Analiso e critico neste artigo a solução apresentada por Robert Brandom para o problema por ele formulado acerca do critério de distintividade das percepções presentes nas meras enteléquias. Brandom considera ser problemática a vinculação entre distinção e consciência feita por vários intérpretes de Leibniz com o propósito de dar conta dos diferentes graus de distinção das percepções, pois tal vinculação somente pode ser válida para almas e espíritos, não se aplicando às enteléquias, as quais não são dotadas de nenhum tipo (...) de senciência ou de reflexão. Em função disso, Brandom propõe uma interpretação que não apresentaria essa difculdade. Segundo essa proposta, uma percepção será tão mais distinta quanto maior for seu domínio expressivo, isto é, seu grau de distinção será determinado pela quantidade de inferências que se deixam realizar a partir dela. Torna-se possível, assim, de acordo com ele, a comparação de diferentes percepções e a ordenação delas em uma série que vai das menos distintas às mais distintas tomando como base seus respectivos domínios expressivos. Mostro neste artigo que tanto esse – a meu ver, aparente – problema levantado por Brandom quanto a solução por ele proposta decorrem de uma compreensão parcial e equivocada da teoria leibniziana das mônadas, de tal forma que estaríamos aqui diante de uma solução equivocada para um problema inexistente. (shrink)

The main objective of this research is to identify the current panorama of scientific production associated with governance in university institutions. A bibliometric analysis was developed in Scopus using R Core Team 2022-Bibliometrix and Vosviewer software. The results highlight the countries with the highest productivity in the topic of study, with the most representative authors favoring the understanding of governance. The main thematic clusters stand out. It recognizes the role of university governance and its migration to direct spaces and the (...) transition from a face-to-face model. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a notion of conversion in Kant’s critical philosophy by drawing a connection between the conversions to be found in Kant and the intellectual, moral, and religious conversions of Augustine. I liken Augustine’s Platonic metaphysics of God to Kant’s antinomy of Pure Reason as an intellectual conversion. I link Augustine’s moral conversion with Kant’s meta-maxim to commit to a use of reason that is free from the influence of inclination. I connect Augustine’s religious conversion with (...) Kant’s recognition of God as the postulated condition for the highest good. There are advantages to understanding the conversions in Kant for understanding how his critical philosophy views faith more generally. The conversions in Kant point to the practical necessity of faith as Kant understands it. Such an interpretation also unifies Kant’s contribution to the conversation on the relationship between faith and reason. For Kant faith, much like knowledge, is a form of holding true and as such is reasonable. (shrink)

In her paper, The case for physician assisted suicide: not proven, Bonnie Steinbock argues that the experience with Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act fails to demonstrate that the benefits of legalising physician assisted suicide outweigh its risks. Given that her verdict is based on a small number of highly controversial cases that will most likely occur under any regime of legally implemented safeguards, she renders it virtually impossible to prove the case for physician assisted suicide. In this brief paper, we (...) suggest some ways that may enable us to weigh the risks and benefits of legalisation more fairly and, hopefully, allow us to close the case for physician assisted suicide. (shrink)

(2013). A Hermeneutics of Sport. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 7, Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport, pp. 140-167. doi: 10.1080/17511321.2012.761893.

This article studies the mathematical properties of two systems that model Aristotle's original syllogistic and the relationship obtaining between them. These systems are Corcoran's natural deduction syllogistic and ?ukasiewicz's axiomatization of the syllogistic. We show that by translating the former into a first-order theory, which we call T RD, we can establish a precise relationship between the two systems. We prove within the framework of first-order logic a number of logical properties about T RD that bear upon the same properties (...) of the natural deduction counterpart ? that is, Corcoran's system. Moreover, the first-order logic framework that we work with allows us to understand how complicated the semantics of the syllogistic is in providing us with examples of bizarre, unexpected interpretations of the syllogistic rules. Finally, we provide a first attempt at finding the structure of that semantics, reducing the search to the characterization of the class of models of T RD. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Warnock Report fails to reveal an important underlying principle concerning the donation and transference of gametes and embryos. This principle contrasts sharply with the principle that children are non‐transferable. Consideration of where to place the line between transferable embryos and non‐transferable fetuses, or children, yields a conception of surrogacy that would set it apart from adoption. The paper argues for a coherent system of surrogacy supported by regulative institutions in which surrogacy is seen to facilitate an acceptable form (...) of parenthood. (shrink)

The realization that there is a process of transnationalization of the Brazilian prison-based criminal group self-named First Command of the Capital can only be understood as an effect of the practices, forms of operation, activities, and configurations taken by criminal networks within the structural changes associated with globalization, particularly the dynamics of the illicit markets for cocaine and marijuana. Understanding PCC's process of transnationalization entails considering the specificities of a group that has its origins in prisons and the particularities of (...) the Brazilian criminal dynamic, in the center of which prisons occupy an increasingly important place. Even though PCC has participated and amplified its international presence, and has in fact entered these global networks to operate within them, they do so in a way that is still devoted to its performance in Brazil. However, there are elements that indicate that the group is evolving toward new configurations in this global criminal market, especially that of drug trafficking. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es dar cuenta de los conceptos de sujeto, subjetivación y ontología histórica de nosotros mismos. Estas categorías son esenciales en las pesquisas de Foucault de los años 80-84. De igual manera, desde estos conceptos, Foucault pudo pensar al sujeto de forma alterna al modo como este fue configurado en Occidente. En efecto, en sus intensas búsquedas encuentra en la tradición moderna, Baudelaire y Kant, pistas para considerar al sujeto no como un dato estático, sino como (...) alguien que se gestiona a través de procesos históricos que lo van delineando y que lo habilitan en la empresa de construirse, de elaborarse a sí mismo, esto es, mediante procesos de subjetivación. Finalmente, la tradición antigua, es decir, la tradición greco-latina, le ofrece elementos teóricos sustanciales para reflexionar sobre las condiciones en las que se pueden configurar modos de vida, estilos de existencia que operen como ejes de resistencia a las formas que se nos han impuesto. (shrink)

This factsheet presents findings from a quantitative study looking at adults’ experiences of sending and sharing potentially harmful digital communications in New Zealand. Typically research into harmful digital communications focuses on the experiences of those on the receiving end – the victims. However, to better address the distress and harm caused, information is needed about the people sending and sharing potentially harmful messages and posts. In this study we asked adult New Zealanders whether they had sent potentially harmful digital communications (...) in the previous year and if so, how often they had done this, who they were sent to, the channel(s) they used, and the reason for doing this. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the philosophical foundations of parental rights. Some commonly held accounts are rejected. The question of whether parental rights are property rights is examined. It is argued that there are useful analogies with property rights which help us to see that the ultimate justification of parental rights lies in the special value of parenthood in human life. It is further argued that the idea of generation is essential to our understanding of parenthood as having special (...) value and that parental rights properly belong, in the first instance, to natural parents. (shrink)

This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector, but also that an investigation of hackathons reveals the extent to which ‘data’ operates as a powerful discursive tool; how the discourses (...) of data mask and reveal a series of tropes pertaining to data; that the politics of data are routinely and simultaneously obscured and claimed with serious implications for expertise and knowledge; and that ultimately, and for the vast majority of hackathons we have attended, the discursive and material constructions of data serve to underpin rather than challenge existing power relations and politics. (shrink)

Supernatural fans often associate Season 3's popular “Jus in Bello” episode with the world's quintessential zombie movie, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Romero's zombie films, beginning with Night, fill the survival space with multiple, diverse survivalists who are forced to work through personal differences stemming from jealousy and petty annoyance to racism and bigotry, issues of morality, theology, and other social and cultural differences. Indeed, the setting is the first link to Romero's Night, whose cramped Pennsylvanian farmhouse is (...) little different than the poorly fortified police station holding Sam and Dean. The demons congregate listlessly around the jail. This is an obvious visual homage to the isolated Pennsylvanian farmhouse in Night. The work of the demons in “Jus in Bello” like the zombies in Night and Dawn, is ceaseless and instinctual. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that developments in transhumanist technologies may have upon human cultures, and to do so by exploring a potential debate between Habermas and the transhumanists. Transhumanists, such as Nick Bostrom, typically see the potential in genetic and other technologies for positively expanding and transcending human nature. In contrast, Habermas is a representative of those who are fearful of this technology, suggesting that it will compound the deleterious effects of the colonisation of (...) the lifeworld, further constraining human autonomy and undermining the meaningfulness of the lifeworld by expanding the technological control and manipulation of humanity. It will be argued that these opposed positions are grounded in fundamentally different understandings of the consequences of scientific and technological advance. On one level, the transhumanists remain confident that the lifeworld has within it the resources necessary to find meaning and purpose in a society deeply infused by genetic technology. Habermas disagrees. On another level, the difference is articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, primarily by challenging what may be understood as a Baconian faith in science as a project for the domination of nature. While the transhumanists broadly embrace this faith, Habermas returns to something akin to Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic scepticism. (shrink)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, advances in experimental psychology and the physiology of the sense organs inspired so-called "Back to Kant" Neo-Kantians to articulate robustly psychologistic visions of Kantian epistemology. But their accounts of the thing in itself were fraught with deep tension: they wanted to conceive of things in themselves as the causes of our sensations, while their own accounts of causal inference ruled that claim out. This paper diagnoses the source of that problem in views of (...) one Neo-Kantian, F. A. Lange, and argues that it is solved only by Ernst Mach. No less than Lange and other Neo-Kantians, Mach was inspired to develop a psychologistic account of the foundations of knowledge, but his account also includes a coherent denial of things in themselves' existence. Finally, this paper uses this account of Lange and Mach on things in themselves to illuminate Mach's relation to a certain strain of the Neo-Kantian philosophy of his own time: his views constitute a more fully coherent version of the psychologistic theory of knowledge Back to Kant figures tried to articulate. (shrink)

This paper uses the social theory of Erving Goffman in order to argue that confidentiality should be understood in relation to the mundane social skills by which individuals present and respect specific self-images of themselves and others during social interaction. The breaching of confidentiality is analysed in terms of one person's capacity to embarrass another, and so to expose that person as incompetent. Respecting confidentiality may at once serve to protect the vulnerable from an unjust society, and yet also protect (...) the guilty from just accusation. Ethical reasoning about confidentiality must therefore recognize the dangers of prejudice and violence inherent in decisions to breach or to respect confidentiality. Case studies are used to illustrate the efficacy of this account, culminating with analyses of three examples from the UKCC document Confidentiality. (shrink)

Professionalism is initially understood as a historical process, through which certain commercial services sought to improve their social status by separating themselves from mere crafts or trades. This process may be traced clearly with the aspiration of British portrait painters, in the eighteenth century, to acquire a social status akin to that of already established professionals, such as clerics and doctors. This may be understood, to a significant degree, as a process of gentrification. The values of the professional thereby lie (...) as much in the etiquette and other social skills with which they deal with their clients, than with any distinctive form of skill or value. Professionalisation as gentrification seemingly says little about the nature of modern professionalism. However, if this process is also construed as one in which the goals and achievements of the profession come to be subject to radical reflection, then something significant about professional values emerges. On this account, the profession is distinguished from craft or trade on the grounds that the goals of the profession, and the effectiveness of any attempt to realise them, are not transparent to the client. While a lay person will typically have the competence necessary to judge whether or not a craft worker has achieved their goal, that person will not necessarily be able to recognise the values that determine the success of a medical operation. It will be concluded that the values of a profession are articulated intrinsically to the profession, in terms of the contested understanding that the professionals themselves have of the meaning of the profession and the narratives within which its history is to be told. (shrink)

Analyzes the history of Western civilization and develops a scientific and historical argument that shows the exceptional power of Christianity in the evolution of Western social consciousness. It argues that the spiritual power of Christianity has had an extraordinary effect on transforming civilization and the development of humanitarian social institutions that even atheists take for granted"--Provided by publisher.

During the course of the last century it has grown increasingly clear that not all the issues with which an experimental science can be faced are experimental issues. If there were no other ground for this belief, history itself would force upon us some such conviction. For there are differences of opinion dividing men today that have divided men from the earliest times recorded, and in every one of the ages in between the self-same issue will have involved in dissension, (...) not an occasional disputant here and there, but all the best thinkers in all the known sciences of their day. Yet at no time has either party to such strifes been in possession of facts ignored by the other; for had this been the case, the ignorant party must ere now have been driven from the field by force of the facts it ignored. It is fair to suppose that an issue which has come no nearer to solution as century after century added its contribution to the store of human knowledge, cannot depend for its decision on any information to be looked for from the centuries to come. (shrink)

This paper intends to explore the topic of consciousness in relation to the domain of the contemporary dream, its narration and interpretation. "Consciousness" involves the experience and interplay of dream, fantasy and "reality." Hence an ethnography of the dreaming subject involves several interlinked domains: the cultural construction of dream symbolism, dream narration, and dream interpretation within and through a group setting. The paper is based on findings from a recent ethnographic study of dreamwork groups in the U.K. Examples from the (...) study will explore how personal identity and consciousness is represented and invented through the production of socially informed imaginative contents in both dreamwork and guided fantasy. Key words: dreamwork, anthropology, metaphor, group therapy. (shrink)

This paper falls into three parts. In the first part I will briefly review the current process of reform that the United Kingdom National Health Service is undergoing. Two fundamental motivations for reform, the desire for increased efficiency and for an increased responsiveness to patients' needs and preferences will be discussed in greater detail. The second part attempts to provide a perspective on the moral debate concerning health care reform by introducing the distinction between ‘civil association’ and ‘enterprise association’ as (...) proposed by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. In the final part, this distinction will be used to analyze the moral and political constitution of the National Health Service, in order to establish the relevance and scope of concerns with efficiency and patient and public accountability. A framework within which the current reforms can be assessed is thereby outlined. Keywords: access to health care, civil association, enterprise association, freedom of choice, health care reform, United Kingdom National Health Service CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

By comparing models of market-based allocation with state-controlled national health care systems, it will be suggested that the way in which different communicaties deal with the allocation of health care is central to their expression of what might be called a moral self-understanding. That is to say that the provision of health care may be expected to be a focus of communal debate, not simply about morally acceptable and unacceptable actions, but also about the community’s understanding of what it is (...) that makes for a worthwhile and morally defensible human life. This moral self-understanding is seen to be entwined with the different concepts of ‘health’ that are implicit in different systems of allocation. In conclusion, it will be suggested that decisions concerning health care allocation must be made in response to a continuing, public and open debate about that health and health care mean to a particular community. (shrink)

This paper considers George A. Reisch’s account of the role of Cold War political forces in shaping the apolitical stance that came to dominate philosophy of science in the late 1940s and 1950s. It argues that at least as early as the 1930s, Logical Empiricists such as Rudolf Carnap already held that philosophy of science could not properly have political aims, and further suggests that political forces alone cannot explain this view’s rise to dominance during the Cold War, since political (...) forces cannot explain why a philosophy of science with liberal democratic, anti-communist aims did not flourish. The paper then argues that if professionalization is understood in the right way, it might point toward an explanation of the apolitical stance of Cold War philosophy of science. (shrink)

Abstract.This paper responds to the Expert Patient initiative by questioning its over-reliance on instrumental forms of reasoning. It will be suggested that expertise of the patient suffering from chronic illness should not be exclusively seen in terms of a model of technical knowledge derived from the natural sciences, but should rather include an awareness of the hermeneutic skills that the patient needs in order to make sense of their illness and the impact that the illness has upon their sense of (...) self-identity. By appealing to MacIntyre’s concepts of “virtue” and “practice”, as well as Frank’s notion of the “wounded story-teller”, it will be argued that chronic illness can be constituted as a practice, by building a culture of honest and courageous story-telling about the experience of chronic suffering. The building of such a practice will renew the cultural resources available to the patient, the physician and the rest of the community in understanding illness and patient-hood. (shrink)

There is no authoritative biography of Archimedes, but there are moments from his life which, apocryphal or not, have become the stuff of legend. These include accounts of Archimedes running naked through the streets after realizing that his body displaces water in the bath , how he sat musing over diagrams in the sand as sword-bearing Romans descended upon him during a siege of Syracuse, and of course, his mechanically-informed claim that a firm resting place is all he would need (...) to dislodge the world from its axis. This is the birth of the Archimedean point, which latter-day interpretations craft into a figure of thought that works according to the mechanical principle it describes: effortlessly, it .. (shrink)

The conception of property is usually moulded upon diverting historical and political-philosophical frameworks. The current interest on the commons illustrates these divergences when they come up between a ‘pure’ public and a ‘pure’ private form of ownership. This conceptual triad misleads by conflating private property with an absolute property right while equating public property with a centralised political regime. This article traces the republican conception of property in order to show how it draws a legal and philosophical continuum around different (...) forms of ownership, based on a fiduciary principle underlying the relationship between the sovereign or principal and its agent. Despite modern socialism apparently left aside the question of the commons, the republican-fiduciary rationale was reformulated according to the modern industrial capitalist society. (shrink)

The literature of our day shows experimental scientists to be divided between two schools of thought, now generally called Mechanist and Vitalist. The literature of any day these last 2000 years would tell the same tale, but for occasional changes of name. Where an issue dividing scientists is seen to be an experimental issue, it presents no challenge to the philosopher. His interest is limited to the question, How shall we find out? and where all are agreed as to the (...) way of settling a difference of opinion, he can wait with patience to learn the result. But the very history of this world-old and world-wide conflict between schools of experimental science shows that it never has been, is not now, could never become one whose issue turned on the outcome of this or that experiment; nor in all the 2000 years the conflict has lasted, has science been able to come upon any other type of evidence by which the issue might be settled. As one of a class of similar issues, ancient, pervasive, persistent, the manner of whose decision lies still beyond the grasp of experimental science, this Mechanist-Vitalist controversy gives the philosopher much to think about. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on every aspect of our social, cultural and commercial lives, including the world of sport. This book examines the ethical and philosophical dimensions of the intersection of COVID-19 and sport. The book goes beyond simple description of the impact of the pandemic on sport to offer normative judgments about how the sporting world responded to challenges posed by COVID-19, as well as philosophical speculation as to how COVID-19 will change our understanding and appreciation (...) of sport in the long term. It examines the considerations that either influenced - or arguably should have influenced - decisions to continue or to resume the playing of organized sport in the midst of a pandemic. As a part of this analysis, a spotlight is shone on how sport intersected with political issues surrounding COVID-19. It also explores the configuration and meaning of sport in the COVID-19 era, touching on themes such as the nature of sport, and its integrity, and sport's relationship to technology. Other themes include the changed nature of spectatorship, suffering in sport during pandemic times, and the impact of COVID-19 on the Olympic and Paralympic Games. A final chapter looks ahead and asks what sport might look like in a post-COVID world. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the ethics and philosophy of sport, the sociology of sport, event studies, politics or public health. (shrink)