This text is an interview given by Prof. Dr. Alfredo Pereira Jr. to Leonardo Ferreira Almada, on the occasion of the call for publication of interviews with different Brazilian philosophers. In response to the goal of the Trans/Form/Ação journal call, we sought to carry out an interview in which a PhD professor with an established career presents some elements of his personal and academic stories, as well as clarifies important points of his research, some of his theses and vision (...) of the world based on questions asked by another professor, a historical research partner, and in-depth knowledge of the interviewee’s career. (shrink)

The Critique of Pure Reason—Kant’s First Critique—is one of the most studied texts in intellectual history, but as Alfredo Ferrarin points out in this radically original book, most of that study has focused only on very select parts. Likewise, Kant’s oeuvre as a whole has been compartmentalized, the three Critiques held in rigid isolation from one another. Working against the standard reading of Kant that such compartmentalization has produced, The Powers of Pure Reason explores forgotten parts of the First (...) Critique in order to find an exciting, new, and ultimately central set of concerns by which to read all of Kant’s works. Ferrarin blows the dust off of two egregiously overlooked sections of the First Critique—the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. There he discovers what he argues is the Critique’s greatest achievement: a conception of the unity of reason and an exploration of the powers it has to reach beyond itself and legislate over the world. With this in mind, Ferrarin dismantles the common vision of Kant as a philosopher writing separately on epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics and natural teleology, showing that the three Critiques are united by this underlying theme: the autonomy and teleology of reason, its power and ends. The result is a refreshing new view of Kant, and of reason itself. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to provide insight into culinary systems. Each culture expresses its own identity through the way in which it transforms food into an elaborated cuisine. The phases of a cooking process start with the choice of ingredients, their preparation, their processing, how they are served, and how they are eaten. Each of these phases makes it possible to understand the semiotic and social behavior of a human group in the moment they choose to prepare and (...) eat a particular food. Therefore, this article contains a contrastive analysis of how Mexican, Texan, and Italian cuisines show how spicy and hot food is interpreted depending on the values that ​​are given to it in regards to being considered a dish, a spice or a vegetable. It bases its analysis on the mechanisms built around the meaning of chile in order to express cultural characteristics and differences. The recipes and their narrative processes, in addition to the use of color, allow the identification of parameters to describe the various cuisines through recipes books. (shrink)

Throughout the following analysis we propose a reflection on the reasons and causes that motivated the appearance and development of “revolutionary terrorism” or of the extreme left in Latin America and Western Europe. We review the role played by some of its main reference organizations and the response offered by the States in which they acted. As fundamental axes, we consider two. On the one hand, the role played by violence in these organizations. On the other hand, the causes that (...) motivated his defeat/disappearance. (shrink)

In this study I propose an epistemological discussion of multiple spatio-temporal scales in neuroscience. Are such scales merely convenient levels of description of structure and function, or do they correspond to irreducible levels of brain organization? What criteria should we employ in order to reduce one level to another, or to identify levels that are not reducible to others? Should we think of these criteria as based on empirical and/or theoretical reasons? Beginning with an empirical criterion – the necessity of (...) different experimental methodologies for the measurement of different phenomena in the same system – I summarize spatial and temporal scales currently used in neuroscience and discuss the possibility of a more general theoretical criterion. I conclude that multiscaling should be recognized as a central concept in the epistemology of neuroscience. (shrink)

According to the semantic view of computation, computations cannot be individuated without invoking semantic properties. A traditional argument for the semantic view is what we shall refer to as the argument from the cognitive science practice. In its general form, this argument rests on the idea that, since cognitive scientists describe computations (in explanations and theories) in semantic terms, computations are individuated semantically. Although commonly invoked in the computational literature, the argument from the cognitive science practice has never been discussed (...) in detail. In this paper, we shall provide a critical reconstruction of this argument and an extensive analysis of its prospects, taking into account some ways of defending it that have never been explored so far. We shall argue that explanatory considerations support at best a weak version of the argument from the cognitive science practice, according to which semantic properties concur with formal syntactic properties in individuating computations in cognitive science, but not a strong version, according to which computation individuation in cognitive science is semantic as opposed to formal syntactic. (shrink)

Argument evaluation, one of the central problems in argumentation theory, consists in studying what makes an argument a good one. This paper proposes a formal approach to argument evaluation from the perspective of justification logic. We adopt a multi-agent setting, accepting the intuitive idea that arguments are always evaluated by someone. Two general restrictions are imposed on our analysis: non-deductive arguments are left out and the goal of argument evaluation is fixed: supporting a given proposition. Methodologically, our approach uses several (...) existing tools borrowed from justification logic, awareness logic, doxastic logic and logics for belief dependence. We start by introducing a basic logic for argument evaluation, where a list of argumentative and doxastic notions can be expressed. Later on, we discuss how to capture the mentioned form of argument evaluation by defining a preference operator in the object language. The intuitive picture behind this definition is that, when assessing a couple of arguments, the agent puts them to a test consisting of several criteria. As a result of this process, a preference relation among the evaluated arguments is established by the agent. After showing that this operator suffers a special form of logical omniscience, called preferential omniscience, we discuss how to define an explicit version of it, more suitable to deal with non-ideal agents. The present work exploits the formal notion of awareness in order to model several informal phenomena: awareness of sentences, availability of arguments and communication between agents and external sources. We discuss several extensions of the basic logic and offer completeness and decidability results for all of them. (shrink)

This volume significantly challenges and expands the critical discourse on photography and text and will be of interest to artists, curators, photographers, architects, and critical theorists.

Libertas philosophandi è una indagine del rapporto disciplinare tra filosofia e teologia che ruota intorno alla celebre Lettera alla granduchessa Cristina di Lorena di G. Galilei, lettera-trattato con cui lo scienziato cerca di salvare uno spazio di libertà di ricerca nel contesto della cultura controriformata. La prima parte del libro illustra criticamente le polemiche sorte a partire dalla pubblicazione del Sidereus nuncius e proseguite fino alla condanna del copernicanesimo nel 1616. La seconda è dedicata all'analisi strutturale della Lettera e alla (...) ricerca delle fonti testuali che l'hanno ispirata, identificandone talora l'edizione precisa. La terza parte sviluppa i diversi temi della Lettera, presentando alcuni elementi fin qui ignoti o ignorati, tra i quali un forte indebitamento con la tradizione del trattato aristotelico De anima (in particolare con Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Pomponazzi e Cesare Cremonini); la scoperta di un plagio da parte di Cremonini; la sensibilità politica di Galileo. Viene poi discusso il problema del cosiddetto concordismo del trattato e proposta una lettura controcorrente; si presenta una analisi iconografica che evidenzia, tra l'altro, il legame tra la Lettera a Cristina e l'Accademia dei Lincei. Ancora, si offre un documento inedito che getta luce sul ruolo del cardinale Bellarmino nella condanna del 1616. Infine una rilettura dei documenti dei due processi a Galileo mostra come una lieve, ma decisiva manipolazione della sentenza del primo processo riproponga la problematicità del secondo. La quarta parte del libro contiene il testo della Lettera accompagnato da numerose note di commento storico. (shrink)

La concepción instrumental de la “palabra” tiene como marco de referencia lametafísica de la subjetividad moderna, de la cual surgen en una u otra medida lafilosofía y la ciencia del lenguaje. Tomando como punto de partida de su método fenomenológico el “ir de camino en pos de la experiencia del lenguaje” –másallá de los presupuestos básicos establecidos por la tradición filosófica– Heideggerlogra superar el reduccionismo lingüístico de Occidente. La pregunta por laesencia del lenguaje –que corresponde finalmente a los interrogantes: ¿Qué (...) esel lenguaje? y ¿cuál es su fundamento?– es superada por la pregunta ¿cómoacontece el lenguaje como tal? Teniendo en cuenta estos presupuestos, haceruna experiencia con el lenguaje significa “dejarse abordar por la interpelaciónde la ‘palabra’ en una actitud de espera sin objeto que representar”. Libre de lasataduras de la representación, el lenguaje es concebido en su sentido ontológicocomo apertura a la posibilidad. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo destacar o contexto no qual a obra Defensio Fidei de Francisco Suárez foi elaborada. Após salientar alguns elementos centrais dos debates entre partidários do direito divino dos reis e defensores da origem democrática do poder civil, veremos as linhas gerais do argumento avançado por Suárez para defender a origem democrátiva do poder civil e como ele interpreta essa tese.

O presente artigo pretende analisar o Speculum doutrinal de Vicente de Beauvais, destacando o modo como o autor busca assimilar materiais de origem árabe, especialmente no que diz respeito à divisão e classificação das ciências. Defenderemos que Vicente de Beauvais manterá em sua obra o espírito que animava as enciclopédias do século do século XII ao mesmo tempo em que recorrerá aos textos árabes para apresentar a estrutura do conhecimento humano. Como resultado, surgirá uma certa tensão entre a metafísica e (...) a teologia como disciplinas supremas. (shrink)

Hegel is, arguably, the most difficult of all philosophers. To find a way into his thought interpreters have usually approached him as though he were developing Kantian and Fichtean themes. This book demonstrates in a systematic way that it makes much more sense to view Hegel's idealism in relation to the metaphysical and epistemological tradition stemming from Aristotle. The book offers an account of Hegel's idealism in light of his interpretation, discussion, assimilation and critique of Aristotle's philosophy. There are explorations (...) of Hegelian and Aristotelian views of system and history; being, metaphysics, logic, and truth; nature and subjectivity; spirit, knowledge, and self-knowledge; ethics and politics. No serious student of Hegel can afford to ignore this major interpretation. It will also be of interest in such fields as political science and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Combining modalities has proven to have interesting applications and many approaches that combine time with other types of modalities have been developed. One of these approaches uses accessibility functions between flows of time to study the basic properties of the functions, such as being total or partial, injective, surjective, etc. The completeness of certain systems expressing many of these properties, with the exception of surjectivity, has been proven. In this paper we propose a language with nominals to denote the initial (...) and final sets of each function in a model in order to obtain a complete system for reasoning about surjective partial functions. (shrink)

Resumen La enseñanza de la filosofía no es únicamente una transmisión de contenidos; incluso probablemente no sea éste el objetivo más importante. Para plantearnos qué es lo más importante en la docencia filosófica deberíamos preguntarnos qué queremos exactamente que aprendan nuestros alumnos. Cuando intentamos responder a esta cuestión se pone de manifiesto la especificidad de la filosofía. La filosofía no es cuestión de contenidos sino de vida; no es cuestión de respuestas, sino de preguntas. En esta comunicación se pretende mostrar (...) la pedagogía de la admiración de Alfonso López Quintás a la luz de la inteligencia sentiente de Xavier Zubiri. Palabras clave: docencia filosofía, Xavier Zubiri, Alfonso López Quintás, capacitación educativa The Zubirian Basis of López Quintás’s Pedagogy Abastract Teaching philosophy is not only about conveying contents; indeed this is probably not the most important goal. In reflecting about what is most important in teaching philosophy we should ask ourselves what we want specifically our students to learn. When we try to answer this question the specificity of philosophy is revealed. Philosophy is not a matter of contents but of life—it is not about answers but about questions. This paper aims to present Alfonso Lopez Quintás’s pedagogy of admiration in the light of Xavier Zubiri’s sentient intelligence. Keywords: teaching philosophy, Xavier Zubiri, Alfonso López Quintás, educational training. (shrink)

O artigo tem como objetivo investigar as razões que levaram Descartes a não concluir as Regras para a direção do Espírito, estabelecendo uma relação entre a interrupção da obra e a teoria de 1630 sobre a natureza criada das verdades eternas. Com a doutrina da livre criação das verdades, Descartes apresenta uma proposta metafísica que exigia uma revisitação dos pressupostos da sua própria epistemologia. Se nas Regras a matemática e a geometria eram consideradas isentas de toda incerteza, com a entrada (...) em cena da teoria de 1630 essas disciplinas encontram-se submetidas à causalidade arbitrária da onipotência divina. Essa consideração metafísica requer uma reflexão ulterior para avaliar as suas consequências. O projeto das Regras – interrompido, mas não abandonado – será assim reformulado à luz da novidade metafísica de 1630. As Meditações se encarregarão dessa tarefa, demonstrando de que modo a natureza criada das verdades eternas não implica colocar em questão o conhecimento humano. (shrink)