This essay argues that policies aimed at suppressing drug use exacerbate the nation's opioid problem. It neither endorses drug use nor advocates legalizing the consumption and sale of all substances in all circumstances. Instead, it contends that trying to suppress drug markets is the wrong goal, and in the midst of an addiction crisis it can be deadly. There is no single, correct drug policy; the right approach depends crucially on the substance at issue, the patterns of use and supply, (...) and the jurisdiction's culture, institutions, and material resources. Decriminalization is no panacea for a nation's drug problems. Nevertheless, either de jure or de facto decriminalization of personal drug possession is a necessary condition for mitigating this crisis. (shrink)

Ernesto Laclau has blazed a unique trail in political theory and philosophy since the early 1970s. In so doing, he has articulated a range of philosophical and theoretical currents into a coherent alternative to mainstream models and practices of conducting social and political science.

The transition toward sustainability and the adjustment to climate change should involve the reduction of consumption behavior and the need to maintain social practices of frugality. This paper investigates the influences of consciousness for sustainable consumption, materialism, and the consideration of future consequences on frugal behaviors. Four-hundred-and-forty-four individuals responded to an instrument investigating these variables. Results of a structural model revealed that materialism significantly and negatively influenced the three dimensions of CSC: economic, environmental, and social. The consideration of distant future (...) consequences positively and significantly affected the economic dimension of CSC. Frugal behavior received significant and positive influences from the three CSC dimensions and from consideration of distant future consequences. The model explained 46% of variance in frugal behavior, revealing the importance of awareness of the consequences of resource consumption and the CFC has on promoting a moderate consumption of resources. (shrink)

Political violence does not end with the last death. A common feature of mass murder has been the attempt at destroying any memory of victims, with the aim of eliminating them from history. Perpetrators seek not only to eliminate a perceived threat, but also to eradicate any possibility of alternate, competing social and national histories. In his timely and important book, Unchopping a Tree, Ernesto Verdeja develops a critical justification for why transitional justice works. He asks, “What is the (...) balance between punishment and forgiveness? And, “What are the stakes in reconciling?” Employing a normative theory of reconciliation that differs from prevailing approaches, Verdeja outlines a concept that emphasizes the importance of shared notions of moral respect and tolerance among adversaries in transitional societies. Drawing heavily from cases such as reconciliation efforts in Latin America and Africa—and interviews with people involved in such efforts—Verdeja debates how best to envision reconciliation while remaining realistic about the very significant practical obstacles such efforts face Unchopping a Tree addresses the core concept of respect across four different social levels—political, institutional, civil society, and interpersonal—to explain the promise and challenges to securing reconciliation and broader social regeneration. (shrink)

In this hugely influential book, Laclau and Mouffe examine the workings of hegemony and contemporary social struggles, and their significance for democratic theory. With the emergence of new social and political identities, and the frequent attacks on Left theory for its essentialist underpinnings, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy remains as relevant as ever, positing a much-needed antidote against ‘Third Way’ attempts to overcome the antagonism between Left and Right.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 3-10 [Access article in PDF] Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles? Ernesto Laclau Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. In a recent interview 1 Jacques Rancière opposes his notion of "people" (peuple) 2 to the category of "multitude" as presented by the authors of Empire. As is well known, Rancière differentiates between police and politics, the first being the logic of (...) counting and assigning the population to differential places, and the second the subversion of that differentiating logic through the constitution of an egalitarian discourse which puts into question established identities. "The people" is the specific subject of politics, and this term presupposes a sharp division in the social body which cannot be led back to any kind of immanent unity. Empire, on the contrary, makes immanence its central category and the ultimate ground of the multitude's unity.The main lines of Rancière's critique provide a good starting point for what we have to say about the book. The immanentism of Hardt and Negri would be linked, according to Rancière, to their Nietzschean/Deleuzian ethics of affirmation, which does away with any reactive or negative dimension. Empire would belong, in that respect, to the whole tradition of modern political philosophy, which is profoundly metapolitical: "the kernel of metapolitics is to lead back the precarious artifices of the political scene to the truth of an immanent power which organizes beings in a community and identifies the true community with the grasped and sensible operation of this truth" ["Peuple ou multitudes" 96]. From Hardt and Negri's rejection of any inherent negativity in political subjects, it follows that the power inherent in the multitude has to be a disruptive power, "lodged in all states of domination as its ultimate content, a content destined to destroy all barriers. 'Multitudes' have to be a content whose continent is Empire" ["Peuple ou multitudes" 97]. Disruptive forces operating through a purely immanent movement are what Marxist theory called "productive forces," and there would be, according to Rancière, a strict homology between the place of productive forces and that in which multitudes, as described in Empire, act. Rancière points out that productive forces should not necessarily be understood in any narrow productivist sense: there has been a constant widening of the concept from the strict economism of classical Marxism, to the recent attempts to introduce in it the ensemble of scientific and intellectual abilities, passing through the Leninist attempt to supplement via political intervention a role that productive forces refused to fulfill.I think that Rancière has rightly stressed what I see as the main source of several weaknesses of Empire, including a central one: that within its theoretical framework politics become unthinkable. So I will start from a discussion of its notion of immanence and move later to various other theoretical and political aspects of the book. [End Page 3]Let us start with the authors' discussion of the origins of European modernity. While the usual insistence is on the secularization process, that process would be, "in our view... only a symptom of the primary event of modernity: the affirmation of the powers of this world, the discovery of the plane of immanence. 'Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium'—every entity has a singular essence. Duns Scotus' affirmation subverts the medieval conception of being as an object of analogical, and thus dualistic predication—a being with one foot in this world and one in a transcendent realm" [Empire 71]. Duns Scotus's insistence on the singularity of being would have initiated an assertion of immanence that the authors describe as a process whose representative names would have been Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Bovillus—other names quoted are Bacon and Occam—and whose point of arrival is Spinoza. "By the time we arrive at Spinoza, in fact, the horizon of immanence and the horizon of the democratic political order coincide completely. The plane of immanence is the one on which the powers of singularity are realized and the one on which the truth of the new... (shrink)

Praise for First Edition: `This book is highly recommended to a wide range of people as a clear and systematic introduction to phenomenological psychology... the book has set the stage for possible new colloquia between the phenomenological and other approaches in psychology' - Changes `As a trainee interested in matters existential, I have been put off in the past by the long-winded and confusing texts usually available in academic libraries. Thankfully, here is a text that remedies that situation... [it] provides (...) a readable and insightful account' - Clinical Psychology Forum 'Spinelli’s classic introduction to phenomenology should be essential reading on all person-centred, existential and humanistic trainings, and any other counselling or psychotherapy course which aims to help students develop an in-depth understanding of human lived-experience. This book is sure to remain a key text for many years to come' - Mick Cooper, Senior Lecturer in Counselling, University of Strathclyde 'This is by far the most monumental, erudite, comprehensive, authoritative case that Existentialism and Phenomenology (a) have a rightful place in the academy; (b) are tough-minded bodies of thought; (c) have rigorous scientific foundations; (d) bequeath a distinctive school of psychotherapy and counselling; and (e) are just as good as the more established systems of psychology' - Alvin R. Mahrer, Ph.D. University of Ottawa, Canada, Author of The Complete Guide To Experiential Psychotherapy 'This book’s rich insight into the lacunae of modern psychological thinking illustrates the contribution that existential phenomenology can make to founding a coherently mature Psychology that is both fully human(e) and responsibly ‘scientific’ in the best sense of that term' - Richard House, Ph.D., Magdalen Medical Practice, Norwich; Steiner Waldorf teacher. The Interpreted World, Second Edition, is a welcome introduction to phenomenological psychology, an area of psychology which has its roots in notoriously difficult philosophical literature. Writing in a highly accessible, jargon-free style, Ernesto Spinelli traces the philosophical origins of phenomenological theory and presents phenomenological perspectives on central topics in psychology - perception, social cognition and the self. He compares the phenomenological approach with other major contemporary psychological approaches, pointing up areas of divergence and convergence with these systems. He also examines implications of phenomenology for the precepts and process of psychotherapy. For the Second Edition, a new chapter on phenomenological research has been added in which the author focuses on the contribution of phenomenology in relation to contemporary scientific enquiry. He describes the methodology used in phenomenological research and illustrates the approach through an actual research study. The Interpreted World, Second Edition demystifies an exciting branch of psychology, making its insights available to all students of psychology, psychotherapy and counselling. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Converging on an Open QuestErnesto Laclau (bio)I very much enjoyed the exchange in which Judith Butler and I engaged last year, through an e-mail correspondence between what Borges would have called the “unlikely geographies” of Berkeley and London. The points of convergence of our respective approaches are clear: as Butler points out, the process of gender formation that she describes and the logic of hegemony as presented in my (...) work (and in that which I wrote in collaboration with Chantal Mouffe) coincide in several of their assumptions. Neither we nor Butler see identities—political in one case, gendered in the other—as the expression of an intemporal mechanism or principle, but as products of the enactment of contingent norms; and both of us deny those norms a transcendental status, an a priori “hardness” which would reproduce itself unchanged in all historical instances. On the contrary, we see them as submitted to historical variations and as penetrated by a constitutive indetermination and ambiguity.I have used the word “transcendental” ex professo, because it is the status of the transcendental which is at the root of many of the most crucial problems in contemporary theory. Most people would agree that transcendentalism, in its classical formulations, is today unsustainable, but there is also a generalized agreement that some kind of weak transcendentalism is unavoidable. In the deconstructionist tradition, for instance, the notion of “quasi-transcendentals” has acquired considerable currency. But most theoretical approaches are haunted by the perplexing question of the precise status of that “quasi.” The problem touches on, on the one hand, the question of “metalanguage”; on the other, the status, in theory building, of categories that apparently refer to empirical events but that in practice have a quasi-transcendental status, operating as the a priori conditions of intelligibility of a whole discursive domain. What is the status in psychoanalysis, for instance, of categories such as “phallus,” of the “castration complex”? Because of the undecided status of the “quasi,” we are confronted with a plurality of alternatives, whose two polar extremes would be a total hardening of those categories, which would thus become a priori conditions of all possible human development, and a no less extreme historicism which sees in them only contingent events, products of particular cultural formations. The first extreme is confronted with the whole array of problems emerging from any transcendentalization of empirical conditions; the second, with the difficulties derived from not dealing with those conditions which make possible even a historicist discourse. The logic of the “quasi” tries to avoid both extremes, but it is extremely unclear in what that logic would consist of. These are questions which have not been dealt with enough, in either Butler’s approach or in mine; but they are issues to which both of us will have to return—perhaps in future exchanges.Let me now move to two central points contained in Butler’s latest piece, published in this issue of Diacritics as an addendum to our original exchange. They relate to the relationship between hegemony and iteration, and to the role of names in fixing meaning. I think that iteration belongs to the structure of any hegemonic operation, but that the latter stresses a double dimension of both repetition and displacement of meaning. To understand how these two dimensions interact with each other is crucial in order to grasp the [End Page 17] logic of the political. (I understand hegemony to be the central category in political analysis.) As Derrida has shown, iterability (the possibility of repetition in a plurality of instances) is something which belongs to the essence of the sign. What would something be which occurs in only one instance? It would simply not be a sign. But if the sign has to be the same, it also has to be different each time—and in that case the instance of its differential use has to be as part of its internal structure as the dimension of sameness. Now, in that case, it can only remain the same by becoming something constantly different from itself. This is the point where the usefulness of this analysis for a theory of the hegemonic becomes visible: for... (shrink)

This paper focusses on the experiences of Indian lesbians and gays who are subjected to unethical acts of workplace bullying which get manifested through constant guesswork, comments and questioning about their sexual identity in the hostile Indian context. Given this, LG participants usually opt for secrecy and lead a double life, using ‘passing’ and ‘covering’ strategies to manage economic, social and psychological risks. Nonetheless, this paper rewrites the negative tenor of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transexuals research by underscoring how LG (...) participants move from fear to courage in their endeavour to live authentic lives while considering the broader organizational and social context. We argue that their courage is manifested mainly through deliberate micro-disclosures and a sense of defiance which can be enhanced if organizations are designed to be more inclusive and ethical. Consequently, participants defined inclusive ethical organizations as having conducive environments with trustworthy, supportive, secure, fair, unbiased and safe non-discriminatory policies open to the idea of diverse sexual orientations. Our findings point to the fact that, first and foremost, organizations must be crafted and sustained to be courageous within a hostile social climate, for employees to overcome their fears. (shrink)

Joseph Carens in his 2013 book Ethics of Immigration argues we should not criminalize undocumented migrants. Instead, we should view them as irregular immigrants who are entitled to some general human rights. This article focuses on Caren's discussion of criminalization in light of recent scholarship by John Marquez and Natalie Cisneros pertaining to the Latina/o border death toll, generalized violence, and discourses on undocumented pregnant migrante females as multiplying rats and anchor babies. This article argues that simply relying on a (...) democratic state model to understand the realities of border militarization is not sufficient because it does not perform some of the explanatory functions performed by other non-ideal theories. By synthesizing the views of Cisneros and Marquez, this article distinguishs thick and thin senses of excessive border enforcement and outlines a notion of the racial/sexual state of expendability as a way of making better sense of these violent realities. (shrink)

In this article, we shift the usual analytical attention of the GPN framework from lead firms to suppliers in the network and from production to IT services. Our focus is on how Indian IT suppliers embed in the Netherlands along the threefold characterization of societal, territorial and network embeddedness. We argue that Indian IT suppliers attempt to display societal embeddedness when they move to The Netherlands. Our findings reveal that the endeavour by Indian IT suppliers to territorially dis-embed from the (...) Dutch context is reinforced by their peripheral position in the network and their ability to offshore work in a bid to contain costs, in addition to the influence of client domination. Therefore, territorial embeddedness is considered to be secondary to societal embeddedness which is intertwined with client interest while neglecting the interest of other network members. Nonetheless, the inter-firm relationship is complex, given the tension between societal, territorial and network embeddedness. While preferring Indian IT suppliers because of their low pricing, Dutch clients also insist on compliance with the institutional context of the Netherlands especially when it comes to Dutch employees. This results in hybridization which means that Indian IT suppliers find ways to adhere to the institutional framework for Dutch nationals while simultaneously insulating Indian employees from the same. Consequently, a highly unfair segmented internal labour market develops, with Dutch nationals being treated more favourably as compared to Indian nationals. Nonetheless, to address these violations, Indian employees prefer individual strategies of resilience and rework rather than a collectivization response. (shrink)

Discussion about the viability of democracy in what can broadly be called our `postmodern', technologically dominated age, has mainly turned around two central issues: does not the current dispersion and fragmentation of social actors — deriving partly from the overriding presence of the media in our civilization — conspire against the emergence of strong social identities which could operate as nodal points for the consolidation and expansion of democratic practices?; and is not this very multiplicity the source of a particularism (...) of social aims which could result in the dissolution of the wider emancipatory discourses considered as constitutive of the democratic imaginary?The first issue is connected with the increasing awareness of the ambiguities of those very social movements about which so many sanguine hopes were conceived in the 1970s. There is no doubt that their emergence has involved an expansion of the egalitarian imaginary to increasingly wider areas of social relations. However, it has also become progressively clear that such an expansion does not necessarily lead to the aggregation of the plurality of demands around a broader collective will. Even more: does not this fragmentation of social demands make it easier for the state apparatuses to deal with them in an administrative fashion — which results in the formation of all types of clientalistic networks, capable of neutralizing any democratic opening? The control of the media by powerful financial conglomerates is only one aspect — albeit a crucial one — of a far more general phenomenon.As for the second issue, its formulation runs along parallel lines. With the breaking up of the totalizing discourses of modernity, we are running the risk of being confronted with a plurality of social spaces, governed by their own aims and leaving any management of the community — conceived in a global sense — in the hands of a techno-bureaucracy located beyond any democratic control. With this, the notion of a public sphere, to which the very possibility of a democratic experience was always linked, is seriously put into question. (shrink)

L'esperienza cristiana di Francesco d'Assisi ha ispirato non solo la letteratura religiosa del suo tempo, ma ha costituito un punto di riferimento anche per l'elaborazione filosofica e teologica dei maestri francescani, come si evince dall'analisi di una questione quodlibetale di Pietro Tommaso relativa al fenomeno delle stimmate del Poverello. Il testo del maestro catalano, in confronto anche con testi simili precedenti o coevi, si presenta come un testimone interessante della temperie culturale dei primi decenni del Trecento, dal momento che analizza (...) la stimmatizzazione di Francesco non tanto per uno scopo apologetico, quanto piuttosto come come locus philosophicus grazie al quale elaborare alcune riflessioni sul rapporto tra natura e soprannatura e in merito alla potentia Dei absoluta. The Christian experience of Francis of Assisi not only inspired the religious literature of his time but also constituted a reference point for the philosophical and theological elaboration of the Franciscan masters, as it can be deduced from the analysis of a quodlibetal question of Petrus Thomae about the phenomenon of the Poverello's stigmata. The text of the Catalan master, in comparison also with similar previous or coeval texts, arises as an interesting witness of the cultural age of the fourteenth century early decades, since it analyzes the stigmatization of Francis not so much for an apologetic purpose, but rather as locus philosophicus thanks to which it is possible to elaborate some reflections on the relationship between nature and supernature and on the potentia Dei absoluta. (shrink)

This study explores the effects of the shift to emergency remote teaching on teachers’ levels of well-being, emotions, and motivation. A total of 936 Spanish teachers participated in this nationwide survey from all educational levels, thus allowing comparison among levels, which is a novelty and strength of our study. Four aspects were explored: instructional adaptation to ERT; well-being changes and the main challenges in this regard; changes in emotions; and changes in motivation and the main factors. Importantly, we explored a (...) number of teacher characteristics for the three last aspects. Our results show that teachers felt the impact of ERT on their well-being, emotions, and motivation. Additionally, female teachers, teachers with students of low socioeconomic status, in public schools, and primary and secondary teachers were the most affected groups. This indicates that the impact of ERT differed and some populations of teachers are more at risk of suffering burnout because of ERT. (shrink)

In the present essay we analyse the role of philosophical investigation for the interdisciplinary research field of the Border Studies. The main thesis of the paper is that a border cannot be ontologically considered as an object, and neither metaphorically as a simple line. Indeed, these approaches tend to extremely simplify the very nature of borders and bordering processes. Here we argue that borders are complex social phenomena produced by the coherent combination of several different elements. Therefore, we suggest that (...) a fruitful way in order to conceptualize the nature of the border is the concept of dispositive, provided by Michel Foucault. The paper is structured as follows: in the first and second paragraph we show why the analysis of borders are increasingly a crucial topic both for scientific and public debate; in the third paragraph we criticize the approach provided by social ontology, focused on the conceptualization of the border as an object; in the fourth paragraph, starting from a Rousseau’s suggestion, we analyse the phenomenology of bordering practices, and we argue that a border should be understood as a complex articulation of material and immaterial elements; in the fifth paragraph we introduce the notion of dispositive in order to catch the complex nature of borders; in the conclusions we summarize the main results of the paper and we sketch possible further lines of research. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se intenta ilustrar con ejemplos de la historia y de la actualidad constitucional de América Latina la paradójica actitud de no pocos juristas y políticos latinoamericanos que simultáneamente profesan una fe inconmovible en el poder de conformación social del ordenamiento jurídico a la vez que aceptan su precaria eficacia. La Constitución se convierte en un mito político y la impunidad en sinónimo de poder. En tales condiciones, parece aventurado establecer una relación causal entre orden constitucional y (...) democracia. Sólo una política jurídica que tome en serio los derechos y deberes constitucionales podrá quizás revertir esta situación. Desgraciadamente la probabilidad de que tal sea el caso a fines del siglo XX es menor que a comienzos de la centuria. (shrink)

In early 2019 Madrid launched the first permanent citizen participation scheme in which members are chosen by lot: the Observatory of the City. Although the scheme was abandoned by the new government after the May 2019 elections, the Madrid experiment raises important questions about democracy. The project is another example of the growing prominence that the draw has acquired in many countries, as an ideal element to organise and order the participation of people in political affairs. In this paper we (...) describe the first steps of this scheme and also highlight the features that make the draw in Madrid a unique experience both because of the implications of the use of the draw, and from the point of view of similar schemes that are being carried out in other parts of the world. Madrid ha puesto en marcha, desde inicios del año 2019, la primera experiencia de participación ciudadana permanente cuyos miembros son elegidos por sorteo, el Observatorio de la Ciudad. A pesar de que la experiencia fue abandonada por el nuevo Gobierno después de las elecciones de mayo del 2019, la experiencia madrileña plantea importantes cuestiones sobre la democracia. Esta experiencia se suma al creciente protagonismo que ha adquirido el sorteo en muchos países, como un elemento idóneo para organizar y ordenar la participación de la gente en los asuntos políticos. En este trabajo exponemos los primeros pasos de esta experiencia, así como destacamos los rasgos que hacen del sorteo en Madrid una experiencia singular, tanto por las implicaciones que tiene el uso del sorteo como desde el punto de vista de las experiencias similares que se hacen en otras partes del mundo. (shrink)

To think the relationships which exist between Marxism and psychoanalysis obliges one to reflect upon the intersections between two theoretical fields, each composed independently of the other and whose possible forms of mutual reference do not merge into any obvious system of translation. For example, it is impossible to affirm—though it has often been done—that psychoanalysis adds a theory of subjectivity to the field of historical materialism, given that the latter has been constituted, by and large, as a negation of (...) the validity and the pertinence of any theory of subjectivity . Thus, no simple model of supplement or articulations is of the slightest use. The problem is rather that of finding an index of comparison between two different theoretical fields, but that, in turn, implies the construction of a new field, within which the comparison would make sense.This new field is one which may be characterized as “post-Marxist” and is the result of a multitude of theoretico-political interventions whose cumulative effect in relation to the categories of classical Marxism is similar to what Heidegger called a “de-struction of the history of ontology.” For Heidegger, this “de-struction” did not signify the purely negative operation of rejecting a tradition, but exactly the opposite: it is by means of a radical questioning which is situated beyond this tradition—but which is only possible in relation to it—that the originary meaning of the categories of this tradition may be recovered. In this sense, effecting a “de-struction” of the history of Marxism implies going beyond the deceptive evidence of concepts such as “class,” “capital,” and so on, and re-creating the meaning of the originary synthesis that such concepts aspired to establish, the total system of theoretical alternatives in regard to which they represented only limited options, and the ambiguities inherent in their constitution itself—the “hymen” in the Derridean sense—which, although violently repressed, rise up here and there in diverse discursive surfaces. It is the systematic and genealogical outline of these nuclei of ambiguity which initially allows for a destruction of the history of Marxism and which constitutes post-Marxism as the field of our current political reflection. But it is precisely in these surfaces of discursive ambiguity that it is possible to detect the presence of logics of the political which allows for the establishment of a true dialogue, without complacent metaphorization, between Marxism and psychoanalytic theory. I would like to highlight two points, which I consider fundamental, concerning these discursive surfaces. Ernesto Laclau is a lecturer in the Department of Government and director of the Graduate Program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. He is the author of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory and, with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics . Amy G. Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 2 Seiten: 135-159.

Increasing global competition has intensified the use of informal sector workforce worldwide. This phenomenon is true with regard to India, where 92% of the workers hold precarious jobs. Our study examines the dynamics of workplace dignity in the context of Indian security guards deployed as contract labour by private suppliers, recognising that security guards’ jobs were marked by easy access, low status, disrespect and precariousness. The experiences of guards serving bank ATMs were compared with those working in large reputed organisations. (...) The former reported loss of dignity though their inherent self-worth remained partially intact, whereas the latter reclaimed dignity despite the precarious working conditions and the absence of unions. Guards from large reputed organisations evolved strategies by which they took advantage of the client’s vulnerabilities, developed ‘thick’ relationships at work and immersed themselves in 'doing dignity work' to ensure that they are not disposable. ‘Doing dignity work’ was a visible device which involved actions that met or went beyond the norms laid down by the client and was used by security guards to limit the extent of their precariousness. Since the opportunity to reclaim dignity was facilitated by large reputed clients’ adherence to legal regulations, we see implications of the study for the moral economy. (shrink)

Este estudo tem por finalidade investigar a teoria da contingência do tempo presente em Duns Scotus, pela qual é afirmada a liberdade humana. O Doutor Sutil parte do conceito de contingência e de possibilidade para fundamentar a contingência das ações divinas e humanas, lançando luzes à problemática das ações livres da vontade humana. Vincula-se a esse assunto o conceito de faculdade natural e de faculdade racional, aos quais o Sutil relaciona à natural o intelecto e à racional a vontade. Consequentemente, (...) esse processo interfere no entendimento que temos sobre como que ocorre as ações livres dos seres humanos. Assim, pois, como bibliografia primeira, analisaremos algumas questões da obra Ordinatio e Lectura, contando com subsídios de comentadores e pesquisadores acerca do assunto. (shrink)

Moving from the problem of defining how medieval speculation conceived the aesthetic dimension of art, this essay purposes an insight into the aspects that describe the peculiarity of the Byzantine conception of beauty and art. Surpassing the noetic perspective established by Platonic thought – shared also by Western medieval philosophy – according to which beauty is an intelligible model subsisting in itself as an autonomous entity, the Byzantine proper vision conceives beauty as a divine energy. The implications of this perspective (...) lead us to investigate its connection with some of the most original achievements of Byzantine speculation, such as hypostatic ontology, theology of deification, eikonic thinking, and especially sophianic gnoseology, which permit us to overcome the dichotomy of the intelligible and the sensible domains of reality. (shrink)

This paper deals with three puzzles concerning reference. The first concerns the Kripkean distinction between reference fixing by description and meaning giving. The second concerns the compatibility of two properties of names, arbitrariness and rigidity across world. The third concerns the tenability of the notion that a name means its bearer considering that a name is meaningful even when the bearer is no longer. The solution of the first consists in seeing that the distinction involved is not essentially a modal (...) distinction. The solution of the second consists in setting things right with our modal talk. The solution of the third consists in realizing the persistence across times of the enjoyment of certain properties. (shrink)