O tema deste estudo é o ritmo samba-reggae como uma expressão afrobrasileira. Apresentamos, inicialmente, alguns aspectos sócio históricos relevantes no tocante à construção da multietnismo e multilinguismo na Bahia, para que se possa compreender tal ritmo como expressão afro. Como corpus de análise apresentamos algumas composições musicais do ritmo citado, que foram examinadas a partir de uma perspectiva léxico semântica, com o objetivo de assinalar sua conexão com aspectos afro religioso e afro político.

The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 has forced governments to impose a lockdown, and many people have suddenly found themselves having to reduce their social relations drastically. Given the exceptional nature of similar situations, only a few studies have investigated the negative psychological effects of forced social isolation and how they can be mitigated in a real context. In the present study, we investigated whether the amount of digital communication technology use for virtual meetings during the lockdown promoted the perception of (...) social support, which in itself mitigated the psychological effects of the lockdown in Italy. Data were collected in March 2020, during the lockdown imposed to reduce the COVID-19 spread. The results indicated that the amount of digital technology use reduced feelings of loneliness, anger/irritability, and boredom and increased belongingness via the perception of social support. The present study supported the positive role of digital technologies in maintaining meaningful social relationships even during an extreme situation such as a lockdown. Implications such as the need to reduce the digital divide and possible consequences of the ongoing pandemic are discussed. (shrink)

Nowadays, binge-watching has become a widespread practice of media consumption, raising concerns about its negative outcomes. Nevertheless, previous research has overlooked the underlying psychological mechanisms leading to binge-watching. In the present work, we investigated some of the psychological variables that could favor binge-watching tendencies in a sample of TV series viewers. To this aim, psychological determinants of problematic digital technologies usage, as well as some of the mechanisms related to the enjoyment of media contents, were considered as predictors of the (...) tendency to binge-watch. Results indicated that higher feelings of loneliness were associated with higher levels of problematic digital technologies usage. Additionally, direct and indirect effects showed that only escapism – out of the four dimensions measuring the problematic use of Internet-related technologies – predicted participants’ stronger identification with media characters, which in turn promoted greater binge-watching tendencies. Overall, we suggest that binge-watching could be interpreted as a coping strategy for media escapists, who enjoy TV series as a privileged online space in which the need to escape finds its fulfillment, allowing them to manage loneliness by identifying with a fictitious character. (shrink)

§1 According to the paradigmatic formula offered by Kant, the philosopher’s task consists of demonstrating “how we ought to think” as opposed to “how we do think” – that is, logical rules or norms must be separated from the functioning principles of the human mind or from psychological laws. As it is well-known, in the “Preface” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher stands against “some moderns” who “have thought to enlarge” logic “interpolating psycholo...

Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries adopted Late Antique aesthetics, characterized by brilliance, dazzle and colors, to create a new form of imagination, where the corpses of the martyrs and their physical remains became shining bodies. Relics became a spiritual body, whose μετάληψις often produced roses or violets. Therefore there was a strict association in Late Antique Christianity among roses, relics and the colour red.

First, this article puts forth a political and cultural explanation for the fact that the work of Rawls and other American liberal analytic political philosophers was neglected in Portugal during the 1970s and 1980s. Second, the article describes Portuguese reactions to Rawls's ideas in the 1990s, focusing on commentaries by scholars and `public intellectuals'. Throughout this period, there was a gradual shift from glib partisan judgements to more careful responses. Third, the reception of Rawls in Portugal is compared (...) with the reception in Spain. This comparison shows that both broad social context and the nature of academia tended to be more hospitable to Rawls in Spain than in Portugal. However, the situation is changing. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Michela Bella, William Curtis, and Emil Višňovský for their thorough and generous interventions on my latest work. I would also like to thank EJPAP’s executive editors, Roberta Dreon and Sarin Marchetti, for hosting a symposium on this book and Michela Bella for her editorial work. Each of the three contributions to the symposium grasps some key features of my work, indeed the spirit that animated it, even if, at times, my statements are not entirely (...) explicit. Since the... (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é compreender o fenómeno da propaganda indirecta no cinema enquanto dispositivo ideológico de controlo da vida privada, identificando a forma como foram tratados os papéis do feminino e do masculino no que à intriga amorosa conducente ao casamento diz respeito.Para o efeito, foram analisados, à luz do contexto sociocultural e político das duas primeiras décadas do Estado Novo em Portugal, sete filmes de ‘comédia à portuguesa’ marcantes do chamado ‘período de ouro’ do cinema português.A análise (...) comparada do enredo faz emergir um paradoxo: por um lado, o casamento, tido à luz da época como epicentro da vida privada e unidade primária da vida social e afetiva, é naturalmente um dos tópicos centrais nessas narrativas - tudo se encaminha para ele como concretização e realização individual. Porém - salvo raríssimas exceções -, nada dele é retratado. A sua vivência exterior ou social, e sobretudo quotidiana, privada, é omissa. Tratado dessa forma, o casamento não é mais do que um “desfecho ornamental” e uma utopia: o círculo da vida comum a dois nunca é invadido pelo espetador. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The principal findings are that the majority of management accounting lecturers in the British Isles do not incorporate ethics. About a third of the respondents to the (...) survey do address ethical issues, although about half of those say they do so only implicitly. Various factors underlying the findings and prospects for the future are discussed. (shrink)

Recent discussions in the philosophy of biology have brought into question some fundamental assumptions regarding evolutionary processes, natural selection in particular. Some authors argue that natural selection is nothing but a population-level, statistical consequence of lower-level events (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; Walsh et al. [2002]). On this view, natural selection itself does not involve forces. Other authors reject this purely statistical, population-level account for an individual-level, causal account of natural selection (Bouchard and Rosenberg [2004]). I argue that each of these (...) positions is right in one way, but wrong in another; natural selection indeed takes place at the level of populations, but it is a causal process nonetheless. (shrink)

The latter half of the twentieth century has been marked by debates in evolutionary biology over the relative significance of natural selection and random drift: the so-called “neutralist/selectionist” debates. Yet John Beatty has argued that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the concept of random drift from the concept of natural selection, a claim that has been accepted by many philosophers of biology. If this claim is correct, then the neutralist/selectionist debates seem at best futile, and at worst, (...) meaningless. I reexamine the issues that Beatty raises, and argue that random drift and natural selection, conceived as processes, can be distinguished from one another. (shrink)

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

Biologists and philosophers have been extremely pessimistic about the possibility of demonstrating random drift in nature, particularly when it comes to distinguishing random drift from natural selection. However, examination of a historical case-Maxime Lamotte's study of natural populations of the land snail, Cepaea nemoralis in the 1950s - shows that while some pessimism is warranted, it has been overstated. Indeed, by describing a unique signature for drift and showing that this signature obtained in the populations under study, Lamotte was able (...) to make a good case for a significant role for drift. It may be difficult to disentangle the causes of drift and selection acting in a population, but it is not impossible. (shrink)

Biologists studying ecology and evolution use the term “population” in many different ways. Yet little philosophical analysis of the concept has been done, either by biologists or philosophers, in contrast to the voluminous literature on the concept of “species.” This is in spite of the fact that “population” is arguably a far more central concept in ecological and evolutionary studies than “species” is. The fact that such a central concept has been employed in so many different ways is potentially problematic (...) for the reason that inconsistent usages (especially when the usage has not been made explicit) might lead to false controversies in which disputants are simply talking past one another. However, the inconsistent usages are not the only, or even the most important reason to examine the concept. If any set of organisms is legitimately called a “population,” selection and drift processes become purely arbitrary, too. Moreover, key ecological variables, such as abundance and distribution, depend on a nonarbitrary way of identifying populations. I sketch the beginnings of a population concept, drawing inspiration from the Ghiselin-Hull individuality thesis, and show why some alternative approaches are nonstarters. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory (ET) is teeming with probabilities. Probabilities exist at all levels: the level of mutation, the level of microevolution, and the level of macroevolution. This uncontroversial claim raises a number of contentious issues. For example, is the evolutionary process (as opposed to the theory) indeterministic, or is it deterministic? Philosophers of biology have taken different sides on this issue. Millstein (1997) has argued that we are not currently able answer this question, and that even scientific realists ought to remain (...) agnostic concerning the determinism or indeterminism of evolutionary processes. If this argument is correct, it suggests that, whatever we take probabilities in ET to be, they must be consistent with either determinism or indeterminism. This raises some interesting philosophical questions: How should we understand the probabilities used in ET? In other words, what is meant by saying that a certain evolutionary change is more or less probable? Which interpretation of probability is the most appropriate for ET? I argue that the probabilities used in ET are objective in a realist sense, if not in an indeterministic sense. Furthermore, there are a number of interpretations of probability that are objective and would be consistent with ET under determinism or indeterminism. However, I argue that evolutionary probabilities are best understood as propensities of population-level kinds. (shrink)

Naïve realism (also called ‘relationalism’ or ‘object view’) is becoming increasingly popular, but the specific outline of its commitments remains often underspecified by proponents and misunderstood by critics. Naïve realism is associated with two claims, both concerning genuine, veridical perceptual experience (where this excludes hallucinations). Constitutive Claim (CC): The phenomenal character of perception is (partly) constituted by the mind-independent objects in one’s surrounding and their properties. Relational Claim (RC): Perception is a relation to mind-independent objects in the environment and their (...) properties. Some philosophers use the two claims interchangeably while talking about naïve realism, while others use only one or the other, although they do not explicitly discuss if the other claim is also a core commitment of naïve realism, or if naïve realism can be held without the other claim. This raises the question of how RC and CC relate to one another, together with the most pressing question of what each claim ultimately commits one to. After discussing the shortcomings of alternative interpretations, I argue that naïve realism should be understood as committed to, first and foremost, RC. This should be understood as a claim about the phenomenal character of perception, rather than about its nature, structure or essence (whatever that means). CC, on the other hand, should be understood as a corollary of RC. This doesn’t only offer a better characterisation of how naïve realists understand phenomenal character: it also helps us understand how we can simultaneously claim that the object of perception is a constitutive element of perception, while also allowing for it to play a causal role in determining perception. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The principal findings are that the majority of management accounting lecturers in the British Isles do not incorporate ethics. About a third of the respondents to the (...) survey do address ethical issues, although about half of those say they do so only implicitly. Various factors underlying the findings and prospects for the future are discussed. (shrink)

It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one’s own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey’s conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. (...) It claims that Dewey’s anti-substantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey—differently from enactivists—frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings’ interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey’s lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human–environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility. (shrink)

A previous study has shown that the degree of trust into others might be biased by inducing either a more “inclusive” or “exclusive” cognitive-control mode. Here, we investigated whether the degree of interpersonal trust can be biased by environmental factors, such as odors, that are likely to impact cognitive-control states. Arousing olfactory fragrances (e.g., peppermint) are supposed to induce a more exclusive, and calming olfactory fragrances (e.g., lavender) a more inclusive state. Participants performed the Trust Game, which provides an index (...) of interpersonal trust by assessing the money units one participant (the trustor) transfers to another participant (the trustee), while being exposed to either peppermint or lavender aroma. All participants played the role of trustor. As expected, participants transferred significantly more money to the alleged trustee in the lavender as compared to the peppermint and no aroma conditions. This observation might have various serious implications for a broad range of situations in which interpersonal trust is an essential element, such as cooperation (e.g., mixed-motives situations), bargaining and negotiation, consumer behavior, and group performance. (shrink)

Biologists and philosophers have offered differing concepts of biological race. That is, they have offered different candidates for what a biological correlate of race might be; for example, races might be subspecies, clades, lineages, ecotypes, or genetic clusters. One thing that is striking about each of these proposals is that they all depend on a concept of population. Indeed, some authors have explicitly characterized races in terms of populations. However, including the concept of population into concepts of race raises three (...) puzzles, all having to do with time. In this paper, I extend the causal interactionist population concept (CIPC) by introducing some simple assumptions about how to understand populations through time. These assumptions help to shed light on the three puzzles, and in the process show that if we want to understand races in terms of populations, we will need to revise our concept(s) of race. (shrink)

Animal models of human diseases are often used in biomedical research in place of human subjects. However, results obtained by animal models may fail to hold true for humans. One way of addressing this problem is to make animal models more similar to humans by placing human tissue into animal models, rendering them chimeric. Since technical and ethical limitations make neurological disorders difficult to study in humans, chimeric models with human neural tissue could help advance our understanding of neuropathophysiology. In (...) this article, we examine whether the introduction of human neural tissue and any consequent cognitive change is relevant to the way we ought to treat chimeras. We argue that changes in cognitive abilities are morally relevant to the extent that they increase the capacities that affect the moral status of any entity, including awareness, autonomy, and sociability. We posit that no being, regardless of species, should be treated in a way that is incommensurate with its moral status. Finally, we propose a framework that can be used to guide ethical assessment of research involving chimeras with advanced cognitive capacities. We advance this framework as a useful tool for bringing relevant considerations to the forefront for those considering the ethical merit of proposed chimeric research. In doing so, we examine concepts relevant to the question of how any entity may be treated, including moral status, dignity, and capacities. (shrink)

In Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore contend that “Darwin would put his utmost into sexual selection because the subject intrigued him, no doubt, but also for a deeper reason: the theory vindicated his lifelong commitment to human brotherhood”. Without questioning Desmond and Moore’s evidence, I will raise some puzzles for their view. I will show that attention to the structure of Darwin’s arguments in the Descent of Man shows that they are far from straightforward. As Desmond and (...) Moore note, Darwin seems to have intended sexual selection in non-human animals to serve as evidence for sexual selection in humans. However, Darwin’s account of sexual selection in humans was different from the canonical cases that Darwin described at great length. If explaining the origin of human races was the main reason for introducing sexual selection, and if sexual selection was a key piece of Darwin’s anti-slavery arguments, then it is puzzling why Darwin would have spent so much time discussing cases that did not really support his argument for the origin of human races, and it is also puzzling that his argument for the origin of human races would be so poor. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, (...) Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed. (shrink)

Frágil é, segundo Alexis de Tocqueville, o equilíbrio em que se encontra a liberdade em um estado social de igualdade de condições. Tomados pela sua maior paixão, a da igualdade, os homens democráticos podem assistir a conversão da liberdade em despotismo ao se entregarem à busca exclusiva de seus interesses e bens privados, ao abdicarem da faculdade de julgar, deixandose guiar servilmente pela opinião da maioria, a fonte da autoridade em tal estado social. Em face disso, este artigo sustenta que, (...) ao discorrer acerca dos costumes estadunidenses, n'A Democracia na América, o autor não faz mera descrição mas delineia uma teoria social, a doutrina do interesse bem compreendido, a qual relacionaria, na república americana, a virtude e o interesse, e poderia fornecer elementos para instruir as sociedades democráticas. (shrink)

El empirismo puede ser caracterizado, por un lado, como una teoría acerca de los orígenes del conocimiento empírico; por otro, como una concepción epistémica acerca de la justificación de las creencias empíricas. Actualmente, esta última dimensión del empirismo ha sido criticada por diversos filósofos. Paradigmáticamente, Rorty ha sostenido que la experiencia es únicamente la causa de las creencias, pero no su justificación. La tesis de Rorty es que las creencias se relacionan con el mundo sólo causalmente. Este artículo posee dos (...) partes. En la primera, se argumenta, en contra de Rorty, que la experiencia debe ser una instancia de justificación si las creencias han de tener algún contenido. En la segunda, se propone una concepción pragmatista alternativa, que i) atribuye un papel epistémico a la experiencia sin recaer en "el mito de lo dado"; y ii) reintroduce el concepto de "representación" sin comprometerse con el representacionismo. Empiricism can be characterized, on the one hand, as a theory about the sources of empirical knowledge; on the other hand, as an epistemic outlook about justification of empirical beliefs. This last dimension of empiricism has been criticized by many philosophers nowadays. Paradigmatically, Rorty has said that experience is only the cause of beliefs, but not its justification. Rorty's thesis is that beliefs relate to the world only causally. This paper has two parts. In the first it is argued, against Rorty, that experience must be an epistemic instance of justification if beliefs are to have any objective content at all. In the second, it is proposed an alternative pragmatist conception of knowledge which i) attributes an epistemic role to experience without falling into "the myth of the given" and ii) reintroduces the concept of "representation" without compromising with representationalism. (shrink)

Current corporate systems risk generating inequality among workers, insofar as they concentrate only on economic results by favoring, through the incentive and award system, only what can be seen, produced, and measured. As such, these systems are unable to recognize workers’ agapic behaviors – similar to the ones considered in organizational citizenship behavior literature – that cannot be quantified, i.e. workers’ generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, help for others and mercy. Although these types of behaviors may appear unproductive or irrational, they (...) create symbols of belonging to the company and social cohesion. This article claims that beyond focusing on reward systems, companies should recognize agapic behaviors to increase workers’ intrinsic motivation. These behavioral attitudes allow fraternal relationships -as conceived in the Civil Economy tradition- to arise within organizations; moreover, they contribute to advancing new managerial practical implications in the humanistic management field. (shrink)

Human genetic engineering may soon be possible. The gathering debate about this prospect already threatens to become mired in irresolvable disagreement. After surveying the scientific and technological developments that have brought us to this pass, _The Ethics of Genetic Engineering_ focuses on the ethical and policy debate, noting the deep divide that separates proponents and opponents. The book locates the source of this divide in differing framing assumptions: reductionist pluralist on one side, holist communitarian on the other. The book argues (...) that we must bridge this divide, drawing on the resources from both encampments, if we are to understand and cope with the distinctive problems posed by genetic engineering. These problems, termed "fractious problems," are novel, complex, ethically fraught, unavoidably of public concern, and unavoidably divisive. Berry examines three prominent ethical and political theories – utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue ethics – to consider their competency in bridging the divide and addressing these fractious problems. The book concludes that virtue ethics can best guide parental decision making and that a new policymaking approach sketched here, a "navigational approach," can best guide policymaking. These approaches enable us to gain a rich understanding of the problems posed and to craft resolutions adequate to their challenges. (shrink)

I respond to Brandon's (2005) criticisms of my earlier (2002) essay. I argue that (1) biologists are inconsistent in their use of the terms 'selection' and 'drift' -- vacillating between 'process' and 'outcome' -- but that the process-oriented definitions I defend make better sense of the neutralist/selectionist debate; (2) Brandon's purported demonstration that there is no qualitative difference between drift and selection as processes begs the question against my account; and (3) biologists (e.g., Kimura) have argued for genuinely neutral variants. (...) Whether any such variants actually exist is an empirical question. However, the philosophical question at hand is conceptual, not empirical. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the idea of “enlanguaged experience” as a radicalization of the Pragmatists’ approach to the continuity between language and experience in the human world as a concept that can provide a significant contribution to the current debate within Enactivism. The first part of the paper explores some new conceptual tools recently developed by enactivist scholarship, namely linguistic bodies, enlanguaged affordances, and languaging. In the second part, the notion of enlanguaged experience is introduced as involving two main (...) interrelated ideas. The first is the idea that human experience is contingently, yet irreversibly, embedded from each person’s birth within contexts made up of linguistic practices that contribute to continuously redefining what happens. Consequently, the development of individuals’ motor, perceptual, affective, selective, and cognitive capacities does not take place in a silent vacuum, but in a context of linguistic practices that are already there: such practices already operate in, and are shared by, the human groups in which individuals begin their experiences. The second key idea is that enlanguaged experience implies the claim that humans primarily meet language as part of their experience of the world, rather than as an independent system of words and grammar. In the third part of the paper, I argue that the conception of human experience as enlanguaged can fruitfully contribute to the enactivist debate, particularly with reference to three main points: firstly, the idea of a circular continuity, which is to say the claim that the advent of language in human life caused a re-configuration of previously existing forms of sensibility both ontogenetically and phylogenetically; secondly, an ecological view of language, according to which humans find themselves embedded in already operating linguistic practices and habits that are a constitutive part of their naturally social world; and, thirdly, a richer view of language “in the wild”, capable of retrieving the qualitative, affective, or aesthetic components of human enlanguaged experience. (shrink)

The capability approach developed by Amartya Sen focuses on the enhancement of people’s capabilities, i.e. their real freedom to choose a life course they have reason to value. Applying the CA to the organizational context, the focus of human resource management is transformed, shifting away from the needs of the organization to the freedoms of the individual. This shift happens also inside the so-called ‘liberated companies,’ firms with an organizational form that allows employees the complete freedom, along with the responsibility, (...) to take any actions they decide are best. In this paper we show the contribution of the capability approach for management and for organizational ethics by focusing on this innovative model of ‘liberated companies.’. (shrink)