“Ought” cannot be derived from “is,” so why should facts about human nature be of interest to business ethicists? In this article, we discuss why the nature of human nature is relevant to anyone wishing to create a more just and humane workplace and society. We begin by presenting evolutionary psychology as a research framework, and then present three examples of research that illuminate various evolved cognitive programs. The first involves the cognitive foundations of trade, including a neurocognitive mechanism specialized (...) for a form of moral reasoning: cheater detection. The second involves the moral sentiments triggered by participating in collective actions, which are relevant to organizational behavior. The third involves the evolved programs whereby our minds socially construct groups, and how these can be harnessed to reduce racism and foster true diversity in the workplace. In each case, we discuss how what has been learned about these evolved programs might inform the study and practice of business ethics. (shrink)

Modernidae, Hegel e o princípio da subjetividade -- Princípio da subjetividade, Bentham e o utilitarismo -- Utilitarismo, mil e o homem econômico -- Homem econômico, Hayek e o individualismo -- Individualismo, neoliberalismo e pós-modernismo -- Pós-modernismo, McCloskey e a retórica da economia -- Retórica da economia, Marx e a crítica do discurso econômico.

Our ability to attribute mental states to others ("to mentalize") has been the subject of philosophical and psychological studies for a very long time, yet the role of language acquisition in the development of our mentalizing abilities has been largely understudied. This book addresses this gap in the philosophical literature. -/- The book presents an account of how false belief reasoning is impacted by language acquisition, and it does so by placing it in the larger context of the issue, how (...) language impacts cognition in general. The work provides the reader with detailed and critical literature reviews, and draws on them to argue that language acquisition helps false belief reasoning by boosting the ability to create schemata that facilitate processing of information in some social contexts. According to this framework, it is a combination of syntactic clues and cultural narratives that helps the child to solve the classic false belief task. -/- The book provides a novel, original account of how language helps false belief reasoning, while also giving the reader a broad, precise and well-documented picture of the debate around some of the most fundamental issues in social cognition. (shrink)

Recent years have featured a leap in academic and public interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities and related corporate reporting. Two main themes in this literature are the exploration of management incentives to engage in and disclose this information, and of the use and value of this information to market participants. We extend the second theme by examining the interest that specific investor classes have in the use of CSR information. We rely on feminist intersectionality, which suggests that gender (...) intersects with other identities to yield different values, experiences, and opportunities that can lead to gender-based preferences for CSR information. Based upon a survey of 750 US-based retail investors, we find that female retail investors have a greater interest in the use of CSR information, relative to male retail investors. Women express greater anticipated future demand for this information than do men. Further, the magnitude of the increase from current use to anticipated future demand is greater for women than men. Age is a significant modifying factor in that the discrepancy between women of any age and older men is greater than that between women and younger men. Finally, women also exhibit greater demand for streamlining of the information flow, consistent with pressures induced by time poverty. It appears that current disclosure practices provide a less than optimal match with the needs of the information consumers that are primarily interested in using this information. This mismatch may result in a systematic disenfranchisement of female investing classes which suggests an ethical need to level the playing field. (shrink)

Review of Lee Braver's 2012 book, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

‘Historical thinking’ has a central role in the theory and practice of history education. At a minimum, history educators must work with a model of historical thinking if they are to formulate potential progression in students’ advance through a school history curriculum, test that progression empirically, and shape instructional experiences in order to maximize that progression. Where do they look, and where should they look, in order to construct such models? Over the past several decades, three major strands have developed, (...) one based in the empirically minded and instruction-oriented British Schools Council History Project, a second through the more philosophically oriented German field of history didactics and historical consciousness, and a third in the US. All three had roots in the historiography and philosophy of their own national traditions. Canadian history educators have been working with a pragmatic hybrid defined around six ‘historical thinking concepts.’ While this model has both been highly influential in the reform of Canadian history curricula and prompted adaptations elsewhere, there has been only minimal theoretical discussion exploring the relationship of these concepts to each other or to the three traditions which helped to shape them. This article is a contribution towards filling that gap. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show the peculiarities of modernity in a peripheral capitalist country like Brazil. To do this, our understanding of modernity and its relationship with capitalist progress will be explained. Subsequently, the particular character of capitalism in peripheral regions, with an emphasis on the Brazilian experience, will be analysed. More specifically, we shall explore the meaning of capitalist progress in Brazil in the last two decades, underlining Brazil’s role as an international platform for financial valorization (...) and the retrocession of the country’s industrial production in a context of monetary stability. These observations on a peripheral economy and its historical trajectory will allow us, in a third step, to analyse the particularity of Brazilian modernity today. Finally, we shall discuss the role of compensatory income programs and the rise of the so-called ‘new middle class’ in this scenario. (shrink)

In the Prologue to the Commentary on St. John, Albert the Great uses the image of an eagle to describe the main feature of the Evangelist, that’s the contemplation. As an eagle John flew into the sky of Trinity going beyond creatural limitation and living a experience, that can be interpreted like a raptus. For better understanding the contemplation of John, some texts are very important: De resurrectione; Quaestio de visione dei in patria; Quaestio de raptu, in which the german (...) teacher explains in what sense the human intellect can know the divine infinity. About this problem it’s significant the distinction between “quid est” and “ut est” in God. The article closes showing how John represents a model of a dominican friar in some texts of the Commentary. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the concept of the right to the city in articulation with the concept of urban play and more specifically, the diverse body of research related with playable and playful cities. Following a brief review of these two concepts and related studies, I critically discuss the possibilities of articulating Lefebvre's radical concept of the right to the city to contemporary interventions on urban and digital play.

I argue that both language acquisition and cultural and social factors contribute to the formation of schemata that facilitate false belief reasoning. While the proposal for an active role of language acquisition in this sense has been partially advanced by several voices in the mentalizing debate, I argue that other accounts addressing this issue present some shortcomings. Specifically, I analyze the existing proposals distinguishing between “structure-oriented” views :1858–1878, 2007; de Villiers in Why language matters for theory of mind. Oxford University (...) Press, New York, pp 186–219, 2005), that stress the role of language as a set of rules providing syntactic input and providing a representational format, and “cultural/social-oriented views”, that stress the role of social interaction. Starting from the analysis of these views, I defend my own account of the role of language acquisition in aiding false belief reasoning. I argue that language acquisition plays a pivotal role in the formation of schemata used by pre-schoolers to pass the false belief task. I propose a specific learning mechanism for exploiting linguistic information that taps into specific cognitive abilities, thus making a very concrete suggestion about the role of linguistic input in specific cultural contexts for the development of false belief skills. (shrink)

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

Este artigo pretende discutir a avalição em larga escala, tema atual e polêmico, pois é um procedimento considerado preocupante para educadores e estudiosos da educação brasileira, em todas as suas modalidades, desde a educação básica até ao ensino superior. Abordaremos aqui a avaliação em larga escala já em processo no ensino fundamental, principalmente por tratar-se de fase crucial do ensino, a educação básica. No caso específico deste artigo, discutiremos a Prova Brasil, instrumento da avaliação em larga escala no Ensino Fundamental (...) I. Apresentamos resultados de uma pesquisa realizada junto a professores de uma escola da Rede Municipal do interior do Estado de São Paulo. Os resultados mostram a insatisfação dos professores frente à avaliação externa, principalmente focando a perda de autonomia deles próprios no desenvolvimento da Matriz Curricular. Teoricamente os resultados da prova Brasil deveriam dirigir possíveis ações mantendo ou reformulando, seja a Matriz Curricular em si, seja a ação dos professores e gestores escolares, mas não é o que ocorre. A pesquisa na qual nos baseamos mostra que o ápice atingido pela avaliação externa foi moldar a ação dos professores às questões da Prova Brasil. Os autores que nos apoiaram na análise dos dados foram: Saviani ; Sacristán ; Teixeira e Werle. (shrink)

Memory evolved to supply useful, timely information to the organism’s decision-making systems. Therefore, decision rules, multiple memory systems, and the search engines that link them should have coevolved to mesh in a coadapted, functionally interlocking way. This adaptationist perspective suggested the scope hypothesis: When a generalization is retrieved from semantic memory, episodic memories that are inconsistent with it should be retrieved in tandem to place boundary conditions on the scope of the generalization. Using a priming paradigm and a decision task (...) involving person memory, the authors tested and confirmed this hypothesis. The results support the view that priming is an evolved adaptation. They further show that dissociations between memory systems are not—and should not be—absolute: Independence exists for some tasks but not others. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the role of labels and generics referring to social kinds in mindshaping practices, arguing that they promote generalizations that foster essentialist thinking and carry a normative force. We propose that their cognitive function consists in both contributing to the formation and reinforcement of schemata and scripts for social interaction and in activating these schemata in specific social situations. Moreover, we suggest that failure to meet the expectations engendered by these schemata and scripts leads to the (...) activation of “reactive attitudes” embedded in feedback loops of reactive exchange that are constitutive of our mindshaping practices. (shrink)

Participants scoring high and low on a measure of repressive coping style (Mendolia, 2002) first learned a series of related word pairs (cue–target). Half of the cues were homographs. In the subsequent think/no-think phase (Anderson & Green, 2001), they responded with targets on some trials and suppressed thoughts of targets on others. Suppressed targets were always emotionally negative, as were targets associated with baseline cues reserved for the final test. Some participants were provided with emotionally benign or positive substitutes to (...) help them suppress, and these substitutes were related to different meanings of the homographic cues, compared to those established by the targets. On the final test, all cues were presented for target recall. Only the repressors significantly benefited from the provision of positive substitutes to aid forgetting of the negative targets, regardless of the nature of the cues. (shrink)

We argue that the problem of ideographic codes stems from neither learnability nor standardization, but from a general issue of pragmatic interpretation. As ideographic codes increase in expressive power, in order to reduce ambiguity, they must become more detailed – such that production becomes more cumbersome, and requires greater artistry on the part of users, limiting their capacity for growth.

Our abstract begins with the question: what means the sentence - the life is a capital? Michel Foucault makes the question when he signalizes that the bio-power is connected to the capitalism. In this case, the question is to understand how the increase and the confiscate of wealth suppose the power’s development that captures the life strength to make them participe to the wealth creation process. What other fundamental question could be emphasized? The contemporaneous capitalism is strictly connected to method (...) of subjetictivity production. In Nascimento da biopolítica Foucault shows how the capitalism appeals to the people to construct their lives like enterprises. It refers to homo oeconomicus like a suject that considers himself as a valuable capital. We realize the human capital is managed like lives markets, through the neoliberal biogovernamentality, regulating the sujects conducts by a place of truth, the market . We propose the constitution of a new subjectivity: the homo dispensatio. Tracing the relation between the life management as a capital and the constitution of this subjectivity, we could signalize what this situation can provide from the ethical and political viewpoint. (shrink)

Aunque, para Deleuze, un empirista es capaz de seguir los desequilibrios presentes en el funcionamiento práctico de las sociedades, de guiarse en ese plano cuyas relaciones no están predeterminadas, es necesario que además pueda servirse de algún medio de orientación en ese plano móvil, representado aquí por el cuerpo de una sociedad. Deleuze extrae del cuerpo social el peso y la inmovilidad de la estructura, incapaz de pensar la lógica de esos desequilibrios, para llenarlo de líneas con cualidades desiguales, capaces (...) de movimientos diferentes. Unas son más duras, delimitando territorios aparentemente estables, otras más flexibles, produciendo siempre zonas de inestabilidad en esos territorios, siendo a veces reintegradas al equilibrio anterior, a veces apuntando a un nuevo equilibrio, o simplemente a la muerte del antiguo. Este artículo trata de explorar esa lógica de las lineas con la cual Deleuze construye otra imagen de las sociedades. (shrink)

Heintz & Scott-Phillips's account of human expression leaves a number of central issues unclear – not least, whether the lack of expression in nonhuman species is attributable to their lack of the relevant metarepresentational abilities, an absence of trust, or a consequence of other factors. In place of their view, we propose a gradualistic account of the origins of human expression.

Neste artigo, desenvolveremos algumas considerações gerais, referentes a noção de biopolítica e biopoder de Michel Foucault relacionadas com a teoria da Necropolítica, enquanto política de morte e o exercício do necropoder, proposta pelo pensador camaronês Achille Mbembe e como essa se relaciona ao fenômeno de pandemia da Covid-19. Pretendemos assim problematizar, à luz dos aportes teóricos tanto da reflexão perpetrada por Michel Foucault, a partir do conceito de Biopolítica, quanto da noção de Necropolítica proposta por Mbembe, as questões políticas e (...) éticas presentes no contexto da eclosão desta pandemia, objetivando criticar e analisar nossa atualidade política dominada por uma racionalidade neoliberal hegemônica e intensamente destrutiva, presente na forma da gestão das condições de saúde e da vida da população por parte dos Estados. (shrink)