This article explores the concept of reality and the transformation concerning the complex approach to the modes of existence based on the interrelation between diverse actants that make up our world. Considering recent ontological debates and critiques of modernity, the article argues for a shift away from ready-made suppositions about reality and the desire for simplified answers. We propose a radical idea of an actant interaction perspective grounded in Bruno Latour’s and Hartmut Rosa’s ideas of exploring an ontology embracing curiosity, (...) imagination, and the importance of making mistakes as necessary attitudes in navigating the uncontrollable nature of reality. The article emphasizes the importance of embracing a sense of liberty when comprehending and interacting with the world. It encourages us to concentrate on the strengths and connections of living organisms. (shrink)

RESUMEN El objetivo de este artículo es proponer una reinterpretación del concepto de comunidad a la luz de las transformaciones tecnológicas y de las formas de comunicación recientes, las cuales ponen la idea de lo social no como precepto teórico, sino como elemento a descubrir en los diferentes estudios planteados. Se busca una transversalización teórica de los tres autores, tomando elementos esenciales de sus obras para proponer una nueva clave interpretativa que permita tomar el concepto de comunidad no como un (...) presupuesto teórico, sino como un producto inmanente, resultado de las conexiones cotidianas que se realizan entre los sujetos de manera espontánea en el campo de lo social. ABSTRACT Taking as a starting point the objective of this article is the reinterpretation of the concept, forced by the technological and communication transformations that place the ideas of social and community, not as theoretical precepts, but as elements to discover on the studies proposed. A theoretical transversalization of the three authors will be sought, taking essential elements from their works to propose a new interpretative key that allows us to take the concept of community, not as a theoretical presupposition, but as an immanent product resulting from the daily connections made between the subjects, spontaneously, on the social field. (shrink)

Responsibility is a key concept in our moral, social, and political thinking, but it is not itself properly understood. J.R. Lucas here presents a lively, broad, and accessible discussion of responsibility in various areas of human life, from personal and sexual relations to politics.

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)

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic (...) or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin. (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)

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

Tradução para o Português de Ethica Nicomachea VI.

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)

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)

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

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

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)

Arguments have been much misunderstood. Not only has it been assumed that they must be deductive, but it has been assumed also that, although often expressed in loose and elliptical form, they must be capable, if they are valid at all, of being expressed with absolute precision, as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the action in question to be appropriate. Mathematical arguments are capable of being stated precisely, and it has long been a reproach to workers in (...) other disciplines that they do not manage to achieve equal precision in their work. The assumption is made that absolute precision is in principle available, and it is only a lack of rigour by practitioners in the non-mathematical disciplines that prevents them casting their arguments in satisfactory form, and the philosopher should, therefore, reconstruct arguments to conform with these requirements, evaluating those that do, and rejecting any that do not. (shrink)

I offer you some theories of intellectual obligations and rights (virtue Ethics): initially, RBT (a Right to Believe Truth, if something is true it follows one has a right to believe it), and, NDSM (one has no right to believe a contradiction, i.e., No right to commit Doxastic Self-Mutilation). Evidence for both below. Anthropology, Psychology, computer software, Sociology, and the neurosciences prove things about human beliefs, and History, Economics, and comparative law can provide evidence of value about theories of rights. (...) However, insofar as we have methods within Philosophy to help us formulate precise concepts of 'belief' and 'rights', methods that also help us to prove links (or absence thereof) amongst families of concepts of rights and belief, our discipline is in and of itself capable of sound reasoning about issues as puzzling as the following. Suppose a Jane who does not believe in God yet who believes she ought to so believe: Jane is undergoing doxastic moral regret (moral regret for lack of faith). We have all known such Janes and perhaps at one time or another even been one. Paradox: given RBT and NDSM, Jane as described not only does not exist, Jane cannot exist. Thus, to enrich the ways in which Philosophy need not get all its evidence from other academic disciplines, I present a brief introduction to what I call Neutral Universal Frames (NUFs). NUFs solve hard puzzles about interactions among modal concepts of belief and rights, concepts that occur in RBT, NDSM and the description of our Janes. NUFs for theories precisely articulated via any two or more modal concepts are a powerful and immensely general set of tools enabling us to define rich theories of truth ("models on frames") to test philosophical theories for internal consistency and to prove the existence of connections (or absence thereof) amongst alternative articulations of philosophical theories. NUFs thereby add to the constructive knowledge producing way Logics intersect with Philosophy of Religion. And we will soon see why Jane, be she named 'Jane' or known simply as you: cannot exist. Read on at your own risk. (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)

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.

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

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.

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)

This paper discusses the following question: why was the term “dunatos” (“possible”) employed by Aristotle as an alternative label for imperfect syllogisms in his discussion of assertoric syllogistic? My answer ascribes to Aristotle a bottom up perspective, in which he stresses what is necessary in the premise-pairs to attain target conclusions of a given form within a given figure. I argue that “dunatos” is employed by Aristotle to stress that an imperfect syllogism is always one of the possible options to (...) attain a conclusion of a given form within a given figure. I also argue that this picture sheds some light on Aristotle’s clarifications of the final clause in his definition of syllogism. (shrink)

The author, who pioneered this argument in 1961, here places it in the context of traditional discussions of the problem, and answers various criticisms that have been made.

A filosofia da natureza de Aristóteles muitas vezes é apresentada como um capítulo inteiramente ultrapassado na história do pensamento: um “finalismo antiquado”, antropocêntrico, avesso à mensuração exata das condições materiais subjacentes aos fenômenos. Essa perspectiva, no entanto, é inadequada: não atenta para o papel relevante que Aristóteles atribui à matéria na explicação dos fenômenos naturais, assim como não atina com o real significado da teleologia aristotélica. Na contra-mão dessa perspectiva apressada, procuramos mostrar que, no cerne da filosofia aristotélica da natureza, (...) entendida como uma teleologia, encontra-se a idéia de que os seres naturais definem-se por uma tendência intrínseca à auto-preservação. É por essa tendência que a forma de cada ser natural governa teleologicamente sua matéria. (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)

This paper discusses whether there is room for knowledge of causal relations between events in Aristotle's theory of science as developed in the Posterior Analytics. My focus is on Aristotle's analysis of the fourth sense of kath' hauto or per se predication.

What place do experiences of beauty have in a meaningful life? A marginal one, at best, it would seem, if one looks at the current literature in analytic philosophy. Treatments of beauty within so-called “analytic existentialism” tend to suffer from four limitations: beauty is neglected, reduced to artistic production, saddled to theology, or taken as a mere application of a broader theoretical framework. These discussions fail to engage with the rich tradition of philosophical aesthetics. In this essay, I begin by (...) responding to the contention that experiences of beauty cannot lend life meaning because they are passive. Drawing on work in philosophical aesthetics, I then argue that encounters with the beautiful count as genuinely meaning-conferring because they have features commonly taken as marks of meaningfulness. (shrink)

Este artigo investiga o Direito nos textos econômicos tardios de Marx, de 1857 em diante. O objeto derivado, portanto, apenas poderia ser a via clássica de objetivação do capitalismo. Desta investigação pudemos concluir que há em Marx duas etapas do movimento do Direito feudal inglês. No primeiro momento, temos a revogação dos restos do Direito feudal, que obstava a acumulação nascente, e a instituição de um Direito viabilizador do capitalismo, que atualiza seus pressupostos objetivos. No segundo momento, com o amadurecimento (...) do modo de produção capitalista, o funcionamento de suas leis imanentes leva a um Direito propriamente capitalista. (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)

La dignité humaine est une notion polysémique et "floue". Il est donc important de comprendre sa construction juridique afin de mesurer les enjeux philosophico-politiques de son usage et son rapport avec les droits de l'homme. La pensée de Michel Foucault est ici utilisée comme méthode d'approche de cette notion. Il est question ici de repérer parmi les documents juridiques, philosophiques, médiatiques, etc., le sens possible de cette notion dans ces différents contextes en nous référant à l'usage régulier qui en est (...) fait dans le monde juridique actuel. (shrink)

IG VII, 3206 is an inscription published long ago, recording a dedication made at Orchomenos by Boeotian cavalrymen after they returned from Alexander the Great’s expedition. There was no new edition of the text since its first publication by P. Foucart in 1879. The present article, based on a squeeze of the inscription made by P. Roesch in the seventies, aims at proposing new readings on a number of points. A prosopographical study allows us to note, as it had already (...) been seen, that the horsemen do not all come from Orchomenos, but rather from a wider geographical area concentrated to the north of Lake Copais. This observation gives way to a new hypothesis on the division of the Boeotian koinon into districts in the late 4th century BC: indeed, a similar text from Thespiai attests to the dispatch of a second Boeotian squadron in the expedition of Alexander the Great. The rest of Boeotia was probably able to provide two additional squadrons, making a total of four squadron, which is the attested size of a Boeotian hipparchy in the Hellenistic period. The text thus offers an insight into the state of the Boeotian Confederacy during the poorly known period in between the destruction of Thebes in 335 BC and the division into seven districts known from ca. 287 BC onward. (shrink)

Nos proponemos en este trabajo aportar nuevos argumentos en favor de una identificación entre los portadores de objetos de la alegoría de la caverna caracterizados por Sócrates en República y los sofistas caracterizados por el Extranjero en el diálogo Sofista. Enfocaremos nuestra atención en una serie de términos presentes en sendas obras, lo que nos permitirá reconocer dos tendencias compartidas por aquellos agentes: la de la teatralidad y la de la exterioridad de sus quehaceres. In this paper, we aim to (...) propose new arguments in favor of an identification between the carriers of objects in the Allegory of the Cave, as characterized by Socrates in Republic, and the Sophists, specifically those characterized in the Sophist dialogue. We will focus our attention on a series of terms present in the said works, which will allow us to recognize two tendencies shared by carriers and sophists: the theatricality and the external condition of their tasks. (shrink)

El texto aquí presentado tiene el propósito de poner en diálogo la filosofía de Friedrich Schelling, específicamente las tres versiones de Las edades del mundo (1811, 1813, 1815), con el trabajo de Gilles Deleuze: Diferencia y repetición (1968) alrededor de los conceptos de disyunción y Diferencia. Su tarea escala en una doble evaluación complementaria. En principio, pone en conexión el concepto de síntesis disyuntiva de Deleuze con la doctrina de las potencias de Schelling. Posteriormente, a partir de entender la propia (...) disyunción schelling- niana, veremos cómo actuaría de manera implicatoria sobre las formulaciones de la ontología univocista del propio Deleuze; tensando conceptos como el de eterno retorno e intensidad, para argumentar una comparación entre los dos textos escogidos. (shrink)

Esta investigación indaga sobre el procesamiento de la contabilidad nominal. De hecho, añade más evidencia a favor de una posible influencia del número semántico en el procesamiento de los sustantivos incontables en cuatro pacientes diagnosticadas con afasia de Broca, siendo su lengua materna es el inglés. Esto sugiere que el procesamiento de estos sustantivos sería un híbrido tanto sintáctico como semántico. Además, corrobora al igual que estudios previos, un déficit específico en la gramática de los sustantivos incontables.

We often effortlessly take the perceptual perspective of others: we represent some aspect of the environment that others currently perceive. However, taking someone's perspective can interfere with one's perceptual processing: another person's gaze can spontaneously affect our ability to detect stimuli in a scene. But it is still unclear whether our cognitive evaluation of those judgements is also affected. In this study, we investigated whether social perspective-taking can influence participants' metacognitive judgements about their perceptual responses. Participants performed a contrast detection (...) task with a task-irrelevant avatar oriented either congruently or incongruently to the stimulus location. By “blindfolding” the avatar, we tested the influence of social perspective-taking versus domain-general directional orienting. Participants had higher accuracy and perceptual sensitivity with a congruent avatar regardless of the blindfold, suggesting a directional cueing effect. However, their metacognitive efficiency was modulated only by the congruency of a seeing avatar. These results suggest that perceptual metacognitive ability can be socially enhanced by sharing perception of the same objects with others. (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)

Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice: faster, lower-levelcoordination processesof behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at timescale t1; mid-rangecollaborative (...) processeswhich re-evoke past experiences in groups, unfolding at timescale t2; cooperative processesinvolved in the transmission of memories over longer periods occurring at timescale t3; and cultural processesand practices operating within distributed socio-cognitive networks over evolutionary and historical timeframes, unfolding at timescale t4. In this paper we survey studies of how the processes operating across these overlapping and complementary timescales constitute joint remembering in social interactions. We describe coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture as complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which we consider as a complex phenomenon unfolding over multiple timescales. (shrink)