RESUMO Neste artigo, são rejeitadas duas teses relativamente aceitas a respeito do projeto filosófico tardio desenvolvido por John Rawls. A primeira tese afirma que o objetivo de obras como "O Liberalismo Político" e "Justiça como Equidade: Uma Reformulação" seria o de revisar a natureza do argumento contratualista de Rawls. A segunda, por sua vez, afirma que a principal consequência dessa revisão teria sido certo recuo das implicações igualitárias de sua teoria da justiça original. Procurar-se-á rejeitar ambas as proposições mostrando que (...) "O Liberalismo Político" deve ser entendido como uma teoria acerca do uso legítimo do poder em uma sociedade democrática, e que essa teoria da legitimidade possui consequências distributivas próprias, incompatíveis com teorias liberais convencionais. ABSTRACT The article aims to reject two interrelated theses on the philosophical project carried forward by the late John Rawls. The first thesis states that there is an important change in Rawls' late works such as "Political Liberalism" and "Justice as Fairness: A Restatement" regarding the nature of his theory. Particularly, this change would had brought about a reassessment of Rawls' contractualist argument. The second thesis claims that one of the most important consequences of such reassessment is the retreat from strong egalitarian commitments, as they were present in Rawls' original theory of justice. The article rejects both theses, showing that Political Liberalism can be understood as a theory about the legitimate uses of power in a democratic society and that such new theory of legitimacy brings about distributive consequences by its own that sharply contrast with classical liberal theories. (shrink)

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic (...) or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle's Physics I-II into Portuguese, with commentaries. Tradução para o português dos livros I e II da Física de Aristóteles, com comentários.

Information and communication technology is changing many aspects ofhuman endeavour and existence. This is beyond dispute for most. Whatare contested are the social and ethical implications of thesechanges. Possible sources of these disputes are the multiple ways inwhich one can conceptualize and interpret the informationtechnology/society interrelationship. Each of these ways ofconceptualization and interpretation enables one to see theinformation technology/society relationship differently and thereforeconstrue its social and ethical implications in a different manner. Atthe center of this technology/society interrelationship we find manycomplex (...) questions about the nature of the human, the technical,agency, autonomy, freedom and much more. This is indeed a vastintellectual landscape, which can obviously not be explored here inits fullness. This entry is about just one particular perspective onthis landscape. It is primarily concerned with the phenomenologicalapproach to interpreting information technology and its social andethical implications. It should be noted from the start that there isnot a unified phenomenological tradition or approach to informationtechnology in particular, or other phenomena more generally. Thephenomenological tradition consists of many different approaches thatshare certain characteristics but not all. We may however suggest, with Don Ihde,that they all accept that “phenomenology investigates theconditions of what makes things appear as such [as that which we takethem to be].” Differently stated, phenomenology suggests thatthere is a co-constitutive relationship between us and the phenomenawe encounter in our engagement with the world. In this sensephenomenologists would suggest that to understand thetechnology/society relationship we need to reveal how theyco-constitute each other—i.e. draw on each other for theirongoing meaning and sense. We will elaborate more precisely what thismeans in section 2 below. However, in order to understand the distinctiveness of thephenomenological approach other possible ways of interpreting thistechnology/society relationship will also be outlined brieflybelow., It can be said that information technology has become in a very realsense ubiquitous. Most everyday technologies such as elevators,automobiles, microwaves, watches, and so forth depend onmicroprocessors for their ongoing operation. Most organizations andinstitutions have become reliant on their information technologyinfrastructure to a lesser or greater degree. Indeed informationtechnology is seen by many as a cost-efficient way to solve amultitude of problems facing our complex contemporary society. One canalmost say that information technology has become construed as thedefault technology for solving a whole raft of technical and socialproblems such as health provision, security, governance, etc. Onecould also argue that it has become synonymous with society’sview of modernization and progress. For most it seems obvious thatinformation technology has made it possible for humans to continue toconstruct increasingly complex systems of coordination and socialordering—systems without which contemporary society would not beable to exist in its present form. To say the least, we, ascontemporary human beings, have our manner of being made possiblethrough a rather comprehensive entanglement with information andcommunication technology. Indeed, the economic, organizational andsocial benefit of information technology is not widely disputed. Thedispute is more often about the way information technology is changingor transforming the social domain, and in particular, the ethicaldomain. This dispute is largely centered around different ways ofconceptualizing and interpreting the nature of our entanglement withinformation technology. This debate is not merely an academic debateabout different and competing theoretical ‘models.’Rather, these different ways of conceptualizing it is central to ourunderstanding of how we go about managing our increasingly entangledrelationship with information technology. (shrink)

It is not uncommon among theorists favoring a deviant logic on account of the semantic paradoxes to subscribe to an idea that has come to be known as ‘classical recapture’. The main thought underpinning it is that non-classical logicians are justified in endorsing many instances of the classically valid principles that they reject. Classical recapture promises to yield an appealing pair of views: one can attain naivety for semantic concepts while retaining classicality in ordinary domains such as mathematics. However, Julien (...) Murzi and Lorenzo Rossi have recently suggested that revisionary approaches to truth breed revenge paradoxes when they are coupled with the thought that classical reasoning can be recaptured in certain circumstances. What’s novel about the paradoxes they put forward is that they cannot be dismissed so easily. The concepts used to generate these paradoxes—those of paradoxicality and unparadoxicality—are concepts that non-classical theorists need in order to offer a diagnosis of the truth-theoretic paradoxes. My goal in this paper is to argue that non-classical theorists can represent the concept of paradoxicality without falling prey to revenge paradoxes. In particular, I will show how to provide a formal fixed-point semantics for a language extended with a paradoxicality predicate that adequately expresses the non-classical logician’s notion of paradoxicality. (shrink)

Bietti, Tilston and Bangerter take an evolutionary approach towards memory transmission and storytelling, arguing that storytelling plays a central role in the creation and transmission of cultural information. They suggest that storytelling is a vehicle to transmit survival‐related information that helps to avoid the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information and contributes to the maintenance of social bonds and group‐level cooperation. Furthermore, Bietti et al. argue that, going beyond storytelling’s individualist role of manipulating the audience to enhance (...) fitness of the narrator, that these adaptive functions of storytelling may well be assigned to other forms of language use besides narration (e.g., instructional discourse and argumentation). Based on this evidence, Bietti and colleagues claim that the specific adaptive function of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling collective sensemaking. (shrink)

This is an introductory handbook for some of the main themes around the notion of predication in Aristotle. It does not aim at being exhaustive, but only sketches some important lines about the subject; it contains an introductory essay, besides the translation (into Portuguese) and commentary of basic texts (such as Posterior Analytics I-22, Categories 1-5, Interpretation 1-6 etc.).

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at (...) timescale t1; (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales (t1, t2, t3, t4). (shrink)

Public participation in scientific research has gained prominence in many scientific fields, but the theory of participatory research is still limited. In this paper, we suggest that the divergence of values and goals between academic researchers and public participants in research is key to analyzing the different forms this research takes. We examine two existing characterizations of participatory research: one in terms of public participants' role in the research, the other in terms of the virtues of the research. In our (...) view, each of these captures an important feature of participatory research but is, on its own, limited in what features it takes into account. We introduce an expanded conception of norms of collaboration that extends to both academic researchers and public participants. We suggest that satisfying these norms requires consideration of the two groups' possibly divergent values and goals, and that a broad characterization of participatory research that starts from participants' values and goals can motivate both public participants’ role in the research and the virtues of the research. The resulting framework clarifies the similarities and differences among participatory projects and can help guide the responsible design of such projects. (shrink)

This book discusses Aristotle’s notions of essence and substance as they are developed in Metaphysics ZH. I examine Aristotle's argument at length and defends an unorthodox interpretation according to which his motivation is to provide an answer against a conflation between criteria for existential priority (delivering substances as primary beings) and criteria for explanatory priority (delivering essences as primary principles).

Translation of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics I into Portuguese, with a few notes, experimental glossary and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2003/4, was preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

The paper generalizes Van McGee's well-known result that there are many maximal consistent sets of instances of Tarski's schema to a number of non-classical theories of truth. It is shown that if a non-classical theory rejects some classically valid principle in order to avoid the truth-theoretic paradoxes, then there will be many maximal non-trivial sets of instances of that principle that the non-classical theorist could in principle endorse. On the basis of this it is argued that the idea of classical (...) recapture, which plays such an important role for non-classical logicians, can only be pushed so far. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics IV and VI, with notes. The translation is preliminary and intended as a provisional teaching tool to be also used in seminars and discussions with peers in order to reach a more elaborated version.

Tradução preliminar em pré-print. A Tradução definitiva é a de 2009.

One of the most fruitful applications of substructural logics stems from their capacity to deal with self-referential paradoxes, especially truth-theoretic paradoxes. Both the structural rules of contraction and the rule of cut play a crucial role in typical paradoxical arguments. In this paper I address a number of difficulties affecting noncontractive approaches to paradox that have been discussed in the recent literature. The situation was roughly this: if you decide to go substructural, the nontransitive approach to truth offers a lot (...) of benefits that are not available in the noncontractive account. I sketch a noncontractive theory of truth that has these benefits. In particular, it has both a proof- and a model-theoretic presentation, it can be extended to a first-order language, and it retains every classically valid inference. (shrink)

In Posterior Analytics 71b9 12, we find Aristotle’s definition of scientific knowledge. The definiens is taken to have only two informative parts: scientific knowledge must be knowledge of the cause and its object must be necessary. However, there is also a contrast between the definiendum and a sophistic way of knowing, which is marked by the expression “kata sumbebekos”. Not much attention has been paid to this contrast. In this paper, I discuss Aristotle’s definition paying due attention to this contrast (...) and to the way it interacts with the two conditions presented in the definiens. I claim that the “necessity” condition ammounts to explanatory appropriateness of the cause. (shrink)

Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semantics. For example, it has been claimed to be problematic for semantic accounts of quantification Proceedings of the 16th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2007), for classical accounts of negation Semantics and contextual expression, 1989), and for intersective accounts of verbal coordination. This paper shows that none of this is the case, once we abandon the idea that the event variable is bound at sentence level, and assume instead that verbs (...) denote existential quantifiers over events. Quantificational arguments can then be given a semantic account, negation can be treated classically, and coordination can be modeled as intersection. The framework presented here is a natural choice for researchers and fieldworkers who wish to sketch a semantic analysis of a language without being forced to make commitments about the hierarchical order of arguments, the argument-adjunct distinction, the default scope of quantifiers, or the nature of negation and coordination. (shrink)

Equality is the great political issue of our time. Liberty is forgotten: Fraternity never did engage our passions: the maintenance of Law and Order is at a discount: Natural Rights and Natural Justice are outmoded shibboleths. But Equality—there men have something to die for, kill for, agitate about, be miserable about. The demand for Equality obsesses all our political thought. We are not sure what it is—indeed, as I shall show later, we are necessarily not sure what it is—but we (...) are sure that whatever it is, we want it: and while we are prepared to look on frustration, injustice or violence with tolerance, as part of the natural order of things, we will work ourselves up into paroxysms of righteous indignation at the bare mention of Inequality. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics II into Portuguese, with a few notes, experimental glossary and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2002 (with a new printing in 2004), was preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

This article is about our relationship with things; about the abundant material geographies that surround us and constitute the very possibility for us to be the beings that we are. More specifically, it is about the question of the possibility of an ethical encounter with things (qua things). We argue, with the science and technology studies tradition (and Latour in particular), that we are the beings that we are through our entanglements with things, we are thoroughly hybrid beings, cyborgs through (...) and through – we have never been otherwise. With Heidegger we propose that a human-centred ethics of hybrids will fail to open a space for an ethical encounter with things since all beings in the sociomaterial network – humans and non-human alike – end up circulating as objects, enframed as ‘standing reserve’, things-for-the-purposes-of the network. We suggest that what is needed is an ethos beyond ethics, or the overcoming of an ethics – which is based on the will to power – towards an ethos of letting be. We elaborate such a possibility with the help of Heidegger, in particular with reference to the work of Graham Harman and his notion of ‘tool-being’. From this we propose, very tentatively, an ethos that has as its ground a poetic dwelling with things, a way of being that lets being be (Gelassenheit). We show how such a poetic dwelling, or ethos of Gelassenheit, may constitute the impossible possibility of a very otherwise way of being with things – an ethos of a ‘community of those who have nothing in common’ as suggested by Alphonso Lingis. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics I-III into Portuguese, with a few notes and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2007, is preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar dois distintos projetos formativos: a paideia grega e a Bildung do esclarecimento alemão representada por Kant e Hegel, bem como o desenvolvimento desta última em Halbbildung no século XX. Para compreender os sentidos e contornos históricos em que essas formulações estavam postas, tornou-se necessário inseri-las no contexto mais geral das formações sociais em que elas estavam inseridas, revelando suas contradições.

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda into Portuguese.

The assumption that coercion is largely responsible for our legal systems’ efficacy is a common one. I argue that this assumption is false. But I do so indirectly, by objecting to a thesis I call “(Compliance)”, which holds that most citizens comply with most legal mandates most of the time at least partly in virtue of being motivated by legal systems’ threats of sanctions and other unwelcome consequences. The relationship between (Compliance) and the efficacy of legal systems is explained in (...) section 1. There I also show that (Compliance) must be rejected for it relies on unsubstantiated empirical assumptions. In section 2, I claim that an alternative, and more refined, formulation of (Compliance) also lacks adequate support. I conclude with a few general remarks about the centrality of coercion in our thought and talk about legal systems. (shrink)

Tradução dos livros Z e H da Metafísica de Aristóteles, com introdução e notas. Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Books VII and VIII into Portuguese, with Introduction and Notes.

Although the use of military force for humanitarian ends seems utterly divorced from the use of such force to combat terrorism, both uses answer to similar descriptions. Both appear to encourage nations that are not necessarily themselves under attack to set aside the reigning conventions of national sovereignty and territorial integrity for the overriding purposes of international law enforcement and protection of vulnerable noncombatants. Both involve offensive rather than purely defensive uses of military force. Both answer to criteria of justification (...) that can be derived more readily from the normative moral principles of the classical just war tradition than from purely descriptive revisions of the 'legalist paradigm' in international relations, because the latter is deeply wedded by precedent to notions of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and a purely defensive use of military force. Most significantly, the justification for both kinds of military action depends essentially upon a notion of 'the international community' that is inchoate and urgently in need of rigorous reformulation. In this paper, I attempt to formulate criteria for the justifiable use of military force for these non-defensive purposes, with attention to the nuances of internationalism that several of the resulting criteria entail. Challenges to the de facto role of the United Nations as the sole authoritative representative of this community, and alternatives to its authority in legitimating the use of military force for purposes of international law enforcement, are considered. (shrink)

I discuss what Aristotle means when he say that scientific demonstration must proceed from necessary principles. I argue that, for Aristotle, scientific demonstration should not be reduced to sound deduction with necessary premises. Scientific demonstration ultimately depends on the fully appropriate explanatory factor for a given explanandum. This explanatory factor is what makes the explanandum what it is. Consequently, this factor is also unique. When Aristotle says that demonstration must proceed from necessary principles, he means that each demonstration requires the (...) principle that is the necessary one for the fully appropriate explanation of its explanandum. This picture also provides a key to understand Aristotle's thesis that scientific explanation depends on essences: it is the essence of the attribute to be explained that should be stated as the fully appropriate explanatory factor. (shrink)

Translation of passages of Aristotle's De Anima into Portuguese. The passages are these: I.1, I.4 (the 'Rylean passage'); II.1-6; III.1-8. The translation is preliminary.

Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such concepts and that they (...) play an important role in our cognitive lives. The argument for the empirical claim has the form of an inference to the best explanation and is aimed at those who are already willing to attribute concepts and beliefs to infants and nonhuman animals. Many animals and prelinguistic infants seem capable of re-identifying event-types in the world, and they seem to store information about things happening at particular times and places. My account offers a plausible model of how such organisms are able to do this without attributing linguistically structured mental states to them. And although language allows adults to form linguistically structured mental representations of the world, there is no good reason to think that such structured representations necessarily replace the unstructured ones. There is also no good reason for a philosopher who is willing to explain the behavior of an organism by appealing to atomic concepts of individuals or kinds to not use a similar form of explanation when explaining the organism's capacity to recognize events. -/- We can form empirical concepts of individuals, kinds, properties, event-types, and states of affairs, among other things, and I assume that such concepts function like what François Recanati calls ‘mental files’ or what Ruth Millikan calls ‘substance concepts’ (Recanati 2012; Millikan 1999, 2000, 2017). To possess such a concept one must have a reliable capacity to re-identify the object in question, but this capacity of re-identification does not fix the reference of the concept. Such concepts allow us to collect and utilize useful information about things that we re-encounter in our environment. We can distinguish between a perception-action system and a perception-belief system, and I will argue that empirical concepts, including atomic event concepts, can play a role in both systems. The perception-action system involves the application of concepts in the service of (often skilled) action. We can think of the concept as a mental file containing motor-plans that can be activated once the individual recognizes that they are in a certain situation. In this way, recognizing something (whether an object or an event) as a token of a type, plays a role in guiding immediate action. The perception-belief system, in contrast, allows for the formation of beliefs that can play a role in deliberation and planning and in the formation of expectations. I distinguish between two particular types of belief which I call where-beliefs and when-beliefs, and I argue that we can model the formation of such perceptual beliefs in nonlinguistic animals and human infants in terms of the formation of a link between an empirical concept and a position on a cognitive map. According to the account offered, seemingly complex beliefs, such as a baby's belief that Daddy changed her diaper in the kitchen earlier, will not be linguistically structured. If we think that prelinguistic infants possess such concepts and are able to form such beliefs, it is likely that adults do too. The ability to form such beliefs does not require the capacity for public language, and we can model them in nonlinguistic terms; thus, we have no good reason to think of such beliefs as propositional attitudes. Of course, we can use sentences to refer to such beliefs, and thus it is possible to think of such beliefs as somehow relations to propositions. But it is not clear to me what is gained by this as we have a perfectly good way to think about the structure of such beliefs that does not involve any appeal to language. (shrink)

These are commentaries to the translation into Portuguese of Nicomachean Ethics VI, found in the same volume of Dissertatio.

Tradução para o Português de Ethica Nicomachea VI.

Past research suggests that death pushes some individuals to strongly promote religious worldviews. The current work explores the role of conceptual metaphor in this process. Past research shows that metaphors can provide meaning and certainty, suggesting that death may therefore cause people to be more attracted to epistemically beneficial metaphoric descriptions of God. In three studies, we test this possibility against competing alternatives suggesting that death concerns may cause more selective metaphor preferences. Using both correlational and experimental methods, we find (...) that death concern is generally associated with embracing metaphors about God. (shrink)

Our main goal is to investigate whether the infinitary rules for the quantifiers endorsed by Elia Zardini in a recent paper are plausible. First, we will argue that they are problematic in several ways, especially due to their infinitary features. Secondly, we will show that even if these worries are somehow dealt with, there is another serious issue with them. They produce a truth-theoretic paradox that does not involve the structural rules of contraction.

I discuss in this paper the six requirements Aristotle advances at Posterior Analytics A-2, 71b20-33, for the premisses of a scientific demonstration. I argue that the six requirements give no support for an intepretation in terms of “axiomatization”. Quite on the contrary, the six requirements can be consistently understood in a very different picture, according to which the most basic feature of a scientific demonstration is to explain a given proposition by its appropriate cause.

I discuss Aristotle's treatment of essence and definition in Metaphysics VII.4. I argue that it is coherent and perfectly in accord with its broader context. His discussion in VII.4 offers, on the one hand, minimal criteria for what counts as definition and essence for whatever kind of object, but also, on the other hand, stronger criteria for a primary sort of definition and essence—and thereby it serves the interest of book VII in pointing to the explanatory power of the essence (...) of composite substances. (shrink)

I have two aims in this paper. First, I argue that, in Aristotle’s theory of the four causes, there is a basic and common feature by which all causes are causes: they all work in a triadic framework in which they explain why a given attribute holds of a given underlying thing. Secondly, I argue against a version of “compatibilism” according to which each kind of cause is complete in its own domain and does not compete with any other kind. (...) I claim that there are priority relations according to which some kinds of cause are subordinated to others, even if these relations do not hold in every cases. (shrink)

Justice has always been regarded as one of the fundamental political virtues. No association of human individuals could subsist, says Hume, “were no regard paid to the laws of equity and justice”, and nearly every thinker who has turned to consider human society, has reached the same conclusion. Yet we are not at all clear what justice is, nor why it is so important. There are many other ideals which a society may cherish, and often reformers have felt impatient of (...) having to compromise their aims merely for the sake of justice, and have not seen why the claims of justice should in any way override other political goods. I shall try to show why justice is, along with liberty, a peculiarly fundamental ideal, which is not merely co-ordinate with other ideals a society may value; but also that this notwithstanding, considerations of justice are not all-sufficient, and do not, and should not, always override all other political ideals. (shrink)

Joint attention customarily refers to the coordinated focus of attention between two or more individuals on a common object or event, where it is mutually “open” to all attenders that they are so engaged. We identify two broad approaches to analyse joint attention, one in terms of cognitive notions like common knowledge and common awareness, and one according to which joint attention is fundamentally a primitive phenomenon of sensory experience. John Campbell’s relational theory is a prominent representative of the latter (...) approach, and the main focus of this paper. We argue that Campbell’s theory is problematic for a variety of reasons, through which runs a common thread: most of the problems that the theory is faced with arise from the relational view of perception that he endorses, and, more generally, they suggest that perceptual experience is not sufficient for an analysis of joint attention. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There are many ways of understanding what it is for an argument to be valid. Although we usually identify the concept of validity with logical validity and, in turn, we typically take this to capture the notion of necessary preservation of truth in virtue of logical form, this is just one way in which validity can be explained. A different understanding of the notion of validity that has received some attention recently is based on the idea that an argument (...) is valid just in case accepting its premises is incoherent with rejecting its conclusion. The main claim of the paper will be that, under this understanding of the notion of validity, the usual reasons to privilege a treatment of validities over a treatment of invalidities loose much of their force. Validity and invalidity are on a par, which means that there are no strong reasons to treat validities primitively and to define invalidities in terms of them. (shrink)

Objective: To present a narrative review of the history of bioethics in Latin America and of scientific output in this interdisciplinary field. Methods: This was a mixed-methods study. Results: A total of 1458 records were retrieved, of which 1167 met the inclusion criteria. According to the Web of Science classification, the predominant topics of study were medical ethics, social sciences and medicine, and environmental and public health topics. Four themes of bioethics output in the Latin American literature have emerged: issues (...) involving the beginning and end of life, ethics in human research, patient–provider relationships, and ethics training for health professionals. Conclusion: Although bioethics is a growing interdisciplinary field in Latin America, its academic impact is still very low, and programmes are highly concentrated in large urban centres in a few countries. Challenges includes the regional and international impact of local scientific output. (shrink)

The relationship between law and coercion has been, and still is, a central topic in legal philosophy. Despite this, discussion about it is immersed in confusion. Some philosophers have noticed this, but hardly any work has been done to attempt to solve or even identify the confusions. This paper aims to fill this gap. Here I propose distinctions and qualifications that help us clarify the relationship between law and coercion and avoid confusion. Building on the clarificatory work, I then argue (...) that despite there being several distinct philosophical discussions about the relationship between law and coercion, one of them should be prioritised. (shrink)

Collective volume with papers by alumni and students from the Campinas Aristotle Group.

I examine Aristotle’s definition of scientific knowledge in Posterior Analytics 71b 9-12 and try to understand how it relates to the sophistical way of knowing and to "kata sumbebekos knowledge". I claim that scientific knowledge of p requires knowing p by its appropriate cause, and that this appropriate cause is a universal (katholou) in the restricted sense Aristotle proposes in 73b 26-27 ff., i.e., an attribute coextensive with the subject (an extensional feature) and predicated of the subject in itself (an (...) intensional feature). Kata sumbebekos knowledge, on the other hand, can occur even when the predicate of a conclusion is coextensive with its subject and is proved by a convertible meson which is not the most appropriate from an explanatory standpoint. (shrink)

Trata-se de tradução do Hípias Maior de Platão para o Português, com algumas notas de elucidação e justificação das opções.