Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta para pensar nas práticas educativas como humanização e diferença. Diante disso, põe em questão que muitos dos conhecimentos sobre educação advêm de processos de elaboração que têm pouca ou quase nenhuma relação com práticas educativas. Por isso, posiciona-se pela crítica à postura que submete a educação aos diversos discursos que circulam nas ciências da educação, superando os fundamentos humanistas modernos e o entendimento de educação como lugar de produção de determinadas subjetividades e/ou identidades. Ao contrário (...) disso, assumindo uma atitude propositiva, as práticas educativas serão abordadas como lugar de formação humana, entendendo a humanização como um conceito aberto, cuja definição não pode ser descrita antes e fora das práticas educativas. Além disso, esta proposta argumenta em favor da diferença e/ou da pluralidade do ser humano, ou seja, deve ser aceito que a educação ainda é um processo pelo qual os indivíduos são formados de acordo com suas potencialidades, e que essas são construídas durante o processo educativo. Palavras-chave: Práticas educativas. Humanização. Singularidades. Diferenças. (shrink)

This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account, which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will show, the evidential account exhibits some distinctive logical features that deserve careful consideration. On the one hand, it departs from the material reading of ‘if then’ exactly in the way we would like it to depart from that reading. On the other, it significantly differs from the non-material accounts which (...) hinge on the Ramsey Test, advocated by Adams, Stalnaker, Lewis, and others. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the work of Paolo Prodi (1932–2016), which is characterised by a constant reflection on secularisation. As a democratic Catholic, he explored the relationship between the Roman Church and the modern world starting from the Council of Trent and from the dual figure of the pope as a temporal ruler and spiritual guide. His original contribution concerned the conflict between law and conscience: a problem that led him to design a triptych of books on the foundations of the (...) western world. He was influenced not only by Verfassungsgeschichte (German constitutional history), but also by Harold Berman. If for Weber the modern world was born from the Reformation, for Berman it was the ‘Gregorian revolution’ that changed the fate of Latin Europe. For Prodi, too, the medieval conflict between canon and civil law introduced a peculiar structure in Europe that would last until the triumph of the nation states and the so-called ‘political religions’. In his three books (the first dedicated to the oath, the second to justice, the last to economics), Prodi placed at the centre of his analysis the notion of forum; the history of moral theology and casuistry and the relationship between penitence and justice. (shrink)

This paper develops a probabilistic analysis of conditionals which hinges on a quantitative measure of evidential support. In order to spell out the interpreta- tion of ‘if’ suggested, we will compare it with two more familiar interpretations, the suppositional interpretation and the strict interpretation, within a formal framework which rests on fairly uncontroversial assumptions. As it will emerge, each of the three interpretations considered exhibits specific logical features that deserve separate consideration.

This paper investigates the logic of reasons. Its aim is to provide an analysis of the sentences of the form ‘p is a reason for q’ that yields a coherent account of their logical properties. The idea that we will develop is that ‘p is a reason for q’ is acceptable just in case a suitably defined relation of incompatibility obtains between p and ¬q. As we will suggest, a theory of reasons based on this idea can solve three challenging (...) puzzles that concern, respectively, contraposing reasons, conflicting reasons, and supererogatory reasons, and opens a new perspective on some classical issues concerning non-deductive inferences. (shrink)

Beyond Personal Identity. Dogen, Nishida and a Phenomenology of No-Self. Gereon Kopf. Curzon Press, Richmond 2001. xx, 298 pp. 40.00. ISBN 0-7007-1217-8.

Philosophers of Nothingness. An Essay on the Kyoto School. James W. Heisig., The University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 2001. xi, 380 pp. ISBN 0-8248-2480-6; 0-8248-2481-4.

Qu’elles soient d’Église ou d’État, les archives italiennes recèlent une documentation rapportant des cas de violences perpétrées par des clercs sur des pueri, c’est-à-dire des enfants ou des préadolescents. Bien que ce crime n’ait pas été inhérent au milieu clérical, de nombreux membres du clergé furent impliqués dans des affaires de crimes « odieux », délits « énormes » et agissements violents à l’époque moderne. Dans les procès, c’est la formation des enfants et des jeunes et leur proximit...

Pobreza, igualdade e justiça social voltaram à linha da frente do léxico político, econômico e social contemporâneo, embora de formas diferentes e com intensidade variável. A embriaguez do liberalismo e o entusiasmo injustificado pela dinâmica do mercado tinham projetado um mundo em que o bem-estar e a felicidade pareciam estar ao alcance de todos e totalmente disponíveis. Mas o despertar que se seguiu à folia das finanças criativas nos entregou um cenário muito mais dramático e repleto de conflitos. Desse ponto (...) de vista, a filosofia política não pode se eximir da tarefa de analisar esses fenômenos e definir um sentido e uma direção para a agenda política em tempos complicados como os atuais. É necessário, portanto, refletir novamente sobre conceitos e perspectivas que talvez tenham sido descartados muito apressadamente. Neste artigo, pretendo examinar esses conceitos utilizando a relação controversa entre a filosofia kantiana e o contratualismo de John Rawls como um fio condutor. (shrink)

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative, The Bioeconomy to 2030. We argue (...) that this initiative is a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime, which seeks to protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action. The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a political–economic macro-context that enables and constrains. Scholarly work in science and technology studies and elsewhere that does not recognize the wider politics of the bioeconomy risks unintentionally contributing to the legitimation of this political project. (shrink)

This paper outlines an account of concessive conditionals that rests on two main ideas. One is that the logical form of a sentence as used in a given context is determined by the content expressed by the sentence in that context. The other is that a coherent distinction can be drawn between a reading of ‘if’ according to which a conditional is true when its consequent holds on the supposition that its antecedent holds, and a stronger reading according to which (...) a conditional is true when its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will suggest, the logical form of concessive conditionals can be elucidated by relying on this distinction. (shrink)

The Dunning–Kruger effect focuses our attention on the notion of invisibility of ignorance, i.e., the ignorance of ignorance. Such a phenomenon is not only important for everyday life, but also, above all, for some philosophical disciplines, such as epistemology of sciences. When someone tries to understand formally the phenomenon of ignorance of ignorance, they usually end up with a nested epistemic operator highly resistant to proper regimentation. In this paper, we argue that to understand adequately the ignorance of ignorance phenomenon (...) we have to understand satisfactorily the concept of disbelief and, as we call it, the concept of “radical ignorance”. We propose also prerequisites that a notion of radical ignorance useful for the philosophy of science ought to fulfill, and we sketch a possible formalization of this notion. Finally, we propose some comments on the problem of propagation of ignorance proposed by Fine. (shrink)

Some debates about the role of non-epistemic values in science discuss the so-called Value-Free Ideal together with the autonomy thesis, to the point that they may be assumed to be intertwined. As I will argue in this article, the two are independent from one another, are supported by different arguments, and ought to be disentangled. I will also show that the arguments against value-freedom and supporting a value-laden conception of science, are different from the arguments against autonomy and supporting democratized (...) science. Moreover, while some of the arguments against autonomy and for democratized science may actually be consistent with value-freedom, they conflict with some philosophical views about the internal diversity of well-designed epistemic communities. This article distinguishes the Value-Free Ideal and the autonomy thesis, as well as their antitheses, and investigates their relations to some of the socio-epistemological models of the social organization of scientific research. Its aim is to make explicit some incompatibilities between different normative frameworks developed in philosophy of science. (shrink)

Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the patient might have. In a probabilistic framework, test selection is often modeled by assuming that people's goal is to reduce uncertainty about possible states of the world. In cognitive science, psychology, and medical decision making, Shannon entropy is the most prominent and most widely used model to formalize probabilistic uncertainty and the (...) reduction thereof. However, a variety of alternative entropy metrics (Hartley, Quadratic, Tsallis, Rényi, and more) are popular in the social and the natural sciences, computer science, and philosophy of science. Particular entropy measures have been predominant in particular research areas, and it is often an open issue whether these divergences emerge from different theoretical and practical goals or are merely due to historical accident. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, we show that several entropy and entropy reduction measures arise as special cases in a unified formalism, the Sharma–Mittal framework. Using mathematical results, computer simulations, and analyses of published behavioral data, we discuss four key questions: How do various entropy models relate to each other? What insights can be obtained by considering diverse entropy models within a unified framework? What is the psychological plausibility of different entropy models? What new questions and insights for research on human information acquisition follow? Our work provides several new pathways for theoretical and empirical research, reconciling apparently conflicting approaches and empirical findings within a comprehensive and unified information-theoretic formalism. (shrink)

The paper lists several editions of Euclid’s Elements in the Early Modern Age, giving for each of them the axioms and postulates employed to ground elementary mathematics.

Harrigan and Spekkens, introduced the influential notion of an ontological model of operational quantum theory. Ontological models can be either “epistemic” or “ontic.” According to the two scholars, Einstein would have been one of the first to propose an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Pusey et al. showed that an epistemic interpretation of quantum theory is impossible, so implying that Einstein had been refuted. We discuss in detail Einstein’s arguments against the standard interpretation of QM, proving that there is a (...) misunderstanding in Harrigan and Spekkens’ attribution of an epistemic perspective to Einstein, whose point of view was actually statistical, but in a quasi-classical sense. (shrink)

In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual networks and lexicons. This article distinguishes these three concepts (...) and shows that adopting each one of them has different impacts on Kuhn’s model of science. After distinguishing and assessing the concepts of taxonomy, network, and lexicon, it will be argued that the latter not only fits the Kuhnian model of science better, but it also helps capture the wide sense of Kuhn’s early concept of a paradigm. (shrink)

In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved in such a (...) transition. I will clarify the role of the scientific community in revolutionary changes and characterize the incommensurability across specialties as possessing both semantic and methodological aspects. The discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA will serve both as an illustration of my main argument and as reply to one criticism raised against Kuhn—namely, that his model cannot capture cases of revolutionary yet non-disruptive episodes of scientific progress. Revisiting Kuhn’s ideas on specialization will shed new light on some often overlooked features of scientific change. (shrink)

In his mature writings, Kuhn describes the process of specialisation as driven by a form of incommensurability, defined as a conceptual/linguistic barrier which promotes and guarantees the insularity of specialties. In this paper, we reject the idea that the incommensurability among scientific specialties is a linguistic barrier. We argue that the problem with Kuhn’s characterisation of the incommensurability among specialties is that he presupposes a rather abstract theory of semantic incommensurability, which he then tries to apply to his description of (...) the process of specialisation. By contrast, this paper follows a different strategy: after criticising Kuhn’s view, it takes a further look at how new scientific specialties emerge. As a result, a different way of understanding incommensurability among specialties will be proposed. (shrink)

To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their engagement in this collective activity. Our (...) classification offers, on the one hand, a model of how the ethical aspects of science are taken into consideration by scientists and, on the other, some indications on how to institutionalize ethics in science. (shrink)

As a result of technological innovations and new cultural practices, the contemporary mediasphere is increasingly populated by digital(ized) faces. The phenomenon is not limited to human faces, but includes a vast universe of fictional animated faces, variously called ‘characters’, ‘mascots’ or ‘kyara’. In Japan, while certainly not new, kyara have been spreading thanks to globalization, digitalization and media-mix strategies. Through the connection between visual design, fictional narratives and socio-cultural consumption, kyara can be considered semiotic figures of in-betweenness, key symbolic mediators (...) in the Japanese mediascape. Their anthropomorphic face design mediates the cultural boundaries between the human and the non-human, the animate and the inanimate, nature and culture. Furthermore, their post-modern narratives mix inspiration from the past and the present, from myths to science fiction. Lastly, they involve an encyclopedic reworking between fiction and reality, mythical references and secularization, between the domains of seriousness and playful make-believe. The article aims to explore the semiotic dimensions of kyara in contemporary Japan, with emphasis on their logic of representation and cultural outcomes. These will be investigated through the analysis of the Pokemon franchise, which will make it possible to describe the emergence of new semiotic patterns of ‘playful visual animism’ in the process of media facialization of everyday life. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is widely considered as one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, while his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is regarded as one of the most influential works in the philosophy ofscience. At the same time, however, his place within philosophy of science remains ambiguous. On the one hand, despite the popularity of SSR, there is no proper ‘Kuhnian school of thought’ in HPS. On the other hand, the interest towards Kuhn does (...) not seem to fade away and the number of publications about his work does not seem to decrease. We suggest that there are at least three different ways to go ‘beyond SSR’: (i) by scrutinising the development of Kuhn’s thought, from his pre- to his post-SSR writings; (ii) by contextualising Kuhn in the philosophical milieu of his time, thus interpreting his view as emerging from the intellectual exchanges he had with contemporary philosophers; (iii) by reinterpreting and developing some of his most known ideas, in ways that perhaps Kuhn himself was not able to contemplate. (shrink)

Once upon a time, some thought that indicative conditionals could be effectively analyzed as material conditionals. Later on, an alternative theoretical construct has prevailed and received wide acceptance, namely, the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. Partly following critical remarks recently ap- peared in the literature, we suggest that evidential support—rather than conditional probability alone—is key to understand indicative conditionals. There have been motivated concerns that a theory of evidential conditionals (unlike their more tra- ditional counterparts) cannot generate (...) a sufficiently interesting logical system. Here, we will describe results dispelling these worries. Happily, and perhaps surprisingly, appropriate technical variations of Ernst Adams’s classical approach allow for the construction of a logic of evidential conditionals with distinctive fea- tures, which is also well-behaved and reasonably strong. (shrink)