We analyze a recent trend in epistemic logic which consists in studying construction of knowledge from the agents’ observational abilities. It is based on the intuition that an agent’s knowledge comes from three possible sources: her observations, communication with other agents, and inference. The approaches mainly focus on the former two and suppose that the object of observations are propositional variables and that agents learn from public announcements. This allows to model knowledge in a more compact and intuitive way than (...) with Hintikka’s semantics. However, the semantics that one can find in the literature come with some counter-intuitive validities such as common knowledge of visibilities or the knowledge operator distributing over disjunctions. We propose a solution of each of these two issues and illustrate them with well-known toy examples of epistemic logic. (shrink)

El presente texto pretende presentar dos propuestas de actualización de la crítica de la economía política marxiana: las de Moishe Postone y Robert Kurz. Sus planteamientos, gestados a partir de los años ochenta, ofrecen claves para superar las insuficiencias del marxismo tradicional y abren perspectivas fructíferas para actualizar la teoría crítica. Partiendo de una reinterpretación común de las categorías de Marx, ambos autores presentan sin embargo diagnósticos diferentes: mientras Postone incide en cómo el capitalismo origina la posibilidad de un nuevo (...) orden social, Kurz señala que el capitalismo contemporáneo habría alcanzado su límite interno y entrado en una fase irreversible de declive y desintegración. (shrink)

This article analyses Roberto Schwarz’s contributions to understanding the significance of Brazilian culture in relation to the way in which it is embedded in the dynamics of global capitalism. At first, it analyses to what extent his approach to Latin American culture can be understood as a dialectical alternative to postcolonial and subaltern studies. Then, based on his analysis of the intertwining of artistic form and social reality, it focuses on how Schwarz reveals the significance of Machado de Assis’ late (...) narrative, which goes far beyond the strictly local. Finally, it offers some insights into his understanding of the evolution of the peripheral ‘maladjustment’ in the recent evolution of global capitalism on the basis of Paulo Lins’ novel Cidade de Deus. (shrink)

La rationalité est un concept difficile à circonscrire, car il en existe plusieurs sortes. Nous partons de cette diversité pour nous focaliser sur les rationalités qui sont à l'oeuvre en Afrique subsaharienne, en nous inspirant en grande partie du paradigme congolais, afin d'amener à un sursaut africain. En effet, le peuple africain apparaît aujourd'hui comme le grand absent de la scène scientifique et technologique. Cependant, en scrutant son histoire, il s'avère qu'il y a beaucoup d'indices de rationalité tant théoriques que (...) pratiques. Celle-ci est illustrée entre autres par la créativité, aujourd'hui en perte de vitesse voire simplement éteinte. D'une certaine façon, il y a eu un déni et un discrédit de la rationalité pratique de tout un peuple"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Olimpia, Hadaly, Rachael, Faustine, Samantha, Albertine…. All loving machines, like we say "washing machines" or "answering machines," machines that you may love and that have the potential of loving you back. All fictitious, of course. As emotions are starting to make their way into computing—think of the pervasive use of emoticons, or more interestingly, of IBM's Watson which, in its text-analysis tool, attempts to give an idea of what it calls "personality insights" of the writer and the "emotions and (...) communication style of the text". Think also of what is called "Affective Computing", a research area in its infancy that has focused so far on detection of... (shrink)