Carta escrita por Gilda de Mello e Souza, remetida ao colega Oswaldo Porchat, que se encontrava em Berkeley, quando a ditadura civil-militar brasileira, recrudescida desde a implantação, em agosto de 1968, do AI-5, representava uma verdadeira ameaça a estudantes e docentes da Universidade de São Paulo, especialmente se lhe fizessem qualquer tipo de oposição. Porchat trocou uma sequência de cartas com Gilda nessa época, nas quais relata sua desilusão com a Faculdade de Filosofia, e com os acontecimentos políticos no (...) Brasil. Ao mesmo tempo, confessa estar encantado com a descoberta de novos elementos da Lógica, e com a atmosfera mais amena dos Estados Unidos. Porchat sabe que Gilda enfrenta momentos difíceis, tendo de assumir a Presidência do curso em meio à tentativa do reitor Miguel Reale de submetê-lo a um interventor. Enfrentando a dúvida sobre se valeria a pena retornar ao Brasil naquele momento, Porchat escreve à amiga. A carta a seguir expressa, dentro do que era possível na época, quando as correspondências eram vigiadas, o parecer de Gilda sobre as indagações do amigo, sobre os rumos da ditadura, e sobre o que ela pensava de sua própria atitude de resistência naquele contexto. A carta original, assim como a sequência de correspondências da qual faz parte, está depositada no Fundo Gilda de Mello e Souza, no Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (IEB/USP). Agradeço à família de Gilda, especialmente a Ana Luisa Escorel e a Laura Escorel, pela disponibilização desse documento para a presente publicação. (shrink)

Computer vision research involving street and road detection methods usually focuses on driving assistance and autonomous vehicle systems. In this context, street segmentation occurs in real-time, based on images centered on the street. This work, on the other hand, uses street segmentation for urban planning research to classify pavement types of a city or region, which is particularly important for developing countries. For this application, it is needed a dataset with images from various locations for each street. These images are (...) not necessarily centered on the street and include challenges that are not common in street segmentation datasets, such as mixed pavement types and the presence of faults and holes on the street. We implemented a multi-class version of a state-of-the-art segmentation algorithm and adapted it to perform street pavement classification, handling navigation along streets and angle variation to increase the accuracy of the classification. A data augmentation approach is also proposed to use preliminary results from the test instances as new ground truth and increase the amount of training data. A dataset with more than 300,000 images from 773 streets from a Brazilian city was built. Our approach achieved a precision of 0.93, showing the feasibility of the proposed application. (shrink)

The use of brain imaging technology as a common tool of research has spawned concern and debate over how investigators should respond to incidental fndings discovered in the course of research. In this article, we argue that investigators have an obligation to respond to incidental fndings in view of their entering into a professional relationship with research participants in which they are granted privileged access to private information with potential relevance to participants' health. We discuss the scope and limits of (...) this professional obligation to respond to incidental fndings, bearing in mind that the relationship between investigators and research participants differs fundamentally from the doctor-patient relationship. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess (...) the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this article, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the claim that the act of writing a work of fiction consists in the performance of a sui generis speech act, and propose a dynamic treatment for acts of fiction-making. Recently, speech act theories of fiction have become targets of the uniformity argument. According to it, in order to account for the myriad of speech acts present in works of fiction, speech act theories of fiction need to propose a similar amount of fiction-related illocutionary forces. (...) When uttered in the same context, these illocutionary forces give rise to the same relations raised by their non-fictional counterparts. While not a knock-down argument, this warrants an explanation. In order to defend speech act theories of fiction, I argue that the claim that speech act theories of fiction need more than one fiction-related sui generis illocutionary force is misguided and rests on an erroneous account of the content of an act of fiction-making. I take that the content of an act of fiction-making is more akin to a speech report than to a regular assertion. Following, I propose a dynamic treatment to the speech act of fiction-making. Concluding, I explore some related topics in order to distinguish my proposal from pretenseapproaches to fictional discourse. (shrink)

Sometimes, when comparing a pair of items, it appears that neither is better than the other, nor that they are equally good, relative to a certain value that they bear. Cases of this kind have come to be referred to as superhard comparisons. What grounds superhard comparisons? On the dominant views, held by Joseph Raz and Ruth Chang, they are grounded, at least partially, in the failure of the three classic value relations—‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. On an (...) alternative view, which might be called the vagueness view, first developed by John Broome, they are grounded in vagueness about which of the classic value relations holds between the items. In this paper, I pay special attention to superhard comparisons in the context of choice and develop a novel argument against the dominant views on the basis of an account of decision-making under vagueness in ‘better than’. The upshot is that a new vagueness view emerges. (shrink)

El contexto de crisis y restricciones presupuestarias sirve de pretexto para promover en la Comunidad de Madrid la implantación de un modelo dual de gestión de los centros y servicios sanitarios, ampliamente contestado en la calle por profesionales sanitarios, asociaciones, pacientes y usuarios. Este proceso se inicia sin evidencia científico-técnica que avale las presuntas ventajas del modelo de concesión y carece de una evaluación solvente de impacto sanitario, conforme a estándares de transparencia, rendición de cuentas y calidad democrática. Entre los (...) aspectos éticos y jurídicos involucrados en este debate analizo los relacionados con el conflicto de intereses y las evidencias recientes que desaconsejan adoptar en España modelos similares. Tras analizar el desafío que supone el nuevo marco institucional para el ejercicio de la responsabilidad profesional conforme a criterios de equidad y buenas prácticas, se concluye aportando elementos para generar un marco más equilibrado de reformas. (shrink)

A questáo do fundamento traz a tona críticas a metafisica. No pensamento de Heidegger, esta questáo mostra que o ontológico náo se reduz as deterrninações metafisicas. Este fato como tal é que precisaria suscitar interesse e ser aprofundado. Criticas generalizadas e correntes a metafisica náo tomam isto como seu objetivo.

The orthodox account of the morality of war holds that the responsibility for resorting to war rests on the state’s political authorities and the responsibility for how the war is waged rests only on the state’s army and, thus, business firms have no special obligations in wartime. The purpose of this article is to reconsider the ethical responsibilities of business firms in wartime. I defend the claim that a plausible standard of liability in war must integrate the degree of the (...) agent’s contributions to posing an unjust threat, the nature of agent's behavior, and his/her intentions. If these premises are correct, it follows that the moral obligations of civilians and business corporations are fundamentally altered by war. Taking into consideration their relative contributions to the war effort, a taxonomy of business firms is developed. (shrink)

In the so-called digital culture, there is a constant presence of radical transformations on the cognitive and affective dimensions of the relations established among teachers and students. Upon this ubiquitous accessibility of information, the very historical and hierarchically verticalized relation between teachers and students has been increasingly questioned. Upon this situation, the authors in this article aim at stating that the revitalization of concepts developed by Paulo Freire, mainly the ones discussed in the books: ‘Pedagogy of Hope’, that sought a (...) re-encounter with ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, ‘Extension or Communication’ and ‘Pedagogy of Freedom’ became essential to understanding how the relationship between teachers and students can be mutually re-signified. In these times of digital culture, we argue that the revitalization of the critical thinking proposed by Freire is able to foment a dialogical communication both in the pedagogical link shared by teachers and students and in the transformation of information into substantially and ethically experienced concepts. Such substantial and ethical experiences are the ones able to attest that the pedagogy of hope and the pedagogy of freedom are possible, provided they are constituted with the students and not for them. (shrink)

La gestación por sustitución, llamada también subrogación de útero o alquiler de vientres, es una práctica que suscita múltiples problemas éticos relacionados con los límites morales del mercado, la idea del cuerpo humano como objeto de contrato o los conflictos entre libertad negativa y positiva. Además, la repercusión de las ideologías políticas y del feminismo en el debate es notable: por un lado, las izquierdas critican la mercantilización de la capacidad reproductiva, pues genera injusticias y grandes desigualdades; por otro, el (...) feminismo se opone a que las mujeres sean tratadas como medios para cumplir fines, y considera que la subrogación de útero conduce a la negación de las libertades conquistadas. El autor de este libro denuncia que el mercado reproductivo de corte neoliberal, nutriéndose del deseo de tener hijos y escudándose en la defensa de la libre elección, fomenta prácticas que perjudican a las mujeres gestantes, en clara desventaja económica y social, para satisfacer los intereses procreativos de las clases privilegiadas. Y en su crítica rescata conceptos clave de la izquierda emancipadora para abordar el debate en términos de derechos básicos y justicia social. (shrink)

In this essay I propose two theories of truth and show how they deal with semantic paradoxes. Their most salient feature is that they are based on a gametheoretic understanding of logic and meaning. “Truth”, therefore, is understood dialogically, as agreement between parts. I compare this proposal with a similar one already existing in the literature —Dutilh Novaes and French 2018—, and highlight the advantages of mine. The theories of truth I present are non-trivial, substructural (in a sense to be (...) clarified) and capture strong intuitions about truth. Some philosophical recommendations in favor of our understanding of Dialogics are delivered along the way. (shrink)

Latin American countries have slowly enacted laws decriminalizing abortion in three circumstances: Life‐threatening risk for the pregnant woman, extra‐uterine non‐viability of malformed foetus, and pregnancy due to rape or incest. Chile is one of the last countries to adopt such a law, formulated in an increasingly restrictive format. Conservative politicians and Church‐related healthcare institutions promptly announced individual and institutional conscientious objection based on the right of private facilities to obey their ideology and personal moral integrity. Juridical consultations and Constitutional Court (...) rulings allowed private hospitals to uphold their objection even if contracted to provide some public health services. Under these conditions, only a few hundred women requested and obtained a legal abortion, while an estimated 100,000 continued to depend on unsafe procedures. Bioethical debate was silenced by the unfettered drive for conscientious objection that continues to limit women’s autonomy, and fails to ease the public health scourge of massive unsafe clandestine abortions. (shrink)

Concern about the rapid ageing of all societies reaches alarming proportions as healthcare inequities are steeply rising, prompting the elderly to live longer but subject to insufficient social protection and healthcare in the wake of dwindling public resources. The aged population of developing nations are facing additional hardships due to the growing gap between needs and the financial reductions of public institutions, retirement funds, and the trend towards privatization of essential services turned into commodities. Current approaches to allocation of insufficient (...) resources without ageist discrimination are briefly discussed: individual self‐care aimed at successful, active and healthy ageing based on resourcefulness of the privileged elderly; utilitarian approaches founded on QALY and fair innings, and human rights focused on the plights of the elderly. These approaches cannot apply to resources poor nations, who need to engage in context‐bound bioethics dealing with the realities of their exposed ageing population. A developing world bioethics is needed to face the plights of the elderly in countries with low and middle‐income and insufficient social capital. Suggested are: 1) a phenomenological approach based on the interaction of bioethics and ethnology, furthering grass‐roots input from the elderly; 2) Create small communities –campus‐like boroughs– to simplify accessibility to social services and healthcare facilities, as an alternative to the high‐cost WHO proposal of age‐friendly large cities. (shrink)

¿Cuál debe ser la actitud de un pensamiento genuinamente postmoderno ante el fenómeno religioso? ¿Debe contribuir a desterrarlo de nuestras sociedades (en alianza con cierto racionalismo ilustrado que siempre miró con suspicacia cuanto no cabía dentro de sus estrechos criterios) o, por el contrario, debe colaborar en su emergente renacimiento (y aliarse, por tanto, con los diversos tradicionalismos que lo reivindican)? La filosofía de Gianni Vattimo constituye una respuesta a esta disyuntiva (típicamente moderna) desde una perspectiva que pretende distorsionar (verwinden) (...) tal dicotomía. La idea clave para ello es el concepto de secularización que, a la vez que reconoce nuestra dependencia, como occidentales, de un cierto discurso religioso, lo debilita con el fin de eliminar de él su violencia (pues, de modo circular, reconoce que dentro de él ya existía in nuce el proyecto de esta eliminación, el proyecto de la kénosis). El presente artículo analiza someramente estas ideas y traza algunas de sus conexiones (no siempre explicitadas por el propio Vattimo) con el pensamiento teológico más reciente, para después reseñar algunas de las consecuencias que han tenido en los debates filosóficos hispanos. (shrink)

For centuries, several disciplines have tried to tackle the topic of how legitimate it is to use violence in order to solve social problems. One of the most recent interdisciplinary approaches (and one of the most successful in present-day Latin America) is the so-called “Ethics of Liberation,” designed by Enrique Dussel. Based on the Theology of Liberation, this theory goes beyond the limits of theology as a discipline and pleads for three ethical criteria that every political revolution must fulfill to (...) use violence in a legitimate way. The first is a formal criterion, which basically takes after the ideal dialogue situation endorsed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and purports to be rooted in yet another discipline, linguistics. The second is a material criterion, defined as the upshot of an acceptable welfare for all citizens, thus intimately linked with the discipline of economy and political philosophy. The third is a criterion of feasibility, which makes a revolt legitimate if, and only if, it has a reasonable possibility of succeeding; hence strategic issues take a leading role. This essay contends that each of these criteria is conceptually incompatible with violence. Hence, Dussel’s arguments involve multiple contradictions as he aims to justify the use of violence precisely with these interdisciplinary criteria. (shrink)

This article examines the expansion of agrofuels in the Americas and the ecological impacts associated with the technologies used in the production of large-scale monocultures of corn and soybeans. In addition to deforestation and displacement of lands devoted to food crops due to expansion of agrofuels, the massive use of transgenic crops and agrochemical inputs, mainly fertilizers and herbicides used in the production of agrofuels, pose grave environmental problems.

Noticia de un secuestro (1996), del Premio Nobel de Literatura Gabriel García Márquez, representa a la sociedad colombiana que atraviesa por un período caracterizado por el desarrollo de actos narcoterroristas, del cual se detecta el funcionamiento de Pablo Escobar —jefe del Cartel de Medellín— hacia el Gobierno. El presente artículo tiene como finalidad hallar aquellos referentes que permiten ubicar esta obra literaria en lo histórico y lo social —definidos desde la percepción del criminólogo Luis Rodríguez Manzanera al precisar sobre la (...) forma delictiva y la tensión provocada en la ciudadanía para denominarlas como macrocriminalidad—, junto con lo político-filosófico (el capitalismo definido desde el marxismo-leninismo) y lo literario —considerando el posboom como una manifestación artística que permite la incorporación de elementos propios de los Estudios Culturales; como, por ejemplo, la articulación de lo nacional y la crítica ideológica al sistema que los impera. (shrink)

En este trabajo me propongo desarrollar un estudio crítico de la concepción mecanicista de la explicación científica. En primer lugar, argumento que la caracterización mecanicista de los modelos fenoménicos (no explicativos) es inadecuada, pues no ofrece un análisis aceptable de los conceptos de modelo científico y similitud, que son fundamentales para la propuesta. En segundo lugar, sostengo que la caracterización de los modelos mecanicistas (explicativos) es igualmente inadecuada, pues los análisis disponibles de la relación explicativa de relevancia constitutiva implican una (...) tesis metafísica que es rechazada por los mismos mecanicistas. Concluyo que el mecanicismo no ofrece todavía una elucidación aceptable de la explicación científica. In this paper, I offer a critical assessment of the mechanicist approach to scientific explanation. Firstly, I argue that the mechanicist characterization of (non explanatory) phenomenological models is inadequate, since it does not develop an explication of the concepts of scientific model and similarity, which are indispensable to the approach. Secondly, I claim that the mechanicist conception of (explanatory) mechanicist models is inadequate as well, since all the available analices of the explanatory relation of constitutive relevance imply a metaphysical thesis that is rejected by the mechanicists themselves. I conclude that mechanicism needs to be emended if it aims to be considered as a genuinely illuminating approach to scientific explanation. (shrink)

Existe una aparente incongruencia entre, por una parte, la gran distancia que Ludwig Wittgenstein detectaba entre sus objetivos filosóficos y los de los pragmatistas y, por otra, el acercamiento que posteriormente se ha producido en la historia de la recepción de la filosofía wittgensteiniana entre esta y el pragmatismo. Con afán de tratar de arrojar algo de luz sobre tal discordancia, nos ocuparemos aquí de modo privilegiado en las reflexiones de Wittgenstein en torno al cumplimiento de reglas , y la (...) solución que a este respecto dan diversos autores pragmatistas, para comprobar si efectivamente es similitud o más bien radical disparidad la que se da entre el proyecto filosófico wittgensteiniano y el pragmatista. Pero el objetivo fundamental de este escrito no es, con todo, una simple determinación exegética de cuáles son las verdaderas intenciones de unos y otros ; sino que de lo que se tratará será principalmente de ver qué tesis resultan, a la postre, más plausibles si queremos hacernos con una idea filosóficamente coherente del fenómeno de lo normativo: si las de un pragmatismo estereotipado , o bien las de un pensamiento que se quiere no filosófico , o bien las mucho más matizadas consideraciones procedentes del neopragmatismo. (shrink)

La pregunta por el papel a desempeñar por la filosofía en la educación es asunto siempre candente, pero en especial los últimos acontecimientos políticos en España la han puesto sobre la palestra. El autor propone que para una consideración más perspicua de tal empresa, se reexamine el debate que hace treinta años entablaron Manuel Sacristán y Gustavo Bueno sobre esta misma materia, el cual provocó numerosas reacciones que quizá se extiendan hasta la raíz misma del debate presente. Además, tal suceso (...) se propone como paradigma del modo en que la reflexión de la filosofía sobre sí acaba revirtiendo beneficiosamente sobre ella misma. (shrink)

The Northern Triangle of Central America is one of the most violent regions in the world. Although the violence has a long history, the countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are currently experiencing a critical situation with a new threat: criminal gangs. This article explores regional violence and elaborates a peacebuilding proposal based on a reading of the concept of jubilee. Jubilee is explained via the categories of inclusion, reconciliation and rest. The article concludes that for the countries of (...) the northern Central American triangle, the application of jubilee principles represents true peace in times of peace. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo aborda la hegemonía que se ciñe sobre Colombia, mediante un punto de vista político que analiza el poder que ejerce la burguesía internacional y burguesía subordinada nacional sobre las clases subalternas y en particular la clase trabajadora colombiana. Se reflexiona sobre el l..