O presente artigo tem por objetivo compreender a discussão entre a alternativa entre uma arte autônoma e uma arte política/de tendência. A partir do referencial teórico do marxista húngaro György Lukács, o texto busca criticar o caráter enrijecido do debate devido à limitação da concepção de sujeito e sociedade inerente à ideologia burguesa, assim como sua tentativa de produzir uma filosofia da arte desvinculada das questões histórico-sociais de seu tempo.

Con Giordano Bruno asistimos a la recuperación de doctrinas neoplatónicas y herméticas que conducen a una comprensión animista y dinámica de la naturaleza, así como a una exaltación del hombre en tanto conoce y actúa sobre el mundo. En el contexto de un universo vivo y animado, Bruno necesita mediaciones en el espacio que hay entre, por un lado, la naturaleza finita del hombre y, por el otro, la divinidad infinita explicada en la naturaleza para fundamentar la teoría (...) mágica de sus obras latinas. Precisamente, la existencia de los demonios en los sistemas neoplatónicos viene a cumplir con este propósito. Sostenemos que existe una continuidad entre la doctrina demonológica que Bruno presenta en su obra latina y la metafísica y cosmología de sus diálogos italianos. Esta continuidad se verifica en la presencia de dos categorías filosóficas importantes del pensamiento bruniano presente en la demonología del De magia naturali : imaginación y vínculos. Así pues, en primer lugar, indagaremos la recepción de la doctrina neoplatónica en la demonología de los siglos XV y XVI, a partir de la cual Bruno desarrolla el marco teórico y filosófico de su doctrina demonológica. En segundo lugar, estudiaremos la naturaleza y función de los demonios en el De magia naturali y su relación con la imaginación y los vínculos en la filosofía del Nolano. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory terms targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The aim of my paper is to propose an account of appropriated uses of slurs – i.e. uses by targeted groups of their own slurs for non-derogatory purposes, as in the appropriation of ‘nigger’ by the African-American community, or the appropriation of ‘queer’ by the homosexual community. In my proposal appropriated uses are conceived as echoic, in Relevance Theory terms: (...) in-groups echo derogatory uses in ways and contexts that make manifest the dissociation from the offensive contents. I will show that the echoic strategy has interesting advantages over alternative theories, and especially over Anderson and Lepore’s deflationary strategy. (shrink)

In this book Bruno Latour brings together these different approaches to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context..

A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and ...

Eating disorders are mental illnesses that can have a significant and persistent physical impact, especially for those who are not treated early in their disease trajectory. Although many persons w...

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing, discursive injustice :440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion. The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words is (...) distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression. (shrink)

From the book: What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!

The combination of increased availability of large amounts of fine-grained human behavioral data and advances in machine learning is presiding over a growing reliance on algorithms to address complex societal problems. Algorithmic decision-making processes might lead to more objective and thus potentially fairer decisions than those made by humans who may be influenced by greed, prejudice, fatigue, or hunger. However, algorithmic decision-making has been criticized for its potential to enhance discrimination, information and power asymmetry, and opacity. In this paper, we (...) provide an overview of available technical solutions to enhance fairness, accountability, and transparency in algorithmic decision-making. We also highlight the criticality and urgency to engage multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, and citizens to co-develop, deploy, and evaluate in the real-world algorithmic decision-making processes designed to maximize fairness and transparency. In doing so, we describe the Open Algortihms project as a step towards realizing the vision of a world where data and algorithms are used as lenses and levers in support of democracy and development. (shrink)

Sex and dementia is becoming an increasingly important topic in applied ethics. By the year 2030, more than 74.7 million people are expected to be diagnosed with dementia worldwide; many of these people may want to engage in sex. The question of how to manage cases of sex and dementia is occurring more frequently in practical cases because of our aging population. The primary reason that sex and dementia is ethically complex is because sexual consent is both legally and morally (...) significant, yet many people with dementia may be unable to consent in accordance with current standards. In this dissertation, I introduce three frameworks that could be used to approach cases of sex and dementia. The first framework is that of relational autonomy and supported decision-making; this framework tries to enable people with dementia to make autonomous sexual decisions with support. The next approach is a framework of advance sexual consent, which considers the relevance of prior autonomous sexual decisions. The third framework focuses on prioritizing well-being above a person’s capacity to make autonomous decisions and to consent to sex. I assess each framework and consider their positive and negative nuances. The overall goal is to balance the right to sexuality while at the same time protecting people with dementia from undue harm. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that cases of sex and dementia ought to be managed on a case-by-case basis; one framework will not work for every context. In order to approach situations on a case-by-case basis, I contend that a process of weighing and balancing norms and principles is necessary. I use Beauchamp and Childress’s method of weighing and balancing to propose a systematic procedure. This process takes various factors into account in order to determine how to proceed in an ethically defensible manner. According to an approach of weighing and balancing, sexual acts would not be immediately barred based on a person’s inability to consent; rather, a person’s present convictions, the sexual activity to which they want to participate, the possibility of experiencing undue harm, their prior wishes and values, their capacity to make autonomous decisions with support, etc. would all be considered. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the complex topic of sex and dementia and offers a starting point for further discussion on how to approach these cases in practice. (shrink)

Intimacy: From Transformation to Transmutation The paper reflects the historical and current dynamism of the concept of intimacy. Besides differences between scientific disciplines in understanding what the substance of intimacy is, the recent discourse on change in intimacy has been dominated by the transformation theme introduced by Anthony Giddens (1992). Led by reflections of Richard Sennett (1986) the author draws attention to the opposite aspect of change in intimacy—the change in content, or the "transmutation" of intimacy. Transmutation of intimacy—the substitution (...) of the satisfaction of intimate needs with identity creation—not only contests the very essence of intimacy, but also constitutes a significant challenge for the project of intimate citizenship (Plummer 2003). (shrink)

Founding our analysis on the Geneva-Brussels approach to quantum mechanics, we use conventional macroscopic objects as guiding examples to clarify the content of two important results of the beginning of twentieth century: Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen’s reality criterion and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. We then use them in combination to show that our widespread belief in the existence of microscopic particles is only the result of a cognitive illusion, as microscopic particles are not particles, but are instead the ephemeral spatial and local manifestations of (...) non-spatial and non-local entities. (shrink)

Mit diesem Aufsatz soll ein Beitrag zur Klärung von Nietzsches Humanitätsverständnis in binnenrelationaler Perspektive geleistet werden. Dabei wird in drei Schritten vorgegangen: Der erste Schritt setzt an den kritischen Vorzeichen von Nietzsches Humanitätsverständnis an. Hierbei geht es um die Skizzierung der kritischen Verfahren der genealogischen Kritik und des Perspektivismus. In einem zweiten Schritt soll sodann aufgezeigt werden, worin bei Nietzsche die genealogische Kritik ihren Halt findet, damit nicht jeglicher Wert destruiert wird. Dabei soll die binnenrelationale Perspektive des Individuums in der (...) Dimension der existentiellen Selbstanerkennung freigelegt werden. Trotz aller Emphase des Individuums bei Nietzsche geht es ihm stets um die Verbindung von Partikularem und Allgemeinem im Lebenszusammenhang. Diese Dimensionen kann der Mensch in seiner Binnenrelationalität selbst abwiegen. Nietzsches Verständnis des Selbst kann für ihn vor dem Hintergrund seines Anerkennungsverständnisses keinen essentialistischen Wesenskern beinhalten; das Selbst entwickelt sich für Nietzsche ursprünglich durch die sozialen Bezüge im Lebensvollzug: Es geht somit um die praktische Dimension, die immer schon relational verschränkt ist. In einem dritten Schritt soll Nietzsches Humanitätsverständnis als existentielle Selbstbeschreibung des Menschen herausgearbeitet werden. Indem Nietzsches kritische Vorzeichen berücksichtigt werden, zeigt sich, dass sich seine Kritik zentral auf ein bloß tradiertes Humanitätsverständnis richtet. Worauf es ihm dagegen ankommt, ist sein Verständnis des Individuums als „freier Geist“, der von sich aus in der Lage ist, sein Leben selbst in die Hand zu nehmen. (shrink)

My first aim in this paper is to use time diagrams in the style of Brentano to analyze constructions in Brouwer's separable mathematics more precisely. I argue that constructions must involve not only pairing and projecting as basic operations guaranteed by the intuition of twoity, as sometimes assumed in the literature, but also a recalling operation. My second aim is to argue that Brouwer's views on the intuition of twoity and arithmetic lead to an ontological explosion. Redeveloping the constructions of (...) natural numbers and systems sketched in an appendix to Brouwer's Cambridge lectures, I observe that the only plausible way he can make some elementary arithmetic in his separable mathematics is by allowing for the same canonical number to be determined by multiple separable entities, resulting in an overabundant mathematical ontology. (shrink)

The paper emphasizes the inadequacy of formal semantics, the classical paradigm in semantics, in treating contextual dependence. Some phenomena of contextual dependence threaten one central assumption of the classical paradigm, namely the idea that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and utterances have truth conditions well defined. It is possible to individuate three forms of contextual dependence: the one affecting pure indexicals, the one affecting demonstratives and "contextual expressions", and the one affecting all linguistic expressions. The third type of dependence (...) is top-down: context, and not only linguistic material, shows which variables must be instantiated, relying on context itself. The generalization of underdetermination to all linguistic expressions is in fact a kind of metadependence: the mode of dependence itself depends on context. (shrink)

In the second lecture of "Naming and Necessity," Saul Kripke presented a new and quite convincing picture of the reference of proper names. At the same time, however, he expressed some skepticism towards the possibility of developing it into a full-blown theory by offering “more exact conditions for reference to take place.” In this paper, after discussing the reasons for his skepticism, I hint at how I think Kripke’s picture could be developed and offer an outline of a theory of (...) reference based on it. One of the key notions my ‘theory’ makes use of is that of repetition, which I take from Kaplan’s “Words.”. (shrink)

I argue against the interpretation of propositions as intentions and proof-objects as fulfillments proposed by Heyting and defended by Tieszen and van Atten. The idea is already a frequent target of criticisms regarding the incompatibility of Brouwer’s and Husserl’s positions, mainly by Rosado Haddock and Hill. I raise a stronger objection in this paper. My claim is that even if we grant that the incompatibility can be properly dealt with, as van Atten believes it can, two fundamental issues indicate that (...) the interpretation is unsustainable regardless: (1) it is hard to determine, without appealing to propositional intentions on pain of circularity, what intention a proof-object should be understood as a fulfillment of; (2) due to a difficult fulfillment dilemma, it is unclear, at best, what the object of an intention corresponding to a proposition is. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition. Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to “hold onto” the same “sense” of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism to what he calls a “science of reason”, (...) which he says cannot prove the absolute’s existence, what other doctrine does he require in order to prove this? I will answer these questions by tracing the shifts in Schelling’s doctrine of intellectual intuition from the 1790s to the 1830s and drawing out its evolving methodological role within his science of intelligibility. (shrink)

Drawing attention to the vexed relationship between feminist theory and philosophy, Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy? demonstrates the spectrum of significant work being done at this contested boundary. The volume offers clear statements by seventeen distinguished scholars as well as a full range of philosophical approaches; it also presents feminist philosophers in conversation both as feminists and as philosophers, making the book accessible to a wide audience. -/- Table of Contents -/- Opening plenary: Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, and Teresa Brennan — (...) Discussion / Teresa Brennan ... et al. — Women, identity, and philosophy / Marjorie C. Miller — The personal is philosophical, or teaching a life and living the truth: philosophical pedagogy at the boundaries of self / Ruth Ginzberg — Musing as a feminist and as a philosopher on a postfeminist era / Patricia S. Mann — Essence against identity / Teresa Brennan — Feminist interpretations of social and political thought / Virginia Held — Mothers, citizenship, and independence: a critique of pure family values / Iris Marion Young — Domestic abuse and Locke's liberal (mis)treatment of family / Matthew R. Silliman — Marx, Irigaray, and the politics of reproduction / Alys Eve Weinbaum — The very idea of feminist epistemology / Lynn Hankinson Nelson — Can there be a feminist logic? / Marjorie Hass — Feminism and mental representation: analytic philosophy, cultural studies, and narrow content / David Golumbia — Replies to Hass and Columbia / Nickolas Pappas — Leaping ahead: feminist theory without metaphysics / Leslie A. MacAvoy — Philosophy abandons women: gender, orality, and some literate pre-Socratics / Cornelia A. Tsakiridou. (shrink)

O presente artigo visa explorar as ricas relações entre Voltaire e Genebra, destacando as questões e o contexto que formam a obra Ideias republicanas e seu combate pela tolerância.

We consider the classical concept of time of permanence and observe that its quantum equivalent is described by a bona fide self-adjoint operator. Its interpretation, by means of the spectral theorem, reveals that we have to abandon not only the idea that quantum entities would be characterizable in terms of spatial trajectories but, more generally, that they would possess the very attribute of spatiality. Consequently, a permanence time shouldn’t be interpreted as a “time” in quantum mechanics, but as a measure (...) of the total availability of a quantum entity in participating to a process of creation of a spatial localization. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Kant's account of physical geography and his theory of the Earth. In spelling out the epistemological foundations of Kant's physical geography, the paper examines 1) their connection to the mode of holding-to-be-true, mathematical construction and empirical certainty and 2) their implications for Kant's view of cosmopolitan right. Moreover, by showing the role played by the mathematical model of the Earth for the foundations of Kant's Doctrine of Right, the exact relationship between the latter and physical geography (...) is highlighted. Finally, this paper shows how, in Kant's view, the progress of physical geography can be assured if and only if the free circulation of human beings is established and regulated by law. Therefore, examining the mutual relationship between the theory of Earth and the foundations of right opens new perspectives on the relationship between epistemology and practical philosophy within Kant's system. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should solve paradoxes for propositions (such as the Russell–Myhill paradox) in essentially the same way that we solve Russellian paradoxes for sets. That is, the standard, iterative approach to sets is extended to include properties, and then the resulting hierarchy of sets and properties is used to construct propositions. Propositions on this account are structured in the sense of mirroring the sentences that express them, and they would seem to serve the needs of philosophers of (...) language and metaphysicians who rely on such propositions. The resulting account has limitations, comparable to those faced by the iterative approach to sets, but it is argued to be in important ways preferable to others that have been proposed. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantic issues of epistemological contextualism - the doctrine according to which the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing sentences vary depending on the context in which they are uttered. According to the contextualist, a sentence of the form "S knows that p" does not express a complete proposition. Different utterances of this same sentence, in different contexts of utterance, can express different propositions: "know" is context-dependent. Little attention has been paid to a precise formulation of the semantic (...) contextualist thesis grounding epistemological contextualism. My goal is then to assess differences and similarities between "know" and context-sensitive terms in a natural language – in particular pure indexicals and demonstratives: my remarks are a strong argument against the postulation of an indexical element in ascriptions of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

In The Explanatory Dispensability of Idealizations, Sam Baron suggests a possible strategy enabling the indispensability argument to break the symmetry between mathematical claims and idealization assumptions in scientific models. Baron’s distinction between mathematical and non-mathematical idealization, I claim, is in need of a more compelling criterion, because in scientific models idealization assumptions are expressed through mathematical claims. In this paper I argue that this mutual dependence of idealization and mathematics cannot be read in terms of symmetry and that Baron’s non-causal (...) notion of mathematical difference-making is not effective in justifying any symmetry-breaking between mathematics and idealization. The function of making a difference that Baron attributes to mathematics cannot be referred to physical facts, but to the features of quantities, such as step lengths or time intervals taken into account in the models. It appears, indeed, that it does not follow from Baron’s argument that idealizations do not help to carry the explanatory load at least for two reasons: mathematics is not independent of idealizations in modelling and idealizations help mathematics to carry the explanatory load of a model in different degrees. (shrink)

É possível constatar, mesmo em uma leitura superficial, que Kant tem o propósito de empreender em seu opúsculo de 1795, À Paz Perpétua, uma defesa dos princípios normativos do direito em todas as esferas da vida pública. Isso se evidencia na tentativa de desenvolver uma teoria da paz erigida sobre uma teoria tríplice do direito público, dividida nos âmbitos do direito estatal, das gentes e cosmopolita. Mas, se a questão é, por um lado, adequar os princípios puros da doutrina do (...) direito à teoria da paz, por outro, o problema com o qual Kant tem de lidar é essencialmente histórico. Não se trata apenas de justificar, em um contexto abrangente, a normatividade dos princípios do direito, mas também de demonstrar a sua aplicabilidade. Por conseguinte, em seu empreendimento, Kant encontra-se diante do desafio de demonstrar a inconsistência da “expressão corrente”, com a qual teve que lidar antes, que diz que “isto pode ser correto na teoria, mas nada vale na prática”. Tal preocupação pode ser observada direta e indiretamente, em várias passagens, no decorrer do texto, explicitando-se ,sobretudo, na discussão apresentada no Suplemento Primeiro no qual a questão suscitada pelo problema da teoria e prática, acerca das condições de possibilidade de realização do ideal da paz, é discutida no contexto de sua filosofia da história e também no Apêndice I, no qual, através de uma reflexão sobre o consenso entre moral e política, o que se põe em questão é a possibilidade da concordância entre teoria e prática no contexto da filosofia e da prática política. Ocupar-me-ei nesse texto apenas em tratar da questão sob esse segundo aspecto, tentando destacar que a estratégia kantiana para superar o problema da teoria e prática, no âmbito da filosofia política, depende do desenvolvimento de uma “renovada” doutrina da prudência. Como observa Castillo1, “[p]ara provar que a teoria jurídica da paz se aplica na teoria e na prática ao mesmo tempo”, Kant “deve fazer um exame crítico do conceito de prudência do Estado”2 . Esta análise deve nos permitir concluir, em primeiro lugar, que, bem diferente da visão antes difundida de que a filosofia política de Kant é expressão de um moralismo “que é certamente sincero, mas basicamente ingênuo”3, o objetivo de Kant, na verdade, nunca foi o de se afastar da realidade concreta da política em nome de um ideal abstrato de virtude política. Sua preocupação foi, em vez disso, a de ajustar os co. (shrink)

Questo primo volume degli "Scritti di Ugo Bianchi" - "Religions in Antiquity" - raccoglie contributi relativi a temi e problemi del cristianesimo antico. Con esso si realizza un progetto, formulato in anni lontani (1983) dallo stesso autore, che contemplava varie sezioni di cui l'ultima - "Christiana" comprendeva i saggi che costituiscono la prima metà del volume; a questi ne sono stati aggiunti altri, sulle medesime tematiche, che risalgono ad anni successivi. Precede i saggi un contributo di carattere metodologico ("Tipologia (...) storica delle religioni e comparazione: il caso del dualismo"). "Ugo Bianchi, nel suo lungo itinerario scientifico che abbraccia alcune delle più significative aree del vasto panorama delle esperienze religiose della storia umana, non ha mai proposto una "teoria" interpretativa generale e onnicomprensiva di esse, quale molto spesso - con esiti e fortune diversi hanno fatto tanti storici delle religioni. Egli, al contrario, ha mostrato riserbo o vera e propria diffidenza nei confronti di tali "teorie" che il progresso della ricerca e la riflessione critica hanno sempre in varia misura smentito o ridimensionato. Di fatto, lo studioso ha costantemente riconosciuto la debolezza intrinseca di tali tentativi alla luce delle mobili e differenziate realtà che la storia ci consegna e che solo a prezzo di un'analisi comparativa condotta con duttilità e rigore..." (dall'Introduzione Giulia Sfameni Gasparro). (shrink)