This essay answers two questions that continue to drive debate in moral and legal philosophy; namely, ‘Is a risk of harm a wrong?’ and ‘Is a risk of harm a harm?’. The essay’s central claim is that to risk harm can be both to wrong and to harm. This stands in contrast to the respective positions of Heidi Hurd and Stephen Perry, whose views represent prominent extremes in this debate about risks. The essay shows that there is at least one (...) category of risks – intentional impositions of risk on unconsenting agents – which can be both wrongful and harmful. The wrongfulness of these risks can be established when, on the balance of reasons, one ought not to impose them. The harmfulness of these risks can be established when the risks are shown to set back legitimate interests. In those cases where risks constitute a denial of the moral status of agents, risks set back agents’ interest in dignity. In these ways, the essay shows that there are instances when a risk can constitute both a wrong and a harm. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model of clinical-ethical decision making which will assist the health care professional to arrive at an ethically defensible judgment. The model highlights the integration between ethics and decision making, whereby ethics as a systematic analytic tool bring to bear the positive aspects of the decision making process. The model is composed of three major elements. The ethical component, the decision making component and the contextual component. The latter incorporates the relational aspects (...) between the provider and the patient and the organizational structure. The model suggests that in order to arrive at an ethically, justifiable sound decision one make reference to those three elements. (shrink)

The moral justification of intellectual property is often called into question when placed in the context of pharmaceutical patents and global health concerns. The theoretical accounts of both John Rawls and Robert Nozick provide an excellent ethical framework from which such questions can be clarified. While Nozick upholds an individuals right to intellectual property, based upon its conformation with Lockean notions of property and Nozicks ideas of just acquisition and transfer, Rawls emphasizes the importance of basic liberties, such as an (...) individuals right to health, superceding such secondary rights as intellectual property rights. From a policy perspective, patent protection for pharmaceutical products necessarily entails the balancing of corporate intellectual property interests and public interests in healthcare. The moral dilemma that occurs when these two interests clash is not easily resolved. Aside from corporate and public interests, the state maintains an interest in creating and preserving policies that regulate the moral dilemma itself. This paper analyzes the economic and ethical factors surrounding the production and distribution of the anti-HIV medication, AZT. Potential policy implications and recommendations are also discussed. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal destacar a importância dos impressos editados pelas escolas de ofício católicas em Porto Alegre, mais precisamente as escolas Pão dos Pobres, Educandário São Luiz Guanela e o Centro Social Padre Calábria. As informações veiculadas por tais impressos constituem um verdadeiro meio pedagógico, formando o cidadão.

O conhecimento cientifico; Natureza do conhecimento cientifico; O metodo cientifico; A pesquisa: nocoes gerais; Fases de uma pesquisa; Como proceder a investigacao; Como transmitir os conhecimentos adquiridos; Tecnicas especiais.

Cet exercice historiographique se propose de suivre le cheminement du thème des femmes - femmes nobles aux XIe et XIIe siècles : - dans l’œuvre de Georges Duby, plus précisément dans son cours, son séminaire et ses publications. Trois phases peuvent être identifiées entre 1953 (année de la parution de sa thèse sur le Mâconnais) et 1996 (année de la publication de la trilogie Dames du XIIe siècle, année de sa mort). 1) 1953-1973 : les questions liées à la condition (...) féminine ont d’abord existé à l’état de questions éparses formulées dans les écrits sur l’aristocratie. 2) 1973-1980 : elles se dessinent plus fermement, avec l’enquête sur les structures familiales et le mariage. 3) 1980-1996 : elles se dégagent du thème de la parenté pour occuper la place centrale, et sont étudiées dans deux directions : la condition des femmes et la sainteté féminine. (shrink)

What does a truly democratic experience of political action look like today? In this provocative new work, Adriana Cavarero weighs in on contemporary debates about the relationship between democracy, happiness, and dissent. Drawing upon Arendt's understanding of politics as a participatory experience, but also discussing texts by Émile Zola, Elias Canetti, Boris Pasternak, and Roland Barthes, along with engaging Judith Butler, Cavarero proposes a new view of democracy, based not on violence, but rather on the spontaneous experience of a (...) plurality of bodies coming together in public. Expanding upon the themes explored in previous works, Cavarero offers a timely intervention into current thinking about the nature of democracy, suggesting that its emergence thrives on the nonviolent creativity of a widespread, participatory, and relational power that is shared horizontally rather than vertically. From digital democracy to selfies to contemporary protest movements, Cavarero argues that we need to rethink our focus on individual happiness and turn toward rediscovering the joyful emotions of birth through plural interaction. Yes, let us be happy, she urges, but let us do so publicly, politically, together. (shrink)

This article analyzes how scientific thinking evolved in Argentina during the 1820s and 1830s. I will focus on liberals’ association of science with the emergence of a new male sensibility that feminized the role of men in society. This gendered scientific culture explains how liberals clashed in the 1830s with the policies of the governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas, whose hyper masculinist model based on the authority of the father was perceived not only as anti-civilization, but also (...) as anti-science. This association of gender and science helps us to explain how the introduction of Darwinian ideas that seemed to support a more masculinist representation of evolution, now ruled by laws of survival and competition, was perceived as a contradiction of past ideas by the 1870s. (shrink)

This short contribution is written on the occasion of the book discussion of Sophie Loidolt’s Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. It presents an attempt to read the two key notions Loidolt elaborates in her book – spaces of meaning and spaces of the public and private – from a critical perspective offered by Judith Butler’s taking up of Arendt’s work. Offering Butler’s conception of social ontology through several major points (...) of contestation with Arendt, I argue against an all too simple reduction of her understanding of the political and normativity to poststructuralist ones. (shrink)

En este libro se recopilan escritos producidos por el profesor García Amado durante los últimos años. La temática es muy variada: teoría de la argumentación jurídica y de la decisión judicial, interpretación del Derecho, crítica del neoconstitucionalismo y examen de sus raíces doctrinales, debates a propósito de Kelsen y el positivismo, puesta en cuestión de la enseñanza del Derecho y de sus reformas actuales, reflexiones sobre tendencias del Derecho penal contemporáneo, balance de algunos autores y temas de la filosofía (...) política de nuestro tiempo, Derecho y cine, etc. Todo ello con el estilo habitual del autor polémico, provocativo y con cierta ironía e irreverancia. (shrink)

In On Nature and Language Noam Chomsky develops his thinking on the relation between language, mind and brain, integrating current research in linguistics into the burgeoning field of neuroscience. This 2002 volume begins with a lucid introduction by the editors Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi. This is followed by some of Chomsky's writings on these themes, together with a penetrating interview in which Chomsky provides the clearest and most elegant introduction to current theory available. It should make his Minimalist (...) Program accessible to all. The volume concludes with an essay on the role of intellectuals in society and government. Nature and Language is a significant landmark in the development of linguistic theory. It will be welcomed by students and researchers in theoretical linguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive science and politics, as well as anyone interested in the development of Chomsky's thought. (shrink)

The human voice does not deceive. The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter “what” she says. We take this fact for granted—for example, every time someone asks, over the telephone, “Who is speaking?” and receives as a reply the familiar utterance, “It’s me.” Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness. She shows how this history—along with (...) the fields it comprehends, such as linguistics, musicology, political theory, and studies in orality—might be grasped as the “devocalization of Logos,” as the invariable privileging of semantike over phone, mind over body. Female figures—from the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers—provide a crucial counterhistory, one in which the embodied voice triumphs over the immaterial semantic. Reconstructing this counterhistory, Cavarero proposes a “politics of the voice” wherein the ancient bond between Logos and politics is reconfigured, and wherein what matters is not the communicative content of a given discourse, but rather who is speaking. (shrink)

The formative experiences carried out throughout the Franciscan Itinerary reveal that reflection on Franciscan Pedagogy and the respective role of educators in Franciscan institutions must be constant and in dialogue with practice, aiming for actions that characterize education based on principles, values, and attitudes. Therefore, it is necessary to know and delve into the life of Saint Francis of Assisi beyond the knowledge of Franciscan humanism, so that its values are intertwined with personal values, becoming foundations for pedagogical practice.

Este artigo tem como objetivo mostrar como a Congregação Pobres Servos da Divina Providência, mais precisamente o Centro Social Padre Calábria, vem desenvolvendo através da sua revista A Ponte, a formação do cidadão autônomo, flexível, mostrando assim a importância da comunicação na formação do cidadão.

La expansión acelerada de tecnologías disruptivas como la Inteligencia Artificial Generativa y su aplicación progresiva a las distintas esferas de la sociedad han evidenciado las enormes potencialidades transformadoras que poseen, pero también los grandes riesgos que se derivan de su uso generalizado. Sobre esa base, el presente artículo analiza y reflexiona acerca del rol que deben tener los poderes públicos como únicas instituciones capaces de preservar la ética pública, los valores públicos y el bien común ante el desarrollo tecnológico. Con (...) ello, la creación de valor público y la preservación de una ética pública han de constituir un marco de referencia para situar las tecnologías disruptivas al servicio de la ciudadanía y construir una adecuada gobernanza pública. Esta propuesta reafirma, por consiguiente, la importancia de que los poderes públicos configuren un modelo eficaz de gobernanza social de esta tecnología disruptiva, lo que debería ser entendido como un aspecto prioritario en la agenda pública. Cualquier respuesta distinta de las instituciones públicas, ya sea pasiva, reactiva o inhibitoria, pondría en riesgo no solo la gestión de lo público, sino también la esencia misma del orden democrático representativo vigente. (shrink)

Una teoría iusmoralista no puede dejar de basarse en el objetivismo moral, mientras que una teoría iuspositivista puede ser defendida por objetivistas y no objetivistas. Se examinan las consecuencias que el iusmoralismo tiene para la teoría de la validez de las normas jurídicas y para su aplicabilidad en los casos concretos y se revisan las asimetrías y aporías a que conduce cualquier teoría iusmoralista. Finalmente, se subraya que los iusmoralistas discrepan entre sí radicalmente sobre los contenidos de la moral verdadera (...) y del derecho justo y que sólo un enfoque iuspositivista es compatible con el estado constitucional y democrático de derecho. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the ethical teachings of Classical Antiquity philosophers in the poetry of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, especially on the parallels between the author’s work and the Cynics and the Stoics. The syncretic nature of Gregory’s work, reflected in the assimilation of the teachings of ancient philosophical schools and the then expanding Christianity creates conditions for the explanation and highlighting of basic human virtues. Gregory of Nazianzus’ legacy also draws on the teachings of such philosophers as Plato and (...) Aristotle, but he always approaches them from the perspective of a strictly Christian worldview. He understands philosophy as a moral underlying basis from which one can draw inspiration for a virtuous and happy life. Gregory thinks that philosophy cannot harm Christians in the pursuit of a virtuous life. Nevertheless, Christian teachings and God are the highest authority. They stand above all philosophical schools or ideas advanced by specific philosophers. Gregory’s moral poetry thus directs his readers, if they are to deserve eternal life, to follow the commandments, which is possible only if one lives a practical and virtuous life. (shrink)

Neste artigo, partindo de uma análise dos conceitos de corpo e potência presentes nas filosofias de Nietzsche e Espinosa, objetivamos mostrar que ambos os filósofos, além de fazerem uma crítica aos valores transcendentes, afirmam a necessidade de criação de novos valores e mostram que para que uma ética afirmativa da vida seja possível há, antes de tudo, a necessidade do aumento de potência da totalidade corpo/ mente, obtido através de uma terapêutica fundada na dinâmica afetiva. Considerando que tanto Nietzsche quanto (...) Espinosa recorrem ao mesmo afeto, o da alegria, para a cura da impotência e apresentam uma terapêutica de caráter estritamente pessoal, recusando a criação de uma ética normativa, concluímos que uma terapêutica que objetiva realmente promover saúde deve ser um processo essencialmente afetivo, pautado em escolhas e ações salutares próprias, e não uma moralização dos atos da vida cotidiana, operada pelos manuais de psicologia do comportamento e de higiene coletiva. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta o sentido da sinonímia entre potência da razão e liberdade humana na Parte V da Ética, a partir de uma análise de seu prefácio, axiomas e quatro primeiras proposições. No decorrer de nossa análise mostramos porque a potência da qual trata Espinosa não é a de uma vontade livre, mas se identifica à potência da razão ou intelecto em realizar um império sobre os afetos, sendo precisamente o exercício deste governo o que oferece sentido à idéia de (...) liberdade humana em Espinosa. (shrink)

This article discusses the results of an investigation on discourse representation in a corpus of 34 million words constituted by texts in Brazilian Portuguese from two different genres: the research article and the science popularization article. Drawing on a systemic functional grammar perspective of language and pursuing a probabilistic approach, it focuses on the realization of lexicogrammatical systems of direct discourse representation as enacting interpersonal and social relationships. It is argued that the citation practices employed by writers in the genres (...) studied negotiate discursive distance and are influenced by the status culturally and historically ascribed to scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Reimagining a community on the basis of vulnerability entails recognizing our responsibility vis-à-vis those who prosper and those who do not persist because they are abandoned or eliminated. The recognition of our vulnerability allows us to find other forms of community that, built upon the human bonds of protection, escape the abstraction of the value of life, bearing in mind, instead, the socio-political conditions that sustain it, especially when they fail. This is not an easy task in contexts marked by (...) violence. The main issues addressed in this paper are: the recognition of vulnerability, violence as a rupture of interdependence, and our responsibility towards others. Examining our vulnerability can become the cornerstone of another community. (shrink)

The article scrutinizes Foucault’s articulations of resistance, arguing against the entrenched understanding that resistance in Foucault is necessarily negative, or impossible. We concentrate on a specific period of his work, situated between the disciplinary phase and the beginning of the 1980s when Foucault began to develop the idea of the aesthetic of existence. We argue that in this period Foucault developed the notion of resistance as agentic, lived and possible, through three interrelated concepts. These are reverse discourse, counter-conduct and the (...) critical attitude, elaborated in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, the course Security, Territory, Population and the lecture ‘What is Critique?’. The link between these concepts is provided by the effect they produce, captured by Foucault’s understanding of desubjectivation. Our claim is that Foucault reorients his work towards studying subjectivity through articulating resistance as desubjectivation. The main claim of the article is that Foucault not only allows for the possibility of resistance, but that his attempts to calibrate what it may mean to resist led him to fine-tune his understanding of power. Foucault arrived at power as subjection through the gradual development of resistance as desubjectivation. (shrink)

Relating Narratives is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, Relating Narratives is a fascinating and challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration. Drawing a diverse array of thinkers from both the philosophical and the literary tradition, from Sophocles and Homer to Hannah Arendt, Karen Blixen, Walter Benjamin and Borges, Adriana Cadarero's theory of the `narratable self' shows how narrative models in philosophy and (...) literature can open new ways of thinking about formation of human identities. By showing how each human being has a unique story that can be told about them, Adriana Cavarero inaugurates an important shift in thinking about subjectivity and identity which relies not upon categorical or discursive norms, but rather seeks to account for `who' each one of us uniquely is. (shrink)

This pathbreaking work pursues two interwoven themes. Firstly, it engages in a deconstruction of Ancient philosopher's texts--mainly from Plato, but also from Homer and Parmenides--in order to free four Greek female figures from the patriarchal discourse which for centuries had imprisoned them in a particular role. Secondly, it attempts to construct a symbolic female order, reinterpreting these figures from a new perspective. Building on the theory of sexual difference, Cavarero shows that death is the central category on which the whole (...) edifice of traditional philosophy is based. By contrast, the category of birth provides the thread with which new concepts of feminist criticism can be woven together to establish a fresh way of thinking. Cavarero develops a philosophical narrative which, by re-interpreting each of the four figures of ancient thought, uncovers several images of the female desire for self-representation. Plato himself had not forseen that one day female subjectivity would assert its autonomy, plundering and throwing into confusion the patriarchal text in order to tell another story. (shrink)

In this article, Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo resume a dialogue on mimetic inclinations in view of furthering a relational, embodied and affective conception of subjectivity that challenges homo erectus from the immanent perspective of homo mimeticus. If a dominant philosophical tradition tends to restrict mimesis to an illusory representation of reality, Plato was the first to know that mimesis also operates as an affective force, or pathos, that dispossesses the subject. While Plato tended to emphasize the pathological implications (...) of mimesis, Cavarero and Lawtoo agree that both mimesis and inclinations go beyond good and evil and can be put to both pathological and democratic use. Picking up a dialogue started during a walk in New York City, Cavarero and Lawtoo, take their shared interests in Joseph Conrad's relating narratives as an occasion to discuss good and bad mimetic inclinations in contemporary politics and ethics. Joined in conclusion by the Gendered Mimesis team (Willow Verkerk, Isabelle Dahms and Giulia Rignano), topics addressed include new fascism, surging democracy, ethical responsibility for vulnerable others, hypermaternity and public happiness in a precarious world. (shrink)

Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine offer here a history and interpretation of the reception of Darwinism in Argentina, illuminating the ways culture shapes ...

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word—"horrorism"—to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from (...) the perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the _Iliad_, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty. In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality. (shrink)

This work employs Elizabeth Cripps’ collectivist account of responsibility for climate change in order to ground an individual duty to reduce one’s GHG emissions. This is significant not only as a critique of Cripps, but also as an indication that even on some collectivist footings, individuals can be assigned primary duties to reduce their emissions. Following Cripps, this work holds the unstructured group of GHG emitters weakly collectively responsible for climate change harms. However, it argues against Cripps that what follows (...) from this is a corresponding collective duty to act qua group to bring about an end to the harm and a derivative duty for each emitter to promote the required organization of a group capable of this. Instead, this work argues that acts of GHG emission, to the extent that they are avoidable and performed with requisite knowledge, make one into a member of a group that is morally responsible for climate-related harms. Thus, individual emitters who can do otherwise should recognize themselves as members of a group that collectively harms. Subsequently, they should take all possible steps in order to renounce their membership (e.g. by reducing their GHG emissions). (shrink)

We reconstruct “the classical transformational theory” of Chomsky, and fit it into the structuralist theory of science. We describe both the formal and the empirical features of this classical account, so that one basic hypothesis of this theory – where central notions are used – can be formulated, and in which Chomsky’s “classical” distinction between surface structure and deep structure is clarified. In the empirical claim of this theory are words, sentences and high-structured entities in an inseparable way intertwined. We (...) claim that the formal structure of a natural language is not approximately the same as that of an empirical theory in general. We clarify two special points which affect the structure of the notion of an empirical theory, namely: the delineation of intended applications and the fit between data and models. We hold that the concept of the empirical claim for a linguistic theory should be generalized in comparison with the “standard” structuralist approach. (shrink)

Se analiza críticamente la idea de Pueblo y el manejo de la Historia que suelen ser propios de las doctrinas nacionalistas, con sus correspondientes secuelas para la relación entre derechos individuales y derechos colectivos, y con sus consecuencias para el modo de concebir y de realizarse la democracia. También se ponen de relieve los problemas teóricos que encierran la noción de “derechos históricos”.

Uno de los ejes que atraviesa la obra de Arturo Andrés Roig es la cuestión del sujeto. La filosofía, dice, "se trata de una meditación en la que no sólo interesa el conocimiento, sino también el sujeto que conoce … en su realidad humana e histórica" (Roig, 1981, 9). Justamente por su referencia a esa realidad humana e histórica, el filosofar no es ajeno al modo de habitar el hombre en el mundo. En otras palabras, el universo del discurso filosófico (...) hace referencia a un universo de lo real histórico. En esa tensión se juega la praxis filosófica, que si ha de ser liberadora, requiere la tematización tanto de la "subjetividad" como de la "morada". Al hilo de estas cuestiones trazamos un itinerario filosófico de Arturo Andrés Roig que lleva el propósito de servir de introducción al presente Dossier de la Revista Estudios de Filosofía Práctica e Historia de las Ideas, el cual se realiza como homenaje y afectuoso recuerdo de quien fuera su director. One axis that runs through the work of Arturo Andrés Roig is the question of the subject. Philosophy, he says, "is a matter of a meditation in which it is concerned not only the knowledge, but also the subject that knows… in his human and historical reality" (Roig, 1981, 9). Precisely because of this reference to human and historical reality, philosophizing is not strange to the man´s way of living in the world. In other words, the universe of the philosophical discourse In other words, the universe of the philosophical discourse refers to a universe of historical reality. It is in this tension where the philosophical praxis is played, which if it must be liberating, requires to question about both, "subjectivity" and "residing". In line with these issues we draw up a philosophical itinerary of Arturo Andrés Roig which has the purpose of serving as the introduction to the present Dossier of the Estudios de Filosofía Práctica e Historia de las Ideas academic journal, which is held in honor and loving memory of its former Director. (shrink)

Parmi les séminaires que Georges Duby dirigea toute sa vie, ceux de Sénanque occupent une place particulière. Pendant trois ans, entre 1981 et 1983, il réunit des universitaires et des chercheurs autour de questions spécifiquement liées à l’histoire de la vie privée. L’Association des Amis de Sénanque (et en son sein le Cercle d’Etudes Médiévales) assurait la bonne organisation matérielle. Son directeur, Emmanuel Muheim, accueillait dans l’abbaye cistercienne provençale, pendant quelques jour..

La infamia constituye el modelo ideal de castigo actual, ya que marca el cuerpo real y simbólico de ciertos sujetos, sin ninguna mediación institucional: los individuos y los grupos sociales se arrogan el derecho a imputar, juzgar y castigar. De manera que existen instituciones formales y, además, ciertos colectivos informales que neutralizan, excluyen, matan y encierran real y simbólicamente, ejerciendo un poder para-judicial y para-penal. En palabras más precisas, hay una penalidad que no pasa necesariamente por el poder judicial ni (...) el proceso legal, sino por el tribunal social y psicológico efectuado por algunos agentes de control social informal. La realidad evidencia la absorción progresiva del proceso judicial en el juicio colectivo, sin ninguna garantía ni código distinto a la mirada, el murmullo social y el juicio instantáneo. La sociedad se transforma así en un tribunal permanente que odia, etiqueta y castiga, y cuya inmediatez, espontaneidad y anonimato reaviva la infamia de los viejos sistemas de la penalidad medieval, así como la devastadora marcación totalitaria. (shrink)