After Plato's Forms, and Aristotle's substances, the Stoics posited the fundamental reality of lekta - the meanings of sentences, distinct from the sentences themselves. This volume analyses the resulting unique, complex, and consistent cosmic view in which lekta are the keystones of the structure of reality: they are all there is to say.

We conducted a thorough investigation of the impact of representativeness on reasoning and metacognitive processes by employing the Linda problem. In congruent versions, the more representative res...

This article reconstructs Habermas’ normative program for the successful and mutually beneficial co-existence of the religious and the non-religious, looking especially at his reliance upon a particular translation of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard himself wrote as a self-described Christian, or at least as someone invested in the possibilities of Christian existence, and so it is instructive to examine how Habermas, an admittedly non-religious thinker, renders Kierkegaard’s project. As I argue below, the specific ways in which Habermas employs Kierkegaard’s thought demonstrates what Habermas (...) himself advocates for others: an appreciative respect for religious insights and simultaneous self-reflection on the limitations of both secular and philosophical thinking. The article concludes by posing several challenges to Habermas's translation of Kierkegaard by looking at the post-secular critiques of liberalism that are found in the work of Asad, Mahmood and others. (shrink)

Starting again of thesis that the value appear to us like value in self, transcendental, and value for somebody, this paper enlarging upon idea that the value is object of knowledge but different of any others objects of the reality. The knowledge of value involve a emotional constituent and other rational constituent. Advancing the judgement of value, the feeling of value is essential for detection and to converted the being of value into reality of life and culture. This part of (...) value feeling do not put in danger the unity and eternity of value and it is very important for the knowledge and the intercultural communication in the world. (shrink)

This paper explores the contradiction of positing the existence of a God who is at once omnipotent and not omnipotent in respect of his power that arises in the thought of two African philosophers of religion, John A.I. Bewaji and Ademola Kazeem Fayemi who accept the limitation thesis that projects a limited God and deny the legitimacy of the transcendence view in Yoruba and, by extension, African thought. I demonstrate in this paper that the contradiction arises from the fact that (...) while Bewaji and Fayemi explicitly deny the legitimacy of the transcendence view in Yoruba and, by extension, African thought, they implicitly accept the view and unwittingly and illegitimately attempt to reconcile the conflicting views through the analysis of the notions of God’s creatorship, co-creatorship, and controllership. I conclude by recommending that instead of attempting to reconcile the antinomy of God’s existence in African philosophy of religion, African philosophers should acknowledge the legitimacy of the two conflicting theses constituting the antinomy and, accordingly, sustain logical consistency by strictly thinking within either the framework of limitedness or the framework of transcendence. (shrink)

On examinera la théorie stoïcienne des lekta en suivant les critiques formulées contre elle provenant de trois perspectives différentes : celle des Péripatéticiens, de Sextus Empiricus et celle formulée au sein même de l’école par Sénèque. Ces critiques se concentrent sur des questions relatives à une théorie du langage, mais une lecture minutieuse révèle que le cœur du problème réside dans un rejet profond de l’ontologie stoïcienne, constituée en partie, par les lekta. Les réactions des critiques tendent toutes à confirmer (...) leurs propres positions, soit en rejetant la possibilité de présence réelle des lekta, soit en considérant cette présence comme négligeable. Ces confirmations de la validité de ses propres convictions se font par le biais de déformations ou de raccourcis faits à la théorie stoïcienne. En dévoilant ces mécanismes d’escamotage, c’est pourtant bien l’importance de la théorie des lekta qui est percée à jour, et les sérieux défis qu’elle pose aux théories rivales, en remettant en question le contrôle supposé de l’homme sur ses pratiques linguistiques, et en complexifiant la relation de la logique à l’éthique. (shrink)

Perspective taking is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct characterized by three components: cognitive, affective, and visual. The experience of psychological maltreatment impairs the child’s emotional competence; in particular, maltreated children present difficulty in understanding and regulating emotions and in social understanding ability. In addition, the literature contains several contributions that highlight maladaptive behaviors of children with a history of maltreatment in peer interactions in the school context. Perspective taking ability has rarely been studied in maltreated children and the existing studies (...) have produced different and often conflicting results that require further insights. On the grounds of these premises, the main objective of the present research is to investigate perspective taking ability in preschool children from maltreating and non-maltreating family contexts and its role in social adjustment, in terms of prosocial and aggressive behavior toward peers inside the kindergarten. A second objective is to verify the effectiveness of a training aimed to promote perspective taking ability in victims of psychological maltreatment. This research, organized into two separate studies, involved 249 preschool children: 206 children from non-maltreating family contexts and 43 brought up in psychologically maltreating families. Perspective taking was measured via the administration of several tests, and prosocial behavior and aggressiveness were observed via non-participant observations in the school context. The training involved maltreated children in small-group meetings based on familiar and appealing activities within the mother–child community. The overall results show that children’s perspective taking ability, in particular the affective perspective taking, contributed to social adjustment. In fact, greater affective perspective taking ability was correlated to a higher frequency of prosocial behaviors toward peers and minor frequency of aggressiveness. Finally, the results of the training showed an increase in perspective taking, especially in the affective dimension, and a consequent increase in prosocial behaviors and a decrease in aggressive ones. Therefore, the affective perspective taking ability seems to represent a very significant protective factor, which should be focused and strengthened in order to improve the social adaptation of preschool children who are victims of psychological abuse. (shrink)

This paper explores the contradiction of positing the existence of a God who is at once omnipotent and not omnipotent in respect of his power that arises in the thought of two African philosophers of religion, John A.I. Bewaji and Ademola Kazeem Fayemi who accept the limitation thesis that projects a limited God and deny the legitimacy of the transcendence view in Yoruba and, by extension, African thought. I demonstrate in this paper that the contradiction arises from the fact that (...) while Bewaji and Fayemi explicitly deny the legitimacy of the transcendence view in Yoruba and, by extension, African thought, they implicitly accept the view and unwittingly and illegitimately attempt to reconcile the conflicting views through the analysis of the notions of God’s creatorship, co-creatorship, and controllership. I conclude by recommending that instead of attempting to reconcile the antinomy of God’s existence in African philosophy of religion, African philosophers should acknowledge the legitimacy of the two conflicting theses constituting the antinomy and, accordingly, sustain logical consistency by strictly thinking within either the framework of limitedness or the framework of transcendence. (shrink)

This article provides a brief overview of the efforts to develop and refine the Critical thinking Assessment Test and its potential for improving the design of classroom assessments. The CAT instrument was designed to help faculty understand their students’ strengths and weaknesses using a short answer essay format. The instrument assesses a broad collection of critical thinking skills that transcend most disciplines. The questions were deliberately designed around real-world scenarios that did not require specialized knowledge from any particular discipline. Various (...) faculty who collaborated in the national dissemination of the CAT instrument found that it was a helpful model for designing better course assessments to grade student work. Classroom assessments modeled on the CAT emphasize more critical thinking within the discipline and less rote retention of factual information. We describe the ongoing work to help faculty successfully adapt the CAT to applications that can be used in each discipline’s courses to evaluate and encourage students’ critical thinking. (shrink)

The article places Game of Thrones within a tradition of pessimism, reaching back to Blaise Pascal and coloured by Nabokov’s vision of birth as a separation between two voids. This lineage provides a philosophical thread to analyse the motivations and actions of the protagonists of Game of Thrones, in particular their relation to child-killing. The void looms large in the world of Game of Thrones as the unchartered space beyond the wall. It is the awareness of the reality of this (...) void and the horrors it harbours which is shown to propel those who have it, to go to the greatest lengths to preserve the life of a child. (shrink)

Media representations are presently a determinant form in fixing and promoting memory in modern times. These representations are synthetic cultural formations, complex abstractions which function under pre-determined options. The search for and selection of objects and their images, usually fo..

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 217-240, April 2024.

"In this highly original book, Ada Agada responds to the question of how a philosophy can be African and at the same time universally relevant by constructing an original philosophical system that is at once African and universal. Drawing on African forms of thought and conceptual schemes like ethnophilosophy, ubuntu, sage philosophy, négritude, ibuanyidanda philosophy, and ezumezu logic, the author introduces new concepts and conceptual schemes like mood and proto-panpsychism into philosophical vocabulary and weaves them into a coherent and original (...) system that promises to significantly impact contemporary African philosophy. Arguing for intercultural and comparative philosophy as a desirable mode of philosophising in a continually globalising and interconnected world, the book demonstrates the universal applicability of consolationism. This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of African Studies, intercultural philosophy, philosophy of mind, and existentialism"--. (shrink)

This paper examines Nietzsche’s conception of what persists, or occurs, as becoming in relation to Ramose’s reconceptualization of what persists, or occurs, as be-ing becoming with a view to showing how divergence and convergence of thought in the western and African contexts can inform cross-cultural philosophizing. Nietzsche radically subverts the traditional notion of an eternal immutable being that constitutes the ground of change and replaces it with the notion of becoming. Ramose’s notion of being, which is grounded in ubuntu philosophy, (...) integrates a dynamic perspective into a process view of reality. While Nietzsche seeks to abandon the categories of being, unity, and purpose altogether, Ramose ambiguously retains them and, in fact, endorses the category of unity. I highlight the dynamics of Nietzsche’s notion of becoming and articulate the basic principles of Ramose’s idea of being as be-ing becoming and argue that both thinkers’ struggle to subvert substance-based understanding of being invites us to question the intelligibility of the binary opposition of being with becoming and to regard both concepts as indicating different ways of understanding reality. (shrink)

"Marin's admiration (in both seventeenth-century senses) for the word made flesh, and hence the word made power, is what makes this book both fascinating and disturbing." -- Times Literary Supplement A wicked queen orders the palace cook to kill her grandchildren and serve them up for dinner -- "in a sauce Robert." But as any good cook knows, this sauce is properly served with game, not domestic animals. Does the ogress transgress? Perhaps, but the cook breaks the rules as well. (...) Deceiving his mistress, he rescues the children and instead serves goat and lamb. In this provocative volume, Louis Marin treats a subject to which some of the most exciting literary criticism has been devoted: the body as represented in text and image. From fairy tales to biblical narrative, from the divine body in the eucharist to the body of Louis XIV as described in his physicians' journals, Marin focuses on the peculiar relationship between verbal and oral functions--speaking and eating, boasting and gluttony, lying and cannibalism. Drawing on the methodologies of semiology, philosophy of language, and literary and art criticism, Marin explores works by Rabelais, La Fontaine, Perrault, and the Logic of Port-Royal. Throughout, he is concerned with the conceptualization of desire and pleasure, justice and force, natural violence and political power -- and questions their ideological as well as their symbolic bases. (shrink)

This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...) found online. Misinformation sharing belongs more in the realm of rumour spreading and gossiping rather than in the information-giving language games. However, the norms for sharing cannot be fixed in advance, as these emerge at the interaction between the platforms’ explicit rules, local norms established by user practices, and a meta-norm of sociality. This unpredictability does not leave us with a normative void as an important user responsibility still remains, namely that of making the context of the sharing gesture explicit. If users will clarify how their gestures of sharing are meant to be interpreted by others, they will implicitly assume responsibility for possible misunderstandings based on omissions, and the harms of shared misinformation can be diminished. (shrink)

1. Dal dogmatismo teologico al teismo morale. (1755-1783).

: Standing before one of Ada Medina's works in a museum recently, I knew myself to be in the company of a distinct presence. The exquisite form was so novel, yet its layers of organicity were deeply familiar. The piece effectively conveyed complex relationality, and pointed toward innovative forms of being, without resorting to didacticism, melodrama, or cliché. I had a strong urge to hug it. I needed to step back and figure it out.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Fashion Cyborgs and Supermodels.

El texto plantea la importancia del oikos griego en tanto referente simbólico que puede permitir, en condiciones de adversidad, la construcción de una estética de la existencia que se constituya en una opción para seguir viviendo cuando las condiciones son desfavorables para la existencia de la vida y para la vivencia del hogar, es decir, en escenarios de conflicto como los que actualmente viven muchas personas en condición de refugiados, de inmigrantes, de asilados; así también quienes están secuestrados y aquellos (...) que viven el desplazamiento forzado y ambiental. Tomaremos como referente de la adversidad lo sucedido en el campo de concentración de Auschwitz para relacionar aquellos hechos de crueldad con muchas de las situaciones que acontecen hoy en el panorama global. Todo esto con la idea de proponer la vivencia del oikos como una construcción íntima que manifiesta la vida y que puede convertirse en un refugio en circunstancias difíciles. (shrink)

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user's side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical (...) thinking online and, instead, we propose that a better way to understand the virtuous behaviour at hand is as critical engagement, namely a mutual cultivation of critical skills among the members of an epistemic bubble. This mutual cultivation allows members within an epistemic bubble (in contrast, as we will show, with the authority-based models of epistemic echo chambers) to become more autonomous critical thinkers by cultivating self-trust. We use the model of relational autonomy as well as resources from work on epistemic self-trust and epistemic interdependence to develop an explanatory framework, which in turn may ground rules for identifying and creating virtuous epistemic bubbles within the environments of social media platforms. (shrink)

ENTREVISTA COM PROFESSORAS (ES) DE FILOSOFIA DO ENSINO SUPERIOR DO CEARÁ – BLOCO ICom: Ada Beatriz Gallicchio Kroef, Vicente Thiago Freire Brazil, Roberta Liana Damasceno Costa, Elizabeth Bezerra FurtadoPor: Antônio Alex Pereira de Sousa, Paulo Willame Araújo de Lima.

In his 2015 Theoria article titled ‘A Rejection of Humanism in African Moral Tradition’, Motsamai Molefe argues that Kwasi Wiredu's humanistic interpretation of traditional Akan ethics cannot be the best account of African ethics because Wiredu overlooks the significant sentiment in traditional African thought that regards reality as a holistic totality of spiritual, social and environmental components. I point out that Molefe's rejection of Wiredu's humanism follows from the latter's de-emphasising of supernaturalism. I argue that Molefe overlooks the fact that (...) the displacement of God in this humanism is consistent with the limited God sentiment in traditional African thought, which confirms Wiredu's humanistic ethics as one rooted in traditional African worldviews. Adopting the method of philosophical exposition and analysis, I show how Wiredu's limited God framework motivates scepticism about the possibility of a supernaturalist ethics and renders a humanistic orientation a more attractive account of African moral tradition. (shrink)

Brains enjoy a bodily life. Therefore animals are subjects with a point of view. Yet, coding betrays an anthropomorphic bias: we can, therefore they must. Here I propose a reformulation of Brette's question that emphasizes organismic perception, cautioning for misinterpretations based on external ideal-observer accounts. Theoretical ethology allows computational neuroscience to understand brains from the perspective of their owners.

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we (...) will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text. (shrink)