Se o "olhar colonial" tem poder de restringir o pensamento, seria a "decolonialidade" o exercício de liberdade que tanto imaginei para a minha própria existência? Talvez eu não seja a responsável pela criação do imaginário que permeia o meu cotidiano até então; mas seria possível tornar-me detentora dessa porção imaginativa da vida a partir de agora? Se o medo da estagnação assombra os meus dias, e temer não pode ser a saída, imaginar sim, mobiliza! Construir um repertório a partir das (...) minhas próprias experiências, ou através do conhecimento de quem sou de fato, é resgate. É libertário e possível. (shrink)

Neste artigo, concentro-me sobre quatro variedades possíveis de ausência da vergonha. Minha esperança é a de que a reflexão sobre essas variedades possa, de alguma maneira, nos dar uma imagem mais completa acerca do papel que a vergonha desempenha sobre nosso caráter moral e nas discussões a respeito da atrocidade. Observo que a vergonha que emerge de uma exposição à atrocidade pode em parte constituir aquilo que nos leva a identificar oevento como atroz. Prossigo então argumentando que quando a vergonha (...) está ausente, esta ausência pode servir para nos cegar para a atrocidade que está à nossa frente, e que é nossa tarefa tentar evitar. Sentir vergonha faz parte de ver a atrocidade pelo que ela é de uma maneira apropriada emocionalmente engajada. Ela é, portanto, uma parte vital de ser humano, e sua ausência em certos casos é uma insuficiência demasiadamente humana de humanidade. (shrink)

Overview -- Locke's internal sense and Kant's changing views -- Personal identity amd its problems -- Rationalist metaphysics of mind -- Consciousness, self-consciousness, and cognition -- Strands of Argument in the Duisburg Nachlass -- A transcendental deduction for a priori concepts -- Synthesis : why and how? -- Arguing for apperception -- The power of apperception -- "I-think" as the destroyer of rational psychology -- Is Kant's theory consistent? -- The normativity objection -- Is Kant's thinker (as such) a free (...) and responsible agent? -- Kant our contemporary. (shrink)

Current treatments of practical rationality understand reasons as considerations counting in favor of or against some practical option, treating the positive and the negative case as symmetrical. Typically the focus is on examples of positive reasons. However, I want to shift the spotlight to negative reasons, as making a tighter or more direct link to rationality — and ultimately to morality, which is what much of the current interest in reasons is meant to clarify. Recognizing a positive/negative asymmetry in normative (...) force will let us reconcile the view of moral or other requirements as based on reasons with the denial that reasons as such, even all-thingsconsidered reasons, yield requirements — or as I like to put it, rationally compel. (shrink)

Empirically minded philosophers have raised questions about judgments and theories based on moral intuitions such as Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium. But they work from the notion of intuitions assumed in empirical work, according to which intuitions are immediate assessments, as in psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s definition. Haidt himself regards such intuitions as an appropriate basis for moral judgment, arguing that normal agents do not reason prior to forming a judgment and afterwards just “confabulate” reasons in its defense. I argue, first, (...) that the notion of “considered intuitive judgment” that Rawls spells out when he first presents his method is pre-theoretical, but not at all pre-reflective, in the way Haidt’s definition supposes; it may rest on various forms of reasoning short of systematic derivation from theoretical principles. I go on to take issue with Haidt’s dismissal of ex post facto moral reasoning, arguing that it can play both a causal role in an individual’s later intuitions or judgments and a legitimate normative role, as required by moral competence in judging non-taboo cases. I suggest that the move from intuition to judgment and thence to ex post facto reasoning makes sense as a justificatory version of Peircean abduction, or what is now mainly called “inference to the best explanation.”. (shrink)

There is a well-known scene from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that illustrates what might be considered benign manipulation: Tom has the job of whitewashing a fence but would rather spend the time with friends. By feigning enthusiasm for the job he manages to get his friends to hang around and do it for him. They even pay to do it - with various little items that he later trades for..

Correspondence theories are frequently either too vaguely expressed – “true statements correspond to the way things are in the world,” or implausible – “true statements mirror raw, mind-independent reality.” I address this problem by developing features and roles that ought to characterize what I call ldquo;modest” correspondence theories. Of special importance is the role of correspondence in directing our responses to cases of suspected non-factuality; lack of straightforward correspondence shows the need for, and guides us in our choice of, various (...) kinds of reconstrual projects. This, I argue, is in contrast to the approaches suggested by deflationism and coherence, and thus modest correspondence theories are appropriately distinct from rivals. (shrink)

We investigated the role of honour concerns in mediating the effect of nationality and gender on the reported intensity of anger and shame in reaction to insult vignettes. Spain, an honour culture, and The Netherlands, where honour is of less central significance, were selected for comparison. A total of 260 (125 Dutch, 135 Spanish) persons participated in the research. Participants completed a measure of honour concerns and answered questions about emotional reactions of anger and shame to vignettes depicting insults in (...) which type of threat was manipulated. It was found that Spanish participants responded especially intensely to insults that threaten family honour, and that this effect of nationality on emotional reactions to threats to family honour was mediated by individual differences in concern for family honour. (shrink)

A recent special issue in the Journal of Business Ethics gathered together a variety of papers addressing the challenges of putting virtue ethics into practice :563–565, 2013). The editors prefaced their outline of the various papers with the assertion that exploring the practical dimension of virtue ethics can help business leaders discover their proper place in working for a better world, as individuals and within the family, the business community and society in general :563–565, 2013). Scholars are yet to explore (...) the role of virtuous organisational leaders in the pursuit of Eudaimonia. This paper is a qualitative study which considered company directors’ self-understandings in light of a virtue ethics conceptual framework. The aim of the study is to explore whether virtue ethics rather than deontology and consequentialism is a better vehicle for expressing directors’ self-understandings about their ideals and role. (shrink)

A collection of lectures which focussed on the small, constant aggressions of racism.

Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’¹ When we say that someone morally ought not to harm others, perhaps all we are saying is that he has a certain kind of reason (...) not to, one that wins out against any opposing reasons such as those touting benefits to him of ignoring others’ concerns. (shrink)

This paper attempts to connect recent cross-disciplinary treatments of the cognitive or rational significance of emotions with work in contemporary philosophy identifying an evaluative propositional content of emotions. An emphasis on the perspectival nature of emotional evaluations allows for a notion of emotional rationality that does not seem to be available on alternative accounts.

Many authors treat freedom and responsibility as interchangeable and simply apply conclusions about responsibility to freedom. This paper argues that the two are distinct, thus allowing for a “semi-compatibilist” view, on which responsibility but not freedom (in the sense of freedom to do otherwise) is compatible with determinism. It thereby avoids the implausible features of recent compatibilist accounts of freedom without alternative possibilities—as if one could make oneself free just by accepting the limitations on one’s choice. In particular, the paper (...) puts forth two main arguments that responsibility does not imply freedom: an argument from “the stakes,” meaning what is at stake in a given action, or how seriously wrong it is, as affecting responsibility more than freedom, and an argument from temporal standpoint, that responsibility is often assessed from a standpoint farther back in time, when the agent could have taken steps to prevent being unfree later, whereas freedom is typically assessed at the time of action. These arguments are applied to the well-known case of Robert Alton Harris as in Watson (1988), in contrast to a Watsonian account of psychopaths as lacking moral responsibility because of “moral blindness.” Instead, what makes responsibility moral is the reasons for our blame, not necessarily what motivates the agent we take to be blameworthy. (shrink)

Asperger's syndrome is a pervasive developmental condition characterized by features of autism. As observed in clinical practice, individuals with Asperger's syndrome present an impairment related to inflexibility in their everyday routine, an immediate manner of experiencing and relating, and difficulties in estimating periods of time. Following a phenomenological perspective, this study is an attempt to examine these aforementioned aspects in terms of temporality. Thirteen participants with Asperger's syndrome, from 13 to 20 years old, were interviewed about their experience of periods (...) of time, personal history, their past, present and future; and their concept of time and finitude. After the interviews, it was possible to identify three general themes which emerged in the invariant aspects of their experience of time: factual experience of present and future dimensions, chronological time and the past experience. Moreover, participants' descriptions evidenced aspects of experience based on the specificity of lived facts and a sense of time specifically related to what was lived in the past. (shrink)

My comments focus on Proops’s treatment of the Paralogisms. I agree with many aspects of his discussion, including his views about the project of Rational Psychology and his analyses of how, exactly, the arguments of the Paralogisms are defective in form, but I disagree with his interpretation of the First Paralogism. I argue that the source of confusion that Kant diagnoses is not the grammatical distribution of ‘I’ as singular, but the fact that the I-representation is both empty and necessary (...) for cognition. (shrink)

Innate emotional bases of ethics have been proposed by authors in evolutionary psychology, following Darwin and his sources in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Philosophers often tend to view such theories as irrelevant to, or even as tending to undermine, the project of moral philosophy. But the importance of emotions to early moral learning gives them a role to play in determining the content of morality. I argue, first, that research on neural circuits indicates that the basic elements or components of emotions (...) need not be limited to what psychologists think of as basic emotions. But in that case, innate mechanisms of social transfer of emotion, such as infants’ tendency to facial imitation, gaze-following, and emotional contagion or empathy, provide a source of plasticity in developing the basic elements that lets emotions incorporate cultural influence from early on. This leaves room later for cognitive components of adult human emotions and hence for the further role of language in conveying cultural influence. We can thus see how moral judgment might depend on innate emotional capacities that are both modifiable by culture and capable of registering objective values. I use Rawls’s treatment of the development of moral sentiments to illustrate the kind of supportive role that emotions can play in a principle-based account – though my own account involves modifications I go on to indicate. (shrink)

How does Kant understand the representation of an empirical self? For Kant, the sources of the representation must be both a priori and a posteriori. Several scholars claim that the a priori part of the ‘self’ representation is supplied by the category of ‘substance,’ either a regular substance (Andrew Chignell), a minimal substance (Karl Ameriks) or a substance analog (Katharina Kraus). However, Kant opens the Paralogisms chapter by announcing that there is a thirteenth ‘transcendental’ concept or category: “We now come (...) to a concept that was not entered in the above general list of transcendental concepts, and that must yet be classed with them … This is the concept – or, if one prefers, the judgment – I think.” (A341/B399). I argue that it is the ‘I think’ that provides the a priori framework for the representation of the empirical self. (shrink)

A REALIDADE DAS SERRAS CENTRAIS POTIGUARES E A QUESTÃO DO DESENVOLVIMENTO REGIONAL SOB A PERSPECTIVA DO DIREITO, DESENVOLVIMENTO E SUSTENTABILIDADE.

This paper focuses on the interpretation of the Italian approximative adverb quasi 'almost' by primarily looking at cases in which it modifies temporal connectives, a domain which, to our knowledge, has been largely unexplored thus far. Consideration of this domain supports the need for a scalar account of the semantics of quasi (close in spirit to Hitzeman's semantic analysis of almost, in: Canakis et al. (eds) Papers from the 28th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1992). When paired with (...) suitable analyses of temporal connectives, such an account can provide a simple explanation of the patterns of implication that are observed when quasi modifies locational (e. g. quando 'when'), directional (e. g. fino 'until' and da 'since'), and event-sequencing temporal connectives (e. g. prima 'before' and dopo ' after'). A challenging empirical phenomenon that is observed is a contrast between the modification of fino and da by quasi, on the one hand, and the modification of prima and dopo by the same adverb, on the other. While quasi fino and quasi da behave symmetrically, a puzzling asymmetry is observed between quasi prima and quasi dopo. To explain the asymmetry, we propose an analysis of prima and dopo on which the former has the meaning of the temporal comparative più presto 'earlier', while the latter is seen as an atomic predicate denoting temporal succession between events (Del Prete, Nat Lang Semantics 16: 157-203, 2008). We show that the same pattern of implication observed for quasi prima is attested when quasi modifies overt comparatives, and propose a pragmatic analysis of this pattern that uniformly applies to both cases, thus providing new evidence for the claim that prima is underlyingly a comparative. A major point of this paper is a discussion of the notion of scale which is relevant for the semantics of quasi', in particular, we show that the notion of Horn (entailment-based) scale is not well-suited for handling modification of temporal connectives, and that a more general notion of scale is required in order to provide a uniform analysis of quasi as a cross-categorial modifier. (shrink)

Henri Bergson commencait en 1914 ses conferences d'Edimbourg en precisant que le probleme de la personnalite pouvait etre considere comme le probleme central de la philosophie. Tel est le point de depart d'un ouvrage qui prend au mot cette reflexion de celui que l'on considere habituellement comme le philosophe de la duree a un moment assez avance de sa carriere intellectuelle. L'auteur interroge la maniere dont le concept de personnalite est apparu dans l'ouvre, mais aussi les progres, les problemes qu'il (...) pose, et finalement son role et sa place dans la genese et le developpement de la pensee de Bergson.". (shrink)

I first began working on emotions as a project in philosophy of action, without particular reference to moral philosophy. My thought was that emotions have a distinctive role to play in rationality that tends to be underappreciated by philosophers. Bringing this out was meant to counter a widespread tendency to treat emotions as “blind” causes of action (for the general picture, see Greenspan 2009.) Instead, I thought that emotions could be seen as providing reasons. I took their significance as moral (...) motivators to be hard to miss. Of course, philosophers and others sometimes rightly insist that we need to put emotions aside in order to formulate satisfying moral principles, but I would have been surprised to hear anyone deny that moral motivation typically rests on emotion and that we need that basis in early life in order to get to the stage of acting on moral principles. However, I have since come to think that none of the main philosophical approaches to ethics fully appreciates the significance of emotion, in part because of a misconception of practical reasons. Reasons for action are commonly taken as prima facie requirements, so that moral reasons would yield requirements just insofar as they outweigh competing reasons such as reasons of simple self-interest. Someone who recognizes a moral reason as holding “all things considered” would be irrational not to act on it. But I argue in recent work (starting with Greenspan 2005) that even all-things-considered reasons may in one sense be optional: a rational agent can legitimately “discount” them, cancelling their deliberative weight and their force for motivation. What keeps us from setting aside reasons of the sort that underlie moral.. (shrink)