The aim of this work is to present the thesis “On the Ontogenetic Evolution of the Human Embryo in its Relations with Phylogenesis,” by Affonso Regulo de Oliveira Fausto, published in Brazil in 1890. To our knowledge, it was one of the first Brazilian academic works focused specifically on evolution. It was also the first doctoral thesis that addressed the topic of recapitulation in order to analyze what was then called the progressive evolution of the human species in tandem with (...) the embryological development of the individuals that would constitute the Brazilian “type.” In the present work, we analyze the author’s thesis in relation to its sources, concepts, as well as the country’s political context at the time of its publication. Fausto’s text, in which he explicitly recognized the influence of Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, represents a window to understand better a concept of nation based on science and on the idea of inexorable progress that was accepted in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Despite the unquestionable importance of technological progress in twenty-first-century society, the decision by many political leaders worldwide to treat natural sciences as an almost exclusive priority betrays a terrible misconception of the complexity of the contemporary world. As the Renaissance cannot be reduced to Copernicus’s or Galileo’s brilliant contributions, or Enlightenment to the works of such giants as Newton and Cavendish, contemporary society will hardly be remembered as just a series of amazing software and gadget updates. There are three categories (...) of questions today that only humanities are prone to answer. The first one, exploring the relations between subject and object mediated by the meaning of “property”, ultimately concerns the discussion between legality and legitimacy. Not long ago, teenagers were still being sued by the giants of the Entertainment Industry for downloading songs, and the practice of mash-ups or remixing even now arouses huge polemics. The second one, focused on the self-representations of the subject, concerns the changing meanings (and representations) of identity and cultural borders in a globalizing world. Finally, the inter-subjective interactions are the centre of the political tensions between democracy and demagogy, two opposed categories that have often been presented as hardly distinguishable from each other. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the modal logic with both $$\Box $$ and $$\Diamond $$ arising from Kripke models with a crisp accessibility and whose propositions are valued over the standard Gödel algebra $$[0,1]_G$$. We provide an axiomatic system extending the one from Caicedo and Rodriguez (J Logic Comput 25(1):37–55, 2015) for models with a valued accessibility with Dunn axiom from positive modal logics, and show it is strongly complete with respect to the intended semantics. The axiomatizations of the most (...) usual frame restrictions are given too. We also prove that in the studied logic it is not possible to get $$\Diamond $$ as an abbreviation of $$\Box $$, nor vice-versa, showing that indeed the axiomatic system we present does not coincide with any of the mono-modal fragments previously axiomatized in the literature. (shrink)

Appropriate information and consent has been one of the most intensely discussed topics within the context of biobank research. In parallel to the normative debate, many socio-empirical studies have been conducted to gather experiences, preferences and views of patients, healthy research participants and further stakeholders. However, there is scarcity of literature which connects the normative debate about justifications for different consent models with findings gained in empirical research. In this paper we discuss findings of a limited review of socio-empirical research (...) on patients’ and healthy research participants’ experiences and views regarding consent to biobank research in light of ethical principles for appropriate information and consent. (shrink)

In response to Ferrario _et al_’s 1 work entitled ‘Ethics of the algorithmic prediction of goal of care preferences: from theory to practice’, we would like to point out an area of concern: the risk of artificial intelligence (AI) paternalism in their proposed framework. Accordingly, in this commentary, we underscore the importance of the implementation of safeguards for AI algorithms before they are deployed in clinical practice. The goal of documenting a living will and advanced directives is to convey personal (...) preferences regarding the acceptance of therapies, including life support, for future use in case of losing one’s capacity. This is standard practice in the care of incapacitated critically ill patients as it is considered to extend the individual’s autonomy. Notably, most of the documents that intensivists encounter in clinical practice are written in a generic fashion and lack context. This problem usually leads to the reliance on... (shrink)

Central figures in the phenomenological tradition, such as Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, drew extensively on gestalt psychology in their writings. The dialogue between phenomenology and psychology they began continues today in the field of embodied cognitive science. We take up this conversation starting from Aron Gurwitsch’s rich phenomenological analysis of the perception of the cultural world. Gurwitsch’s phenomenological descriptions of the perception of the cultural world bear a striking resemblance to work in embodied cognitive science that takes (...) its inspiration from Gibson’s ecological psychology. Gibson coined the term “affordance” to refer to the possibilities for action that can be directly perceived by persons [Gibson 1979]. However, Gibson from his earliest writings made a distinction between a universal, strictly individual and nonsocial form of perception and a perception of the world that was subject to social and cultural influences. We use Gurwitsch to argue against Gibson’s individualist understanding of direct perception. Each affordance that can be selected as an object of perception refers to a wider sociocultural context, which Gurwitsch called an “order of existence”. We end our paper by taking up the question of the relation of phenomenological description of the perceptual world and explanations of perceptual experience provided by embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two prominent arguments claiming that physicalism entails reductionism. One is Kim’s causal exclusion argument (CEA), and the other is Papineau’s causal argument. The paper argues that Kim’s CEA is not logically valid and that it is driven by two implausible justifications. One is “Edward’s dictum”, which is alien to non-reductive physicalism and should be rejected. The other is by endorsement of Papineau’s conception of the physical, immanent in Papineau’s causal argument. This argument only arrives at the (...) physical property-property identities by using a conception of the physical that licenses anything to be reductively physical, including putative core anti-physical entities; thus, leaving Papineau’s causal argument and Kim’s CEA without a reductive physicalist conclusion of philosophical interest. (shrink)

The use of new paradigms of false belief tasks (FBT) allowed to reduce the age of children who pass the test from the previous 4 years in the standard version to only 15 months or even a striking 6 months in the nonverbal modification. These results are often taken as evidence that infants already possess an—at least implicit—theory of mind (ToM). We criticize this inferential leap on the grounds that inferring a ToM from the predictive success on a false belief (...) task requires to assume as premise that a belief reasoning is a necessary condition for correct action prediction. It is argued that the FBT does not satisfactorily constrain the predictive means, leaving room for the use of belief-independent inferences (that can rely on the attribution of non-representational mental states or the consideration of behavioral patterns that dispense any reference to other minds). These heuristics, when applied to the FBT, can achieve the same predictive success of a belief-based inference because information provided by the test stimulus allows the recognition of particular situations that can be subsumed by their ‘laws’. Instead of solving this issue by designing a single experimentum crucis that would render unfeasible the use of non-representational inferences, we suggest the application of a set of tests in which, although individually they can support inferences dissociated from a ToM, only an inference that makes use of false beliefs is able to correctly predict all the outcomes. (shrink)

This paper examines physics and mathematics textbooks published in France at the end of the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1960s for children aged 11–15 years old. It argues that at this “middle school” level, textbooks contributed to shape cultural representations of both disciplines and their mutual boundaries through their contents and their material aspect. Further, this paper argues that far from presenting clearly delimited subjects, late 1950s textbooks offered possible connections between mathematics and physics. It highlights that (...) such connections depended upon the type of schools the textbooks aimed at, at a time when educational organization still differentiated pupils of this age. It thus stresses how the audience and its projected aptitudes and needs, as well as the cultural teaching traditions of the teachers in charge, were inseparable from the diverse conceptions of mathematics and physics and their relationships promoted through textbooks of the time. (shrink)

Las investigaciones que Carlos Alchourrón desarrolló en la Filosofía del Derecho se vincularon, desde inicios de la década de 1980, con problemáticas críticas de la Inteligencia Artificial. Su contribución a la construcción de una lógica de las normas se conectó rápidamente con la deducción automática y los Sistemas Expertos Jurídicos. Su preocupación por la cuestión de los conflictos de obligaciones que pueden plantearse en un sistema normativo cuando el juez se enfrenta a la necesidad de emitir un veredicto considerando ciertos (...) hechos, se vinculó, en sus trabajos, con la noción más general de "condicionales derrotables" y con la formalización del Razonamiento No Monótono. Pero su contribución de mayor impacto fue aquella derivada de la búsqueda de una solución al problema de los resultados múltiples que surgen de la derogación de una norma en un sistema jurídico, problema que puede ser visto, en un contexto epistémico, como el de la contracción de un conjunto de creencias. Su enfoque constructivo, que desarrolló con David Makinson, convergió con el axiomático elaborado por Peter Gärdenfors, dando lugar al surgimiento de la teoría de los Cambios Racionales de Creencias, más conocida como AGM, teoría que fue adoptada en IA como un modelo standard para la especificación de las actualizaciones de Bases de Conocimiento, operaciones que, habitualmente, involucran la introducción de una nueva creencia que puede ser inconsistente con las anteriores. ¿Por qué AGM adquirió rápidamente carta de ciudadanía en IA, al punto de que su influencia, medida según la cantidad de menciones bibliográficas del artículo fundacional de 1985, se ha duplicado en la última década? Mostraremos en este trabajo que la teoría apareció en un momento de crisis de la IA y que el alto nivel de abstracción del modelo de AGM era lo que muchos investigadores de la disciplina estaban buscando. El presente artículo, luego de describir la génesis de AGM, realiza un análisis histórico de las circunstancias en las cuales la teoría se introdujo en la IA y una evaluación cuantitativa y cualitativa de su impacto en dicha disciplina. The main lines of research that Carlos Alchourrón developed in the Philosophy of Law, were connected, from the beginnings of the 80' s, to some critical problems in the Artificial Intelligence. His contributions to the construction of a logic of norms were rapidly linked to automatic deduction and the Legal Expert Systems. His concerns for the conflict of obligations that could arise in a normative system when a judge has to issue a ruling taking some particular facts into account were associated in his work with the more general notion of "defeasible conditionals" and with the formalization of Non Monotonic Reasoning. But his most relevant contribution was the one derived from the search of a solution to the problem of multiple outcomes resulting from the derogation of a norm in a legal corpus, which may be considered -within an epistemic framework- analogous to the contraction of a set of beliefs. The constructive approach he worked out with David Makinson converged with Peter Gärdenfors' axiomatic, giving rise to the formulation of the theory of Rational Changes of Belief, which was adopted in AI as a model for the specification of the updates of Knowledge Bases as it usually involves a new belief that may be inconsistent with the old ones. (shrink)

Texto de la presentación del libro de Marc Richir La contingencia del déspota (Madrid, Brumaria) en la librería La Central de Callao, en Madrid, el día 7 de febrero de 2014.

O presente artigo é fruto de uma pesquisa realizada no Programa de Pós-Graduação – Mestrado em Educação e de uma demanda da Escola Agrícola Municipal Carlos Heins Funke, que temos atuado em projetos de extensão desde 2014. A referida Escola tem se preocupado em ressignificar seu Projeto Político Pedagógico – PPP, tentando articular aspectos culturais locais ao currículo, sobretudo, em suas práticas. Desta forma, a pesquisa centrou seus estudos e ações educativas/investigativas nas seguintes indagações: como realizar ações a partir das (...) questões culturais locais? Em que sentido essas questões contribuem para um ensino e aprendizado significativos? Como construir um PPP, que articule essas questões e que tenha realmente a participação de todos os seguimentos - gestão, professores, alunos, comunidade e pesquisador? Portanto, o objetivo da pesquisa foi ressignificar e implementar o PPP da Escola Agrícola “Carlos Heins Funke”, em Joinville/SC, juntamente com seus protagonistas, a fim de analisar as contribuições de um projeto que articula experiências culturais as questões técnicas e conceituais. Para nos ajudar no desenvolvimento da pesquisa, alguns autores foram fundamentais, a exemplo: Saviani ;Veiga ; Gadotti ; Freire ; Arroyo ; Caldart, entre outros. Pensando em uma pesquisa, com abordagem qualitativa, que levasse em conta a participação de todos e que fosse de forma interativa, a metodologia utilizada foi a ‘Pesquisa Ação’ fundamentada em Thiollent e o instrumento ‘Grupo Focal’ baseado nos preceitos de Dias e Gatti. Foram desenvolvidos dois grupos focais para preservar as características e similaridades dos participantes, o primeiro grupo com professores e gestores e o segundo com pais, associação de pais e professores e estudantes. Os dados coletados foram transcritos, organizados e analisados utilizando a Análise de Conteúdo à luz de Bardin. Os resultados demonstram que as demandas da comunidade acadêmica, tais como: interdisciplinaridade, eventos culturais locais, uniforme dos estudantes, transporte dos alunos e as características diferenciadas da escola devem estar presentes no Projeto Político-Pedagógico, pois assim, tais peculiaridades serão oficializadas e valorizadas no documento e perpetuadas na memória e na identidade de toda a região. Palavras-chave: Práticas educativas. Educação do campo. Projeto Político- Pedagógico. Cultura. Grupo Focal. (shrink)

La COVID-19 generó grandes estragos en materia de economía ocasionando que, desde el inicio de la pandemia, los microempresarios sortearan grandes desafíos. Así las cosas, el presente articulo busca reflexionar sobre las dimensiones gerenciales aplicables por los microempresarios de la ciudad de montería durante la Covid 19, a través de una investigación con enfoque mixto de carácter exploratorio, en donde se aplicó como instrumento una entrevista semiestructurada donde se ahondó la problemática con los empresarios, arrojando como resultado las habilidades que (...) consideran esenciales para este tipo de desafíos, partiendo del efecto que tuvo la Covid 19 en sus empresas. (shrink)

Resenha do livro COLLECTED PAPERS OF HERBERT MARCUSE PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND EMANCIPATION –VOL. 5.

A presença dos acontecimentos enquanto fenômeno, e seu contraponto, o hábito, ecoam numa inter-relação contínua ao longo de todo o enredo do romance A Peste de Albert Camus. O presente artigo consiste na investigação do conceito de acontecimento e suas relações com a noção mediadora de linguagem - do mesmo modo que a ideia de resistência - à luz de uma leitura das reflexões de Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Zizek e John Caputo acerca desse tema. Para tanto, estarão expostas correlações possíveis (...) entre construção ficcional e filosofia na análise desta obra que é considerada uma das mais simbólicas do século XX. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar as implicações críticas da imunização biopolítica da vida humana a partir das reflexões de Roberto Esposito, problematizando a seguinte questão: em tempos de pandemia viral e, consequentemente, de Estados emergenciais, de que maneira o paradigma imunitário atua sobre a vida humana? A hipótese que gostaríamos de desenvolver parte do relevo de que, em crises agudas, o paradigma imunitário é tensionado ao seu limite, convergindo para a produção de Estados de emergência segundo os quais (...) são responsáveis por introduzir políticas nefastas de produção tanto da vida quanto da morte. Para validar nossa hipótese e desenvolver o objetivo e a problemática da pesquisa, o presente texto se organiza em dois momentos: primeiramente, nosso intuito consiste em apresentar brevemente a reflexão de Esposito acerca do paradigma imunitário; em seguida, temos como fito analisar criticamente o estado de pandemia viral à luz do paradigma imunitário, buscando encontrar vestígios de como tal ferramenta conceitual nos permite desenvolver uma interpretação para o tempo presente. (shrink)

A novel algebraic structure of the genetic code is proposed. Here, the principal partitions of the genetic code table were obtained as equivalent classes of quotient spaces of the genetic code vector space over the Galois field of the four DNA bases. The new algebraic structure shows strong connections among algebraic relationships, codon assignment and physicochemical properties of amino acids. Moreover, a distance function defined between the codon binary representations in the vector space was demonstrated to have a linear behavior (...) respect to physical variables such as the mean of amino acids interaction energies in proteins. It was also noticed that the distance between wild type and mutant codons approach to smaller values in mutational variants of four genes, i.e., human phenylalanine hydroxylase, human β-globin, HIV-1 protease and HIV-1 reverse transcriptase. These results strongly suggest that deterministic rules must be involved in the genetic code origin. (shrink)

In this paper, we will argue that, while Big Data enthusiasts imply that the analysis of massive data sets can produce serendipitous (that is, unexpected and fortunate) discoveries, the way those models are currently designed not only does not create serendipity so easily but also frequently generates zemblanitous (that is, expected and unfortunate) findings.

Education is a pillar of buen vivir, the guiding ideal of Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution. In this framework, Ecuador made significant shifts in its education system from 2006 to 2016, the decade of the Citizens’ Revolution. The key buen vivir concepts and processes that framed these shifts were considering education as a right, as a social debt, and as a driver of a more just, knowledge-intensive and clean economy. Resource allocation, general access, learning, and inclusion of structurally marginalized groups showed significant (...) improvement in this decade, along with other key political, economic and social changes, thus making significant advances in the emancipation of society toward buen vivir, and marking elements of how and why advancing this transformation is important. (shrink)

En este artículo, intentamos recobrar el pensamiento de Condillac, como importante exponente de la Ilustración francesa e interpretándolo como un adelanto de la etología contemporánea. Gracias a un naturalismo de base, Condillac creó una etología primitiva del estatuto y facultades animales en su propia especificidad. Esta aproximación no se disuelve en una mera antropología.

The ability to identify the mineral composition of rocks and softs is an important tool for the exploration of geological sites. For instance, NASA intends to design robots that are sufficiently autonomous to perform this task on planetary missions. Spectrometer readings provide one important source of data for identifying sites with minerals of interest. Reflectance spectrometers measure intensities of light reflected from surfaces over a range of wavelengths. Spectral intensity patterns may in some cases be sufficiently distinctive for proper identification (...) of minerals or classes of minerals. For some mineral classes, carbonates for example, specific short spectral intervals are known to carry a distinctive signature. Finding similar distinctive spectral ranges for other mineral classes is not an easy problem. We propose and evaluate data-driven techniques that automatically search for spectral ranges optimized for specific minerals. In one set of studies, we partition the whole interval of wavelengths available in our data into sub-intervals, or bins, and use a genetic algorithm to evaluate a candidate selection of subintervals. As alternatives to this computationally expensive search technique, we present an entropy-based heuristic that gives higher scores for wavelengths more likely to distinguish between classes, as well as other greedy search procedures. Results are presented for four different classes, showing reasonable improvements in identifying some, but not all, of the mineral classes tested. (shrink)

Este trabalho tem por objetivo refletir sobre a emergência da modernidade, a consolidação do pensamento científico moderno e suas consequências especificamente indesejáveis no domínio da política. Para isso, baseio-me no pensamento de Hannah Arendt. Arendt destaca três eventos como os principais precursores da era moderna: a exploração dos continentes, a Reforma e a invenção e utilização do telescópio. Discuto brevemente a relação desses eventos com a alienação do mundo, tal como entendida por Arendt, e me aprofundo nas novidades relativas à (...) ciência. Menciono Galileu e a revolução copernicana, o método experimental e quantitativo, o papel da fabricação de instrumentos na produção do conhecimento, o critério avaliativo de sucesso prático e o raciocínio lógico-matemático como elementos que passam a moldar a atividade científica. A partir daí, destaco a tendência, descrita por Arendt, do pensamento científico moderno em abarcar os mais diversos campos da vida cotidiana, especialmente seu âmbito público. Concluo destacando o modo como o pensamento cientificista – que possui características próprias do homo faber – mina a possibilidade de ação quando adentra a esfera política. Na medida em que “ser livre e agir é a mesma coisa”, impede também a manifestação da liberdade. Mais do que isso, abordo como o cientificismo vai à contramão da pluralidade, da singularidade e da espontaneidade humanas. Os governos totalitários e as sociedades de consumo são exemplos extremos e reais do que a racionalidade do homo faber pode fazer quando substitui o campo da ação. Ao finalizar, destaco um grande desafio que temos pela frente. (shrink)

El campo intencional es un campo dual. Una de las dos mitades transcurre de arriba hacia abajo, conservando las propiedades de modo propio, por transposición de niveles; ahí se constituyen las ciencias, desde la física cuántica a la etología, con arreglo a un principio de economía de mínima acción. La otra mitad transcurre de abajo hacia arriba, de modo impropio; ahí se constituye el arte, sin atenerse a ningún principio de economía. El campo intencional es poderoso porque impone sus niveles (...) a la naturaleza, pero es también vulnerable porque está rodeado por cuatro abismos: la trans-cendencia, la cis-cendencia, la inhumanidad y la ceguera. (shrink)