"CAMINOS DEL PENSAR DE NUESTRA AMÉRICA se integra con 27 ensayos, cuyos autores escriben en torno a siete materias principales: Eticidad y educación; Circunstancialidad y liberación; Literatura y expresión; Movimientos sociales ¿antiguos y modernos?; Epistemologías actuales en América Latina; Tecnología ecología y ciencia, y cierra con Temas en el tintero en América Latina, todos ellos con un objetivo común: la historia de las ideas. Gracias al trabajo metodológico y guía del doctor Mario Magallón Anaya fue posible conjuntar temas diversos entrelazando (...) ideas; este libro es resultado de sesiones de análisis en las que distintas generaciones convergieron desde sus disciplinas para pensar a nuestro mundo en estas primeras dos décadas del siglo XXI."--Back cover. (shrink)

Escribir sobre ética —y en particular sobre ética médica— en los tiempos que corren comporta un cierto riesgo, no sólo por la posible incompetencia del autor, sino porque éste se encuentra algo desubicado en un entorno de crisis moral propiciada por el cientifismo como nueva religión laica y la voracidad de los mercados. La preocupación de los legos por la creciente dificultad en discernir aquello que es ético o bueno de lo que no lo es constituye en la actualidad un (...) dilema universal, al menos por cuanto respecta a nuestra civilización occidental. Dicha preocupación se encuentra plasmada en decenas de textos dedicados no ya a los aspectos más abstractos o filosóficos de la ética general, sino a las “éticas particulares” aplicables a las profesiones, las empresas o al ámbito político. Así, se habla de una ética periodística, del compliance industrial, de la investigación, de la banca, de las redes de sociales y, por supuesto de la medicina. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a computational framework aimed at extending the problem solving capabilities of cognitive artificial agents through the introduction of a novel, goal-directed, dynamic knowledge generation mechanism obtained via a non monotonic reasoning procedure. In particular, the proposed framework relies on the assumption that certain classes of problems cannot be solved by simply learning or injecting new external knowledge in the declarative memory of a cognitive artificial agent but, on the other hand, require a mechanism for the (...) automatic and creative re-framing, or re-formulation, of the available knowledge. We show how such mechanism can be obtained trough a framework of dynamic knowledge generation that is able to tackle the problem of commonsense concept combination. In addition, we show how such a framework can be employed in the field of cognitive architectures in order to overcome situations like the impasse in SOAR by extending the possible options of its subgoaling procedures. (shrink)

The paper discusses from a metaphysical standpoint the nature of the dependence relation underpinning the talk of mutual action between material and spatiotemporal structures in general relativity. It is shown that the standard analyses of dependence in terms of causation or grounding are ill-suited for the general relativistic context. Instead, a non-standard analytical framework in terms of structural equation modeling is exploited, which leads to the conclusion that the kind of dependence encoded in the Einstein field equations is a novel (...) one. (shrink)

O presente artigo examina como a obra historiográfica _Revoluções Cisplatinas_, de 1915, do político, diplomata e historiador Alfredo Augusto Varella, representa tanto disputa política como uma forma de escrita da história sobre a Farroupilha. A partir da hipótese de que na Primeira República, no Rio Grande do Sul, houve uma hegemonia social e política do PRR quer se investigar como a obra de Varella articulou-se com o seu contexto. Portanto, o objetivo é analisar como foi construída a narrativa sobre a (...) Farroupilha no contexto de disputas em torno do borgismo. Para atingir tal objetivo, usa-se o conceito de operação historiográfica de Michel de Certeau, isto é, como a partir de uma análise do lugar social, da prática científica e da escrita do texto pode-se perceber as transformações na escrita da história sobre a Farroupilha. Por fim, percebe-se que a obra analisada foi um objeto tanto de luta política como de virada interpretativa na escrita da Farroupilha. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSome firms are initiating pro-stakeholder activities and policies that transcend conventional corporate social responsibility conceptions and seem inconsistent with their business interests or economic responsibilities. These initiatives, which are neither legally nor morally obligatory, are responding to calls for a more active role of business in society and for a broader interpretation of CSR. In fact, they benefit stakeholders in a superior and an innovative way and are difficult to reconcile with commonly used rationales in the extant CSR literature, such (...) as win-win opportunities, creating shared value, or corporate philanthropy. For better insight, we develop a qualified account of the concept of supererogation from ethical theory. This account, which examines voluntary responses to moral obligations from which a business is normally excused, is applied to identify the unique features of the initiatives that are not readily understood within conventional reasoning, which is generally focused on a business case. (shrink)

Researchers in cultural evolutionary theory have recently proposed the foundation of a new field of research in cultural evolution named ‘epistemic evolution’. Drawing on evolutionary epistemology’s early studies, this programme aims to study science as an evolutionary cultural process. The paper discusses the way CET’s study of science can contribute to the philosophical debate and, vice versa, how the philosophy of science can benefit from the adoption of a cultural evolutionary perspective. Here, I argue that CET’s main contribution to an (...) evolutionary model of scientific growth comes from the application of ‘population thinking’ to science. Populationism offers a ‘variation based’ understanding of scientists’ epistemic and socio-epistemic criteria that is able to better accommodate the variegated preferences that intervene in scientific epistemic decisions. A discussion of the so called theory choice context is offered as an example of the way a populationist approach can shed new light on the operation of scientists’ epistemic choices. (shrink)

We must undoubtedly take advantage of the benefits brought by new technologies, and we must apply them to the human being to the extent that a prolonged and serene reflection tells us that this application brings improvements in a full sense. But that does not mean that we should accept the ideological discourse of transhumanism. This discourse owes much of its power of conviction to certain philosophical assumptions that have not been sufficiently clarified and discussed. This article aims to highlight (...) some of them. (shrink)

In our paper we aim to meditate on the concept of depth (profondeur) in the works of M. Merleau-Ponty, as it is a key notion to understand the French philosopher’s concept of space. Furthermore we will try to show that space plays a fundamental role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, allowing us to understand important features both of his phenomenological readings and ontological project.

As we turn to the lived experience of memory, we are confronted with an eerie and enigmatic possibility: the possibility to remember what we ourselves never lived. How to explain phenomenologically this enigmatic but fundamental level of spatialized memory? I would like to come back to these issues in order to face yet another fundamental question: Does a phenomenology of spatialized memory require any onto-phenomenological concretizations?

This book explores the philosophical writings of Gerda Walther. It features essays that recover large parts of Walther’s oeuvre in order to show her contribution to phenomenology and philosophy. In addition, the volume contains English translations of her key work. The essays consider the interdisciplinary implications of Gerda Walther’s ideas for sociology, political science, psychology, women’s and gender studies, and religious studies. A student of Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Alexander Pfänder, she wrote foundational studies on the ego, community, mysticism (...) and religion, and consciousness. Walther’s discussion of empathy, identification, the ego and ego-consciousness, alterity, God, mysticism, sensation, intentionality, sociality, politics, and woman is relevant not only to phenomenology and philosophy but also to scholars of religion, sociology, political science, and psychology. Gerda Walther was one of the important figures of the early phenomenological movement. However, as a woman, she could not habilitate at a German University and was, therefore, denied a position. Her complete works have yet to be published. This ground-breaking volume not only helps readers discover a vital voice. It also demonstrates the significant contribution of women to the early phenomenological movement. (shrink)

Esse artigo parte da arte, da ficção científica e da literatura fantástica para propor uma outra cosmopolítica, divergente daquela que sustentaria, simultaneamente, realismo literário e etnocentrismo ocidental.

It is in Sein und Zeit that Heidegger decrees the end of the Geisteswissenschaften and their tradition, when, as he is commenting on the Briefwechsel [exchange of letters] between Dilthey and Yorck von Wartenburg, he pays homage to the latter for “his full understanding of the fundamental character of history as virtuality [...] [which he] owes to his knowledge of the character of being of human Dasein itself.” Consequently, Heidegger continues, “the interest of understanding historicality” is confronted with the task (...) of an elaboration of the “generic difference between the ontic and the historical.” But he must part ways with Yorck when the latter, after having clearly established that difference, moves from virtuality to mysticism. If, on the other hand, once separated from the ontic, “the question of historicality shows itself to be an ontological question which inquires into the constitution of being of historical being”, it is once again towards Dilthey that one must turn, in spite of his confused vitalism. Heidegger effects two operations at once. On the one hand, he expels the Geisteswissenschaften from the position they occupied at the heart of metaphysics, as the inheritors of the Enlightenment and the outcome of Hegelianism. On the other hand, he brings to fulfillment the critical labor which had precisely shown its value in Dilthey’s historicism —acritical labor which develops the search for the meaning of historicity and allows one to move from the theory of objectivity to that of expression, from the acknowledgment of historiography in the context of the critique of cognition to its definition at the heart of the transcendental schematism. Historicity is then posited as an ontological dimension and leaves only its ontic residue for historiography. (shrink)

The mirror is the metaphor of what produces, together with the unity of our image, also its doubling, openingnt hereby the possibility of moving toward the state of reflection. What role can philosophy have to educate for reflection? Philosophy must "return to the mids of men" and, as J. Dewey suggests, in order to reflexive thinking to be carried out as a particular form of thought, it is necessary to dwell a state of doubt, discomfort, disorientation.

Algunos defensores del realismo científico, particularmente Ilkka Niiniluoto y Philip Kitcher, han intentado moderar las tesis ontológicas más fuertes del realismo buscando la integración de la teoría de la verdad como correspondencia con alguna versión matizada del relativismo conceptual propugnado por Putnam, según el cual el mundo carece de una estructura propia y, por tanto, la ontología depende de nuestros esquemas conceptuales. No es claro, sin embargo, que ambas cosas se puedan armonizar fácilmente. Si nuestro conocimiento del mundo está mediado (...) por nuestras categorías y conceptos, y si además la elección de esas categorías y conceptos puede variar en función de nuestros intereses y no obedecen a la existencia de unos supuestos géneros naturales o a una estructura propia del mundo, se torna entonces problemático establecer a qué corresponden nuestros enunciados verdaderos. ¿Corresponden al mundo independiente de nuestra mente o al mundo estructurado por nosotros mediante nuestras categorías y conceptos? En este artículo se presentarán las principales dificultades que encuentra este proyecto de realismo moderado tanto en Niiniluoto como en Kitcher, se analizarán sus propuestas para solventar dichas dificultades, mostrando sus insuficiencias y, finalmente, se propondrá una modalidad de realismo ontológico moderado que, recogiendo algo del espíritu de la relatividad conceptual de Putnam, es lo suficientemente fuerte como para sustentar una teoría de la verdad como correspondencia. Replucación autorizada. Publicado por primera vez en Contrastes vol. XII. (shrink)

Dynamic conceptual reframing represents a crucial mechanism employed by humans, and partially by other animal species, to generate novel knowledge used to solve complex goals. In this talk, I will present a reasoning framework for knowledge invention and creative problem solving exploiting TCL: a non-monotonic extension of a Description Logic (DL) of typicality able to combine prototypical (commonsense) descriptions of concepts in a human-like fashion [1]. The proposed approach has been tested both in the task of goal-driven concept invention [2,3] (...) and has additionally applied within the context of serendipity-based recommendation systems [4]. I will present the obtained results, the lessons learned, and the road ahead of this research path. -/- . (shrink)

This paper presents a practical case study showing how, despite the nowadays limited collaboration between AI and Cognitive Science (CogSci), cognitive research can still have an important role in the development of novel AI technologies. After a brief historical introduction about the reasons of the divorce between AI and CogSci research agendas (happened in the mid’80s of the last century), we try to provide evidence of a renewed collaboration by showing a recent case study on a commonsense reasoning system, built (...) by using insights from cognitive semantics. (shrink)

Algunos defensores del realismo científico, particularmente Ilkka Niiniluoto y Philip Kitcher, han intentado moderar las tesis ontológicas más fuertes del realismo buscando la integración de la teoría de la verdad como correspondencia con alguna versión matizada del relativismo conceptual propugnado por Putnam, según el cual el mundo carece de una estructura propia y, por tanto, la ontología depende de nuestros esquemas conceptuales. No es claro, sin embargo, que ambas cosas se puedan armonizar fácilmente. Si nuestro conocimiento del mundo está mediado (...) por nuestras categorías y conceptos, y si además la elección de esas categorías y conceptos puede variar en función de nuestros intereses y no obedecen a la existencia de unos supuestos géneros naturales o a una estructura propia del mundo, se torna entonces problemático establecer a qué corresponden nuestros enunciados verdaderos. ¿Corresponden al mundo independiente de nuestra mente o al mundo estructurado por nosotros mediante nuestras categorías y conceptos? En este artículo se presentarán las principales dificultades que encuentra este proyecto de realismo moderado tanto en Niiniluoto como en Kitcher, se analizarán sus propuestas para solventar dichas dificultades, mostrando sus insuficiencias y, finalmente, se propondrá una modalidad de realismo ontológico moderado que, recogiendo algo del espíritu de la relatividad conceptual de Putnam, es lo suficientemente fuerte como para sustentar una teoría de la verdad como correspondencia. (shrink)

Persuasive technologies can adopt several strategies to change the attitudes and behaviors of their users. In this work we present some empirical results stemming from the hypothesis - firstly formulated in [3] - that there is a strong connection between some well known cognitive biases reducible to fallacious argumentative schemata and some of the most common persuasion strategies adopted within digital technologies. In particular, we will report how both framing and fallacious-reducible mechanisms are nowadays used to design web and mobile (...) technologies in domains ranging from e-commerce [4] and news recommendations [1] to the jihadist propaganda. We will also show how and to what extent such persuasive strategies have an impact on nudging the choices of the users in digital environments. (shrink)

In this article we aim to distinguish between the transhuman and posthuman condition, according to their anthropological, ontological, and ethical natures. We will show that the current historical moment can be considered the beginning of a transhuman civilisation, given that the characteristics of the transhuman are already present in today’s human being. We will show that a series of decisive limitations for belonging to the human condition are in the process of being transcended due to acquisition of attributes of divinity (...) that human beings do not currently possess: omnipotence, omnipresence , ex nihilo creation – starting from the divine creative ideation – and immortality. Humans are increasingly taking on the attributes of divinity in the process of human enhancements. We will discuss the ways in which technology allows the human to overcome these limitations, elevating humans past their current condition, in a process in which they gain technological transcendence. Excepting immortality, all other limitations, once exceeded, generate a transhuman condition. Immortality generates a posthuman condition, since it can only be obtained by modifying the human ontological status from that of a biological being to that of a resident being in informatics networks. In order to clarify this process, we will discuss the concepts of everlastingness and artificial life prolongation. (shrink)

The aims of the present study were to analyse people’s natural ability to discriminate between true and false statements provided by people with intellectual disability (IQTRUE = 62.00, SD = 10.07; IQFALSE = 58.41, SD = 8.42), and the differentiating characteristics of such people’s statements using criteria-based content analysis (CBCA). Thirty-three people assessed 16 true statements and 13 false statements using their normal abilities. Two other evaluators trained in CBCA evaluated the same statements. The natural evaluators differentiated between true and (...) false statements with somewhat above-chance accuracy, even though error rate was high (38.19%). That lay participants could not effectively discriminate between false and true statements demonstrates that such assessments cannot be considered useful in a forensic context. The CBCA technique did discriminate at a better level than intuitive judgements. However, of the 19 criteria, only one significantly discriminated. More procedures specifically adapted to the abilities of people with intellectual disabilities are thus required. The presence of structured production, quantity of details, characteristics details and unexpected complications increased the probability that a statement would be considered true by non-expert evaluators. The classification made by the non-expert evaluators was independent of the participants’ IQ. A big data analysis is performed in search for better classification quality. (shrink)

Charity, as a social construct, is considered in various interpretative contexts, in a subjectively manner, social progress. The meta-narration about charity as Christian duty, by passing through the secular interpretive and atomizer context of postmodernity, becomes a narrative about social responsibility and equity in ethical dimension, and is translated into restorative community practices in social action plan. We will pursue the constructive interpretive contexts that generated the idea of social policies and social work practice as a contemporary deconstruction of charity. (...) The thesis of the article is that the process of deconstruction of charity, as a religious value which regulates in a Christian manner the reference to the other, is the foundation of restorative social policies and professionalized social work as a social action. We will analyze the deconstruction of Christian idea of charity from two perspectives, namely the secularization of charitable practices and constructive foundation of a particular meta-story of our times which we call secular society and/or knowledge society. (shrink)

The paradox marking Spinoza’s reappearance in modernity is well known. If Mendelssohn wished to “give him new credence by bringing him closer to the philosophical orthodoxy of Leibniz and Wolff,” and Jacobi, “by presenting him as a heterodox figure in the literal sense of the term, wanted to do away with him definitively for modern Christianity”—well, “both failed in their goal, and it was the heterodox Spinoza who was rehabilitated.” The Mendelssohn-Jacobi debate can be grafted onto the crisis of a (...) specific philosophical model. It generates a figure of Spinoza capable of assuaging the exacerbated spiritual tension of that epoch, and of constituting the systematic preamble of the relation between power and substance—between subject and nature. Spinoza, the damned Spinoza, had a resurgence in modernity as a Romantic philosopher. Lessing won out by recognizing in Spinoza an idea of nature which was capable of balancing the relation between feeling and intellect, freedom and necessity, and history and reason. Herder and Goethe, against the subjective and revolutionary impatience of the Sturm und Drang, based themselves on this powerful image of synthesis and recomposed objectivity: Spinoza is not only the figure of Romanticism; he constitutes its grounding and its fulfillment. The omnipotence of nature was no longer to break off into the tragedy of feeling, but it was to triumph over it, by opposing it to a kingdom of completed forms. Spinoza’s first reception within Romanticism was thus an aesthetic reception, a perception of motion and perfection, of dynamism and forms. And it remained such, even when the general frame and the particular components of Romanticism were subjected to the labor of philosophical critique. Fichte, the real philosophical hero of Romanticism, considered both Spinoza’s and Kant’s systems to be “perfectly coherent,” in the incessant ontological movement of the I. For the Schelling of the 1790s, the assertion of a radical opposition between 1 critical philosophy and dogmatic philosophy—that is, between a philosophy of the absolute I founding itself on the critical philosophy and a dogmatic philosophy of the absolute object and Spinozism—was quickly resolved into an analysis of action which dialectically took on the weight of the objective. Far from becoming antinomial, the absolute position of the I composes itself into a necessary process which, above tragedy, exalts the “spiritual automatism” of the relation between subject and substance. The aesthetic dimension of this synthesis consists in ceaselessly and tirelessly bringing back power and substance, the productive element and the form of production, to perfection. Romanticism, according to Hegel, is characterized by a capacity to overcome the pure objectivity of the ideal and the natural as a true idea of beauty and truth, initially to destroy the union of the idea and its reality, and to locate the latter in the difference, so as then to bring to manifestation the inner world of absolute subjectivity and reconstruct its objectivity where the overcoming of sensibility is appeased in the absolute character of the result. The filiation of this process is still Lessingian, but the new dialectic expresses and articulates its motivations, while insisting on the propaedeutic of the beautiful along the path leading to the absolute. Spinoza, a certain Spinoza, becomes the central figure in this process. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze those passages of the Black Notebooks where Heidegger mentions Søren Kierkegaard and to see how Heidegger interprets Kierkegaard’s impact on his own philosophical thought. The paper intends to clarify whether, and to what extent, Heidegger’s rejection of an existentialist reading of his early thought is plausible and justified. The conclusions reached will be twofold. First, Heidegger tries to reinterpret his existential analytic by using the approach he has developed in his work after (...) Being and Time. In so doing, Heidegger tries to understate or diminish the Kierkegaardian background of his analytic of existence. Second, Heidegger’s retrospective self-interpretation argues for a continuity between the approach he develops in Being and Time and that which he calls the question of ‘the truth of beyng’. In so doing, he does not recognize the inconsistencies and mismatches that characterize his thought during the transition from the existential analytic to the philosophy of the event. The passages dealing with Kierkegaard in the Black Notebooks are important sources that allow us to note how problematic Heidegger’s self-interpretation is. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this short introductory contribution the guest editors of this special issue sketch its aim and context.

O caderno Filosofia e Consciência Negra: desconstruindo o racismo que integra a Coleção Saberes e Práticas 1 da EdUFMT é resultado da experiência dos bolsistas do PIBID, Estudantes da Licenciatura em Filosofia da UFMT campus Cuiabá em atuação nas escolas estaduais sob a supervisão, coordenação e organização dos professores aqui autores que possuem formação em Filosofia e, se configura em um convite à reflexão e discussão sobre um dos principais problemas do mundo contemporâneo: o racismo. Palavras chave: Filosofia; Consciência; Racismo.

The word “organism” represents an original keyword of the early-modern philosophical world. As it was first developed by Leibniz, it seems to blend together two different conceptual paradigms: the Cartesian model of the “machines” and the Aristotelian legacy of the “individual natures”. According to the first, nature represents itself the prototype of any good mechanical functioning, but at the same time its inner development is explained by the occurrence of a normative dimension that rules the world of primitive forces in (...) the dynamics. For such reasons, the “organism” lexicon is affected by an internal stress that is extremely interesting to analyze for it seems to posit a normative turn acting from the within of a mechanically conceived notion of life. (shrink)

The present contribution offers an overview of the main problems concerning the representation of the planets in the pre-Islamic Iranian world, the origin of their denominations, their astral roles and the reasons behind their demonization in the Zoroastrian and Manichaean frameworks. This is a preliminary attempt to resume the planetary iconography and iconology in western and eastern Iranian sources, involving also external visual data, such as those coming from Dunhuang and the Chinese world. The article offers an intellectual journey into (...) a net of mutual cultural and spiritual relations, focusing on the image of the heaven (and of its celestial beings), thereby proposing a new synthesis and highlighting a number of intercultural contaminations. (shrink)

"One of the most significant figures of current political thought."--New Statesman.

The essay investigates the relationship between humanity and catastrophe in Davi Kopenawa’s shamanic cosmology, which is compared by approximation to Lucretius’ venusian cosmology and by contrast to Kant’s moral eschatology. It considers the thesis of the structural and dynamic instability of the sky and the problem of the cosmic void. So it seeks to develop the question about the origin and the end of humanity through the catastrophe, both in its ancestral, extra-human dimension, and in its connection with the current (...) socio-environmental destruction, of anthropic origin. In conclusion, it speculates about the role played by the critical thinking in the catastrophe’s eruption. (shrink)

Inventing novel knowledge to solve problems is a crucial, creative, mechanism employed by humans, to extend their range of action. In this paper, we present TCL (typicality-based compositional logic): a probabilistic, non monotonic extension of standard Description Logics of typicality, and will show how this framework is able to endow artificial systems of a human-like, commonsense based, concept composition procedure that allows its employment in a number of applications (ranging from computational creativity to goal-based reasoning to recommender systems and affective (...) computing). -/- The framework relies on 3 main ingredients: a non monotonic extension of standard Description Logics (allowing to reason on exceptions to inheritance in standard knowledge bases) a probabilistic extension coming from the field of logic programming (the DISPONTE semantics) a cognitive heuristics known ad HEAD-Modifier determining preference rules for the inheritance mechanisms of the novel concepts to be generated via commonsense rules. -/- We report the obtained results and the lessons learned of this research path in the context of model-based AI applications. -/- . (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas raised by the use of nanotechnology in medical practice can be viewed from several perspectives: religious spiritualist perspective, the perspective of human dignity (nanotechnologies can be thought of as an affront to human dignity), the issue of controversial choice. The article aims to expose some bioethical dilemmas in using synthetic biology and nanotechnologies. Nowadays is often brought into discussion the fact it is possible to appear in the future new human species resulted not via natural selection and evolution, (...) but through the demiurgic effect of technology development in areas such as: synthetic biology, genetics, neurobiology and neurosciences, prosthesis technology and not least of artificial intelligence research. We will also refer into this paper at the possible raised challenges to ethicists who are oriented towards an ethics of species. Those challenges are raised right from the dawn of a consciousness of species, a social construction generated by changes of the meaning of belonging to humanity. During our article we argue that medical technology, especially genetics, medical assisted human reproduction and not least synthetic biology, require a rethinking ethical meanings of applying those technologies in everyday practices. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci (1891--1937) was one of the most original political thinkers in Western Marxism and an exceptional intellectual. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom, yet he wrote extensive letters while incarcerated, rich with insight into the physical and psychological tortures of prison. In meticulous detail, Gramsci records how political prisoners, himself included, contend with the fear of illness and death and the rules and regulations that threaten to efface (...) their individuality. Forming an incomparable link between Gramsci's intellectual passion and his emotional vulnerability, _Letters from Prison_ shows a man reconstructing his life while being separated from it, struggling to recapture the primary relationships that once defined his identity. Frank Rosengarten divides more than four hundred Gramsci letters into two companion volumes, complete with a chronology of the thinker's crucial life experiences, biographical notes on his correspondents, and a bibliography of works cited in his letters. (shrink)

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikām é uma das obras mais importantes do místico e pensador andaluz Muḥyi al-dīn Ibn 'Arabī (1165-1240). Esse texto, um dos melhores exemplos do pensamento medieval, é um autêntico repositório simbólico do conhecimento da tradição abraâmica. Ao mesmo tempo, o mestre murciano atribui essa obra a uma experiência visionária na forma de conhecimento descendente do qual ele se sentia um mero transcritor. Este trabalho se propõe a analisar simbolicamente os desafios de um livro visionário e, por outro lado, os (...) recursos que ele utiliza: os profetas como arquétipos para justificar a antropologia transcendental do ser humano perfeito (insān al-kāmil) e a metodologia da "cadeia ligada" para legitimar um conhecimento além da razão. (shrink)

Recent neuro-psychoanalytic literature has emphasized the view that our subjective identity rests on ancient subcortical neuro-psychic processes expressing unthinking forms of experience, which are “affectively intense without being known” (Solms and Panksepp, 2012). Devoid of internal representations, the emotional states of our “core-Self” (Panksepp, 1998b) are entirely “projected” towards the external world and tend to be discharged through instinctual action-patterns. However, due to the close connections between the subcortical and the cortical midline brain, the emotional drives may also find a (...) way to be reflected within an intrinsic self-referential processing, evident when the organism is not actively engaged with the external world. Thanks to such endogenous functioning, the core-Self emotional dispositions are not overtly executed, but they are organized within coherent dynamic mental structures, called “feeling-toned complexes” by C.G. Jung and “unconscious phantasies” by Melanie Klein. The intrinsic self-referential dynamism of the ‘brainmind’ originated from REM sleep arousal and then evolved in the resting-state activity of a complex of cortico-limbic midline brain structures (CMS), also called Default Mode Network (DMN). From our neuro-ethological perspective, it is sustained by an “introverted” SEEKING activity leading to the subjective exploration of internally constructed virtual scenarios. This “mind wandering” function, implicated in dreaming, fantasy processing, remembering and thinking, is the essence of the imaginative function and constitutes the first form of reflection, where intentions and drives gain a primordial form of conscious (but not self-conscious) representation. During postnatal development, this original (“archetypal”) imaginative function is slowly attuned in a relational “transitional” space and may be expressed first in non-verbal and eventually in abstract-verbal social communicative patterns. Our view has noticeable implications for psychotherapy. Instead of trying to directly modify interpersonal, extrinsic relationships (a top-down approach), dysfunctional emotional-relational patterns may be modified by a process in which the patient is helped to let-go of the perceived feeling-objects in favor of an immersion, via the actual feeling, from the superficial level of perception towards a void feeling-state, empty of images. Only starting from this “anoetic” feeling-state, the deep imaginal creative and re-structuring self-referential activity may be reactivated by a process of spontaneous imagination. (shrink)