In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences (...) worrying and I come up with two candidate principles. I then argue that one principle should be rejected because it is inconsistent with permissivism. The principle we should accept implies that it is sometimes rational to maintain our beliefs, even upon learning that they were caused by irrelevant influences. (shrink)

Este artículo sintetiza algunos aspectos del proyecto “Hierro y bronce. Criterios para la valoración y conservación de la herrería artística en el patrimonio arquitectónico del Uruguay”[i], cuyo objetivo es establecer los atributos patrimoniales de los elementos ornamentales metálicos asociados a fachadas del patrimonio arquitectónico nacional y contribuir a su difusión, puesta en valor y conservación. A lo largo de la investigación se abordan los aspectos socioculturales, artísticos, formales, técnicos y, por último, los relativos al deterioro de estos elementos y las (...) pautas para su preservación y restauración. La metodología se basa en el estudio de fuentes primarias, éditas e inéditas, en la revisión de bibliografía especializada y en el trabajo de campo sobre una muestra representativa de elementos ornamentales metálicos aplicados a las fachadas de la arquitectura montevideana. Fue relevado un total de 250 edificios, correspondientes a los distintos períodos que distinguimos en la evolución de la herrería local entre finales del siglo XVIII y mediados del siglo XX. Se trata de un aporte inicial que profundiza en un campo escasamente abordado en nuestro medio acerca del conocimiento y difusión de los trabajos de herrería en el marco del patrimonio arquitectónico y artístico uruguayo, proporcionando información útil a la academia, las instituciones vinculadas a la valoración y conservación patrimonial y el público general. Notas [i] Proyecto concursado y financiado en la modalidad Investigación y Desarrollo (I+D), Comisión Sectorial de Investigación científica (CSIC), Universidad de la República, a realizarse entre marzo de 2018 y marzo de 2020, por un equipo interdisciplinario integrado por docentes e investigadores de las facultades de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo: Miriam Hojman, Valentina Marchese y Tatiana Rimbaud (Instituto de Historia), Gianella Mussio, Leticia Olivera, Carola Romay y Verónica Ulfe (Instituto de Tecnologías); de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación: Ernesto Beretta (Instituto de Ciencias Históricas-Historia del Arte); y de la Facultad de Ingeniería: Sofía Aguiar (Instituto de Ensayo de Materiales). El presente artículo fue elaborado por todos los integrantes del equipo. (shrink)

The evolution of humans required performing increasingly hierarchically complex tasks within multiple domains. Hierarchical complexity increases task by task. Tasks occur within, and differ by, determinable domains, their stages of performance measurable using the Model of Hierarchical Complexity. How well one performs within single and multiple domains is considered to indicate intelligence. Original task-initiation is more difficult than imitational learning and can create new domains. Levels of support reduce task difficulty, increasing performance. Task-performance may be generalized to other domains. Stages (...) of developing tools and empathy are presented to demonstrate domains' roles in the evolution of human intelligence. (shrink)

Este texto busca narrar o encontro feliz das trajetórias do ativista Cleodon Silva e da instituição Casa dos Meninos, e como esse encontro pode nos ajudar a repensar o papel daquilo que Gilbert Simondon chamou de “mecanólogo” ou “tecnólogo”: aquele que estuda os indivíduos técnicos completos, que introduz na cultura “a consciência da natureza das máquinas, de suas relações mútuas e de suas relações com o homem, e dos valores implicados nestas relações”.

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

This paper examines a range of issues concerned with the process of choosing schools in the private and state sectors at the primary/pre‐preparatory stage and at the time of transfer to secondary/senior school. The findings indicate that choices about schools are made at different times and in different ways by parents who use the state and private sectors. One of the key findings is that the process of choosing a school begins earlier in the private than in the state sector; (...) another is that quality of education is cited more frequently as one of the ‘top three’ essential factors by parents of children in the private sector. At both the primary and transfer to secondary stages, very high percentages of parents consider it essential that their child should be happy. A discussion of the different notions that private school and the state school parents may have of ‘happiness’ is offered. (shrink)

We present the first systematic literature review on stress and burnout in K−12 teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 17 studies that included 9,874 K−12 teachers from around the world. These studies showed some indication that burnout did increase during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were, however, almost no differences in the levels of stress and burnout experienced by K−12 teachers compared to individuals employed in other occupational fields. School principals' leadership styles emerged as (...) an organizational characteristic that is highly relevant for K−12 teachers' levels of stress and burnout. Individual teacher characteristics associated with burnout were K−12 teachers' personality, self-efficacy in online teaching, and perceived vulnerability to COVID-19. In order to reduce stress, there was an indication that stress-management training in combination with training in technology use for teaching may be superior to stress-management training alone. Future research needs to adopt more longitudinal designs and examine the interplay between individual and organizational characteristics in the development of teacher stress and burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. (shrink)

This title opens the debate about what an ethics for the 21st century would look like and the role of corporations and how to work to ensure they produce results which benefit society as a whole.

The aim of this essay is to argue that, if a robust form of moral realism is true, then moral vagueness is ontic vagueness. The argument is by elimination: I show that neither semantic nor epistemic approaches to moral vagueness are satisfactory.

Insofern entwickelt die Begriffslogik eine Epistemologie freien Denkens. Damit entscheidet sich Hegel in den nachkantischen Debatten für Kant und gegen den von Schelling in die Diskussion zurückgebrachten Spinozismus.

The aim of this paper is to apply the accuracy based approach to epistemology to the case of higher order evidence: evidence that bears on the rationality of one's beliefs. I proceed in two stages. First, I show that the accuracy based framework that is standardly used to motivate rational requirements supports steadfastness—a position according to which higher order evidence should have no impact on one's doxastic attitudes towards first order propositions. The argument for this will require a generalization of (...) an important result by Greaves and Wallace for the claim that conditionalization maximizes expected accuracy. The generalization I provide will, among other things, allow us to apply the result to cases of self-locating evidence. In the second stage, I develop an alternative framework. Very roughly, what distinguishes the traditional approach from the alternative one is that, on the traditional picture, we're interested in evaluating the expected accuracy of conforming to an update procedure. On the alternative picture that I develop, instead of considering how good an update procedure is as a plan to conform to, we consider how good it is as a plan to make. I show how, given the use of strictly proper scoring rules, the alternative picture vindicates calibrationism: a view according to which higher order evidence should have a significant impact on our beliefs. I conclude with some thoughts about why higher order evidence poses a serious challenge for standard ways of thinking about rationality. (shrink)

How is medical knowledge made? There have been radical changes in recent decades, through new methods such as consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine. Miriam Solomon explores their origins, aims, and epistemic strengths and weaknesses; and she offers a pluralistic approach for the future.

For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the (...) traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations. (shrink)

: In this essay, Miriam argues for a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the radical feminist theory of sex-right and compulsory heterosexuality. Against critics of radical feminism, she argues that when understood from a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective, such theory does not foreclose female sexual agency. On the contrary, men's right of sexual access to women and girls is part of our background understanding of heteronormativity, and thus integral to the lived experience of female sexual agency.

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism. In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products (...) of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief. (shrink)

A defense of imprecise credences (and other imprecise doxastic attitudes).

Abstract: This paper defends a constraint that any satisfactory decision theory must satisfy. I show how this constraint is violated by all of the decision theories that have been endorsed in the literature that are designed to deal with cases in which opinions or values are represented by a set of functions rather than a single one. Such a decision theory is necessary to account for the existence of what Ruth Chang has called “parity” (as well as for cases in (...) which agents have incomplete preferences or imprecise credences). The problem with the all of the decision theories that have been defended to account for parity is that they are committed to a claim I call unanimity: when all of the functions in the set agree that an agent ought to do A, then an agent ought to do A. A decision theory committed to unanimity violates the constraint I defend in this paper. Thus, if parity exists, a new approach to decision theory is necessary. (shrink)

Had we grown up elsewhere or been educated differently, our view of the world would likely be radically different. What to make of this? This paper takes an accuracy-centered first-personal approach to the question of how to respond to the arbitrary nature in which many of our beliefs are formed. I show how considerations of accuracy motivate different responses to this sort of information depending on the type of attitude we take towards the belief in question upon subjecting the belief (...) to doubt. (shrink)

In this essay, Miriam argues for a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the radical feminist theory of sex-right and compulsory heterosexuality. Against critics of radical feminism, she argues that when understood from a phenomenological’ hermeneutic perspective, such theory does not foreclose female sexual agency. On the contrary, men's right of sexual access to women and girls is part of our background understanding of heteronormativity, and thus integral to the lived experience of female sexual agency.

Em maio de 1643, Elisabeth da Bohemia endereçou uma questão a Descartes que inaugurou uma Correspondência de seis anos, até a morte do filósofo. Ele dedica à Princesa o seu trabalho de maturidade metafísica (Princípios de Filosofia Primeira, 1644) e redige Paixões da Alma (1649) como um dos resultados do diálogo com a filósofa. O silenciamento dos últimos cem anos de historiografia sobre o legado de Elisabeth da Bohemia nesta troca epistolar causou distorções e, em alguns casos, lastreou o viés (...) como regra e como a história. Uma das consequências dessa distorção está na leitura de que a questão da filósofa consistiria em uma crítica ao dualismo substancial. Neste estudo busco oferecer uma interpretação da natureza da primeira questão, com o intuito de esclarecer o pensamento da filósofa e o seu papel no diálogo, de uma maneira compreensiva, sem subscrever o paradigma literário do solilóquio cartesiano, e seu viés na literatura filosófica. (shrink)

O estudo das Cartas de Descartes a Elisabeth ocupou a literatura, ao passo que a fortuna da contribuição de Elisabeth foi soterrada pela historiografia. Essa negligência intelectual merece registro, visto que as cartas de Elisabeth foram descobertas no Século XIX e publicadas pela primeira vez em 1876 (Ebbersmeyer 2020, p. 4). O fato de que Elisabeth tenha sido ignorada pela historiografia explicita a precariedade a que o viés pode condenar uma narrativa, e torna o estudo sobre Elisabeth da Bohemia difícil. (...) Como se sabe, de 1876 para cá a história do racionalismo moderno levou muito a sério as Respostas de Descartes a Elisabeth, sobretudo quando foram estudados os problemas da interação entre mente e corpo, da união substancial e as concepções de movimento. Assim, uma relevante literatura resultou do estudo de respostas a questões ignoradas. -/- Somente a partir da década de noventa do Século XX, historiadoras da filosofia começaram a levar a sério que Descartes não estava em um solilóquio diante de Elisabeth. Em um período de intensa troca epistolar, no qual as cartas veicularam larga medida a nova filosofia (tanto do racionalismo como do empirismo), não era comum, estranhamente, a mudança de posições. Este não foi o caso do impacto que as questões de Elisabeth causaram em Descartes e, por isso, a literatura sobre as Respostas de Descartes à filósofa configura um caso paradigmático do viés misógino que contaminou a história da filosofia, desafiando a sua seriedade e rigor. Isto ficará demonstrado a seguir. (shrink)

Internalists face the following challenge: what is it about an agent's internal states that explains why only these states can play whatever role the internalist thinks these states are playing? Internalists have frequently appealed to a special kind of epistemic access that we have to these states. But such claims have been challenged on both empirical and philosophical grounds. I will argue that internalists needn't appeal to any kind of privileged access claims. Rather, internalist conditions are important because of the (...) way in which we expect them to act as causal mediators between states of the world, on the one hand, and our beliefs and actions on the other. (shrink)

The article deals with larger stretches of talk-in-interaction and argues in favor of a descriptive approach, which integrates the structural requirements of global organization, the special type of sequential orderliness within larger units as well as the genre-orientation of these units. Drawing on previous work in conversation analysis, discourse analysis and the sociological genre analysis, the article introduces GLOBE as an analytical tool which functionally links discourse units to conventionalized communicative purposes. GLOBE reconstructs the interactive achievement of genre-oriented discourse units (...) in a three-branch analysis of jobs, devices and forms. The analytical potential of GLOBE is demonstrated in the exemplary genre-contrastive analysis of a narrative, an explanative and an argumentative excerpt. On the basis of the analyses of the three genres, the overarching constitution of genre-oriented global units is then explicated. (shrink)

Embodied approaches in cognitive science hold that the body is crucial for cognition. What this claim amounts to, however, still remains unclear. This paper contributes to its clarification by confronting three ways of understanding embodiment—the sensorimotor approach, extended cognition and enactivism—with Locked-in syndrome. LIS is a case of severe global paralysis in which patients are unable to move and yet largely remain cognitively intact. We propose that LIS poses a challenge to embodied approaches to cognition requiring them to make explicit (...) the notion of embodiment they defend and its role for cognition. We argue that the sensorimotor and the extended functionalist approaches either fall short of accounting for cognition in LIS from an embodied perspective or do it too broadly by relegating the body only to a historical role. Enactivism conceives of the body as autonomous system and of cognition as sense-making. From this perspective embodiment is not equated with bodily movement but with forms of agency that do not disappear with body paralysis. Enactivism offers a clarifying perspective on embodiment and thus currently appears to be the framework in embodied cognition best suited to address the challenge posed by LIS. (shrink)

A new, social epistemology of science that addresses practical as well as theoretical concerns.

My main aim in this paper is to specify conditions that distinguish rational, or justified, hope from irrational, or unjustified hope. I begin by giving a brief characterization of hope and then turn to offering some criteria of rational hope. On my view both theoretical and practical norms are significant when assessing hope’s rationality. While others have recognized that there are theoretical and practical components to the state itself, when it comes to assessing its rationality, depending on the account, only (...) one of these dimensions matters. Either hope’s rationality is taken to be entirely derivative on the rationality of some belief that the hope entails, or the focus is entirely on the practical dimensions. If we take seriously the idea that both kinds of norms are at play, an account which treats these both as salient and as intertwining in important ways is preferable. I argue that as the practical importance of hope increases, the demand for the level of evidential support lessens and as the stakes get lower, the evidence for the likeliness of the hoped-for outcome coming to be must go up for the hope to be rational. This is so because a hope is rational insofar as it contributes to agential flourishing, but the different dimensions of hope each pick out different aspects of agency; to hope well requires agential competence in both the epistemic and practical realms. (shrink)

My main aim is to argue that most conceptions of doxastic agency do not respond to the skeptic’s challenge. I begin by considering some reasons for thinking that we are not doxastic agents. I then turn to a discussion of those who try to make sense of doxastic agency by appeal to belief’s reasons-responsive nature. What they end up calling agency is not robust enough to satisfy the challenge posed by the skeptics. To satisfy the skeptic, one needs to make (...) sense of the possibility of believing for nonevidential reasons. While this has been seen as an untenable view for both skeptics and anti-skeptics, I conclude by suggesting it is a position that has been too hastily dismissed. (shrink)

REVIEW ESSAY The minimal self needs a social update Self and other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame, by Dan Zahavi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, 304 pp.

I investigate what we mean when we hold people responsible for beliefs. I begin by outlining a puzzle concerning our ordinary judgments about beliefs and briefly survey and critique some common responses to the puzzle. I then present my response where I argue a sense needs to be articulated in which we do have a kind of control over our beliefs if our practice of attributing responsibility for beliefs is appropriate. In developing this notion of doxastic control, I draw from (...) John Fischer's discussions of “guidance control”. A central feature of this kind of control is the idea of “ownership”. I argue that we can own our beliefs and that we expect each other to do so. We take responsibility for our beliefs and taking responsibility includes taking control of them. I end by considering objections to my view as well as some implications of it. (shrink)

This paper takes a new look at an old question: what is the human self? It offers a proposal for theorizing the self from an enactive perspective as an autonomous system that is constituted through interpersonal relations. It addresses a prevalent issue in the philosophy of cognitive science: the body-social problem. Embodied and social approaches to cognitive identity are in mutual tension. On the one hand, embodied cognitive science risks a new form of methodological individualism, implying a dichotomy not between (...) the outside world of objects and the brain-bound individual but rather between body-bound individuals and the outside social world. On the other hand, approaches that emphasize the constitutive relevance of social interaction processes for cognitive identity run the risk of losing the individual in the interaction dynamics and of downplaying the role of embodiment. This paper adopts a middle way and outlines an enactive approach to individuation that is neither individualistic nor disembodied but integrates both approaches. Elaborating on Jonas’ notion of needful freedom it outlines an enactive proposal to understanding the self as co-generated in interactions and relations with others. I argue that the human self is a social existence that is organized in terms of a back and forth between social distinction and participation processes. On this view, the body, rather than being identical with the social self, becomes its mediator. (shrink)

Non-financial interests, and the conflicts of interest that may result from them, are frequently overlooked in biomedicine. This is partly due to the complex and varied nature of these interests, and the limited evidence available regarding their prevalence and impact on biomedical research and clinical practice. We suggest that there are no meaningful conceptual distinctions, and few practical differences, between financial and non-financial conflicts of interest, and accordingly, that both require careful consideration. Further, a better understanding of the complexities of (...) non-financial conflicts of interest, and their entanglement with financial conflicts of interest, may assist in the development of a more sophisticated approach to all forms of conflicts of interest. (shrink)

English summary: This book analyses the relationship between faith and love in terms of Aquinas' theology.

It is commonly held that (i) beliefs are revisable in the face of counter‐evidence and (ii) beliefs are connected to actions in reliable and predictable ways. Given such a view, many argue that if a mental state fails to respond to evidence or doesn't result in the kind of behavior typical or expected of belief, it is not a belief after all, but a different state. Yet, one finds seeming counter examples of resilient beliefs that fail to respond to evidence, (...) or that do not connect to action in the way that is expected. I offer a view of belief that does not force us to exclude states as realbeliefs that we pre‐reflectively think of as beliefs, and that does not require us to “outsource” the work belief seems to do to other mental states. I propose that we view belief as a type of emotion where emotions are understood a irreducibly blended states, containing representational, motivational and phenomenological elements. (shrink)

Schopenhauer como educador é a terceira, das quatro Considerações Intempestivas e, nesta obra, o então mestre de Nietzsche figura como modelo de educador. Schopenhauer é visto por Nietzsche, neste momento, como um exemplo de gênio, pois figurou na sociedade como exceção, não como regra. A universidade da época e a estrutura estatal são reprovadas por Nietzsche, e, para as confrontar, ele as utiliza como chave de leitura crítica o pensamento do autor conterrâneo. Estudaremos, perpassando as análises que Nietzsche de que (...) modo este autor figurou como alguém que apontou para uma educação intempestiva. Como essa postura de esforço de priorizar a singularidade pode ser configurada como perspectiva também artística. (shrink)

It has been argued that Extended Cognition (EXT), a recently much discussed framework in the philosophy of cognition, would serve as the theoretical basis to account for the impact of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) on the self and life of patients with Locked-in Syndrome (LIS). In this paper I will argue that this claim is unsubstantiated, EXT is not the appropriate theoretical background for understanding the role of BCI in LIS. I will critically assess what a theory of the extended (...) self would comprise and provide a list of desiderata for a theory of self that EXT fails to accommodate for. There is, however, an alternative framework in Cognitive Science, Enactivism, which entails the basis for an account of self that is able to accommodate for these desiderata. I will outline some first steps towards an Enactive approach to the self, suggesting that the self could be considered as a form of human autonomy. Understanding the self from an enactive point of view will allow to shed new light on the questions of whether and how BCIs affect or change the selves of patients with LIS. (shrink)

The usage of imprecise probabilities has been advocated in many domains: A number of philosophers have argued that our belief states should be “imprecise” in response to certain sorts of evidence, and imprecise probabilities have been thought to play an important role in disciplines such as artificial intelligence, climate science, and engineering. In this paper I’m interested in the question of whether the usage of imprecise probabilities can be given a practical motivation (a motivation based on practical rather than epistemic, (...) or alethic concerns). My aim is to challenge the central motivation for using imprecise probabilities in decision-making that has been offered in the literature: the idea that, in at least some contexts, it’s desirable to be ambiguity averse. If I succeed, this will show that we need to reconsider whether there are good reasons to use imprecise probabilities in contexts in which making good decisions is what's of primary concern. (shrink)

El “centro” constituye el punto más importante de las ciudades (Gutman y Hardoy, 1992; Hiernaux, 2007). Este término es entendido como un área concreta con capacidad de atraer e influir en el resto de los espacios urbanos que integra y cuyas funciones varían en función de su tipología, de sus relaciones y de su propio entorno (Mayorga y Pla, 2012).