This work is an attempt to outline basic political aspects of the ethics and the ontology developed by the philosopher Alain Badiou. It seeks to present the concepts of being, event, subject and truth, in addition to other similar, drawing parallels with central authors of contemporary philosophical debate. Initially exposing Badiou’s original theoretical reasons, we try to build a conceptual reconstruction that culminates in confrontation with currently hegemonic political-philosophical perspectives. At last, it`s discussed in what practical senses Badiou maintains the (...) need for a renewed understanding of universalistic politics. (shrink)

RESENHA: CAMAROTTI, Gerson. Segredos do Conclave: os bastidores da eleição do papa Francisco e a operação do Vaticano para estancar a hemorragia de fiéis na América Latina. 1ª ed. São Paulo: Geração Editorial, 2013.

Translation of Aristotle's Physics I-II into Portuguese, with commentaries. Tradução para o português dos livros I e II da Física de Aristóteles, com comentários.

This book uses mathematical models of language to explain why there are certain gaps in language: things that we might expect to be able to say but can't. For instance, why can we say I ran for five minutes but not *I ran to the store for five minutes? Why is five pounds of books acceptable, but *five pounds of book not acceptable? What prevents us from saying *sixty degrees of water to express the temperature of the water in a (...) swimming pool when sixty inches of water can express its depth? And why can we not say *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity. In this book, Lucas Champollion provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of algebraic semantics and mereology, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature and formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above. (shrink)

This is an introductory handbook for some of the main themes around the notion of predication in Aristotle. It does not aim at being exhaustive, but only sketches some important lines about the subject; it contains an introductory essay, besides the translation (into Portuguese) and commentary of basic texts (such as Posterior Analytics I-22, Categories 1-5, Interpretation 1-6 etc.).

This book discusses Aristotle’s notions of essence and substance as they are developed in Metaphysics ZH. I examine Aristotle's argument at length and defends an unorthodox interpretation according to which his motivation is to provide an answer against a conflation between criteria for existential priority (delivering substances as primary beings) and criteria for explanatory priority (delivering essences as primary principles).

Die Geste wurde von der römischen Rhetorik über die Physiognomik bis hin zu den Gesture Studies vordergründig als eine funktionale körperliche Stütze für sprachliche Kommunikation oder als sinnliche Spur geistiger Zustände aufgefasst. Gesten begleiten unsere Diskurse und Gemütslagen und machen diese wahrnehmbar. Über diesen traditionell gültigen Standpunkt hinaus verlagert Luca Viglialoro den Fokus auf den somatisch-medialen Kunstcharakter der Geste, um diese als prozesshafte Technik (ars) für die Modellierung der aísthesis zu konturieren. Dafür werden die komplexen Relationen zwischen Gesten und Kunstreflexionen (...) am Beispiel von medial unterschiedlichen Konfigurationen (von der Schrift und der Zeichnung bis zur Fotografie und Installationskunst) analysiert. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda into Portuguese.

I discuss what Aristotle means when he say that scientific demonstration must proceed from necessary principles. I argue that, for Aristotle, scientific demonstration should not be reduced to sound deduction with necessary premises. Scientific demonstration ultimately depends on the fully appropriate explanatory factor for a given explanandum. This explanatory factor is what makes the explanandum what it is. Consequently, this factor is also unique. When Aristotle says that demonstration must proceed from necessary principles, he means that each demonstration requires the (...) principle that is the necessary one for the fully appropriate explanation of its explanandum. This picture also provides a key to understand Aristotle's thesis that scientific explanation depends on essences: it is the essence of the attribute to be explained that should be stated as the fully appropriate explanatory factor. (shrink)

Sets are central to mathematics and its foundations, but what are they? In this book Luca Incurvati provides a detailed examination of all the major conceptions of set and discusses their virtues and shortcomings, as well as introducing the fundamentals of the alternative set theories with which these conceptions are associated. He shows that the conceptual landscape includes not only the naïve and iterative conceptions but also the limitation of size conception, the definite conception, the stratified conception and the graph (...) conception. In addition, he presents a novel, minimalist account of the iterative conception which does not require the existence of a relation of metaphysical dependence between a set and its members. His book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

I examine Aristotle’s definition of scientific knowledge in Posterior Analytics 71b 9-12 and try to understand how it relates to the sophistical way of knowing and to "kata sumbebekos knowledge". I claim that scientific knowledge of p requires knowing p by its appropriate cause, and that this appropriate cause is a universal (katholou) in the restricted sense Aristotle proposes in 73b 26-27 ff., i.e., an attribute coextensive with the subject (an extensional feature) and predicated of the subject in itself (an (...) intensional feature). Kata sumbebekos knowledge, on the other hand, can occur even when the predicate of a conclusion is coextensive with its subject and is proved by a convertible meson which is not the most appropriate from an explanatory standpoint. (shrink)

"Lucas' book competently brings Whitehead's philosophy into dialogue with "analytic" philosophy. This is a topic of great originality and considerable potential importance for the field of philosophy.

Paul Guyer is well known for defending the claim that freedom, understood as the capacity to set ends, is Kant’s fundamental value. In contrast, I have developed a reading of Kant’s ethics that places autonomy and community at the heart of Kant’s ethics. At the heart of my account is a conception of autonomy understood as what I call the capacity for sovereignty. I argue that these two positions can be made compatible. To do this involves making a distinction between (...) the concepts of dignity and value and arguing that although autonomy, understood as the capacity for sovereignty, is the source of the dignity of humanity, this is compatible with the claim that the ultimate value for Kant is freedom understood as the capacity to set ends. To explain how this is possible I appeal to Wilfrid Sellars Kantian account of the moral point of view in Science and Metaphysics. (shrink)

Joint attention customarily refers to the coordinated focus of attention between two or more individuals on a common object or event, where it is mutually “open” to all attenders that they are so engaged. We identify two broad approaches to analyse joint attention, one in terms of cognitive notions like common knowledge and common awareness, and one according to which joint attention is fundamentally a primitive phenomenon of sensory experience. John Campbell’s relational theory is a prominent representative of the latter (...) approach, and the main focus of this paper. We argue that Campbell’s theory is problematic for a variety of reasons, through which runs a common thread: most of the problems that the theory is faced with arise from the relational view of perception that he endorses, and, more generally, they suggest that perceptual experience is not sufficient for an analysis of joint attention. (shrink)

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, and historian. As one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, he exerted tremendous influence on the social sciences. He was the first to stress cultural and linguistic dimensions in the development of both the human mind and social institutions. Although his ideas on the relationship between mind and culture and his epistemology have inspired the work of many scholars in psychology, his sizeable influence has been scarcely acknowledged. The volume is organized (...) in two sections. The first locates Vico in his historical context and in the landscape of contemporary human and social sciences. The second part presents those of Vico's concepts that seem promising for the development of a new way of looking at psychological phenomena. In the book's conclusion, Luca Tateo gathers the ideas of the volume's contributors to suggest future development of the psychological sciences. This book aims to show how Vico's insights can inspire future research in the psychological sciences. It collects multidisciplinary contributions of leading international scholars that draw upon the thought of this original thinker. Collectively, the contributors remind us of the legacy and continuing influence of this inspiring historical figure. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify the nature and the importance of a third kind of sophistic argument that is not always found in the classification of those arguments in the secondary literature. An argument of the third kind not only is a valid one, but is also constituted of true propositions. What makes it a sophistic argument is the fact that it produces a false semblance of scientific explanation: its explanation seems to be appropriate to the explanandum without being so. (...) Evidence from this kind of argument comes from Sophistic Refutations 11, and Brison’s attempt to square the circle should be counted as one of its instances. (shrink)

This paper discusses some issues concerning the definition of moral virtue in Nicomachean Ethics 1106b 36- 1107a 2. It is reasonable to expect from a definition the complete enumeration of the relevant features of its definiendum, but the definition of moral virtue seems to fail in doing this task. One might be tempted to infer that this definition is intended by Aristotle as a mere preliminary account that should be replaced by a more precise one. The context of the argument (...) Aristotle develops in Book II of his NE give us some help. I argue that the definition of moral virtue, once considered in the light of its context, is far from being an incomplete and provisional account: it rather introduces coherently the same notion of moral virtue that Aristotle employs in other texts (as in Nicomachean Ethics VI 13). My main proposal is that the way in which "hexis" is understood in the context of previous chapters allows Aristotle to encode in it the notion of an ability to do the right things regularly. Thus, moral virtue is a "hexis prohairetike etc.", but the ability to do the right things regularly is already encoded in the occurrence of "hexis" in the definiens account of moral virtue, as if Aristotle meant "hexis [praktike] prohairetike". (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

L’articolo si propone di indagare le implicazioni ecologiche di due differenti tendenze sistemiche: La General Systems Theory di Ludwig von Bertalanffy, che fa da cornice alla Systems Ecology di Eugene Odum; La Second-Order Cybernetics elaborata da Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana e Niklas Luhmann, che costituisce la matrice di un nuovo paradigma ecologico denominato General Ecology. Nell’articolo verranno comparate la GST e la SOC in relazione ai loro differenti modi di intendere il sistema e la sua genesi; il ruolo dell’osservatore (...) nella definizione dei confini di un sistema; e la relazione tra sistema e ambiente. Verrà mostrato come la SOC, mettendo in causa il principio del controllo gerarchico della GST, conduce alla nozione di differenze ecologiche, con la quale si indica una pluralità di diadi sistema-ambiente, problematizzando così la nozione di ambiente come riferimento fisico e oggettivo. (shrink)

The expression “ecological threat” refers to a dynamic of double intrusion: the intrusion of geological history in human history (the intrusion of Gaia) and the intrusion of human history in geological history (the Anthropocene). This double intrusion is founded on a series of major partitions (culture/nature; society/environment) that do not allow for the possibility of communication between the terms of these dichotomies unless it is in the form of reciprocal violation. In the article, the ontology of the flesh is used (...) in order to think the intrusion in a different way compared to the great partitions. Within a chiasmatic logic, the terms of each dichotomy are understood as inseparable moments of the same flesh which institutes a difference – inside/outside – through an infinite movement of folding and torsion. By thinking this common element, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh enters in dialogue with Amerindian mythocosmologies of the “first Anthropocene.” In these mythocosmologies, a humanity-flesh – understood as a transformative, pre-individual, and metastable potential – gives birth, through differentiation, to the multiple points of view that populate the cosmos. This dialogue allows us to think about the socialization of Gaia and to trace the contours of a general ecology understood as a thought that operates between – or beyond – major partitions. (shrink)

This book explores the diverse understandings of the archaeological record in both historical and contemporary perspective, while also serving as a guide to reassessing current views. Gavin Lucas argues that archaeological theory has become both too fragmented and disconnected from the particular nature of archaeological evidence. The book examines three ways of understanding the archaeological record - as historical sources, through formation theory, and as material culture - then reveals ways to connect these three domains through a reconsideration of (...) archaeological entities and archaeological practice. Ultimately, Lucas calls for a rethinking of the nature of the archaeological record and the kind of history and narratives written from it. (shrink)

I discuss three kinds of relationship between ends and means (or "things that promote ends") in the Aristotelian ethical theory, in order to clarify how moral virtues and phronesis are related both in adopting ends and in determining means for virtuous actions. Phronesis seems to be mainly charged with determining means for an end given by the moral virtues, but it must involve some conception of ends too. Phronesis cannot be parasitic on moral virtue concerning the conception of ends, for (...) otherwise it will lack intrinsic moral value. I argue that the intrinsic moral value of phronesis can be better understood through a certain kind of relation between means and ends that has not received much attention. (shrink)

Genetic explanation of complex human behavior presents an excellent test case for pluralism. Although philosophers agree that successful scientific investigation of behavior is pluralistic, there remains disagreement regarding integration and elimination—is the plurality of approaches here to stay, or merely a waystation on the road to monism? In this paper we introduce an issue taken very seriously by scientists yet mostly ignored by philosophers—the missing heritability problem—and assess its implications for disagreement among pluralists. We argue that the missing heritability problem, (...) which isn’t going anywhere any time soon, implies that pluralism in behavior genetics is both practically ineliminative and theoretically non-integrative. (shrink)

John Danaher and Sven Nyholm have argued that automation, especially of the sort powered by artificial intelligence, poses a threat to meaningful work by diminishing the chances for meaning-conferring workplace achievement, what they call “achievement gaps”. In this paper, I argue that Danaher and Nyholm’s achievement gap thesis suffers from an ambiguity. The weak version of the thesis holds that automation may result in the appearance of achievement gaps, whereas the strong version holds that automation may result on balance loss (...) in possibilities for workplace achievements, i.e., in the appearance of an overall gappier work landscape. Against the strong version of the achievement gap thesis, I characterize situations where automation may result in boons to meaning-conferring workplace achievements: the appearance of what I call achievement spread and achievement swaps. Nevertheless, Danaher and Nyholm are right to worry about some uses of automation whereby human workers become subservient to AI. But these situations are better framed, I argue, as autonomy gaps rather than achievement gaps. (shrink)

Non‐classical logicians do not typically reject classically valid logical principles across the board. In fact, they sometimes suggest that their preferred logic recovers classical reasoning in most circumstances. This idea has come to be known in the literature as ‘classical recapture’. Recently, classical logicians have raised various doubts about it. The main problem is said to be that no rigorous explanation has been given of how is it exactly that classical logic can be recovered. The goal of the paper is (...) to address this problem. First, I discuss a number of different ways to characterize the idea of classical recapture and I examine how far it can be pushed. Secondly, I argue that a palatable form of classical recapture is given by the thought that classical logic can be retained for statements that are grounded (in Kripke’s sense). To substantiate this view I provide a formal fixed‐point semantics for a language containing a predicate standing for the concept of groundedness and I address a couple of objections that have been deployed against the claim that classical recapture can aid the non‐classical logician’s cause. (shrink)

The paper generalizes Van McGee's well-known result that there are many maximal consistent sets of instances of Tarski's schema to a number of non-classical theories of truth. It is shown that if a non-classical theory rejects some classically valid principle in order to avoid the truth-theoretic paradoxes, then there will be many maximal non-trivial sets of instances of that principle that the non-classical theorist could in principle endorse. On the basis of this it is argued that the idea of classical (...) recapture, which plays such an important role for non-classical logicians, can only be pushed so far. (shrink)

I argue that Aristotle’s teleology in natural science (more specifically, in biology) is not incompatible with his admissions of the “brute necessity” of the movements of matter. Aristotle thinks that the brute necessity emerging from the movements of matter is not sufficient to explain why living beings are what they are and behave the way they behave. Nevertheless, Aristotle takes this brute necessity to be a sine qua non condition in biological explanations. The full explanation of the features of living (...) beings requires the hylomorphic model, in which the brute necessity belonging to the matter is subordinated to the teleological causality of the form. The model for which I argue is pretty much Balme’s “cybernetic”. However, I explore some aspects of Aristotle’s texts that have not received much attention in the recent literature. (shrink)

I discuss some of Aristotle’s scattered remarks from which one can construct his conception of matter. Aristotle seems to oscillate between two conceptions: one in which matter is the principle of becoming, another in which matter is a constituent element with no contribution for processes of becoming. Sometimes Aristotle takes matter as a thing independent in itself, and the correlated form is a feature that does not contribute to the matter’s essence, nor is a necessary condition for its existence. But (...) sometimes Aristotle takes matter as a constituent element the existence of which depends on the whole thing it is the matter of. These different approaches to matter seem to suggest an inconsistent theory of matter. However, I argue that, quite to the contrary, Aristotle has a consistent theory about matter. One of my main points is to distinguish contexts in which Aristotle is indeed talking about matter in general from contexts in which he uses the term “matter” to refer to a given thing that was previously taken as matter and to talk about that thing not qua matter, but qua the thing it is. (shrink)

One of the most fruitful applications of substructural logics stems from their capacity to deal with self-referential paradoxes, especially truth-theoretic paradoxes. Both the structural rules of contraction and the rule of cut play a crucial role in typical paradoxical arguments. In this paper I address a number of difficulties affecting noncontractive approaches to paradox that have been discussed in the recent literature. The situation was roughly this: if you decide to go substructural, the nontransitive approach to truth offers a lot (...) of benefits that are not available in the noncontractive account. I sketch a noncontractive theory of truth that has these benefits. In particular, it has both a proof- and a model-theoretic presentation, it can be extended to a first-order language, and it retains every classically valid inference. (shrink)

David Lewis criticizes an argument I put forward against mechansim on the grounds that I fail to distinguish between OL, Lucas's ordinary potential arithmetic output, and OML, Lucas's arithmetical output when accused of being some particular machine M; and correspondingly, between OM the ordinary potential arithmetic output of the machine M, and ONM, the arithmetic output of the machine M when accused of being a particular machine N. For any given machine, M, N, O, P, Q, R,... etc., (...) I can in principle calculate a Godel sentence for that machine - indeed infinitely many, depending on the Godel numbering scheme adopted. The Godel sentence of a particular machine can, I claim, be seen to be true, if that machine is adequate for Elementary Peano Arithmetic. Hence, if I were accused of being M, I can on that supposition see that the Godel sentence of M is true, since I am capable of Elementary Peano Arithmetic and the machine M is said to be an adequate characterization of me. (shrink)

In the literature on self-referential paradoxes one of the hardest and most challenging problems is that of revenge. This problem can take many shapes, but, typically, it besets non-classical accounts of some semantic notion, such as truth, that depend on a set of classically defined meta-theoretic concepts, like validity, consistency, and so on. A particularly troubling form of revenge that has received a lot of attention lately involves the concept of validity. The difficulty lies in that the non-classical logician cannot (...) accept her own definition of validity because it is given in a classical meta-theory. It is often suggested that this mismatch between the consequence relation of the account being espoused and the consequence relation of the meta-theory is a serious embarrassment. The main goal of the paper is to explore whether certain substructural accounts of the paradoxes can avoid this sort of embarrassment. Typically, these accounts are expressively incomplete, since they cannot assert in the object language that certain invalid arguments are in fact invalid. To overcome this difficulty I develop a novel type of hybrid proof-procedure, one that takes invalidities to be just as fundamental as validities. I prove that this proof-procedure enjoys a number of interesting properties and I analyze the prospects of applying it to languages capable of expressing self-referential statements. (shrink)

This chapter has two main sections. In the first section I briefly sketch Immanuel Kant’s moral theory as laid out in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). I explain Kant’s claim that morality must be grounded on what he calls a categorical imperative and examine his three formulations of this categorical imperative. In the second section I explain the distinction between “deontological” and “teleological” ethical theories. Kantian ethics is often presented as the paradigm example of a deontological ethical (...) theory, but I question whether Kant’s ethics should be understood as purely deontological. (shrink)

In Prior Analytics I.30, Aristotle seems too much optmistic about finding out the principles of sciences. For he seems to say that, if our empirical collection of facts in a given domain is exhaustive or sufficient, it will be easy for us to find out the explanatory principles in the domain. However, there is a distance between collecting facts and finding out the explanatory principles in a given domain. In this paper, I discuss how the key expression in the sentence (...) at 46a25 should be interpreted: “the true characteristics of things” (“τῶν ἀληθῶς ὑπαρχόντων τοῖς πράγμασιν”). I argue that, on a more accurate interpretation of the expression, Aristotle’s point would cease to look like a piece of naïve or even silly optimism. (shrink)

Bietti, Tilston and Bangerter take an evolutionary approach towards memory transmission and storytelling, arguing that storytelling plays a central role in the creation and transmission of cultural information. They suggest that storytelling is a vehicle to transmit survival‐related information that helps to avoid the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information and contributes to the maintenance of social bonds and group‐level cooperation. Furthermore, Bietti et al. argue that, going beyond storytelling’s individualist role of manipulating the audience to enhance (...) fitness of the narrator, that these adaptive functions of storytelling may well be assigned to other forms of language use besides narration (e.g., instructional discourse and argumentation). Based on this evidence, Bietti and colleagues claim that the specific adaptive function of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling collective sensemaking. (shrink)

This paper explores some aspects of Aristotle’s notion of subject for predications. I examine the argument Aristotle develops in Posterior Analytics I.22, 83a1-14. I argue that the notion advanced by Aristotle in that argument is different from the one found in his Categories, although they are far from being incompatible with each other. I also add some philological considerations to justify the Portuguese translation of “hypokeimenon” as “algo subjacente” (“underlying thing”) instead of “sujeito” (“subject”).

It is not uncommon among theorists favoring a deviant logic on account of the semantic paradoxes to subscribe to an idea that has come to be known as ‘classical recapture’. The main thought underpinning it is that non-classical logicians are justified in endorsing many instances of the classically valid principles that they reject. Classical recapture promises to yield an appealing pair of views: one can attain naivety for semantic concepts while retaining classicality in ordinary domains such as mathematics. However, Julien (...) Murzi and Lorenzo Rossi have recently suggested that revisionary approaches to truth breed revenge paradoxes when they are coupled with the thought that classical reasoning can be recaptured in certain circumstances. What’s novel about the paradoxes they put forward is that they cannot be dismissed so easily. The concepts used to generate these paradoxes—those of paradoxicality and unparadoxicality—are concepts that non-classical theorists need in order to offer a diagnosis of the truth-theoretic paradoxes. My goal in this paper is to argue that non-classical theorists can represent the concept of paradoxicality without falling prey to revenge paradoxes. In particular, I will show how to provide a formal fixed-point semantics for a language extended with a paradoxicality predicate that adequately expresses the non-classical logician’s notion of paradoxicality. (shrink)