O presente trabalho examina os aspectos históricos da extração do óleo de canela-sassafrás (Ocotea pretiosa Mez), rico em safrol, no Alto e Médio Vale do Itajaí, a partir de 1940, por iniciativa de Otto Grimm, no município de Rio do Sul. Apresenta-se o tema no contexto da memória química em Santa Catarina, e discutem-se os procedimentos utilizados, e principalmente os motivos que levaram tal indústria incipiente a não se converter em uma indústria de química fina. Para tanto, são apresentados alguns (...) dados pertinentes à química do safrol, indicando que tal indústria poderia ter evoluído, bem como os aspectos econômicos e sociais que, ao lado da proibição do corte da canela-sassafrás, levaram em 1990 à extinção definitiva dessa "química fina que poderia ter sido". (shrink)

Este texto analisa dois conceitos especificos da ética kantiana, a saber, virtude edever. No decorrer desta análise procura-se demonstrar que a matéria da virtude é o dever e que o formalismo Kkantiano não implica uma indiferença para com a realidade do mundo empírico. Para tanto, é abordada a abrangência da ética de Kant basicamente nas três obras principais de sua filosofia prática, isto é, na Fundamentação da Metafísica dos Costumes, na Crítica da Razão Prática e na Metafísica dos Costumes.

This article offers a pragmatic and relational analysis of the controversial heuristic of cultural resistance and presents some of the problems that affect the production and distribution of the poetic discourses of resistance and emancipation. To that end, it focuses on the incorporation of the historicity and the historic contingency of conflict as key elements of the subjectification constituted by the poem of resistance as “poem for the political”. It also explores the applicability of certain notions common to the contemporary (...) critical tradition, as developed by scholars such as Badiou, Mouffe, Rancière, Bal and Žižek. (shrink)

There is at present a widespread unease about the direction in which our technology is taking us, apparently against our will. Promising advances seem to carry with them unforeseen negative consequences, including damage to the environment and the reduction of work to the trivial mechanical repetition of actions which have no human meaning. However, attempts to design a better, human-centered technology--one that complements rather than rejects human skills--are all too often frustrated by the prevailing belief that "man is a machine," (...) and one, moreover, that compares badly in terms of performance and durability. This contentious and stimulating book offers a new approach, one that refutes four centuries of science based on strictly causal explanations. It shows that man and nature can be viewed as "machines with a purpose," and that the "purpose" can be the advancement of technology to the benefit and not the detriment of the human race and its environment. This fascinating work is accessible to a wide range of readers, scientists and nonspecialists alike. It will interest anyone concerned about the impact of technology and the way it is shaping our world. (shrink)

The concept of will to power is one of the most important Nietzsche’s theories, that deals with the capacity of a person to face death and the thought of his own sacrifice without any fear, in order to obtain one’s self-overcoming. The so called will to wreck is the most powerful objectification of will to power, and it is deep-rooted in European society, especially German popular ideology. Actually, it is possible to find this conception of will to wreck in connection (...) with will to power in Nibelungenlied, the greatest Nordic poem of 13th century, and, years and years later, in Nazi ideology (and of course Nietzsche himself), as a proof of the temporal continuity of this particular philosophy. A philosophy which is probably part of our psychology, and which is not likely to be easily forgotten though its terrible, destructive power. (shrink)

Imagination has received a great deal of attention in different fields such as psychology, philosophy and the cognitive sciences, in which some works provide a detailed account of the mechanisms involved in the creation and elaboration of imaginary worlds. Although imagination has also been formalized using different logical systems, none of them captures those dynamic mechanisms. In this work, we take inspiration from the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, that identifies the different processes involved in the creation of imaginary worlds, (...) and we use it to define a dynamic formal system called the Logic of Imagination Acts. We build our logic by using a possible-worlds semantics, together with a new set of static and dynamic modal operators. The role of the new dynamic operators is to call different algorithms that encode how the formal model is expanded in order to capture the different mechanisms involved in the creation and development of imaginary worlds. We provide the definitions of the language, the semantics and the algorithms, together with an example that shows how the model is expanded. By the end, we discuss some interesting features of our system, and we point out to possible lines of future work. (shrink)

En el presente artículo nos hemos propuesto analizar las variantes textuales griegas relativas a los términos “vino” y “vinagre” dentro del contexto neotestamentario de la Pasión de Cristo, así como sus correlatos en la traducción de los Evangelios en antiguo eslavo. Como resultado de dicho análisis, hemos detectado una tendencia a introducir el término “vinagre” por parte de la tradición textológica del Nuevo Testamento griego, que es secundada además por otras tradiciones, como la siríaca o la eslava.

A pesar de la relevancia que ganó el pensamiento de Jean-François Lyotard con la publicación de La Condition postmoderne (1979), solo un pequeño número de publicaciones académicas han abordado sus primeras propuestas en el campo de la estética. Este artículo pretende contribuir a la tarea de enmendar semejante error. Para ello se propone una aproximación general y sistemática a sus primeros usos del concepto de figura, comenzando por sus precedentes e influencias y concluyendo con la afirmación de que la estética (...) de Lyotard no expone una mera filosofía de las artes o una filosofía de la percepción, sino una auténtica ontología. Para facilitar la comprensión de esta cuestión, se abordarán algunos de sus conceptos más complejos, como el de figura-matriz, y se harán pequeñas aproximaciones a la producción de artistas como Joan Fontcuberta y Peter Tscherkassky, cuya obra explicita el tema central de este artículo: la poética, la política y la ontología de la figura. (shrink)

This article analyses the original core of the ‘Art’ of Ramon Llull, which, according to the author, was the result of a vision on Mount Randa. We start from the paradoxical fact that Llull describes his Art as a result of an immediate revelation, but throughout his life constantly reworked the artistic structure, in both formal and procedural aspects. We thus take a hermeneutical approach to the ontology, logic and symbolism of Llull’s Art to define as precisely as possible what (...) remained constant through the changes. We conclude that the so-called ‘illumination of Randa’ was actually a mystical vision of the cosmos and its internal relations, but not the argumentative process of the Art, which Llull clarified over the course of his life. (shrink)

Technology has become one of the main channels through which people engage in most of their everyday activities. When working, learning, or socializing, the affordances created by technological tools determine the way in which users interact with one another and their environment, thus favoring certain actions and behaviors, while discouraging others. The ethical dimension behind the use of technology has been already studied in recent works, but the question is often formulated in a protective way that focuses on shielding the (...) users from potential detrimental effects. Nevertheless, when considering collateral ethical benefits that the use of technology could bring about, virtue ethics and the notions of “practice” and “practical wisdom” present new opportunities to harness this potential. By understanding the combination of technology, its users and their interactions as a system, technology can be seen as the space where most of its users’ daily practice happens. Through this practice, users can get the chance to collaterally develop and enhance their ethical awareness, sensitivity and reasoning capabilities. This work is shaped as a manifesto that provides the background, motivations and directions needed to ask a complementary question about the ethics of technology that aims towards the potentiality behind the use of technology. Instead of focusing on shielding the users, the proposed _ethical idealist_ approach to the ethics of technology aims to empower them by understanding their use of technology as the space where the development of their practical wisdom, understood in the virtue ethics’ sense, takes place. (shrink)

This essay examines Arendt’s descriptions of “Hottentots” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, especially the comparisons and contrasts she frequently draws between Hottentots and other peoples. In particular, Arendt highlights dehumanization of presumptively “civilized” people in comparing them to African “savages.” Close reading of such analogies demands that we look beyond the racial explanations that other scholars have offered and focus instead on how Arendt’s conception of humanity is bound up with a specific sense of culture that is antiprimitivist—exclusive of peoples (...) without history, primitives. Analysis of her moral anthropology uncovers the Cape Colony discourses and postenlightenment German philosophical supports that inform her antiprimitivism. However, Arendt’s antiprimitivism may not remain confined to Origins. In later essays, Arendt analyzes the various aspects of culture in instructive ways.Yet she also synthesizes culture concepts into a schema that introduces problems for her. (shrink)

In this paper, we review three influential theories of imagination in order to understand how the dynamics of imagination acts could be modeled using formal languages. While reviewing them, we notice that they are not detailed enough to account for all the mechanisms involved in creating and developing imaginary worlds. We claim those theories could be further refined into what we call the Common Frame for Imagination Acts, which defines a framework that can be used to study the dynamics of (...) imagination using formal languages, and we support our claim by showing how the framework allows to model certain imagination acts step by step. Then, we introduce the Rhombus of Imagination, which is a visual tool that can be used in conjunction with our framework to study the procedural structure of different kinds of imagination acts and identify their dynamic properties. (shrink)

In a recent book, ‘Machines with a Purpose’, many of the unattractive features of our technology were traced to a view of the world which has predominated in science for nearly four hundred years. This is, that nature, and everything that it contains, operates causally and without purpose. To counter this view, an alternative, purposive view was developed. The paper gives a simple account of this development, of other related work, and of the underlying motivation.

La condición de discapacidad es una realidad antropológica que no sólo afecta la integridad biológica de los individuos que la padecen sino también su interacción social y hasta su experiencia religiosa. Como una vía de aproximación a dicha realidad, el presente artículo propone un marco histórico-literario que permita comprender el trasfondo teológico de dos situaciones de discapacidad concretas, la ceguera y la sordera, a través de un estudio sobre tales condiciones en las tradiciones bíblicas y extra-bíblicas y en la literatura (...) judía y greco-romana contemporánea a la redacción del Nuevo Testamento. The disability condition is an anthropological reality that affects not only the biological integrity of the individuals who suffer it but also their social interaction and even their religious experience. As a way of approach to such reality, this article proposes a historical and literary framework which leads to understand the theological background of two disabilities situations in specific, blindness and deafness, throughout a study about such conditions on the biblical and extra-biblical traditions and on the Jewish and Greco-Roman literature contemporary to the New Testament redaction. (shrink)

Carta al editor / Letter to the editor / Carta ao editorPara citar esta carta / To reference this letter / Para citar esta carta Casas ML. Una nueva profesión técnica. ¿Y por qué no?. Pers Bioet. 2020; 24: 220-221. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2020.24.2.8Publicado: 27/11/2020.

In the paper, three propositions are put forward. First, that intellectual structures of wide scope commonly lead to conclusions which are ethically unacceptable; secondly that the ethically unacceptable consequences of science arise from one particular presupposition which it adopts, namely that of causality; thirdly, that causality is no essential part of science.

A nascent science in the sixteenth century rejected explanations in terms of purpose in favour of causality, and this bias has persisted and grown stronger. It has unfortunate consequences in areas where social and ethical considerations should prevail, and the paper describes a search extending over 20 years for a way in which these consequences could be avoided.

If one interprets the ‘ecology of technology’ as the study of technology in relation to its environment, there are two important levels at which this study can be made. It is possible to consider the different environments in Europe, Japan and the USA, and look for the different technological influences which accompany them. At a more general level, one can look at those factors which are common to all three environments, and which are associated with generic similarities in the technology (...) of all three areas.The paper considers both aspects as they have been experienced in Europe in some attempts to develop a ‘human-centred technology’. (shrink)