In this article the public-theological motives in the film As it is in heaven is analised to demonstrate the film producer Kay Pollack's ideal to communicate through the film that people should live their lives here and now authentically without seeking excuses for being happy. In this article the principles of narratology is applied in the analysis of the film's plot, characterisation, plotted time and narrated spaces. It is also argued that the protagonist in the film can be regarded as (...) a 'Christ-figure' and that the film conveys a 'Christ narrative' in a secularised context. Societal issues such as emotional abuse and violence against children, women, people with disability and animals constitute building blocks of the narrative. Ecclesiastical hypocrisy and outdated sexual values endorsed by the institutional church are replaced by a choir consisting of common people which leads a whole world to sing in harmony. (shrink)

This essay seeks to answer the questions of which children in the contemporary world have been targeted and killed "unintentionally”or "at random" by the Brazilian State. In order to understand the place of children in this “war” we rely on the work, among others, of Achille Mbembe, Maurizio Lazzarato and Peter Pál Pelbart. Our text is structured in six sections. First, we take up the concepts of biopolitics, biopower and necropolitics, in an attempt to specify the type of governmental power (...) that is exercised nowadays. Biopower is understood, not only as a military or political concept, but also in relation to a “biological” war against blacks, against certain sexualities, against some women and against some children. We than show how the construction of the universal idea of “child” excludes children who do not belong to this representation, which is, in general, disseminated as being the only image of a child. This diffusion of a single, universal notion of “child” is made through countless discursive and audiovisual imagery, and excludes black children and all those who diverge from or “flee” the hegemonic way of representing, thinking and writing about what a child is. Finally, we verify that the dead children are black and poor and we demonstrate the importance of children's political participation in social life. (shrink)

Religions and the research about them were significantly affected by the feminist practices and studies in the twentieth century. In the religious context that has been presented in this third millennium, marked by the autonomy of women and their role in society, further studies are necessary to understand the religious phenomenon that occurs in the silent protagonism of women. One has to ask how to research and to think religion from a feminist perspective at this time; what religion is for (...) women, how women experience religion and appropriate of it in the third millennium. The new religious practices, the connection of women to religion or the ruptures with religions, spearheaded by them, the resistances, their active subjectivity, as alternatives to the traditional spaces circumscribed by religious patriarchy, as well as the issue of autonomy and responsibility of the women in the construction of spiritual and religious alternatives in the contemporary society deserve attention. This text aims to present signs of these protagonist movements of women, especially in the Christian context in the current Brazil, stating hypotheses and presenting reflections on this reality. The text dialogues with the de-colonial feminism and has implications for the ways of conceptualizing and studying religion from the institutionalized religious forms. (shrink)

O artigo identifica as instâncias subjetivas do que leva o ser humano à busca por experiências de cunho espiritual e religioso. Situa a contemporânea busca religiosa e a crise de sentido que afeta a humanidade como uma busca de realização espiritual e do ser-si-próprio, diante de um mundo onde a potencialidade espiritual se encontra cada vez mais devastada. Viktor Frankl, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, todos originários das contribuições da fenomenologia, são os principais autores a sustentar a reflexão em torno do (...) tema. Frankl sustenta a ideia de um inconsciente espiritual, de uma transcendência da consciência, e Jaspers e Tillich se ocupam com a análise da “situação espiritual do nosso tempo”, uma era cujos reflexos colhemos sobremodo no terceiro milênio. Todos tratam de decifrar a intrínseca relação da não realização espiritual, da busca de um sentido do ser humano para a sua existência com a crise mais generalizada no mundo ocidental. A conclusão do texto segue na perspectiva de que a busca espiritual é inerente ao ser humano, pois se trata da realização do ser humano como ser-si-próprio no mundo. A impossibilidade de realização desta dimensão leva a uma profunda frustração existencial cujas consequências são patentes no modo de vida da humanidade na contemporaneidade. Palavras-chave: Espiritual. Busca de vida. Psicologia da religião. Viktor Frankl. Karl Jaspers. Paul Tillich.The article identifies the subjective instances of what makes humans to search for experiences of spiritual and religious nature. It places the contemporary religious quest and the crisis of meaning that affects humanity as a search of spiritual fulfillment and of the being-oneself, facing a world where spiritual potentiality is increasingly devastated. Viktor Frankl, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, all originating from the contributions of Phenomenology, are the main authors that sustain the reflection around the topic. Frankl holds the idea of an spiritual unconscious, a transcendence of consciousness, and Jaspers and Tillich deal with the analysis of the "spiritual situation of our time", an era whose reflexes we mostly reap in the third millennium. All of them try to decipher the intrinsic relationship of not spiritual realization and of the human being search for a sense of its own existence with the most generalized crisis in the western world. The conclusion of the text follows the perspective that the spiritual quest is inherent in the human being, because it is about the realization of the human being as being-oneself in the world. The impossibility of realization of this dimension leads to a profound existential frustration whose consequences are patent on the way of life of mankind in contemporary times. Keywords: Spiritual. Search for meaning. Psychology of religion. Viktor Frankl. Karl Jaspers. Paul Tillich. (shrink)

Este trabalho procura mapear, a partir de um estudo bibliográfico, a genealogia enquanto referencial teórico metodológico pós-estruturalista. Como resultado, observa-se que a genealogia aparece de forma contínua e com muitas similaridades em Nietzsche, Foucault e Deleuze, contudo, na educação trata-se ainda de uma perspectiva teórica metodológica pouco explorada. São elementos da genealogia: questionar o conhecimento, o saber e as verdades; questionar quem as produzem e em que condições, fazendo emergir as relações de poder que as tornam possíveis; por fim, entrar (...) no campo da genealogia é colocar em foco saberes antes não considerados, é trazer à tona o marginal e o impensado. Ce travail a comme objectif de cartographier, à partir d’une étude bibliographique, la généalogie en tant que référence théorico-méthodologique poststructuraliste. L’on a par conséquent observé que la généalogie apparaît de façon continue et avec nombre de similitudes chez Nietzsche, Foucault et Deleuze. Toutefois, en éducation, il s’agit encore d’une perspective théorique peu exploitée. Font partie de la généalogie les éléments suivants : remettre en question la connaissance, le savoir et les vérités ; s’intéresser à ceux qui les produisent et dans quelles conditions, mettant ainsi en lumière les rapports de pouvoir qui les rendent possibles ; et, enfin, mettre en relief des savoirs auparavant non pris en compte, faire émerger le marginal et l’impensé. (shrink)

ArgumentLudwik Antoni Birkenmajer (1855-1929), following along the paths pioneered by Leopold Prowe, Maximilian Curtze, Franz Hipler, and J. L. E. Dreyer, joined them as trailblazers of Copernican scholarship in the nineteenth century. Educated in the classics and mathematics, Birkenmajer began by examining more closely the Cracow background to Copernicus's development and studying his works and annotations in books he owned or read. Birkenmajer contributed many discoveries that eventually became common knowledge, and his studies loomed over Polish research on Copernicus (...) into the 1970s. Focusing on historical context and his original insights, the essay reminds readers of his contributions (sections 1–2), relates them to discussions of Copernicus's precursors (section 3), to the debate about Maragha precedents (section 4), his reading of theUppsala Notebook(sections 2 and 5), and his account of the origin of Copernicus's heliocentrism (section 6). By means of a more critical assessment of his interpretation, the essay revises earlier accounts, rescuing the original insights that mark Birkenmajer's most important contributions to current debates and his efforts to reconstruct Copernicus's path to heliocentrism. (shrink)

Growing concern has been expressed that we have entered a “post-truth” era in which each of us willfully believes whatever we choose, aided and abetted by alternative and social media that spin alternative realities for boutique consumption. A prime example of the belief in alternative realities is said to be acceptance of “conspiracy theories”—a term that is often used as a pejorative to indict claims of conspiracy that are so obviously absurd that only the unhinged could believe them. The epistemological (...) standard often involved in this indictment, however—the standard of “obvious” falsity—invites subjectivity in its application, because what is obviously false to one person can be common sense to another. This is not just a truism; considerable research suggests that people’s political beliefs, in general, and their acceptance or rejection of conspiracy theories in particular, tends in large part to be determined by partisan, ideological, and other priors. (shrink)

The title of this paper reflects the fact truthmaking is quite frequently considered to be expressive of realism. What this means, exactly, will become clearer in the course of our discussion, but since we are interested in Armstrong’s work on truthmaking in particular, it is natural to start from a brief discussion of how truthmaking and realism appear to be associated in his work. In this paper, special attention is given to the supposed link between truthmaking and realism, but it (...) is argued that this link should not be taken too seriously, as truthmaking turns out to be, to a large extent, ontologically neutral. Some consequences of this are studied. (shrink)

It is now possible to have a child without sexual intercourse. The history of this apparently new statement has been breefly synthetised.The new perspectives open ethical problems for the scientific community and a new social context for single women.

The main aim of this paper is to introduce the logics of evidence and truth $$LET_{K}^+$$ and $$LET_{F}^+$$ together with sound, complete, and decidable six-valued deterministic semantics for them. These logics extend the logics $$LET_{K}$$ and $$LET_{F}^-$$ with rules of propagation of classicality, which are inferences that express how the classicality operator $${\circ }$$ is transmitted from less complex to more complex sentences, and vice-versa. The six-valued semantics here proposed extends the 4 values of Belnap-Dunn logic with 2 more values (...) that intend to represent (positive and negative) reliable information. A six-valued non-deterministic semantics for $$LET_{K}$$ is obtained by means of Nmatrices based on swap structures, and the six-valued semantics for $$LET_{K}^+$$ is then obtained by imposing restrictions on the semantics of $$LET_{K}$$. These restrictions correspond exactly to the rules of propagation of classicality that extend $$LET_{K}$$. The logic $$LET_{F}^+$$ is obtained as the implication-free fragment of $$LET_{K}^+$$. We also show that the 6 values of $$LET_{K}^+$$ and $$LET_{F}^+$$ define a lattice structure that extends the lattice L4 defined by the Belnap-Dunn four-valued logic with the 2 additional values mentioned above, intuitively interpreted as positive and negative reliable information. Finally, we also show that $$LET_{K}^+$$ is Blok-Pigozzi algebraizable and that its implication-free fragment $$LET_{F}^+$$ coincides with the degree-preserving logic of the involutive Stone algebras. (shrink)

Hume's famous discussion of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is curious both on account of the arguments he does deploy and on account of the arguments he does not deploy, but might have been expected to. The first and second parts of this paper will be devoted to examining, respectively, these two objects of curiosity. The second part I regard as the more important, because I shall there try to show that the fact that Hume does not deploy (...) an argument that he might have been expected to deploy in fact reflects a weakness in the view of natural laws that has come to be associated with Hume's name. I shall argue, in fact, that it is a symptom of the defectiveness of the ‘Humean’ view of natural laws that on that view it is only too easy to rule out the possibility of a miracle ever occurring. In the third part of the paper, I shall show how another view of laws can overcome this problem. (shrink)

Between 1873 and 1876, Felix Klein published a series of papers that he later placed under the rubric anschauliche Geometrie in the second volume of his collected works (1922). The present study attempts not only to follow the course of this work, but also to place it in a larger historical context. Methodologically, Klein’s approach had roots in Poncelet’s principle of continuity, though the more immediate influences on him came from his teachers, Plücker and Clebsch. In the 1860s, Clebsch reworked (...) some of the central ideas in Riemann’s theory of Abelian functions to obtain complicated results for systems of algebraic curves, most published earlier by Hesse and Steiner. These findings played a major role in enumerative geometry, whereas Plücker’s work had a strongly qualitative character that imbued Klein’s early studies. A leitmotif in these works can be seen in the interplay between real curves and surfaces as reflected by their transformational properties. During the early 1870s, Klein and Zeuthen began to explore the possibility of deriving all possible forms for real cubic surfaces as well as quartic curves. They did so using continuity methods reminiscent of Poncelet’s earlier approach. Both authors also relied on visual arguments, which Klein would later advance under the banner of intuitive geometry (anschauliche Geometrie). (shrink)