info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

Stem cells have the capacity both to self‐renew and to give rise to differentiated progeny, and are vital to the organization of multicellular organisms. Stem cells raise a number of fundamental questions regarding lineage restriction and cellular differentiation, and they hold enormous promise for cell‐based therapies. Here I propose a theoretical framework for stem cell biology based on the concepts of autopoiesis (self‐production) and complementarity. I argue that stem cells are pivotal in the self‐production of the organism and that we (...) need complementary approaches to understand their probabilistic behavior. I discuss how this framework generates testable hypotheses regarding stem‐cell functions. BioEssays 26:1013‐1016, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Neste artigo abordo a questão da interpretação de Hegel acerca do conceito de apercepção pura transcendental em Kant. Como procuro mostrar, Hegel inicialmente faz uma análise positiva do argumento kantiano acerca da apercepção, concordando com Kant sobre a unidade e o caráter pensante e autorreferente do eu. Com efeito, para Hegel, Kant elabora uma compreensão muito importante sobre a natureza do conhecimento, ao afirmar que a unidade conceitual da autoconsciência constitui a unidade do objeto. Contudo, por outro lado, Hegel analisa (...) o argumento kantiano sob outra perspectiva, sustentando que Kant não desenvolve coerentemente a tese da unidade da apercepção pura e acaba por considerar a autoconsciência apenas do ponto de vista subjetivo, em uma relação externa com o objeto. Neste contexto, minha leitura é que Hegel incorpora em sua Lógica aquilo que ele concebe como um elemento especulativo no interior do argumento kantiano sobre a apercepção pura transcendental, transformando, assim, a compreensão kantiana sobre o eu penso em sua concepção lógico-especulativa sobre o conceito subjetivo. Nestes termos, dialogo com a interpretação de Robert Pippin em Hegel ́s Idealism, discordando da afirmação do autor, segundo a qual, a concepção hegeliana sobre o conceito na Ciência da Lógica consiste em uma continuidade da concepção kantiana sobre a apercepção pura transcendental. (shrink)

Chagas disease or American trypanosomiasis is an important health problem in Latin America. Due to the mobility of Latin American population around the world, countries without vector presence started to report disease cases. We developed a deterministic compartmental model in order to gain insights into the disease dynamics in a scenario without vector presence, considering congenital transmission and transmission by blood transfusion. The model was used to evaluate the epidemiological effect of control measures. It was applied to demographic data from (...) Spain and sensitivity analysis was performed on model parameters associated with control strategies. (shrink)

Neste trabalho busco estabelecer algumas relações entre formas da imaginação cinematográfica, tecnologias e materialidades fílmicas (BRUNO, 2014), tomando como base um conjunto de proposições contemporâneas articuladas a partir dos estudos de cinema, da teoria estética e da teoria queer. A argumentação atribui ênfase aos usos (AHMED, 2019) que realizadoras e realizadores brasileiros fazem de recursos técnicos como o chroma key e as projeções, bem como a inserção e múltiplas telas e interfaces no quadro fílmico. Busco argumentar que tais procedimentos, quando (...) acionados por cineastas no tempo presente, elaboram modos de se relacionar com os outros, o cinema e o mundo. Além disso, convocam o público a tomar parte no trabalho da imaginação inerente à experiência cinematográfica. (shrink)

O presente trabalho aborda o conceito de vontade na Filosofia do espírito de Hegel. Segundo Hegel, a vontade possui um desenvolvimento que abrange três figuras: a vontade natural, o livre arbítrio e a vontade livre em si e para si. Os dois primeiros momentos do conceito encerram o querer como finito, pois o objeto desejado permanece, nestes casos, um limite, uma barreira para a realização da liberdade plena da vontade. Analisarei, portanto, com base nos conceitos de “finito” e “limite”, considerados (...) por Hegel na Ciência da lógica, as duas primeiras figuras finitas do conceito de vontade e sua necessária passagem para a infinitude da realização da liberdade. (shrink)

This paper deals with the questions of emergence and complex (mental and social) systems and with downward determination from the viewpoint of perspectival realism. These are issues concerning the foundations of the human sciences, generally speaking, and particularly psychology and sociology. A criterion is put forward, which distinguish metaphysicalfrom ontological (conceptual) problems, and the notions of complex, hierarchic system and causation that would be suitable for those that defend emergence and perspectivist foundations of the human sciences are discussed. Este artigo (...) trata das questões da emergência de sistemas complexos (mentais e sociais) e da determinação descendente do ponto de vista do realismo perspectivista. Essas são questões sobre os fundamentos das ciências humanas em geral e, em particular, da psicologia e da sociologia. É proposto um critério para distinguir problemas metafísicos de problemas ontológicos (ou conceituais), e são discutidas as noções de sistema complexo hierárquico e de causação que seriam adequadas para uma fundamentação emergentista e perspectivista das ciências humanas. (shrink)

Este trabalho investiga a presença da figura de Zumbi dos Palmares no conto “A cabeça de Zumbi”, de Alberto Mussa, buscando tanto compreender aspectos históricos e culturais nele presentes como explorar a associação entre a figura mítico-histórica de Zumbi e a do orixá Exu. Inicialmente, para situar e dimensionar a importância do herói de Palmares para a história do negro no Brasil e dimensionar a questão de nossa formação identitária, utilizamos pensamentos de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Gilberto Freyre e Stuart (...) Hall, entre outros. Em seguida, enfocamos o conto e a relação entre Zumbi e Exu, feita por Conceição Evaristo na apresentação do livro, aprofundando-a a partir de informações colhidas nas obras de Reginaldo Prandi, Roger Bastide e Vagner Gonçalves da Silva e de observações críticas feitas por Moema Augel. (shrink)

The foundations of biology have been a topic of debate for the past few decades. The traditional perspective of the Modern Synthesis, which portrays organisms as passive entities with limited role in evolutionary theory, is giving way to a new paradigm where organisms are recognized as active agents, actively shaping their own phenotypic traits for adaptive purposes. Within this context, this article raises the question of whether contemporary biological theory is undergoing a cognitive revolution. This inquiry can be approached in (...) two ways: from a theoretical standpoint, exploring the centrality of the cognitive sciences in current theoretical biology; and from a historical perspective, examining the resemblance between the current state of theoretical biology and the Cognitive Revolution of the mid-20th century. Both inquiries yield affirmative answers, though important nuances will be emphasized. The cognitive sciences' explanatory framework is employed to elucidate the agentic characteristics of organisms, establishing a clear parallelism between the Cognitive Revolution and the present state of theoretical biology. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components involved (...) in natural selection processes. An important prerequisite for the explanation is the ability to understand development in a teleological way. Here, the concept of Umwelt plays a crucial role: if organisms are responsible for generating adaptive variation in specific environments, we need a theory that explains the context-dependent nature of adaptively oriented processes. The Umwelt is thus a central element in determining the goal that an adaptive process pursues. The second path in my analysis also has a historical dimension. I will present Karl Ernst von Baer’s reflections on teleological development and his influence on von Uexküll's thinking. I will present various ideas developed by von Baer, such as the distinction between Ziel and Zweck and the use of musical metaphors, which can help to understand development teleologically and give von Uexküll’s theory a central place in this framework. (shrink)

Disputes about the causal structure of natural selection have implications for teleosemantics. Etiological, mainstream teleosemantics is based on a causalist view of natural selection. The core of its solution to Brentano’s Problem lies in the solution to Kant’s Puzzle provided by the Modern Synthesis concerning populational causation. In this paper, I suggest that if we adopt an alternative, statisticalist view on natural selection, the door is open for two reflections. First, it allows for setting different challenges to etiological teleosemantics that (...) arise if a statisticalist reading of natural selection is right. Second, by providing a different solution to Kant’s Puzzle based on individual causes of evolution, statisticalism promotes a different answer to Brentano’s Problem, what I label as Agential Teleosemantics. (shrink)

The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...) this context is the possibility of naturalizing teleology, a classical nightmare for the history of biology itself. This requires, principally, understanding the causes of teleological explanations without assuming an unfashioned backward causation of sorts. As the riddles of teleological explanations are about their temporal dimension, I analyze different temporal scales of biological processes: evolutionary, developmental, and physiological. -/- The first one is the one defended in the context of the Modern Synthesis. As expected, one of the aims of this thesis is to evaluate the adequacy of an evolutionary account of teleological explanation. The scrutiny is negative. Evolutionary explanations in the context of the Modern Synthesis lack the necessary causal roots to naturalize teleology. Concerning the physiological scale, a long tradition pushed up by Kant and the organicist movement in the 20th century allows us to better understand how teleological explanations can be naturalized in physiological process. The key notions in this temporal scale are self-organization and the recursive, looped character of physiological process. While the physiological scale may be suitably accounted by contemporaries views, such as Autonomous Systems Theory, different central teleological phenomena remain unexplained from a purely physiological perspective. In particular, different issues concerning the (adaptive) construction of organism ---such as plasticity, robustness, variation, novelty, inheritance--- deserve an ontogenetic analysis. -/- The principal aim of this thesis is to provide a theory of teleological development that falls beyond the Modern Synthesis' framework and is prompted by different insights from the history of biology. I call it Agential Teleosemantics. It rests on two central pillars. First, that developmental processes, beyond any gene-centered stance, can be understood in informational terms; i.e. developmental processes are about the interaction of developmental resources conveying biological information. The second ingredient is agentivity, namely the idea that development is regulated by an agentive system according to the adaptiveness of the phenotypic outcomes produced. The role of agency in Agential Teleosemantic is equivalent to the role of genes in the Modern Synthesis: it is responsible for explaining the order and the adaptive complexity in the living realm. -/- The second target of this thesis regards the possibility of naturalizing intentional explanations in cognitive science. The central project involved in such an aim is known as teleosemantics. Classical teleosemantics however is etiological: it explains the teleofunctions of representational systems in terms of evolutionary processes. The different disputes in the contemporary philosophy of biology provide two insights to analyze teleosemantics in cognitive science. First, the challenges against the Modern Synthesis must be extended to the evolutionary approach of etiological teleosemantics. Second, as Agential Teleosemantics suggests an alternative source for teleofunctions ---ontogeny, I offer an attempt to integrate Agential Teleosemantics into cognitive science in order to provide an alternative teleosemantic project to understand intentional explanations in cognitive science. (shrink)

A common explanatory error in science concerns the conflation of the epistemological roles between two domains. Here we will address a specific case: when explanations of development replace evolutionary explanations or vice versa. Ernst Mayr famously distinguished between proximate and ultimate causal explanations in biology. His view was central to the Modern Synthesis’ exclusion of development from evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, the explanatory role of developmental processes in evolution is a central theme in current theoretical biology which has prompted several revisions (...) of Mayr’s distinction. Here we will review these reviewers to determine whether the integration of development and evolution is based on an appropriate reinterpretation of Mayr’s distinction. In many cases, revisionists suggest an interactionist alternative, in which proximate and ultimate causes interact to produce evolved traits. The most frequent interactionist account relies on the idea of reciprocal causation. We will argue that this perspective is still problematic and that the boundaries between explanatory domains are crossed. Instead, we should rethink Mayr’s distinction by adopting an alternative view of evolutionary causation, the so-called Statisticalist view, which maintains that the only level of causation is the individual level. By ruling out two different levels of causation, this framework is appropriate to avoid fallacious explanations and reconsider reciprocal causation entirely as a proximate phenomenon. We introduce the concept of “statistical reciprocity” to explain the statistical effects of reciprocal causality in populations and outline some ideas of “population ontogenetics” as a prominent framework for unifying development and evolution beyond interactionist positions. (shrink)

The use of evolutionary explanations to explain phenomena at the individual level has been described by various authors as an explanatory error, the so-called Phylogeny Fallacy. In this paper, this fallacy will be analyzed in the context of teleosemantics, a central project of the philosophy of mind whose main aim is to naturalize intentional systems by appealing to their biological teleofunctions. I will argue that those teleosemantics projects that invoke evolutionary functions generally commit the fallacy. First, I will point to (...) various arguments in the literature that point to this fallacy. However, a more general argument will also be made. To illustrate this puzzling scenario, I will present two desiderata that any teleosemantic project must fulfill. I will argue that naturalizing intentionality based on natural selection creates an explanatory gap between types and tokens. This gap prohibits an adequate explanation of the desiderata. To close the gap, teleosemantics invokes replicator biology, a view of inheritance that has already been identified to commit the fallacy. This leads teleosemantics into a complex situation: to close the gap, it must commit the fallacy. (shrink)

This study empirically tests a sequential mediation model that links ethical leadership with employees’ unethical behaviour. The corruption index for countries is used as the moderator, because it represents both the instrumental ethical climate and the employee displacement of responsibility embedded in society’s ethical standards. A total of 175 participants comprising 41 teams (134 dyads) across 13 countries participated in a dyadic two-wave survey. The findings show that ethical leadership has an indirect influence on the avoidance of unethical behaviour by (...) reducing the instrumental ethical climate and by negating the displacement of individuals’ responsibility. In addition, the results also show that this process is not sensitive to the countries’ corruption levels. Such findings suggest that organizations are less prone to adjust their ethical standards to the environment than is usually expected. Accordingly, ethical leaders of MNCs may be instrumental in counteracting any corruptive pressure in the social environment, and likewise, non-ethical leaders may be a contributing factor to fostering corrupt organizations in a society that otherwise values ethical principles in business. (shrink)

This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of _Umwelt_ in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components involved in (...) natural selection processes. An important prerequisite is to understand developmental change in a teleological way. Here, the concept of _Umwelt_ plays a crucial role: if organisms are responsible for generating adaptive variation in specific environments, we need a theory that explains the context-dependent nature of adaptively oriented processes. The _Umwelt_ is thus a central element in determining the goal that an adaptive process pursues. The second path in my analysis also has a historical dimension. I will present Karl Ernst von Baer’s reflections on teleological development and his influence on Jacob von Uexküll’s thinking. I will present various ideas developed by Baer, such as the distinction between _Ziel_ and _Zweck_ and the use of musical metaphors, which can help to understand development teleologically and give Uexküll’s theory a central place in this framework. (shrink)

Abstract: A common explanatory error concerns conflating epistemological roles between two domains. Here I deal with a special case: when explanations of development replace evolutionary explanations or vice versa. Ernst Mayr famously distinguished between proximate and ultimate causal explanations in biology. His view was central to keeping development outside the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, the explanatory role of developmental processes in evolution is a central theme in current theoretical biology, which has led to several revisions of Mayr’s distinction. In the (...) following, I will review these reviewers to determine whether the integration of development and evolution is based on an appropriate reinterpretation of Mayr’s distinction. The revisionists often propose an interactionist alternative in which proximate and ultimate causes interact to produce evolved traits. The most common interactionist account relies on the idea of reciprocal causation. I will argue that this perspective is still problematic and that the boundaries between explanatory domains are crossed. Instead, we should rethink Mayr’s distinction by adopting an alternative view of evolutionary causation, the so-called Statisticalist view on natural selection, which claims that the only level of causation is the proximate level. By excluding two different levels of causation, this framework is able to avoid fallacious explanations and fully consider reciprocal causation as a proximate phenomenon. I introduce the concept of “statistical reciprocity” to explain the statistical effects of (proximate) reciprocal causation in ultimate explanations and outline some ideas of “population ontogenetics” as a prominent framework for unifying development and evolution beyond interactionist positions. (shrink)

Over the past decade, many findings in cognitive about the contents of consciousness: we will not address neuroscience have resulted in the view that selective what might be called the ‘enabling factors’ for conscious- attention, working memory and cognitive control ness (e.g. appropriate neuromodulation from the brain- stem, etc.). involve competition between widely distributed rep-.