In several studies on the interpretation of the term politeuma, Patrick Sänger argues that it has three basic meanings: ‘political act’, ‘citizenry’ or ‘active citizenry’, and ‘polity’ and thus ‘state’, sometimes having the connotation ‘constitution’. Although the interpretation of the word can be traced back at least to Aristotle, it is generally acknowledged that its basic meanings can be found as well in Hellenistic and Roman literature, sometimes even used side by side. Taking into account the epoch in which Plutarch (...) wrote his work and the wide chronological period that it covers, it can be expected that Plutarch might be a very illustrative guide for the use of the term politeuma. The word occurs in fact 75 times throughout his work. In most cases, it is used only once or twice in a single biography or in a piece of the Moralia. There are, however, three exceptions to this global pattern: the Lives of Lycurgus and Numa, which concentrate 12 occurrences; those of Agis/Cleomenes and Tiberius/Gaius Gracchus with 13; finally, and from the Moralia, the An seni respublica gerenda sit, with 5 passages. This paper discusses the way Plutarch combines text and context, namely the way the concept of politeuma works in the context in which it is used throughout the Lives and the Moralia. En varios estudios sobre la interpretación del término politeuma, Patrick Sänger sostiene que tiene tres significados básicos: a) “acto político”, b) “la ciudadanía” o conjunto de ciudadanos activos”, y c) “sistema de gobierno” y, por lo tanto, “estado”, muchas veces con la connotación de “constitución”. Aunque la interpretación de la palabra suele remontarse hasta Aristóteles, generalmente, se reconoce que sus significados básicos pueden hallarse también en las Literaturas Helenística y Romana, a veces, incluso utilizados uno junto a otro. Teniendo en cuenta la época en la que Plutarco escribió su obra y el vasto período de tiempo que abarca, podemos considerarlo una guía muy ilustrativa sobre el uso del término politeuma. La palabra se registra 75 veces a lo largo de su obra. En la mayoría de los casos se la utiliza sólo una o dos veces en alguna biografía individual dentro de Moralia. Sin embargo, hay tres excepciones a este patrón general: las Vitae de Licurgo y Numa, incluyendo la Comparatio, que concentran 12 ocurrencias, aquellas de Agis/Cleomenes y Tiberio/Cayo Graco con 13 y, finalmente, en An seni respublica gerenda sit dentro de Moralia, en 5 pasajes. En el presente artículo discutimos el modo en que Plutarco combina texto y contexto y cómo funciona el término politeuma según su contexto en las Vitae y en Moralia. (shrink)

The title of this volume A Man of Many Interests: Plutarch on Religion, Myth, and Magic. Essays in honour of Aurelio Pérez Jiménez is first and foremost a coalescing homage to Plutarch and to Aurelio, and to the way they have been inspiring (as master and indirect disciple) a multitude of readers in their path to knowledge, here metonymically represented by the scholars who offer their tribute to them. The analysis developed throughout the several contributions favors a philological approach of (...) wide spectrum, i.e., stemming from literary and linguistic aspects, it projects them into their cultural, religious, philosophical, and historical framework. The works were organized into two broad sections, respectively devoted to the Lives and to the Moralia. Contributors are: Frances Titchener, Carlos Alcalde Martín, José Luis Calvo, Delfim Leão, Judith Mossman, Anastasios G. Nikolaidis, Christopher Pelling, Philip Stadter, Paola Volpe, Francesco Becchi, Israel Muñoz Gallarte, Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, Geert Roskam, Vicente M. Ramón Palerm, Frederick Brenk, John Dillon, Franco Ferrari, Aristoula Georgiadou, Luc van der Stockt, Luisa Lesage Gárriga. (shrink)

Introduction: The importance attached to ethical practice and related informed consent varies among health professionals and is further influenced by working environments, level of knowledge, experience and societal values and beliefs. The objective of this study is to evaluate the ethical conduct of professors, undergraduates and graduate students through questionnaires answered by patients. Methods: One hundred twenty patients at the dental clinics of three different dental schools in São Paulo State were interviewed based on objective and discursive questions about signed (...) informed consent, participation in scientific research, photographs during treatment, requested saliva samples, tooth donation requests, and information about tooth destination after removal. A frequency distribution was used for a statistical analysis of the data. Results: In all, 65.8% of the patients had given signed informed consent for treatment and 12.5% had not done so; 10.8% did not know if they had participated in scientific research; 54.2% were photographed during dental procedures and 47.1% of them had signed an authorization form; 6.6% were requested to provide a saliva sample and 66.6% of them had signed an authorization form to that effect; 16.1% had a tooth donation requested and 64.4% of them had signed an authorization form to that effect; and 61.3% did not know the destination of the tooth after removal, when donation was not requested. Conclusions: The majority of the patients had signed an informed consent form for treatment, photographs, saliva samples and tooth donation. This demonstrated ethical conduct towards patients on the part of professors, undergraduates and graduate students. doi: 10.5294/pebi.2017.21.1.2. (shrink)

ARISTÓTELES.. Econômicos. Coleção Obras Completas de Aristóteles, Volume VII – Tomo 2. Introdução, notas e tradução do original grego e latino de Delfim F. Leão. São Paulo, Martins Fontes.

Soren Kierkegaard's Works of Love, a series of deliberations on the commandment to love one's neighbor, has often been condemned by critics. Here, Ferreira seeks to rehabilitate Works of Love as one of Kierkegaard's most important works. He shows that Kierkegaard's deliberations on love are highly relevant to some important themes in contemporary ethics, including impartiality, duty, equality, mutuality, reciprocity, self-love, sympathy, and sacrifice. Ferreira also argues that Works of Love bears on issues peculiar to a religious ethic, (...) such as the role of God as "middle term," and the possibility of preserving the aesthetic dimensions of love in a religious ethic of relation. (shrink)

Soren Kierkegaard's Works of Love, a series of deliberations on the commandment to love one's neighbor, has often been condemned by critics. Here, Ferreira seeks to rehabilitate Works of Love as one of Kierkegaard's most important works. He shows that Kierkegaard's deliberations on love are highly relevant to some important themes in contemporary ethics, including impartiality, duty, equality, mutuality, reciprocity, self-love, sympathy, and sacrifice. Ferreira also argues that Works of Love bears on issues peculiar to a religious ethic, (...) such as the role of God as "middle term," and the possibility of preserving the aesthetic dimensions of love in a religious ethic of relation. (shrink)

The present paper draws a contrast between the notions of τὸ παρ’ ἡμᾶς and τὸ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν to the effect that, according to Chrysippus, each has a different role to play and different requirements to meet, the former being especially tailored to suit the exigencies of praise and blame taken as exhortations, the latter those of desert and justice in praising and blaming as well as honoring and punishing.

I suggest here ecologies of the nascent state, posing the following general questions: what is this state and what is it to live, to fabricate modes of life, in its immanence? I believe populating this state is, by right, ‘ecological’, even if what I offer here is only a sketch or glimpse, playful as it is, of the possibility of such modes of life, of dwelling. As I develop it here, the nascent is in flight of being. It is populated (...) by lesser, minoritarian existences. If it is ‘ecological’, it is because these existences, or modes of becoming, are themselves, in their own right, ‘ecologies’, that is, modes of dwelling, of life, on the ‘other side of existence’, as Antonin Artaud put it once, in exile from Being. The power to return eternally to the nascent state is the power to live, to dwell, in the absolute forgetfulness of Being, in the interstice where philosophy supposedly ends, but where it nevertheless begins again, in oblivion itself, where being is never already the verticality of Being, its difference with beings, but always nascent, in the beginning, eternally so. (shrink)

O artigo aponta que o estudioso das imagens alemão Aby Warburg (1866-1929) pode ter sido vítima de um mal provocado pelo envolvimento com suas coleções de fotos e recortes de jornais e revistas sobre a guerra: algo próximo do que é hoje conhecido como Síndrome de Estresse Pós-Traumático (PTSD, na sigla em inglês). As emoções concentradas em fotografias de cenas de guerra que ele colecionou e manipulou durante toda a Primeira Guerra Mundial (1914-18), teriam sido um fator importante para a (...) ocorrência de surtos psicóticos que o levaram a uma longa internação. Tal hipótese permitiria explicar o quadro de esgotamento emocional, com aceleração maníaca e exaltação do psiquismo, que acometeu Warburg logo após o final da guerra. Pretendemos, a partir desse exemplo clínico, levantar elementos para compreender o conceito central de seu pensamento sobre a força das imagens, o conceito de “fórmula de emoção” ou “fórmula de pathos”. (shrink)

Resumo da dissertação de mestrado. PPGCR PUC Minas. 2018.

Palace of the End is a dense triptych of monologues exploring alternative narratives - albeit based in real facts - behind the events and the headlines surrounding the war in Iraq. Borrowing its title from the former royal palace where Saddam Hussein’s torture chamber was located, Thompson’s docudrama is structured as a chain of monologues telling three real-life stories set in the context of the war in Iraq. The play conveys three unconventional interpretations of the realities of war: that of (...) a young American soldier convicted for her misconduct at Abu Ghraib, the prison that stands as one of the most controversial symbols of the American-led Iraq invasion; a British scientist and weapons inspector who denounces what he understands as the false arguments given by his country’s leaders for engaging in a distant war; and an Iraqi mother whose life was shattered firstly by Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime, and later by the American first Gulf War. Each story is an enthralling and gut-wrenching reflection of one of the contemporary world’s most studied and controversial conflicts. The play gives voice to three different kinds of war victims, insofar as their political subjectivities and their moral conundrums are concerned. (shrink)

This book examines the significantly similar, yet finally different, thinking of two nineteenth-century existentialist thinkers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Its focus is on the different ways each envisioned a joyful acceptance of life - a concern they shared. Each strove to give a place to this acceptance in his picture of life, but their conceptions of it are far apart.

This article brings a historical perspective to explain the recent dissemination of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the new “gold standard” method to assess international development projects. Although the buzz around RCT evaluations dates from the 2000s, we show that what we are witnessing now is a second wave of RCTs, while a first wave began in the 1960s and ended by the early 1980s. Drawing on content analysis of 123 RCTs, participant observation, and secondary sources, we compare the two (...) waves in terms of the participants in the network of expertise required to carry out field experiments and the characteristics of the projects evaluated. The comparison demonstrates that researchers in the second wave were better positioned to navigate the political difficulties caused by randomization. We explain the differences in the expertise network and in the type of projects as the result of concurrent transformations in the fields of development aid and the economics profession. We draw on Andrew Abbott’s concept of “hinges,” as well as on Bourdieu’s concept of “homology” between fields, to argue that the similar positions and parallel struggles conducted by two groups of actors in the two fields served as the basis for a cross-field alliance, in which RCTs could function as a “hinge” linking together the two fields. (shrink)

This book highlights some of the most pressing safety, ethical, legal and societal issues related to the diverse contexts in which robotic technologies apply. Focusing on the essential concept of well-being, it addresses topics that are fundamental not only for research, but also for industry and end-users, discussing the challenges in a wide variety of applications, including domestic robots, autonomous manufacturing, personal care robots and drones.

A prevailing view in moral psychology holds that empathy and sympathy play key roles in morality and in prosocial and altruistic actions. Recently, Jesse Prinz (2011a, 2011b) has challenged this view and has argued that empathy does not play a foundational or causal role in morality. He suggests that in fact the presence of empathetic emotions is harmful to morality. Prinz rejects all theories that connect empathy and morality as a constitutional, epistemological, developmental, motivational, or normative necessity. I consider two (...) of Prinz’s theses: the thesis that empathy is not necessary for moral development, and the thesis that empathy should be avoided as a guide for morality. Based on recent research in moral psychology, I argue that empathy plays a crucial role in development of moral agency. I also argue that empathy is desirable as a moral emotion. (shrink)

Levinas's ethics of other-centered service has been criticized at the theoretical level for failing to offer a conception of moral agency adequate to ground its imperative and at the practical level for encouraging self-hatred. Levinas's explicit resistance to the incorporation of the phrase "as yourself" in the Judaeo-Christian love command might seem to validate the critics' complaints. The author argues, on the contrary, that Levinas does offer a strong and compelling conception of moral agency and that his ethics, properly understood, (...) does not entail self-abnegation. Levinas's attempt to counter excessive and manipulative self-concern and self-inflation by insisting on the dependent and situational position of the self has been wrongly overinterpreted as an abandonment of the self and its just claims. The author seeks to establish a more balanced understanding by focusing attention on the "ethics of welcome," on Levinas's distinctive conception of passivity, and on the role of "the third" in all human relations. (shrink)

The increasing use of digital technologies in judicial and arbitration proceedings increases the usage of digital evidence by the parties, which brings the necessity of creating patterns for adjudicators to admit and assess this new type of evidence. This paper generally addresses digital evidence focusing on the second moment in international arbitration proceedings. It also narrows the topic to hacked and leaked evidence and its admissibility in international arbitration. The literature review showed a significant amount of research devoted to the (...) evidence in arbitration. Some considered electronic evidence within one jurisdiction; others focused on certain forms of digital evidence such as electronic signatures. Papers on digital evidence in international arbitration approach arbitration rules for digital evidence but skip admissibility issues. No systemic and complex works research digital evidence in arbitration, explicitly focusing on the admissibility of hacked and leaked digital evidence from a comparative perspective. Also, no research deals with enforcing international arbitration awards relying on illegally obtained digital evidence. In these cases, there could be a possible violation of domestic public policy under the New York Convention terms (art. V, 2, b). That is why the paper aims to offer the concept of digital evidence in international arbitration, including hacked and leaked evidence, criteria of its admissibility and relevance, and design the arbitration guidelines for assessing hacked and leaked evidence. Comparative legal analysis of the international arbitration rules and national procedure law allowed us to compare the regulatory approaches to the definition of digital evidence and its admissibility worldwide. The method of legal modeling allowed designing model guidelines for arbitral tribunals to evaluate the admissibility and relevance of digital evidence, including hacked and leaked evidence. Moreover, the case study method allowed us to analyze jurisprudence and define criteria for admission of hacked and leaked evidence. We conclude that the admissibility of hacked and leaked evidence depends solely on the arbitrator’s broad discretion to assess the evidence. Nevertheless, thorough evidence analysis and a well-reasoned award are always mandatory. (shrink)

The article analyzes the possibility of reconciling skepticism with moral theories and the idea that moral philosophy is the supreme arbiter of all moral justification. We cannot take universally valid maxims as descriptive rules nor can we fall into an individualistic relativism. H. Putnam seeks to deconstruct Habermas' separation of values and norms, and, in doing so, he shows the need for such a reconciliation.