A editora Losada publicou uma série de conferências de Karl Jaspers pronunciadas na Universidad de laBasilea a convite da Fundação Acadêmica livre e da Faculdade de História da Filosofia daquela Instituição. Esse conjunto de conferências importantes para entender como o filósofo pensava o significado da Filosofia foi reunido em livro com o título de La fe filosófica. O livro integra a coleção da editora argentina denominada Obras Maestras delPensamiento e ainda não teve edição em português. Portanto, La fe filosófica não (...) foi inicialmente concebida como livro, mas como reflexões sobre aspectos fundamentais da Filosofia e mais tarde reunidas numa obra. (shrink)

Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician. Nineteen former or current musical prodigies were compared to 35 musicians with either an early or late start but similar amount of musical training, and 16 non-musicians. All completed a Wechsler IQ test, the Big Five Inventory, the (...) Autism Spectrum Quotient, the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, the Dispositional Flow Scale, and a detailed history of their lifetime music practice. None of the psychological traits distinguished musical prodigies from control musicians or non-musicians except their propensity to report flow during practice. The other aspects that differentiated musical prodigies from their peers were the intensity of their practice before adolescence, and the source of their motivation when they began to play. Thus practice, by itself, does not make a prodigy. The results are compatible with multifactorial models of expertise, with prodigies lying at the high end of the continuum. In summary, prodigies are expected to present brain predispositions facilitating their success in learning an instrument, which could be amplified by their early and intense practice happening at a moment when brain plasticity is heightened. (shrink)

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as (...) longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (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)

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)

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)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

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.

Engineers encounter difficult ethical problems in their practice and in research. In many ways, these problems are like design problems: they are complex, often ill-defined; resolving them involves an iterative process of analysis and synthesis; and there can be more than one acceptable solution. This book offers a real-world, problem-centered approach to engineering ethics, using a rich collection of open-ended scenarios and case studies to develop skill in recognizing and addressing ethical issues.

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)

In this paper, I argue that the ecological approach to perception provides resources to overcome the causal argument against disjunctivism. According to the causal argument, since the brain states that proximally cause the perceptual experience and the corresponding hallucinatory one can be of the same type, there would be no good reason to reject that the perceptual experience and the corresponding hallucinatory experience have fundamentally the same nature. Disjunctivism concerning the nature of the experience would then be false. I identify (...) three assumptions that support the causal argument: the indistinguishability assumption, the linearity assumption, and the duplication assumption. According to the ecological approach to disjunctivism, these assumptions should be rejected, opening up room for a version of disjunctivism that I call 'Ecological Disjunctivism'. Perceptual episodes are extended over time and are supervenient to the organism-environment system. They can be distinguished from the 'corresponding' hallucinations because the former results from a controlled process of attunement to the environment, whereas hallucinations are passive and insensible to the exploratory activities of the perceptual system. Finally, ecological disjunctivism, since it is immune to the causal argument, is more advantageous than negative and positive disjunctivism. (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)

A cause is proportional to its effect when, roughly speaking, it is at the right level of detail. There is a lively debate about whether proportionality is a necessary condition for causation. One of the main arguments against a proportionality constraint on causation is that many ordinary and seemingly perfectly acceptable causal claims cite causes that are not proportional to their effects. In this paper, I suggest that proponents of a proportionality constraint can respond to this objection by developing an (...) idea that is present in Yablo’s early work on proportionality, but which has strangely been ignored by both Yablo and others in the subsequent debate. My suggestion is that proportionality—and, indeed, causation itself—is relative to a domain of events. At the metaphysical level, this means that the causal relation has an extra relatum—namely, a domain of events. At the level of language, it introduces a new way in which causal claims are context-sensitive: what is expressed by a causal claim depends on the contextually relevant domain of events. As I argue, this suggestion allows us to accommodate the truth of ordinary causal claims while extending the explanatory benefits of a proportionality constraint. (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)

Research in the U. S. on fair trade consumption is sparse. Therefore, little is known as to what motivates U. S. consumers to buy fair trade products. This study sought to determine which values are salient to American fair trade consumption. The data were gathered via a Web-based version of the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) and were gleaned from actual consumers who purchase fair trade products from a range of Internet-based fair trade retailers. This study established that indeed there are (...) significant interactions between personal values and fair trade consumption and that demographics proved to be useless in creating a profile of the American fair trade consumer. (shrink)

It is widely held that free speech is a distinctive and privileged social kind. But what is free speech? In particular, is there any unified phenomenon that is both free speech and which is worthy of the special value traditionally attached to free speech? We argue that a descendent of the classic Millian justification of free speech is in fact a justification of a more general social condition; and, via an argument that 'free speech' names whatever natural social kind is (...) justified by the best arguments, that free speech is therefore this more general condition. This condition involves not merely the orthodox freedom (in some sense) of speakers to distribute words, but also two less frequently acknowledged dimensions of free speech: audience understanding and consideration. We conclude with some discussion of the policy implications of this conception of free speech. (shrink)

This paper analyses certain contemporary narratives among Buryats of Russia and China. At issue is the nature of responsibility for the campaigns of terror, in particular the devastation of the Buddhist church in the 1930s. In these accounts political leaders appear as reincarnations, destined to unleash terrible events. Stalin, for example, is said by Buryat Mongol villagers to have been the reincarnation of a Blue Elephant which lived in ancient times in India. I examine local discussions around these stories to (...) suggest that the narrators, themselves having been caught up in the seemingly objective and transparent, yet deeply irrational, accounts of the Party-State, do not (at any rate at present) confront actions in which they were both perpetrators and victims ‘matter-of-factly’. Having been a particular target of the Stalinist all-pervasive organisation of suspicion and punishment, Buryat Buddhists today are creating ‘paranoid narratives’ of their own to explain the repressions - a narrative of displacement, in which the actions attributed to an other (in this case Stalin) are in some way ‘about’ oneself. The reincarnation stories point up the crucial moral issue erased by socialist metahistory, the ethical problem of individual accountability. They are about complicity, for they reveal an uneasy, and probably unconscious, identification with Stalin. (shrink)

On peut certes regretter que les artistes ne se soucient plus guère de beauté ou qu’avec le déclin des avant-gardes ils semblent avoir renoncé à transformer notre environnement urbain ; il n’en reste pas moins que l’art occupe dans la ville une place grandissante, voire envahissante, justifiant à elle seule que Cités y consacre..

El cuidado de la reciprocidad y de la imparcialidad es fundamental en la tradición de la filosofía liberal. Las teorías liberales y solidarias de la justicia aspiran a establecer un acceso igual a las oportunidades y a los recursos a todos los individuos dentro de la comunidad. Sin embargo la dificultad principal que se encuentra reside en la determinación y la identificación de los recursos pertinentes que se debe tomar en cuenta. Ahora bien el análisis demuestra que ni el enfoque (...) de Rawls sobre los bienes primarios ni el de Dworkin, apoyado en una subasta de las dotaciones tan internas que externas, convienen. ¿Cuál es desde entonces el enfoque lo mas satisfactorio? ¿Debemos revolver al de la igualdad del bienestar como el análisis, propuesta por Roemer, de la posición de Dworkin le sugiere? ¿Debemos privilegiar el punto de vista de la igualdad de las ?realizaciones sociales fundamentales?? Tal son las perspectivas que queremos explorar. (shrink)

Dans l'examen de problèmes distributifs on admet souvent qu'une répartition égale des avantages ne nécessite aucune justification, une distribution inégale ne pouvant être instituée qu'à condition d'être justifiée. Notre propos est ici d'envisager et d'évaluer les jugements négatifs motivés par un sentiment ou un diagnostic d'inégalité, pour en discerner les enjeux éthiques réels et contribuer à identifier les conditions d'acceptabilité, par les agents sociaux, de configurations inégalitaires. En particulier, il nous semble que la problématique de l'égalité des chances gagnerait à (...) être reformulée en termes d'obstacles rencontrés dans la mise en œuvre de projets de vie individuels. Par ailleurs, nous tâcherons de montrer que l'identification d'inégalités pertinentes, appelant une correction, profite du renoncement à un point de vue unifié sur l'inégalité et à la référence à l'égalité comme principe privilégié dans tous les domaines. (shrink)

Parmi l’abondante littérature consacrée aux esthétiques kantienne et hégélienne, seuls quelques auteurs en ont esquissé une lecture phénoménologique. Prenant pour objet ces textes de l’idéalisme allemand, cette lecture a pu être qualifiée de «paradoxale» et d’«an-historique». Pourtant il est incontestable que l’appréhension désintéressée du beau est corrélative d’un apparaître phénoménal. Dans cette mesure, nous voulons cerner l’intérêt et la pertinence d’une perspective phénoménologique, pour l’analyse de l’appréhension du phénomène et de l’expérience esthétiques comme tels, mais également et de façon immanente (...) pour le commentaire critique des esthétiques kantienne et hégélienne. (shrink)

Success in job interviews depends largely on the interviewers' favourable opinion of the candidates' presentation, and how well candidates have managed to build solidarity with their interviewers. This article explores the ways in which candidates shape their talk to interact interpersonally with their interviewers, so as to construct affiliation and solidarity. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics Appraisal theory, in particular its system of Attitude, this article examines a set of authentic job interviews in French, or French and English. The interview (...) analyses are complemented by the candidates' comments on the impressions they had tried to convey and the interviewers' comments about their impressions of the candidates. The analysis identifies two strategies whereby candidates may construct affiliation and solidarity with their interviewers: expressing their enthusiasm for and interest in their work and profession, and demonstrating their professional ability. It also highlights the damaging effect of expressing negative feelings and opinions. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo mostrar o papel crucial das emoções nas tomadas de decisões morais e sua contribuição na solução de conflitos bioéticos. Ao contrário da tese racional, as tomadas de decisão morais demandam a colaboração entre razão e emoção, ou nos termos dos estudos em Metaética, cognição e emoção. Por meio da análise da teoria de Antônio Damásio, teses de filósofas morais feministas, como Kathryn Pyne Addelson, entre outras, pretendemos refutar as recorrentes teses bioéticas conservadoras cuja autoridade (...) moral é erroneamente delegada à racionalidade em detrimento das emoções. (shrink)