This work scrutinizes different elements of a philosophical disagreement about the understanding of justice between John Rawls and Gerald Cohen. Rawls uses the original position device where representative members of society hypothetically meet to select the best principles for their social cooperation. More convincing seems Cohen s conceptual analysis method which proposes an unveiling of the concept of justice in order to judge what is just.".

As ever more advanced digital systems are created, it becomes increasingly likely that some of these systems will be digital minds, i.e. digital subjects of experience. With digital minds comes the risk of digital suffering. The problem of digital suffering is that of mitigating this risk. We argue that the problem of digital suffering is a high stakes moral problem and that formidable epistemic obstacles stand in the way of solving it. We then propose a strategy for solving it: Access (...) Monitor Prevent (AMP). AMP uses a ‘dancing qualia’ argument to link the functional states of certain digital systems to their experiences—this yields epistemic access to digital minds. With that access, we can prevent digital suffering by only creating advanced digital systems that we have such access to, monitoring their functional profiles, and preventing them from entering states with functional markers of suffering. After introducing and motivating AMP, we confront limitations it faces and identify some options for overcoming them. We argue that AMP fits especially well with—and so provides a moral reason to prioritize—one approach to creating such systems: whole brain emulation. We also contend that taking other paths to digital minds would be morally risky. (shrink)

O texto aborda a relação da educação escolar e o catolicismo no espaço rural, especialmente, no rio Mapuá, no município de Breves, arquipélago de Marajó, estado do Pará. Tem-se por objetivo identificar a presença do catolicismo na escola do campo e a relação com a formação dos alunos ribeirinhos. Especificamente, a perspectiva é discutir a influência dos rituais religiosos e artefatos sagrados no processo educativo e na cultura escolar do campo. É uma investigação de natureza qualitativa, fundamentada na incursão bibliográfica (...) e pesquisa de campo, cujos dados empíricos foram coletados por meio de observações etnográficas, entrevistas semiestruturadas e fotografias. Em termos teóricos o estudo busca amparo em escritos de autores do campo da Antropologia, Ciência da Religião e da Educação, tendo como recorte o ensino religioso. Os resultados indicam que a educação escolar e o catolicismo no rio Mapuá entrelaçam-se por meio de rituais e artefatos sagrados que narram saberes, tradições, afetos, significados e simbologias que na percepção dos depoentes ajudam a forjar a formação escolar dos sujeitos e, por conseguinte, à cultura escolar. (shrink)

Dualism holds that some mental events are fundamental and non-physical. I develop a prima facie plausible causal argument for dualism. The argument has several significant implications. First, it constitutes a new way of arguing for dualism. Second, it provides dualists with a parity response to causal arguments for physicalism. Third, it transforms the dialectical role of epiphenomenalism. Fourth, it refutes the view that causal considerations prima facie support physicalism but not dualism. After developing the causal argument for dualism and drawing (...) out these implications, I subject the argument to a battery of objections. Some prompt revisions to the argument. Others reveal limitations in scope. It falls out of the discussion that the causal argument for dualism is best used against physicalism as a keystone in a divide and conquer strategy. (shrink)

In this paper we examine some of the economic and ethical consequences of different credit market regulations, including usury laws, complete prohibition of interest and providing ease to the borrower upon default. The references to these credit market regulations can be found in many religious and moral philosophy texts. We first examine the effectiveness of these regulations in deterring exploitative lending by developing a model that shows lending can be regulated through either act-based or harm-based regulations. We show that act-based (...) regulations which comprise usury laws and complete prohibition of interest deter lenders more than harm-based regulations which constitute bankruptcy laws. We then analyze that while the regulations may deter certain forms of lending behavior, they may also create certain externalities by contributing towards inequity and societal risk. We propose that a regulator’s choice of implementing credit market regulations maybe dependent on her ethical commitment towards growth and reduction of inequity. We suggest the usury laws are more ethical than bankruptcy laws; however, discouraging the use of debt contracts through prohibition of interest and encouraging the use of risk sharing contracts maybe the most ethical way to regulate the credit markets. (shrink)

Of recent time, there has been a concern about ethical leadership and ethics in business. Research on leadership did not pay a lot of attention to fairness and many authors have studied the relationship between leader fairness and factors such as outcome satisfaction and trust in leader for instance. For the moment, there is no study that focused on the direct relationship between transformational leadership and fairness. That’s why; in this paper our aim is to study the relationship between transformational (...) leadership and the employees’ perceptions of fairness, mainly the three types of fairness which are distributive, procedural, and interactional in French firms. A questionnaire survey was sent to employees working in the industry and service sectors. A sample of 100 respondents was collected. We found a partial relationship between employees’ perceptions of fairness and transformational leadership. More specifically, we found that procedural and interactional fairness are strongly associated with transformational leadership. (shrink)

Following Chalmers, I take the most promising response to the meta-problem to be a realizationist one on which (roughly) consciousness plays a role in realizing the processes that explain why we think that there is a hard problem of consciousness. I favour an interactionist dualist version of realizationism on which experiences are non-physical states that non-redundantly cause problem judgments. This view is subject to the challenges of specifying laws that would enable experiences to cause problem judgments and of explaining why (...) it's not a lucky coincidence that experiences' causal and rational powers converge on problem judgments. I propose a strategy for solving the meta-problem and meeting these challenges. According to it, a fundamental teleological law operates on normative features of experiences in ways that bias experiences towards causing effects that they rationalize, including problem judgments. I conclude by applying the strategy to other luck-avoidance challenges. (shrink)

Experiences tend to be followed by states for which they provide normative reasons. Such harmonious correlations cry out for explanation. Theories that answer or diminish these cries thereby achieve an advantage over theories that do neither. I argue that the main lines of response to these cries that are available to biological theorists—theorists who hold (roughly) that conscious subjects are generally biological entities—are problematic. And I argue that panpsychism—which holds (roughly) that conscious subjects are ubiquitous in nature—provides an attractive response (...) to these explanatory cries. Taken together, these considerations underwrite a kind of ‘psychophysical fine-tuning’ argument in support of panpsychism, one that is reminiscent of cosmological fine-tuning arguments in favor of multiverse hypotheses. (shrink)

Some physical theories predict that almost all brains in the universe are Boltzmann brains, i.e. short-lived disembodied brains that are accidentally assembled as a result of thermodynamic or quantum fluctuations. Physicists and philosophers of physics widely regard this proliferation as unacceptable, and so take its prediction as a basis for rejecting these theories. But the putatively unacceptable consequences of this prediction follow only given certain philosophical assumptions. This paper develops a strategy for shielding physical theorizing from the threat of Boltzmann (...) brains. The strategy appeals to a form of phenomenal externalism about the physical basis of consciousness. Given that form of phenomenal externalism, the proliferation of Boltzmann brains turns out to be benign. While the strategy faces a psychophysical fine-tuning problem, it both alleviates cosmological fine-tuning concerns that attend physics-based solutions to Boltzmann brain problems and pays explanatory dividends in connection with time’s arrow. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical foundations of the Islamic financial industry which is strongly criticized for its similarity with conventional finance. In this paper, we argue that this criticism is based on the consequentialist reasoning. The deontological considerations are largely ignored when the focus is on aggregate returns and associated product features. We build an economic model which allows us to examine the implementation of deontological rules in the Islamic financial products along with examining their consequences. We show that the (...) market forces may cause the returns and the attributes of Islamic financial products to converge with conventional finance even though the industry may be adhering to the Islamic deontological rules. We build a model to show that there may exist ‘Epsilon States’ where the deontological rules are followed by the Islamic finance industry, but their impact is not significant. We argue that the source of these ‘Epsilon States’ could be either moral uncertainty or costly monitoring. The presence of these ‘Epsilon States’ enable Islamic financial institutions with weak ethical commitments to create financial products where the deontological rules are followed, but their impact remains insignificant. (shrink)

We use a quantum electrodynamics model, to study the evolution of maximally entangled bipartite states, as well as a maximally entangled tripartite states as a multipartite system. Furthermore, we study the entanglement behaviour of these output states in cavity QED as function of interaction time and the coupling strength. The present study discusses the separability and the entanglement limit of such states after interaction with a cavity QED.

Our universe features a harmonious match between laws and states: applying its laws to its states generates other states. This is a striking fact. Matters might have been otherwise. The universe might have been stillborn in a state unengaged by its laws. The problem of nomological harmony is that of explaining the noted striking fact. After introducing and developing this problem, we canvass candidate solutions and identify some of their virtues and vices. Candidate solutions invoke the likes of a designer, (...) axiarchic meta-laws, multiverses, essential causal powers, and Humean laws. (shrink)

Volume 29, Issue 4, December 2023, Page 386-389.

Dualism holds that experiences are non-physical states that exist alongside physical states. Dualism leads to the postulation of psychophysical laws that generate experiences by operating on certain sorts of physical states. What sorts of physical states? To the limited extent that dualists have addressed this question, they have tended to favor a brain-based approach that locates the physical basis of experience in the head. In contrast, this paper develops an argument for a form of dualism on which experience has a (...) physical basis that reaches out into the world. Specifically, the argument uses a puzzle about spatial experience to support a theory I call _tracking dualism_. On tracking dualism, a psychophysical law generates experiences by operating on complex physical states that involve both brain states and tracking relations that they bear to features of the environment. To develop the argument, I discuss tracking dualism alongside its more familiar physicalist counterpart, the tracking intentionalist theory associated with Dretske, Lycan, and Tye. I conclude by outlining a tracking dualist research agenda. (shrink)

A espremer sonhos em palavras, o escritor angolano Ondjaki tem desenvolvido uma escrita potente que resulta em títulos para infância de forte carga literária. Dos seus títulos publicados no Brasil destacamos O leão e coelho Saltitão (2009), Ynari, a menina das cinco tranças (2010), O vôo do golfinho (2012) e Ombela, a origem das chuvas (2014a), narrativas curtas que pela sua interlocução com a ilustração podem ser manuseados e lidos pelos pequenos.

RESUMO Este artigo contempla nosso estudo de práticas socioculturais que demonstram que/como o sujeito contemporâneo dialoga online com enunciados advindos de acontecimentos do universo off-line. Nosso corpus apresenta postagens circuladas publicamente em páginas diversas no Facebook em que se lê: “É verdade esse bilete”. A afirmativa, proveniente de um bilhete escrito por uma criança em sua esfera familiar e divulgado em redes sociais, foi apropriada por múltiplos interlocutores no ciberespaço a fim de produzir efeitos de humor e dizeres contraditórios em (...) diferentes instâncias discursivas. Para a análise, recorremos a elementos constitutivos do dialogismo de proposição bakhtiniana; aos conceitos de meme e remix e às discussões foucaultianas acerca da vontade de verdade. Nossas interpretações apontam que é possível rastrear, nas réplicas ativas analisadas, posições axiológicas que nos remetem ao sujeito contemporâneo, o qual, usando a ironia e efeitos de humor, constitui/compartilha enunciados no intuito de estabelecer sua vontade de verdade na ágora digital. ABSTRACT This paper presents a study of sociocultural practices that exemplify how subjects interact online with offline events. We analyse selected posts collected from social media profiles supported by Facebook. Each excerpt shows the affirmative “It’s true this notte,” a rough translation of a written message addressed by a four-year-old Brazilian boy to his mother stating that there would “supposedly” be a school holiday the following day. The note went viral after his teacher posted it publicly on her social media timeline and the reassuring assertion was appropriated multiple times in the cyberspace so as to as trigger a humour effect in different discourse instances. Grounded on the concepts of meme; remix; Bakhtinian dialogism and Foucauldian’s ideas on truth, we perform a discursive analysis. Our results point to track marks of axiological positions of contemporary subjects that resort to irony to construct/share utterances in order to establish their will to truth in the digital landscape. (shrink)

Plus qu'un ouvrage concernant les rapports ombrageux et controversés de l'art et de la pathologie, ce recueil est d'abord une rencontre, un creuset entre des champs, la clinique et la théorie qui, pour s'y confronter, excèdent les limites du " prêt-à-penser ". C'est pourquoi ici les divergences de méthodes et de perspectives entre des approches phénoménologique et psychanalytique ne dressent pas de strictes délimitations, mais font résonner des dissonances capables de laisser penser l'écart entre l'art et la pathologie comme établi (...) sur une entr'appartenance plus essentielle, ne livrant rien de son secret à celui qui s'en tient à des distinctions de principe. Encore faut-il entendre pathologie en son sens grec, au sens où la rencontre avec le monde ouvre, dans le réel, une brèche incolmatable dont seul l'art peut authentiquement rendre compte et dans laquelle la psychose s'engouffre si aucune mise en œuvre ne vient l'endiguer ou la ressourcer. " Aussi ne faut-il pas s'étonner que penser l'art et penser la folie puissent converger dans la mesure où ni l'un ni l'autre ne sont conceptualisables. Finalement, penser l'art ou penser la folie, c'est avoir ouverture à eux, à travers les œuvres, à travers les êtres malades et cela n'est possible précisément que dans une rencontre. Qu'est-ce qu'une rencontre? C'est cette situation qui n'a pas d'antécédent, qui n'a pas d'espace ni de temps qui puisse la précéder. L'épiphanie de quelqu'un dans le regard d'un autre implique nécessairement l'autophanie de celui-ci. L'échec de la rencontre, récusant tout passage lucide à l'ouvert, rejette le thérapeute sur sa facticité. C'est pour se dérober à l'épreuve sans partage de cette absence de soi, que la psychiatrie médicale, scientifico-médicale fait l'impasse sur la présence de l'autre, en objectivant tout ce qui touche à l'homme, en faisant de lui un cas particulier de cette objectivation universelle qui est la caractéristique de la culture de notre époque. ". (shrink)

Violence is often understood as a phenomenon characterized by direct physical harm customarily motivated by willful malice. In his 2017 World Day of Peace Message, Pope Francis challenges this narrow definition, noting that violence is not confined to physical harm but also includes environmental devastation, which, as he points out, disproportionately harms the most vulnerable members of the planet. Following this claim, this article probes the interrelationship between care for creation, nonviolence, and racial justice, highlighting the significance of this intersectionality (...) within Catholic social teaching. It reflects on Francis’s reading of Gospel nonviolence and his notion of integral ecology, and concludes with a case study that demonstrates the practical application of Francis’s social teachings on creating a more just, nonviolent, and sustainable world. (shrink)

A passive brain–computer interface based upon functional near-infrared spectroscopy brain signals is used for earlier detection of human drowsiness during driving tasks. This BCI modality acquired hemodynamic signals of 13 healthy subjects from the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain. Drowsiness activity is recorded using a continuous-wave fNIRS system and eight channels over the right DPFC. During the experiment, sleep-deprived subjects drove a vehicle in a driving simulator while their cerebral oxygen regulation state was continuously measured. Vector phase analysis (...) was used as a classifier to detect drowsiness state along with sleep stage-based threshold criteria. Extensive training and testing with various feature sets and classifiers are done to justify the adaptation of threshold criteria for any subject without requiring recalibration. Three statistical features along with six VPA features were used. The average accuracies for the five classifiers are 90.9% for discriminant analysis, 92.5% for support vector machines, 92.3% for nearest neighbors, 92.4% for both decision trees, and ensembles over all subjects’ data. Trajectory slopes of CORE vector magnitude and angle: m and m are the best-performing features, along with ensemble classifier with the highest accuracy of 95.3% and minimum computation time of 40 ms. The statistical significance of the results is validated with a p-value of less than 0.05. The proposed passive BCI scheme demonstrates a promising technique for online drowsiness detection using VPA along with sleep stage classification. (shrink)

Este texto, bem como as pesquisas que realizamos, tem como meta dar visibilidade às leituras literárias destinadas ao público infantil e juvenil, que enfatizem o tema étnico-racial, ou ainda, títulos que incluam a real participação de personagens negras, costumes afro-brasileiros e informações culturais produtoras de identificação entre o leitor e a narrativa, contribuindo, assim, com as mudanças atuais na história da educação brasileira. Neste texto, apresentamos seis títulos da Editora SM, que, em seu catálogo editorial para 2008/2009, dos 173 títulos (...) publicados, 20 títulos trazem a presença da cultura africana e afro-brasileira. Dos 20, optou-se pela análise de cinco títulos. Da análise desses títulos, constatou-se, acima de tudo, que um dos caminhos para o entendimento e a consciência acerca da pluralidade cultural está também na apropriação da leitura literária produtora de identidade e inclusão social. (shrink)

En este trabajo se sostiene que la teoría del derecho iberoamericana ha malinterpretado la teoría del razonamiento jurídico de Jeremy Waldron, presentándola como una teoría formalista de la adjudicación, y a Waldron como un positivista excluyente. Esto se debe a una lectura sesgada de su teoría del derecho, que se explica, a su vez, por la imagen que el constitucionalismo ha construido en torno a Waldron, como un opositor de Dworkin. Este trabajo muestra que Waldron suscribe a una teoría “dworkiniana” (...) del razonamiento jurídico, la que opera como eslabón entre su teoría de la democracia y su teoría más reciente de la dignidad humana. Ambas cuestiones han sido virtualmente ignoradas por el medio académico hispanoparlante. (shrink)

O trabalho elabora uma comparação entre os pensamentos de Karl Marx e Martin Heidegger no que tange à questão do útil. Em seguida propõe uma reflexão sobre como as diferenças entre os dois filósofos neste tema implica em distintos posicionamentos em relação à obra de arte. O objetivo do trabalho é apontar pontos de convergência e divergência entre os pensamentos destes filósofos em relação aos temas propostos.

Publication d'un miroir à boîte, provenant d'une tombe fortuitement découverte à Lamia en 1983. Le type du miroir et l'étude iconographique et comparative de la représentation en relief du couvercle se rapportant à une scène dionysiaque mettent en évidence son caractère attique, ainsi que sa datation aux environs du dernier quart du ive s. av. J.-C. Les éléments iconographiques analysés ici sont rapprochés de parallèles provenant tant de la sculpture et de la céramique que des terres cuites et des bronzes. (...) On constate que certains types et motifs de cette nouvelle représentation remontent à la dernière phase du ν s. av. J.-C, ce qui prouve, une fois encore, l'importance de l'influence du langage artistique de cette période sur les arts mineurs en général, et sur l'évolution de la toreutique en particulier. Ainsi sont mis en lumière des rapports étroits entre l'imagerie du ive s. avancé et celle des dernières décennies du ve s., phénomène qui va se poursuivre par la suite avec des variations. Les questions de la composition et de la signification de la scène sont brièvement traitées. (shrink)