O texto traça as linhas gerais do pensamento de L. Fleck por meio da análise de seus principais trabalhos no campo da epistemologia. Foram consultadas publicações anteriores e posteriores à monografia de 1935, até o último trabalho datado de 1960 e escrito pouco antes de sua morte. Desta forma, procurou-se compreender o desenvolvimento de suas idéias e estabelecer conexões entre o seu pensamento e a atividade prática no campo das ciências aplicadas, com especial atenção para o ensino nas ciências da (...) saúde.The text traces the general lines of thought of L. Fleck through an analysis of his major works in the field of epistemology. Publications before and after the monograph of 1935 were consulted, up to the last work dated 1960 and written shortly before his death. Through this procedure, this study has sought to understand the development of his ideas and establish connections between Fleck’s concepts and practical activity in field of applied science, focusing especially on the teaching of the health sciences. (shrink)

A ciência é feita das escolhas de seus protagonistas e como tal, repleta de subjetividade. Uma teoria científica é uma suposição explicativa e negar a influência da imaginação como agente ativo na construção do conhecimento seria no mínimo ingenuidade. Embora a ciência possua regras bem definidas, seu método se limita a obtenção e tratamento de dados. O surgimento da ideia ou da hipótese inicial é fruto do salto intuitivo da livre imaginação humana. A Experimentação Mental é o processo de empregar (...) situações imaginárias para ajudar-nos a entender ou prever de que maneira as coisas podem se comportar na realidade. Assim como os Experimentos Concretos os Experimentos Mentais são uma ferramenta essencial na construção do conhecimento científico. Tais situações imaginárias são parte importante da argumentação dos cientistas na busca do convencimento de seus pares, servindo também como ferramenta didática. Neste trabalho, através da revisão de algumas das principais referências sobre este conceito, buscaremos analisar questões epistemológicas envolvidas. Afinal o que são Experimentos Mentais? Será que eles podem nos fornecer uma fonte de conhecimentos do mundo natural? De onde vem esse conhecimento? O objetivo principal desta análise é buscar padrões de interpretação através de categorias de definições apresentadas por pontos de vista significativos. Diferentes autores discutem os limites e potencialidades dos Experimentos Mentais, baseado em suas considerações propomos aqui cinco categorias distintas para sua compreensão: Processo de Re-contextualização, Intuições Platônicas, Argumentos Pitorescos, Experimentos e Manipulação de Modelos Mentais. Palavras-chave: Experimentos mentais. Gedanken experiment. Epistemologia. (shrink)

Seres humanos têm necessidade perene de encontrar respostas significativas para a sua vida: as respostas implicam a espiritualidade/religiosidade/religião e as experiências culturais. Nesse contexto objetiva-se discutir na perspectiva ético-fenomenológica a atuação pública das pessoas que detêm conhecimento teológico em vista de colaborar para a vida na sociedade plural do século XXI. A literatura escolhida para pensar crítico-reflexivamente a questão tem base fenomenológica, teológico-moral, e a perspectiva pública da Teologia. Observa-se que medo e culpabilidade estão ligados às “falsas imagens” de Deus; (...) não são de poucos os prejuízos e as dificuldades causadas por esta equivocada experiência. Resulta que convém reconsiderar, em muitos casos, a vida moral a partir de um _ethos_ profético, tornando mais crível e acolhedora a presença do Divino no mundo. Ou seja, requer sair da Academia e/ou dos Templos para estar junto à sociedade que convive em interculturalidade e inter-religiosidade. (shrink)

Ovídio, poeta latino do século I a.C, compôs as Heroides, obra em que heróis e heroínas das lendas escrevem a seus amados(as) ausentes. Todas as cartas apresentam profundo teor trágico, tanto na temática quanto nos aspectos trágicos marcantes. Analisamos a tragicidade na carta de Dejanira a Hércules, na qual a mulher do herói narra seu desespero ao receber a notícia da morte de Hércules, após vestir a túnica que ela havia enviado. Como base para a análise, serão usados os conceitos (...) aristotélicos de hamartia e hybris, bem como os sentimentos de terror e compaixão e também a concepção filosófica de trágico estabelecida pelos idealistas alemães do século XVIII. (shrink)

Os poetas elegíacos romanos estabelecem, em seus versos, uma forte relação entre o amor e a guerra. Os vocábulos usados para descrever os deuses do amor, Vênus e Cupido, ou o próprio ato amoroso, associam-se a vocábulos bélicos. Trava-se uma batalha entre os amantes ou entre o deus do Amor e aquele que foi ferido por sua flecha. Essa associação explica-se por questões míticas, as relações amorosas entre a deusa do amor e o deus da guerra, nas mitologias grega e (...) latina, e também por questões históricas, já que o nascimento da elegia, em Roma, acontece em um momento conturbado de guerras externas e internas. Exemplificaremos a relação entre amor e guerra com versos dos principais poetas que escreveram elegias amorosas, em Roma, Catulo, Tibulo, Propércio e Ovídio. (shrink)

Catulo (século I a.C.), o primeiro grande autor lírico romano, traz a elegia grega com temática variada, inclusive amorosa. Assim a poesia elegíaca latina desenvolve-se e ganha contorno de um gênero autônomo em Roma, com temática própria, a elegia erótica romana. O tema do amor passa a ser fundamental, nos autores do século de Augusto (século I a.C.), Tibulo, Propércio e Ovídio, que escrevem livros inteiros para uma amada. Contudo, unida à temática do amor encontramos também o tema morte, constante (...) em Propércio e encontrado também em Ovídio na esfera mítica. Através de fragmentos de poemas dos autores elegíacos, veremos como os temas amor e morte encontram-se unidos na elegia latina. (shrink)

A elegia é uma forma poética muito antiga. Os gregos compuseram elegias desde a lírica arcaica (século VII – V a.C.). Contudo, foram as elegias compostas no período da lírica alexandrina (século III – II a.C.) que influenciaram os elegíacos romanos. Tanto na Grécia quanto em Roma a elegia é considerada como gênero lírico, mas percebemos que nas composições romanas é notória a presença do trágico, especialmente, nas obras de Ovídio, por isso discutimos a problemática do gênero elegíaco, que se (...) apresenta na Antiguidade como um gênero híbrido. (shrink)

A personagem Medeia, desde os autores gregos, como Eurípides, é apresentada como o exemplo mais clássico do prejuízo causado pela paixão desmedida. Ela justifica todos os seus atos buscando como medida seu amor por Jasão. É o amor que a faz salvar a vida do amado e tirar várias outras vidas, inclusive de seus próprios filhos. Ovídio, poeta latino do século I a.C., retoma a personagem em sua obra Heroides, para também apresentar o mal que a paixão desenfreada pode causar (...) em um ser humano. A cultura romana que ensinava os riscos do amor e da paixão, como tão bem nos legou Lucrécio, em seu De rerum natura, buscava não cometer o erro de amar em demasia. Contudo, Ovídio mostra nessa obra, as dores e os sofrimentos causados por um amor que se torna para a personagem, ao mesmo tempo, sua salvação e sua destruição. (shrink)

Ovídio, o último autor elegíaco do período augustano, começou sua produção literária seguindo a tradição elegíaca latina, inaugurada por Catulo e intensificada por Tibulo e Propércio, que transformaram a elegia latina em verdadeiro estilo literário independente com temática unificada na paixão amorosa do eu-lírico por uma amada específica, trazendo assim a paixão como uma experiência pessoal, não mítica, como fizeram os alexandrinos. Ovídio inicia sua produção poetizando sua paixão por Corina, no livro Amores, mas sua elegia migra da paixão pessoal (...) para a paixão de personagens míticas e históricas, em Heroides, e depois para a teorização da conquista amorosa em Ars Amandi. Em toda essa produção a temática ainda é o amor. Esse sentimento, no entanto, é abordado de uma maneira inovadora. Também em seus últimos livros Tristia e Epistula ex Ponto, ele inova trazendo ainda uma experiência pessoal, mas não mais amorosa. Seu tema passa a ser a dor de ter sido obrigado a deixar Roma, seus amigos e sua família. (shrink)

In order to highlight the intimate relationship between imagining, drawing and making worlds, this essay questions the educational meaning of children to initiate in the action of drawing in face of the growing cultural tendency of the body being less and less required to produce senses. The incarnated action of drawing, as an aesthetic action of touching and being touched by the world when transposing the visible limits and entering into the intimacy of worldly invisibility, constitutes an experience that is (...) as recurrent and trivialized in school daily life as it is existentially complex due to its poetic power to enter the invisible and inaugurate worldviews. The historical disqualification of the image and imagination in Western thought, supported by the separation between subjectivity of the body and objectivity of the world, does not allow educational thought to consider the phenomenon of poetic imagination as an existential experience of language insertion in the world from the gesture of drawing. Gesture that finds its specificity in the instant the hand traces and inscribes lines on the surface of the supports as infinitely creative writing. The aesthetic gesture of drawing, temporalized by the rhythm of the body in the emergence of the fabulation that accompanies the repetition of the marks, implies a poetic experience of language that involves the fusion of two senses: that of the gesture in materiality and that of the mark configured in it, marked and cicatrized in the surface of the support by the body’s action that performed it. The approximation between education, arts and childhood allows us to highlight the philosophical and pedagogical tensions that involve the question of poetic imagination and to take another look at the action of drawing in the context of children's education. What emerges, from the dialogue between Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, is the relevance of the educational intention of caring for the vital function of language as an aesthetic and poetic experience that is constituted in the processuality of the body to make something appear that produces and contains presence, that which promotes and expands the existential density of the real. (shrink)

This article presents an analytic critique of the predominant revisionist theoretical paradigm of just war (henceforth: revisionism). This is accomplished by means of a precise description and explanation of the practicability problem that confronts it, namely that soldiers that revisionism would deem “unjust” are bound to fail to fulfil the duties that revisionism imposes on them, because these duties are overdemanding. The article locates the origin of the practicability problem in revisionism’s overidealized conception of a soldier as an individual rational (...) agent analogous to the aggressor or defender in a case of lethal self-defense, who is capable of reflecting on the morality of his status in war and of the killing he performs and thus of recognizing his revisionist duties. Revisionism, however, ignores the following fact: Killing in war is not a natural human behavior. This is why training soldiers to kill is—and arguably always has been—a necessity for the existence of war and the killing that occurs in it. Moreover, this training involves a certain level of moral desensitization to violence whose goal is to prevent soldiers from thoroughly reflecting on the morality of the killing they engage in. Hence, war and killing can only exist if soldiers are trained in such a way that they do not reflect on whether they could be addressees of revisionist duties in the first place. This means that military training is a “constitutive condition” of soldiers and war, which is why it cannot excuse their noncompliance with revisionist duties, thus making these duties categorically overdemanding. The argument here draws on the paradigmatic example of modern US military killing conditioning (MC), but embeds it into a broader military-historical perspective that describes how soldiers have always needed to be mentally and morally influenced in order to enable war and killing. The article’s explanation of revisionism’s practicability problem has a constructive consequence for future theory-building in the ethics of war: It implies that a potentially revised ethical theory of war must necessarily analyze the institutions that allocate belligerent resources, if it aims to morally assess battlefield behavior in a practicable manner. (shrink)

During the past decade ethical theory has been in a lively state of development, and three basic approaches to ethics - Kantian ethics, consequentialism, and virtue ethics - have assumed positions of particular prominence.

1. Stoicism in classical Latin literature -- 2. Stoicism in Christian Latin thought through the sixth century.

Build the skills you need to understand and resolve ethical problems! Ethical Dimensions in the Health Professions, 7th Edition provides a solid foundation in ethical theory and concepts, applying these principles to the ethical issues surrounding health care today. It uses a unique, six-step decision-making process as a framework for thinking critically and thoughtfully, with case studies of patients to illustrate ethical topics such as conflict of interest, patient confidentiality, and upholding best practices. Written by Regina F. Doherty, an (...) educator and occupational therapist, this book will help you make caring and effective ethical choices that improve patient care and outcomes. UNIQUE! Ethical decision-making process provides an organizing framework to use in making the best decisions when faced with ethical problems. Patient stories depict real-life situations and demonstrate the ethical decision-making process. Reflection boxes depict important concepts and stimulate critical thinking. Summary boxes highlight the most important information in each section. Coverage of interprofessional team decision-making reflects this important, expanding movement in healthcare nationally and internationally. Questions for thought and discussion encourage students to apply the ethical decision-making process to different situations. NEW! Updated content throughout the book reflects the changes in the growing interprofessional movement. NEW! Expanded content on clinician well-being includes tools for supporting moral resilience and preventing burnout in health professionals. NEW! Updated content addresses the topics of social justice, health disparities, intersectionality, and health outcomes. NEW! Updated national standards and regulations are provided for electronic health communications, data protections, and clinical research. NEW! Coverage of scientific literature is expanded with studies on the effects of compassion on patient outcomes, patient safety, and provider and organizational well-being. NEW! Coverage of ethical issues impacting healthcare and society includes topics such as medical scarcity due to healthcare supply chain shortages and extreme weather events due to climate change. (shrink)

Populism and Civil Society: The Challenge to Democratic Constitutionalism (2022) by Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen is an important book that addresses a widespread and ominous phenomenon around the world: The challenge of populism. This book forms a symposium by renowned authors which gathers commentaries on Arato and Cohen’s book. From different points of view, comments, suggestions and queries are put forward, to which the authors respond. The authors’ illuminating rejoinders not only present some of their arguments in a new (...) light but also arrive at a clarifying interpretation of their approach. (shrink)

Many of our cognitive capacities are the result of enculturation. Enculturation is the temporally extended transformative acquisition of cognitive practices in the cognitive niche. Cognitive practices are embodied and normatively constrained ways to interact with epistemic resources in the cognitive niche in order to complete a cognitive task. The emerging predictive processing perspective offers new functional principles and conceptual tools to account for the cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily components that give rise to cognitive practices. According to this emerging perspective, many (...) cases of perception, action, and cognition are realized by the on-going minimization of prediction error. Predictive processing provides us with a mechanistic perspective that helps investigate the functional details of the acquisition of cognitive practices. The argument of this paper is that research on enculturation and recent work on predictive processing are complementary. The main reason is that predictive processing operates at a sub-personal level and on a physiological time scale of explanation only. A complete account of enculturated cognition needs to take additional levels and temporal scales of explanation into account. This complementarity assumption leads to a new framework—enculturated predictive processing—that operates on multiple levels and temporal scales for the explanation of the enculturated predictive acquisition of cognitive practices. Enculturated predictive processing is committed to explanatory pluralism. That is, it subscribes to the idea that we need multiple perspectives and explanatory strategies to account for the complexity of enculturation. The upshot is that predictive processing needs to be complemented by additional considerations and conceptual tools to realize its full explanatory potential. (shrink)

The emphasis on duly in Kant's ethics is widely held to constitute a defect. Marcia W. Baron develops and assesses the criticism, which she sees as comprising two objections: that duty plays too large a role, leaving no room for the supererogatory, and that Kant places too much value on acting from duty. Clearly written and cogently argued, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology takes on the most philosophically intriguing objections to Kant's ethics and subjects them to a rigorous yet sympathetic (...) assessment. (shrink)

Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can (...) serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology. (shrink)

Many of our cognitive capacities are shaped by enculturation. Enculturation is the acquisition of cognitive practices such as symbol-based mathematical practices, reading, and writing during ontogeny. Enculturation is associated with significant changes to the organization and connectivity of the brain and to the functional profiles of embodied actions and motor programs. Furthermore, it relies on scaffolded cultural learning in the cognitive niche. The purpose of this paper is to explore the components of symbol-based mathematical practices. Phylogenetically, these practices are the (...) result of concerted organism-niche interactions that have led from approximate number estimations to the emergence of discrete, symbol-based mathematical operations. Ontogenetically, symbol-based mathematical practices are associated with plastic changes to neural circuitry, action schemata, and motor programs. It will be suggested that these practices rely on previously acquired capacities such as subitizing and counting. With these considerations in place, I will argue that computations, understood in the sense of Turing (1936), are a specific kind of symbol-based mathematical practices that can be realized by human organisms, machines, or by hybrid organism-machine systems. In sum, this paper suggests a new way to think about mathematical cognition and computation. (shrink)

...believe that his theory asks too much, demanding total devotion to morality and treating everything worth doing (and perhaps more) as a duty. But, despite their differences, the two sets of...

When successful and ethical managers are alerted to possible organizational wrongdoing, they take corrective action before the problems become crises. However, recent research [e.g., Rynes et al. (2007, Academy of Management Journal50(5), 987–1008)] indicates that many organizations fail to implement evidence-based practices (i.e., practices that are consistent with research findings), in many aspects of human resource management. In this paper, we draw from years of research on whistle-blowing by social scientists and legal scholars and offer concrete suggestions to managers who (...) are interested in encouraging internal reporting of problems requiring attention, and to observers of questionable activity who are considering reporting it. We also identify ways that research suggests policy-makers can have a more positive influence. We hope that these suggestions will help foster evidence-based practice regarding whistle-blowing. (shrink)

Morality and Cognitive Science What do we know about how people make moral judgments? And what should moral philosophers do with this knowledge? This article addresses the cognitive science of moral judgment. It reviews important empirical findings and discusses how philosophers have reacted to them. Several trends have dominated the cognitive science of morality in … Continue reading Morality and Cognitive Science →.

The distinction between justifications and excuses is a familiar one to most of us who work either in moral philosophy or legal philosophy. But exactly how it should be understood is a matter of considerable disagreement. My aim in this paper is, first, to sort out the differences and try to figure out what underlying disagreements account for them. I give particular attention to the following question: Does a person who acts on a reasonable but mistaken belief have a justification, (...) or only an excuse? One disagreement I highlight concerns the extent to which justification is primarily about agents rather than about actions. Those who think, as I do, of “His action, X, was justified” as “He was justified in doing X” are far more likely to allow that justification requires reasonable belief and does not require truth, than are those who think of “His action, X, was justified” as “Although actions of this type usually are prohibited, X is in these circumstances in fact permissible.” In addition to sorting out the differences and tracing them to some underlying disagreements, I defend the reasonable belief view of justification against some objections, and argue that, whether or not we continue to use the term “justified” in a way that does not require truth, we need the concept. Contrary to the claims of some who reject the reasonable belief view of justification, justification thus understood does not reduce to excuse. (shrink)

Clarke A. Chambers interviews Marcia Eaton, professor in the Department of Philosophy.

This paper examines the scholarship, evidence, and assumptions that place the origins of Chinese drama in shamanic ritual. The paper is roughly divided in two parts: the first contextualizes the use of shamanism within the theories of art and literature of one of the first scholars to link the origins of Chinese theatre to shamanism, Wang Guowei, to show that Wang’s view of the relationship between shamanism and drama differs from mainstream interpretations. The second part assesses the views of modern (...) ethnographers and historians of China on the role of shamanism in theater, with a focus on the work of the scholar Piet van der Loon. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Jakob Hohwy argues that the emerging predictive processing perspective on cognition requires us to explain cognitive functioning in purely internalistic and neurocentric terms. The purpose of the present paper is to challenge the view that PP entails a wholesale rejection of positions that are interested in the embodied, embedded, extended, or enactive dimensions of cognitive processes. I will argue that Hohwy’s argument from analogy, which forces an evidentiary boundary into the picture, lacks the argumentative resources to (...) make a convincing case for the conceptual necessity to interpret PP in solely internalistic terms. For this reason, I will reconsider the postulation and explanatory role of the evidentiary boundary. I will arrive at an account of prediction error minimization and its foundation on the free energy principle that is fully consistent with approaches to cognition that emphasize the embodied and interactive properties of cognitive processes. This gives rise to the suggestion that explanatory pluralism about the application of PP is to be preferred over Hohwy’s explanatory monism that follows from his internalistic and neurocentric view of predictive cognitive systems. (shrink)

Recent work on enculturation suggests that our cognitive capacities are significantly transformed in the course of the scaffolded acquisition of cognitive practices such as reading and writing. Phylogenetically, enculturation is the result of the co-evolution of human organisms and their socio-culturally structured cognitive niche. It is rendered possible by evolved cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily learning mechanisms that make human organisms apt to acquire culturally inherited cognitive practices. In addition, cultural learning allows for the intergenerational transmission of relevant knowledge and skills. (...) Ontogenetically, enculturation is associated with neural plasticity and the development of new motor routines and action schemas. It relies on scaffolded learning that structures novice-teacher interactions. The acquisition of reading and writing are paradigm examples of enculturation. Based on an empirically informed analysis of the components of enculturation, I will apply the emerging account of enculturated cognition to narrative practices. To date, research on the impact of narratives on the constitution of the self and our understanding of folk psychology has not paid much attention to the question how narratives are influenced by cumulative cultural evolution and our capacity to acquire reading and writing during ontogeny. I will argue that textual narratives, above and beyond oral narratives, provide genuinely new ways of narration. Therefore, the enculturated interaction with textual narratives has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of ourselves and other cognitive agents. (shrink)