I discuss the methodological passage in the begin- ning of Ethica Eudemia I.6 (1216b26-35), which has received attention in connection with Aristotle’s notion of dialectic and his methodology in Ethics. My central focus is not to discuss whether Aristotle is prescribing and using what has been called the method of endoxa. I will focus on how this passage coheres with the remaining parts of the same chapter, which also are advancing methodological remarks. My claim is that the meth- od of (...) Ethica Eudemia I.6 is in agreement with many features of Aristotle’s theory of explanation as presented in the Posterior Analytics: Aristotle’s main concern is a warning against misuses of explanatory arguments. (shrink)

O presente trabalho pretende ler o fenômeno da crise da jurisdição e alguns de seus corolários, em especial na seara de proteção ambiental, à luz do pensamento de Hannah Arendt. Para tanto, busca estabelecer paralelos entre as reflexões jurídicas, mormente assentadas na crítica do paradigma racionalista e da “consumerização” do Direito, e as meditações arendtianas. Sinaliza a necessidade de paradigma capaz de lançar luzes a um Direito igualmente exortado a responsabilizar-se pelo meio ambiente.

Norm theory (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) described a tendency for people to associate stronger regret with a negative outcome when it is a result of an exception (abnormal behavior) compared to when it is a result of routine (normal behavior). In two pre-registered studies, we conducted a replication and extension of three classic experiments on past behavior exception/routine contrasts (N = 684). We successfully replicated Kahneman and Miller’s (1986) experiments with the classic hitchhiker-scenario (Part 1) and car accident-scenario (Part 2). (...) In both cases, participants examined negative outcomes and tended to indicate a protagonist who deviated from own past behavior as more regretful than another who followed routine. Pre-registered extensions also showed effects for ratings of social norms, negative affect, and perceived luck. We did not find support for the Miller and McFarland (1986) experiment robbery scenario (Part 3) using a compensation measure, in that compensation to a victim of a robbery was not significantly different comparing exceptional and routine circumstances. However, a pre-registered extension showed that robbery under exceptional circumstances was regretted more than robbery under routine circumstances. We discuss implications for current and future research. (shrink)

Talvez “redescobrimento” seja uma caracterização adequada para designar o _status_ do movimento neokantiano atualmente. Se, por um lado, o neokantismo tem recebido uma maior atenção em diversos lugares da Europa, América do norte, Ásia, e em alguns países da América Latina, por outro, na ainda jovem cultura filosófica brasileira, o estudo desse importante e decisivo movimento é algo atípico dentro de nossas instituições de ensino, para dizer o mínimo. De fato, a quantidade de trabalhos acadêmicos, artigos e livros sobre as (...) filosofias de autores como Cassirer, Windelband, Cohen, Lask, Natorp, Rickert e tantos outros que fizeram parte desse plural movimento filosófico está muito aquém do que eles realmente merecem. Sem dúvidas, esse “acerto de contas” com tais personagens seria uma tarefa muito mais árdua se não tivéssemos à nossa disposição os _Estudos_ _Neokantianos_, do Professor Mario Ariel González Porta. (shrink)

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

Nosso artigo irá avaliar a contribuição de uma teoria intensional para projetos de filosofia da ciência. Esperamos explorar o conceito de intensão, que fez parte da polêmica semântica do século XX, para discutir a natureza dos enunciados da ciência e suas diferenças de profundidade. Optamos por dar a seguinte forma à argumentação: almejamos apresentar indícios para a plausibilidade da tese de que as intensões contribuem para marcar diferenças de conteúdo preditivo das proposições. Argumentaremos que essas diferenças falham em ser avaliadas (...) extensionalmente. Sugerimos explorar a diferença entre intensões carnapianas (Carnap 1891-1970) e millianas (Stuart Mill 1806-1873). A linha de contraste será traçada a partir dos problemas para os quais os autores elaboraram seu conceito: as primeiras para ampliar o universo extensional da interpretação com casos possíveis mapeados por um modelo (as quais chamaremos de extensionalidade estendida), e as segundas para resolver problemas de profundidade teórica, entendidos como questões de projeção e predição. A sequência do artigo avalia o desafio de Quine à concepção carnapiana de intensão, e explora a seguinte opção: a de que uma versão profunda (milliana) do conceito de intensão e analiticidade não seria alvo da crítica de Quine. Passamos, por fim, por um exame de possíveis alinhamentos e alianças com o racionalismo crítico recente (David Miller, J. Watkins), para concluir que o universo da filosofia da ciência está aberto a discutir a contribuição de uma noção não-extensional de significação. (shrink)

This short paper focuses on Kripke's paper on truth from 1975. It is 1. a historiographical commentary, 2. an argument about the advantages of the theory, and 3. an interpretation of its philosophical meaning. 1. Kripke presents a diagnosis of semantic paradoxes based on their similarity with ungrounded sentences. Based on Kleene's three-value logic, he then shows that it is possible to find fixed points in which the assertion of an unsubstantiated (non-paradoxical) sentence can sustain a cumulative distance with its (...) anti-extension. 2. We argue that Kripke's paper has the advantage of explaining risk in truth assessments. It provides a framework to solve problems of languages that have their truth predicate. Although compatible with Tarski's, this solution more faithfully paints the speculative and revisionist representation of assignments of truth. It exhibits the conditions of stable risk assertions (whose fixed point accumulates semantic value in a single direction) and distinguishes it from irrational assertions, which, as dogmas, base their risk on arbitrary points and provide an unstable basis for truth assertions. (shrink)

We argue that Russell’s treatment of propositions containing non-existent denotations is the prelude of a strategy for discerning the predictive content of any proposition with descriptions (and incomplete symbols), insofar as its indeterminacy is classifiable as a possible extension. We argue, further, that Russell’s theory of propositional functions is dedicated to explaining the discernibility of hypothetical propositions, through representing (what we call) the superextension of assertoric modal propositions. The indeterminacy of the truth of hypothetical propositions is thus paired with a (...) second- order classification condition, expressing its conjectural content as the projected scope of instantiation of a propositional function; which in turn is the superextension of a modal predicate. Russell’s theory is his non-pragmatic answer to the problem of assertability in unstable and uncertain conditions. It involves a sophisticated thesis about the discernibility of complex contents, such as those represented by analogical and approximate denotations (descriptions, fictions, etc.), which classify more than one possibility of instantiation in different modal and intensional contexts. We will conclude this article by testing the assumption that Russell’s theory favors a coherentist theory, seeing that as it admits assertability conditions that are super-mapped in a system, or that derive from different orders of referential layers. (shrink)

Neste artigo, discutiremos, a partir do texto de Chalmers, O Enigma da Experiência Consciente, e do de Place, É a Consciência um Processo Cerebral?, em que medida o assim chamado por Chalmers de “o problema difícil da consciência” estaria vinculado ou mesmo confundir-se-ia com um ou mais problemas que, na verdade, teriam sua origem na ontologia, tais como “O que significa dizer que algo é?”, ou, ainda, “O que significa dizer que uma coisa é outra coisa?”. Nesse sentido buscaremos desenvolver (...) a hipótese de que, por trás de muitas das dificuldades em torno do “problema difícil da consciência” estariam certos pressupostos ontológicos, cuja reformulação ou reconsideração poderiam abrir novos rumos para a reflexão sobre a consciência e a sua relação com os processos cerebrais. Em poucas palavras, discutiremos em que medida uma certa ‘virada ontológica’ que possivelmente, recorreria a uma ambivalência inerente à própria ontologia, poderia contribuir para avançar na compreensão sobre o que é a consciência. (shrink)

The Norrington Table is scotched, but not killed. It still appears each year in a national daily, having been compiled by an enterprising graduate with more need for money than time. Some people argue that this shows the futility of trying to suppress the table. But that is not so. In a free society it is open to anyone to obtain information and publish his results. There are many things that people might like to know about colleges. Of greater interest (...) to many than schools results would be the average earnings of graduates of each college five years after going down: that would enable people to pick the best college for repaying student loans, and for enjoying the fruits of worldly success. An enterprising graduate with nothing better to do might go through the university telephone directory, and work out the Ms-ratio for each college and department: no doubt the Daily Telegraph would pay good money for a list of those parts of Oxford that were entirely Ms-free. What is important is not what other people say, but what we say, or seem to endorse its being said, about us. Once the Norrington table appeared to have our imprimatur, it suggested that we set too much score by schools results, and instead of regarding final examinations as a necessary evil, bad, but less bad than any available alternative, we reckoned that getting a good result in schools was the chief.. (shrink)

Information and communication technology is changing many aspects ofhuman endeavour and existence. This is beyond dispute for most. Whatare contested are the social and ethical implications of thesechanges. Possible sources of these disputes are the multiple ways inwhich one can conceptualize and interpret the informationtechnology/society interrelationship. Each of these ways ofconceptualization and interpretation enables one to see theinformation technology/society relationship differently and thereforeconstrue its social and ethical implications in a different manner. Atthe center of this technology/society interrelationship we find manycomplex (...) questions about the nature of the human, the technical,agency, autonomy, freedom and much more. This is indeed a vastintellectual landscape, which can obviously not be explored here inits fullness. This entry is about just one particular perspective onthis landscape. It is primarily concerned with the phenomenologicalapproach to interpreting information technology and its social andethical implications. It should be noted from the start that there isnot a unified phenomenological tradition or approach to informationtechnology in particular, or other phenomena more generally. Thephenomenological tradition consists of many different approaches thatshare certain characteristics but not all. We may however suggest, with Don Ihde,that they all accept that “phenomenology investigates theconditions of what makes things appear as such [as that which we takethem to be].” Differently stated, phenomenology suggests thatthere is a co-constitutive relationship between us and the phenomenawe encounter in our engagement with the world. In this sensephenomenologists would suggest that to understand thetechnology/society relationship we need to reveal how theyco-constitute each other—i.e. draw on each other for theirongoing meaning and sense. We will elaborate more precisely what thismeans in section 2 below. However, in order to understand the distinctiveness of thephenomenological approach other possible ways of interpreting thistechnology/society relationship will also be outlined brieflybelow., It can be said that information technology has become in a very realsense ubiquitous. Most everyday technologies such as elevators,automobiles, microwaves, watches, and so forth depend onmicroprocessors for their ongoing operation. Most organizations andinstitutions have become reliant on their information technologyinfrastructure to a lesser or greater degree. Indeed informationtechnology is seen by many as a cost-efficient way to solve amultitude of problems facing our complex contemporary society. One canalmost say that information technology has become construed as thedefault technology for solving a whole raft of technical and socialproblems such as health provision, security, governance, etc. Onecould also argue that it has become synonymous with society’sview of modernization and progress. For most it seems obvious thatinformation technology has made it possible for humans to continue toconstruct increasingly complex systems of coordination and socialordering—systems without which contemporary society would not beable to exist in its present form. To say the least, we, ascontemporary human beings, have our manner of being made possiblethrough a rather comprehensive entanglement with information andcommunication technology. Indeed, the economic, organizational andsocial benefit of information technology is not widely disputed. Thedispute is more often about the way information technology is changingor transforming the social domain, and in particular, the ethicaldomain. This dispute is largely centered around different ways ofconceptualizing and interpreting the nature of our entanglement withinformation technology. This debate is not merely an academic debateabout different and competing theoretical ‘models.’Rather, these different ways of conceptualizing it is central to ourunderstanding of how we go about managing our increasingly entangledrelationship with information technology. (shrink)

This is a book of political theory about personal autonomy: its nature, its importance, and its problems. Swaine offers solutions for the defects of personal autonomy, arguing for ethical autonomy, a kind of self-rule that is modified by moral character.

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)

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)

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.

I discuss in this paper the six requirements Aristotle advances at Posterior Analytics A-2, 71b20-33, for the premisses of a scientific demonstration. I argue that the six requirements give no support for an intepretation in terms of “axiomatization”. Quite on the contrary, the six requirements can be consistently understood in a very different picture, according to which the most basic feature of a scientific demonstration is to explain a given proposition by its appropriate cause.

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)

Proclus, head of the Philosophy School at Athens for fifty years, was one of the leading philosophical figures in Late Antiquity. Lucas Siorvanes here introduces Proclus to English-language readers, discussing his metaphysics and theory of knowledge and focusing in particular on his Neo-Platonism. Proclus lived in the turbulent fifth century A.D., a time of struggles among Christians, Jews, and pagans, the invasion of Attila the Hun, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the rise of the Eastern Roman (...) Empire in Byzantium. While Late Antiquity has been regarded as a time of superstition and forbiddingly complex philosophies, recent scholarship has shown it to be full of cultural and intellectual vigor. During Proclus's tenure as head of the Philosophy School, he systematized Neo-Platonism as the summit of ancient Greek thought, brought it to its peak of influence, and became responsible for the form in which it was transmitted to the Byzantine, Western European, and Islamic civilizations. Siorvanes's extensive original research presents Proclus as much more than just a metaphysician. He surveys all of Proclus's philosophical interests—including religion, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and poetry—revealing the philosopher's central concern with the problems of being and knowledge and relating the ideas of Proclus to those of such other major thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy. To help the newcomer, Siorvanes supplies more than 200 quotations from Proclus's works. He also traces the impact of Proclus's Neo-Platonism across cultures, religions, and centuries, in such diverse areas as Christian and Islamic theologies, Renaissance art, Kepler's astronomy, Romantic poetry, Emerson's thought, modern philosophy and science, and current popular phrases. (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)

My object is Aristotle's discussion of principle of non-contradiction in the first stretch of Metaphysics IV.4. My main focus rests on the connections between Aristotle's discussion of the principle and some key notions of his (explicit or implied) semantics.

L’article propose de déduire de l’analyse géohistorique des patrimonialisations polarisées par le centre historique de Bologne (Italie) les logiques successives et simultanées qui accompagnent l’évolution temporelle du fait patrimonial, et ainsi définir ce que nous rendons par le néologisme de « pluripatrimonialisation ». Pour cela, nous menons une étude comparative des patrimonialisations architecturales et urbanistiques de ce territoire à partir des sites à portiques inscrits par l’Unesco au Patrimoine mondial en juillet 2021. Ce corpus est en effet l’occasion pour les (...) acteurs locaux de mettre en valeur une forme patrimoniale typique et diffuse à l’échelle de la commune de Bologne, qui s’inscrit dans l’histoire patrimoniale locale. Sa définition suppose qu’ils se confrontent à la fois aux représentations exogènes dans un contexte de mondialisation culturelle (Gravari-Barbas, 2012) et à la sémiogenèse des corpus de biens nationaux et municipaux existants comme héritage et production... (shrink)

The field of language evolution has recently made Gricean pragmatics central to its task, particularly within comparative studies between human and non-human primate communication. The standard model of Gricean communication requires a set of complex cognitive abilities, such as belief attribution and understanding nested higher-order mental states. On this model, non-human primate communication is then of a radically different kind to ours. Moreover, the cognitive demands in the standard view are also too high for human infants, who nevertheless do engage (...) in communication. In this paper I critically assess the standard view and contrast it with an alternative, minimal model of Gricean communication recently advanced by Richard Moore. I then raise two objections to the minimal model. The upshot is that this model is conceptually unstable and fails to constitute a suitable alternative as a middle ground between full-fledged human communication and simpler forms of non-human animal communication. (shrink)

Public participation in scientific research has gained prominence in many scientific fields, but the theory of participatory research is still limited. In this paper, we suggest that the divergence of values and goals between academic researchers and public participants in research is key to analyzing the different forms this research takes. We examine two existing characterizations of participatory research: one in terms of public participants' role in the research, the other in terms of the virtues of the research. In our (...) view, each of these captures an important feature of participatory research but is, on its own, limited in what features it takes into account. We introduce an expanded conception of norms of collaboration that extends to both academic researchers and public participants. We suggest that satisfying these norms requires consideration of the two groups' possibly divergent values and goals, and that a broad characterization of participatory research that starts from participants' values and goals can motivate both public participants’ role in the research and the virtues of the research. The resulting framework clarifies the similarities and differences among participatory projects and can help guide the responsible design of such projects. (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.

This volume begins with important critical, comparative, and historical assessments of the contemporary problems in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, social thought, and philosophy of religion, of history, and ...

Does the rise of artificial intelligence pose a threat to human sources of meaning? While much ink has been spilled on how AI could undercut meaningful human work, John Danaher has raised the stakes by claiming that AI could “sever” human beings from non-work-related sources of meaning—specifically, those related to intellectual and moral goods. Against this view, I argue that his suggestion that AI poses a threat to these areas of meaningful activity is overstated. Self-transformative activities pose a hard limit (...) to AI’s impingement on meaningful human activities. Contra Danaher, I suggest that a wider range of sources for meaning will continue to exist in a world dominated by AI. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn’s relativistic position is usually expounded in terms of its subjectivist and irrationalist consequences and, accordingly, as a contribution to anti-scientificism. This paper explains his pluralism in semantics and ontology and shows in it a kind of relativism from which those consequences do not follow. It is also argued that, despite that, this version does not converge to empiricism or scientific realism.

We argue that the recent debate over the meaning and identification of content has led to a shift in the theoretical circumstances that favored Frege’s divergence from Kant. Quine’s critique of the theoretical distinction of intensional identities removed the certainty that we can distinguish necessary from accidental identifications of content. The decline of the stability of language as a central object for the study of recognizable and predetermined attributes of meaningful information marks the end of the era of philosophical optimism (...) about the superiority of language analysis over psychologism and leads to a resurgence of philosophical emphasis on the study of mind and cognition. The extent of this shift is such that the central discrepancy between Frege's formal methodology of second-order quantification and Kant's synthetic theory of content identification has lost its significance. With the removal of these circumstances and the erosion of this discrepancy, we can now perceive the aspects in which Frege's theory is consistent with, rather than in direct opposition to, the cognitive perspective that Kant himself endorses. These aspects have always been present, but under unfavorable conditions they have been suppressed or disregarded. (shrink)

This article illustrates the ways in which visual representations construct the meanings of norms governing the spaces we commonly inhabit. I argue that norms regulating public spaces such as streets, parks, plazas, and beaches arise within the process of conceiving tourist representations of space that benefit hegemonic groups in society. My argument is empirically grounded on evidence from a case study on public space regulation in Acapulco, Mexico. By means of a semiotic analysis of tourist materials such as maps and (...) postcards, I show that images related to tourism represent urban space in a way that includes some elements and excludes others. By doing so, they portray a very specific image of the city and its public spaces. Because representations of space are performed upon the entire society, the imagery reproduced by tourist materials is part of the expectations that surround social actors’ actions. This is one of the mechanisms through which the tourism industry influences the regulation of public spaces. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to systematically reconstruct Theodor Adorno’s account of the relationship between the processes of authoritarian subject formation and the processes of political formation of the democratic common will. Undertaking a reading that brings Adorno into dialogue with contemporary philosophical perspectives, the paper asks the question of whether it is possible to think of a “democratic We” in nihilistic times. In order to achieve this aim, I will analyze in reverse the modifications that the concept of narcissism (...) has undergone, from Adorno’s use of it to account for the symbolic obstacles to the formation of democratic subjectivities after the Holocaust, to the initial formulations of Freudian psychoanalysis. Finally, I will attempt to outline an affirmative answer to the initial question, formulating the potentials and merits of what I will call a politics of negativity. (shrink)

Space, Time and Causality An Essay in Natural Philosophy.

I discuss the notion of education or educatedness (paideia) involved in the ‘educated human being’ (pepaideumenos), which Aristotle presents at the beginning of his Parts of Animals and a few other passages. The competence of educated human beings makes them able to evaluate some aspects of the explanations in a given domain without having a determinate knowledge about the specific subject-matter in that domain. I examine how such a competence is possible and how it is related to other critical abilities (...) which Aristotle usually ascribes to the science of being qua being. Discuto a noção de educação ou cultura (paideia) envolvida na figura do ser humano cultivado (pepaideumenos), que Aristóteles apresenta no início do tratado As Partes dos Animais e em algumas outras passagens. A competência do ser humano cultivado o habilita a avaliar certo aspecto das explicações propostas em um dado domínio, sem requerer dele um conhecimento determinado sobre o assunto específico do mesmo domínio. Examino de que modo essa competência é possível e como ela se articula a outras habilidades críticas que Aristóteles geralmente associa à ciência do ser enquanto ser. (shrink)

Our main goal is to investigate whether the infinitary rules for the quantifiers endorsed by Elia Zardini in a recent paper are plausible. First, we will argue that they are problematic in several ways, especially due to their infinitary features. Secondly, we will show that even if these worries are somehow dealt with, there is another serious issue with them. They produce a truth-theoretic paradox that does not involve the structural rules of contraction.

Neste trabalho discuto a natureza e a estrutura de análise da ignorância proposicional. Meu objetivo é de apontar que, em primeiro lugar, diferentemente de como ao menos duas das principais concepções da epistemologia da ignorância têm pressuposto, a análise da ignorância proposicional não se reduz a estrutura “S é ignorante que P” ou variantes semelhantes a esta estrutura. Ao lerem a ignorância proposicional reduzida em termos de “S é ignorante que P”, essas concepções não fazem a melhor análise da ignorância (...) proposicional. Isto porque, por um lado, geram um problema que se refere a uma possibilidade pouco trabalhada. Trata-se da possibilidade da ignorância sobre proposições falsas e o problema, como será mostrado, é que nessa redução há boas razões tanto para afirmar como para negar essa possibilidade. Isso se constitui, no mínimo, como uma tensão teórica relevante que pode comprometer essas concepções e as análises realizadas a partir delas. Por outro lado, essa redução exclui ao menos um sentido geral e não necessariamente factivo de ignorância proposicional, o que nos priva de uma análise mais adequada da ignorância e de outros temas relacionados. Tendo esse problema e os seus desdobramentos em vista, apontarei, em segundo lugar, para uma hipótese que tem o potencial de dissolvê-lo a partir da reformulação de como compreendemos a ignorância proposicional, herdando as vantagens das razões a favor e das razões contra a possibilidade da ignorância sobre proposições falsas e superando as objeções levantadas contra elas. (shrink)

In the face of enduring environmental decline, ecologists are continuously exploring new ways to improve the relevance of their research and address nature conservation issues. Hoping for more relevant solutions than former species-centered conservation, some ecologists have mapped ecosystems and the services they deliver to human societies. Maps offer crucial, but understudied, relevance-making tools. By proposing a relational conceptualisation of relevance, I demonstrate that maps can make issues simultaneously relevant and irrelevant for conservation. In two mapping projects conducted at the (...) European Union level by the Working Group Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services and at the French regional scale by the Laboratoire d’Écologie Alpine, I investigate how the (ir)relevance of ecosystem services maps is enacted through different modes. I successively show that: ecologists employed maps to re-orient their research toward social issues, but were constrained by the available quantified data (mode A); they used maps to implement a biopolitical approach and decide which ecosystems to protect, yet grappled with the imprecision of maps (mode B); and they engaged stakeholders in map development, but had to make excessive adjustments to align with their demands (mode C). I conclude by arguing that ecosystem services maps exemplify an automation of relevance, where relevance is more conditioned by technical feasibility than by the conceptualisation of solutions to conservation issues. Ultimately, the article contributes to the relevance scholarship by advancing the concept of irrelevance, operationalising the study of modes of relevance, and demonstrating that relevance is an inherently relational process. (shrink)

This paper is my first effort to revaluate the disagreement between two central texts for Aristotle's the conception of ousia: Categories and Metaphysics VII. Scholars have taken chapter Zeta-3 as a payment of the debt with the Categories, so that the hylomorphic analysis of the composite substance would require a revision of the subject-criterion, now improved by the addition of the “a this” and “separate” criterion. This paper, however, downgrades the importance of the Categories for understanding Aristotle's Metaphysics Z. The (...) two texts are dealing with different arguments and are not incompatible with one another. I myself consider this paper somehow obsolete, for I have returned to the same subject more than once: in my 2003 paper on Z-3 and, most importantly, on my Book 'As Noções Aristotélicas de Substância e Essência' (2008). (shrink)

A common idea about assessing meaning in life is that one draws up a list of those various positive values that one has achieved and subtracts from it one's negative deeds in life. The resulting balance is the meaningfulness of one's existence. I call this the ledger theory. Drawing on the work of Raimond Gaita and Julian Barnes's novel The Sense of an Ending, I argue for a phenomenology of remorse that gives us reason to reject the ledger theory. Even (...) those agents whose lives have been exceptionally meaningful in some respects may remain haunted by their past. Certain sorts of misdeeds – those that involve significant, irreparable damage – leave life marred in such a way that the negative remains, even in the face of all the meaningful deeds of life. (shrink)

Although the use of military force for humanitarian ends seems utterly divorced from the use of such force to combat terrorism, both uses answer to similar descriptions. Both appear to encourage nations that are not necessarily themselves under attack to set aside the reigning conventions of national sovereignty and territorial integrity for the overriding purposes of international law enforcement and protection of vulnerable noncombatants. Both involve offensive rather than purely defensive uses of military force. Both answer to criteria of justification (...) that can be derived more readily from the normative moral principles of the classical just war tradition than from purely descriptive revisions of the 'legalist paradigm' in international relations, because the latter is deeply wedded by precedent to notions of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and a purely defensive use of military force. Most significantly, the justification for both kinds of military action depends essentially upon a notion of 'the international community' that is inchoate and urgently in need of rigorous reformulation. In this paper, I attempt to formulate criteria for the justifiable use of military force for these non-defensive purposes, with attention to the nuances of internationalism that several of the resulting criteria entail. Challenges to the de facto role of the United Nations as the sole authoritative representative of this community, and alternatives to its authority in legitimating the use of military force for purposes of international law enforcement, are considered. (shrink)