sketch has lately attracted a glance or two. Historians of technology pay scant attention to the first half of the fifteenth century, five decades that seem merely to repeat medieval knowledge and have the disadvantage to their prestige of falling “before Leonardo.” Whether one views Fontana as an engineer or as a science fiction illustrator, a great deal in the manuscript has not been given its due. The brief normative account in the literature so far on Fontana focuses on politics and warfare. My account in the case of his castellus image in this paper emphasizes issues of imagery, communication, subjectivity, moral feeling, spiritual life, and personhood. This account runs along two lines. For the first, I will suggest some untried ideas for approaching this image. In part this is in pursuit of what Jonathan Sawday calls the imaginative history of machines and mechanisms, though more largely it concerns contributing to a broad-range history of communication and persuasion. If we look at the image from our standpoint in aworld accustomed to the reproduction of images, we readily see in it an early step toward our present control of the display and diffusion of images. Fontana’s castle of shadows(castellus umbrarum), based on a worldwide transfer of technical knowledge about imagery in antiquity (and even in pre-history), presents some of the continuing questions driving thereproduction of imagery and the dispersal of information. As a practical matter, a sense ofproximity to Fontana and his time, as opposed to a sense of untranslatable distance, helps to broaden the historiography. My second line of thought is to oppose my account of Fontana’s’s castellus to an interpretation, and to the thinking behind it, that has started to appear on the borders of disciplinary history. This other interpretation reflects an increasingly influential approach to the history of technology and cultural theory that employs a growing and powerful line of philosophical thought. In 2003 Philippe Codognet, a philosopher of technology, published an essay in which he described Fontana’s castle of shadows as a specimen of the pre-historyof virtual reality devices. His reference of the castle of shadows is a bit casual, perhaps accidental in feeling; but it has begun to stimulate interest in Fontana’s striking idea and hasgiven it a bit of renown. Codognet’s view (along with his reproduction of the image) has been picked up by thinkers who are concerned with post-humanistic ideas derived from philosophical work in which the distinction between human persons and objects is deflated in such a way that both persons and objects are correctly characterized by attributes commonly divided into subjective and objective. What’s more, they are characterized by attributes that, under this view, are incorrectly distinguished from one another as the human, the organic, and the inorganic. The ontology supporting this approach denies the privileged epistemological relationship of humans to the world. This school of thought is object-oriented ontology, also known in a more radical form as speculative realism. Its potential influence on historiography is great, and part of it is and will be valuable. Its current actual influence is centered on medieval cultural studies and on the history of technology. (shrink)
À partir d’une analyse de la matérialité linguistique, cet article explore les processus de subjectivation et d’identification qui constituent le(s) sujet(s) des différentes pratiques urbaines, par rapport à l’espace de la rue et dans le cadre de disputes visant à l’affirmation d’identités socialement légitimées. Le corpus constitué pour ma recherche est de nature hétérogène, aussi bien dans sa matérialité symbolique que du point de vue de son inscription institutionnelle et de sa circulation sociale.
A collection of essays that provides an introduction to the emerging postmodern world. The reader is guided through the subject and shown how it affects psychology, philosophy, religion and science.
ABSTRACT This article draws attention to the reception that François Fénelon's Télémaque received in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. It overturns the historiographical assumption that the Jacobites were the leading disseminators of this continental bestseller on the other side of the Channel. Even though in the English intellectual context Télémaque's framework was unorthodox, many staunch supporters of the Glorious Revolution were fascinated by the book's portrayal of a virtuous king who respects laws, rights and liberties, and (...) sacrifices himself to improve the wellbeing of his subjects. Moderate Whigs - who included several Huguenot refugees - capitalised on the poem's esprit du roi in order both to celebrate the English kings and to construct the ‘Myth of Louis XIV' as an example of how a sovereign should not rule. The study of the book's reception thus presents a somewhat emblematic case study from which to view the genesis of ‘Englishness', that of an ideological discourse largely based on a process of overturning. In addition, the Télémaque responded to the thirst for ‘useful Knowledge' that distinguished the advocates of ‘politeness' and, not least, its mild pedagogical approach rendered it a precious resource for the ‘moderation’ of the youth. (shrink)
With the growth of Muslim economies, both at the national and international levels, the issue of riba (interest, usury) poses great difficulties. The charging or receiving of riba has been forbidden in Islam, which presents a major problem to financial institutions that charge interest. Muslim legal scholars belonging to all schools of legal thought have reinterpreted scriptural sources to accommodate drastic economic changes; practical considerations have forced Muslim groups, both of Sunni and Shi'ite persuasion, to justify interest-based banking and other (...) institutions of finance. As a matter of religion, the status of interest is far from resolved. However, within the legal tradition, there are ethical principles like maslahah (public good) and la darar wa la dirar (no harm, no harassment) that will determine the future direction of a Muslim search for a morally responsible economy. (shrink)
The present article proposes an analysis of the foucauldians studies concerning the disciplinary techniques and its relation with the government of individuals and collectives conducts. To this end, this article focus in demonstrated, throughout the works “Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison ”, “The order of discourse ”and “Micro-physics of Power ”, how the discipline, understood as a technology of power, operates in the conduct of the subject practices.Thus, we will follow an analytical path of differentiation of the (...) both uses of the term discipline found in the theorizations of Michel Foucault: one in the way of the knowledge, thenceforth the control of the discourses formation which configures the acting of a power that exercises itself as a discursive restrictor in order to maintain the regulation and control of what can be said and though in certain time. The other use, constituted in the scope of the power, in which the disciplinary power acts specifically in the bodies as a group of techniques engendered in the subjects’ fabrication. Therefore, the main objective outlines in present the discipline as a technology of the power the works as an machinery of the government of conducts, highlighting its forms of operation in the fields undertaken by Foucault, of the know and the power, following his genealogic triad of investigation. The article still intends to explore the foucauldian understanding that the discipline and the disciplinary techniques are configured as an ingenious machine that come together in the fabrication of the human, being required to understand them not only through the repression categories, oppression and alienation, like much has been done and continues to be made. Accordingly, the French philosopher will provide us an understanding of this technology of power as a machinery that productive says yes, much more than it says, no. (shrink)
The next origin of the generation of the 98 is inserted in the complex Spanish sociocultural panorama in the end of XIX century. "Regeneracionisme", regionalisme, the social and religious questions, the war against the U.S.A., the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, to more of the political crisis of the Restoration, are the circumstances to consider.
Local supplier corporate social responsibility in developing countries represents a powerful tool to improve labour conditions. This paper pursues an inter-organizational network approach to the global value chain literature to understand the influence of suppliers’ collective behaviour on their CSR engagement. This exploratory study of 30 export-oriented and first-tier apparel suppliers in Bangladesh, a developing country, makes three relevant contributions to GVC scholarship. First, we show that suppliers are interlinked in a horizontal network that restricts unilateral CSR engagement. This is (...) justified in that unilateral CSR engagement is a source of heterogeneity in labour practices; consequently, it triggers worker unrest. Second, we present and discuss an exploratory framework based on four scenarios of how suppliers currently engage in CSR given their network’s pressure toward collective behaviour: unofficial CSR engagement, geographic isolation, size and competitive differentiation, and external pressure. Finally, we show the need to spread CSR homogeneously among suppliers and to reconceptualize the meaning of CSR in developing countries, encouraging more scrutiny toward horizontal dynamics. (shrink)
Armando P. Ribas was born in Ciego de vila, Cuba, in 1932 and died in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2020. In 1956 he graduated as a Juris Doctor from Saint Thomas of Villanova University in Havana, Cuba. He later studied Law and Economics at Southern Methodist University and Columbia University in the United States. In Argentina, he worked as a journalist and economist and from 1889 to 1990 and was a Deputy in that country. This book clearly explains the (...) ethical and non-economic antagonism between socialism and the misnamed capitalism, as well as the importance of liberty for the individual to achieve prosperity with justice and solidarity. The " illuminism" fallacy clearly emerges from the work as a pretense of the course of reason in history. This explains how obscurantism arising from the confusion between reason and truth caused greater crimes in the West than the Manichean virtues of the Middle Ages. It explains the fundamental discrepancy between the reason of state, prevailing in Europe and the "rule of law" of Americans. The latter changed for the first time in history the relationship between the government and the citizen in defense of individual rights: to life, liberty, property and the search for their own happiness. Ribas also expands on the analysis of economic ideas, which, detached from private rights, have caused the recent failures of "democracies south of the Rio Grande." This book allows us to understand to a great extent the evolution and problems of the world that we have had to live, between the supposed globalization and the reality of terrorism. But just as he points out the problems, he also teaches the ways in which individual prosperity can be achieved for all men who know how to use their freedom. Armando Ribas has been pointed out as the most liberal of Cubans and also of Argentines, since he had two homelands in his life. (shrink)
Leibniz was writing his "Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese" as the Leibniz-Clarke Controversy developed. Both were terminated by his death. These two fronts show interesting doctrinal correlations. The first is Leibniz' concern for the "decadence of natural religion." The dispute with Clarke began with it, and the Discourse is a defense of Chinese natural religion in order to show its agreement with Christian natural religion. The Controversy can be summed up as "clockmaker God versus idle God." Leibniz (...) wants to escape from the perverse consequences that all criticism of divine voluntarism seems to cause. Thus, his elaboration is directed at a distinct concept of a God that rules without interposing, a supramundane intelligence. And the Leibnizian interpretation of the natural theology of the Chinese can be viewed the same way: it emphasizes a First Principle, Li, which rules without interposing. (shrink)
Faced with the criticism of the biopolitical control exercised in the COVID-19 pandemic, we defend the importance of a re-examination of the foucauldian reflections so that the critical diagnoses of the present is accompanied by a careful analysis of the fields of force and knowledges in which such controls occur. Bearing in mind the correlation between security mechanisms and the management of insecurities, we argue that in the management of the pandemic by the brazilian executive government, the excesses of power (...) took place more due to the lack of imposing restrictive health measures and obstacles to the control of contagion than through restrictive actions of classical individual freedoms. (shrink)
O estudo tem como objetivo analisar o trabalho pedagógico no PIBID - “Cultura esportiva da escola” e suas implicações para a formação inicial em Educação Física do CEFD/UFSM. Para a coleta das informações utilizou-se a Entrevista Semiestruturada, realizada com 10 participantes do subprojeto. Constatou-se que o trabalho pedagógico contribuiu para a formação inicial dos alunos participantes, através da aproximação da realidade escolar e das trocas de experiência, sendo mais qualificado que os estágios e as práticas de ensino. Entretanto, verificou-se que (...) o trabalho pedagógico no subprojeto não repercutiu diretamente no curso de Educação Física do CEFD pela falta de articulação das ações do subprojeto PIBID com o Projeto Pedagógico de Curso. (shrink)
