Research has found that both cisgender and transgender androphilic males (i.e., males sexually attracted to and aroused by other adult males) have female-typical occupational preferences when compared with gynephilic males (i.e., males sexually attracted to and aroused by adult females). Moreover, whereas cisgender androphilic males’ occupational preferences tend to be intermediate between those of gynephilic men and androphilic women, transgender androphilic males tend to have occupational preferences that are more similar to androphilic women. No study has directly compared both types (...) of androphilic males within the same culture. The present study investigated occupational preference and its relation to childhood sex-atypical behavior (CSAB), among gynephilic men (_n_ = 208), androphilic women (_n_ = 138), and cisgender (_n_ = 132) and transgender (_n_ = 129) androphilic males from the Istmo region of Oaxaca, Mexico, where androphilic males are recognized as third gender, _muxes_. The study found large sex differences in occupational preferences (_d_ = 2.80). Furthermore, both cisgender _muxe nguiiu_ (_d_ = 2.36) and transgender _muxe gunaa_ (_d_ = 3.44) reported having more sex-atypical occupational preferences compared with men. However, _muxe gunaa_ reported higher female-typical occupational preferences than women (_d_ = 0.59) and _muxe nguiiu_ (_d_ = 0.57), whereas _muxe nguiiu_ and women did not differ (_d_ = 0.08). These findings are consistent with the conclusion that sex-atypical occupational preferences are a cross-culturally universal aspect of male androphilia. Finally, CSAB was associated with sex-atypical occupational preferences among all participants. These findings suggest that a developmental continuity exists between childhood and adulthood sex-atypicality. (shrink)

Large-scale public datasets are vital for driving the progress of abstractive summarization, especially in law, where documents have highly specialized jargon. However, the available resources are English-centered, limiting research advancements in other languages. This paper introducesLAWSUIT, a collection of 14K Italian legal verdicts with expert-authored abstractive maxims drawn from the Constitutional Court of the Italian Republic.LAWSUITpresents an arduous task with lengthy source texts and evenly distributed salient content. We offer extensive experiments with sequence-to-sequence and segmentation-based approaches, revealing that the (...) latter achieve better results in full and few-shot settings. We openly releaseLAWSUITto foster the development and automation of real-world legal applications. (shrink)

While courtroom examinations are often recognized as a distinct speech-exchange system, little is known about how participants do an examination beyond its unique turn-taking system. This article attempts to shed some light on this issue by studying the question design during the direct examination in an American criminal court case using Conversation Analysis. It shows that attorneys use different question forms compared to casual conversation: declaratives are far less prevalent and questions are often designed as requests for action. In (...) addition, attorneys make use of forms that are not found in other types of interaction, such as the tag correct. The way in which attorneys design their questions additionally shows that the rules of the courtroom have procedural consequences for how the interaction is done. But these rules have to be enacted, and it is in their violation that participants bring about categories such as leading questions. (shrink)

Environmental ethics is often seen as a branch of applied ethics whose task is to offer solutions to emerging ethical dilemmas in the context of ecology. In this paper, we challenge this assumption, showing how the object of environmental ethics raises questions that go beyond that of applied ethics. We explore how the environmental issues bring up the need to inquire into the ontological status of Nature and the place of human beings in it, raising more general and far-reaching questions (...) that do not get entrapped in the mere application. In this regard, it appears that “dwelling”, in its ontological sense, is at the bottom of these questions, creating a bridge between the ontological and the practical realm. Finally, we review classical environmental ethics’ paradigms highlighting the elements that go beyond applied ethics. And so, taking into account the different environmental ethics paradigms, we have two options: reducing the scope of the discipline and exclude the models that exceed it, or reconsidering it as an environmental philosophy tout court. (shrink)

L’articolo intende mettere in luce i rapporti tra le fonti storiche del Medioevo russo e la resa cinematografica della narrazione medievale nelle poetiche di Ejzenštejn e Tarkovskij. Congelando le filmografie dei due autori sulle due rispettive pellicole che hanno raccontato il Medioevo russo, l’_Alexandr Nevskij_ di Ejzenštejn e l’_Andrej Rublёv_ di Tarkovskij, l’articolo propone un’indagine critica sulle modalità d’approccio divergenti dei due registi rispetto al materiale storiografico e l’analisi della portata storica che la narrazione del Medioevo assume in un prodotto (...) artistico cinematografico. Partendo dal pensiero di H. White sulla necessità di affiancare la forma narrativa al contenuto del lavoro storico, l’obiettivo dell’articolo è anzitutto la messa in discussione della presunta oggettività della verità storiografica, spostando l’attenzione, in un’ottica cinematografica, sui precisi processi che portano a compimento una narrazione storica _tout court_ in relazione al presente della narrazione e allo sguardo dello spettatore. _This contribution aims to highlight the relationship between the historical sources of the Russian Middle Ages and the cinematic rendering of the medieval narrative in Ejzenštejn and Tarkovskij’poetics. Focusing on two respective films that recounted the Russian Middle Ages, the _Alexandr Nevsky_ by Ejzenštejn and the _Andrej Rublёv_ by Tarkovskij, the article proposes a critical investigation into the divergent approaches of the two directors with respect to historiographical material and the analysis of the historical significance that the medieval narrative assumes in a cinematographic product. Starting from the thought of the philosophy of history’s expert H. White on the need to combine the narrative form with the content of the historical work, the objective of the contribution is primarily to question the alleged objectivity of the historiographical truth. Afterwards the focus will be on the precise processes that bring to completion an historical narrative _tout court_ in relation to the present of the narrative and the viewer’s gaze in a cinematographic perspective._. (shrink)

Resumen:La reducción de la ética ambiental a una mera aplicación de principios a priori ha llevado, según Næss, al fracaso de la disciplina. La amplia moralización en el contexto de las políticas ambientales, además, ha provocado la pérdida de un interés genuino por la casa común. En este sentido, para recuperar y refundar una filosofía ambiental tout court, para Næss es necesario volver a partir de una renovada epistemología, vinculada a una ontología profunda. El punto central de esta nueva (...) ontología es la recuperación de nuestras experiencias espontáneas en la naturaleza, que revelan que nuestras relaciones con la naturaleza son más profundas que las explicadas por las ciencias duras. Dichas experiencias se expresan a través de distintas formas culturales, que tienen, para Næss, un valor en sí. De allí que surge el imperativo ético de preservar a dichas culturas y de repensar nuevos imaginarios que vayan más allá de las principales tendencias en ética ambiental. Este artículo intentará mostrar estas conexiones (epistemológicas, ontológicas y éticas) en la ecosofía de Arne Næss, que se configura como “algo más” que un paradigma de la Environmental Ethics.Palabras clave: Næss; Filosofía ambiental; Experiencia espontánea; Culturas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT (ITA) Un’idea emerge, si sviluppa, guadagna consenso, muta, talvolta scompare per poi risorgere. Questo è anche stato il destino dell’idea di evoluzione, il cui lungo cammino viene ricostruito in questo saggio, dai Greci fino ai nostri giorni. A partire dal diciassettesimo secolo questa nozione assume sempre più rilevanza nello studio della natura. In ciascun pensatore l’idea di un’evoluzione delle specie viventi è stata accompagnata da una teoria volta a spiegare le cause e il meccanismo del mutamento. Questo saggio racconta (...) non soltanto la genesi e lo sviluppo dell’idea tout court che la natura in qualche modo si trasformi, ma anche la storia delle teorie che, assumendo come reale questa trasformazione, ne postulano una spiegazione. Particolare attenzione viene data ad alcuni aspetti spesso trascurati che hanno reso possibile il concetto di evoluzione del mondo vivente come la conosciamo adesso, di cui se ne mostra la rilevanza, già a partire dal pensiero greco. -/- ABSTRACT (ENG) An idea emerges, develops, gains consensus, evolves, sometimes disappears and then rises again. This was also the fate of the idea of evolution, whose long journey is reconstructed in this essay, from the Greeks to the present day. Since the seventeenth century, this idea has become more and more relevant in the study of nature. In each thinker the idea of an evolution of living species has been accompanied by a theory aimed at explaining the causes and the mechanism of change. This essay tells not only the genesis and development of the idea that nature somehow transforms itself, but also the history of the theories which, assuming this transformation as real, postulate an explanation. Particular emphasis is given to some often overlooked aspects that made possible the concept of evolution of the living world as we know it now, whose full relevance is shown, starting from Greek thought. Keywords: evolution, natural selection, Charles Darwin, history of ideas, history of science. (shrink)

Coherentism in epistemology has long suffered from lack of formal and quantitative explication of the notion of coherence. One might hope that probabilistic accounts of coherence such as those proposed by Lewis, Shogenji, Olsson, Fitelson, and Bovens and Hartmann will finally help solve this problem. This paper shows, however, that those accounts have a serious common problem: the problem of belief individuation. The coherence degree that each of the accounts assigns to an information set (or the verdict it gives as (...) to whether the set is coherent tout court) depends on how beliefs (or propositions) that represent the set are individuated. Indeed, logically equivalent belief sets that represent the same information set can be given drastically different degrees of coherence. This feature clashes with our natural and reasonable expectation that the coherence degree of a belief set does not change unless the believer adds essentially new information to the set or drops old information from it; or, to put it simply, that the believer cannot raise or lower the degree of coherence by purely logical reasoning. None of the accounts in question can adequately deal with coherence once logical inferences get into the picture. Toward the end of the paper, another notion of coherence that takes into account not only the contents but also the origins (or sources) of the relevant beliefs is considered. It is argued that this notion of coherence is of dubious significance, and that it does not help solve the problem of belief individuation. (shrink)

The automatic prediction of court case judgments using Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing is challenged by the variety of norms and regulations, the inherent complexity of the forensic language, and the length of legal judgments. Although state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures and Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on large-scale datasets, the underlying model reasoning is not transparent to the legal expert. This paper jointly addresses court judgment prediction and explanation by not only predicting the judgment but also providing (...) legal experts with sentence-based explanations. To boost the performance of both tasks we leverage a legal named entity recognition step, which automatically annotates documents with meaningful domain-specific entity tags and masks the corresponding fine-grained descriptions. In such a way, transformer-based architectures and Large Language Models can attend to in-domain entity-related information in the inference process while neglecting irrelevant details. Furthermore, the explainer can boost the relevance of entity-enriched sentences while limiting the diffusion of potentially sensitive information. We also explore the use of in-context learning and lightweight fine-tuning to tailor LLMs to the legal language style and the downstream prediction and explanation tasks. The results obtained on a benchmark dataset from the Indian judicial system show the superior performance of entity-aware approaches to both judgment prediction and explanation. (shrink)

For 15 years, former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky used his Penn State University perquisites to lure young and fatherless boys by offering them special access to one of the most revered football programs in the country. He repeatedly used the football locker room as a space to groom, molest, and rape his victims. In February 2001, an eye-witness alerted Penn State’s top leaders that Sandusky was caught sexually assaulting a young boy in the showers. Instead of taking swift action (...) against Sandusky, leaders began a cover-up that is considered one of the worst scandals in sports history. While public outcry has focused on the leaders’ silence, we focus on the talk that occurred within the organization by key personnel. Drawing from court documents and internal investigative reports, we examine two euphemism clusters that unfolded in the scandal. The first cluster comprises reporting euphemisms, in which personnel used coded language to report the assault up the chain of command. The second cluster comprises responding euphemisms, in which Penn State’s top leaders relied on an innocuous, but patently false, interpretation of earlier euphemisms as a decision-making framework to chart their course of action. We use this case to demonstrate how euphemistic language impairs ethical decision-making, particularly by framing meaning and visibility of acts, encouraging mindless processing of moral considerations, and providing a shield against psychological and material consequences. Further, we argue that euphemism may serve as a disguised retort to critical upward communication in organizations. (shrink)

Can static pictures depict motion and temporal properties? This is an open question that is becoming increasingly discussed in both aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Theorists working on this issue have mainly focused on static pictures of dynamic scenes and streaky images – such as futurists’ paintings or long-exposure photographs. And yet, we could ask: if there is some success in creating an illusory impression of movement in a static image - as is the case in optical illusions of (...) movement, such as Bridget Riley’s Fall (1963: Tate, London), or Kitaoka’s Rotating Snakes Illusion - is this to say that such static images depict movement? As far as I know, no one working on the depiction of motion has specifically and systematically tackled motion-based illusions nor tried to answer this question. This paper considers two cases of optical illusions of movement and concludes that one of them is involved in the depiction of movement. While the declared goal of my analysis is to answer a quite circumscribed question, it is also the occasion to tackle motion-based illusions tout court - to account for the complex visual experiences they elicit and related phenomenology. Moreover, this account has interesting consequences for theorizing depiction and pictorial experience in general. In particular, it constitutes a counterexample to resemblance theories of depiction. (shrink)

It has historically been a crime in Canada to provide assistance to someone in ending their own life, however, this paradigm was inverted in 2015 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that restrictions on this practice, within certain defined parameters, violated the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. Subsequently, recent legal and policy decisions have highlighted the issue of how to balance the rights of individuals to access MAiD with the rights of care providers to (...) exercise conscience-based objections to participation in this process. We argue that there is significant harm and ethical hazard in disregarding individual and institutional rights to conscientious objection and since measures less coercive than the threat of regulatory or economic sanctions do exist, there should be no justification for such threats in Canada’s health care systems. (shrink)

La plupart des études récentes sur le Lysis de Platon considèrent ce dialogue comme un échec philosophique. Si quelques parties du Lysis ont retenu l’at­tention des commentateurs, il en est peu qui ont essayé, dans leur analyse, de défendre l’idée que ce court texte offre un contenu philosophique construit et cohérent. Terry Penner et Christopher Rowe (P&R) relèvent ce défi dans leur commentaire philosophique de ce dialogue en affirmant qu’une analyse systéma­tique du Lysis est insuffisante e...

Automated classification of legal documents has been the subject of extensive research in recent years. However, this is still a challenging task for long documents, since it is difficult for a model to identify the most relevant information for classification. In this paper, we propose a two-stage supervised learning approach for the classification of petitions, a type of legal document that requests a court order. The proposed approach is based on a word-level encoder–decoder Seq2Seq deep neural network, such as (...) a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) or a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, and a document-level Support Vector Machine classifier. To address the challenges posed by the lengthy legal documents, the approach introduces a human-in-the-loop approach, whose task is to localize and tag relevant segments of text in the word-level training part, which dramatically reduces the dimension of the document classifier input vector. We performed experiments to validate our approach using a real-world dataset comprised of 270 intermediate petitions, which were carefully annotated by specialists from the 15th civil unit of the State of Alagoas, Brazil. Our results revealed that both BiLSTM and BERT-Convolutional Neural Networks variants achieved an accuracy of up to 95.49%, and also outperformed baseline classifiers based on the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency test vectorizer. The proposed approach is currently being utilized to automate the aforementioned justice unit, thereby increasing its efficiency in handling repetitive tasks. (shrink)

Historians have recently paid increasing attention to the role of the disputation in Italian universities and humanist circles. By contrast, the role of disputations as forms of entertainment at fifteenth-century Italian courts has been somewhat overlooked. In this article, the Milanese "scientific duel" described in Luca Pacioli's De divina proportione is taken as a vantage point for the study of the dynamics of scientific patronage and social advancement as reflected in Renaissance courtly disputes. Pacioli names Leonardo da Vinci as one (...) of the participants in the Milanese dispute. In this paper I argue that Leonardo's Paragone and Pacioli's De divina proportione are likewise the outcome of the Milanese "scientific duel." By challenging the traditional hierarchy of the arts, they both exemplify the dynamics of social and intellectual promotion of mathematicians and artists in the privileged setting of Renaissance courts, where courtly patronage could subvert the traditional disciplinary rankings. (shrink)

The Kunstkammer of the Electors of Saxony, founded in Dresden around 1560, housed one of the richest collections of tools and scientific instruments in its day. A close analysis of the optical objects in the collection in the decades around 1600 is undertaken here—in particular, their arrangement by a mathematically trained curator, Lucas Brunn, and their use in an ‘experiment’ by a distinguished visitor, Johannes Kepler. It is argued that the selection, display and use of optical objects within this (...) collection reflect a specific, playful image of optics promoted at the Saxon court.Keywords: Court collections; Optics; Instruments; Perspective; Wonder. (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)

In this article, Lucas maintains the falseness of Mechanism - the attempt to explain minds as machines - by means of Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel. Gödel’s theorem shows that in any system consistent and adequate for simple arithmetic there are formulae which cannot be proved in the system but that human minds can recognize as true; Lucas points out in his turn that Gödel’s theorem applies to machines because a machine is the concrete instantiation of a formal system: (...) therefore, for every machine consistent and able of doing simple arithmetic, there is a formula that it can’t produce as true but that we can see to be true, and so human minds and machines have to be different. Lucas considers as well in this article some possible objections to his argument: for any Gödelian formula we could, for instance, construct a machine able to produce it or we could put the Gödelian formulae that we had proved as axioms of a further machine. However - as Lucas underlines - for every of such machines we could again formulate another Gödelian formula, the Gödelian formula of these machines, that they are not able to proof but that we can recognize as true. More general arguments, such as the possibility to escape Gödelian argument by suggesting that Gödel’s theorem applies to consistent systems while we could be inconsistent ones, are moreover refuted by Lucas by maintaining that our inconsistency corresponds to occasional malfunctioning of a machine and not to his normal inconsistency; indeed, a inconsistent machine is characterized by producing any statement, on the contrary human being are selective and not disposed to assert anything. (shrink)

A strong case has been made for the role and value of mechanistic reasoning in process-oriented sciences, such as molecular biology and neuroscience. This paper shifts focus to assess the role of mechanistic reasoning in an area where it is neither obvious nor expected: population genetics. Population geneticists abstract away from the causal-mechanical details of individual organisms and, instead, use mathematics to describe population-level, statistical phenomena. This paper, first, develops a framework for the identification of mechanistic reasoning where it is (...) not obvious: mathematical and mechanistic styles of scientific reasoning. Second, it applies this framework to demonstrate that both styles are integrated in modern investigations of evolutionary biology. Characteristic of the former, applied population genetic techniques provide statistical evidence for associations between genotype, phenotype, and fitness. Characteristic of the latter, experimental interventions provide causal-mechanical evidence for associations between the very same relationships, often in the same model organisms. The upshot is a richer perspective of how evolutionary biologists build evidence for hypotheses regarding adaptive evolution and a general framework for assessing the scope of mechanistic reasoning across the sciences. (shrink)

This paper discusses some intricacies of hylomorphism in Aristotle's discussion in his Metaphysics VII.

This paper explores the perversion of reality in the context of advanced technologies, such as AI, VR, and AR, through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality and the precession of simulacra. By examining the transformative effects of these technologies on our perception of reality, with a particular focus on the usage of digital avatars, the paper highlights the blurred distinction between the real and the simulated, where the copy becomes more ‘real’ than the original. Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept (...) of hyperreality, the paper delves into the perversion of reality as individuals seek refuge in virtual pleasure paradises and embrace artificial pleasures through their digital avatars, disconnecting from genuine human experiences. The convergence of AI, VR, and AR technologies amplifies this hyperreal condition, where digital avatars mimic or surpass the depth of human relationships, challenging our understanding of what is real. In line with Baudrillard’s theory, the paper explores the objectification and commodification of reality within digital spaces, specifically examining the digital avatars’ role in the erosion of genuine human connections. It explores the implications of these avatars in terms of consent, exploitation, and loss of authenticity, echoing Baudrillard’s concerns about the distortion of reality in contemporary society. Recognizing the implications of these technologies, the paper calls for a critical reflection on their transformative power. It emphasizes the need for a nuanced understanding of the hyperreal condition and ethical responsibility in engaging with AI, VR, and AR, particularly in relation to the usage of digital avatars. By resisting the seductive allure of digital escapism and preserving genuine human connections, we can navigate the perversion of reality and cultivate empathy, compassion, and meaningful interactions that transcend the simulated experiences offered by technology. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics I into Portuguese, with a few notes, experimental glossary and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2003/4, was preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics IV and VI, with notes. The translation is preliminary and intended as a provisional teaching tool to be also used in seminars and discussions with peers in order to reach a more elaborated version.

In Posterior Analytics 71b9 12, we find Aristotle’s definition of scientific knowledge. The definiens is taken to have only two informative parts: scientific knowledge must be knowledge of the cause and its object must be necessary. However, there is also a contrast between the definiendum and a sophistic way of knowing, which is marked by the expression “kata sumbebekos”. Not much attention has been paid to this contrast. In this paper, I discuss Aristotle’s definition paying due attention to this contrast (...) and to the way it interacts with the two conditions presented in the definiens. I claim that the “necessity” condition ammounts to explanatory appropriateness of the cause. (shrink)

I discuss the argument Aristotle ascribes to Parmenides at Physics 186a23-32. I discuss (i) the reasons why Aristotle considers it as eristic and inconclusive and (i) the solution (lusis) Aristotle proposes against it.

Tradução preliminar em pré-print. A Tradução definitiva é a de 2009.

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda into Portuguese.

These are commentaries to the translation into Portuguese of Nicomachean Ethics VI, found in the same volume of Dissertatio.

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics I-III into Portuguese, with a few notes and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2007, is preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

Tradução para o Português de Ethica Nicomachea VI.

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)

I have two aims in this paper. First, I argue that, in Aristotle’s theory of the four causes, there is a basic and common feature by which all causes are causes: they all work in a triadic framework in which they explain why a given attribute holds of a given underlying thing. Secondly, I argue against a version of “compatibilism” according to which each kind of cause is complete in its own domain and does not compete with any other kind. (...) I claim that there are priority relations according to which some kinds of cause are subordinated to others, even if these relations do not hold in every cases. (shrink)

I discuss an important feature of the notion of cause in Post. An. 1. 13, 78b13–28, which has been either neglected or misunderstood. Some have treated it as if Aristotle were introducing a false principle about explanation; others have understood the point in terms of coextensiveness of cause and effect. However, none offers a full exegesis of Aristotle's tangled argument or accounts for all of the text's peculiarities. My aim is to disentangle Aristotle's steps to show that he is arguing (...) in favour of a logical requirement for a middle term's being the appropriate cause of its explanandum. Coextensiveness between the middle term and the attribute it explains is advanced as a sine qua non condition of a middle term's being an appropriate or primary cause. This condition is not restricted either to negative causes or to middle terms in second‐figure syllogisms, but ranges over all primary causes qua primary. (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)

Collective volume with papers by alumni and students from the Campinas Aristotle Group.

The day has arrived that genetic tests for educational outcomes are available to the public. Today parents and students alike can send off a sample of blood or saliva and receive a ‘genetic report’ for a range of characteristics relevant to education, including intelligence, math ability, reading ability, and educational attainment. DTC availability is compounded by a growing “precision education” initiative, which proposes the application of DNA tests in schools to tailor educational curricula to children’s genomic profiles. Here I argue (...) that these happenings are a strong signal of the geneticization of education; the process by which educational abilities and outcomes come to be examined, understood, explained, and treated as primarily genetic characteristics. I clarify what it means to geneticize education, highlight the nature and limitations of the underlying science, explore both real and potential downstream bioethical implications, and make proposals for mitigating negative impacts. (shrink)

I discuss Aristotle's treatment of essence and definition in Metaphysics VII.4. I argue that it is coherent and perfectly in accord with its broader context. His discussion in VII.4 offers, on the one hand, minimal criteria for what counts as definition and essence for whatever kind of object, but also, on the other hand, stronger criteria for a primary sort of definition and essence—and thereby it serves the interest of book VII in pointing to the explanatory power of the essence (...) of composite substances. (shrink)

Summary of my Master's Dissertation (published in the section meant for this).

Translation of Aristotle's Parts of Animals Book I into Portuguese, with full commentaries.

ABSTRACT Literature, as the art of words, presents its text in different forms and languages. Whether through its humanizing potential or, still, through its narrative quality, it reaches readers and offers them a plurality of tools to create texts, using established works as arguments. After all, literature holds within its scope narratives that are true treasures arranged as a testament for all of humanity. Thus, in this article, our goal is to analyze the literary work A verdadeira história de Chapeuzinho (...) Vermelho [The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood] (2020)1 by Agnese Baruzzi and Sandro Natalini, presented as a book-object with a keen materiality. We will seek to understand the characteristics of the work that promote literary aesthetic enjoyment, moving the work away from a didactic and moralizing perspective. To do so, we will comprehend the specificities of the verbal text, the imagery, and the materiality characteristics that pervade the work, understand the techniques, tools, and proposed interactions, as well as recognize the book’s multimodal capacity. (shrink)

This chapter argues in favour of three interrelated points. First, I argue that demonstration (as expression of scientific knowledge) is fundamentally defined as knowledge of the appropriate cause for a given explanandum: to have scientific knowledge of the explanandum is to explain it through its fully appropriate cause. Secondly, I stress that Aristotle’s notion of cause has a “triadic” structure, which fundamentally depends on the predicative formulation (or “regimentation”) of the explanandum. Thirdly, I argue that what has motivated Aristotle to (...) choose the syllogism as a demonstrative tool was precisely the fact that syllogisms are apt to express causal relations in their triadic structure. Instead of complaining against Aristotle’s preference for the syllogisms as demonstrative tools, I argue that Aristotle was fully aware of the advantages of regimenting the explanandum into a predication. One of these advantages is to abandon a purely extensional standpoint and to highlight the importance of the notion of relevancy in explanation. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the extent to which heteronomous people can be positive contributors to political deliberation. I examine the normative potential of heteronomous people as participants in public debate, and address the overall effects that inclusion of heteronomous people can provide for group deliberations. I subsequently consider empirical findings that bear upon the case I develop, and conclude that liberals ought to reconsider the importance of heteronomous people in healthy liberal democracy. This philosophical recognition lays groundwork for a (...) more morally and politically compelling version of liberalism, one that outstrips comprehensive schemes that vaunt personal autonomy as liberalism's primary normative commitment. (shrink)

Aristotle contrasts episteme and doxa through the key notions of universal and necessary. These notions have played a central role in Aristotle’s characterization of scientific knowledge in the previous chapters of APo. They are not spelled out in APo I.33, but work as a sort of reminder that packs an adequate characterization of scientific knowledge and thereby gives a highly specified context for Aristotle’s contrast between episteme and doxa. I will try to show that this context introduces a contrast in (...) terms of explanatory claims: on the one hand, episteme covers those claims which capture explanatory connections that are universal and necessary and thereby deliver scientific understanding; on the other hand, doxa covers the explanatory attempts that fail at doing so. (shrink)

Trata-se de tradução do Hípias Maior de Platão para o Português, com algumas notas de elucidação e justificação das opções.

I discuss the exact meaning of the thesis according to which the object of scientific knowledge is necessary. The thesis is expressed by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics, in his definition of scientific knowledge. The traditional interpretation understands this definition as depending on two parallel and independent requirements, the causality requirement and the necessity requirement. Against this interpretation, I try to show, through the examination of several passages that refer to the definition of scientific knowledge, that the necessity requirement specifies (...) more exactly the causality requirement: what cannot be otherwise is the explanatory relation between the explanandum and the cause by which it is what it is. (shrink)