This chapter presents findings on a study of neuropsychological aspects of visual hallucinations with a focus on hallucinations in Parkinson's disease. The results of the study suggest that VHs in PD are a complex multifactor effect of different risk factors, primarily the dysfunctions of the visual system and the system that regulates rapid eye movement sleep and arousal. The study reported here also investigated whether the same risk factors are implicated in proneness to VHs as they are in VHs in (...) PD. The results suggest that the predisposition to VHs in the healthy young population is a multifactor effect of strikingly similar risk factors to those found in PD. However, in addition to the dysfunctions of the visual and arousal system, proneness to hallucinations in the normal population is also predicted by a specific personality profile. (shrink)

In a recent opinion paper, it was argued that individuals with multiple retractions or a record of academic misconduct should not serve as editors, including as editors-in-chief, on the editorial boards of scholarly or academic journals. As a first step towards appreciating how such a policy could be applied in practice, the presence of 30 individuals listed on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard on editorial boards was screened. Six cases are highlighted to gain an appreciation of the potential reputational risks that (...) journals and publishers might incur by including individuals with a tainted academic record on editorial boards. Given the reputational, legal and other risks associated with this type of assessment and decision, more formal positioning and guidance are needed by global ethics policy-related bodies such as COPE, the ICMJE, and the CSE, even more so in journals that claim to follow these organizations’ ethical guidelines. (shrink)

Bottom of the Pyramid organizations are the ones that develop a set of capabilities that contribute to create short- and long-term sustainability values inside and outside the boundaries of BoP ecosystems. Capabilities have an important role in BoP organizations’ strategies that aim to solve BoP issues. Notwithstanding its developments, BoP research still lacks theoretical contributions for the analysis of organizations. We suggest special attention to the need of advancing knowledge on capabilities of BoP organizations because this field is scattered and (...) fragmented, misinterpreted, and still underdeveloped in the literature. We oriented our research formulating and seeking answers to our main question on what are the capabilities needed to enable organizations to create sustainability values in BoP ecosystems? We conducted an integrative review of BoP research for the period from 1998 to 2019, and we found 22 key capabilities of BoP organizations. We organized the capabilities into four major categories including BoP Responsible Consumption, BoP Responsible Business Model, BoP Responsible Management, and BoP Responsible Innovation. We advanced propositions and discussions regarding the capabilities and major categories’ popularity, interdependence and combination, short- and long-term temporal functions, sustainability roles, and effectiveness to address BoP issues. Our article organizes the field of capabilities of BoP organizations; advances contributions and implications for management, organizations, and policymaking; and opens fruitful avenues for future research. (shrink)

This paper explores that the topic of ethics dumping, its causes and potential remedies. In ED, the weaknesses or gaps in ethics policies and systems of lower income countries are intentionally exploited for intellectual or financial gains through research and publishing by higher income countries with a more stringent or complex ethical infrastructure in which such research and publishing practices would not be permitted. Several examples are provided. Possible ED needs to be evaluated before research takes place, and detected prior (...) to publication as an academic paper, because it might lead to a collaborative effort between a wealthier country with restrictive ethical policies and a less wealthy country with more permissive policies. Consequently, if that collaboration ultimately results in an academic paper, there are ethical ramifications of ED to scholarly communication. Institutional review board approval is central to avoid ED-based collaborations. Blind trust and goodwill alone cannot eliminate the exploitation of indigenous or “vulnerable” populations’ intellect and resources. Combining community-based participatory research using clear codes of research conduct and a simple but robust verification system in academic publishing may reduce the risks of ED-based research from being published. (shrink)

The article is about the freedom in Rousseau splitting of two basic ideas. The first is that the freedom existed markedly in the natural man and the second is this man came to lose it along his history, when by far historical processes constituted in society. The text proposes a discussion – from the reading of two works of Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men and The Social Contract – of the possibility of a return (...) to freedom in civil society, where perceives the opportunity of this rescue. For Rousseau, the man in the state of nature lived happy and in peace, whereas in the state of society there is a predominance of the inequality between the men: the moral inequality. The social pact is guarantee of the life in society and of the convergence of interests of his members. A pact by the freedom of the individual and by the democratic society. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to show that the relationships between individuals, including the intersubjectivity inherent to the body politic, are also affective relationships, so as to reconstruct Spinoza’s minimalist theory of tolerance. According to Spinoza’s concept of affectivity and bodily life, affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, while affect refers to the transition from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of affective bodies, that (...) is, the affect is always a passage or variation in the intensity of our power to exist and act—the increase or decrease, the favoring or the restraint of our power to exist and act. We argue that Spinoza’s geometry of affective relations decisively contributes to a political theory of democracy, insofar as it anticipates modern, liberal conceptions of tolerance. (shrink)

As part of a continuous process to explore the factors that might weaken or corrupt traditional peer review, in this paper, we query the ethics, fairness and validity of the request, by editors, of authors to suggest peer reviewers during the submission process. One of the reasons for the current crisis in science pertains to a loss in trust as a result of a flawed peer review which is by nature biased unless it is open peer review. As we indicate, (...) the fact that some editors and journals rely on authors’ suggestions in terms of who should peer review their paper already instills a potential way to abuse the trust of the submission and publishing system. An author-suggested peer reviewer choice might also tempt authors to seek reviewers who might be more receptive or sympathetic to the authors’ message or results, and thus favor the outcome of that paper. Authors should thus not be placed in such a potentially ethically compromising situation, especially as a mandatory condition for submission. However, the fact that they do not have an opt-out choice during the submission process—especially when using an online submission system that makes such a suggestion compulsory—may constitute a violation of authors’ rights. (shrink)

Retractions of COVID-19 literature in both preprints and the peer-reviewed literature serve as a reminder that there are still challenging issues underlying the integrity of the biomedical literature. The risks to academia become larger when such retractions take place in high-ranking biomedical journals. In some cases, retractions result from unreliable or nonexistent data, an issue that could easily be avoided by having open data policies, but there have also been retractions due to oversight in peer review and editorial verification. As (...) COVID-19 continues to affect academics and societies around the world, failures in peer review might also constitute a public health risk. The effectiveness by which COVID-19 literature is corrected, including through retractions, depends on the stringency of measures in place to detect errors and to correct erroneous literature. It also relies on the stringent implementation of open data policies. (shrink)

The definition of the technique as the mediation between man and nature raises some philosophical problems. Such mediation was established based on imperatives, among which we can highlight efficiency and domination, both exercised over nature. In order to expand the possibilities for improving the human condition, the notion of technical progress has become an emerging need for the consolidation of ancient and modern civilizations. However, it is necessary to establish the criteria for a critique of the limits of unrestrained progress (...) in order to be able to highlight the ambiguity of this process. The development of reality goes through a series of increasingly sophisticated domains without which the objective achievements that structure human life would not be possible. As it oscillates more and more rapidly between production and destruction, technology - understood as the applied discourse of technique - accuses its own limit when submitted to the imperative of efficiency and domination. The purpose of this paper is to show that the ambiguous consequences of technical progress work as an instinctive mechanism for both the welfare state and the state of war. The methodology used to address these issues will be the clash of ideas present in the studies of thinkers who reflected the theme of the technique. Our conclusion, in addition to pointing to a reflection on the limits of technique in human life, intends to rethink the unfolding of the imperatives of a civilization guided by the notion of technical progress and its inevitable contradiction with the notion of human progress. (shrink)

Este trabalho pretende apresentar alguns pontos do pensamento filosófico de Gumbrecht sobre a presença, especialmente, com relação às possibilidades da linguagem. A partir desse logos propõe-se uma crítica introdutória aos conceitos de coisa, de sujeito/objeto, de visão cartesiana do mundo, demonstrando, a partir do autor analisado, as possibilidades de tangibilidade por meio da linguagem e o que isso representa em face dos paradigmas vigentes das ciências instituídas. Através de pesquisa bibliográfica, viu-se que a teoria da linguagem de Gumbrecht é subsídio (...) importante para a reflexão transdisciplinar, etnometodológica e etnoecológica; pode contribuir para um aprofundamento conceitual da “visão dionisíaca de mundo” de Nietzsche e Maffesoli; da “Geografia Humana” e do etnoconceito de “lugar” de Yi-Fu Tuan; dos conceitos de “abertura”, “lida”, “práxis”, “linguagem”, “Dasein”, “Ser-no-mundo” de Heidegger; de “adaptabilidade” de Moran e de “autopoiesis” e da fenomenologia biológica de Maturana. (shrink)

O presente estudo encontra-se inserido mais diretamente nas linhas de pesquisa de História da Filosofia Moderna e do Pensamento Ético-Político, temos alguns estudos filosóficos sobre o pacifismo erasmiano na “Queixa da Paz” como aqueles realizados por Meulen (1990), Hoffmann (2000), Kinsella e Carr (2007), Martín e Chornet (2007), Dungen (2008) e Christi (2009).

Authors endure considerable hardship carrying out biomedical research, from generating ideas to completing their manuscripts and submitting their findings and data (as is increasingly required) to a journal. When researchers submit to journals, they entrust their findings and ideas to editors and peer reviewers who are expected to respect the confidentiality of peer review. Inherent trust in peer review is built on the ethical conduct of authors, editors and reviewers, and on the respect of this confidentiality. If such confidentiality is (...) breached by unethical reviewers who might steal or plagiarize the authors’ ideas, researchers will lose trust in peer review and may resist submitting their findings to that journal. Science loses as a result, scientific and medical advances slow down, knowledge may become scarce, and it is unlikely that increasing bias in the literature will be detected or eliminated. In such a climate, society will ultimately be deprived from scientific and medical advances. Despite a rise in documented cases of abused peer review, there is still a relative lack of qualitative and quantitative studies on reviewer-related misconduct, most likely because evidence is difficult to come by. Our paper presents an assessment of editors’ and reviewers’ responsibilities in preserving the confidentiality of manuscripts during the peer review process, in response to a 2016 case of intellectual property theft by a reviewer. Our main objectives are to propose additional measures that would offer protection of authors’ intellectual ideas from predatory reviewers, and increase researchers’ awareness of the responsible reviewing of journal articles and reporting of biomedical research. (shrink)

The blogosphere is full of personalities with masks, or pseudonyms. Although not a desired state of public communication, one could excuse the use of pseudonyms in blogs and social media, which are generally unregulated or weakly regulated. However, in science publishing, there are increasingly strict rules regarding the use of false identities for authors, the lack of institutional or contact details, and the lack of conflicts of interest, and such instances are generally considered to be misconduct. This is because these (...) violations of publishing protocol decrease trust and confidence in science and bring disrepute to those scientists who conform to the rules set out by journals and publishers and abide by them. Thus, when cases are encountered where trust and protocol in publishing are breached, these deserve to be highlighted. In this letter, I focus on Neuroskeptic, a highly prominent science critic, primarily on the blogosphere and in social media, highlighting the dangers associated with the use of pseudonyms in academic publishing. (shrink)

Mead and Modernity is one of the most detailed and ambitiously conceived studies of G. H. Mead's work to appear in years. Filipe Carreira da Silva addresses the basic questions 'How should we read Mead?' and 'Why should we read Mead today?' by showing that the history of ideas and theory-building are closely related endeavors. Mead and Modernity is a methodological innovation with sweeping theoretical implications.

Mead and Modernity is one of the most detailed and ambitiously conceived studies of G. H. Mead's work to appear in years. Filipe Carreira da Silva addresses the basic questions "How should we read Mead?" and "Why should we read Mead today?" by showing that the history of ideas and theory-building are closely related endeavors. Mead and Modernity is a methodological innovation with sweeping theoretical implications.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

We cannot simply observe that Emile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Pierre Bourdieu all received philosophical training and subsequently asserted, in surprisingly similar terms, that escaping from philosophy or breaking away from philosophical modes of thought was a necessary condition for any research in the human and social sciences, without considering whether there might be a direct relationship between the sociological ethos and a particular attitude towards philosophy. The "rupture" with philosophyis never complete: the sociologists' conception of sociology is, on the (...) contrary, heavily influenced by the negative image they have of philosophy, which they always invoke as something to be avoided or a specter that must be exorcised. The sociological perception of philosophy thus constitutes a system of oppositions, a set of likes and dislikes deeply ingrained in the minds of practitioners in the human and social sciences, and which, so to speak, form the very foundation of the discipline and its definition of its identity. By reconstructing it, this article proposes a sociological analysis of the genesis, structure, and function of the sociological unconscious. (shrink)

En 1964, Glauber Rocha dirigió la película Dios y el Diablo en la Tierra del Sol. Año en el que Brasil sufrió el golpe de estado militar. En este momento, hablar de política o problemas sociales era un asunto turbio debido a la fuerte amenaza de represión. Glauber escribió y dirigió esta película que versa acerca de la dicotomía entre el bien y el mal, lo culto y lo inculto, el orden y el desorden, las diferencias sociales, las construcciones simbólicas (...) del espacio como semiosfera, las fronteras y la ruptura de éstas, que provocan el caos. Para el director, la religión guarda una relación muy estrecha con la política. Se plasma el deseo por el poder en los vínculos sociales-políticos (interés de los terratenientes sobre los trabajadores) y religiosos (interés de los predicadores sobre los creyentes). Este análisis discurre sobre dichas dualidades simbólicas, fijándonos en la discusión semiótica realizada por teóricos como Yuri Lotman, Michael Foucault, Mijaíl Bajtín, Umberto Eco, entre otros. La intención es analizar de qué manera Glauber Rocha construye los espacios simbólicos a lo largo de su discurso fílmico, y conocer el mensaje crítico que transmite. (shrink)

A surge in post-publication activity related to editing, including by technical editors and copyeditors, is worthy of some discussion. One of these issues involves the issue of 'tortured phrases', which are bizarre terms and phrases in academic papers that replace standard English expressions or jargon. This phenomenon may reveal an attempt to avoid the detection of textual similarity or to masquerade plagiarism, and yet remain undetected by editors, peer reviewers and text editors. Potentially thousands of cases have already been discovered (...) and reported publicly on the post-publication platform PubPeer. In this opinion paper, 35 cases from ranked scholarly journals are presented, mainly the fields of materials, computer and engineering sciences. This collation serves to expand discussion about this integrity-related phenomenon and to increase educational awareness of the topic. (shrink)

1. INTRODUCTIONIt has been some time now since the philosophical community has learned to appreciate Husserl’s contribution to the philosophies of logic, mathematics, and science in general, despite still some prejudices and misinterpretations in certain academic circles incapable of reading Husserl beyond the incompetent and malicious review which Frege wrote in 1894 of his Philosophie der Arithmetik (PA) [1891/2003], hereafter Hua XII.Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics, in particular, has been the subject of many articles and books and has attracted the attention (...) of many interpreters and philosophers who have found in Husserl fruitful ideas with which to tackle the many philosophical problems elicited by mathematics — its ontology, its epistemology, and its somehow surprising utility, even when not indispensable, in modern science. This original and interesting work by Professor Hartimo is a welcome addition to this already respectable bibliography. The book is essentially exegetical and presents a reading of Husserl’s philosophy, particularly his philosophy of mathematics, as found in some of his most important published works, which were reactions to the development of mathematics in his time, of which he was, as the mathematician he used to be, an attentive and well-informed observer. (shrink)

This paper is about the relationship between leadership, organisational morals, and temporality. We argue that engaging with questions of time and temporality may help us overcome the overly agentic view of organisational morals and leadership ethics that dominates extant literature. Our analysis of the role of time in organizational morals and leadership ethics starts from a virtue-based approach to leading large-scale moral endeavours. We ask: how can we account for organizational morality across generations and independently of the leader? To address (...) this question, we studied the leadership model of the Jesuits, a Catholic Religious Order. Our case reveals that a virtue-based model of leadership does not necessarily imply that those who are selected to lead the organization are themselves virtuous, but that the processes underpinning the exercise of leadership are cyclical and repeated as truthfully as possible. Virtuous leadership, for the Jesuits, is therefore about the construction of an ideal type of leadership against which the processes which sustain it were designed. Our theoretical contribution is twofold. First, we propose an habitual understanding of moral forms of leadership, in which the procedural is constitutive of moral forms of organising; second, we explain how “timelessness”, understood as the quality of not changing as years go by, allowed the Jesuits to centre the processes which sustain their ethical model on the repetition, across space and time, of said processes, rather than on their outcome. We conclude that the search for virtue might be more relevant for large-scale moral endeavours than virtue itself. (shrink)

This paper investigates the cultural significance of black holes and suns as metaphors in continental European literature and art, drawing on theoretical insights from French continental authors such as Jean-François Lyotard and Ray Brassier. Lyotard suggests that black holes signify the ultimate form of the sublime, representing the displacement of humanity and our unease with our place in the cosmos. On the other hand, Brassier views black holes as a consequence of the entropic dissolution of matter, reflecting physical reality's indifference (...) to subjective or teleological significance. The study also presents a curated collection of literary works and artworks that employ black holes and suns as metaphors, examining the emergence of these metaphorical objects and identifying discursive and epistemological shifts in society. Furthermore, this collaborative research project, involving the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and the Federal Fluminense University in Brazil, and the Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic, aims to provide a valuable resource for further academic inquiry. (shrink)

This article seeks to correlate some topics from Hobbes (especially the sovereignty problem) to reconstruct, in Foucault, the resistance problem. To this end, working with the state of nature example and with several commentators from both authors, an analysis will be carried out whose intersection point is the command­obedience pair, more specifically concerning the voice issue, such as referenced by Veyne. Merging two theoretical approaches, as far as Hobbes is concerned, a structural perspective was chosen, respecting the author's geometric methodology; (...) regarding Foucault, it is operated from a heuristic aspect, aiming to approach his experimentalism. (shrink)

This “essay” aims to think with Klossowski and Foucault the notions of “parody” and “fiction” based on the elegiac gesture presented by Veyne. From this, the “relational” possibility, and the “authors” quotation (notions reframed in the course of the text) will think and open up new possibilities for how to make philosophical historiography. Thus, postulated the death of God and the author's death, how would it break the Identity relations, leading to the end of the A = A relationship between (...) the textually constructed persons and the extra-textual historical ones? This is the question operated as the guideline for the mentioned notions mapping, aiming to deepen the gray area created by the elegiac fiction used here. (shrink)

Este breve ensaio busca, por meio da análise estruturalista e distanciada indicada por Lévi-Strauss, aproximar o conjunto de funções literárias das relações presentes entre os personagens principais do mito de Orphéus e Eurydíkē, fundadores dos mistérios órficos da Antiguidade Clássica, e de Lot e sua esposa, apresentados no Livro de Gênesis. Os pontos correlacionados são: o ponto de partida da jornada de ambos os casais, a figura mítico-mágica que anuncia a saída, o olhar para trás da figura feminina e a (...) punição sobre elas exercida. (shrink)

In the academic world, despite their corrective nature, there is still a negative stigma attached to retractions, even more so if they are based on ethical infractions. Editors-in-chief and editors are role models in academic and scholarly communities. Thus, if they have multiple retractions or a record of academic misconduct, this viewpoint argues that they should not serve on journals’ editorial boards. The exception is where such individuals have displayed a clear path of scholarly reform. Policy and guidance is needed (...) by organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics. (shrink)

Multiple authorship is the universal solution to multi-tasking in the sciences. Without a team, each with their own set of expertise, and each involved mostly in complementary ways, a research project will likely not advance quickly, or effectively. Consequently, there is a risk that research goals will not be met within a desired timeframe. Research teams that strictly scrutinize their modus operandi select and include a set of authors that have participated substantially in the physical undertaking of the research, in (...) its planning, or who have contributed intellectually to the ideas or the development of the manuscript. Authorship is not an issue that is taken lightly, and save for dishonest authors, it is an issue that is decided collectively by the authors, usually in sync with codes of conduct established by their research institutes or national ministries of education. Science, technology and medicine publishers have, through independent, or sometimes coordinated efforts, also established their own sets of guidelines regarding what constitutes valid authorship. However, these are, for the greater part, merely guidelines. A previous and recent analysis of authorship definitions indicates that the definitions in place regarding authorship and its validity by many leading STM publishers is neither uniform, nor standard, despite several of them claiming to follow the guidelines as set forward by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors or ICMJE. This disparity extends itself to ghost and guest authorship, two key authorship-related issues that are examined in this paper to assess the extent of discrepancies among the same set of STM publishers and what possible influence they might have on publishing ethics. (shrink)

The title of the paper is an allusion to Philip K. Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which inspired the movie Blade Runner) and aims, at once, to highlight the (possible) relation between Criminal Law and Artificial Intelligence in its two dimensions of criminal protection (hence the reference to ‘electric crimes’) and criminal liability (hence the reference to the androids’ dreams), within the background problem of knowing whether Artificial Intelligence is truly mind. The purpose of this paper is, (...) precisely, to identify whether there is indeed such relation, in those two dimensions, and making use of a mediating concept, the concept of ‘mind (or ‘mentality’). I argue that Artificial Intelligence “specimens” do not have a mind and, therefore, its protection and regulation by Criminal Law is impaired. I conclude by presenting a choice between a total irrelevance model of Artificial Intelligence to Criminal Law and a model in which Artificial Intelligence emerges as object and subject of Criminal Law by analogy with persons. (shrink)

O objetivo do artigo é apresentar e analisar o que é a Doutrina da Essência. Por que a essência é a esfera de mediação entre a lógica objetiva e a lógica subjetiva, e sendo a própria essência incluída na lógica objetiva? Essa é a questão que nos guia. Para isso, é claro, será necessário expor de modo geral o significado de cada um dos momentos da lógica de Hegel e como eles se relacionam. Ou seja, o que são e como (...) se relacionam as duas subdivisões da lógica (lógica objetiva e lógica subjetiva), o que são e como se relacionam os três momentos da lógico (ser, essência e conceito), e como se relacionam as duas subdivisões da lógica (lógica objetiva e lógica subjetiva) com os três momentos do lógico (ser, essência e conceito). Para alcançar nosso objetivo, analisamos algumas seções cruciais da Ciência da Lógica de Hegel. (shrink)

À la croisée de la philosophie et de l’histoire de l’art, Bernard Teyssèdre a ouvert des champs de recherche très divers, ce qui a suscité l’enthousiasme de ses étudiants, mais aussi déconcerté ceux qui restaient attachés à leur pré carré disciplinaire. Présenter aujourd’hui son parcours intellectuel revient à faire redécouvrir certains de ses travaux oubliés en esthétique afin de montrer leur singularité et leur cohérence profondément hégélienne, bien que ses recherches aient pris des formes très différentes et abordés avec érudition (...) des domaines très éloignés les uns des autres. Sans oublier de situer philosophiquement des aspects moins connus de ses activités, littéraires, artistiques et aussi institutionnelles avec sa contribution déterminante au développement de la discipline esthétique et à l’introduction des arts plastiques à l’université. Ce panorama n’aurait pas été complet si n’était pas signalée la place de ses recherches en paléontologie restées longtemps secrètes et a priori fort éloignées de l’esthétique. Alors que Bernard Teyssèdre avait publié en 2007 une nouvelle édition de son Roman de l’Origine revue et augmentée (et que Thierry Savatier était sur le point de publier une nouvelle édition de L’Origine du monde, Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet ), Jean Da Silva lui apprit qu’une photographie du tableau exposé au musée d’Orsay avait circulé en France pendant une vingtaine d’années avant d’être publiée en 1953 dans des revues oubliées ; ce qui bouleversait l’idée que l’on avait encore en 2009 de la connaissance de ce tableau. S’ensuivit ensuite un jeu de piste à deux, sur le blog, par courriels et au téléphone. (shrink)

Este artículo discute el problema de la libertad en el pensamiento crítico de Kant, tomando como base tres momentos. Primero, el modo como Kant plantea y soluciona el problema de la libertad en la tercera antinomia de la Crítica de la razón pura. Segundo, cómo Kant investiga la ley de la libertad en la Fundamentación de la metafísica de las costumbres. Tercero, cómo Kant relaciona ley y libertad a fin de demostrar la realidad objetiva de la libertad en la Crítica (...) de la razón práctica. Centrado en esta tripla acepción, el artículo concluye que la libertad es la clave de bóveda de la razón y solo tiene realidad objetiva mediante un factum de la razón. (shrink)

Este trabalho discute a proposição lacaniana segundo a qual “o inconsciente é estruturado como uma linguagem” e sua fundamentação a partir da Antropologia de Lévi-Strauss. Em vista disso, discute o estatuto do significante como ser concreto e como representação vazia ou indeterminada, destituída de conteúdo ou significado e o da imagem fundante do mesmo, a qual se impõe como seu pressuposto essencial. Enfim, considera os limites e as contradições do significante para a tematização e a compreensão do inconsciente.

This monograph offers a fresh perspective on the applicability of mathematics in science. It explores what mathematics must be so that its applications to the empirical world do not constitute a mystery. In the process, readers are presented with a new version of mathematical structuralism. The author details a philosophy of mathematics in which the problem of its applicability, particularly in physics, in all its forms can be explained and justified. Chapters cover: mathematics as a formal science, mathematical ontology: what (...) does it mean to exist, mathematical structures: what are they and how do we know them, how different layers of mathematical structuring relate to each other and to perceptual structures, and how to use mathematics to find out how the world is. The book simultaneously develops along two lines, both inspired and enlightened by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy. One line leads to the establishment of a particular version of mathematical structuralism, free of “naturalist” and empiricist bias. The other leads to a logical-epistemological explanation and justification of the applicability of mathematics carried out within a unique structuralist perspective. This second line points to the “unreasonable” effectiveness of mathematics in physics as a means of representation, a tool, and a source of not always logically justified but useful and effective heuristic strategies. (shrink)

It is rare that we have Arthur Schopenhauer and Thomas Hobbes in the same publication, and when this occurs, it is usually aimed at exploring their dissenting political views. However, this study is based on the belief that both philosophers have significant similarities in their theories about the creation of the individual as a human being. Schopenhauer and Hobbes have, in their constructions, the pessimistic view of human nature and, furthermore, there are prominent similarities in the construction of the human (...) machinery, similarities that at times appear to merge. The goals that Hobbes and Schopenhauer had when they wrote their works were different, however, what we show in this study is that pessimism is a prolific path for philosophical theory. (shrink)