When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative (...) approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world. (shrink)

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We show (...) that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)

The contemporary problem of disagreement has two prominent solutions. The Conciliationists think that after discovering a case of disagreement one should be less certain of one’s original position. Those who favor Conciliatory views tend to think that disagreement is epistemically significant because it causes problems for one’s rationality. The Steadfasters, on the other hand, think that one should maintain one’s belief in the face of a disagreement; thus, disagreement appears a less epistemically significant problem to them. But neither of these (...) solutions address the actual problem of disagreements: that the very same faculties which cause me to trust myself provide you a differing opinion. Therefore, we need a solution for disagreement that responds to the issues it presents to one’s self-trust rather than secondary factors, like the likelihood of peerhood or the truth of the Uniqueness Thesis. Such an account ought to be regulative in nature. That is, it should offer insight to epistemic agents. The best of the regulative accounts can be found in virtue epistemology, because its practical nature is grounded in a holistic appraisal of epistemic agents. In cases of disagreement, to be epistemically virtuous, an agent needs to balance her intellectual fortitude with her intellectual humility and open-mindedness. But in order to balance these virtues when they appear to be in conflict, we need another resource that is able to govern them. For this purpose, I introduce intellectual phronesis. Like its moral counterpart, intellectual phronesis can help one to discern the particularity of situations in order to determine the appropriate response. Accordingly, intellectual phronesis is the ideal tool to adjudicate which intellectual virtue is appropriate for a particular disagreement. (shrink)

Although Gramsci's notions of hegemony and subalternity may seem outdated in this 21st century, a critical examination of the literature shows that these concepts apply in this global pandemic and political context. Racialization is a form of structural violence. In this paper, I also explore Gramsci's’ notion of engaged intellectuals to support the idea of social and political activism in nursing. Nurse scholars call for the decolonization of the discipline. Gramsci's philosophical approach to hegemony can be extended to racialization in (...) nursing. Gramsci's notions of civil society and state can help nurses to see the structures that create racism in nursing and society. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of trust in nurse–patient relationships from the perspective of the patient's trust in the nurse and what might be said to then render such a relationship trustworthy, from the patient's point of view. The paper commences with a general examination of the nature of trust, followed by consideration of the nature of professional–patient relationships in healthcare, with emphasis on nurse– patient relationships in particular. The nature of this relationship is used to provide grounds for arguing, (...) both morally and conceptually, that the nature of patients’ trust in those who nurse them is generally such that for the nurse to respond in a trustworthy way, she must care about her patients, not just for them. In arriving at this conclusion, the paper deliberately restricts its focus to nurse–patient encounters where patients are adults and a relationship, as opposed to a brief engagement between two people, can be said to have taken place. The context for this focus is public sector health care in the United Kingdom. In the text, gendered pronouns referring to doctors, nurses and patients are meant to be inclusive of both sexes. (shrink)

RACINE L and PETRUCKA P. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 12–20 Enhancing decolonization and knowledge transfer in nursing research with non-western populations: examining the congruence between primary healthcare and postcolonial feminist approachesThis article is a call for reflection from two distinct programs of research which converge on common interests pertaining to issues of health, social justice, and globalization. One of the authors has developed a research program related to the health and well-being of non-western populations, while the other author has expanded (...) the field of Aboriginal and international research in Canada and abroad. Based on examples drawn from our respective programs of research, we suggest conciliating the philosophy of primary healthcare to postcolonial feminism for decolonizing research and enhancing knowledge transfer with non-western populations. We contend that applying the theoretical and methodological strengths of these two approaches is a means to decolonize nursing research and to avoid western neocolonization. In conciliating primary health care and postcolonial feminism, the goal is to enhance the pragmatic relevance of postcolonial feminism to generate resistance through transformative research for achieving social justice. In tapping into the synergistic and complementary epistemological assumptions of the philosophy of primary health care and postcolonial ‘feminisms’, nurse researchers reinforce the anti-oppresive goals of postcolonial feminist research. Consequently, this approach may enhance both decolonization and knowledge transfer through strategies like photovoice. (shrink)

Implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research related to non‐Western populations In this article, I argue that implementing a postcolonial feminist perspective in nursing research transcends the limitations of modern cultural theories in exploring the health problems of non‐Western populations. Providing nursing care in pluralist countries like Canada remains a challenge for nurses. First, nurses must reflect on their ethnic background and stereotypes that may impinge on the understanding of cultural differences. Second, dominant health ideologies that underpin nurses’ everyday (...) practice and the structural barriers that may constrain the utilization of public healthcare services by non‐Western populations must be further examined. Postcolonial feminism is aimed at addressing health inequities stemming from social discriminative practices. I will draw on extant literature and data of an ongoing ethnography exploring the Haitian caregivers’ ways of caring for ageing relatives at home to unveil how the larger social and cultural world has an impact on caregivers’ everyday lives. Marginalized locations represent privileged sites from which health problems, intersecting with power, race, gender, and social classes, can be addressed. Postcolonial feminism provides the analytic lens to look at the impact of these factors in shaping health experiences. It also suggests redirecting nursing cultural research and practice to achieve social justice in the healthcare system. (shrink)

Through its social and political activism goals, postcolonial feminist theoretical approaches not only focus on individual issues that affect health but encompass the examination of the complex interplay between neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and globalization, in mediating the health of non-Western immigrants and refugees. Postcolonial feminism holds the promise to influence nursing research and practice in the 21st century where health remains a goal to achieve and a commitment for humanity. This is especially relevant for nurses, who act as global citizens and (...) as voices for the voiceless. The commitment of nursing to social justice must be further strengthened by relying on postcolonial theories to address issues of health inequities that arise from marginalization and racialization. In using postcolonial feminist theories, nurse researchers locate the inquiry process within a Gramscian philosophy of praxis that represents knowledge in action. (shrink)

A review of the Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme. Argues that Hulme, a philosopher/journist/poet who was killed in WWI, was a forerunner of the 20th-cent. mind, esp. as reflected in modernist poetry (T. S. Eliot, Imagism, Ezra Pound), aesthetics (Wilhelm Worringer), philosophy (Bergson, Jaspers, Wittgenstein), and politics (Charles Maurras, Georges Sorel).

This essay argues that the revolt against Cartesian dualism in the early 20th century was pivotal in the development of the modern mind and in the revolution in form that occurred in modern literature and the arts.

In a quiet London office, a software designer muses on the algorithms that will make possible the risk flags to be visualized on the screens of border guards from Heathrow to St Pancras International. There is, he says, ‘real time decision making’ – to detain, to deport, to secondarily question or search – but there is also the ‘offline team who run the analytics and work out the best set of rules’. Writing the code that will decide the association rules (...) between items of data, prosaic and mundane – flight route, payment type, passport – the analysts derive a novel preemptive security measure. This paper proposes the analytic of the data derivative – a visualized risk flag or score drawn from an amalgam of disaggregated fragments of data, inferred from across the gaps between data and projected onto an array of uncertain futures. In contrast to disciplinary and enclosed techniques of collecting data to govern population, the data derivative functions via ‘differential curves of normality’, imagining a range of potential futures through the association rule, thus ‘opening up to let things happen’. In some senses akin to the risk orientation of the financial derivative, itself indifferent to actual underlying people, places or events by virtue of modulated norms, the contemporary security derivative is not centred on who we are, nor even on what our data say about us, but on what can be imagined and inferred about who we might be – on our very proclivities and potentialities. (shrink)

Increasing globalisation and advances in artificial reproductive techniques have opened up a whole new range of possibilities for infertile couples across the globe. Inter-country gestational surrogacy with monetary remuneration is one of the products of medical tourism meeting in vitro fertilisation embryo transfer. Filled with potential, it has also been a hot topic of discussion in legal and bioethics spheres. Fears of exploitation and breach of autonomy have sprung from the current situation, where there is no international regulation of surrogacy (...) agreements—only a web of conflicting national laws that generates loopholes and removes safeguards for both the surrogate and commissioning couple. This article argues the need for evidence-based international laws and regulations as the only way to resolve both the ethical and legal issues around commercial surrogacy. In addition, a Hague Convention on inter-country surrogacy agreements is proposed to resolve the muddled state of affairs and enable commercial surrogacy to demonstrate its full potential. (shrink)

In a 1955 lecture the physicist Richard Feynman reflected on the place of doubt within scientific practice. ‘Permit us to question, to doubt, to not be sure’, proposed Feynman, ‘it is possible to live and not to know’. In our contemporary world, the science of machine learning algorithms appears to transform the relations between science, knowledge and doubt, to make even the most doubtful event amenable to action. What might it mean to ‘leave room for doubt’ or ‘to live and (...) not to know’ in our contemporary culture, where the algorithm plays a major role in the calculability of doubts? I propose a posthuman mode of doubt that decentres the liberal humanist subject. In the science of machine learning algorithms the doubts of human and technological beings nonetheless dwell together, opening onto a future that is never fully reduced to the single output signal, to the optimised target. (shrink)

Canadian and international nursing educators are increasingly concerned with the quality of university nursing education. Contemporary nursing education is fraught by a growing anti‐intellectualism coupled with the dominance of neoliberalism and corporate university business culture. Amid these challenges, nursing schools must prepare nurses to provide care in an era compounded by social and health inequities. The purpose of this paper was to explore the philosophical and contextual factors influencing anti‐intellectualism in nursing education. We use John Henry Newman's view of the (...) purpose of a university education as a heuristic perspective to examine anti‐intellectualism in nursing. We contend that the ideological worship of technological advances, a culture of consumerism, quality improvement and risk management, the primacy of doing over thinking, competency‐based curricula and business models rooted in neoliberal financial policies reinforce anti‐intellectualism in nursing. Anti‐intellectualism is a complex issue to address within the corporate university culture. We propose multiple strategies at the disciplinary, university and sociopolitical levels to decrease anti‐intellectualism. Counteracting anti‐intellectualism requires critical thinking, praxis and emancipation. Nurses should critically examine this anti‐intellectual trend as it limits the advancement of the discipline and marginalizes its contributions within the academy. If nurses do not address this challenge, the survival of nursing as an academic discipline may be jeopardized. (shrink)

In the past few years, scholars have been questioning whether the current approach in data ethics based on the higher level case studies and general principles is effective. In particular, some have been complaining that such an approach to ethics is difficult to be applied and to be taught in the context of data science. In response to these concerns, there have been discussions about how ethics should be “embedded” in the practice of data science, in the sense of showing (...) how ethical issues emerge in small technical choices made by data scientists in their day-to-day activities, and how such an approach can be used to teach data ethics. However, a precise description of how such proposals have to be theoretically conceived and could be operationalized has been lacking. In this article, we propose a full-fledged characterization of ‘embedding’ ethics, and how this can be applied especially to the problem of teaching data science ethics. Using the emerging model of ‘microethics’, we propose a way of teaching daily responsibility in digital activities that is connected to the higher level ethical challenges discussed in digital/data ethics. We ground this microethical approach into a virtue theory framework, by stressing that the goal of a microethics is to foster the cultivation of moral virtues. After delineating this approach of embedding ethics in theoretical detail, this article discusses a concrete example of how such a ‘micro-virtue ethics’ approach could be practically taught to data science students. (shrink)

As a gynecologic surgeon with a focus on infertility, I frequently hold complex discussions with patients, exploring with them the risks and benefits of surgical options. In the past, we physicians may have expected our patients to simply defer to our expertise and choose from the options we presented. In our contemporary era, however, patients frequently request options not favored by their physicians and even some they've found themselves online. In reproductive endocrinology and infertility, the range of options that may (...) be offered or that patients may themselves seek out is continuously widening. Physicians certainly seek to find the option that will result in the best outcome for their patients, but the information to guide us in achieving the best outcome can be vague or conflicting. Add to this the financial and emotional pressures bearing on patients seeking assisted reproduction. In this essay, I explore the extent to which clinicians in reproductive medicine should follow patient requests with which they disagree or instead try to persuade the patient to do something else or simply refuse outright to meet the request. And if persuasion is to be used, what would be legitimate methods? Clearly, coercion is unacceptable, but the line between persuasion and coercion can be elusive. At what point can or should clinicians resist such requests—and to what degree? (shrink)

Shaun Gallagher applies enactivist thinking to a staggeringly wide range of topics in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, even venturing into the realms of biological anthropology. One prominent point Gallagher makes that the holistic approach of enactivism makes it less amenable to scientific investigation than the cognitivist framework it seeks to replace, and should be seen as a “philosophy of nature” rather than a scientific research program. Gallagher also gives truth to the saying that “if you want new ideas, (...) read old books”, showing how the insights of the American pragmatists, particularly Dewey and Mead, offer a variety of resources and tools that can be brought to bear on modern day enactivism. Here, I suggest that the adoption of enactivist thinking would undermine the assumptions of certain scientific positions, requiring their abandonment, rather than simply making it more difficult to conduct research within an enactivist framework. I then discuss how Mead’s work has been used previously as a “pragmatist intervention” to help resolve problems in a related 4E endeavour, Gibson’s ecological psychology, and make a case for the inclusion of radical behaviorism as another pragmatist resource for 4E cognition. I conclude with a plea for further enactivist intervention in studies of comparative cognition. (shrink)

Using multisource data and multilevel analysis, we propose that the ethical stance of supervisors influences subordinates’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility which in turn influences subordinates’ trust in the organization resulting in their taking increased personal social responsibility and engagement in organizational citizenship behaviors oriented toward both the organization and other individuals. Using a multilevel model, we assessed the extent to which ethical leadership and CSR at the work unit level impacts subordinates’ behaviors mediated by organizational trust at the individual (...) level. We employed a sample of 71 work unit supervisors and 308 subordinates from five businesses of a conglomerate company located in mainland China. Subordinates were asked to rate supervisory ethical leadership practices, CSR, and their extent of organizational trust. Supervisors were asked to rate the personal social responsibility taking and OCB of their respective subordinates. A multilevel path analysis revealed that ethical leadership has a positive effect on CSR at the work unit level and that CSR has a positive cross-level effect on organizational trust at the individual level, which in turn significantly and positively impacts OCB through the mediating effect of taking personal social responsibility. Results are discussed in the context of China’s manufacturing sector. (shrink)

Does the real difference between non-consequentialist and consequentialist theories lie in their approach to value? Non-consequentialist theories are thought either to allow a different kind of value (namely, agent-relative value) or to advocate a different response to value ('honouring' rather than 'promoting'). One objection to this idea implies that all normative theories are describable as consequentialist. But then the distinction between honouring and promoting collapses into the distinction between relative and neutral value. A proper description of non-consequentialist theories can only (...) be achieved by including a distinction between temporal relativity and neutrality in addition to the distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, (...) the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

BackgroundDealing with end of life is challenging for patients and health professionals alike. The situation becomes even more challenging when a patient requests a legally permitted medical service that a health professional is unable to provide due to a conflict of conscience. Such a scenario arises when Victorian health professionals, with a conscientious objection (CO) to voluntary assisted dying (VAD), are presented with patients who request VAD or merely ask about VAD. The Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) recognizes the (...) inherent conflict of conscience that may arise for some health professionals when asked to provide VAD and responds by affording broad protection to conscientious objectors who wish to refuse to take part in the VAD process.MethodsSeventeen semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with Victorian health professionals with a self-identified CO to VAD in the lead-up to the implementation of VAD in Victoria. Interviews explored how participants anticipated they would manage their CO in practice. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed thematically.ResultsOur results reveal that the way in which health professionals claimed they would approach CO conversations is variable and was dependant on the strength of their opposition to VAD. We categorized conscientious objectors according to their approach as either dissuasive non-referrers, passive non-referrers, facilitators or negotiators. Our study also explores the perceived difficulties of exercising one’s CO as identified by our participants.ConclusionThe broad protection offered by the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) encourages a range of behaviors from conscientious objectors, due to the minimal obligations imposed. In order to assist conscientious objectors, more policy, institutional guidance, and education needs to be available to conscientious objectors explicitly addressing how to effectively manage one’s CO. Such guidance is imperative to ensuring that their moral integrity is preserved and that they are exercising their CO appropriately. (shrink)

As embodied theories of cognition are increasingly formalized and tested, care must be taken to make informed assumptions regarding the nature of concepts and representations. In this study, we outline three reasons why one cannot, in effect, represent the same concept twice. First, online perception affects offline representation: Current representational content depends on how ongoing demands direct attention to modality-specific systems. Second, language is a fundamental facilitator of offline representation: Bootstrapping and shortcuts within the computationally cheaper linguistic system continuously modify (...) representational content. Third, time itself is a source of representational change: As the content of underlying concepts shifts with the accumulation of direct and vicarious experience, so too does the content of representations that draw upon these concepts. We discuss the ramifications of these principles for research into both human and synthetic cognitive systems. (shrink)

RACINE L and PERRON A. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 190–201 Unmasking the predicament of cultural voyeurism: a postcolonial analysis of international nursing placementsThe growing interest in international nursing placements cannot be left unnoticed. After 11 years into this twenty‐first century, violations of human rights and freedom of speech, environmental disasters, and armed conflicts still create dire living conditions for men and women around the world. Nurses have an ethical duty to address issues of social justice and global health as a (...) means to fulfil nursing’s social mandate. However, international placements raise some concerns. Drawing on the works of postcolonial theorists in nursing and social sciences, we examine the risk of replicating colonialist practices and discourses of health in international clinical placements. Referring to Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and unfinalizability, we envision a culturally safe nursing practice arising from dialogical encounters between the Self as an Other and with the Other as an Other. We suggest that exploring the intricacies of cultural and race relations in everyday nursing practice are the premises upon which nurses can understand the broader historic, racial, gendered, political and economic contexts of global health issues. Finally, we make suggestions for developing culturally safe learning opportunities at the international level without minimizing the impact of dialogical cultural encounters occurring at the local and community levels. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that olfactory experience, like visual experience, is exteroceptive: it seems to one that odours, when one smells them, are external to the body, as it seems to one that objects are external to the body when one sees them. Where the sense of smell has been discussed by philosophers, it has often been supposed to be non-exteroceptive. The strangeness of this philosophical orthodoxy makes it natural to ask what would lead to its widespread acceptance. I (...) argue that philosophers have been misled by a visuocentric model of what exteroceptivity involves. Since olfaction lacks the spatial features that make vision exteroceptive the conclusion that olfaction is nonexteroceptive can appear quite compelling, particularly in the absence of an alternative model of exteroceptivity appropriate to olfaction. I offer a model according to which odours seem to be external to the body because they seem to be brought into the nose from without by sniffing and breathing through the nostrils. I argue that some natural-seeming objections to this model rely on substantive assumptions about how the senses are distinguished from one another, and how perceptual experience is put together out of its modality-specific parts, that require defence. (shrink)

Many people accept, at least implicitly, what I call the asymmetry claim: the view that moral realism is more defensible than aesthetic realism. This article challenges the asymmetry claim. I argue that it is surprisingly hard to find points of contrast between the two domains that could justify their very different treatment with respect to realism. I consider five potentially promising ways to do this, and I argue that all of them fail. If I am right, those who accept the (...) asymmetry claim have a significant burden of proof. (shrink)

We argue that claims of racial progress rest upon untenable teleological assumptions founded in Enlightenment discourse. We examine the theoretical and methodological focus on progress and its historical roots. We argue research should examine the concrete mechanisms that produce racial stability and change, and we offer three alternative frameworks for interpreting longitudinal racial data and phenomena. The first sees racism as a “fundamental cause,” arguing that race remains a “master category” of social differentiation. The second builds on Glenn’s “settler colonialism (...) as structure” framework to describe race relations as a mutually constituted and place-based system of resource allocation. The third framework draws attention to racialized agency. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: grief is, by definition, a response to a death; grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are unconvincing, (...) we sketch a positive case for a conception of grief that is not specific to bereavement, by noting some features that grief following bereavement shares with other experiences of loss. (shrink)

O poeta Vinícius de Moraes ensinava a amar "porque não há nada melhor para a saúde que um amor correspondido". Se não há nada mais importante do que amar, pensar o amor em suas diversas formas e vínculos é fundamental. Em Amor para corajosos, o filósofo Luiz Felipe Pondé conduz o leitor por um passeio sobre o tema. Não se trata de um manual para amar melhor ou um estudo acadêmico. Na sua tradicional prosa ao mesmo tempo provocativa e elucidativa, (...) Pondé escreve uma série de ensaios que podem ser lidos aleatoriamente ou na ordem sugerida. Ele parte de uma diferença filosófica entre o que seria um "amor kantiano" - que busca estabilidade e respeito - e um "amor nietzschiano" - aquele da paixão avassaladora. O foco principal é o amor romântico chamado pelos medievais de "doença da alma". Pondé usa a filosofia, as ciências sociais e a cultura para analisar questões eternas e outras mais contemporâneas. O amor pode conviver com rotinas? O amor tem cura? É ético abrir mão do amor em nome de obrigações familiares? Como saber se você é um canalha ou uma vagabunda? É possível confiar numa mulher? Como curar a atávica insegurança masculina? E quando o amor morre? Como o próprio título sugere, Amor para corajosos - Reflexões proibidas para menores vai instigar o leitor ao exercício do amor. Afinal, segundo o próprio Pondé, o amor é uma experiência prática, jamais teórica. "Se você nunca entendeu a razão de a literatura estar cheia de exemplos de pessoas que "morrem de amor", nenhuma teoria do amor vai salvá-lo do vazio que é nunca ter sofrido de amor". (shrink)

Este não é um livro sobre marketing. É um livro sobre a existência, avisa o filósofo Luiz Felipe Pondé, logo na abertura de Marketing existencial. Seu objetivo não é indicar caminhos para o mercado, nem auxiliar os leitores a serem consumidores mais felizes. É analisar por que a produção de bens em nossa época foi, pouco a pouco, se confundindo com os anseios existenciais dos indivíduos e deixou de atender à mera satisfação de necessidades básicas. Neste século XXI, a difusão (...) de bens de signifi cado passa à vanguarda do mercado, conduzido por um marketing existencial que busca vender produtos não apenas materiais, mas, sobretudo, os imateriais, na forma de bálsamos para as angústias mais profundas das pessoas. Em sua provocante reflexão, o autor recorre à filosofia da existência – de Kierkegaard a Sartre, de Unamuno a Camus – para examinar como as questões essenciais dos seres humanos permanecem vivas e sem resposta, mesmo na sociedade do cartão de crédito. O AUTOR Luiz Felipe Pondé é filósofo, professor da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP) e da Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP). É autor de, entre outros, Os Dez Mandamentos (+ um) e coautor de Por que virei à direita (ambos pela Três Estrelas). É colunista da Folha de S.Paulo. (shrink)

Abstract: In this paper I offer an account of a particular variety of perception of absence, namely, visual perception of empty space. In so doing, I aim to make explicit the role that seeing empty space has, implicitly, in Mike Martin's account of the visual field. I suggest we should make sense of the claim that vision has a field—in Martin's sense—in terms of our being aware of its limitations or boundaries. I argue that the limits of the visual field (...) are our own sensory limitations, and that we are aware of them as such. Seeing empty space, I argue, involves a structural feature of experience that constitutes our awareness of our visual sensory limitations, and thus, in virtue of which vision has a field. (shrink)

Discussions of what minds are and what they do is a contentious issue. This is particularly so when considering non‐human animals, for here the questions become: do they have minds at all? And if so, what kinds of minds are they? Alternatives to Cartesian or computational models of mind open up a whole new space of possibility for how we should conceive of animal minds, while also highlighting how Skinner's pragmatist‐inspired radical behaviourism has much more to offer than most researchers (...) in animal cognition would like to admit. Pragmatism, or ‘American Naturalism' is also highlighted by Chemero as the alternative for human cognition. The challenge, then, is to build an understanding of mind along pragmatist lines in a way that does justice to both human and non‐human animals. A clear understanding of embodiment, and commitment to a radical form of enactivism, can, perhaps, begin to generate a better kind of continuity. (shrink)

The Social Intelligence or Social Brain Hypothesis is an influential theory that aims to explain the evolution of brain size and cognitive complexity among the primates. This has shaped work in both primate behavioural ecology and comparative psychology in deep and far-reaching ways. Yet, it not only perpetuates many of the conceptual confusions that have plagued psychology since its inception, but amplifies them, generating an overly intellectual view of what it means to be a competent and successful social primate. Here, (...) I present an analysis of the Social Intelligence/Brain hypothesis highlighting how its anthropocentric origins have led us to be held captive by a picture of what social life involves and the kind of mind needed to navigate the social landscape. I go on to consider how experimental work in this vein either does not test what it claims to be testing, or introduces impossible problems regarding animal minds that cannot be solved, but only dissolved. What we need, in other words, is the application of “Wittgenstein's razor” and the reinvention of primatology along his enactivist lines. (shrink)