Demonstratives play a crucial role in the acquisition and use of language. Bringing together a team of leading scholars this detailed study, a first of its kind, explores meaning and use across fifteen typologically and geographically unrelated languages to find out what cross-linguistic comparisons and generalizations can be made, and how this might challenge current theory in linguistics, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Using a shared experimental task, rounded out with studies of natural language use, specialists in each of the languages (...) undertook extensive fieldwork for this comparative study of semantics and usage. An introduction summarizes the shared patterns and divergences in meaning and use that emerge. (shrink)

In trying to explain the possibility of akrasia , it seems plausible to deny that there is a conceptual connection between motivation and evaluation ; akrasia occurs when the agent is motivated to do something that she does not judge to be good . However, it is hard to see how such accounts could respect our intuition that the akratic agent acts freely, or that there is a difference between akrasia and compulsion. It is also hard to see how such (...) accounts could be extended to the realm of theoretical reason, but this is generally not taken Ito be a problem, because it is generally assumed that there is no similar phenomenon in the realm of theoretical reason. This paper argues that there is such a thing as theoretical akrasia, and that we can find a characterization of this phenomenon in Descartes’s Meditations. Drawing on certain passages in the Meditations, we can construct an account of theoretical akrasia; this account can then be adapted to resolve the original problem of akrasia in the realm of practical reason. The account asserts that there is a conceptual connection between motivation and evaluation in free action; it also enables us to show how the akratic agent is still acting freely when he does something that he does not judge to be the best all things considered. (shrink)

It seems rather intuitive that if I can save either one stranger or five strangers, I must save the five. However, Kantian (and other non-consequentialist) views have a difficult time explaining why this is the case, as they seem committed to what Parfit calls “innumeracy”: roughly, the view that the values of lives (or the reasons to save them) don’t get greater (or stronger) in proportion to the number of lives saved. This chapter first shows that in various cases, it (...) is permissible to save fewer lives, contrary to what is implied by “numerate” views. Then it argues that in the cases in which it is intuitive that we must save the greater number, Kantians (and other deontologists) can not only deliver this verdict but also explain why it is correct, without presupposing that the value of our action depends on “adding up” the values of the lives saved. (shrink)

La celebración del centenario de la publicación de las Meditaciones del Quijote ofrece la oportunidad única de reflexionar sobre una obra que creó un nuevo tipo de reflexión filosófica contemporánea en lengua castellana, reflexión caracterizada por una forma de “ontología del presente”.

Mayr’s paper is extremely interesting and compelling and I don’t plan here to address all its insights. Rather, I’ll just try to argue that there might be more unity in understanding of Raz’s accou...

Patients with advanced dementia are less likely than those with other terminal illnesses to receive palliative care. Due to the nature and course of dementia, there may be a failure to recognize the terminal stage of the disease. A possible and under-investigated explanation for this healthcare disparity is the healthcare practitioner who plays a primary role in end-of-life decision-making. Two potential areas that might impact provider decision-making are cognitive biases and moral considerations. In this analysis, we demonstrate how the cognitive (...) biases and moral considerations of practitioners related to clinical decision-making are inherent in clinical practice and may impact on providers’ accuracy related to diagnostic and treatment related decision-making associated with patients with advanced dementia. Anchoring, default, availability, representativeness and framing biases are cognitive biases based on the "Two System Model" that relate to decision-making in end-of-life care. In patients with advanced dementia, those biases may result in a tendency to adhere to traditional mandatory care, involving an aggressive approach to care, which values saving lives at all costs, without taking into account the possible suffering and long-term consequences. Aspects such as moral sensitivity and moral courage play an important role in ethical decision-making related to advanced dementia. Investigations of clinical decision-making that include the cognitive biases and ethical considerations of practitioners might advance the comprehensive understanding of the clinical decision-making process related to care of patients with advanced dementia and promote the quality of care given to this population. (shrink)

Accidie, depression, and dejection seem to be psychological phenomena that are best characterized as cases in which an agent has no motivation to pursue what he or she judges to be good or valuable. The phenomena thus seem to present a challenge to any view that draws a close connection between motivation and evaluation. ‘Accidie, Evaluation, and Motivation’ aims to show that the phenomena are actually best explained by a theory that postulates a conceptual connection between motivation and evaluation.

Compilación de textos que abordan la elaboración de las ideas filosóficas de Gaos, así como la forma en la que éste se apropia de algunos de los autores más significativos del pensamiento occidental.

The Demands of Liberal Education analyses and applies contemporary liberal political theory to certain key problems within the field of educational theory. Levinson examines problems centred around determining appropriate educational aims, content and institutional structure and argues that liberal governments should exercise a much greater control over education than they now do. Combining theoretical with empirical research, this book will interest and provoke scholars, policy makers, educators, parents, and all citizens interested in education politics.

In the present essay I intend to approach the racial problems of today's world, or more particularly the problem of the Negro and of his integration in multiracial societies, from the point of view of the Jungian concept of Persona.I will, of necessity, limit iny study to one national case only, that of Brazil. The use of Brazil as a particular instance for study can be easily justified. Brazil is probably the most complex multiracial society in the world and one (...) that boasts the least tensions among communities of different stock, religion or cultural background. In 8.5 million sq. km., over one hundred and twenty million people are living who speak the same language, both in the literal and the figurative sense. We believe we have been somehow more successful than the Americans in emphasizing the element of fraternity that is so fundamental to the democratic way of life. My thesis is that we have achieved such a result thanks to a very peculiar working of the archetype of the Persona. This article will try to adumbrate the construction of what one may call a collective Persona, a fa¸ade, a pattern of national behaviour which tries to overcome the problem by simply overlooking the fact that genetic differences of colour, shape and mind exist. (shrink)

The 1850s through early 60s was a transformative period for nascent studies of the remote human past in Britain, across many disciplines. Naturalists and scholars with Egyptological knowledge fashioned themselves as authorities to contend with this divisive topic. In a characteristic case of long-distance fieldwork, British geologist Leonard Horner employed Turkish-born, English-educated, Cairo-based engineer Joseph Hekekyan to measure Nile silt deposits around pharaonic monuments in Egypt to address the chronological gap between the earliest historical and latest geological time. Their conclusion (...) in 1858 that humans had existed in Egypt for exactly 13,371 years was the earliest attempt to apply geological stratigraphy to absolute human dates. The geochronology was particularly threatening to biblical orthodoxy, and the work raised private and public concerns about chronological expertise and methodology, scriptural and scientific authority, and the credibility of Egyptian informants. This essay traces these geo-archaeological investigations; including the movement of paper records, Hekekyan’s role as a go-between, and the publication’s reception in Britain. The diverse reactions to the Egyptian research reveal competing ways of knowing the prehistoric past and highlights mid-Victorian attempts to reshape the porous boundaries between scholarly studies of human antiquity. (shrink)

Resenha do livro: ENKVIST, Inger. Educação: Guia para perplexos. Campinas-SP: Kirion, 2019. 142 p. Inger Enkvist é professora de literatura espanhola na Universidade de Lund, na Suécia e estudiosa das ideias pedagógicas e práticas educativas, com vasta publicação de ensaios e livros sobre o tema, analisando-o em suas aplicações em diferentes contextos. É conhecida por sua crítica às abordagens pedagógicas que se tornaram hegemônicas a partir da metade do século XX, as quais ela sintetiza sob o título de “ nova (...) pedagogia”, contrastando-as com os pressupostos teóricos e práticas da chamada “pedagogia tradicional”. Na obra em análise, a autora procura esclarecer o conceito de “pedagogia tradicional” ou “educação tradicional” que, segundo ela, normalmente é apresentado de forma superficial, pejorativa e até caricatural. Remete-se à filosofia clássica para apresentar os fundamentos dessa tradição que já vem sendo negada desde que a educação passou a ser pensada dos pontos de vistas utilitarista e igualitarista, desde o século XIX, culminando na hegemonia de tais pressupostos em meados do século XX. Aponta a crise atual como, em grande parte, consequência dessa “nova” percepção. Nessa abordagem introdutória, propõe aos educadores o aprofundar-se no conhecimento dos conceitos e princípios educação tradicional, refletindo sobre as suas implicações práticas e os resultados obtidos por países que ainda os adotam. Realiza também uma avaliação dos pressupostos da “nova pedagogia” e as suas possíveis relações não apenas com os resultados da educação escolar, mas implicações sociais mais amplas. Aborda as diversas aplicações do conceito de educação e espaços onde ela é realizada, delimitando o seu enfoque a educação escolar e as suas relações. Discute os fundamentos epistemológicos da educação, o papel do professor, sua formação e postura profissional, as disciplinas escolares, seus objetivos e métodos de ensino e aprendizagem, bem como os papéis da instituição escolar, do aluno e a imprescindível colaboração da família. Aborda ainda a educação como política de Estado, refletindo sobre avaliações dos sistemas de ensino em diferentes contextos. Enkvist (2019) discute inicialmente o conceito de educação em suas diversas aplicações e nos vários espaços de sua realização, enfatizando aquela que é produzida no âmbito da família e da escola. Nesse aspecto, apesar das diferenças de objetivos e fundamentação teórica, a abordagem lembra Brandão (2001), apontando quão amplo é este conceito e a diversidade de possibilidades de suas aplicações, sendo a educação escolar apenas uma delas. Mesmo sendo o objetivo da autora tratar especificamente da educação escolar, reconhece a necessidade de articular a sua abordagem aos outros aspectos e instituições relacionadas. Para ela, “a educação de um jovem é um projeto de colaboração entre o próprio jovem, a família, a escola e a sociedade” (p.71). Data de registro: 01/10/2020 Data de aceite: 22/09/2021. (shrink)

Apocalyptic thinking permeates Paul’s ideas about the gospel, God, the present age, and what is to come. Paul in his letters not only writes about the revelations that he himself has received, but also how the gospel reveals God’s ultimate justice. Apocalypticism as an ideology is fundamentally concerned with justice and the expectation of a future intervention that will conclusively reconcile the injustices of the world with the justice of God. Though of course Paul never sat down and wrote an (...) “Apocalypse” or even an apocalyptic letter, his letters reveal glimpses of the apocalyptic ways Paul thought about the world and humanity’s place in it. This article reviews the history and main tenets of apocalypticism and then examines three fundamental areas of apocalyptic thinking as expressed in Paul’s letters: the idea of apocalypse as full disclosure, the apocalyptic promise of full justice, and Paul’s use of apocalyptic ideas to reorient his readers to thinking about true-but-hidden identity, both of the “present evil age” and of one’s current place in it. Paul draws upon and employs apocalyptic imagery to solve practical problems in his communities, equipping them to face the world with a full cosmic perspective. (shrink)

Educators and policy makers confront challenging questions of ethics, justice, and equity on a regular basis. Should teachers retain a struggling student if it means she will most certainly drop out? Should an assignment plan favor middle-class families if it means strengthening the school system for all? These everyday dilemmas are both utterly ordinary and immensely challenging, yet there are few opportunities and resources to help educators think through the ethical issues at stake. Drawing on research and methods developed in (...) the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,_ Dilemmas of Educational Ethics_ introduces a new interdisciplinary approach to achieving practical wisdom in education, one that honors the complexities inherent in educational decision making and encourages open discussion of the values and principles we should collectively be trying to realize in educational policy and practice. At the heart of the book are six richly described, realistic accounts of ethical dilemmas that have arisen in education in recent years, paired with responses written by noted philosophers, empirical researchers, policy makers, and practitioners, including Pedro Noguera, Howard Gardner, Mary Pattillo, Andres A. Alonso, Jamie Ahlberg, Toby N. Romer, and Michael J. Petrilli. The editors illustrate how readers can use and adapt these cases and commentaries in schools and other settings in order to reach a difficult decision, deepen their own understanding, or to build teams around shared values. (shrink)

_Teaching in a democracy is challenging and filled with dilemmas that have no easy answers._ For example, how do educators meet their responsibilities of teaching civic norms and dispositions while remaining nonpartisan? _Democratic Discord in Schools_ features eight normative cases of complex dilemmas drawn from real events designed to help educators practice the type of collaborative problem solving and civil discourse needed to meet these challenges of democratic education. Each of the cases also features a set of six commentaries written (...) by a diverse array of scholars, educators, policy makers, students, and activists with a range of political views to spark reflection and conversation. Drawing on research and methods developed in the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), _Democratic Discord in Schools_ provides the tools that allow educators and others to practice the deliberative skills they need in order to find reasonable solutions to common ethical dilemmas in politically fraught times. (shrink)

Resumo : O presente artigo objetiva discutir o mal-estar docente a partir da perspectiva niilista de Friedrich Nietzsche. Atualmente, o debate sobre o mal-estar docente tem privilegiado perspectivas ou enfoques políticos, econômicos e psicológicos. Neste texto, os autores analisam inferências e evidências possíveis que relacionem o fenômeno cultural do niilismo ao mal-estar docente, tão em evidência nas instituições públicas de ensino, no Brasil. São tecidas discussões e argumentos sobre a decadência dos valores do entorno e dos fundamentos da ação educativa, (...) mais precisamente o valor da educação, do conhecimento, da ciência, da cultura elaborada, da autoridade docente, da didática etc. Em outras palavras, a originalidade desse texto é, sobretudo, situar o mal-estar docente, em um espaço e tempo de derrocada de valores culturais, dentre outros, e o apresentar como resultado de um mal-estar maior compartilhado pela cultura ocidental em parte do século XX até os dias atuais. Espera-se que os debates presentes no texto possam ampliar as perspectivas para a compreensão do mal-estar entre os professores. (shrink)

The role of Greek thought in the final days of the Roman republic is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years. This volume of essays, commissioned specially from a distinguished international group of scholars, explores the role and influence of Greek philosophy, specifically Epicureanism, in the late republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views of Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosopher of the day, and Lucretius, foremost among the representatives and supporters of (...) Epicureanism at the time. Throughout the volume, the impact of such disparate reception on the part of these leading authors is explored in a way that illuminates the popularity as well as the controversy attached to the followers of Epicurus in Italy, ranging from ethical and political concerns to the understanding of scientific and celestial phenomena. (shrink)

'We desire all and only those things we conceive to be good; we avoid what we conceive to be bad.' This slogan was once the standard view of the relationship between desire or motivation and rational evaluation. Many critics have rejected this scholastic formula as either trivial or wrong. It appears to be trivial if we just define the good as 'what we want', and wrong if we consider apparent conflicts between what we seem to want and what we seem (...) to think is good. In Appearances of the Good, Sergio Tenenbaum argues that the old slogan is both significant and right, even in cases of apparent conflict between our desires and our evaluative judgements. Maintaining that the good is the formal end of practical inquiry in much the same way as truth is the formal end of theoretical inquiry, he provides a fully unified account of motivation and evaluation. (shrink)

Nosso objetivo neste artigo é o de lançar luz sobre alguns aspectos das concepções de Gödel acerca da percepção de conceitos. Começamos investigando a natureza e o papel da analogia entre percepção sensível e percepção de conceitos. A seguir, examinamos as conexões entre percepção de conceitos, razão e compreensão, tentando mostrar que a percepção de conceitos é compreensão de conceitos. Por fim, examinamos aqueles aspectos da concepção de Gödel em que a percepção de conceitos de fato se aproxima perigosamente da (...) ideia de um "olho da mente". Contudo, argumentamos que esses aspectos problemáticos não são intrínsecos à noção de percepção de conceitos, mas sim resultam de uma má compreensão da distinção entre conceito e objeto. Our goal in this article is to illuminate some aspects of Gödel's conception of the perception of concepts. We begin by investigating the nature and function of Gödel's analogy between sense perception and perception of concepts. After that, we examine the connections between perception of concepts, reason, and understanding, trying to show that the perception of concepts consists in the understanding of concepts. Finally, we examine those aspects of Gödel's conception where the perception of concepts actually comes dangerously close to the idea of a "mind's eye". However, we argue that these problematic aspects are not intrinsic to the notion of perception of concepts, but result from a misunderstanding of the distinction between concept and object. (shrink)

After its establishment in 1948 many Jews emmigrated to Israel from Arab countries, Yemen included. In 1995, a governmental committee was established to investigate the alleged disappearance of about 1000 Yemenite children from hospitals within transit camps where the new immigrants were kept in the 1950s. Interviews with Yemenites present how the bodies of new immigrants were medicalized and commodified in the transit camps during the mass-immigration period of the 1950s, and how people have come to resist it. I conclude (...) with the role of the Israeli medical profession and biomedical technologies in promoting national goals and as mediators of collective, group and individual identities. (shrink)

Western representation of countries from the Global South implies a dichotomist view of business ethics: on the one hand, universal ethics largely reproduces commonsensical views of the South as ‘less ethical’, and on the other hand, voices from the South are often conditioned to present themselves as substantially indigenous and unambiguous to be accepted as legitimate ethical subjects. We join the growing interest in bridging this gap by drawing on studies from human geography, and ask to what extent the materiality (...) of moral dilemmas bespeaks the disputed underpinning ethical values of a given space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s perspective of the production of social space, we outline and apply the idea of ‘spatial ethics’ to organizations, in order to approach the entanglement between center and periphery. We analyze organizations in favelas, which are, for many authors, territories where experiences are extreme, and poverty and violence mix with vibrant culture and ingenuity. We critically approach the field of business ethics and suggest that one way of moving beyond the North–South debate is to consider that ethics cannot be transmitted or represented in empty milieus. (shrink)