En el presente ensayo se analizan algunos aspectos importantes de la interpretación elaborada por Henri Bergson acerca de “la risa” y el fenómeno de lo cómico en relación, principalmente, a lo social. Este aspecto, crucial a nuestro juicio, es lo que nos permite pensar dicho fenómeno más allá de la pura frontera estética, hacia los linderos siempre difíciles del ethos. Tomando en cuenta también la relación entre esta propuesta y otros aspectos del llamado “bergsonismo”, en lo que sigue afirmamos y (...) defendemos el potencial correctivo y ético de la risa dentro de la generalidad de su filosofía. (shrink)

Children and youth are typically positioned as passive subjects in learning, and when talking about working class children in particular, the common belief is that attendance at school institutions will translate into social displacement; that is, that children and young people from this economic segment who invest in the study will be able rise economically. It is in this context that recent public policies aimed at maintaining and extending the presence of children and young people in educational institutions can be (...) understood. Some of these policies aim to guarantee access by blacks and the poor to higher education, from which they have been historically excluded. This paper reports on a qualitative study that addresses the motivations that make young people from lower classes feel called to seek participation in higher education, and what are the subjective consequences of this movement. The study focused on 23 university students, beneficiaries of the Quota Law or the University for All Program, from two recognized quality higher education institutions located in Rio de Janeiro. The results demonstrate that the support of family and peers, a passion for studying per se, identification with the university as a life path, and the expectation of upward social mobility were factors that contributed to motivating young people toward higher education. As far as the university is concerned, we found that it delivers contradictory messages to young people from the lower classes. For one, entering an institution historically destined for another social class can make young people feel that they don’t belong there, which promotes uncertainties about the future. Faced with these challenges, poor young people are driven to “bet on themselves” as a way of overcoming the hardships of the present. However, it was also observed that many of these young people want to use their knowledge and university status to bring about changes in reality. It is concluded that the university in the neoliberal context can reinforce a model of individualistic subjectivation, but that, on the other hand, it can also operate to open lines of escape from this model, in instrumentalizing the poor young person for action towards the other. (shrink)

This article aims to present four case studies of the different responses to governmental measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic by supreme and constitutional courts, especially in cases of jurisdictions that have been facing democratic erosion. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic demanded immediate public policies and other political decisions from the branches of government. Executive authorities were the main actors in effecting constitutional public health norms. The expectation was that they will abide by the rule of law in fulfilling (...) their duties; that has not been the case under governments that promoted democratic erosion. The different contexts of the threats posed to the constitutional democracies led populist and illiberal leaders to opportunistically either try to—and then be contained by courts—or effectively consolidate the expansion of powers under the conditions of the pandemic. Concentrating on four jurisdictions (the USA, Hungary, El Salvador, and Brazil), the article demonstrates that courts can effectively work as bulwarks against waves of democratic erosion, especially in situations of stress, as it was the case in the global COVID-19 pandemic. This hypothesis is also proven by episodes in which courts did not sufficiently operate to curb illiberalism because they were already captured. The analyses enable classifying the court’s responses to the COVID-19 executive measures in a threefold pattern: deferential, restrictive, and of forced capitulation. (shrink)

Antônio de Castro Alves was born on 1 March 1847 on the Fazenda das Cabaceiras (Cabaceiras Farm) in the state of Bahia, and died in July 1871 in Salvador, the state capital. For this short twenty-four year span of his life he represented, as no one else in Brazil did, the myth of the Romantic poet and hero.His literary vocation became clear very early on. Coming from a well-to-do family, he studied law in Recife (the capital of Pernambuco), (...) Salvador and São Paulo. He fell in love with a Portuguese actress, Eugênia Câmara, ten years older than himself, and had the deep experience of a love affair with her that shocked the moral provincialism of contemporary Catholic monarchist Brazil. Like many writers of the period he wrote plays, and had great success with the drama Gonzaga, or the Minas Revolution, about the (abortive) attempt to free Brazil from the Portuguese yoke, which had been made in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. But it was in poetry – Espumas flutuantes (‘Floating Foam’, 1870) as well as the posthumous A cachoeira de Paulo Alfonso (‘Paulo Alfonso's Waterfall’, 1876) and Os escravos (‘The Slaves’, 1883) – that Castro Alves stood out on the country's literary scene. (shrink)

Esta entrevista tem como escopo registrar algumas das experiências e saberes de uma das maiores sociólogas do Brasil, Mary Garcia Castro. Graduada em Ciências Sociais pela Universidade Federal da Bahia, mestre em Sociologia da Cultura pela mesma instituição. Também possui mestrado em Planejamento Urbano e Regional pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro e doutorado em Sociologia pela University of Florida. Ela tem um vasto currículo marcado por atuações e publicações nacionais e internacionais. Mary Castro foi professora e (...) pesquisadora da UFBA, além de pesquisadora associada da Universidade Estadual de Campinas e da Universidade Católica de Salvador. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than harm.—Miguel (...) de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

A widespread view in philosophy claims that inner speech is closely tied to human metacognitive capacities. This so-called format view of inner speech considers that talking to oneself allows humans to gain access to their own mental states by forming metarepresentation states through the rehearsal of inner utterances (section 2). The aim of this paper is to present two problems to this view (section 3) and offer an alternative view to the connection between inner speech and metacognition (section 4). According (...) to this alternative, inner speech (meta)cognitive functions derivate from the set of commitments we mobilize in our communicative exchanges. After presenting this commitment-based approach, I address two possible objections (section 5). (shrink)

This catalogue essay is based on a series of interviews conducted by the authors with international scholars who were asked to reflect on Guattari's scattered comments concerning animism. Interviewees are: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (anthropologist, Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro), Eric Alliez (philosopher, Paris), Jean Claude Polack (psychoanalyst, Paris), Barbara Glowczewski (anthropologist, Paris), Peter Pál Pelbart (philosopher, São Paolo) Janja Rosangela Araujo (master of Capoeira Angola, and professor, Salvador de Bahia) and Jean Jacques Lebel (artist, Paris). Animism was (...) thought by Guattari in relation to a number of themes and places in excess of religion and ritual but in the context of the shattering of capitalism. (shrink)

Resumen: Una de las nociones más controvertidas dentro de las interpretaciones contemporáneas de la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar, es la de “sentido común”. Junto a éste, Kant propuso un nuevo modelo de validez normativa calificada como “ejemplar”, cuyo planteamiento resulta bastante problemático. El presente artículo propone una lectura y una interpretación de este tipo de validez, a partir de la reactualización realizada por Alessandro Ferrara, y desde el horizonte de la tradición retórica, representada por Aristóteles Con ello se (...) espera un mejor entendimiento del problema en cuestión, y al mismo tiempo, se pretende hacer mucho más comprensibles las posibilidades que Alessandro Ferrara le atribuye a esta forma de la normatividad.: One of the most controversial notions in contemporary interpretations of the Critique of judgment is that of common sense. Along with it, Kant proposed a new model of normative validity called exemplary, whose approach is quite problematic. This article proposes a reading and an interpretation of this type of validity, based on the reinterpretation carried out by Alessandro Ferrara and from the point of view of the rhetorical tradition as represented by Aristotle. It intends to achieve an improved understanding of the problem in question and, at the same time, to make much more understandable the possibilities that Alessandro Ferrara attributes to this form of normativity. (shrink)

Fast food companies like Siam Burger that participate in health awareness campaigns create a conflict of interest between the social responsibility of promoting health and the business interest of increasing sales through marketing strategies like advertising. Alternative options of raising health awareness without mitigating the involvement of fast food companies either by denying advertisements or having a third party foundation should be explored.

Esta tesis estudia el pensamiento del conservador español Juan Donoso Cortés (1809- 1853). Más precisamente, se ocupa de responder cómo resuelve el problema de la decadencia de la autoridad monárquica en Europa a partir de las revoluciones de 1848. Para abordar este objetivo general elaboramos dos objetivos específicos. El primero busca señalar las continuidades y discontinuidades de la obra donosiana, escindida generalmente en dos períodos: el juvenil, con un Donoso Cortés liberal, y el maduro, que luego de una “conversión religiosa” (...) se vuelca hacia el catolicismo reaccionario. El segundo objetivo hace foco en el concepto de dictadura, bajo la sospecha de que en esta noción reside la clave de su proyecto conservador. Con esto en mente construimos dos hipótesis. La primera afirma que nuestro autor es consciente de la imposibilidad de restituir el proyecto monárquico. La segunda, sugiere la presencia de una fórmula parcialmente decisionista como alternativa a dicho proyecto. Luego de un trabajo de lectura de primera mano de los textos donosianos, las conclusiones confirman las hipótesis y observan que existe una continuidad estructural en las ideas del español, pero también que hay discontinuidades, de las cuales la más importante es su particular noción de dictadura, que denominamos dictadura catolizante. (shrink)

Desde la publicación de El error de Descartes, la influencia de Damásio no ha hecho otra cosa que crecer. A partir de una revisión de sus tesis acerca del papel de los sentimientos, nos proponemos contribuir a la construcción de las cadenas causales que median entre las emociones y los sentimientos, de una parte, y la acumulación de las representaciones y prácticas culturales, de otra. Para ello, subrayamos la importancia de la aparición en nuestro linaje de las primeras formas de (...) enseñanza y lo que ello revela acerca de nuestra asimétrica percepción del mundo y sus consecuencias cognitivas y prácticas. (shrink)

Mindreading capacity has been widely understood as the human ability to gain knowledge about the inner processes and states of others that bring about the behavior of these agents. This paper argues against this epistemic view of mindreading on the basis of different empirical studies in linguistics and social and developmental psychology: we are systematically biased in attributing mental states, and many everyday uses of mental ascription sentences do not reflect an epistemic function in our social interactions. We introduce an (...) alternative view of mental ascriptions, the social cover view, which is consistent with the evidence. The social cover view holds that the main function of mental ascriptions is to cover the social status and reputation of an agent rather than to gain knowledge about her inner processes and states. Finally, we discuss two possible objections to our proposal. (shrink)

The article assumes that the expression “comparative relativism”—the title of the Common Knowledge symposium in which the essay appears—is neither tautological nor oxymoronic. Rather, the author construes the term as an apt synthetic characterization of anthropology and illustrates that idea by means of four quotations, taken from authors as different as Richard Rorty and David Schneider, Marcel Mauss and Henri Michaux. The quotations can be said to “exemplify” anthropology in terms that are interestingly (and diversely) restrictive: some of them amount (...) to extrinsic negations of anthropology that would paralyze it; others suggest intrinsic negativities that would propel it. All of the passages chosen evoke the idea of belief, which is profoundly implicated, in all possible senses (and especially the worse ones), in the majority of arguments that connect the themes of anthropology, comparison, and relativism. (shrink)

El presente estudio examina la percepción que 100 profesoras y profesores de educación primaria en México manifestaron tener acerca de personajes que participaron en acontecimientos históricos de la historia nacional. La metodología ha sido de tipo mixto, a través de un cuestionario con preguntas abiertas y cerradas. Los resultados muestran que dichos personajes fueron principalmente varones, y hace ver que su actuar estuvo relacionado con hechos de violencia. Se plantea que el estudio de esa violencia, considerada una cuestión socialmente viva, (...) permitiría a la didáctica de la historia trascender, en el aula y en los programas respectivos, a un enfoque propicio para que el alumnado construya una conciencia histórica que fundamente su interpretación del pasado y del presente en su entidad, Sonora, México, con vías a contribuir a la construcción de la paz. Más aún, propone lo mismo respecto de otros tipos de violencia. (shrink)

Este artículo se integra en una investigación general cuyo objeto es desvelar la discrepancia teórica fundamental entre la ontología y el psicoanálisis. Este artículo en concreto trata de explicar el modelo de estructura planteado por Gilles Deleuze en su ontología a partir de algunos de los mecanismos que Sigmund Freud descubre en la forma de represión específica de una de las configuraciones patológicas más comunes de la subjetividad, la neurosis obsesiva, tal y como la describe en el caso clínico «El (...) hombre de las ratas». (shrink)

According to Schroeder-Heister 2018, proof-theoretic semantics is ‘an alternative to truth-condition semantics. It is based on the fundamental assumption that the central notion in terms of which meanings are assigned to certain expressions of our language, in particular to logical constants, is that of proof rather than truth. In this sense proof-theoretic semantics is semantics in terms of proof. Proof-theoretic semantics also means the semantics of proofs, i.e. the semantics of entities which describe how we arrive at certain assertions given (...) certain assumptions.' This text advocates that proof-theoretic semantics, as described above, was an approach to semantical issues in logic that appeared in mainstream philosophical literature at least a couple of centuries before the tradition of general proof theory (cf. Prawitz 1971) came into being. This is done by means of an interpretive analysis of Kant’s 1762 essay Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren, in which two theses are argued: first, that the issue of justifying the logical validity of inferences is approached by Kant in this text, in a strong sense, in terms of proofs; and second, that the purpose of his effort is to establish a point concerning the semantical equivalence between certain distinct valid inferences. (shrink)

Term Functor Logic is a term logic that recovers some important features of the traditional, Aristotelian logic; however, it turns out that it does not preserve all of the Aristotelian properties a valid inference should have insofar as the class of theorems of Term Functor Logic includes some inferences that may be considered irrelevant (e.g. ex falso, verum ad, and petitio principii). By following an Aristotelian or syllogistic notion of relevance, in this contribution we adapt a tableaux method for Term (...) Functor Logic in order to avoid irrelevance and we offer some sort of intuitive semantics in terms of traditional inferential situations (e.g. propter quid, quia, non causa ut causa, and non sequitur). (shrink)

O artigo tem o objetivo de oferecer uma resposta às críticas que Puntel fez a Levinas em seu livro Ser e Deus. Iniciamos nossa abordagem com uma contextualização do pensamento punteliano. Dado esse passo inaugural, propomos uma análise de seu exame crítico à obra de Levinas em dois tempos, seguindo a ordem de seus argumentos em Ser e Deus. Primeiramente, analisamos as críticas de Puntel às “assunções fundamentais” da filosofia levinasiana, sobre teoria/conhecimento, metafísica e Ser. Depois disso, analisamos suas críticas (...) à “concepção de transcendência e Deus” em Levinas. O título deste artigo é uma provocação a partir da pergunta: “Qual é o lugar do absolutamente Outro no quadro referencial teórico de Puntel?”. Tal como ocorre na ontoteologia e na ontologia fundamental, o absolutamente Outro não encontra lugar no quadro referencial teórico de Puntel. Palavras-chave: Ontoteologia, Ética, Alteridade, Levinas, Puntel. (shrink)

Algumas passagens bastante controversas dos Fundamentos da Metafísica dos Costumes sáo comumente interpretados como se Kant propusesse a tese de que as ações náo podem ter qualquer valor moral quando estiverem acompanhadas de inclinações ( Neigungen ) favoráveis a tais ações. O que resulta dessa interpretaçáo é uma retrato de Kant como um severo defensor de uma moralidade em que sentimentos de compaixáo e assemelhados nada acrescentam ao valor moral de uma açáo, e em vez disso, o solapam. Neste artigo, (...) sustento que tal interpretaçáo náo é apoiada pela evidência textual. Além disso, discuto tentativas feitas por diversos autores no sentido de mostrar que as inclinações favoráveis sáo na verdade compatíveis com a argumentaçáo de Kant nos Fundamentos e defendo uma versáo em particular da tese da compatibilidade. (shrink)

This work pres ents Ian Hack ing as a pi o neer of the shift to wards prac tice in the phi los o phy of sci ence. His think ing is marked by di verse net - works of con nec tions. Three as pects are em pha - sized: i) his con cept of lan guage, his tory and knowledge; ii) his position on experi..

The aim of this paper is to show the impact of Russell’s paradox in Frege’s mathemathical and philosophical system. First, it shows that the development of the Begriffsschrift was enough to give a structural definition of natural numbers, but not enough to accomplish Frege’s program. For this it w..

O artigo reflete sobre o procedimento hermenêutico utilizado pelo professor, crítico e filósofo Benedito Nunes em sua obra. Reconstruindo diálogos do autor com Nunes, procura-se compreender as peculiaridades da sua abordagem interpretativa em relação a três pensadores com os quais sua obra dialoga em permanência, Heidegger, Gadamer e Ricoeur. Compreende- se que a abordagem de Nunes procura superar alguns impasses da hermenêutica contemporânea por meio da problemática heideggeriana da co-referencialidade entre fundamento e abismo, tema presente na questão geral do conflito (...) ôntico ontológico, compreendendo-se fundamento como aquilo que é a fundamentação do ser relativamente ao ente, e abismo como o ser enquanto tal. A partir dessa equação, considerando o estatuto da co-presença (Zusammengeböririgkeit) entre os dois elementos, entende-se que a ação de interpretação de Nunes valoriza não apenas as dinâmicas de desvelamento, mas também de ocultamento do ser e, em o fazendo, permite uma abertura da hermenêutica para a alteridade. (shrink)

This essay seeks to provide a detailed analysis of chapter 12 of Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics. Fundamental chapter not only for understanding the author’s ethical and moral thought, but also for understanding the author’s cultural and civilizational thought. It is in this sense that the question posed in the title - why act morally - is not limited to the horizon of the redundant discussion of personal interest or educational factors but becomes the philosophical-ethical exercise of inquiry into human action (...) in the world, and therefore, It is a question that is rooted within ethics itself (as the author states), that is, as the foundation of human action. The essay ends with a reflection on the validity of the author’s ethical thinking in this specific chapter and some considerations on the philosopher’s general ethical thought. (shrink)

An important tradition in philosophy holds that in order to successfully perform a joint action, the participants must be capable of establishing commitments on joint goals and shared plans. This suggests that social robotics should endow robots with similar competences for commitment management in order to achieve the objective of performing joint tasks in human-robot interactions. In this paper, we examine two philosophical approaches to commitments. These approaches, we argue, emphasize different behavioral and cognitive aspects of commitments that give roboticists (...) a way to give meaning to monitoring and pro-active signaling in joint action with human partners. To show that, we present an example of use-case with guiding robots and we sketch a framework that can be used to explore the type of capacities and behaviors that a robot may need to manage commitments. (shrink)