Intentaremos reconstruir la controversia acerca de la posibilidad de un lenguaje privado. Analizamos primero las posiciones “epistemológicas” (Malcolm y Fogelin), mostrando sus fallos. Luego analizamos la versión “semántica” (Kenny y Tugendhat) encontrándolas igualmente fallidas. La crítica de Barry Stroud a los argumentos trascendentales como argumentos antiescépticos nos permite discernir el presupuesto común que debilita las posiciones anteriores. Asimismo, la reconstrucción permite apreciar mejor la manera en la que la versión de Kripke evita comprometerse con este presupueto. Argumentamos que esta versión (...) es la única versión consistente del argumento. Esta afirmación obliga afrontar algunas de las objeciones corrientes dirigidas a la propuesta de Kripke: el problema de la objetividad de la regla, ¿puede un individuo estar acertado en contra de la opinión comunitaria consensuada?; y el problema de las relaciones internas entre reglas y casos, presuntamente violentada por el rol que la noción de acuerdo comunitario desempeña en la misma. Sostenemos que nuestra reconstrucción de la controversia permite encontrar razones para mostrar por qué las objeciones mencionadas no se le aplican. -/- This paper tries to reconstruct the controversy on the possibility of private language. First, we analyse “epistemological” trends in the argument (Malcolm, Fogelin) showing their failures. Then, we analyse “semantic” versions (Kenny, Tugendhat) finding they are also failed. Barry Stroud’s criticism of transcendental arguments as refutations of scepticism allows us to discern the common presupposition that weakens the versions of the argument considered. Moreover, this reconstruction allows us to see how Kripke’s deals with the problem of the previous discussion in order to avoid committing himself with this presupposition. We consider Kripke’s version to be the only consistent version of the argument. Such a statement obliges us to consider two of the most important criticisms directed against Kripke’s Wittgenstein: The problem of objectivity of the rule: Can a single individual be right in contradicting communal assent?; and the problem of internal relationships between rules and their applications, allegedly violated because of the role played by communal agreement. We claim that our reconstruction of the controversy provides good reasons to show that the above-mentioned objections don’t apply to Kripke’s Wittgenstein version. (shrink)

The main aim of this essay is to defend Don Marquis’s “future-like-ours“ argument against abortion from David Boonin’s recent critique to it. In the first two sections I show that Marquis’s FLO argument is much more plausible than the traditional argument against abortion, grounded on an appeal to the humanity of the fetus. The third section explains Boonin’s critique to the FLO argument. In the last section I show that: Boonin’s critique rests on a misunderstanding conceming the content of Marquis’s (...) moral principle; We can restate Boonin’s position in order to avoid that misunderstanding, but such restatement leads to the conclusion that infanticide, and not only abortion, is morally permissible. (shrink)

Brian Cutter objected to the consequence argument due to its dependence on the principle that miracle workers are metaphysically impossible. A miracle worker is someone who has the ability to act in a way such that the laws of nature would be violated. While there is something to the thought that agents like us do not have this ability, Cutter claims that there is no compelling reason to regard miracle workers as metaphysically impossible. However, the paper contends that miracle workers (...) are indeed impossible according to well-known theories concerning the laws of nature. This result highlights the reliance of the consequence argument on a plausible premise, which is widely accepted by proponents of non-Humean views of laws. The paper also provides a way to explain away the intuition that miracle workers are possible, but this has the upshot that a recent, two-dimensional formulation of the consequence argument is unsound. (shrink)

New and expanded edition of the now classic study in the phenomenology of sound.

Introduction: situating Heidegger and the philosophy of technology -- Heidegger's philosophy of technology -- The historical-ontological priority of technology over science -- Deromanticizing Heidegger -- Interlude: the earth inherited -- Was Heidegger prescient concerning technoscience? -- Heidegger's technologies: one size fits all -- Concluding postphenomenological postscript: writing technologies.

This was the book which first garnered international celebrity and notoriety for its author, and which fire-started a debate about the supernatural claims of Christianity. Rejecting Christian doctrines and metaphysics in favour of the religious consciousness which characterises human identity, Cupitt 'takes leave' of God by abandoning objective theism. Whatever one thinks of the author's views, and of the non-realist beliefs he has been seen to champion, Taking Leave of God remains an essential work, and one of the most controversial (...) theological interventions of its age. (shrink)

O artigo analisa, a partir sobretudo do pensamento de Hannah Arendt, o desafio que representa para a política “viver junto”. Embora a expressão origine-se com o ensaísta francês Roland Barthes, o objetivo do artigo é quadruplo: (1) apresentar seu fundamento ontológico na condição humana ou existencial de “ser-com”, ou seja, de ser junto aos outros, pensada desde Martin Heidegger; (2) descrever seu sentido político pela conjugação entre isonomia e diferença na forma da pluralidade pela qual cada pessoa pode aparecer singularmente (...) em atos e palavras, de acordo com uma liberdade frente a quaisquer predeterminações; (3) demonstrar como a recente situação da pandemia de Covid-19 radicalizou o impasse de viver junto – e separado – em sociedade, particularmente no caso do Brasil, colocando em relevo uma dimensão coletiva da liberdade pela interdependência entre os seres humanos; e (4) apontar a importância da forma de governo da república, mas também os perigos da sua fragilização nas democracias contemporâneas no que se refere à dificuldade de responder – como viver junto? (shrink)

Original essays by leading philosophers of science explore the question of whether metaphysics can and should be naturalized--conducted as part of natural science.

Information Retrieval systems benefit from the use of long queries containing a large volume of search-relevant information. This situation is not common, as users of such systems tend to use very short and precise queries with few keywords. In this work we propose a modification of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) technique using data from the document collection and its vocabulary for a better representation of short queries. Additionally, a study is carried out on how the modification of the proposed (...) LDA weighted vectors increase the performance using relevant documents as feedback. The work shown in this paper is tested using three biomedical corpora (TREC Genomics 2004, TREC Genomics 2005 and OHSUMED) and one legal corpus (FIRE 2017). Results prove that the application of the proposed representation technique, as well as the feedback adjustment, clearly outperforms the baseline methods (BM25 and non-modified LDA). (shrink)

We offer a review of some of the most influential views on the status of Reichenbach’s Principle of the Common Cause (PCC) for genuinely indeterministic systems. We first argue that the PCC is properly a conjunction of two distinct claims, one metaphysical and another methodological. Both claims can and have been contested in the literature, but here we simply assume that the metaphysical claim is correct, in order to focus our analysis on the status of the methodological claim. We briefly (...) review the most entrenched or classical positions, including Salmon’s ‘interactive forks’, van Fraassen’s scepticism, and Cartwright’s generalisation of the fork criterion. We then go on to review the results of the ‘Budapest school’ on the existence of formally defined screening-off events for any correlation —by means of the ideas of probability space extensibility and (Reichenbachian common cause) completability. We distinguish the Budapest doctrine clearly from any of the classical conceptions, and thus present an overall framework for discussions of causal inference in quantum mechanics. The framework, however preliminary, is essential work for a thorough assessment of the conditions under which PCC may be a reliable tool for causal inference in a genuinely probabilistic (indeterministic) context. (shrink)

In the context of business, interactions between individuals generate social systems that emerge anywhere within a corporation or in its relations with external agents. These systems influence the behaviors of individuals and, as a result, the collective actions we usually attribute to corporations. Social systems thus make a difference in processes of action that are often morally evaluated by internal and external agents to the firm. Despite this relevance, social systems have not yet been the object of specific attention in (...) the literature on moral agency in business. To fill this gap, I construct a theoretical framework based on Luhmann’s ideas on social systems and morality. In particular, I argue that morality is a phenomenon that occurs in communication, and an agent can engage in morality in three different ways (as a _moral factor_, an _expressive moral agent_, or a _reflective moral agent_) depending on the functions it plays in communicative interactions. Based on this framework, I argue that social systems in business can be considered moral agents of those types. (shrink)

Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most systematic, inspiring, and influential philosophers of the early modern period. From a pantheistic starting point that identified God with Nature as all of reality, he sought to demonstrate an ethics of reason, virtue, and freedom while unifying religion with science and mind with body. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics, politics, and the analysis of religion remain vital to the present day. Yet his writings initially appear forbidding to contemporary (...) readers, and his ideas have often been misunderstood. This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza includes new chapters on Spinoza's life and his metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and biblical scholarship, as well as extensive updates to the previous chapters and bibliography. A thorough, reliable, and accessible guide to this extraordinary philosopher, it will be invaluable to anyone who wants to understand what Spinoza has to teach. (shrink)

He adds, "I show my worries to be less about the loss of subjects or authors, than I do about (there) not being bodies or perceivers". The book has two parts.

David Hume’s historical thought was shaped before he even began writing the History of Great Britain in 1752. This article shows how Hume developed his historical thought in an attempt to combine two historical structures: the natural-jurisprudential conjectural history of the Treatise of Human Nature and the early eighteenth-century historical narratives of modern Europe that featured in his Essays. The Treatise’s conjectural history used the developmental categories “rude” and “civilised” to explain the origins of justice, government and the moral sentiment. (...) The narratives of modern Europe, in contrast, revolved around the historical categories “ancient” and “modern.” Hume’s historical thought was shaped by the attempt to merge those two structures into a single, coherent structure. The critical question concerned the relation between the ancient and the modern: was modern Europe merely a “revival” of classical antiquity? Or did it have new, “post-ancient” dimensions? The article shows how Hume gradually distanced classical antiquity from modern Europe, thereby creating space for exclusively modern concepts such as “civilised monarchies” and the narrative of modern civilisation that structured his History of England (1754–1762). The paper concludes by suggesting that this structure defined Enlightenment philosophical history, not just Hume’s version of it. (shrink)

What distinguishes deception from manipulation? Cohen (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96, 483 and 2018) proposes a new answer and explores its ethical implications. Appealing to new cases of “non‐deceptive manipulation” that involve intentionally causing a false belief, he offers a new definition of deception in terms of communication that rules out these counterexamples to the traditional definition. And, he leverages this definition in support of the claim that deception “carries heavier moral weight” than manipulation. In this paper, I argue that (...) these cases of “non‐deceptive manipulation” are even more prevalent than Cohen suggests—especially in the digital world. Thus, if his moral claim were correct, a lot of what is happening on the internet these days would constitute moral improvement over old‐fashioned deception. Fortunately, we are not forced to accept this counterintuitive conclusion. Cohen's definition must be rejected because it incorrectly rules out clear instances of deception. In this paper, I defend a definition of deception in terms of evidence that does correctly distinguish between deception and non‐deceptive manipulation. Moreover, it does not support Cohen's claim that deception is morally worse than other forms of manipulation. (shrink)

Este artigo discute como os conceitos de mediação e representação se articulam na reflexão de Carl Schmitt em alguns de seus primeiros escritos e preparam o terreno para a formulação da ideia de representação política em um de seus trabalhos mais conhecidos: Teoria da Constituição. O procedimento mediante o qual se traduz uma realidade amorfa ou um coletivo em forma de representação política se atém à noção de presentificar algo ausente ou tornar visível algo invisível. Toda ideia entra no mundo (...) empírico como hóspede forasteiro e para ganhar existência ou visibilidade necessita de uma decisão soberana pela sua representação. A finalidade deste estudo é explicar o modo pelo qual ocorre este procedimento. (shrink)

v. 1. Olhar sociológico pós-moderno -- v. 2. Insolúvel busca de solução -- v. 3. Felicidade possível.

En este artículo se ensaya un análisis de los presupuestos, de las consecuencias, que entraña la concepción cartesiana del saber. Y se llega a la conclusión de que toda la reflexión de Descartes se puede leer también como una filosofía de la historia en la que está la raíz de la idea moderna (y contemporánea) de progreso.

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal analisar o pensamento desenvolvido por Georges Canguilhem e Gilbert Simondon sobre dois conceitos principais: o conceito de organismo e de máquina. A intenção é de reconstruir, a partir das continuidades e descontinuidades entre os dois conceitos, o raciocínio desenvolvido pelos dois autores sobre esses temas na história da filosofia francesa do século passado. Assim, tomamos como escopo as obras La connaissance de la vie, publicada por Canguilhem em 1952 e a tese complementar de doutoramento (...) de Simondon, orientada por Canguilhem, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, de 1958. A partir disso, o texto se divide em seis partes: uma introdução, onde damos as especificações de escopo e de análise, seguida pela primeira parte, onde analisamos os conceitos de pensamento, conhecimento, sujeito e objeto. Em seguida, na parte dois, analisamos os conceitos de máquina, mecanismo e motor, como utilizadas em Canguilhem, e os conceitos de indivíduo, elemento e conjunto técnico desenvolvidas por Simondon. A terceira parte se dedica a analisar a questão do autômato, bem como os conceitos de mecanismo e finalismo. A quarta parte desenvolve o conceito de organismo-máquina e os conceitos de potencialidade e de teleologia desenvolvidos principalmente em Canguilhem. Por fim, na conclusão, analisamos as aproximações e distâncias entre os dois autores, bem como a imagem do monstro e do robô. (shrink)

Don Locke; X*—Natural Powers and Human Abilities, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 171–187, https://doi.org/10.10.

En este artículo se realiza una aproximación a Miguel Mañara, ejemplar figura del hombre barroco del siglo XVII. Aunque su personalidad se ha visto manipulada a partir de la época romántica con su vinculación a don Juan Tenorio, todo es ajeno a la verdad. De familia noble, caballero de Calatrava, tras enviudar joven, sufre un proceso de conversión que le hace seguir el ejemplo de Jesucristo en la Hermandad de la Santa Caridad cuya regla principal de conducta era el enterrar (...) a los muertos sin familia y en la que realizó una abnegada labor con la fundación de un hospital para socorrer a los enfermos sin sustento. Escritor brillante ante la idea de la muerte con su Discurso de la Verdad, dirigió́ los postulados artísticos de la iglesia del hospital donde destaca la escena de su retablo mayor en la que se efigia, con suma belleza, la escena del Entierro de Cristo debida a la gubia de Pedro Roldán. (shrink)

C. L. Hardin has argued that the colour opponency of the vision system leads to chromatic subjectivism: chromatic sensory states reduce to neurophysiological states. Much of the force of Hardin's argument derives from a critique of chromatic objectivism. On this view chromatic sensory states are held to reduce to an external property. While I agree with Hardin's critique of objectivism it is far from clear that the problems which beset objectivism do not apply to the subjectivist position as well. I (...) develop a critique of subjectivism that parallels Hardin's anti-objectivist argument. (shrink)

C. L. Hardin has argued that the colour opponency of the vision system leads to chromatic subjectivism: chromatic sensory states reduce to neurophysiological states. Much of the force of Hardin's argument derives from a critique of chromatic objectivism. On this view chromatic sensory states are held to reduce to an external property. While I agree with Hardin's critique of objectivism it is far from clear that the problems which beset objectivism do not apply to the subjectivist position as well. I (...) develop a critique of subjectivism that parallels Hardin's antiobjectivist argument. (shrink)

La discusión sobre las consecuencias políticas del pensamiento de L. Wittgenstein ha girado sobre la posibilidad de construir miradas críticas sobre lo social, su legitimidad, amplitud, fuerza, etc. Sin embargo, aproximar a Wittgenstein a una posición materialista, como la entendía L. Althusser, conduce a una comprensión diferente de la crítica, vinculada a la tarea de deconstruir el discurso filosófico que intenta unificar y organizar jerárquicamente las evidencias (certezas) constitutivas de los diferentes juegos de lenguaje en los que se despliega lo (...) social. Se intenta extraer de esta aproximación una distinción entre la filosofía como práctica teórica ideológica y como práctica teórica crítica. The discussion regarding the political consequences of Wittgenstein's thought has focused on the possibility of building critical approaches to the legitimacy, amplitude, strength, etc. of the social sphere. However, bringing Wittgenstein close to a materialist position as understood by L. Althusser leads to a different understanding of critique, linked to the deconstruction of the philosophical discourse that attempts to unify and hierarchically organize the certainties that are constitutive of the different language games in which the social is deployed. On the basis of this approach, the article attempts to draw a distinction between philosophy as ideological theoretical practice and as critical theoretical practice. (shrink)

This collection explores the controversial and perhaps even abject idea that evils, large and small, human and natural, may have a central positive function to play in our lives. For centuries a concern of religious thinkers from the Christian tradition, very little systematic work has been done to explore this idea from the secular point of view.

Resenha de: CHAMAYOU, Grégoire. Teoria do drone. Tradução de Célia Euvaldo. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2015.