ABSTRACTThis article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had (...) been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polythéisme romain that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this view and came to see the early Christians as demonstrating the inherently social nature of all religious practice. Some of these ideas were anticipated by Madame de Staël in De la littérature, but all three thinkers sought to reintegrate religion into their ideas of modern liberty in ways that merit greater attention. (shrink)

This essay deals with metaphilosophical issues, i.e., different ways of “doing philosophy” and their possible applications for the formulation of a properly Brazilian philosophy. The arguments are drawn from questions that constitute the instigating and pertinent book by Gonçalo Palácios entitled De como fazer filosofia sem ser grego, estar morto ou ser gênio. In order to problematize the increasingly explored question of whether there is a Brazilian philosophy, firstly, I interact with some problems raised in the mentioned work, such as (...) academic philosophical practice, its attachment to the exegesis of works consecrated by tradition, and the consequent subdivision between history of philosophy and “philosophizing” through specific problems of national reality. Next, I articulate some elements that allow us to characterize a specifically Brazilian philosophy. To carry out this characterization, it is essential to critically articulate the relationship between philosophy teaching, in both school and academic level, with the philosophical tradition and its adjacent concepts. (shrink)

Although David Mitrany’s international thought is not usually associated with the concept of the international anarchy, I argue that his analysis actually compares two forms of anarchical order. The first form is the order associated with the relations between states, while the second is his functional alternative to this order. The functional approach is anarchical in the sense that it remains an order without an orderer. In first analysing the dynamics and failings of the inter-state order, and then suggesting pragmatic (...) process-orientated solutions to those failings, I argue that Mitrany follows a similar approach to his classical realist contemporaries. (shrink)

De nos jours, la cote de l'imaginaire est en hausse. Sensibles au mouvement des idees, les historiens se sont mis a la tache. Leurs contributions dans ce domaine ne se denombrent plus. Mais chaque historien affine sa problematique particuliere. Les ponts sont rares entre les epoques et les cultures, et encore plus rares entre les axes differents de recherche. Il existe des imaginaires historiques plutot qu'une veritable histoire de l'imaginaire.Une telle histoire - batie essentiellement sur les structures de l'imaginaire - (...) serait-elle possible? Lucian Boia le croit et essaie de le prouver. Son but est d'identifier certains principes susceptibles d'offrir un minimum de coherence a un domaine pour le moment eclate. Tout en tenant compte d'un large eventail de contributions, ce travail repose en grande partie sur les propres recherches de l'auteur. Il y est question de l'imaginaire scientifique, de l'espace, des humanites autres, des visions apocalyptiques, des millenarismes, des mythes fondateurs, ces mythologies totalitaires. C'est la premiere fois qu'un historien tente de rassembler dans un panorama cette diversite deroutante de manifestations en vue de definir les structures et la dynamique propres a l'imaginaire et de saisir ainsi sa logique particuliere.L'histoire de l'imaginaire: une des histoires de demain? (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Review of Ioan Chirilă, The Holy Bible - The Word of Words (Sfânta Scriptură – Cuvântul Cuvintelor), ( Cluj-Napoca: Editura Renaşterea, 2010), 415 p.

The Hermotimus is Lucian’s longest piece of writing, surpassing even the two books of the True Tales, and at the same time his most successful effort to recreate the style and atmosphere of a Platonic dialogue, filled with a new—and for Lucian uncharacteristically serious—content, namely a sustained attack on “dogmatic” philosophical schools (the “haireseis” of its subtitle) and, inversely, a ringing endorsement of the tenets of Pyrrhonian Scepticism.... (review at BMCR).

This collection uses economic analysis to study some of the most pressing issues in corporate law. The last decade has brought certain corporate transactions and arrangements to the forefront of public attention and public debate. At the same time, a new mode of corporate law analysis has been developed - one that uses the tools of economics to identify the consequences and desirable features of corporate law rules. By bringing together work at the frontier of this method of analysis, the (...) volume provides a good picture of the power, current state, and future direction of the economic analysis of corporate law. Written by some of the most prominent contributors to the field, many of the chapters focus directly on the corporate control transactions that have recently attracted the most interest and controversy - corporate takeovers, buy-outs, recapitalizations, and reorganizations. (shrink)

"Previously unpublished images from glass-plate negatives taken by Walter Schneider capture the years of transition from agrarian to industrial society in America and beyond.

Developments in both China and Russia are a challenge to political science, and more particularly to theories of political culture. Both countries are engaged in profound processes of transition involving the abandonment of totalitarianism and the adoption of market-based economies. It is, however, far from clear what form their political systems will eventually take. They are currently following strikingly different paths. Are the differences a reflection of their distinctive cultures? Or, are the differences more structural, a manifestation of their respective (...) stages of economic and social development? Or, are they merely the consequences of the idiosyncratic choices and policy decisions of the two leaderships? (shrink)

From a classical phenomenological point of view, to reason is to have a conscious intentional experience. A conscious experience can be described as a predicative reconstruction of whatever reason might be concerned with while the intentional aspect can be deduced from the effort of disclosing specialized propositional insights into whatever reasoning is concerned with. Husserl argued that the task of phenomenology is to pave the way toward a science of consciousness in which reason as key feature of conscious life will (...) be properly treated. However, contemporary phenomenology adopted an entirely different perspective on this matter. Conscious experiences are now described from a perspective reminiscent to traditional empiricism while the search for universal objectivity is abandoned in favor of contextual truths. The current situation raises several questions how did we get here, does making sense entail emotions, does the emotivist reconsideration of consciousness solve the problem of objectivity, should a future science of consciousness stress the role of emotions as a solution to subjectivism and yet to be considered a phenomenological science of consciousness. In this paper, I only begin to tackle these problems. (shrink)

There is an interesting historical detour in the dissemination of one of the seventeenth century’s most praised discoveries: the reception of Harvey’s account of the circulation of the blood is closely intertwined, especially in the Low Countries, with Descartes’ account of the origin of the heartbeat. Descartes was one of the first figures to support the circulation of the blood and to give credit to Harvey for it, although he presumably arrived at the same conclusion independently through his own anatomical (...) experiments. He did so while vocally rejecting Harvey’s views on the muscular nature of the heart and his explanation of cardiac motion, to promote his own mechanistic solutions instead. Although Descartes’ .. (shrink)

Responding to the co-production of screen seriality and human subjectivity within contemporary machine cultures and economies of excess, this article examines televisual affect and proposes concepts that address the languages, components and processes of particular televisual subjectivities. Discussions focus on science fiction fantasy series Farscape – a space odyssey fascinated with biotechnological evolution and mutative consciousness. This article aims to invigorate and extend the critical analysis of contemporary televisual affect, taking up questions and methodologies from Félix Guattari’s machinic ontology and (...) Georges Bataille’s formulation of a sacrificial economy to address the conditions of consumption–production relevant to television today. (shrink)

A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.

As Roger Ariew shows, one of the most fascinating challenges for the authors trying to create a Cartesian complete course on philosophy was coming up with a Cartesian Logic based on the existing texts of the master. Were the few simple rules from the Discourse on Method the "logic" of Descartes? Were the Rules for the Direction of the Mind "logic"? How can we even have a logic without syllogism? When looking at the authors studied by Ariew one finds that (...) the best that they could come up was adding some Cartesian elements on what remains basically a traditional Aristotelian Logic. It seems that there was no Cartesian Logic after all.I want to show here that Cartesian Logic is something else, not exactly... (shrink)

As forças pessoais/de caráter são as características psicológicas positivas que se refletem nos pensamentos, sentimentos e comportamentos. Esse artigo objetivou descrever as forças pessoais/de caráter mais prevalentes em 60 profissionais de Tecnologia da Informação e comparar quatro grupos distintos nos cargos de Atendimento e Suporte Técnico, Desenvolvedor de Software, Gestor e Líder Técnico em um Parque Tecnológico do Sul do Brasil. Estudo com delineamento quantitativo, descritivo, comparativo e transversal com aplicação online de um Questionário Sócio Demográfico e Laboral e da (...) Escala das Forças de Caráter. As forças mais prevalentes são a imparcialidade, a curiosidade, a bondade, o pensamento crítico e o amor ao aprendizado. As forças com menor prevalência são a apreciação do belo, a espiritualidade, o perdão, a inteligência social e a sensatez. As implicações práticas sugerem que as características psicológicas positivas sejam fortalecidas em processos de desenvolvimento pessoal e profissional dos trabalhadores de TI no âmbito organizacional. (shrink)

In “On the Abolition of All Political Parties,” Simone Weil poses the hypothetical predicament of a person who is intent on solving highly complex mathematical problems but is flogged every time the answer he arrives at is an even number. The person will oscillate between his genuine desire for the truth and the painful cries of his body. “[I]nevitably,” Weil writes, “he will make many mistakes—even if he happens to be very intelligent, very brave and deeply attached to the truth.” (...) She then asks: “What should he do?” Weil’s answer may surprise many readers, even though she claims it is “simple.” If possible, “he must run away” from those who wield the whip. It would have been best, she avers, had he avoided these associations in the first place. Elsewhere in her writings, Weil openly endorses the argument for the lesser evil, justifying active, potentially violent, resistance instead of a pacifist ethic of refusal. This essay analyses the tension between Weil’s ethic of “running away” and her acceptance of the lesser evil. (shrink)

These manifestos for the future of world thought offer a uniquely global outlook by incorporating forceful examples from both western and non-western regions and placing important movements of western and non-western societies into a theoretical dialogue.

ABSTRACTWhat does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

Neste artigo, busco elementos conceituais presentes em O Segundo Sexo para a formulação de uma teoria da consciência propriamente beauvoiriana. A sua própria teoria da consciência foi, pode-se dizer, ofuscada teoricamente pelas teses de grandes autores como Sartre, Merleau-Ponty e mesmo Bergson. É claro que não é possível dissociá-los por completo do pensamento de Beauvoir. Apesar disso, pretendo rastrear os elementos conceituais próprios da fenomenologia de Beauvoir. Se há uma teoria da consciência especificamente beauvoiriana ela só pode ser caracterizada a (...) partir de conceitos que compõem a sua análise da condição existencial da mulher, isto é, conceitos como os de socialização e de eterno feminino. Com esses termos técnicos, Beauvoir fundamenta a sua crítica à pretensa impessoalidade fenomenológica que pode ser reconstituída até a fenomenologia clássica de Husserl. Não há, portanto, como pensar uma teoria da consciência satisfatória, sem considerar a desproporcionalidade entre mulheres e homens, no que se refere à constituição da consciência de si. (shrink)

This article briefly compares and contrasts Kantian and Marxist thinking, trying to show how the second derived from the first.

An attitude of support in the learning environment can positively affect academic outcomes. Educational risks associated with the absence of a positive relationship between teachers and students include: high rates of college dropout, low self-efficacy, and low self-confidence. The vast majority of sociological research concerning the relationship between teachers and students deals with secondary school and high school years. The present study concentrates on the academic trajectory of college students. The first objective of the present study is assessing the impact (...) of the teacher-student relationship on academic achievements starting from the hypothesis that teachers’ respect, trust and care positively influence students’ performances. The second objective is presenting the psychosocial profile of a good teacher in the vision of the questioned students. The study confirmed that equal treatment, the teachers’ patience and extracurricular availability remain important throughout the entire educational process. Concerning the psycho-social profile of a good teacher, qualities that concern providing emotional comfort have the highest share. The present survey brings into light the deficiencies of emotional education in Romanian educational system. The research underlines the importance of didactic training of the teaching staff and the necessity of counseling services. (shrink)

Я интерпретирую философские взгляды Вернера Гайзенберга как прагматизм и неметафизический реализм виттгенштайновского типа. «Замкнутая теория» – виттгенштайновское правило/концепт. В отличие от Бокулич, предпочитающей позицию Дирака относительно природы связей между различными физическими теориями, я отдаю предпочтение позиции Гайзенберга. Моя позиция, интерпретирующая Гайзенберга, также прямо противоположна позиции Поппера: критерием устоявшейся научной (замкнутой) теории является её нефальсифицируемость. -/- I interpret philosophical views of Werner Heisenberg as a pragmatism and non-metaphysical realism of a Wittgensteinian kind. The “closed theory” is a Wittgensteinian rule/concept. Unlike Alisa (...) Bokulich, favouring Dirac’s position about inter-theoretical relations, I favour Heisenberg’s one. My position, interpreting Heisenberg’s notion of a closed theory, is also in direct opposition to Popper’s one: the criterion of an established scientific (closed) theory is its non-falsifiability. (shrink)

All these extracts are linked by his general epistemology, especially his distinction between two types of knowledge: ‘paradisiac’ or Type 1, which is that of everyday awareness and the current methods, concepts and presuppositions of the sciences of nature and humanity, plus mathematics and philosophy, and accumulates in ‘plus knowledge’ and resolves problems in standard ways; and ‘Luciferican’ or Type 2, which opens up the ‘mysteries’ of new realms of reality which do not fit the current methods, concepts and presuppositions, (...) and so results in ‘minus’ knowledge, the awareness that there are things which at the moment we cannot understand. For these ‘mysteries’ new methods, concepts and presuppositions are required, which ‘abyssal’ categories can supply, ones below those we normally employ and may be aware of. It is part of man’s role in the cosmos to reveal such mysteries.. (shrink)

Il est assez rare qu’un concept philosophique s’échappe de l’arène académique. C’est pourtant le cas du concept de spécisme, qui a fait une entrée remarquée dans la sphère publique au cours de la dernière décennie. Il est désormais au cœur du débat de société sur nos devoirs envers les animaux non humains. Hélas, ce concept et les enjeux qu’il soulève sont souvent mal compris. Nombreux sont les auteurs qui contestent sa légitimité alors qu’ils le maitrisent mal. D’autres l’utilisent plus volontiers (...) sans toutefois mieux le comprendre. Les confusions qui entourent cette notion l’empêche de contribuer à la discussion autant qu’elle le pourrait. Le présent ouvrage entend remédier à cet état de faits en donnant de la notion de spécisme une présentation à la fois assez précise pour rendre justice aux discussions philosophiques dont elle fait l’objet et suffisamment claire pour être accessible à quiconque s’intéresse au statut moral des animaux. Il se divise en deux parties. La première aborde des questions ontologiques : Qu’est-ce exactement que le spécisme ? À quelles conditions existe-t-il ? Ces conditions sont-elles remplies dans les faits ? Quant à la seconde, elle porte sur des questions éthiques : Le spécisme peut-il être justifié ? Faut-il au contraire le condamner au même titre que le racisme et le sexisme ? (shrink)