O artigo apresenta uma visão de conjunto do pensamento de Lima Vaz, a partir de seu método original, caracterizado por seu cunho rememorativo, dialético e sistemático. Ele é aplicado particularmente na Antropologia Filosófica e na Ética, sintetizando a categoria de história com a de transcendência, superando assim a crise do pensamento moderno à luz da práxis ética.

A evolução cósmica e biológica é hoje um fato universalmente admitido pela comunidade científica. Muitos julgam que essa posição científica é incompatível com a aceitação de um Deus criador do mundo, seja que neguem a criação em nome da evolução, seja que rejeitem a evolução em nome da fé. O artigo pretende apontar a inconsistência do dilema “evolução ou criação”, mostrando, mediante uma reflexão filosófica, que ele deriva de uma falsa compreensão do método e do alcance tanto das ciências positivas (...) como da teologia. Defende, além disso, que compete aos cientistas verificar se o neodarwinismo da teoria sintética é ou não uma explicação científica satisfatória dos fenômenos. Afirma, porém, que também essa teoria seria compatível com uma ideia adequada de criação, mesmo que não recorra, para explicar a evolução, nem à intervenção de uma causa eficiente trans-empírica, nem a uma inteligência superior que oriente o processo evolutivo para determinados fins. Com efeito, a ação criadora de Deus que confere o ser e agir a toda a realidade natural e a orienta, de algum modo, para seus fins, tem um caráter transcendente, e, por princípio, não pode ser detectada pela investigação científica, mas, tão somente, pela reflexão filosófica. (shrink)

In 346 BC. the Athenians negotiated a peace treaty with King Philip II of Macedon, but afterwards one of the Athenian ambassadors, Demosthenes, accused another, Aiskhines, of accepting a bribe from Philip to contrive that the terms of the treaty should be favourable to him. The case came to trial three years later, and On the False Embassy is the speech which Demosthenes prepared for the prosecution. It is one of the most famous pieces of ancient oratory, and it is (...) also one of the principal sources of information about the politics of its period. This volume is on the same lines as Professor MacDowell's previous edition of Demosthenes' speech Against Meidias. It includes an introduction concentrating especially on the historical circumstances, a revised Greek text based on fresh study of the manuscripts, an English translation on pages facing the text, and the first detailed commentary on the speech for over a hundred years. (shrink)

Our texts of the two complete extant works of Gorgias and of the two attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Alkidamas are derived entirely from two manuscripts. The one generally known as A is the Cripps manuscript , now in the British Museum, which is a principal authority also for Antiphon, Andokides, Isaios, Lykourgos, and Deinarchos; it contains Helen, Palamedes, and Odysseus, but not On Sophists. The other, known as X, is the Palatine manuscript , which is the principal manuscript of (...) Lysias; it contains Helen Odysseus, and On Sophists, but not Palamedes. (shrink)

The number of speaking actors in Old Comedy has been much discussed, but no consensus has been reached. The old assumption that the number was three, as in tragedy, was shaken when it was realized that some scenes of Aristophanes have four characters on-stage at once, all taking part in the dialogue: for example, in Lys. 77–253 we have Lysistrate, Kalonike, Myrrhine, and Lampito, and in Frogs 1414–81 we have Dionysos, Aiskhylos, Euripides, and Plouton. Rees therefore argued that there was (...) no fixed number, but that view was not generally accepted. A more widely held view is that there were three principal actors with additional performers for small parts. However, there is no evidence contemporary with Aristophanes which distinguishes three actors from the others in this way, and it is probable that writers of later periods who mention three actors are referring to their own times and did not have authentic information about the fifth century. The passage which DFA, p. 149, seems to regard as the most trustworthy is in a brief account of comedy attributed to Tzetzes: πιγενμενος δ Κρατνος κατστησε μν πρτον τ ν τ κωμδ πρσωπα μεχρ τριν, στσας τν ταξαν4 DFA paraphrases this as ‘Cratinus reduced the disorderliness and, in some sense, fixed the number of regular actors at three’. But πρσωπα means ‘masks’ or ‘characters’; it does not mean ‘actors’ . What the writer meant by saying that Kratinos settled the masks or characters in comedy at ‘up to three’ is not clear, but his statement is useless as evidence for the number of actors. (shrink)

The time-limits imposed by the κλεψύδρα on speakers in Athenian trials have been much discussed, but a valuable distillation of the ancient evidence and modern interpretations of it has recently been made by P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia , pp. 719–28. He prudently states his own conclusions in a cautious manner, but I find them convincing. One khous of water took 3 minutes to run out; this is indicated by the length of time taken by (...) the κλεψύδρα found in the Agora , which holds 2 khoes and takes 6 minutes, and it is also consistent with the evidence of Aiskhines about the διαμεμετρημένη μέρα. In a ‘measured-through day’, used only for public cases, the total amount of time allowed for the speeches in a trial was 11 amphoreis , equivalent to 132 khoes, taking 396 minutes; one third of this time was allocated to the prosecution, one third to the defence, and one third to the speeches on the assessment of the penalty . Time taken for other proceedings, including the allocation of jurors to courts, voting, and payment of jurors at the end of the day , was additional. (shrink)

In theories of interpretation, the artwork's “surface” is frequently cast as something to be looked past in our quest for meaning. As such, the “surface” has also understandably been the focus of several polemics against the excesses of interpretive criticism – in film scholarship and beyond. This article explores what role concepts of the “surface” and “surface meaning” might fruitfully play in the interpretation of fiction films by thinking about a particular kind of expression-by-implication available to the medium: irony. An (...) under-theorised phenomenon, filmic irony could seem to require interpretation in order to grasp meanings that reside precisely elsewhere than the “surface”. Yet, can we even distinguish between a “surface meaning” and an “implied” meaning in a non-linguistic medium like film? This article addresses such questions by exploring the possibility of separating the explicit and implicit, as well as interpretation and comprehension, in a medium whose very capacity for ironic expression h... (shrink)

Aeschylus has just defeated Euripides in the verse-weighing round of their contest. In 1407–10 he issues a final challenge, that with two lines he could outweigh Euripides' whole household. But as it stands the challenge is incomplete; to finish it we need something like ‘and my poetry would easily appear the heavier’. Perhaps Aeschylus is interrupted by the next speaker— or, it has been suggested, by a thunderclap heralding the arrival of Pluto.

When Kleomenes seized the Athenian Akropolis , he was forced to surrender and leave Attika. Why was he wearing a very short cloak? Wilamowitz thought it was because he had to give up part of his clothing when he surrendered. But in fact Spartans always wore scanty clothing; being unwashed for six years cannot have been a condition of surrender after a siege lasting only two days ; and clearly the whole of 278–80 is not an account of the conditions (...) of surrender, but an expression of the Athenians' amusement or disgust at the normal appearance of Spartans. (shrink)

If you look up οἶκος in Liddell and Scott, you find the instances classified in three main divisions: first those meaning a house, or sometimes other kinds of building; secondly ‘one's household goods, substance’, for which I shall generally say ‘property’, though Liddell and Scott do not actually use that word; and thirdly ‘family’. This threefold distinction is sound, and I shall adhere to it here. Admittedly one sometimes finds an instance where it is not easy to decide which sense (...) the word has. Two of the senses, occasionally even all three, may overlap. But in the great majority of instances it is clear which sense is meant. (shrink)

Marriage is a subject of perennial interest, and we should like to be able to assess the exact degree of importance which the Greeks attached to this institution. One of the chief questions is how the formality of marriage, or the lack of it, affected the children of a union; above all, was illegitimate birth a bar to citizenship even in democratic Athens? Unfortunately there is still no general agreement about the answer to this question.

The speech Against Euergos and Mnesiboulos describes a dispute over some naval gear. The dispute occurred early in the year 357/6 b.c. π' γαθοκλους ρχοντος, Dem. 47.44), when the speaker was a trierarch and supervisor of his symmory , and he refers to ‘the law of Periandros, by which the symmories were organized’ . There is no other specific reference to the law of Periandros. If 357/6 was the first year of its operation, it was probably passed in 358/7, but (...) that is not known for certain. The identity of the man is likewise uncertain, though it has plausibly been suggested that he was Periandros son of Polyaratos and that he was the Periandros who proposed an alliance between Athens and Arkadia in 362/1 . However, his identity is of no importance for the present article. Here I am concerned only to try to reconstruct what the law said about the symmories. Despite a great deal of modern discussion this question has still not been satisfactorily solved. The word συμμορα means ‘group’ or ‘division’ and does not necessarily have a technical or legal sense. But most of the Attic instances do have the special sense of a group of persons formed for the purpose of making payments of a compulsory tax or levy: either the property tax called εσορ, which was imposed at irregular intervals, or payments towards the maintenance of ships in the Athenian navy, which were required every year. A fragment of Philokhoros says that Athenians were divided κατ συμμορας for the first time in 378/7, and it is generally agreed that this means that symmories were first formed in 378 for the payment of eisphora. For the navy, however, there is no trace of symmories before the 350s, and everyone agrees that it was the law of Periandros which introduced the use of symmories for maintaining ships, which had previously been the sole responsibility of one trierarch or a pair of syntrierarchs for each ship. (shrink)

Knowledge representation (KR) is actually more than representation: It involves also inference, namely inference of “new” knowledge, i.e. new facts. Logic programming is a suitable KR medium, but more often than not discussions on this programming paradigm focus on aspects other than KR. In this paper, I elaborate on the general theory of logic programming and give the essentials of two of its main implementations, to wit, Prolog and Datalog, from the viewpoint of deductive computing over knowledge bases, which includes (...) deductive programming. (shrink)

Not focusing on the history of classical logic, this book provides discussions and quotes central passages on its origins and development, namely from a philosophical perspective. Not being a book in mathematical logic, it takes formal logic from an essentially mathematical perspective. Biased towards a computational approach, with SAT and VAL as its backbone, this is an introduction to logic that covers essential aspects of the three branches of logic, to wit, philosophical, mathematical, and computational.

One question in moral psychology concerns the role of emotions to motivate moral action. This question has recently become more urgent, because it is now clearer that cognitive developmental theories cannot offer a complete explanation of moral functioning. This paper suggests that emotion, as is typically understood in psychology, cannot be seen as the basis for an acceptable explanation of moral behaviour and motivation. However, it is argued that it is possible to understand emotions as embedded in agentic processes, and (...) regulated by conscious concerns. So understood, emotions acquire an important role in the person's moral life. These conclusions are reached through an extensive review of psychological and philosophical conceptions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In Who's Afraid of Idealism? the philosophical concept of idealism, the extent to which reality is mind-made, is examined in new light. Author Luis M. Augusto explores epistemological idealism, at the source of all other kinds of idealism, from the viewpoints of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, two philosophers who spent a large part of their lives denigrating the very concept. Working from Kant and Nietzsche's viewpoints that idealism was a scandal to philosophy and the cause of nihilism, (...) class='Hi'>Augusto evaluates these philosophers and their role in shaping epistemological idealism. Using textual evidence from their writings and their reactions to western philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, and Hegel, Who's Afraid of Idealism? argues that in fact Kant and Nietzsche were really idealists at heart. In accessible prose, this text puts forward a theory that goes against current scholarly opinion, and even Kant and Nietzsche's opinions of themselves. (shrink)

Dual-Process Theories (D-PTs) claim there are two qualitatively different types of processes in the human brain-mind. Despite forming the basis for several areas of cognitive science, they are still shrouded in ambiguity: critics erroneously attack D-PTs as a whole (e.g., Evans and Stanovich Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(3), 2013), the qualitative/quantitative distinction is not clear enough (De Neys Perspectives on Psychological Science 16 (6): 1412–1427, 2021; Dewey 2022) and, given this criterion, deciding between qualitative or quantitative differences may even be (...) scientifically irrelevant (De Neys 2021). As a way of disambiguating the discussion and clarifying what exactly means to claim the existence of a second type of process, I define two possible categories of D-PT: The substantial and the instrumental. In the substantial case, Type 2 processes are subpersonal level ones. In the instrumental case, Type 2 processing is a personal level phenomenon that does not necessarily imply subpersonal level Type 2 processes. Discussing the different implications of each of the categories, I use as a main example to illustrate the ambiguity – and the exercise of disambiguation – the model proposed by Evans and Stanovich (2013), making clear its substantial character, and contrast it with Frankish’ (2009) – a clear case of instrumental D-PT. Finally, I discuss the contributions this distinction can make. By making the discussion clearer, it can provide a relatively unanimous framework for dual- and single-process theorists (the instrumental version) and clearer desiderata for those wishing to defend the substantive one. (shrink)

3rd ed, 2021. A circumscription of the classical theory of computation building up from the Chomsky hierarchy. With the usual topics in formal language and automata theory.

The representational nature of human cognition and thought in general has been a source of controversies. This is particularly so in the context of studies of unconscious cognition, in which representations tend to be ontologically and structurally segregated with regard to their conscious status. However, it appears evolutionarily and developmentally unwarranted to posit such segregations, as,otherwise, artifact structures and ontologies must be concocted to explain them from the viewpoint of the human cognitive architecture. Here, from a by-and-large Classical cognitivist viewpoint, (...) I show why this segregation is wrong, and elaborate on the need to postulate an ontological and structural continuity between unconscious and conscious representations. Specifically, I hypothesize that this continuity is to be found in the symbolic-based interplay between the syntax and the semantics of thought, and I propose a model of human information processing characterized by the integration of syntactic and semantic representations. (shrink)

Esta obra permanece aún como la primera y la más brillante demostración ñdespués de Marxñ de que la agricultura no puede producir por sí misma los elementos que ne cesita para llegar al socialismo, es decir que íla industria somete a la agricultura de modo que el desarrollo industrial determina siempre más la ley del desarrollo agrarioî. íY en esto ñdice Kautskyñ, en haber evidenciado la industrialización de la agricultura, es donde yo veo la idea central de mi libro.î La (...) introducción se dedica a analizar la figura de Kautsky y las discusiones que el presente libro provocó en el seno de la socialdemocracia alemana. (shrink)

Much ado – and increased complexity – is generally the case when it comes to checking formally the (intended) meaning of programs, as formal semantics for programs are typically extrinsic to both them and the formal grammars that generate the programming languages in which they are written. The van Wijngaarden grammars, on the contrary, have an intrinsic semantics in the sense that their rules contain or express the (intended) meaning of the terminal strings generated by them. This intrinsicness allows for (...) preservation of meaning both in syntactic change and context-sensitive conditions. In order better to show the intrinsicness of the semantics of the van Wijngaarden grammars I contrast them with the attribute grammars, a frequent choice when the semantic analysis of programming languages is called for (e.g., in compilation). (shrink)

Genera, typically hand-in-hand with their branching species, are essential elements of vocabulary-based information constructs, in particular scientific taxonomies. Should they also feature in formal ontologies, the highest of such constructs? I argue in this article that the answer is “Yes” and that the question posed in its title also has a Yes-answer: The way medieval ontologists sliced up the world into genera does matter to formal ontology. More specifically, the way Dietrich of Freiberg, a Latin scholastic, conceived and applied strictly (...) generic criteria to slice up the world into its entities can provide some guidelines to the field of formal ontology with respect to not only its contents, but also its scope. In particular, Dietrich's information criterion plays here a central role. (shrink)

The traditional model of human cognition (TMHC) postulates an ontological and/or structural gap between conscious and unconscious mental representations. By and large, it sees higher-level mental processes as commonly conceptual or symbolic in nature and therefore conscious, whereas unconscious, lower-level representations are conceived as non-conceptual or sub-symbolic. However, experimental evidence belies this model, suggesting that higher-level mental processes can be, and often are, carried out in a wholly unconscious way and/or without conceptual representations, and that these can be processed unconsciously. (...) This entails that the TMHC, as well as the theories on mental representation it motivates and that in turn support it, is wrong. (shrink)

Ao longo da história, a relação entre a filosofia e a política tem-se revelado espinhosa, denunciando a dificuldade em se conceptualizar sobre o que é por natureza antagónico à cristalização, porque particular e pluralista. Na esfera da opinião, o filósofo deve restringir-se a analisar, criticar, rever e aperfeiçoar os valores políticos coevos, a explicar aos seus conterrâneos o universo de acepções sociais partilhadas, consciente de que a sua concepção fundamenta uma via entre as muitas poss...

Our present moral traits are unable to provide the level of large-scale co-operation necessary to deal with risks such as nuclear proliferation, drastic climate change and pandemics. In order to survive in an environment with powerful and easily available technologies, some authors claim that we need to improve our moral traits with moral enhancement. But this is prone to produce paradoxical effects, be self-reinforcing and harm personal identity. The risks of moral enhancement require the use of a safety framework; such (...) a framework should guarantee practical robustness to moral uncertainty, empirical adequacy, correct balance between dispositions, preservation of identity, and be sensitive to practical considerations such as emergent social effects. A virtue theory can meet all these desiderata. Possible frameworks incorporate them to variable degrees. The social value orientations framework is one of the most promising candidates. (shrink)

In this paper, we intend to discuss if and in what sense semiosis (meaning process, cf. C. S. Peirce) can be regarded as an "emergent" process in semiotic systems. It is not our problem here to answer when or how semiosis emerged in nature. As a prerequisite for the very formulation of these problems, we are rather interested in discussing the conditions which should be fulfilled for semiosis to be characterized as an emergent process. The first step in this work (...) is to summarize a systematic analysis of the variety of emergence theories and concepts, elaborated by Achim Stephan. Along the summary of this analysis, we pose fundamental questions that have to be answered in order to ascribe a precise meaning to the term "emergence" in the context of an understanding of semiosis. After discussing a model for explaining emergence based on Salthe's hierarchical structuralism, which considers three levels at a time in a semiotic system, we present some tentative answers to those questions. (shrink)

While ontic structural realism (OSR) has been a central topic in contemporary philosophy of science, the relation between OSR and the concept of emergence has received little attention. We will argue that OSR is fully compatible with emergentism. The denial of ontological emergence requires additional assumptions that, strictly speaking, go beyond OSR. We call these _physicalist closure assumptions._ We will explain these assumptions and show that they are independent of the central commitments of OSR and inconsistent with its core goals. (...) Recognizing the compatibility of OSR and ontological emergence may contribute to the solution of ontological puzzles in physics while offering new ways to achieve the goals that advocates of OSR set for their view. (shrink)

In mainstream economic theory money functions as an instrument for the circulation of commodities or for keeping a stock of liquid wealth. In neither case is it considered fundamental to the production of goods or the distribution of income. Augusto Graziani challenges traditional theories of monetary production, arguing that a modern economy based on credit cannot be understood without a focus on the administration of credit flows. He argues that market asset configuration depends not upon consumer preferences and available (...) technologies but on how money and credit are managed. A strong exponent of the circulation theory of monetary production, Graziani presents an original and perhaps controversial argument that will stimulate debate on the topic. (shrink)

This innovative volume is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this preeminent group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war; how new information and medical (...) technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which forms of subjectivity and life possibilities are produced against a world in pieces. The transdisciplinary conversation includes anthropologists, historians of science, psychologists, a literary critic, a philosopher, physicians, and an economist. The authors touch on how we think and write about contingency, human agency, and ethics today. (shrink)

All research is immersed in the competition for knowledge, but this is not always governed by fairness. In this opinion article, I elaborate on indicators of unfairness to be found in both evaluation guides and evaluation panels, and I spontaneously offer a number of rules of thumb meant to keep it at bay. Although they are explicitly offered to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and in particular to the evaluation panel for Philosophy, Ethics and Religion of FCT's (...) fifth edition of their Individual Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus, here used as concrete illustrations of unfairness, my rules of thumb are guaranteed to promote fairness in the competition for knowledge in general. (shrink)

Reasoning over our knowledge bases and theories often requires non-deductive inferences, especially – but by no means only – when commonsense reasoning is the case, i.e. when practical agency is called for. This kind of reasoning can be adequately formalized via the notion of supraclassical consequence, a non-deductive consequence tightly associated with default and non-monotonic reasoning and featuring centrally in abductive, inductive, and probabilistic logical systems. In this paper, we analyze core concepts and problems of these systems in the light (...) of supraclassical consequence. (shrink)

We say that things happen accidentally when they do indeed happen, but only by chance. In the opposite situation, an essential happening is inescapable, its inevitability being the sine qua non for its very occurrence. This paper will investigate modal logics on a language tailored to talk about essential and accidental statements. Completeness of some among the weakest and the strongest such systems is attained. The weak expressibility of the classical propositional language enriched with the non-normal modal operators of essence (...) and accident is highlighted and illustrated, both with respect to the definability of the more usual modal operators as well as with respect to the characterizability of classes of frames. Several interesting problems and directions are left open for exploration. (shrink)

An overcomplete logic is a logic that ‘ceases to make the difference’: According to such a logic, all inferences hold independently of the nature of the statements involved. A negation-inconsistent logic is a logic having at least one model that satisfies both some statement and its negation. A negation-incomplete logic has at least one model according to which neither some statement nor its negation are satisfied. Paraconsistent logics are negation-inconsistent yet non-overcomplete; paracomplete logics are negation-incomplete yet non-overcomplete. A paranormal logic (...) is simply a logic that is both paraconsistent and paracomplete. -/- Despite being perfectly consistent and complete with respect to classical negation, nearly every normal modal logic, in its ordinary language and interpretation, admits to some latent paranormality: It is paracomplete with respect to a negation defined as an impossibility operator, and paraconsistent with respect to a negation defined as non-necessity. In fact, as it will be shown here, even in languages without a primitive classical negation, normal modal logics can often be alternatively characterized directly by way of their paranormal negations and related operators. So, instead of talking about ‘necessity’, ‘possibility’, and so on, modal logics could be seen just as devices tailored for the study of (modal) negation. This paper shows how and to what extent this alternative characterization of modal logics can be realized. (shrink)