A hard difficulty in Astrobiology is the precise definition of what life is. All living beings have a cellular structure, so it is not possible to have a broader concept of life hence the search for extraterrestrial life is restricted to extraterrestrial cells. Earth is an astronomical rarity because it is difficult for a planet to present liquid water on the surface. Two antagonistic bioethical principles arise: planetary protection and terraforming. Planetary protection is based on the fear of interplanetary cross-infection (...) and possible ecological damages caused by alien living beings. Terraforming is the intention of modifying the environmental conditions of the neighbouring planets in such a way that human colonisation would be possible. The synthesis of this antagonism is ecopoiesis, a concept related to the creation of new ecosystems in other planets. Since all the multicellular biodiversity requires oxygen to survive, only extremophile microorganisms could survive in other planets. So, it could be carried out a simulation of a meteorite by taking to other planets portions of the terrestrial permafrost, or ocean or soil, so that if a single species could grow, a new ecosystem would start, as well as a new Natural History. As a conclusion, ecopoiesis should be the bioethical principle to guide practices and research in Astrobiology. (shrink)

O propósito deste trabalho é enfrentar o seguinte problema: que possibilidades a autonomia e a descentralização educacional apresentam para uma efetiva educação no Estado Democrático de Direito? Construir autonomia a partir de uma descentralização educacional implica “mudanças culturais” profundas nas pessoas. Assim, o presente trabalho objetiva discutir sobre a autonomia e a descentralização educacional. O conceito de descentralização e autonomia indicam a importância para o Estado Democrático de Direito. O método de trabalho foi o hipotético-dedutivo versando sobre o conceito de (...) autonomia que consiste na construção de conjecturas e situações que permitem alcançar os objetivos da pesquisa. (shrink)

We commonly speak of people as being ‘‘justified’’ or ‘‘unjustified’’ in believing as they do. These terms describe a person’s epistemic condition. To be justified in believing as one does is to have a positive epistemic status in virtue of holding one’s belief in a way which fully satisfies the relevant epistemic requirements or norms. This requires something more (or other) than simply believing a proposition whose truth is well-supported by evidence, even by evidence which one possesses oneself, since one (...) could entirely miss the relevance of this evidence and hold the belief as a result of wishful thinking or for some other bad reason. My topic in this paper is the notion of being justified which precludes beliefs flawed in this way. I will take the notion of something’s telling in favor of the truth of a proposition—that is, the notion of evidential support—for granted. (shrink)

Is it coherent to suppose that in order to hold a belief responsibly, one must recognize something else as a reason for it? This paper addresses this question by focusing on so-called "Inferential Internalist" principles, that is principles of the following form: in order for one to have positive epistemic status Ø in virtue of believing P on the basis of R, one must believe that R evidentially supports P, and one must have positive epistemic status Ø in relation to (...) that latter belief as well. While such principles and their close relatives figure centrally in a wide variety of recent epistemological discussions, there is confusion in the literature about what, precisely, Inferential Internalism commits one to and whether it is so much as coherent. This paper articulates a broader framework for understanding the notion of epistemic responsibility, motivates Inferential Internalism on the basis of considerations about the basing relation, epistemic responsibility, and parallels with practical deliberation, defends Inferential Internalism against charges of incoherence leveled by James Van Cleve and Paul Boghossian, and shows that contrary to a currently widespread view, Inferential Internalism is coherent even if foundationalism and the a priori are rejected. The paper closes with a preliminary argument for an affirmative answer to the initiating question about the requirements of epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

Tom Kelly argues that instrumentalist aeeounts of epistemie rationality fail beeause what a person has reason to believe does not depend upon the eontent of his or her goals. However, his argument fails to distinguish questions about what the evidence supports from questions about what a person ought to believe. Once these are distinguished, the instrumentalist ean avoid Kelly’s objeetions. The paperconcludes by sketehing what I take to be the most defensible version of the instrumentalist view.

ABSTRACT In the current debate between scientific realism and empiricism, both sides seem to embrace some sort of structuralism as an important component of their descriptions of science. The structural realism is generally presented in two versions: one ontic and the other epistemic. It has been argued that that epistemic structural realism is close, if not identical, to a Kantian approach. We aim to show that this is not the case, since ESR, being fundamentally a realist position, cannot be fully (...) consistent with a transcendental approach. Such a position is better called transcendental structuralism, an alternative that we believe is worth being investigated on its own. In this paper, we will take Henry Allison's interpretation of transcendental idealism as a starting point to establish the distinctions between ESR and TS.RESUMO No debate atual entre realismo científico e empirismo, ambos os lados parecem abraçar algum tipo de estruturalismo como um componente importante de suas descrições sobre a ciência. O realismo estrutural é geralmente apresentado em duas versões: uma ôntica e outra epistêmica. Tem-se argumentado que o realismo estrutural epistêmico, por sua vez, é próximo, se não idêntico, a uma abordagem kantiana. Nosso objetivo neste artigo é mostrar que esse não é o caso. Sendo o ESR fundamentalmente uma posição realista, queremos defender que ele não pode ser totalmente compatível com uma abordagem transcendental. Uma posição kantiana mais coerente é aqui defendida sob o nome de estruturalismo transcendental. Neste artigo, partiremos da interpretação de Henry Allison do idealismo transcendental para estabelecer as devidas distinções entre ESR e TS. (shrink)

I take as my starting point the evident fact that people are capable of modifying their beliefs in response to reasons in the course of deliberation. This fact is sufficient to make notions such as responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness applicable to people with regard to their beliefs. If a state is such, and one is such, that one is capable of determining it through one’s best evaluations of reasons in the course of deliberation, then even if it isn’t under one’s (...) voluntary control, it is attributable to one as something for which one is appropriately held accountable. There is thus conceptual space for the possibility of one’s conducting oneself poorly or well with regard to it, and accordingly for the application of praise or criticism. And there is room for an evaluation of whether one has conducted oneself responsibly or irresponsibly – that is, whether one has proceeded in a way that takes proper account of the considerations which one reasonably could have been expected to take account of, or not. (shrink)

Self-consciously attempting to shape one's beliefs through deliberation and reasoning requires that one stand in a relation to those beliefs that might be signaled by saying that one must inhabit one's beliefs as one's own view. What does this amount to? A broad swath of philosophical thinking about self-knowledge, norms of belief, self-consciousness, and related areas assumes that this relation requires one to endorse, or be rationally committed to endorsing, one's beliefs. In fact, however, fully self-conscious adherence to epistemic norms (...) requires the ability to self-consciously hold a belief without endorsing that belief as true, as well-supported by the evidence, or as meeting some other epistemic standard, and there are cases in which no such commitment is rationally required. This ability is necessary if there is to be any such thing as a fully self-conscious process of changing one's mind. (shrink)

Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors. However, there have been disparate results in terms of the mandatory character of an agreement context to observe competitive gender effects and the interpretation of the (...) direction of these effects in Romance languages, this probably due to uncontrolled variables such as animacy. In the present study, we conducted two PWI experiments with European Portuguese speakers who were asked to produce bare nouns. The percentage of animate targets within the list was manipulated: 0, 25, 50, and 100%. A gender congruency effect was found restricted to the 0% list (all targets were inanimate). Results support the selection of gender in transparent languages in the absence of an agreement context, as predicted by the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis (Sá-Leite et al.,2019), and are interpreted through the attentional mechanisms involved in the PWI paradigm, in which the processing of animate targets would be favored to the detriment of distractors due to biological relevance and semantic prioritization. (shrink)

Esse artigo propõe uma análise comparativa de duas narrativas, o filme As Boas Maneiras e o romance Suíte Tóquio, a partir da figuração das personagens principais em cada obra, que se relacionam enquanto patroa e babá. Entendendo cada uma dessas pedagogias culturais como tecnologias de gênero, que abordam a ética do cuidado como demarcada por sexo-gênero, o intuito é investigar que elementos das ficcionalidades próprias de cada obra transbordam para a experiência como indicadores interseccionais em torno do ato de cuidar. (...) Abordando as contradições entre afeto e abjeção inerentes à alocação do trabalho do cuidar associado às mulheres, interessa perceber os efeitos de um engendramento da referida ética, e, sobretudo, os processos de estratificação entre mulheres quando consideramos um contexto de desigualdades demarcadas por raça e classe. (shrink)

The standard view in social science and philosophy is that lying does not require the liar’s assertion to be false, only that the liar believes it to be false. We conducted three experiments to test whether lying requires falsity. Overall, the results suggest that it does. We discuss some implications for social scientists working on social judgments, research on lie detection, and public moral discourse.

Keith DeRose has recently argued that the contextual variability of appropriate assertion, together with the knowledge account of assertion, yields a direct argument that 'knows' is semantically context-sensitive. The argument fails because of an equivocation on the notion of warranted assertability. Once the equivocation is removed, it can be seen that the invariantist can retain the knowledge account of assertion and explain the contextual variability of appropriate assertion by appealing to Williamson's suggestion that practical and conversational considerations can influence the (...) extent to which adherence to the constitutive norm of assertion matters. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to elucidate the evolution of the concept of poverty in Rousseau’s reflections. This will be done through the analysis of three depictions of poverty taken from the philosopher’s texts. The goal is to demonstrate that, beyond the apparent ambiguity in the use of the term ‘poverty,’ Rousseau engages in a semantic play with multiple functions, highlighting the importance of this theme. Finally, it will be proposed how the status of poverty can be seen as (...) relative, showing how the meaning of the term evolves into new senses. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to analyse the diffrerences between the formal structure of anticipation of perception in classical and in quantum context. I argue that a transcendental point of view can be supported in quantum context if objectivity is defined by an invariant anticipative structure, which has only a predictive character. The classical objectivity, which defined a set of properties having a descriptive meaning must be abandoned in quantum context. I will focus my analysis on Kant's Principle of (...) the Anticipations of Perception. (shrink)

“Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moorean Dogmatism” would allow. A surprising result is that Dogmatism’s commitment to immediate epistemic (...) warrant isn’t enough to avoid certain standard arguments for skepticism about the external world. (shrink)

O objetivo desse texto é levantar algumas questões sobre as raízes do judaísmo de Paulo, ou dos referenciais judaicos que sustentam a sua visão de mundo - no decorrer de suas jornadas após a visão da estrada de Damasco. Há elementos para afirmar que além do seu farisaísmo assumido, Paulo recolheu concepções teóricas de outros movimentos judaicos do período. Tendo lido ou conhecido elementos das principais tendências do pensamento apocalíptico. Utilizou esses conceitos no sentido de atuar não só junto aos (...) judeus influenciados pelo farisaísmo como também junto àqueles outros inseridos na tradição apocalíptica. Acreditamos que Paulo expressa, além do mais, a culminância de uma tradição judaica consistente. Tradição que vinha, literariamente, do terceiro Isaías e que culminou, talvez, no Livro dos Jubileus, que defendia a necessária universalização messiânica da experiência religiosa judaica. Paulo ultima essa tradição e a transforma de experiência meramente teórica em prática concreta realizada numa perspectiva messiânica. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 2 Seiten: 175-194.

Modern-day heirs of the Cartesian revolution have been fascinated by the thought that one could utilize certain hypotheses – that one is dreaming, deceived by an evil demon, or a brain in a vat – to argue at one fell swoop that one does not know, is not justified in believing, or ought not believe most if not all of what one currently believes about the world. A good part of the interest and mystique of these discussions arises from the (...) contention that the seeds of such arguments lie in our ordinary epistemic practices, so that external world skepticism can arise “from within”. But is this contention correct? I doubt it. Taking skepticism seriously requires that we address this question head on. To do so, I will approach skeptical arguments from a certain vantage point. I will try to stand, as far as possible, with both feet squarely in ordinary life. I will start out with all of our ordinary commitments about what is the case, about what we know or have reason to believe, about when someone knows, is justified, or has good reason to believe something, and about how one should proceed in deciding what to believe. My question, then, will be this. From within that vantage point can I somehow be moved in a reasonable way to accept the conclusion that I know far less about the world around me than I thought, or that epistemically speaking, I really ought not believe much of what I have believed about the world around me? In order for such movement to take place, I will have to find reason from within my ordinary standpoint to discount or reject much of what I ordinarily accept. And of course, that reason will have to come from some.. (shrink)

Is there a plausible argument for external world skepticism? Robert Nozick’s well-known discussion focuses upon arguments which utilize the Sensitivity Requirement and the Closure Principle. Nozick claims, correctly, that no such argument succeeds. But he gets almost all the details wrong. The Sensitivity Requirement and the Closure Principle are compatible; the Sensitivity Requirement is incorrect; and even if true, the Closure Principle is structurally incapable of generating a plausible and valid global skeptical argument. It is therefore a mistake to take (...) the Closure Principle as central in discussions of skepticism. The paper concludes by examining the prospects for a plausible skeptical argument. (shrink)

Is knowledge a mental state? For philosophers working within the idealistic tradition, the answer is trivial: there is nothing else for knowledge to be. For most others, however, the claim has seemed prima facie implausible. Knowing that p requires or involves the fact that p, or p’s truth, and that – with certain specifiable exceptions – is quite independent of my mind; so while knowledge may require or involve certain mental states, it itself is not a state of mind.

“Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moorean Dogmatism” would allow. A surprising result is that Dogmatism’s commitment to immediate epistemic (...) warrant isn’t enough to avoid certain standard arguments for skepticism about the external world. (shrink)

If affirmative action and other ethnicity-based social programs are justified, then J. Angelo Corlett believes it is important to come to an adequate understanding of the nature of ethnicity in general and ethnic group membership in particular. In Race, Racism, and Reparations, Corlett reconceptualizes traditional ideas of race in terms of ethnicity. As he makes clear, the answers to the questions "What is a Native American?" or "What is a Latino?" have important implications for public policy, especially for those programs (...) designed to address historic injustices and economic and social imbalances among different groups in our society. Having supplanted "race" with a well-defined concept of ethnicity, the author then analyzes the nature and function of racism. Corlett argues for a notion of racism that must encompass not only racist beliefs but also racist actions, omissions, and attempted actions. His aim is to craft a definition of racism that will prove useful in legal and public policy contexts. Corlett places special emphasis on the broad questions of whether reparations for ethnic groups are desirable and what forms those reparations should take: land, money, social programs? He addresses the need for differential affirmative action programs and reparations policies—the experiences of different ethnic groups vary greatly. Arguments for reparations to Native and African Americans are considered in light of a variety of objections that are or might be raised against them. Corlett articulates and critically analyzes a number of possible proposals for reparations. (shrink)

In this essay, I provide a reconstruction of the history of and surrounding the bust of Kant, together with its plaque, which jointly compose the monument created in honor of the sage of Königsberg at the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences (FAFICH) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In so doing, I have the following aims: first, to examine the relationship between the monument and the ideas that guided the creation of the Faculty (...) of Philosophy of Minas Gerais by one of its founders, Prof. Arthur Versiani Velloso; second, to highlight and register the authorship of this work by the plastic artist Frederico Bracher Júnior, as an important part of Kant’s international and indeed truly cosmopolitan iconography. (shrink)

According to a common view, the activity of justifying is epistemologically irrelevant: being justified in believing as one does never requires the ability to justify one’s belief. This view runs into trouble regarding the epistemic basing relation, the relation between a person’s belief and the reasons for which the person holds it. The view must appeal to basing relations as part of its account of what it is for a person to be justified in believing as she does, but the (...) view prevents basing relations from doing the needed work. In place of the common view, I propose an account of basing relations which links them to the person’s commitments and hence to her justificatory activity. If this proposal is correct, then positive justificatory status, too, will be conceptually linked to the ability to succeed in the activity of justifying. (shrink)

A catarse é considerada por muitos autores como um “efeito” ligado a um processo que leva à tomada de consciência. Que “efeito” é esse? Por quem foi sistematizado? Quais abordagens foram construídas a partir desse conceito? Qual a sua relação com a educação e com os espaços escolar e expositivo? O artigo em tela pretende refletir, por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica, sobre essas questões ao revisitar o conceito de catarse a partir de autores como Aristóteles, Vigotski, Jauss e, em especial, (...) Lukács. Busca relacionar as ideias desse esteta húngaro ao campo da educação e, principalmente, ao ensino da arte. (shrink)

In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten hat die Metapher in der Philosophie zunehmend Beachtung gefunden und wurde zu einem zentralen Thema, mit dem Kant sich in seiner kritischen Philosophie in Begriffen von Analogie und Symbolisierung beschäftigt. Sein Beitrag zur Entwicklung unseres Verständnisses der Rolle, die Bilder, Metaphern und Symbole in theoretischer und praktischer Hinsicht leisten, ist bedeutend; zudem ist Kant selber auch als Schöpfer von Metaphern weithin bekannt. Symbole, Analogien und ästhetische Ideen sind unleugbar metaphorische Verfahren, die eine ebenso grundlegende wie systematische (...) Funktion in Kants philosophischer Sprache einnehmen. – Dieser Sammelband ist das Ergebnis einer neueren Initiative seitens einer internationalen Gruppe von mit Kant befassten Philosophen und Kant-Spezialisten, um die Erforschung von Themen zu befördern, die noch nicht umfassend bearbeitet sind. Das trifft mit Sicherheit auf die „Metapher“-Thematik in Kants Philosophie zu, der der vorliegende Band gewidmet ist. (shrink)

Book review of Conant, James and Kern, Andrea, Varieties of Skepticism: Essays after Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014, vi + 458 pp.

RESUMO: O objetivo deste artigo é examinar o que entendemos ser uma prova original da existência de Deus na obra de Pierre Duhem. Cremos que a originalidade dessa prova consiste especialmente nas premissas usadas pelo filósofo. Quanto à forma, a mesma assemelha-se ao conhecido argumento do desígnio, mas a sua versão se caracteriza por buscar na história das teorias físicas a matéria da qual a existência de uma Providência é derivada. É a complexa evolução das teorias e, a despeito dela, (...) a sua espantosa progressividade em direção a estágios sempre mais perfeitos que servem de premissa para a via duhemiana de acesso a Deus. Tudo se passa como se houvesse uma suposta pré-ordenação divina do curso das teorias, uma finalidade intrínseca a ele.ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to examine what we believe to be an original proof of the existence of God in the work of Pierre Duhem. We think that the originality of this proof consists especially in the assumptions used by the French philosopher in his argumentation. Regarding the form, it resembles the well-known design argument, but his version is characterized by seeking in the history of physical theories the matter from which the existence of a Providence is derived. It is the complex evolution of theories and, despite it, its amazing progress towards ever more perfect theories that serves as the premise for Duhem's way of access to God. Everything goes as if it had been a divine preordainment and an intrinsic goal ruling the evolution of theories. (shrink)

A familiar form of scepticism supposes that knowledge requires infallibility. Although that requirement plays no role in our ordinary epistemic practices, Barry Stroud has argued that this is not a good reason for rejecting a sceptical argument: our ordinary practices do not correctly reflect the requirements for knowledge because the appropriateness-conditions for knowledge attribution are pragmatic. Recent fashion in contextualist semantics for 'knowledge' agrees with this view of our practice, but incorrectly. Ordinary epistemic evaluations are guided by our conception of (...) a person's standing with regard to the reasons that there are for and against the truth of a belief. Thus the objection from our ordinary practices is sound: fallibility is not an epistemological shortcoming, and a convincing sceptical argument must use only requirements which figure in ordinary epistemic practice. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues that the empirical knowledge of the world depends on a priori conditions of human sensibility and understanding, i. e., our capacities of sense experience and concept formation. The objective knowledge presupposes, on one hand, space and time as a priori conditions of sensibility and, on another hand, a priori judgments, like the principle of causality, as constitutive conditions of understanding. The problem is that in the XX century the physical science completely changed (...) how we conceive our knowledge of the world. Face to this new situation, what was changed in our classical reason? However, if the transcendental point of view is adopted, in the specific case of quantum mechanics, we have to wonder about the general conditions of this theory that make possible such knowledge, which predictive value is much more accurate than the classical physics. The aim of this work is firstly to show the Kantian implications on Bohr’s interpretation of quantum phenomena and secondly to provide an overview of the key elements for understanding the transcendental locus of ordinary language in the quantum mechanics context, in order to give support to a transcendental pragmatic position in the analysis of science. (shrink)