O seguinte trabalho buscará revisitar a noção de racionalismo aplicado na obra epistemológica de Gaston Bachelard. Mais precisamente, analisar separadamente os elementos que constituem tal noção, inserida no livro de mesmo nome. Nesse sentido, explorará elementos como: filosofia dialogada, racionalismos regionais, vigilância intelectual de si, dentre outros, tendo em vista contribuir para os debates acerca da relevância da obra epistemológica do autor, assim como, para os debates em epistemologia histórica, de uma forma ampla. O trabalho ainda inclui proposições pontuais acerca (...) da construção de interfaces entre o pensamento epistemológico de Bachelard e temas como educação e política. (shrink)

O seguinte trabalho tem por propósito uma breve análise acerca do pensamento do filósofo francês Gaston Bachelard. Para tal, inicialmente, retomarei de forma sucinta a trajetória biográfica deste, recuperando elementos históricos que teriam certa influência em sua construção teórica. Posteriormente, analisarei alguns daqueles que são considerados como conceitos centrais à obra de Bachelard e que buscam dar cabo das discussões a respeito do saber científico e de como este se daria sob o signo de uma ruptura. As análises que apresentarei (...) neste buscarão colocar a obra de Bachelard dentro de uma conjuntura hermenêutica, onde estas rupturas epistemológicas representariam, sobretudo, reestruturação linguística e de sentido. (shrink)

Many domains, notably the one involving predicates of personal taste, present the phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement. Contextualism is a characteristically moderate implementation of the relativistic attempt to endorse such appearances. According to an often-voiced objection, although it straightforwardly accounts for the faultlessness, contextualism fails to respect “facts about disagreement.” With many other recent contributors to the debate, I contend that the notion of disagreement—“genuine,” “real,” “substantive,” “robust” disagreement—is indeed very flexible, and in particular can be constituted by contrasting attitudes. (...) As such, contextualism is clearly straightforwardly compatible with facts about the existence of disagreement. There is, however, a genuine prima facie worry for contextualism involving facts about the expression of disagreement in ordinary conversations. Elaborating on a suggestion by Lewis :113–138, 1989), I argue that the presupposition of commonality approach in López de Sa shows that there are versions of contextualism that are in good standing vis-à-vis such facts about the expression of disagreement. (shrink)

Tesis doctoral presentada en el departament de Lògica Història i Filosofia de la Ciencia de la Universitat de Barcelona per optar al títol de Doctor en Filosofia.

O presente artigo procura esclarecer os traços fundamentais da relação entre o pensamento de Heidegger e a política. No contexto da emergência do nazismo na Alemanha, Heidegger recusará a compreensão do povo como “raça” e como “valor supremo”. Nesta linha, apropriando-se da concepção de Ernst Jünger do “trabalhador”, procurará pensar a relação deste trabalhador com um mundo, ou seja, a “mobilização total” do mundo por uma “vontade de poder”, para lá daquilo a que chama a “metafísica da subjectividade”, à qual (...) o próprio Jünger permanecerá amarado. Por outro lado, confrontando-se com o conceito do político de Carl Schmitt, Heidegger procurará aceitar o desafio de pensar este mesmo político como algo irredutível ao estatal. No entanto, se, em Schmitt, a tentativa de pensar o político como algo anterior ao Estado o conduzia a pensá-lo a partir da diferenciação amigo-inimigo, e a defender esta diferenciação como algo que deveria ser monopolizada pelo Estado, Heidegger procurava pensar o político fora da relação amigo-inimigo e, neste sentido, como uma instância que destituiria o Estado de um estatuto de “valor supremo”. (shrink)

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (2006) argues against attempts to preserve the entailment principle (or a restriction of it) while avoiding the explosion of truthmakers for necessities and truthmaker triviality. In doing so, he both defends the disjunction thesis--if something makes true a disjunctive truth, then it makes true one of its disjuncts--, and rejects the conjunction thesis--if something makes tue a conjunctive truth, then it makes true each of its conjuncts. In my discussion, I provide plausible counterexamples to the disjunction thesis, and (...) contend that Rodriguez-Pereyra's general defence of it fails. Then I defend the conjunction thesis from Rodriguez-Pereyra's case against it. (shrink)

Consider a cat on a mat. On the one hand, there seems to be just one cat, but on the other there seem to be many things with as good a claim as anything in the vicinity to being a cat. Hence, the problem of the many. In his ‘Many, but Almost One,’ David Lewis offered two solutions. According to the first, only one of the many is indeed a cat, although it is indeterminate exactly which one. According to the (...) second, the many are all cats, but they are almost identical to each other, and hence they are almost one. For Lewis, the two solutions do not compete with each other but are mutually complementary, as each one can assist the other. This paper has two aims: to give some reasons against the first of these two solutions, but then to defend the second as a self-standing solution from Lewis’s considerations to the contrary. (shrink)

According to Jackson, Pettit & Smith, “restricted particularism” is not affected by their supervenience-based consideration against particularism but, they claim, suffer from a different difficulty, roughly that it would violate the platitude about moral argument that, in debating controversial moral issues, a central role is played by various similarity claims. I present a defense of “restricted particularism” from this objection, which accommodates the platitudinous character of the claim that ordinary participants in conversations concerning the evaluative are committed to descriptive similarities (...) and differences being relevant in the way described by Jackson, Pettit and Smith, to moral similarities and differences. My defense exploits a presuppositional component congenial to response-dependent proposals such as Lewis’s. (shrink)

Neste artigo, no intuito de nos inscrevermos em uma reflexão mais abrangente acerca dos negacionismos contemporâneos, com foco no “negacionismo histórico”, que se sustenta por processos de falseamento e homogeneização da história e das memórias, buscamos seguir o seguinte roteiro de reflexão analítica: i) tratar da escrita da história, abordando a produção de memórias, as políticas de esquecimento e o falseamento discursivo da história; ii) traçar um panorama acerca da escrita da história e da produção de memórias da ditadura civil-militar (...) brasileira, observando, de um lado, a produção discursiva nos campos escolar, jornalístico e “de história”, como formas de manifestação e promoção da memória oficial do regime, e, de outro, a construção das políticas institucionais de memória, com foco nas comissões de verdade, como mecanismos de instituição de regimes de dizibilidade sustentados por memórias-outras; iii) como eixo analítico-conclusivo, traçar uma reflexão que vai da negação da história à formação do autoritarismo contemporâneo, tomando como exemplo a violência contra os povos originários. Inscrevemo-nos, para dar cabo a esta discussão, na perspectiva arqueogenealógica dos Estudos Discursivos Foucaultianos, a partir da mobilização de um arcabouço teórico-metodológico que permite a análise dos processos de formação dos enunciados e dos discursos e, fundamentalmente, uma crítica reflexiva do presente. (shrink)

According to the simple proposal, a predicate is rigid iff it signifies the same property across the different possible worlds. The simple proposal has been claimed to suffer from an over-generalization problem. Assume that one can make sense of predicates signifying properties, and assume that trivialization concerns, to the effect that the notion would cover any predicate whatsoever, can be overcome. Still, the proposal would over-generalize, the worry has it, by covering predicates for artifactual, social, or evaluative properties, such as (...) 'is a knife,' 'is a bachelor,' or 'is funny.' In defense, it is argued that rigidity for predicates as characterized plays the appropriate theoretical role, and that the contention that "unnatural" properties are not to be rigidly signified is ungrounded. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to offer a new view of the key relation between the content and the conscious character of visual experience. The author aims to support the following claims. First, the author rejects the qualia realist claim that conscious character is an intrinsic, nonrepresentational property of visual experience, for example, a pattern of activation of neurons. However, the author also rejects the rival widespread representationalist claim that the conscious character of visual experience is identical to, or (...) supervenes on, any specific property represented by visual experience. The positive proposal is the following. Conscious character is identical with those patterns of activation of neurons that are referentially or representationally alive. Conscious redness, for example, is a pattern of activations of neurons that is created normally only when brains of physical duplicates come in visual contact with some distal property and this pattern of activation is recruited by natural selection to represent that property. This is called meaning representationalism. (shrink)

In recent discussions on contextualism and relativism, some have suggested that audience-sensitivity motivates a content relativist version of radical relativism, according to which a sentence as said at a context can have different contents with respect to the different perspectives from where it is assessed. The first aim of this note is to illustrate how this is not so. According to Egan himself, the phenomenon motivates at least refinement of the characteristic moderate contention that features of a single context determine (...) the appropriate truth-value of the sentence. The second aim of this note is to explore how this may not be so. (shrink)

Discute-se com possíveis distinções entre pluralismo e pluralidade. Tais conceitos são revisitados em Filosofia, Política, Sociologia e Direito. Procura-se detectar especificidades da ideia de pluralidade e de pluralismo aplicados à ética, à moral e ao Direito, no passado e em nossos dias. Indaga-se a respeito da atualidade ou não de certas obras de É. Durkheim, um dos fundadores da Sociologia, para esclarecer o debate contemporâneo sobre questões referentes à pluralidade e ao pluralismo.

The aim of this paper is to critically review several interpretations of Kantian sensible intuition. The first interpretation is the recent construal of Kantian sensible intuition as a mental analogue of a direct referential term. The second is the old, widespread assumption that Kantian intuitions do not refer to mind-independent entities, such as bodies and their physical properties, unless they are brought under categories. The third is the assumption that, by referring to mind-independent entities, sensible intuitions represent objectively in the (...) sense that they represent in a relative, perspective-independent manner. The fourth is the construal of Kantian sensible intuitions as non-conceptual content. In this paper, I support the alternative view that Kantian sensible representation is to be seen as iconic de re presentation of objects without representational content. (shrink)

In the recent literature on contextualism and relativism, one often finds disputes as to which kind of consideration would be relevant for positing a feature of a context as a parameter in the ‘‘circumstance of evaluation’: via the presence of an operator in the language which shifts that feature (Stanley) or by being a feature of a context with respect to which the truth of ‘‘propositions’’ expressed in the context is relative (McFarlane). This kind of dispute arises from two different (...) independent roles that elements in ‘‘circumstances of evaluation’’ are sometimes assumed to have. I distinguish indices from points of evaluation, and motivate its significance in the debate. (shrink)

In recent years, some people have held that a radical relativist position is defensible in some philosophically interesting cases, including future contingents, predicates of personal taste, evaluative predicates in general, epistemic modals, and knowledge attributions. The position is frequently characterized as denying that utterance-truth is absolute. I argue that this characterization is inappropriate, as it requires a metaphysical substantive contention with which moderate views as such need not be committed. Before this, I also offer a more basic, admittedly less exciting (...) alternative characterization of the position, in terms of departing from the Kaplan–Lewis–Stalnaker two-dimensional framework. (shrink)

What are things like the Supreme Court? Gabriel Uzquiano has defended that they are groups, entities which are somehow composed of members (at certain times) but which, unlike sets (or pluralities), allow for fluctuation in membership. The main alternative holds that 'the Supreme Court' refers (at any time) to the set (or plurality) of their members (at the time). Uzquiano motivates his view by posing a metaphysical puzzle for this reductive alternative. I argue that a parallel reasoning would also find (...) a corresponding 'puzzle' in the case of singular terms like 'The Chief Supreme Court Justice'. (shrink)

The Person and the Inpersonal: confronting Max Scheler’s phenomenological thought with Heidegger’s. This essay starts from a similarity between the thought of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger in their correspondent approaches to the way the being of the human as non-substantial. Both Scheler’s notion of “Person” and Heidegger’s notion of “Dasein” are conceived of as acts, always already determined by their being-in-the-world, and not as substantial entities with a kind of identity previous to their “actuality”. Nonetheless, Scheler and Heidegger extract (...) from that originally common thought divergent pathways of thinking: whereas the first one addresses the mode of being of the Person, the second derives to the “impersonal” (das Man). This text aims at showing precisely the way of that divergence. (shrink)

What different relativist claims about a given domain are to be distinguished? Which of them is best placed to account for intuitive facts about disagreement in that domain? In a recent paper in this journal, ‘Indexical Relativism versus Genuine Relativism’ (2004), Max Kölbel distinguishes two forms of relativism, andargues that one of them, indexical relativism, faces problems in accounting for disagreement. In the first part of this discussion I present my own taxonomy of relativist positions in a given domain, which (...) is based on David Lewis’s 1980 essay, and I compare it with Kölbel’s and other recent suggestions. In the second part, I argue that the presuppositional defence of indexical relativism against related objections that I have elaborated elsewhere is also effective against Kölbel’s recent charges. (shrink)

The article considers the development of the concept of war in four stages. State Wars: wars between morally equal sovereign states. Democratic Wars of Peoples: defence and self-determination wars. Humanitarian Wars: “just wars” fought in the name of mankind and justice against an enemy considered as an unhuman criminal. Star Wars: the “war on terror” that tries to circumscribe the most extreme violence inside enemy territory, to be closed as if it would be a “star”.

Upon her release, Mary gains new knowledge aligned with B-type materialism and property dualism, even though she already possesses knowledge of all the facts and truths related to color and color vision during her time in captivity. I argue that this “cognitive progress” can only be accounted for by the acquisition of a new nonconceptual representation of the color red upon her release. Independently of any concepts, this acquisition already enables her to discriminate all sorts of shades of color within (...) her environment. However, the existence of nonconceptual representations, by itself, is not enough to specify the type of knowledge Mary acquired, obviously. We must add two additional conditions. Firstly, the acquisition of these nonconceptual representations must enrich Mary’s preexisting physical concept of red. Assuming that concepts are mental files, the enrichment takes the form of housing information in analog format, like pictures of the color red. Secondly, by utilizing these enhanced concepts by analog information, Mary can achieve an introspective propositional knowledge. She learns the truth of the crucial proposition: she learns what it is like to experience red. (shrink)

McDowell, responding to Mackie’s argument from queerness, defended realism about values by analogy to secondary qualities. A certain tension between two inter- pretations of McDowell’s response is highlighted. According to one, realism about val- ues would indeed be vindicated, but at the cost of failing to provide an appropriate response to Mackie’s argument; whereas according to the other, McDowell does pro- vide an adequate response, but evaluative realism is jeopardized.

According to Jackson, Pettit & Smith , “restricted particularism” is not affected by their supervenience-based consideration against particularism but, they claim, suffer from a different difficulty, roughly that it would violate the platitude about moral argument that, in debating controversial moral issues, a central role is played by various similarity claims. I present a defense of “restricted particularism” from this objection, which accommodates the platitudinous character of the claim that ordinary participants in conversations concerning the evaluative are committed to descriptive (...) similarities and differences being relevant in the way described by Jackson, Pettit and Smith, to moral similarities and differences. My defense exploits a presuppositional component congenial to response-dependent proposals such as Lewis’s. (shrink)

Reponse to Peter Milne (2005)'s argument agaist maximalism about truthmaking.

According to the view that Peacocke elaborates in A Study of Concepts (1992), a concept can be individuated by providing the conditions a thinker must satisfy in order to possess that concept. Hence possessions conditions for concepts should be specifiable in a way that respects a non-circularity constraint. In a more recent paper “Implicit Conceptions, Understanding and Rationality” (1998a) Peacocke argues against his former view, in the light of the phenomenon of rationally accepting principles which do not follow from what (...) the thinker antecedently accepts. In this paper I defend the view of the book from his more recent criticisms, claiming that the noncircularity constraint should be respected, and that Peacocke's more recent insights could be accommodated in the framework of his former theory of concepts. (shrink)

Kilimanjaro is a paradigmatic mountain, if any is. Consider atom Sparky, which is neither determinately part of Kilimanjaro nor determinately not part of it. Let Kilimanjaro(+) be the body of land constituted, in the way mountains are constituted by their constituent atoms, by the atoms that make up Kilimanjaro together with Sparky, and Kilimanjaro(–) the one constituted by those other than Sparky. On the one hand, there seems to be just one mountain in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. On the other (...) hand, both Kilimanjaro(+) and Kilimanjaro(–)—and indeed many other similar things—seem to have an equal claim to be a mountain: all of them exhibit the grounds for something being a mountain—like being an elevation of the earth’s surface rising abruptly and to a large height from the surrounding level,1 or whathaveyou—; and there seems to be nothing in the vicinity with a better claim. Hence, the problem of the many. (shrink)

The author defends the naturalizing program of the notion of representation against the primitivist view according to which the notion of representation as belonging to psychology as a mature science is irreducible. First, the author concedes that the original teleological project trivializes the concept of representation by applying it to bacteria, protozoa, amoeba, when the best available explanation is the assumption that primitive organisms and artifacts are merely indicating proximal stimulation rather than representing the distal causes of stimulation. Yet, the (...) author does not believe that this presents an unsurmountable obstacle for the naturalizing program when what is in question is genuine sensory representation, namely perception. In the author’s view, what matters for the naturalizing program are not cases in which the concept of representation is misemployed, but rather cases in which the focus is genuine sensory representation, that is, genuine perceptions; or so he shall argue. (shrink)

Intersectionality is the notion that concerns the complexity of the experiences of individuals in virtue of their belonging to multiple socially significant categories. One of its main insights is that the way society is structured around categories such as gender, race, sexuality, class, etc., produces distinctive and specific forms of discrimination and privilege for groups in the intersections. In this paper, we suggest conceiving intersectionality as a general metaphysical framework wherein specific claims to the effect that the experiences of discrimination (...) of Black women, among others, can be fruitfully formulated and examined. The main claim is that intersectional experiences emerge from the conjunction of social categories when social structures make them relevant vis-à-vis discrimination and privilege. We then argue that our view has three main virtues: metaphysical neutrality, explanatory flexibility and methodological openness. Explaining these virtues will allow us to contrast our proposal with alternatives from the recent literature. (shrink)

O objetivo de presente artigo é trazer uma reflexão sobre o lugar central da noção heideggeriana de “disposição” (Befindlichkeit) para as práticas clínicas daseinsanalíticas. Se o fundamento da daseinsanálise é a compreensão do homem como ser-aí e se, na analítica existencial de Heidegger, essa compreensão só é aberta a partir de disposições afetivas fundamentais, depreende-se que a própria prática daseinsanalítica se dá como atenção apropriativa dessas disposições fundamentais. São esses modos de aberturas, exemplarmente caracterizados pela angústia na obra Ser e (...) Tempo, que deixam aparecer as estruturas ontológico-existenciais encobertas pelos sentidos ônticos que regulam de modo impessoal as ocupações cotidianas: a estrutura ontológica do ser-aí como “cuidado” (Sorge).A hermenêutica clínica daseinsanalítica se dá, portanto, como preocupação antepositiva na medida em que devolve ao ser-aí sua própria compreensão pré-ontológica já sempre incluída e projetada em todos os comportamentos ôntico-existenciários da vida cotidiana. (shrink)

This paper is in five sections. In the first one, I summarize some views on truthmaking I will be presupposing, emphasizing however the various controversies on which I will remain neutral. In section two and three, I present the characterization of a response-dependent property. In section four, I present two ways in which a property can be response-dependent, in the characterized sense. In final section five, I present how these correspond to different versions of moderate relativism, namely indexical and nonindexical (...) contextualism. Thus the view presented here contrasts not only with pluralism about truth, but also with radical relativism about truth, as recently defended by John MacFarlane. (shrink)

ExcerptContemporary Western societies have a peculiar relationship with their political foundations. On the one hand, after the collapse of big metaphysical narratives and the appearance of what has been called the “weak thought” of postmodernity, liberal democracies developed the idea that they were the fulfillment of multicultural “open societies,” societies that, characterized by the coexistence of different moral and religious beliefs, do not allude to any comprehensive doctrine of the good or to any public philosophical or theological-political background. On the (...) other hand, it is precisely radical relativism and the absence of foundations, or, as Richard Rorty put it, the…. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a characterization of evaluative realism, present the intuitive case against it, and offer two considerations to support it further: one concerning the internalist connection between values and motivation, and the other concerning the intuitibve causal inefficacy of evaluative properties. The considerations ultimately rely on the former intuitions themselves, but are not devoid of interest, as they might make one revise what one took to be his own realistic supporting intuitions, if such one had.

Some philosophers seem to think that borderline cases provide further cases of apparent faultless disagreement. This chapter argues against such a suggestion. It contends that with respect to borderline cases, people typically do not respond by taking a view, in contrast to what is the case in genuine cases of apparent faultless disagreement. It shows that the claim of the chapter is indeed respected, and is accounted for by paradigm cases of semantic and epistemic views on the nature of vagueness. (...) It is also argued that this claim turns out to be, initial appearances notwithstanding, compatible with other claims in the literature; to the effect that in appropriate circumstances, there are indeed, or there might well be, ‘macho’, admissible, forced, and hesitant responses to borderline cases. -/- Keywords: borderline cases, faultless disagreement, semantic indecision, epistemicism. (shrink)

Donald Smith (2006) argues that if ‘I’ is indeed vague, and the view of vagueness as semantic indecision correct after all, then ‘I’ cannot refer to a composite material object. But his considerations would, if sound, also establish that ‘Tibbles,’ ‘Everest,’ or ‘Toronto,’ do not refer to composite material objects either—nor hence, presumably, to cats, mountains, or cities. And they can be resisted, anyway. Or so I argue.