Buscar-se-á desenvolver no presente artigo a temática do racismo e sua forma de operar dentro de um contexto no qual se verifica a existência de uma biopolítica, e, posteriormente, de uma necropolítica; com enfoque no seu potencial de dividir e estigmatizar populações. Para isso, faz-se necessário identificar a atuação do racismo de Estado trabalhado por Michel Foucault no curso “Em Defesa da Sociedade” (2005) e de outras formas de racismo no cenário capitalista em dois momentos distintos: o primeiro englobando o (...) período de atuação da biopolítica, e o segundo, em que verifica-se a insurgência do que o pensador camaronês Achille Mbembe (2003) chama de necropolítica. Destarte, o caminho a ser seguido inicia-se na explanação do conceito de biopolítica, enfatizando a necessidade verificada na fase de expansão do capitalismo em manter corpos vivos, dóceis e produtivos; seguida da análise do racismo de Estado tal qual pensado por Foucault como produtor de cisões e diferenças dentro do corpo social; a identificação das alterações de contexto do capitalismo como sistema econômico, pautada nas diferenças da fase expansionista e de consolidação para a fase de declínio e crise mundial; e, por fim, a consideração da necropolítica como possível forma de atualização, expansão e deslocamento do pensamento foucaultiano para as periferias do capitalismo na fase de crise do sistema, onde o modo de operar da política passa a ser o “trabalho de morte”. (shrink)

Teachers’ conceptions about the origin of life in three Latin American countries with contrasting levels of secularism were analyzed: Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. A European survey questionnaire was used and the interpretation of the results drew on Barbour's four categories concerning the relationships of science and religion. A large majority of Argentinian and Uruguayan teachers were clearly evolutionist, even when believing in God, with no difference between Argentina and Uruguay. The majority of Brazilian teachers assumed a religious position about the (...) origin of life, being creationist or evolutionary creationist. Differences of Brazilian teachers’ conceptions may result from the higher percentage of evangelicals and lower proportion of agnostics/atheists. Brazilian Catholic teachers were more creationist than their Catholic colleagues in Argentina and Uruguay. Distinct patterns were found, but further research is needed to understand possible classroom impacts. (shrink)

The study of the cultural Cold War and East–West interaction outside diplomacy and high politics has emerged as an important research field during the last two decades. With a few exceptions, however, scholarly interaction has been overshadowed by other forms of interaction. Existing research has mostly paid attention to technological exchange and to espionage, which was at times connected with scientific exchanges across the Iron Curtain. This article discusses scholarly exchanges in the human sciences between Finland and the Soviet Union. (...) Even though Finland was a western-style democracy with a market economy, it had close political ties with the Soviet Union, which allowed for the development of active scholarly connections between the countries. This article discusses the emergence of such connections in the human sciences and the reasons for their rapid expansion in the 1970s. (shrink)

In recent decades, developing and middle-income countries around the globe have adopted path-breaking reforms to their social protection systems. Latin America has been a pioneer region, expanding the state’s commitment on behalf of low-income citizens in key policy areas in many countries. This paper undertakes two tasks. First, it documents the surprising extension of noncontributory social protection policies across many Latin American countries, highlighting how tax-financed programs have come to play a central role in a variety of settings. Second, it (...) examines citizen-level preferences that support this trend, arguing that employment vulnerability and threats to income continuity play a decisive role in shaping demand for public, rather than private, social protection. Survey data on labor-market risks and social policy preferences from eighteen countries corroborate these claims. Our findings suggest that other countries undergoing labor-market strains may experience similar demands for a “return of the state” as a guarantor of social protection in the coming years. (shrink)

The paper presents different clustering approaches in legal judgments from the Special Civil Court located at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. The subject is Consumer Law, specifically cases in which consumers claim moral and material compensation from airlines for service failures. To identify patterns from the dataset, we apply four types of clustering algorithms: Hierarchical and Lingo, K-means and Affinity Propagation. We evaluate the results based on the following criteria: entropy and purity; algorithm's ability in providing labels; legal expert’s (...) evaluation; and experimental complexity. The results demonstrate that the most advantageous approach is Hierarchical Clustering, since it has the best entropy and purity numbers, as well as the least difficulty for the expert to analyze the clusters, and the least experimental complexity. The main contribution of the paper is to show the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, especially to identify labels in unstructured and non-indexed legal texts. (shrink)

Taking the regime established by the Convention on Biological Diversity as a foundation, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines how the international biodiversity regime integrates the private property paradigm into its toolbox for conservation and sustainability and then critically evaluates the shortcomings of the intellectual property mechanism. Second, it argues that the increasing ubiquity of open access emerging technologies should lead the international community to carefully assess the benefits for conservation research of reverting to a framework (...) that places biodiversity within the global commons. The impasse between global commons advocates and the intellectual property status quo obscures the underlying problematic of the “commodity fiction” of biodiversity and increasing use of digital sequence information likely exacerbates power asymmetries. One remedy explored here is an alternative to these two approaches that dislodges rather than discards the concept of private property. Drawing inspiration from Polanyi and building on May (2010), the article shows how a hybrid approach bridging a public and private conception of genetic resources and traditional knowledge could more effectively and equitably distribute benefits to countries and communities providing resources of value to industry. (shrink)

In this paper, we make explicit the changing configurations of power relations that currently characterize the Brazilian Emergency Care System (SAMU) team in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The SAMU is a recent innovation in Brazilian healthcare service delivery. A qualitative case study methodology was used to explore SAMU’s current organizational arrangements, specifically the power relations that have developed and that demonstrate internal team struggles over space and defense of particular occupational interests. The argument advanced in this paper is that these professionals (...) are developing their work in conditions of exposure, that is, they are always being observed by someone, and that such observational exposure provides the conditions whereby everyday emergency care practices are enacted such that practice is shaped by, as well as shapes, particular, yet recognizable power relationships. Data were collected through the observation of the SAMU’s work processes and through semi‐structured interviews. Research materials were analyzed using discourse analysis. In the emergency care process of work, visibility is actually embedded in the disciplinary context and can thus be analyzed as a technique applied to produce disciplined individuals through the simple mechanisms elaborated by Foucault such as hierarchical surveillance, normalizing judgment, and the examination. (shrink)

ResumoEste ensaio examina a sobrevida textual de uma cabeça — a de Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, o Antônio Conselheiro (1830-1897), a partir de sua morte na Guerra de Canudos (1896-1897). Traçam-se as figurações do crânio de Conselheiro na imprensa brasileira do fim do século XIX e nos trabalhos do médico legista Raimundo Nina Rodrigues e do engenheiro e escritor Euclides da Cunha. Embora ambos esperassem que o crânio de Conselheiro apresentasse evidências físicas de degeneração racial, as observações craniométricas de Nina (...) Rodrigues revelaram um crânio normal. Argumenta-se que esse fracasso da aproximação materialista à psique humana deu proeminência a explicações sociológicas para o fenômeno de Canudos, além de levantar questões sobre visibilidade, raça e racismo científico na virada do século XX e no mundo contemporâneo.Palavras-chave: Raça. Psiquiatria. Guerra de Canudos. Antropologia criminal. AbstractThis essay examines the textual afterlife of a head—that of Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel (Antônio Conselheiro [1830-1897]), after his death in the Canudos War (1896-1897). It traces figurations of Conselheiro’s skull in the late nineteenth-century Brazilian press and in the works of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and Euclides da Cunha. Although these two social scientists expected Conselheiro’s skull to display physical evidence of racial degeneration, Nina Rodrigues’s craniometric measurements and observations revealed a perfectly normal skull. It is argued that this failure of a materialist approach to the human psyche allowed a stronger reliance on sociological explanations for the Canudos phenomenon that opens up questions on scientific racism and the visibility of race in the turn of the twentieth century and in contemporary times.Keywords: Race. Psychiatry. Canudos War. Criminal Anthropology. (shrink)

In 1877 Louis Paul Cailletet in France and Raoul Pictet in Switzerland liquefied oxygen in the form of a mist. The liquefaction of the first of the so-called permanent gases heralded the birth of low-temperature research and is often described in the literature as having started a ‘race’ for attaining progressively lower temperatures. In fact, between 1877 and 1908, when helium, the last of the permanent gases, was liquefied, there were many priority disputes—something quite characteristic of the emergence of a (...) new research field. This paper examines Cailletet’s path to the liquefaction of oxygen, as well as a debate between him and the Polish physicist Zygmunt Wróblewski over the latter’s contribution to the liquefaction of gases. (shrink)

This book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism, but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination. Pentecostal theologians increasingly acknowledge that their theological methodology should be informed by a Pentecostal rationality, epistemology and theological hermeneutics. Simo Frestadius offers such a Pentecostal rationality from a Foursquare perspective. Frestadius first analyses and evaluates some of the main contemporary Pentecostal rationalities and epistemologies to date, with a particular emphasis on the works of Amos (...) Yong and James K.A. Smith and L. William Oliverio Jr., before proposing that Alasdair MacIntyre's tradition-focused and historically-minded narrative approach is conducive in providing a more tradition-constituted Pentecostal rationality. Utilising the methodological insights of MacIntyre, the book then provides a philosophically informed historical narrative of a major British Pentecostal tradition, namely, the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance, by exploring its underlying context and roots as a classical Pentecostal movement, its emergence as a religious tradition, and its two major 'epistemological crises'. Based on this historical narration and analysis, it is argued that Elim's tacit Pentecostal rationality is best defined as Pentecostal Biblical Pragmatism in a Foursquare Gospel framework. This form of rationality is then developed vis-à-vis Elim's Pentecostal concept of truth, biblical hermeneutics, and pragmatic epistemic justification in dialogue with William P. Alston. In doing the above, the book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination. (shrink)

The article defends the no-harm principle as an intuitively plausible and a common-sense way to justify individual emitters’ duties to take more radical steps in the fight against climate change. The appearance of climate change as requiring large-scale collective action should not lead us astray with respect to the fundamental moral nature of the problem: individual emitters who knowingly sustain and foster the carbon intensive ways of acting also bear personal moral responsibility for the foreseeable climate-related harm and acquire in (...) line with the no-harm principle a direct personal duty to contribute to the efforts of preventing the harm. The article examines more closely the so-called collectivistic approach, according to which emitters’ responsibilities are primarily collective, and argues that without individualistic grounds of emitters’ personal moral responsibility for the harm the collectivistic approach fails to provide unstructured emitters with sufficient reason to act together and fulfil their correlative duty of effective harm prevention. The article argues that since an emitter's personal moral responsibility warrants others to expect her personal engagement in the efforts of effective harm prevention and can justify blame if she fails, identifications of personal responsibility may also significantly increase unstructured emitters’ collective capability of remedying the climate crisis. (shrink)

Developments in professional practice can be related to ongoing changes in relations of power among professionals, which often lead to changes in the boundaries of practices. The differing contexts of practices also influence these changing relations among health professionals. Legislation governing professional practice also differs from country to country. In Brazil, over the past 12 years, in a climate of deep disagreement, a new law to regulate medical practice has been discussed. It was sanctioned, or made into law, but with (...) some notable changes, in July 2013. Of interest to us in this paper are the ways the proposed legislation, by setting out the boundaries and scope of medical practice, ‘interfered’ in the practices of other health professions, undermining many ‘independent’ practices that have developed over time. However, even taking into account the multiple routes through which practices are established and developed, the role of legislation that seems able to contradict and deny the historical realities of multiple, intersecting practices should be critically interrogated. In this paper, we use the theoretical resources of poststructuralist thinking to explore gaps, ambiguities, and power relations implicit in the discourses that constituted this law. We argue that although the new law can be understood as a social and political device that will interfere in the organization of other health professions’ practices, such legislation is only part of what constitutes change in a consolidated professional practice. And while it is important to understand the effects of such legislation, healthcare practices are also realized or ‘made real’ through ongoing relations of knowledge and power, including, as we will see in this case, activities of resistance. The problem, then, is to understand the practical arrangements, including legislation, traditions and routines, values and knowledge that come to shape the practices of nursing in a particular context. (shrink)

Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific (...) flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested. (shrink)

Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific (...) flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested. (shrink)

The World Health Organization has declared a world pandemic due to COVID-19. In response, most affected countries have enacted measures involving compulsory confinement and restrictions on free movement, which likely influence citizens' lifestyles. This study investigates changes in health risk behaviors with duration of confinement. An online cross-sectional survey served to collect data about the Spanish adult population regarding health behaviors during the first 3 weeks of confinement. A large sample of participants from all Spanish regions completed the survey. Binomial (...) logistic regressions adjusted for socioeconomic characteristics, body mass index, previous HRBs, and confinement context were conducted to investigate associations between the number of weeks confined and a set of six HRBs. When adjusted, we observed significantly lower odds of experiencing a higher number of HRBs than before confinement overall in a time-dependent fashion: OR 0.63; 95% CI: 0.49–0.81 for the second and OR 0.47; 95% CI: 0.36–0.61 for the third week of confinement. These results were equally consistent in all age and gender subgroup analyses. The present study indicates that changes toward a higher number of HRBs than before confinement, as well as the prevalence of each HRB except screen exposure, decreased during the first 3 weeks of COVID-19 confinement, and thus the Spanish adult population may have adapted to the new situational context by gradually improving their health behaviors. (shrink)

Emotions are the focus of intense debate both in contemporary philosophy and psychology, and increasingly also in the history of ideas. Simo Knuuttila presents a comprehensive survey of philosophical theories of emotion from Plato to Renaissance times, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with careful historical reconstruction. The first part of the book covers the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism and, in addition, their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement and Origen (...) to Augustine and Cassian. Knuuttila then proceeds to a discussion of ancient themes in medieval thought, and of new medieval conceptions, codified in the so-called faculty psychology from Avicenna to Aquinas, in thirteenth century taxonomies, and in the voluntarist approach of Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and their followers. Philosophers, classicists, historians of philosophy, historians of psychology, and anyone interested in emotion will find much to stimulate them in this fascinating book. (shrink)

According to the semantic view, a theory is characterized by a class of models. In this paper, we examine critically some of the assumptions that underlie this approach. First, we recall that models are models of something. Thus we cannot leave completely aside the axiomatization of the theories under consideration, nor can we ignore the metamathematics used to elaborate these models, for changes in the metamathematics often impose restrictions on the resulting models. Second, based on a parallel between van Fraassen’s (...) modal interpretation of quantum mechanics and Skolem’s relativism regarding set-theoretic concepts, we introduce a distinction between relative and absolute concepts in the context of the models of a scientific theory. And we discuss the significance of that distinction. Finally, by focusing on contemporary particle physics, we raise the question: since there is no general accepted unification of the parts of the standard model (namely, QED and QCD), we have no theory, in the usual sense of the term. This poses a difficulty: if there is no theory, how can we speak of its models? What are the latter models of? We conclude by noting that it is unclear that the semantic view can be applied to contemporary physical theories. (shrink)

This paper discusses the issues of deciding to have a child with mental retardation, and of terminating a pregnancy when the future child is known to have the same disability. I discuss these problems by criticizing a utilitarian argument, namely, that one should act in a way that results in less suffering and less limited opportunity in the world. My argument is that future parents ought to assume a strong responsibility towards the well-being of their prospective children when they decide (...) to reproduce. The moral point in cases in which our acts affect the well-being of future children should be expressed strictly in terms of parents' culpability. Future children thus do not have current moral standing but presently living persons have current obligations to consider the presumable effects of their actions on future people. I will also argue that there are morally significant differences between 'selective contraception' and selective abortion. (shrink)

Activities protesting against major polluters who cause climate change may cause damage to private property in the process. This paper investigates the case for a more international general basis of moral justification for such protests. Specific reference is made to the Kingsnorth case, which involved a protest by Greenpeace against coal-powered electricity generation in the UK. An appeal is made to Rawlsian fairness arguments, traditionally employed to support the obligation of citizens to their national governments as opposed to their international (...) duties. The argument made here, however, is that there seem to be sufficient reasons for holding that a stable climate is one of the first truly global public goods that is indispensable to acceptable standards of living everywhere. This would suffice to justify international and intergenerational 'atmospheric' political obligations, which in turn may justify protests - even those causing some damage to private property - against the laws and policies that violate the fair terms of cooperation in providing a stable climate. The fairness argument aims also to provide a ground from which Green political theory could integrate accounts of radical forms of citizenship into appeals to state political authority. This leads to justifying acts of civil disobedience on the basis of novel understandings of 'atmospheric' citizenship obligations. (shrink)

This paper discusses whether prospectiveparents ought to find out about their geneticconstitution for reproductive reasons. It isargued that ignoring genetic information can bein line with responsible parenthood or perhapseven recommendable. This is because parenthoodis essentially an unconditional project inwhich parents ought to commit themselves tonurturing any kind of child. Besides, thetraditional reasons offered for theunfortunateness of impairments and the tragicfate of families with disabled children are notconvincing. Other morally problematic outcomesof genetics, such as discrimination againstindividuals with impairments, and limiting freeparental (...) decision making, are alsoconsidered. (shrink)

This paper follows Derrida’s criticism, in The Voice and the Phenomenon, of Husserl ‘s conception of meaning as ideality and identity. The french author contests the ideality and supratemporality·of meaning, its separation from the meaning conferring act, and defends the inclusion of the following indicative dimensions of the last in the former: 1) the sensible element of the linguistic sign (namely in the ideal form of the word, that is in the expression) 2) the manifestation and communication of the experience (...) or act (in the conscience as such) 3) the sensible and empirical content of experience, be it sensational, perceptive, imaginative or potentially and mediatelly intended (in the meaning itself). He questions, moreover, having asserted its temporal condition, which also derives, nevertheless, from some assertions by Husserl, the possibility of constitution of a «strict» and «true» identity, stating that intuitive presence is unable to form both the total covering between the intended and the fulfilling meaning, and the abstract ideality that would be function of the possibility of an infinite repetition, instead of conditioned by a “finite-infinite” one. Finally, he explains better the relation between the sensible face of sign and the ideality of meaning, the former’s place and role within the differentiation and repetition process. He notes that it is an ‘originary’ lack in thinking and meaning itself that claims for the linguistic sign (‘supplement of origin’), “in succession” for its ideal form and its sensible oral and written elements, without ever reaching any completion (‘ supplementarity’, ‘differe(a)nce’). We also attend the derridean hypothesis of writing as the consummation of the link between ideality and death, the last one being considered as having a special relation to sensibility and difference. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze how movement takes part in creating intersubjective meaning. We discuss what Daniel Stern termed ‘affect attunement,’ a primary way of constituting intersubjectivity. Based on an analysis of how movement, meaning-making, vitality affects, and primordial feelings interrelate in affect attunement, we show that primordial feelings and thereby movement play a much greater role in affect attunement than Stern proposed. This makes movement a primary meaning-making modality, indispensable to the development of intersubjectivity. To illustrate the relation between (...) movement and affect attunement in psychological development, we discuss the role of movement in autism. Recent research suggests that differences in movement precede the onset of social-communicative deficits and may be primary to autistic development. Building on the proposed interrelation of movement and primordial feelings in affect attunement, we suggest that autistic movement differences illuminate the vital role played by movement in early intersubjective development. (shrink)

In Neither Physics Nor Chemistry, Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simoes examine the evolution of quantum chemistry into an autonomous discipline, tracing its development from the publication of early papers in the 1920s to the dramatic changes ...

O tempo é um grande tema para a fenomenologia. O atual artigo remonta alguns dos embates teóricos entre as primeiras teorias elaboradas por Husserl e Brentano sobre esta temática. É curioso notarmos que Husserl também se deparou com muitos dos problemas epistêmicos enfrentados pelo Brentano. No entanto, Husserl não tinha o compromisso de melhorar a teoria brentaniana, uma vez que o autor não quis continuar como um membro de sua escola. Conforme veremos, Husserl elaborou desde os seus escritos iniciais sobre (...) a temporalidade fenomenológica e a consciência-tempo, algo totalmente diverso daquilo que foi proposto pela primeira teoria do tempo de Brentano. (shrink)

This article combines a pragma-dialectical conception of argumentation, a sociological conception of legitimacy and a sociological theory of the political field. In particular, it draws on the theorization of the political field developed by Pierre Bourdieu and tries to determine what new insights into the concept of strategic maneuvering might be offered by a sociological analysis of the political field. I analyze a speech made by the President of Romania, Traian Băsescu, following his suspension by Parliament in April 2007. I (...) suggest that the argument developed in this speech can be regarded as an example of adjudication and I discuss its specificity as an adjudication in the political field in an electoral campaign. I also try to relate legitimation as political strategy to strategic maneuvering oriented to meeting the contradictory demands of the political field, which I see—following Bourdieu—as involving a double political game, a game of democratic representation and a game of power. (shrink)

This article provides the first historiographical analysis of the origins of Jewish Orthodoxy in Helsinki and describes the development of the rabbinate from the establishment of the congregation in the late 1850s up to the early 1980s. The origins of the Finnish Jewish community lies in the nineteenth-century Russian army. The majority of Jewish soldiers in Helsinki originated from the realm of Lithuanian Jewish culture, that is, mainly non-Hasidic Jewish Orthodoxy that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Initially, the Finnish (...) Jewish religious establishment continued this Orthodox-Litvak tradition. After the independence of Finland, the Helsinki congregation hired academic, Modern Orthodox rabbis educated in Western Europe. Following the devastation of the Shoah and the Second World War, the recruitment of rabbis faced new challenges. Overall, the rabbi recruitments were in congruence with the social and cultural development of the Helsinki community, yet respected its Orthodox roots. (shrink)