A long history of extractive industries and activities have shaped the societies of northern Mozambique, and the Cabo Delgado province in particular. For centuries, the growing international demand on local resources had a great impact on the northern micro-societies. The demand for cheap labour and natural resources, ranging from ivory and cotton, to timber, rubies, land, gas and more, involved thousands of local actors in its extraction, reproducing systems of local power. The persistence of poverty, inequality and conflicts, as well (...) as simmering and sometimes grand-scale violence, fits into a long-term trend of extractivism. Through a historical approach and field observations, we focus on the political economy of extracting natural resources. We point out the persisting basic patterns of extractivism that accompanied Mozambique's integration into global markets, and continued or even deepened, in the post-independence period. These activities are oriented towards foreign markets. They are instigated by foreign investment, but invariably carried out in collaboration with a chain of national gatekeepers. In a clientelist system, local elites resort to their proximity to the state to reproduce their power, often at the expense of state expropriation. Weak state institutions have the functional effect of reproducing the elites, also serving the interests of extractivist capital. It is, however, a system with many and profound contradictions, producing conflict and violence, which also recurrently put those interests at risk. (shrink)

This paper argues that eighteenth-century Portuguese scientific policies promoted the inclusion of its main colony, Brazil, in the Enlightenment environment. This was accomplished by innovative initiatives, such as voyages to explore the colonial territory. Natural history activities, especially in mining, remained at the center of this political project and relied on co-opting groups of Portuguese in America. Based on the life of João da Silva Feijó, this article outlines the relevant connections between Feijó's scientific activities and the (...) first Brazilian national expedition in the 1850s, which led to discussion about developing the Brazilian nation. This analysis is aimed toward the growing consensus in historiography of the sciences that scientific activities practiced outside European centers gave rise to complex interactions involving the processes of mondialization of sciences and the construction of a local scientific context. (shrink)

The standard approach for abstractive text summarization is to use an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder is responsible for capturing the general meaning from the source text, and the decoder is in charge of generating the final text summary. While this approach can compose summaries that resemble human writing, some may contain unrelated or unfaithful information. This problem is called “hallucination” and it represents a serious issue in legal texts as legal practitioners rely on these summaries when looking for precedents, used (...) to support legal arguments. Another concern is that legal documents tend to be very long and may not be fed entirely to the encoder. We propose our method called LegalSumm for addressing these issues by creating different “views” over the source text, training summarization models to generate independent versions of summaries, and applying entailment module to judge how faithful these candidate summaries are with respect to the source text. We show that the proposed approach can select candidate summaries that improve ROUGE scores in all metrics evaluated. (shrink)

The standard approach for abstractive text summarization is to use an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder is responsible for capturing the general meaning from the source text, and the decoder is in charge of generating the final text summary. While this approach can compose summaries that resemble human writing, some may contain unrelated or unfaithful information. This problem is called “hallucination” and it represents a serious issue in legal texts as legal practitioners rely on these summaries when looking for precedents, used (...) to support legal arguments. Another concern is that legal documents tend to be very long and may not be fed entirely to the encoder. We propose our method called LegalSumm for addressing these issues by creating different “views” over the source text, training summarization models to generate independent versions of summaries, and applying entailment module to judge how faithful these candidate summaries are with respect to the source text. We show that the proposed approach can select candidate summaries that improve ROUGE scores in all metrics evaluated. (shrink)

Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace (...) the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. An instant classic, _Vita_ has been widely acclaimed for its bold fieldwork, theoretical innovation, and literary force. Reflecting on how Catarina’s life story continues, this updated edition offers the reader a powerful new afterword and gripping new photographs following Biehl and Eskerod’s return to Vita. Anthropology at its finest, _Vita_ is essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world. (shrink)

O artigo é uma reflexão sobre o modo como, na "Genealogia da Moral", Nietzsche repensa "o problema estético" a partir da oposição entre a concepção kantiana do belo como predicado de um juízo "desinteressado" e a concepção stendhaliana do belo como efeito de uma "cristalização" e uma "promessa de felicidade". A chave do pensamento de Nietzsche neste contexto está no conceito de "embriaguez" , por um lado, como termo-chave para designar a "pré-condição fisiológica" da arte, mas, por outro, como um (...) processo de espiritualização dos instintos ou das pulsões que as interioriza e intensifica. Esta espiritualização distingue-se da contemplação desinteressada porque não nos des-afecta e porque é, em grande medida, uma espiritualização da sexualidade, mas não deixa, por isso, de implicar uma reavaliação dos valores e uma ampliação do horizonte do humano. É por isso que a arte pode ser pensada como um "contra-movimento" que afirma a vida e combate o "ideal ascético" e o "niilismo europeu". The present article is a reflection on the way how, in "Genealogy of Morals", Nietzsche rethinks "the aesthetic issue" based on the opposition between Kant's conception of beauty as a predicate of a "disinterested" judgment and the stendhaliana conception of beauty as the effect of a "crystallization" and a "promise of happiness". The key to the thought of Nietzsche's in this context resides on the concept of "intoxication" on the one hand, as a key-term to designate the "pre-physiological condition" of art, but on the other hand, as a process of spiritualisation of the instincts or of the drives, which internalizes and intensifies them. This spiritualization is distinguished from disinterested contemplation for it does not dis-affects us, and because it is by large a spiritualization of sexuality, without renouncing to imply a revaluation of the values and a widening on the horizon of the human. That is why art can be thought of as a "counter-movement" that affirms life and fights the "ascetic ideal" and the "European nihilism". (shrink)

Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace (...) the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina’s words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade under economic pressures, pharmaceuticals as moral technologies, a public common sense that lets the unsound and unproductive die, and anthropology’s unique power to work through these juxtaposed fields. _Vita’s_ methodological innovations, bold fieldwork, and rigorous social theory make it an essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought and ethics in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Este trabalho discute os resultados de uma pesquisa de mestrado cujo objetivo foi propor um modo de trabalhar a sociologia no ensino médio através de uma de suas vertentes contemporâneas: a de Zygmunt Bauman. Tal perspectiva foi escolhida devido à complexidade apresentada pelo atual estágio da modernidade, que impacta fortemente as sociedades contemporâneas. A maneira como Bauman revisa a contemporaneidade pode ser um caminho profícuo para que os estudantes compreendam melhor os seus próprios dilemas na medida em que possam relacionar (...) o conteúdo das ciências sociais com o seu cotidiano. Partindo do pressuposto que o conteúdo ministrado nas aulas de Sociologia no ensino médio deve estar em sintonia com as demandas atuais das ciências sociais, a pesquisa buscou compreender quais os sentidos em que tem se baseado a disciplina. Para tanto, procura-se mostrar que a relação entre disciplina escolar, demandas das ciências sociais e contexto social esteve presente nos diversos períodos em que a Sociologia foi lecionada. A partir do exposto, sugere-se a adaptação de temas e conceitos pertencentes à sociologia contemporânea, sobretudo baseando-se em Bauman, para ensinar ciências sociais aos adolescentes, visando que esses possam melhor compreender o mundo, a si e às relações sociais que os cercam. (shrink)

The occurrence of oscillatory behaviours in living cells can be viewed as a visible consequence of stable, regulatory homeostatic cycles. Therefore, they may be used as experimental windows on the underlying physiological mechanisms. Recent studies show that growing pollen tubes are an excellent biological model for these purposes. They unite experimental simplicity with clear oscillatory patterns of both structural and temporal features, most being measurable during real‐time in live cells. There is evidence that these cellular oscillators involve an integrated input (...) of plasma membrane ion fluxes, and a cytosolic choreography of protons, calcium and, most likely, potassium and chloride. In turn, these can create positive feedback regulation loops that are able to generate and self‐sustain a number of spatial and temporal patterns. Other features, including cell wall assembly and rheology, turgor, and the cytoskeleton, play important roles and are targets or modulators of ion dynamics. Many of these features have similarities with other cell types, notably with apical‐growing cells. Pollen tubes may thus serve as a powerful model for exploring the basis of cell growth and morphogenesis. BioEssays 23:86–94, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the new theory of political liberalism, developed by people like jJohn Rawls and Charles Larmore. This is a quite specific subject and it should not be confused with another and more usual meaning attached to the same expression. This more conventional meaning of political liberalism is primarily a form of liberalism which stresses the political sphere - the state - as opposed to the economic sphere - the marketplace. However, the new theory of political (...) liberalism is not in opposition to economic liberalism in this way. Instead, the adjective political refers to the fact that this recent defence of liberalism avoids reliance on comprehensive and controversial religious, metaphysical, epistemological, and moral views. In this sense, political liberalism is a theory of argumentative restraint regarding the defence of liberal justice. (shrink)

The Second Vatican Council was built within a solidly constituted tradition in the Catholic Church. All councils were held within the traditional and legal parameters of the Church. The question about the condition of possibility of a renewal Council under this tradition shows relevant. The Vatican II is the result of a negotiation between renewal and preservation. Pope John XXIII personally coordinated the construction of the legitimacy of the new event, following steps which may be rescued during the preparatory stages (...) of the great assembly. The reading of this process from sociological parameters may elucidate its plausibility within the tradition and the Church's bureaucratic organization. Pope John started ably a church renewal process, opening a new phase in the long Catholic tradition. Under his Pope condition, he knew how to seed the idea of a revamping event in the name of a divine inspiration and with the set of bishops’ participation of the Church. (shrink)

This innovative volume is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this preeminent group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war; how new information and medical (...) technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which forms of subjectivity and life possibilities are produced against a world in pieces. The transdisciplinary conversation includes anthropologists, historians of science, psychologists, a literary critic, a philosopher, physicians, and an economist. The authors touch on how we think and write about contingency, human agency, and ethics today. (shrink)

Ao longo da história, a relação entre a filosofia e a política tem-se revelado espinhosa, denunciando a dificuldade em se conceptualizar sobre o que é por natureza antagónico à cristalização, porque particular e pluralista. Na esfera da opinião, o filósofo deve restringir-se a analisar, criticar, rever e aperfeiçoar os valores políticos coevos, a explicar aos seus conterrâneos o universo de acepções sociais partilhadas, consciente de que a sua concepção fundamenta uma via entre as muitas poss...

A new argument has been made against moral enhancement by authors who are otherwise in favour of human enhancement. Additionally, they share the same evolutionary toolkit for analysing human traits as well as the belief that our current morality is unfit to deal with modern problems, such as climate change and nuclear proliferation. The argument is put forward by Buchanan and Powell and states that other paths to moral progress are enough to deal with these problems. Given the likely costs (...) and risks involved with developing moral enhancement, this argument implies moral enhancement is an unpromising enterprise. After mentioning proposed solutions to such modern problems, I will argue that moral enhancement would help implement any of them. I will then detail Buchanan and Powell’s new argument disfavouring moral enhancement and argue that it makes too bold assumptions about the efficacy of traditional moral progress. For instance, it overlooks how that progress was to achieve even in relatively successful cases such as the abolition of slavery. Traditional moral progress is likely to require assistance from non-traditional means in order to face new challenges. (shrink)

The first part of the following text does make the map of an answer to the question of knowing if and how it is possible to speak of beautiful art in the context of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. There is an appeal to the conditions of the freedom of the imagination, to an interpretation of representation as exemplification and to a reference to aesthetic purposes and constraints. This way it will be made evident it is possible (...) to think the judgment by means of which one declares a work of art a beautiful one as a pure judgment of taste and the artistic beauty as free beauty. Starting from a reflection on what it does mean to speak of aesthetic purposes and constraints, it will be put at stake, in the second part of the text, the univocity of meaning of the notion of taste in Kant’s third Critique. Perhaps in the case of the pure judgment of taste by means of which one declares a work of art a beautiful one it is mandatory to appeal not only to taste as aesthetic power of judgment, but to another taste: a corpus which is narrowly connected with the mechanical, compulsory and academic side of beautiful art. (shrink)

O jornal Tribuna Criciumense foi o único impresso publicado na cidade de Criciúma no período deste escrito. Fundado em 1955, ele passou por três fases. Na primeira, produziu um discurso anticomunista, mas de maneira um pouco tímida. Na segunda fase, com curta duração, o impresso passou a valorizar a ideologia comunista e, ao mesmo tempo, a defesa do presidente João Goulart. A última fase foi marcada por ataques violentos contra o comunismo, em defesa do golpe civil-militar e da ditadura (...) implantada. Analisar essas fases e como os discursos anticomunista e pró-comunismo reverberaram no jornal se configura no objetivo deste escrito. (shrink)

In a review of Frege's Puzzle1, Graeme Forbes makes the claim that Salmon's account of belief might be seen, under certain conditions, as a mere notational variant of a neo-Fregean theory; and thus that such an account might be reduced to a neo-Fregean one simply by rewriting it in terms of Fregean terminology. With a view to supporting his claim, Forbes offers an outline of an account of belief which, according to him, would satisfy the following conditions: (i) it could (...) be directly obtained from Salmon's own analysis by means of a certain set of substitutions, which presumably would not affect the essential features of Salmon's view; (ii) it could naturally be described as Fregean, in the sense that it would preserve, (at least) the spirit of Frege's doctrines, especially his fundamental intuitions about belief. Of course, the upshot of Forbes's argument is that Salmon's theory would not, at bottom, constitute a genuine alternative to a Fregean semantics for belief ascriptions. In this paper I argue to the effect that Forbes's claim is not in general sound. It seems to me that the sort of indirect argument used by Forbes - that of trying to undermine Salmon's theory by showing that it is just a version of a neo-Fregean account - does not provide someone working within a Fregean framework with an adequate strategy to counter Salmon's neo-Russellian views. It would perhaps be better to concentrate a Fregean attack on certain apparently dubious and highly controversial theses and results which are constitutive of Salmon's view, e.g. the counterintuitive character of a substantial set of consequences which follow from his theory of belief, as well as the associated revisionist stand he is forced to take towards our current patterns of speaking about belief. (shrink)

In this paper, we intend to discuss if and in what sense semiosis (meaning process, cf. C. S. Peirce) can be regarded as an "emergent" process in semiotic systems. It is not our problem here to answer when or how semiosis emerged in nature. As a prerequisite for the very formulation of these problems, we are rather interested in discussing the conditions which should be fulfilled for semiosis to be characterized as an emergent process. The first step in this work (...) is to summarize a systematic analysis of the variety of emergence theories and concepts, elaborated by Achim Stephan. Along the summary of this analysis, we pose fundamental questions that have to be answered in order to ascribe a precise meaning to the term "emergence" in the context of an understanding of semiosis. After discussing a model for explaining emergence based on Salthe's hierarchical structuralism, which considers three levels at a time in a semiotic system, we present some tentative answers to those questions. (shrink)

Investiga-se o conceito de força, tal como aparece em Nietzsche e na psicanálise. Objetiva-se esclarecer e potencializar seu uso clínico. A pesquisa se justifica porque se trata de conceber o processo clínico como explicitação da força pulsional, uma vez que a tipologia das forças proposta por Nietzsche e a precisão analítica, de caráter ético e clínico, convergem inteiramente. Uma ética nietzschiana da força ativa (o amor fati) torna-se providencial para se pensar a retomada do conceito de força na psicanálise. Objeções (...) levantadas à noção de força serão oportunas para, inversamente, justificar seu uso: equivalente à noção de real, a de força não se beneficia do deslocamento que a primeira sofre e opera. Que o real possa ser tratado pela negatividade, mas não a força, problematiza o uso das duas noções: a força jamais definir-se-á pelo impossível ou pelo vazio, e sim por atos de resistência ou sublimações. Conclui-se que ao nível dessa potência avaliadora, seletiva, não condicionada pela atualidade, perfilam-se os temas nietzschianos do intempestivo e da transvaloração dos valores. O tempo por vir das forças ativas depende de seu exercício. Esses temas essenciais à filosofia nietzschiana implicam, portanto, a consideração da força e de suas vicissitudes. O mesmo vale para a psicanálise e a noção irrevogável de pulsão. É verdade que, inversamente, a força se esclarece pela transvaloração dos valores que o intempestivo deflagra. A pulsão também só é conhecida mediante seu exercício, ou seja, enquanto ela mesma opera sua decifração pragmática. Ela requer, para tanto, uma perspectiva ética e clínica aliada às suas avaliações imanentes, extramorais. É a razão para que a análise se ocupe do sonho e de sua memória ativa, interpeladora, desde um tempo por vir. (shrink)

What is the fundamental insight behind truth-functionality ? When is a logic interpretable by way of a truth-functional semantics? To address such questions in a satisfactory way, a formal definition of truth-functionality from the point of view of abstract logics is clearly called for. As a matter of fact, such a definition has been available at least since the 70s, though to this day it still remains not very widely well-known. A clear distinction can be drawn between logics characterizable through: (...) (1) genuinely finite-valued truth-tabular semantics; (2) no finite-valued but only an infinite-valued truthtabular semantics; (3) no truth-tabular semantics at all. Any of those logics, however, can in principle be characterized through non-truth-functional valuation semantics, at least as soon as their associated consequence relations respect the usual tarskian postulates. So, paradoxical as that might seem at first, it turns out that truth-functional logics may be adequately characterized by non-truth-functional semantics . Now, what feature of a given logic would guarantee it to dwell in class (1) or in class (2), irrespective of its circumstantial semantic characterization? (shrink)

Following logicism, Frege famously held that logic is a science on its own. Particularly, he held the informativity thesis, viz., that logic is a science because it is deductively informative. This paper aims to understand Frege’s informativity thesis and its connection with the conception of logic as science. For such, it focuses on some features of Frege’s philosophy that are key for understanding this connection, particularly his conception of analyticity, the role of judgments in inferential reasoning, and the use of (...) decomposition of functions as a means for concept-formation, which Frege names as fruitful definitions. Keywords: Gottlob Frege; Informativity of Logic; Judgements; Fruitful Definitions. (shrink)

Over recent years, various semantics have been proposed for dealing with updates in the setting of logic programs. The availability of different semantics naturally raises the question of which are most adequate to model updates. A systematic approach to face this question is to identify general principles against which such semantics could be evaluated. In this paper we motivate and introduce a new such principle the refined extension principle. Such principle is complied with by the stable model semantics for (single) (...) logic programs. It turns out that none of the existing semantics for logic program updates, even though generalisations of the stable model semantics, comply with this principle. For this reason, we define a refinement of the dynamic stable model semantics for Dynamic Logic Programs that complies with the principle. (shrink)

This paper has a negative and a positive claim. The negative claim is that the Frege-Russell account of existence as a higher-order predicate is mistaken and should be abandoned, even with respect to general statements of existence such as “Flying mammals exist” (where statements of this sort are supposed to be best accommodated by the account). The Frege-Russell view seems to be supported by two ideas. First, the idea that existence is entirely expressed by the existential quantifier of standard predicate (...) logic. Second, the idea that the existential quantifier is a higher-order predicate, a predicate of predicates, not of individuals. I think that both ideas are wrong but will focus on the latter. By construing prima facie first-order statements such as “Flying Mammals exist” as higher-order predications such as “The Fregean Concept Flying Mammal maps at least one individual onto the True”, the Frege-Russell view commits one - merely on the basis of the meaning it assigns to the existence predicate – to abstract objects such as concepts (Gottlob Frege), or propositional functions (Bertrand Russell), or classes (Rudolf Carnap), or properties, kinds, and so on. This cannot be right, I think. The positive claim of the present paper is that, at least in the context of first-order discourse, the existence predicate is just what it seems to be: a bona fide first-order predicate (pace Kant, Hume, Frege, Russell and others). Three important ideas about existence are shared with the Frege-Russell conception of existence, though. (1) Being and existence are one and the same thing: there is no difference between “Unicorns are not”, or “There are no unicorns”, and “Unicorns do not exist”, or “There exist no unicorns”. (2) To be is to be the value of a bound variable, to belong to a domain of quantification (Willard Quine). (3) Anti-Meinongianism, the idea that there are no non-existent objects (Russell). However, we diverge from the Frege-Russell tradition with respect to the following claim. (4) The best concept of existence, in the sense of the one that is best understood and best enables us to formulate ontological disputes, is a purely logical first-level concept defined in terms of existential quantification and identity. First-order statements of existence and non-existence like “Flying Mammals exist” and “Unicorns do not exist” are accordingly taken at face value and analyzed in terms of a logical first-order predicate of existence, the predicate “is (identical to) something”. Reasons are given to prefer this notion of existence to other first-order non-logical notions that have been proposed in the literature, notions characterized in terms of predicates such as “is in space-time”, “is concrete”, “is causally efficacious”, “is actual”, “is real”, etc. (shrink)

O texto é uma resenha da Doutrina do Conceito hegeliana recém editada e publicada em português. O terceiro livro da Ciência da Lógica é estruturado em subjetividade, objetividade e ideia, com cada uma destas partes também desenvolvida numa estrutura tripartite. Nesta exposição, merece destaque o movimento contraditório de autodeterminação do conceito, no qual a universalidade se autodiferencia imanentemente em particularidade e o conceito retorna a si mesmo na forma da universalidade concreta. O conceito passa pelas diferentes formas de mediação na (...) teoria do silogismo, especialmente com a mediação da universalidade, quando o conceito se transforma em objetividade. Esta começa com a relação externa do mecanismo, avança para a relação interna do quimismo e conclui na teleologia, onde a liberdade é mais elevada que a necessidade. A Ideia, última parte da Doutrina do Conceito, é a unidade sintética entre conceito e objetividade, com destaque no capítulo da Ideia absoluta na qual Hegel formula uma noção de método como estrutura e movimento do conteúdo e da racionalidade. (shrink)

Resenha de: Hegel, G. W. F. Ciência da lógica: 1. A doutrina do ser. Tradução deChristian Iber, Marloren L. de Miranda, Federico Orsini e Agemir Bavaresco. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes; Bragança Paulista, SP: Ed.Universitária São Francisco, 2016. 464 p. ISBN 9788532653086.************************************************************************************** ************************************ Com a tradução, os falantes da língua portuguesa têm em mãos uma obra filosófica estruturante do pensamento moderno e uma das mais importantes da História da Filosofia. Temos agora e nossas mãos, em língua portuguesa, uma obra de difícil acesso do (...) pensamento hegeliano e que um filósofo de língua portuguesa leria com muita dificuldade. A tradução, ora disponibilizada, tenta conciliar a difícil linguagem hegeliana escrita em alemão com a fluência típica do nosso português, permitindo uma compreensão mais ou menos fácil por parte do falante da língua portuguesa. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objeto de investigação os principais níveis de fundamentação enquanto momentos estruturantes do sistema filosófico hegeliano. No contexto filosófico da comemoração dos duzentos anos de publicação da Enciclopédia das Ciências Filosóficas, o objeto do trabalho é a reconstrução dos momentos estruturantes da passagem da Ciência da Lógica para a Filosofia da Natureza, da Filosofia da Natureza para a Filosofia do Espírito e dessas para a esfera do Espírito Absoluto. O artigo não tem como meta a discussão de (...) tópicos intrínsecos à Ciência da Lógica ou à Filosofia do Espírito, mas visa à exposição de círculos da passagem dialética de uma esfera para a outra como um autodesenvolvimento sistemático qualitativo. Mesmo de caráter genérico, não aponta para a possível substantividade de uma parte do sistema, mas para as relações fundamentais entre os círculos. O texto é perpassado por uma chave interpretativa da filosofia hegeliana no sentido de que não é formado por partes fixas e estanques, mas é articulado na perspectiva de relações fundamentais caracterizadoras das interfaces entre as esferas. (shrink)

Our present moral traits are unable to provide the level of large-scale co-operation necessary to deal with risks such as nuclear proliferation, drastic climate change and pandemics. In order to survive in an environment with powerful and easily available technologies, some authors claim that we need to improve our moral traits with moral enhancement. But this is prone to produce paradoxical effects, be self-reinforcing and harm personal identity. The risks of moral enhancement require the use of a safety framework; such (...) a framework should guarantee practical robustness to moral uncertainty, empirical adequacy, correct balance between dispositions, preservation of identity, and be sensitive to practical considerations such as emergent social effects. A virtue theory can meet all these desiderata. Possible frameworks incorporate them to variable degrees. The social value orientations framework is one of the most promising candidates. (shrink)

Philosophers and social scientists of diverse orientations have suggested that the pragmatics of semiosis is germane to a dynamic account of meaning as process. Semiosis, the central focus of C. S. Peirce's pragmatic philosophy, may hold a key to perennial problems regarding meaning. Indeed, Peirce's thought should be deemed seminal when placed within the cognitive sciences, especially with respect to his concept of the sign. According to Peirce's pragmatic model, semiosis is a triadic, time-bound, context-sensitive, interpreter-dependent, materially extended dynamic process. (...) Semiosis involves inter-relatedness and inter-action between signs, their objects, acts and events in the world, and the semiotic agents who are in the process of making and taking them. (shrink)

No livro dois da Ética Nicomaqueia, Aristóteles afirma com clareza que a prática reiterada de ações virtuosas leva à constituição de uma determinada disposição de caráter, ou seja, o hábito funcionaria como uma segunda natureza, em função da fixidez e estabilidade da disposição por ele constituída, o que aparentemente impediria qualquer modificação no que concerne ao caráter. O problema é que várias passagens do Corpus Aristotelicum parecem contradizer esta asserção, permitindo uma leitura diferente daquela que sugeriria a ideia do hábito (...) como algo que operasse de modo similar à natureza. Este artigo propõe-se investigar se é possível uma leitura que permita, nas Éticas, bem como em outras obras do Corpus Aristotelicum, a possibilidade da mudança de caráter, da decadência ou da reforma moral, bem como sua implicação na investigação sobre o problema do determinismo e da responsabilidade moral. (shrink)

An overcomplete logic is a logic that ‘ceases to make the difference’: According to such a logic, all inferences hold independently of the nature of the statements involved. A negation-inconsistent logic is a logic having at least one model that satisfies both some statement and its negation. A negation-incomplete logic has at least one model according to which neither some statement nor its negation are satisfied. Paraconsistent logics are negation-inconsistent yet non-overcomplete; paracomplete logics are negation-incomplete yet non-overcomplete. A paranormal logic (...) is simply a logic that is both paraconsistent and paracomplete. -/- Despite being perfectly consistent and complete with respect to classical negation, nearly every normal modal logic, in its ordinary language and interpretation, admits to some latent paranormality: It is paracomplete with respect to a negation defined as an impossibility operator, and paraconsistent with respect to a negation defined as non-necessity. In fact, as it will be shown here, even in languages without a primitive classical negation, normal modal logics can often be alternatively characterized directly by way of their paranormal negations and related operators. So, instead of talking about ‘necessity’, ‘possibility’, and so on, modal logics could be seen just as devices tailored for the study of (modal) negation. This paper shows how and to what extent this alternative characterization of modal logics can be realized. (shrink)

This paper consists in an analysis of two explanatory models of human behaviour which play a prominent role in the contemporary literature on human action. The first model - the causalist - aims at explaining action in terms of causes and general laws. The second model - the intentionalist - explains human action in terms of intentions and practical syllogism. The difficulties of both models are presented and in the last part of the essay we propose one alternative model, based (...) on the notion of retroduction.O trabalho consiste numa análise de dois modelos explicativos do comportamento humano considerados fundamentais na literatura contemporânea sobre teoria da ação. O primeiro modelo, o causalista, tenta explicar as ações em termos de causas e leis gerais. O segundo explica a ação em termos de intenções e silogismos práticos. As dificuldades e problemas de ambos modelos são apresentadas e na última parte do ensaio propomos um modelo alternativo baseado na noção de retrodução. (shrink)

The paper focuses in philosophical problems concerning the nature of intentionality and mental representation. The first part presents a historical outline of the problem and reviews some classical/contemporary writings on the question. The second part examines the so-called Chinese Room Argument formulated by J. Searle. The third part presents a few arguments aiming to show the inadequacy of the functionalist model for the design of robots. The conclusion points to some alternatives to the traditional functionalist model such as, for instance, (...) the connectionist model.O artigo aborda problemas filosóficos relativos à natureza da intencionalidade e da representação mental. A primeira parte apresenta um breve histórico dos problemas, percorrendo rapidamente alguns episódios da filosofia clássica e da filosofia contemporânea. A segunda parte examina o Chinese Room Argument formulado por J. Searle. A terceira parte desenvolve alguns argumentos visando mostrar a inadequação do modelo funcionalista de mente na construção de robots. A conclusão aponta algumas alternativas ao modelo funcionalista tradicional, como, por exemplo, o conexionismo. (shrink)