O presente artigo expõe, inicialmente, um panorama da sociedade contemporânea, a qual se apresenta como programada para o consumo e é marcada pelas exigências de um mercado capitalista e neoliberal, visando demonstrar de que forma tais características influenciam e determinam a construção da subjetividade dos indivíduos. Nesse contexto, o texto analisa as consequências das referidas configurações sociais no campo educacional, em especial no ensino de filosofia. Ademais, busca-se ressaltar o modo como são desenvolvidas as relações de poder, pautadas essencialmente pelo (...) caráter opressivo. Como proposta para o desenvolvimento de práticas de ensino nesse cenário, de modo a não reproduzir o modelo vigente, cujo objetivo é a construção de um sujeito eficiente em termos de produção, é apontado o ensino de filosofia a partir do eixo problemático. Esse modelo, na concepção do filósofo Sílvio Gallo, é uma das formas mais adequadas de propiciar aos estudantes a experiência do pensar crítico, fugindo de um ensino mecanicista, reprodutor de um sistema de controle e normatização. Por fim, é apresentada a ética do cuidado de si ou a estética da existência, a partir dos estudos de Michel Foucault. À luz dessa concepção, busca-se analisar as suas possíveis contribuições para o ensino de filosofia, entendido como uma forma de resistência às práticas criadas pelos estados modernos com o objetivo de domesticar, subjugar e controlar os indivíduos. Entendemos que o ensino de filosofia torna-se uma práxis libertadora, que desperta nos sujeitos o pensar crítico, criativo e reflexivo, de modo a se tornar uma forma de resistência contra as lógicas de controle e alienação das subjetividades. (shrink)

O livro reúne textos apresentados no II Workshop de Filosofia e Ensino, realizado na UFRGS em 2015, com a temática "Epistemologia e Currículo" -/- .

BIOGRAFIAS NÃO AUTORIZADAS: UMA DISCUSSÃO INÓCUA NO BRASIL?

This schedule, provided as a companion to my “Teaching Firefly” article, was used for a sophomore level philosophy course that was populated mostly by non-majors. The original idea for the course was to develop a popular culture philosophy course that would attract students from all over campus, which was meant to both introduce them to multiple philosophical ideas and theories and hopefully convince some of them to major or minor in philosophy. The course was quite successful at drawing Whedon fans (...) from across the university (after a certain amount of advertising through posters and social media). Students were very engaged with both discussions of episodes and the readings. (shrink)

A complete, illustrated survey of Etienne-Jules Marey's work that investigates the far reaching effects of her inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists.

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, (...) feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

ATIVIDADE CURRICULAR EM COMUNIDADE E SOCIEDADE E OS POVOS TRADICIONAIS: EXPERIÊNCIA DE CAMPO DO CURSO DE DIREITO DA UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA BAHIA.

La siempre fascínate escritura rulfiana continúa dialogando con el mundo. El así conocido “escritor de las letras mexicanas”, nos sigue ofreciendo un mar de posibilidades de acercamiento a otras áreas humanísticas entre las cuáles incluimos a la filosofía. Coincidentes en la época y en la geografía mexicana, Juan Rulfo y María Zambrano se encontraron en 1939. Exponentes ejemplares y creadores de nuevos caminos en la escritura literaria y filosófica, los exponemos como paralelos a través de dos piezas claves de sus (...) obras: Pedro Páramo y Los sueños y el tiempo. La antropología zambraniana viene propuesta como uno de estos senderos creativos y creadores de la búsqueda del propio ser y del sentido mismo del existir. Dicho pronunciamiento antropológico lo exponemos como perspectiva de lectura del viaje no sólo de Juan preciado, ansioso buscador de su padre, sino de todos los lectores de Rulfo que hemos tejido con sus letras —extractoras de sueños y productoras de anhelos— la frágil cuerda que sostiene la aventura del descubrir nuestro lugar en el oscuro pozo del mundo. Realismo mágico y Razón poética en armonía propositiva que revela el origen de ambos proveniente de la misma semilla del ser. Rulfo y Zambrano nos enseñan que hay encuentros más profundos y reales que aquellos sólo históricos. (shrink)

Philosophers unknowingly subscribe to two competing conceptions of philosophy. On the inclusive conception, teaching philosophy provides a valuable social good that should be distributed as much as possible. On the traditionalist conception, certain materials and techniques constitute the way philosophy should be taught, which must be conserved. Unfortunately, the traditionalist conception clings to methods that have repeatedly produced an elitist, hierarchal version of philosophy that inhibits diverse engagement. Given the value of philosophy, philosophers have a duty to distribute philosophy to (...) a greater number of people, which requires embracing the inclusive conception. Acting towards this duty can be done by working beyond the classroom, spreading philosophy through service, and improving our teaching both to reach a more diverse audience and to follow pedagogical research, such as with experiential learning techniques. Philosophers should also ensure that the duty’s burden falls more on privileged philosophers who can take on the necessary sacrifices. (shrink)

While virtually everyone recognizes the moral permissibility of whistleblowing under certain circumstances, most theorists offer relatively conservative accounts of when it is allowed, and are reluctant to offer a full recommendation of the practice as an important tool towards addressing ethical failures in the workplace. We think that accounts such as these tend to overestimate the importance of professional or personal obligations, and underestimate the moral obligation to shine light on severe professional malfeasance. Of course, a whistleblower, even an anonymous (...) one, often faces serious threats of retaliation and harm to their professional livelihoods and well-being. To address these challenges we argue in favor of a practice that we will call Preemptive Anonymous Whistleblowing (PAW). Such whistleblowing is preemptive in that a whistleblower provides information about malfeasance to a party in a position to do something about it without first raising the worry to one’s immediate superiors. At first blush, such preemption may seem unsettling, and PAW admittedly raises a number of worrisome issues. We defend PAW, however, as part of a larger argument that whistleblowing is morally required more often than is commonly thought. The availability of PAW as an option provides a method for allaying the concern that whistleblowing can be overly burdensome due to the risks of job and career. Insofar as that concern can be allayed, it is feasible for there to be substantial moral requirements to engage in whistleblowing in cases where severe harms can be prevented. With high enough stakes, there is a moral requirement for whistleblowing. (shrink)

The question whether compulsory schooling is justifiable or not has been treated at considerable length by critics, defenders, and positions in-between. What these treatments—about paternalism and autonomy and institutionalization and more—have not directly analyzed is a question that precedes the issue of overall justification: the preliminary question of time. Does it matter when compulsion takes place? Furthermore, does the timing of compulsion matter to the question of overall justification? I will argue that it does matter, but for reasons not directly (...) related to the question of overall justification. (shrink)

Deep beneath the Jack the Ripper story, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell use From Hell to argue for a philosophical thesis: Although physical violence and structural violence are quite different, they are also interconnected as each causes the other to worsen. William Gull claims that through the Ripper murders, he has “delivered” the twentieth century, as seen in his premonition of the mundane office place. In other words, Gull believes that the Ripper murders somehow played a foundational role in creating (...) twentieth-century life. This premonition suggests that horrific murders like those of the Ripper make structural violence, such as that found in the contemporary office place through wrongs such as sexual harassment, recede into the background of society where it becomes invisible and taken for granted. As Gull sees his violence as particularly connected to his misogynist worldview, From Hell makes the clearest case for the connection between physical violence and structural violence through the problem of patriarchy. (shrink)

Is there room for philosophy in educational research? Is there phenomenology before and beyond its uses and abuses in the applied and social sciences? How are phenomenology and philosophy of education related? What are the methods for phenomenology within the field of philosophy of education? These talks to educational scholars and researchers responds to these questions and appeals for place of philosophy within educational research and the tradition of phenomenology within philosophy of education. Across a genealogy of thought and frequent (...) autobiographical confessions, this book of lectures works from the simple insight that philosophy and education are not so different. (shrink)

The relationship between philosophy and science has always been complementary. Today, while science moves increasingly fast and philosophy shows some problems in catching up with it, it is not always possible to ignore such relationships, especially in some disciplines such as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and neuroscience. However, the methodological procedures used to analyze these data are based on principles and assumptions that require a profound dialogue between philosophy and science. Following these ideas, this work aims to raise the (...) problems that a classical connectionist theory can cause and problematize them in a cognitive framework, considering both philosophy and cognitive sciences but also the disciplines that are near to them, such as AI, computer sciences, and linguistics. For this reason, we embarked on an analysis of both the computational and theoretical problems that connectionism currently has. The second aim of this work is to advocate for collaboration between neuroscience and philosophy of mind because the promotion of deeper multidisciplinarity seems necessary in order to solve connectionism’s problems. In fact, we believe that the problems that we detected can be solved by a thorough investigation at both a theoretical and an empirical level, and they do not represent an impasse but rather a starting point from which connectionism should learn and be updated while keeping its original and profoundly convincing core. (shrink)

Cases—be they real or fictional—are commonplace both in the medical ethics literature and in the public media. Cases take on a variety of forms: from streamlined to book length narratives. They also serve a variety of different purposes, from illustration, to decision making, and from debunking to heuristics. Drawing on the rhetorical analysis of « exemplum », I shall describe what cases are, and what their role is in the practice of clinical ethics. I identify two basic ways in which (...) cases can be brought to bear on ethical thinking and practice: a « tamed » and a « wild » way, and show how « wild cases » can serve a useful heuristic function despite their appeal to emotions and their unusual and striking character. In conclusion, I will argue that cases, both in their wild and their tamed form, are not only useful pedagogical tools, but can serve as a legitimate empirical basis for medical ethics. (shrink)

Cancer research is experiencing ‘paradigm instability’, since there are two rival theories of carcinogenesis which confront themselves, namely the somatic mutation theory and the tissue organization field theory. Despite this theoretical uncertainty, a huge quantity of data is available thanks to the improvement of genome sequencing techniques. Some authors think that the development of new statistical tools will be able to overcome the lack of a shared theoretical perspective on cancer by amalgamating as many data as possible. We think instead (...) that a deeper understanding of cancer can be achieved by means of more theoretical work, rather than by merely accumulating more data. To support our thesis, we introduce the analytic view of theory development, which rests on the concept of plausibility, and make clear in what sense plausibility and probability are distinct concepts. Then, the concept of plausibility is used to point out the ineliminable role played by the epistemic subject in the development of statistical tools and in the process of theory assessment. We then move to address a central issue in cancer research, namely the relevance of computational tools developed by bioinformaticists to detect driver mutations in the debate between the two main rival theories of carcinogenesis. Finally, we briefly extend our considerations on the role that plausibility plays in evidence amalgamation from cancer research to the more general issue of the divergences between frequentists and Bayesians in the philosophy of medicine and statistics. We argue that taking into account plausibility-based considerations can lead to clarify some epistemological shortcomings that afflict both these perspectives. (shrink)

The chapter provides an analysis of the concept of the dignity of the person in Polish legal culture. It begins with a brief description of the historical background in which the legal status of human dignity has been framed. Then it turns to the analysis of the philosophical doctrines which have shaped the concept, in particular those which influenced Polish legal scholarship to the highest degree. The subsequent section attempts to clarify the meaning of the concept, specifying its features and (...) providing distinctions between dignity of the person and dignity of personage. Finally, the chapter presents the protection and respect of the dignity of the person in Polish legislation. (shrink)

Academic mobility is usually perceived and discussed as a positive phenomenon — as a prerequisite for building a competitive and successful economy and quality science. Academic mobility has now become essential to building a successful academic career in many research domains. On the policy level the negative impact of academic mobility on researchers’ lives and especially women’s is usually overlooked and marginalized. In my paper I focus on academic mobility in the context of academics’ relationships and family lives. I ask (...) two research questions: What is the impact of mobility on researchers’ relationships? How does mobility affect the lives of the partners of mobile researchers? The analysis is based on i) 16 in-depth interviews with academics from various fields of research about their experiences of long-term fellowships abroad in the early stages of their academic path and on ii) 16 in-depth joint interviews with Czech dualcareer academic couples. The analysis shows that academic mobility has a great and significant impact on the family and partnership lives of migrating researchers. For many, especially the partners of migrating researchers, mobility means they have to make many concessions in their private and family lives. I conclude that the impact of academic mobility on people’s partnership lives is highly gendered because couples’ work and family lives are closely intertwined. (shrink)

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead (...) of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory. (shrink)

In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world‐champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as “creative” by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I argue that AlphaGo displays one important aspect of creative problem solving (namely mental scenario building in the form of Monte Carlo (...) tree search), while lacking another (domain generality). This analysis has consequences for how we think about creativity in humans and AI. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

A natural landscape can look serene, a shade of colour cheerful and a piece of music might sound heartrending. Why do we ascribe affective qualities to objects that can't entertain psychological states? The capacity that objects, and especially artworks, have to express affective states is a bizarre phenomenon that needs to be clarified in numerous respects. Philosophers are still struggling with the phenomenon of expressiveness being a matter of imagination, perception, or mnemonic association, and usually do not agree on the (...) role that emotions and human bodily expressions play in it. Benenti questions the main theories that populate the aesthetics domain using the tools of philosophy of mind. This study deals with crucial debates concerning seeing-in, cognitive penetration, the relation between phenomenal character and representational content and between emotions and expressions. It aims at providing a viable account of the experience we have of expressive properties by casting light on its fundamentally perceptual nature. The outcome is an empirically informed and critical overview of a topic which has been rather neglected in the philosophy of mind. The book will be of interest to scholars of the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, the cognitive sciences, and psychology. (shrink)

I analyze the deimopolitical functioning of cisgender-straight-bolsonarist masculinity as a norm of recognition characterized not only by the fear of penetrating the anus, but essentially marked by the fear of having an anus. I seek to analyze the production of fear of the existence of the anus as an intrinsic element in the fabrication of supposed social threats in cisgender-straight-bolsonarism. Through a topographic metaphorization that locates/means the excluded as the anus of the social, the “enemy” appears as a mark of (...) the anal memory, reminding that the anus exists. If it exists, it can be penetrated. In this way, the existence of the anus organizes the differential distribution of humanity in this regime, as the minimum condition of being a human being is that of being a man, that is, not having an anus. This condition is reaffirmed by other markers of absence: not having a vagina, not having black skin, not belonging to ethnic and religious minorities... Cisgender-straight-bolsonarism behaves like an anatomical engineering in which the anus works as a catalyst for a masculinist reaction. The dermal tube is then reformatted in this regime. With this, I try to show that the fear of the existence of the anus is a central element of subjective enunciation and fascist recognition in this community. (shrink)

Animal minds are complex and diverse, making them difficult to study. This Element focuses on a question that has received much attention in the field of comparative cognition: 'Do animals reason about unobservable variables like force and mental states?' The Element shows how researchers design studies and gather evidence to address this question. Despite the many virtues of current methods, hypotheses in comparative cognition are often underdetermined by the empirical evidence. Given this, philosophers and scientists have recently called for additional (...) behavioral constraints on theorizing in the field. The Element endorses this proposal (known as 'signature testing'), while also arguing that studies on animal minds would benefit from drawing more heavily on neuroscience and biology. (shrink)

Aristotle ’s claim that we become virtuous by doing virtuous actions raises a familiar problem: How can we perform virtuous actions unless we are already virtuous? I reject deflationary accounts of the answer given in _Nicomachean Ethics_ 2.4 and argue instead that proper habituation involves doing virtuous actions with the right motive, i.e. for the sake of the noble, even though learners do not yet have virtuous dispositions. My interpretation confers continuity to habituation and explains in a non-mysterious way how (...) we become virtuous by doing virtuous actions in the right way. (shrink)

Hélène Cixous is more than an influential theorist. She is also a groundbreaking author and playwright. Combining an idiosyncratic mix of autobiographical and fictional narrative with a host of philosophical and poetic observations, Cixous's writing matches the kaleidoscopic nature of her thought, offering new ways of conceptualizing sex, relationships, identity, and the self, among other topics. Yet, as Jacques Derrida once observed, a "profound misunderstanding" hangs over the accomplishments of Cixous, with many believing the intellectual excelled only at theoretical exploration. (...) Providing a truly liberal selection of her writings from throughout her career, Marta Segarra rediscovers Cixous's acts of invention for a new generation to enjoy. Divided into thematic concerns, these works fully capture Cixous's genius for merging fiction, theory, and the experience of living. They discuss dreaming in the feminine, Algeria and Germany, love and the other, the animal, Derrida, and the theater. They defy classification, locking literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into thrilling new patterns of engagement. Whether readers are familiar with Cixous or are approaching her thought for the first time, all will find fresh perspectives on gender, fiction, drama, philosophy, religion, and the postcolonial. (shrink)

This work presents a post-positivist research framework for explaining any surprising or anomalous fact in the evolutionary path of a complex, dynamic, and contingent social process. Firstly, it elaborates on the reconciliation betweenthe ontological and epistemological assumptions of Critical Realism with the principles of American Pragmatism. Next, the research method is presented: theoretical propositions about a social structure are translated into a set of grammar rules that acknowledge patterns of sequences of events, either involving individual action or interaction between actors (...) within a real social system. The result is a discrete mathematical model for a concrete category of social process based on these rules. Finally, data-grounded refinement of the theory is possible through comparison between cases belonging to the same category, but differing in some contingent pattern of sequences of event outcomes. Consequently, their grammars differ in some pairs of context-sensitive rules that explain this surprising fact, and the derivation of this alternative historical trajectory of event outcomes becomes an extension to the early category of social process. In this sense, the proposed framework suggests a hierarchy of classes of grammars for middle-range explanations based on the ontological assumption of the generative nature of social reality. (shrink)