This paper focuses on the relations among critique, destruction and negation, on the one hand, and creation, affirmation, love, and care on the other, in Nietzsche’s writings from Daybreak to Zarathustra. In doing this, it traces a movement in Nietzsche's thought that can be understood as an integration of critique in the process of affirmation, which consolidates in Nietzsche’s project of self-overcoming. In contrast to readings that use the metaphor of art and the creativity of the artist, this paper presents (...) pregnancy as a cipher to understand Nietzsche’s project as well as the dynamics that are involved. A key issue addressed throughout the entire paper concerns the way in which Zarathustra says that he loves those who want their own downfall (Untergang) and go “zu Grunde” (or perish). To fully grasp the meaning of these rather puzzling utterances, the paper analyzes Nietzsche's engagement with Pascal (as a very particular case of “going under”). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. In the first instance it is an attempt to offer a new perspective from which to reflect on the meaning and philosophical presuppositions of Friedrich Schlegel’s defence and use of (romantic) irony, as well other related notions: humour, wit, and other comic devices. I propose to situate this perspective within a revaluation of pleasure and joy. To do this in a new way (although not in opposition to authors such as Manfred Frank, Elizabeth (...) Millan-Zaibert, or Gary Handwerk), I refer to one of Schlegel’s earliest texts devoted to The Aesthetic Value of Greek Comedy from 1794. In addition, this paper questions the extent to which Schlegel’s position is tenable in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. For this, I reflect briefly on the ways in which Nietzsche’s writings and notion of life-affirmation respond to Schlegel’s vindication of romantic irony. (shrink)

The following paper presents a reflection on the violence of images understood as the “power” that certain images have in “provoking” what appear to be disproportionate responses on the part of the viewer. In particular, this paper addresses the systematic censorship of images (such as the photographs from David Jay’s work The SCAR Project) in open and highly mediatized societies that advocate and defend freedom of speech. But this requires a new understanding of the image and the working hypothesis of (...) this paper is that we can find resources for this in the work of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. (shrink)

Cet article confronte la réception du sublime kantien chez Schiller et chez Schelling, ainsi que leurs analyses du tragique, en particulier du héros tragique. Ce dernier incarne pour les deux auteurs la réalisation sublime de la liberté humaine. Toutefois, malgré les similitudes qu’offrent leurs pensées, des différences majeures existent. L’article vise à faire voir ces différences et à les comprendre en faisant appel aux positions philosophiques plus larges aussi bien de Schelling que de Schiller concernant la liberté humaine. Ce faisant, (...) l’article analyse également les appropriations et réinterprétations par Schelling de certaines des pensées de Schiller sur le sublime. (shrink)

Nietzsche was a severe critic of German Idealism, but what exactly is the relation between his thought and theirs? Papers from leading specialists in Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche contribute to a clearer understanding of the differences and affinities between Nietzsche's philosophy and that of his predecessors.".

Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology is the third of a three-volume collection exploring Nietzsche’s relationship to the Kantian legacy in philosophy. This volume examines his relationship to Kant’s aesthetic and anthropological views, focusing on the traces of Kant’s third Critique and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View that can be found in Nietzsche’s published and unpublished works. In this review, I offer a summary of each of its chapters, with some brief commentary, and underscore its major themes, (...) contributions, and omissions. In their introduction, Maria Branco and Katia Hay signal that the scope of this volume goes well beyond a strict understanding of aesthetics as the evaluation of... (shrink)

It’s intuitive to think that (a) the more sure you are of something, the harder it’ll be to change your mind about it, and (b) you can’t be open-minded about something if you’re very sure about it. If these thoughts are right, then, with minimal assumptions, it follows that you can’t be in a good position to both escape echo chambers and be rationally resistant to fake news: the former requires open-mindedness, but the latter is inimical to it. I argue (...) that neither thought is true and that believing them will get us all mixed up. I show that you can be open-minded and have confidently held beliefs, and that beliefs in which you are less sure are not, thereby, more fragile. I close with some reflections on the nature of rational belief change and open-mindedness and a brief sketch about what might actually help us in the fight against misinformation and belief polarization …. [please read below the rest of the article]. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments start with a premise about the influence of evolutionary forces on our evaluative beliefs, and conclude that we are not justified in those beliefs. The value realist holds that there are attitude-independent evaluative truths. But the debunker argues that we have no reason to think that the evolutionary forces that shaped human evaluative attitudes would track those truths. Worse yet, we seem to have a good reason to think that they wouldn’t: evolution selects for characteristics that increase (...) genetic fitness—not ones that correlate with the evaluative truth. Plausibly, the attitudes and judgments that increase a creature’s fitness come apart from the true evaluative beliefs. My aim in this paper is to show that no plausible evolutionary debunking argument can both have force against the value realist and not collapse into a more general skeptical argument. I conclude that there is little hope for evolutionary debunking arguments. This is bad news for the debunker who hoped that the cold, hard scientific facts about our origins would debunk our evaluative beliefs. And it is good news for the realist. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments move from a premise about the influence of evolutionary forces on our moral beliefs to a skeptical conclusion about those beliefs. My primary aim is to clarify this empirically grounded epistemological challenge. I begin by distinguishing among importantly different sorts of epistemological attacks. I then demonstrate that instances of each appear in the literature under the ‘evolutionary debunking’ title. Distinguishing them clears up some confusions and helps us better understand the structure and potential of evolutionary debunking arguments.

We often hear such casual accusations: you just believe that because you are a liberal, a Christian, an American, a woman… When such charges are made they are meant to sting—not just emotionally, but epistemically. But should they? It can be disturbing to learn that one's beliefs reflect the influence of such irrelevant factors. The pervasiveness of such influence has led some to worry that we are not justified in many of our beliefs. That same pervasiveness has led others to (...) doubt whether there is any worry here at all. I argue that evidence of irrelevant belief influence is sometimes, but not always, undermining. My proposal picks out ordinary, non-skeptical cases in which we get evidence of error. It says that, in those cases, evidence of irrelevant influence is epistemically significant. It shows how respecting evidence of error is compatible with the epistemic lives we see ourselves living. We are fallible creatures, yes, but we are also capable and intelligent ones. We can recognize and correct for our own error so as to improve our imperfect, yet nevertheless robust, epistemic lives. (shrink)

Ce livre étudie comment la philosophe Hannah Arendt pense la cité, ou encore le politique, cette dimension essentielle de la vie des hommes. Cheminant dans la tradition, avec des penseurs politiques comme Machiavel, Montesquieu et Tocqueville, Arendt bouleverse les rapports entre philosophie et politique. La pensée politique telle qu'elle la définit, en opposition à la philosophie politique classique, doit recevoir ses normes de l'expérience : le discours est second et puise à l'événement. Née en 1906 en Allemagne où elle s'est (...) formée à la philosophie, juive, exilée en France puis aux États-Unis, Hannah Arendt a été projetée dans l'étude de la pensée politique par la force de l'histoire. Longtemps considérée comme une historienne, une journaliste ou une essayiste, Hannah Arendt est désormais reconnue comme penseur central du XXe siècle. Il s'agit de comprendre à la fois le travail théorique qu'elle a mené et sa revendication d'être, non pas une « philosophe », mais une théoricienne du politique. Sa volonté de pratiquer la philosophie en se situant hors champ n'est pas une simple critique de la tradition : elle inaugure une nouvelle manière de philosopher, où l'expérimentation conceptuelle ouvre de nouveaux champs pour la pensée. (shrink)

The fact of moral disagreement when conjoined with Conciliationism, an independently attractive view about the epistemic significance disagreement, seems to entail moral skepticism. This worries those who like Conciliationism, the independently attractive view, but dislike moral skepticism. Others, equally inclined against moral skepticism, think this is a reductio of Conciliationism. I argue that they are both wrong. There is no reductio and nothing to worry about.

We are fallible creatures, prone to making all sorts of mistakes. So, we should be open to evidence of error. But what constitutes such evidence? And what is it to rationally accommodate it? I approach these questions by considering an evolutionary debunking argument according to which (a) we have good, scientific, reason to think our moral beliefs are mistaken, and (b) rationally accommodating this requires revising our confidence in, or altogether abandoning the suspect beliefs. I present a dilemma for such (...) debunkers, which shows that either we have no reason to worry about our moral beliefs, or we do but we can self-correct. Either way, moral skepticism doesn’t follow. That the evolutionary debunking argument fails is important; also important, however, is what its failure reveals about rational belief revision. Specifically, it suggests that getting evidence of error is a non-trivial endeavor and that we cannot learn that we are likely to be mistaken about some matter from a neutral stance on that matter. (shrink)

Can citizens impact the broader discourse about an organization and its legitimacy? While social media have empowered citizens to publicly question firms through large volumes of online evaluations, the high heterogeneity of their evaluations dilutes their impact. Our empirical study applying a threshold vector autoregressive model (TVAR) analysis of 2.5 million tweets and 1,786 news media articles tests the condition by which the heterogeneity of online evaluations converges and influences the broader media discourse. Although social media evaluations do not initially (...) influence media legitimacy, they become influential after reaching a tipping point of refracted attention, which is created by high volume and convergence of individual evaluations around few aggregative frames. Thus, social media storms may influence the broader discourse about an organization when this discourse converges and reaches a tipping point, rather than merely through the massive participation of citizens. (shrink)

Zhuangzi purports to follow a particular method of viewing human emotion and suggests freeing oneself from worldly emotions—this is called “doctrine of non-emotion” (wuqing shuo 無情說). This article attempts to show that the idea of non-emotion in Zhuangzi does not in any way conflict with the expression of emotion in poetry, and moreover, it provides a foundation for the poet to express his emotions naturally and freely. We will use the Chinese poetry of the Wei-Jin Period—a period that is strongly (...) influenced by the philosophy of Zhuangzi, yet at the same time emphasizes the expression of the poet's emotion in poetry—as an example to show how fruitful it indeed is when Zhuangzi's philosophy becomes applied to Chinese poetry. (shrink)

Based on the analysis of Zhuangzi, this paper attempts to illustrate the positive aspects of Zhuangzi’s idea concerning contented acceptance of fate, whi...

In Psychology, the issue of language usage as a means of action in psychological life requires that we question the relations between the forms of language expression and their psychological functions. The current paper contributes to an understanding of this question. The relation between form and function is examined here, with particular focus on a discursive and dialogic method employed in the Activity Clinic approach to elicit controversy as a means of developing dialogical thinking. We argue that the interfunctionality of (...) levels of dialogue serves developmental processes, promoting thought and the possibilities for its elaboration. We describe these developmental processes on the basis of an empirical analysis of a sequence from an intervention conducted with Roman Catholic Priests on preaching in homily. Our methodological frameworks have the function of vivifying dialogical thinking about work, by making use of the interfunctionality of levels of dialogue and the vital function of social relations in the psychological life of the subjects. (shrink)

Should learning we disagree about p lead you to reduce confidence in p? Some who think so want to except beliefs in which you are rationally highly confident. I argue that this is wrong; we should reject accounts that rely on this intuitive thought. I then show that quite the opposite holds: factors that justify low confidence in p also make disagreement about p less significant. I examine two such factors: your antecedent expectations about your peers’ opinions and the difficulty (...) of evaluating your evidence. I close by proposing a different way of thinking about disagreement. (shrink)

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo discutir, com fundamentação teórica na Psicologia Analítica de C. G. Jung, as concepções de médicos e psicólogos sobre o processo saúde-doença e a formação do profissional para atuar em contexto hospitalar. A partir de uma pesquisa em campo qualitativa-descritiva, est..

In 1977, the first computer-assisted proof of a mathematical theorem was presented by K. Appel and W. Haken. The proof was met with a lot of criticism from both mathematicians and philosophers. In this paper, I present some examples of computer-assisted proofs, including Appel and Haken’s work. Then, I analyze the most famous arguments against the equal acceptance of computer-based and human-based proofs in mathematics and examine the philosophical assumptions behind the presented criticism. In the conclusion, I talk about whether (...) the philosophical assumptions are justified as they are, or one needs to take a specific philosophical position to accept them. (shrink)

Christianity has a long presence in the Maghreb, dating back to Roman imperial times. Eventually it became a mostly Muslim region, but in the late nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church embarked on a vast mission of church building, in part to assist the French colonial endeavor. In Tunisia, political independence in 1956 was accompanied by a further reinvigoration of Christianity, and, over the last twenty years, conversion to Christianity has been on the rise. Beginning in 2003, workers and students (...) from sub-Saharan Africa have contributed to the growth of both Catholic and Protestant churches in Tunis. This article analyzes the ways in which various Christian groups organize and articulate their religious practice and proselytization in ritual spaces that are sparse and must be shared in contemporary Tunisia. (shrink)

Freedom was, quite naturally, a dream cherished by every Brazilian slave. The desire for manumission - a more reliable route to freedom than the path of flight or revolt - was based on the experiences of other slaves in Brazil, a country open to all sorts of social adaptation practices. Consequently, the charters of liberty granted by masters and registered in notarial records have proved a rich source for the study of certain aspects of slavery itself. The similarity between the (...) title of the present article and that of the 1979 work To Be a Slave in Brazil reflects the fact that since the publication of that book, other authors have added to the bibliography on the subject of manumitted Brazilians, thus confirming the important role of this social group whose close connections with the slaves themselves were described in my previous study. In their experience of life, the manumitted slaves regularly encountered pitfalls that served as constant reminders of their skin color. Moreover, the daily lives of African blacks on the market, who at the time were merely African captives shipped to Brazil in various stages of youth and various degrees of adaptation to their slave status - along with the experiences of creole slaves (that is, those born in Brazil), of free-able slaves in the process of attaining freedom, of freed slaves, of children and grandchildren of manumitted slaves (who were therefore born free) - must all be understood not only in the context of their legal status but also and especially in the light of their subtly nuanced lives. (shrink)

How can the visual and textual data about an image – the image of a work of art – on recto and verso of a picture be interpreted? An analogical-art-documentary photograph represents a palimpsest to be considered layer by layer. The examples discussed in this article, which refer to both Aby Warburg himself and the first nucleus of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection, contribute to effectively outline elements of the debate around the question of the photographic reproduction of the work (...) of art as well as of the position of photography in relation to the perception of the work of art. (shrink)

In this article, I show why it is necessary to abolish the use of predictive algorithms in the US criminal justice system at sentencing. After presenting the functioning of these algorithms in their context of emergence, I offer three arguments to demonstrate why their abolition is imperative. First, I show that sentencing based on predictive algorithms induces a process of rewriting the temporality of the judged individual, flattening their life into a present inescapably doomed by its past. Second, I demonstrate (...) that recursive processes, comprising predictive algorithms and the decisions based on their predictions, systematically suppress outliers and progressively transform reality to match predictions. In my third and final argument, I show that decisions made on the basis of predictive algorithms actively perform a biopolitical understanding of justice as management and modulation of risks. In such a framework, justice becomes a means to maintain a perverse social homeostasis that systematically exposes disenfranchised Black and Brown populations to risk. (shrink)

Alan Hájek launches a formidable attack on the idea that deliberation crowds out prediction – that when we are deliberating about what to do, we cannot rationally accommodate evidence about what we are likely to do. Although Hájek rightly diagnoses the problems with some of the arguments for the view, his treatment falls short in crucial ways. In particular, he fails to consider the most plausible version of the view, the best argument for it, and why anyone would ever believe (...) it in the first place. In doing so, he misses a deep puzzle about deliberation and prediction – a puzzle which all of us, as agents, face, and which we may be able to resolve by recognizing the complicated relationship between deliberation and prediction. (shrink)

In the late 1990s, computational technology had advanced sufficiently that astrophysicists were able to construct reasonably high resolution computer simulations of the Local Group of galaxies. These simulations indicated there should be around 250 small satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way and Andromeda. In the real Local Group, however, only around 40 satellites had been observed, and only twenty or so more have been discovered since then. Despite this discrepancy in numbers, claims have been made in recent years that the (...) ‘missing satellites problem’ has been solved. Using the examples of the constructed luminosity curve, and hydrodynamic simulations, this paper explores how simulations are used in conjunction with observation to ‘solve’ the missing satellites problem. It is suggested that the simulated universes have sufficient complexity to be understood as worlds in their own right, ones that can be measured and observed. By demonstrating that these virtual worlds are sufficiently ‘realistic’ with respect to observations, astrophysicists are able to make a robust argument for the existence of ‘dark’, non-observable astrophysical objects. Observational and simulated data are combined to demonstrate the plausibility—a term that develops more ontologically meaningful connotations—of both the existence and the maintenance of dark satellites. It is thus through the conflation of the real and virtual worlds, the blending of simulation data with empirical data, that the missing satellites problem is ‘solved’. (shrink)

As crianças participam de corpo inteiro nos seus mundos de vida, visibilizando a natureza incorporada da ação humana. A partir de uma pesquisa etnográfica com crianças em nível de doutorado, sua empiria e bases teóricas, vimos que o corpo das crianças está na base de toda sua experiência social, mediador das relações, das práticas, dos discursos, das apropriações do Outro e do mundo. Tal ideia precisa ser considerada nas práticas pedagógicas, para que vençamos os fortes mecanismos de controle e dominação (...) que instituem e orientam um ordenamento social normativo do modelo ideal de corpo disciplinado e obediente, que marginaliza e exclui o corpo da criança ávido por descobrir e descobrir-se na sua relação novidável e embrionária com o mundo. As crianças como atores sociais de corpo inteiro têm na sua ação incorporada uma de suas formas de participar dos contextos coletivos de educação pela qual expressam seus pontos de vista. Palavras-chaves: Corpo. Criança. Educação Infantil. Direitos. Direitos de participação. (shrink)