Este artigo procura lidar com as batalhas travadas pela memória na pós-transição democrática vivenciada pelo Chile a partir da análise do filme “Não”, de Pablo Larraín. O objetivo é pensar nas produções audiovisuais como um lugar privilegiado de disputa pela memória. Examinaremos como a obra, terceira de uma trilogia sobre a ditadura civil-militar chilena, procura retratar as campanhas do SIM e do NÃO antes do plebiscito de 1988, em que se decidiu sobre o destino da ditadura de Pinochet. Será analisada, (...) igualmente, a mistura que o filme faz de diferentes épocas históricas através de um amálgama entre imagens arquivísticas, personagens reais e cenas da ficção. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar as contribuições de Ludwig Wittgenstein à fundamentação do saber e prática psicológica. Isso será feito em dois movimentos fundamentais: em primeiro lugar, reconstruiremos os interlocutores de Wittgenstein e as questões que estavam pressupostas em cada um deles. Em segundo lugar, argumentaremos sobre o método analítico que Wittgenstein escolheu para lidar com essas questões. Isto significa, pelo menos, duas coisas: Wittgenstein assume que a linguagem descritiva é o padrão para a interlocução humana, mas que (...) também a linguagem expressiva tem seu lugar de importância, ainda que com ressalvas; essa distinção de gramáticas fundamentará o seu método de lidar com as questões psicológicas: através da interpretação e descrição do comportamento, entendido como manifestação externa das vivências internas, a terceira pessoa terá um acesso privilegiado às ocorrências da consciência da primeira pessoa. Concluiremos o trabalho com considerações críticas sobre os benefícios e as deficiências da abordagem wittgensteiniana. (shrink)

no conjunto imenso e nada sistematizado da filosofia de Slavoj Žižek, a noção benjaminiana de “violência divina” é recorrentemente articulada. Para os propósitos do presente artigo, que é pensar a introdução de um terceiro elemento destituinte da dialética da violência que põe e mantém o direito, nos valeremos três textos do filósofo esloveno: Robespierre, ou a “divina violência” do terror (2007), Violência divina (2008) e Da democracia à violência divina (2009). Nesse sentido, reconstruiremos o que está no centro da sua (...) argumentação em que Žižek se apropria do conceito benjaminiano, para em seguida, mostrarmos a inadequação de sua interpretação para pensarmos uma teoria do poder destituinte. Corremos o risco de afirmar uma inadequação, não pelos resultados que Žižek alcançou, mas porque ele arroga para si uma interpretação do conceito de Benjamin que em nosso entendimento não está próximo de sua argumentação. (shrink)

O presente trabalho buscará fazer uma breve fenomenologia da ação humana tendo como ponto de inflexão a concepção de trágico na ação, isto é, pensar a ação humana como portadora de aspectos trágicos que exigem de nós respostas e atitudes que geralmente os sistemas éticos clássicos não conseguem proporcionar. Esta concepção pode ser apresentada a partir de vários autores de épocas e lugares bastante distintos. Todavia, optaremos por buscar em dois, dos três grandes tragediógrafos gregos, uma perspectiva trágica da ação (...) humana para então examinarmos, a luz do pensamento de Friedrich Nietzsche e Hannah Arendt, possíveis modos de redenção aos infortúnios em que as ações humanas podem nos colocar. (shrink)

O artigo tem como objetivo apresentar os problemas teóricos e históricos ligados à compreensão da técnica moderna na filosofia de Martin Heidegger. Para tal investigação começaremos investigando sobre qual é a constituição da essência da técnica para que, então, possamos explorar o significado da técnica à luz de sua caracterização mais essencial. Isto nos dará condições de identificar quais sãos os riscos envolvidos na era em que a dominação técnica atingiu níveis nunca vistos antes. Tudo isto será questionado para que (...) possamos estabelecer, inspirados pelo pensamento de Heidegger, um modo de relacionamento livre com a técnica que nos permita uma redenção à regência da técnica como o modo de desencobrimento moderno. (shrink)

o presente trabalho procura investigar se existe algum elo de união que perpassa a crítica à civilização empreendida pelo filósofo alemão Walter Benjamin, bem como algo que passa necessariamente pela sua rejeição ao capitalismo, impulsionada tanto pelo romantismo alemão, pelo marxismo libertário quando pelo messianismo judaico. Em meio a um aparente aglomerado filosófico, nossa pergunta metodológica indaga-se pela possibilidade de falar de um fio condutor no pensamento do filósofo das inúmeras passagens e anotações fragmentadas? A hipótese que sustentaremos no presente (...) trabalho é que o messianismo de Benjamin percorre toda a sua obra, como uma corrente elétrica que alimenta e ilumina todos os seus escritos. (shrink)

This book is a collection of specifically commissioned articles on the key continental European philosophical movements since 1914. It shows how each of these bodies of thought has been shaped by their responses to the horrors set in train by World War I, and considers whether we are yet ‘post-post-war’. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914,set in chain a series of crises and re-configurations, which have continued to shape the world for a century: industrialized slaughter, the end (...) of colonialism and European empires, the rise of the USA, economic crises, fascism, Soviet Marxism, the gulags and the Shoah. Nearly all of the major movements in European thinking were forged in, or shaped by, attempts to come to terms with the global trauma of the World Wars. This is the first book to describe the development of these movements after World War I, and as such promises to be of interest to philosophers and historians of philosophy around the world. (shrink)

Assuming Martin's Axiom, we compute the value of the cofinality of the symmetric group on the natural numbers. We also show that Martin's Axiom does not decide the value of the covering number of a related Mycielski ideal.

In the recent progressive reappraisals of the enlightenment by Jonathan Israel and Rainer Forst, Voltaire figures as almost a reactionary thinker, opposing the radical dimensions of the enlightenment pushing forwards secularisation, democratisation, and toleration. Part 1 examines Israel’s and Forst’s accounts of Voltaire, showing their striking proximity. Part 2 is divided into the three subheadings of (i) Voltaire’s deism, (ii) the pivotal subject of toleration, and (iii) the decisive question of what philosophical radicalism, in the direction of democratising reform, involves. (...) At issue in Israel’s and Forst’s claims that Voltaire’s deism represents a step backwards from Bayle’s and Spinoza’s more radical conceptions of reason and toleration, we will claim, is a shared, anachronistic failure to duly credit Voltaire’s deism’s distance from the revealed religions, and the radicalism of Voltaire’s anti-clericism. In the key claim of the paper, however, we will argue that the larger issue in Israel’s and Forst’s positioning of Voltaire as almost reactionary are a deeper set of assumptions about how we should assess philosophical texts which aim to act in the world, and (evoking Feuerbach) to change it (2, iii). Both Israel and Forst, despite the former’s extensive labours in contextualisation, read the texts of eighteenth century philosophers for their arguments alone, rather than as rhetorical and political acts and interventions which aimed to reach, entertain, and reform an expanding reading public through esprit, art, satire, and rhetoric, as well as by making argumentative contributions to the controversies of the day. (shrink)

The terms "appropriate" and "necessary" are crucial determinants in decisions regarding the use and reimbursement of medical treatments. This paper encourages greater awareness of the political, economic, and normative assumptions that give meaning to these concepts.

We extend research on the effects of local audit office characteristics on audit quality by investigating whether audit offices in highly religious U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas exhibit going concern decisions that reflect heightened professional skepticism relative to audit offices in less religious MSAs. Prior research links religiosity to risk aversion and ethical development and suggests audit practice offices in more religious MSAs are more likely to issue going concern opinions because they will assess the effects of mitigating factors in a (...) more skeptical manner. Our results indicate that audit practice offices located in highly religious MSAs are more likely to issue going concern audit opinions, consistent with a more skeptical assessment of mitigating factors. Additional tests provide direct evidence consistent with the argument that these audit offices are more risk averse in issuing going concern opinions. Our findings are relevant to auditors, audit clients, researchers, and regulators. (shrink)

In the United States, organ transfer has generated a highly selective and overly specialized approach to bioethics. A dominant assumption is the myth of medical democracy: whereas professionals involved in this highly technocratic arena publicly embrace notions of medical equality, particularized practices expose another reality. The more specific ideological tenets of medical democracy read as follows: First, all potential transplant patients are equally deserving of replacement organs. Further, all citizens are entitled to equal access to these unusual commodities, which are (...) regularly described as precious and scarce “national resources.” Whether the premises of medical democracy are in fact played out in daily practice, however, is another matter entirely. Organ donation is driven by a universalized sense of humanity, whereby all bodies are assumed equal beneath the surgeon's knife. Yet the social worth of individuals varies radically: children, pregnant women, the unemployed, and prisoners, for example, expose a wide spectrum of responses to certain categories of bodies. So, too, do the cultural origins of organ donors. By drawing on anthropological knowledge of sociomedical practices relevant to organ transfer, this essay explores this theme of medical democracy specifically in reference to the needs of Latinos in New York City. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by British literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, as the “most formidably brilliant” recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe. Žižek’s work is infamously idiosyncratic. It features striking dialectical reversals of received common sense; a ubiquitous sense of humor; … Continue reading Žižek, Slavoj →.

Freud seems to have been torn between a literary and a scientific model for his enterprises. On the one hand he stresses the scientific nature of his researches to an extent which makes the suspicious reader wonder whether he protests too much. On the other hand it is well known that he regarded many writers, though predominantly Shakespeare, as anticipating his findings on the unconscious. In one famous passage in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis he places his discovery of the (...) unconscious on a par with the discoveries of Darwin and Copernicus in their effect upon man's picture of himself. He is justified, of course, and if we add Marx to this triumvirate we add a figure even closer to Freud in claiming a scientific status for his work, a scientific status which is, to the uncommitted, dubious. Theodore Mischel argues that Freud increasingly construes neurotic behaviour upon the model of ordinary intentional behaviour and, though he continued to show interest in the view that the unconscious impulses which are repressed are physiological in nature, this ideal of a reduction of the psychological to the physiological became a less active ingredient in his published work as his collaboration with Fliess receded into the past. So although he may have paid lip service to some form of psycho-physical identity, believing that mental phenomena are ultimately no more or less than physical happenings in the neurones of the brain, in mature Freud this seems to have been an idly spinning wheel. Roy Schafer has recently pointed out that many of Freud's followers use the concepts of natural science , whilst simultaneously retaining traces of anthropomorphism in their metapsychology. For instance Heinz Hartmann emphasizes the concept of a ‘higher organizing function’ which resists formulation in the mechanistic metapsychology he favours. Similar difficulties obtrude in the work of Waelder and Kohut. The significance of these conflicts leads Schafer to frame basic Freudian insights in terms of the theory of action, stressing the manner in which an action may be described in differing ways and thus allowing us to present the fact that a patient's behaviour may both tell and not tell us of his deepest anxieties. Yet curiously Schafer denies that freedom plays any part in his account whereas we would have expected a concept so central to agency to have an equally central role in any recasting of psycho-analysis in terms of the theory of action. (shrink)

In this note I have presented the essentials of a view of how laws are falsified, a view which has been held by some notable philosophers but which is radically opposed to that of Professor Popper. I have not scrupled to ?improve? upon it, so the view of no one philosopher is presented. I try to show that an interesting and convincing account of scientific simplicity is implicit in the theory and I conclude by suggesting how we can bring the (...) argument to bear on the problem of the logical status of laws of nature, showing that through their manner of falsifiability, laws share some characteristics with necessary statements as well as with empirical generalizations. (shrink)

Several times each month, usually on a Thursday morning, I join one or more of my physician colleagues on teaching rounds. Most weeks these are traditional rounds, where an attending physician leads a group of medical students, residents, and clinical fellows from bed to bed reviewing charts, examining patients, and planning daily procedures. As a medical ethicist, my role is to discuss some of the ethical issues that are embedded in these decisions about medical care and help students to hone (...) the skills required to manage these issues successfully in the context of ongoing care.Although the clinical setting varies, questions of patient management are always at the center of teaching rounds. Since my training is in philosophy, and not in medicine or nursing, there have been occasions when this focus on patient care has prompted me to reflect upon my role as a medical ethicist in these contexts. Lacking even the most basic medical training, and having been remarkably fortunate in having had limited personal experiences as a patient, what can I possibly contribute to the training of physicians?I suspect that at some time or another most teachers, but perhaps especially those trained in the humanities, have moments when they question the usefulness of their teaching. In my case, by introducing perspectives from the humanities on teaching rounds, my hope is to add some balance to the often narrow focus on the ordering of diagnostic tests, scheduling of procedures, obtaining of patient consent, and other practical matters. I often stress, for example, how the patients with whom students and residents interact are not mere patients, but persons with lives outside the hospital that can be made profoundly better or worse as a result of the brief time they are seen in the hospital. I draw attention to the …. (shrink)