The article explores the historicity of political subjecthood, making the case that through a process of subjectification “subjects of the king” gradually became the political subjects of the state. This in turn contributed to reconstitute the state as an abstract notion that nevertheless was real through the allegiance owed to it by its subjects. Addressing the making of subjecthood in relation to state formation helps fill an important lacuna in the literature on state formation, namely the double oversight of subjecthood. (...) Either studies of state formation have taken both territory and subjecthood—the two objects of state power—for granted, or, more recently, they have assumed that changes in subjecthood were a function of changes in territoriality. I propose to address this by inquiring into early modern subjecthood in its own right, through a historical exploration of the emergence of political subjecthood in English statutes during the Tudor period. Through gradual yet incremental changes in the relation between subject/king and subject/state, the political subject’s allegiance to the state changed and acquired a “taken-for-grantedness”—maintained and reinforced through constant legal reiteration. (shrink)

The article explores the historicity of political subjecthood, making the case that through a process of subjectification “subjects of the king” gradually became the political subjects of the state. This in turn contributed to reconstitute the state as an abstract notion that nevertheless was real through the allegiance owed to it by its subjects. Addressing the making of subjecthood in relation to state formation helps fill an important lacuna in the literature on state formation, namely the double oversight of subjecthood. (...) Either studies of state formation have taken both territory and subjecthood—the two objects of state power—for granted, or, more recently, they have assumed that changes in subjecthood were a function of changes in territoriality. I propose to address this by inquiring into early modern subjecthood in its own right, through a historical exploration of the emergence of political subjecthood in English statutes during the Tudor period (1485–1602). Through gradual yet incremental changes in the relation between subject/king and subject/state, the political subject’s allegiance to the state changed and acquired a “taken-for-grantedness”—maintained and reinforced through constant legal reiteration. (shrink)

Emphasizing the predictive success and practical utility of psychological science is an admirable goal but it will require a substantive shift in how we design research. Applied research often assumes that findings are transferable to all practices, insensitive to variation between implementations. We describe efforts to quantify and close this practice-to-practice gap in education research.

Este artigo se propõe pensar a relação entre natureza e humanidade a partir de alguns ensaios de Walter Benjamin – particularmente através da leitura do fragmento A caminho do planetário, em Rua de Mão Única, assim como dos ensaios Sobre o conceito de história, com ênfase na Tese XI, e d’A obra de arte na época de sua reprodutibilidade técnica – em paralelo com a leitura do ensaio de Ailton Krenak, liderança indígena da região do vale do Rio Doce, (...) intitulado Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. A proposta de buscar esse diálogo entre autores tão distantes – de realidades político-sociais e culturais que até mesmo se desconhecem –, em uma primeira vista, baseia-se na necessidade que ambos tiveram de pensar sobre a catástrofe iminente como consequência da dominação da natureza. (shrink)

In this paper, I will focus on the nature of the modernity from the perspective of a «logical» square. On the basis of its vectorial orientation, I will show the value of Guy Debord’s work, according to which, undeniably, there is a need to articulate two core issues of our time: «How does a multitude turn into a class?» (Benjamin’s question) and «How does the individual become a subject?» (Althusser’s question). It is precisely the nexus between these questions that (...) allows us to draw the line between the modernity and the postmodernity. (shrink)

No presente artigo pretendemos apresentar o conceito de violência-poder em Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940), com base no ensaio intitulado Crítica do Poder, Crítica da Violência [Zur Kritik der Gewalt] . Utilizamos como ponto de partida da crítica aqui em questão, a consideração da violência-poder no movimento próprio do texto de Walter Benjamim. Nesse sentido, esta exposição tem a seguinte seqüência: a) A recusa crítica dos pressupostos metodológicos do jusnaturalismo e do positivismo jurídico; b) A definição do procedimento da (...) filosofia da história para estabelecer os critérios para uma avaliação do poder-violência; c) A identificação de dois princípios inerentes ao direito: a violência instauradora da lei ( Rechtsetzende Gewalt ) e a violência mantenedora da lei ( Rechtsendhaltende Gewalt ). A partir daí, estabelecemos as seguintes suspeitas ou hipóteses: 1) O direito ou poder jurídico possui uma forma paradoxal de atuação, segundo as dimensões, instituidora e mantenedora do poder- violência, ou seja, na medida em que ele se faz valer, ele cria a sua própria suspensão, produz a exceção. 2) Essa contradição não se explicita na letra da lei, não se explica pelo seu caráter formal, mas apenas na realidade no sentido histórico abordado por Benjamin. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss the presence of psychoanalysis in Adorno’s ’Philosophy of the new music’. He draws on the Benjaminian scheme of understanding Baudelaire’s poetry (understood as an elaboration of the shock experiences in life in post-industrial Revolution capitalism), but uses it in music criticism. The works of Schönberg and Stravinsky, the mostimportant composers of two schools of the so-called “new or modern music”, deals with different compositional subjects and their ways of dealing with the shocks (...) of modern life. Both Benjamin and Adorno draw on Freudian theory for the understanding of this notion of shock, in particular his theory of anxiety and trauma. The works of these composers, understood as models of trauma elaboration, offer different ways of reacting to trauma: the identification with the aggressor and resistance. Therein lie elements that help to defend the hypothesis of the centrality of the notion of suffering in Adorno’swork. (shrink)

The so-called New Music in Europe after the Second World War was based on the idea of progress, similar to technological progress and related to it, and aimed at a complete rationalization of composing. The ideal of music as autopoiesis, which appeared in the 1950s, became inherent to this development. It supposed a kind of communication on music as a reified object, which opposed music making and listening as communication between partners. Separated from the life-world and conceived as a self-referential (...) system, New Music should represent not only the logical achievement of the historical development of European music, but also the superiority of Western musical thought in the more developed countries (like the USA, France, West Germany) over the music cultures of the world. Therefore, the integral serialism, which should rule the musical composition, became a form of symbolic power within the musical field, in correspondence with similar forms of domination within the economic, political and technological fields. However, some European composers rejected this trend and tried to find an alternative to aestheticism by means of political engagement. For instance, the Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924-90) explores the dialectic between subject and object, technological development and critique of technology, avant-garde and critique of progress, globalization and anti-imperialistic resistance. In his strategy, in which Gramsci's and Walter Benjamin's thought played an important role, aesthetics became inseparable from politics. His search for identity as a composer transforms the tragedy of listening into an allegory of human condition. (shrink)

A partir de imagens de crianças encontradas no cinema dos primeiros tempos, propomos uma reflexão sobre as relações entre a infância e cinema. Segundo Walter Benjamin (2009), tanto a infância quanto o cinema são invenções da modernidade: o conceito de infância como um período importante de formação do sujeito nasce de forma inseparável das tecnologias de produção e reprodução da imagem que nos dão a ver as crianças de uma forma inédita, primeiro na fotografia e depois no cinema. A (...) partir disso, nos perguntamos se seria possível pensar na “invenção” do cinema como também um gesto de infância? Nos propomos a pensar uma ideia de infância do cinema para além de um reducionismo teleológico. Para tanto, partimos de uma visão psicanalítica sobre o processo de entrada na linguagem, que coincide com o movimento de individuação do sujeito, na infância. A partir desta perspectiva, estabelecemos uma analogia entre a infância e o desenvolvimento do cinema como momentos igualmente marcados pela entrada na linguagem: de um estado atravessado fortemente pela visualidade, pela experimentação, pela descoberta e pela brincadeira, em direção a uma entrada no sistema simbólico estruturado da linguagem através de constantes negociações com as convenções e os limites do mundo adulto. (shrink)

If you ought to perform a certain act, and some other action is a necessary means for you to perform that act, then you ought to perform that other action as well – or so it seems plausible to say. This transmission principle is of both practical and theoretical significance. The aim of this paper is to defend this principle against a number of recent objections, which (as I show) are all based on core assumptions of the view called actualism. (...) I reject actualism, provide an alternative explanation of its plausible features, and present an independent argument for the transmission principle. (shrink)

People loved for their beauty and cheerfulness are not loved as irreplaceable, yet people loved for “what their souls are made of” are. Or so literary romance implies; leading philosophical accounts, however, deny the distinction, holding that reasons for love either do not exist or do not include the beloved’s distinguishing features. In this, I argue, they deny an essential species of love. To account for it while preserving the beloved’s irreplaceability, I defend a model of agency on which people (...) can love each other for identities still being created, through a kind of mutual improvisation. (shrink)

Open texture is a kind of semantic indeterminacy first systematically studied by Waismann. In this paper, extant definitions of open texture will be compared and contrasted, with a view towards the consequences of open-textured concepts in mathematics. It has been suggested that these would threaten the traditional virtues of proof, primarily the certainty bestowed by proof-possession, and this suggestion will be critically investigated using recent work on informal proof. It will be argued that informal proofs have virtues that mitigate the (...) danger posed by open texture. Moreover, it will be argued that while rigor in the guise of formalisation and axiomatisation might banish open texture from mathematical theories through implicit definition, it can do so only at the cost of restricting the tamed concepts in certain ways. (shrink)

Scientific practice involves two kinds of induction. In one, generalizations are drawn about the states of a particular system of variables. In the other, generalizations are drawn across systems in a class. We can discern two questions of correctness about both kinds of induction: what distinguishes those systems and classes of system that are ‘projectible’ in Goodman’s sense from those that are not, and what are the methods by which we are able to identify kinds that are likely to be (...) projectible? In answer to the first question, numerous theories of ‘natural kinds’ have been advanced, but none has satisfactorily addressed both questions simultaneously. I propose a shift in perspective. Both essentialist and cluster property theories have traditionally characterized kinds directly in terms of the causally salient properties their members possess. Instead, we should focus on ‘dynamical symmetries’, transformations of a system to which the causal structure of that system is indifferent. I suggest that to be a member of natural kind it is necessary and sufficient to possess a particular collection of dynamical symmetries. I show that membership in such a kind is in turn necessary and sufficient for the presence of the sort of causal structure that accounts for success in both kinds of induction, thus demonstrating that has been answered satisfactorily. More dramatically, I demonstrate that this new theory of ‘dynamical kinds’ provides an answer to with methodological implications concerning the discovery of projectible kinds. (shrink)

Consciousness is a natural phenomenon, the object of a flourishing area of research in the natural sciences – research whose primary goal is to identify the neural correlates of consciousness. This raises the question: why is there need for a philosophy of consciousness? As we see things, the need for a philosophy of consciousness arises for two reasons. First, as a young and energetic science operating as yet under no guiding paradigm, the science of consciousness has been subject to considerable (...) confusion regarding its methodological, conceptual, and philosophical foundations, and it is philosophy’s mandate to address such confusion in an attempt to regiment scientific practice. Secondly, the identification of a neural feature that correlated perfectly with consciousness would still leave open a certain metaphysical question: is the relation between consciousness and the relevant neural feature merely correlation, or is that correlation indicative of a deeper, more intimate relation between the two? In this paper, we offer an opinionated overview of the philosophy of consciousness as it addresses these two dimensions of consciousness research. (shrink)

The possibility of cooperation and the stability of political order are long-standing problems. Polybius, well known for his Histories analysing the expansion of Rome and his description of the Roman constitution, also offers an intriguing social and political theory that covers ground from psycho-anthropological micro-foundations to institution-based political order, providing a genealogy of morals and political order that is best understood in game-theoretical terms. In this paper I try to give such an interpretation. Polybius’ naturalistic, proto-game theoretical views show similarities (...) with Hume, Smith and especially Hobbes’ doctrine of sovereignty by acquisition. However, Polybius is original in crucial regards, giving a motivationally plausible account of institutional and especially constitutional solutions to moral and political problems. Constitutional order, for Polybius, embodies and makes possible in the first place a kind of political reason that cannot be had individually. Polybian political theory thus offers interesting solutions to problems concerning moral motivation, collective action, and the conditions for political order, as well as the explanation and character of institutions. (shrink)

The paper studies the contribution of Joaquim de Carvalho, a teacher at the University of Coimbra in the first half of last century, to the phenomenological movement in Portugal. Its importance is not restricted to the introduction he had prepared for the Portuguese translation of The Philosophy of rigor as science. He used the lessons of Edmund Husserl to build a critique of Hegelian and positivist conceptions in his work History of Philosophy. It also draws on phenomenology to treat (...) problems such as homesickness. All these aspects of the project as publisher of phenomenology in Portugal, especially in education. (shrink)

Many theories on cognition assume that people adapt their decision strategies depending on the situation they face. To test if and how affect guides the selection of decision strategies, we conducted an online study (N = 166), where different mood states were induced through video clips. Results indicate that mood influenced the use of decision strategies. Negative mood, in particular anger, facilitated the use of non-compensatory strategies, whereas positive mood promoted compensatory decision rules. These results are in line with the (...) idea that positive mood broadens the focus of attention and thus increases the use of compensatory decision strategies that take many pieces of information into account, whereas negative mood narrows the focus of attention and thus fosters non-compensatory strategies that rely on a selective use of information. The results further indicate that gaining a deeper theoretical understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that govern decision processes requires taking emotions into account. (shrink)

In addition to considering sociocultural, political, economic, and ethical factors, effectively engaging socioscientific issues requires that students understand and apply scientific explanations and the nature of science. Promoting such understandings can be achieved through immersing students in authentic real-world contexts where the SSI impacts occur and teaching those students about how scientists comprehend, research, and debate those SSI. This triangulated mixed-methods investigation explored how 60 secondary students’ trophic cascade explanations changed through their experiencing place-based SSI instruction focused on the Yellowstone (...) wolf reintroduction, including scientists’ work and debates regarding that issue. Furthermore, this investigation determined the association between the students’ post place-based SSI instruction trophic cascade explanations and NOS views. Findings from this investigation demonstrate that through the place-based SSI instruction students’ trophic cascade explanations became significantly more accurate and complex and included more ecological causal mechanisms. Also, significant and moderate to moderately large correlations were found between the accuracy and contextualization of students’ post place-based SSI instruction NOS views and the complexity of their trophic cascade explanations. Empirical substantiation of the association between the complexity of students’ scientific explanations and their NOS views responds to an understudied area in the science education research. It also encourages the consideration of several implications, drawn from this investigation’s findings and others’ prior work, which include the need for NOS to be forefront alongside and in connection with science content in curricular standards and through instruction focused on relevant and authentic place-based SSI. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to an objection raised by Duncan Pritchard and Jesper Kallestrup against virtue epistemology. In particular, they argue that the virtue epistemologist must either deny that S knows that p only if S believes that p because of S’s virtuous operation or deny that intuitive cases of testimonial knowledge. Their dilemma has roots in the apparent ease by which we obtain testimonial knowledge and, thus, how the virtue epistemologist can explain such knowledge in a way that (...) both preserves testimonial knowledge and grounds it in one’s virtues. I argue that the virtue epistemologist has a way to accomplish both tasks if we take epistemic trust to be an intellectual virtue. I briefly discuss what such trust must look like and then apply it to the dilemma at hand: showing that a key intellectual virtue plausibly operates in cases of testimonial knowledge and/or belief. (shrink)

Em poucos anos, Olavo de Carvalho, figura obscura, sem projeção e sem qualquer reconhecimento acadêmico, passa a ocupar o centro do poder político brasileiro. Considerado o guru ideológico do governo Bolsonaro, é responsável pela indicação de pelo menos dois ministros e vem sendo o mentor intelectual de vários ocupantes de cargos na administração e na política. Olavo simboliza hoje os contraditórios valores conservadores brasileiros e, no passo disto, instiga algumas das mais destrutivas estratégias na guerra cultural que ele e (...) seus discípulos empreendem. Através do olhar incisivo de Heloisa de Carvalho, a filha mais velha deste guru e testemunha ocular destes relatos, a faceta sombria e controversa de Olavo, que ele tanto tentou ocultar, se expõe: seus vínculos com escandalosas seitas esotéricas, sua vida errática e desregrada, o grave abandono intelectual dos filhos, e toda uma trajetória pessoal e profissional centrada no culto à própria personalidade que, contra todas as expectativas e quase que desafiando a lógica, tornou-se uma incontornável referência intelectual da chamada "Nova Direita" do país. Um novo que aponta para o passado - para a longínqua Idade Média -, concorrendo para o retrocesso dos avanços sociais a tão alto custo conquistados pelo povo. Esperamos que as revelações biográficas de Heloísa sejam uma gota no oceano da necessária frenagem da difusão e defesa dessas ideias torpes e contraditórias. Não nos importa o homem, mas sua trajetória tem a ver com suas ideias e suas práticas, daí a importância da leitura desse livro. (shrink)

American health care reformers face a number of ethical issues, including familiar debates over the merits of a single-payer system and publicly provided universal health insurance. No matter how these debates are resolved, a further ethical question must be addressed. Both universal coverage and a single-payer system are compatible with permitting some patients to pay more for faster, better, or more health care choices. Should the United States continue to have a two-tier health care system in which wealth grants some (...) patients access to medical services that others with the same needs cannot obtain? Critical evaluation of both principled objections to inequalities and practical objections to anticipated social and medical consequences of a two-tier health care system are needed. (shrink)

The relationship between Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and Kant's philosophy is as important as it is ambiguous. The aim of this paper is to explore one significant and under-examined aspect of this relationship, i.e., the respective views of Fichte and Kant on the concept of God. Fichte's noteworthy divergences from Kant's discussions are described and analyzed. Fichte's explication of the concept of God is considerably sparser than Kant's. Furthermore, Fichte excludes from philosophy some of the sub-disciplines of rational theology allowed by Kant. (...) The deeper philosophical roots of these divergences are located in Fichte's radical revision of the Kantian doctrine of the “primacy of practical reason”. (shrink)

The book contends that contrary to accepted interpretation, moral intuition, rather than any other form of reasoning, least of all formal logic, is the moral method found in the ethics of Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Dewey - the first four chapters of the book. These four thinkers represent a dialectical selection of ethical relativism and absolutism as well as a chronological succession from ancient to contemporary thought. The fifth and concluding chapter is a major presentation of the author's thesis on (...) moral intuition as the exact antidote against the dilemma ethics approach, which is widely used today with rapidly diminishing effect and interest. This chapter is a detailed illustration of how moral intuition works out concretely in the lived world. It stresses the unity of moral experience even as this is clouded over by our relatively fewer, but overdramatized, confrontations on some moral issues. (shrink)

The concept of Health in All Policies aims to improve the health outcomes associated with policies in an attempt to mitigate health disparities and provide optimal environments for healthier living. This multidisciplinary framework seeks to improve health through effective assessment and reformation of policy for organizations of any level and stature. The importance of integrating health in policy assessment and decision making is a key concept in the growing field of Health Impact Assessment.The World Health Organization defines Health Impact Assessment (...) as “a combination of procedures, methods, and tools by which a policy, program, or project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population.” HIA provides a mechanism for collaboration between various sectors and disciplines bridging the gap between research, policymaking, and implementation of policies, programs, and projects affecting health outcomes. In the United States, while some HIA efforts have focused on proposed public policies, HIA has been used primarily to analyze the health effects of proposed development projects and plans related to community design and transportation. (shrink)

Take strong open-future Humeanism (OFH) to comprise the following three tenets: (i) that truth supervenes on being (ii) that there is a dynamic present moment, and (iii) that there are no future facts; that is, contingent propositions about the future obtain truth values only when their referents are actualised (Tooley 1997). On the face of it this is a deeply problematic metaphysic - if there are no future facts then prima facie the Humean can neither provide laws of nature, nor (...) explain the evolution of physical systems, as the Humean takes truths (including nomological truths) to supervene on the omnitemporal mosaic of local particular matters of fact. Hypertemporal Humeanism (HH), the view I propose in this paper, admits of nomological facts whilst granting the ontological and conceptual commitments of OFH. HH provides a coherent account of laws of nature, and (unlike standard Humean conceptions) accommodates the natural intuition that future facts are yet to be determined. Furthermore, although the view arguably struggles to combat the problem of induction, the Hypertemporal Humean is in no worse a position in this respect than the traditional closed-future Humean metaphysics. (shrink)

Corria o ano de 2007 quando o jornalista britânico Peter Trickett publicou na Austrália um livro no qual atribuía a descoberta da Austrália ao português Cristóvão de Mendonça, ainda durante a primeira metade do século XVI. Já nos anos setenta do século XX tinha havido uma acalorada discussão entre historiadores acerca da eventual descoberta da Austrália por portugueses, mas o assunto tinha ficado adormecido durante algumas décadas. Quando em 2008 se publicou, em Portugal, Para Além de Capricórnio. Como os navegadores (...) portugueses descobriram e cartografaram secretamente a costa da Austrália e da Nova Zelândia, 250 anos antes da chegada do Capitão Cook, a tradução do livro de Trickett para português, o Museu da Ciência da Universidade de Coimbra reuniu especialistas de diversas áreas para discutirem o tema. No presente livro encontram-se reunidas algumas das contribuições desse colóquio, Portugueses na Austrália. (shrink)

Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is (...) that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve her intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view and by showing how direct learning, seen as instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity. (shrink)

The philosophy of perception has been mostly focused on vision, to the detriment of other modalities like audition or olfaction. In this paper I focus on olfaction and olfactory experience, and raise the following questions: is olfaction a perceptual-representational modality? If so, what does it represent? My goal in the paper is, firstly, to provide an affirmative answer to the first question, and secondly, to argue that olfaction represents odors in the form of olfactory objects, to which olfactory qualities are (...) attributed. In order to do this I develop an empirically adequate notion of olfactory object that is sensitive to the peculiarities of olfaction, and defend it against various objections. (shrink)

Feelings are conscious mental events that represent body states as they undergo homeostatic regulation. Feelings depend on the interoceptive nervous system (INS), a collection of peripheral and central pathways, nuclei and cortical regions which continuously sense chemical and anatomical changes in the organism. How such humoral and neural signals come to generate conscious mental states has been a major scientific question. The answer proposed here invokes (1) several distinctive and poorly known physiological features of the INS; and (2) a unique (...) interaction between the body (the ‘object’ of interoception) and the central nervous system (which generates the 'subject' of interoception). The atypical traits of the INS and the direct interactions between neural and non‐neural physiological compartments of the organism, neither of which is present in exteroceptive systems, plausibly explain the qualitative and subjective aspects of feelings, thus accounting for their conscious nature. (shrink)

A short entry on social affordance. Social affordances are possibilities for social interaction or possibilities for action that are shaped by social practices and norms.

Through a theoretical examination of the preventive turn in criminal law and justice which has gained momentum in Anglo-American criminal justice systems since the late-twentieth century, The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law demonstrates how recent transformations in criminal law and justiceare intrinsically related to and embedded in the way liberal society and liberal law have been imagined, developed, and conditioned by its social, political, and historical context. Henrique Carvalho identifies a tension between the idea of punishment as an expression (...) of individual justice, andprevention as a manifestation of the need for security and the promotion of welfare. Tracing this tension back to an intrinsic ambivalence within the modern conception of individual liberty, which is both repressed and preserved by liberal conceptions of responsibility and punishment, Carvalhoproves that as long as this ambivalence remains unexamined, liberal law has the potential to both promote and undermine individual justice.Engaging with the dominant contemporary literature on criminal law, prevention, risk, security, and criminalisation, this volume deploys a theoretical perspective developed through a critical analysis of both classical and contemporary works of social and political theory. The book reveals that thepervasiveness of prevention in 21st century criminal justice systems represents not only the consequence of new and unprecedented features of contemporary politics and society, but also the manifestation of essential aspects of the liberal legal and political tradition. (shrink)

The extended mind thesis claims that at least some cognitive processes extend beyond the organism’s brain in that they are constituted by the organism’s actions on its surrounding environment. A more radical move would be to claim that social actions performed by the organism could at least constitute some of its mental processes. This can be called the socially extended mind thesis. Based on the notion of affordance as developed in the ecological psychology tradition, I defend the position that perception (...) extends to the environment. Then I will expand the notion of affordance to encompass social affordances. Thus, perception can in some situations also be socially extended. (shrink)

Thinking with images -- Aesthetics without theory -- The Baroque and Bacon's popes -- Chance meeting with Duane Michals -- Étant donnés, Marcel Duchamp -- Le Mépris or Contempt, a film by Jean-Luc Godard.

In this chapter, I put forward and sustain an articulation of the notion of bodily skill based on ecological psychology, and I show how it is relevant for the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell about skillful coping and also for the debate about whether know-how is reducible or not to propositional knowledge. The right metaphor to understand bodily skills is not the computer metaphor but the radio metaphor. These skills result from a process of organism attunement to its environment.

In this paper I claim that perceptual discriminatory skills rely on a suitable type of environment as an enabling condition for their exercise. This is because of the constitutive connection between environment and perceptual discriminatory skills, inasmuch as such connection is construed from an ecological approach. The exercise of a discriminatory skill yields knowledge of affordances of objects, properties, or events in the surrounding environment. This is practical knowledge in the first-person perspective. An organism learns to perceive an object by (...) becoming sensitized to its affordances. I call this position ecological disjunctivism. A corollary of this position is that a case of perception and its corresponding case of hallucination—which is similar to the former only in some respects—are different in nature. I show then how the distinguishability problem is addressed by ecological disjunctivism. (shrink)

O presente artigo almeja demonstrar que em Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie, de 1906/07, por meio de uma crítica ao ceticismo, Husserl promove uma mudança que será significativa no desenvolvimento posterior de sua filosofia: a introdução da εποχή. Ao contrário do ceticismo grego, tal conceito em Husserl, ao suspender o juízo, busca um dado indubitável: o ego. Isso proporciona com que Husserl supere o ceticismo, tanto em sua face dogmática (negação de possibilidade de todo o conhecimento), quanto crítica (suspensão (...) do juízo perante o alcance do conhecimento). Com isso, pode-se perceber que ao retomar um conceito cético da filosofia antiga, e opor-se ao relativismo, Husserl inaugura o seu primeiro esboço de uma filosofia pura, que adiante será concretizada, em sua última fase, como idealismo fenomenológico-transcendental. (shrink)

The topic of liberty in Foucault becomes controversial when related to the objections, predicted by the author, for the subjects to be located outside the power networks. However, Foucault also points out potential for resistance and a notion of freedom involved by historical circumstances, which suggests original normative questions. In order to analyze the tension between domination and freedom in his work, and what is normatively reflected, two main directions are noted: the idea of freedom as something inherent in power (...) relations and as the foundation of the critical exercise of knowledge. It is argued that Foucault`s estimation of dimensions of freedom generates singular implications of evaluation of social conditions based on a normative temperance. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem como objetivo refletir acerca do modo como na crítica do conhecimento, Husserl passa da suspensão do juízo à afixação de um dado apodítico, revelado através do cogito. Para tal, através da análise de alguns elementos presentes em Die Idee der Phänomenologie, de 1907, almeja-se demonstrar que o dado apodítico encontrado por Husserl está envolvido na pergunta sobre a legitimidade do conhecimento. Deste modo, a fenomenologia husserliana se apresenta como a doutrina universal da essência, uma proposta que (...) tem em vista apresentar os fundamentos seguros à teoria do conhecimento. -/- . (shrink)

Enactivism is a family of theories that construe action as constitutive of cognition and reject the need to postulate representations in order to explain all cognitive activities. Acknowledging a biologically basic, non-representational mode of cognition, however, raises the question of how to explain higher or more complex cognitive acts, what we call explanatory integration challenge. In this paper, we critically discuss some attempts to meet that challenge through scaling up basic cognition and through scaling down complex cognition within the enactivist (...) research program. (shrink)