The aim of this article is to indicate the difficulties in maintaining a dogmatic interpretation of Plato, and to develop some reflections about the relationships between dogmatism, scepticism and dialectics.Este artigo procura mostrar as dificuldades existentes para sustentar a interpretação dogmática de Platão e, a partir daí, indicar algumas reflexões sobre as relações entre dogmatismo, ceticismo e dialética.

We discuss issues raised by the commentators, such as specification in single-energy arrays, task-specific pickup of information, general principles of the ecological approach to perception and action, and how specification may be constrained by the facts of physical relativity. While the commentaries raise many important issues we conclude that they do not undermine our argument that specification exists solely in the global array.

The new commentaries raise important issues about the target article (Stoffregen & Bardy 2001). The commentaries also highlight some assumptions, often implicit, that underlie traditional interpretations of perception. We argue that evaluation of the global array and its implications for perception requires both analytical research on specification in the global array and new empirical research on the use of information in the global array for the control of action.

For Knobe, observers evaluate mental states by comparing agents' statements with the attitudes they are expected to hold. In our analysis, Knobe's model relies primarily on what agents should think, and little on expectancies of what they would think. We show the importance and complexity of including descriptive and prescriptive norms if one is to take expectancies seriously.

In this target article we question the assumption that perception is divided into separate domains of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. We review implications of this assumption for theories of perception and for our understanding of ambient energy arrays (e.g., the optic and acoustic arrays) that are available to perceptual systems. We analyze three hypotheses about relations between ambient arrays and physical reality: (1) that there is an ambiguous relation between ambient energy arrays and physical reality, (2) that there (...) is a unique relation between individual energy arrays and physical reality, and (3) that there is a redundant but unambiguous relation, within or across arrays, between energy arrays and physical reality. This is followed by a review of the physics of motion, focusing on the existence and status of referents for physical motion. Our review indicates that it is not possible, in principle, for there to be a unique relation between physical motion and the structure of individual energy arrays. We argue that physical motion relative to different referents is specified only in the global array, which consists of higher-order relations across different forms of energy. The existence of specificity in the global array is consistent with the idea of direct perception, and so poses a challenge to traditional, inference-based theories of perception and cognition. However, it also presents a challenge to much of the ecological approach to perception and action, which has accepted the assumption of separate senses. (shrink)

Posthumous homage to Professor José Cavalcante de Souza.

Political leaders’ debates are an important and highly visible instances of public argumentation. As such, they merit scholarly attention. This essay applies the Functional Theory of Political Campaign Discourse to analyze televised presidential debates from the Ukraine in 2004. Overall, this analysis revealed that acclaims were the most common function, followed by attacks and then defenses. Policy was addressed more often than character in these debates, as expected. The incumbent candidate acclaimed significantly more and attacked less than the challenger. The (...) incumbents used past deeds significantly more often to acclaim – and less to attack – than the challengers. Finally, general goals and ideals were used more as the basis for acclaims than attacks in these debates. Implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Based on a careful reading of Michael Marder’s book Plant-Thinking and a recent 2020 article by Michael Marder, this essay argues it is necessary to establish a differentiation between what is called plant and vegetal. Through and beyond the form of the plant there would be a time and a vegetal metabolism whose proper name is “we.” “We” as a denomination of the vegetal implies a conceptual transformation, but also an answer to the question of who “we” are. Who are (...) we now when, as Dipesh Chakrabarty asserts, our “we” no longer has any “ontological dimension”? While Chakrabarty answers the question of the “we” by answering that “we” are “a geophysical force,” I propose, following Marder, that the answer is: we are vegetality. (shrink)

The reception of René Girard’s work in France deserves book-length treatment to fully describe the heated debates, conflicting expectations, and controversy that it inspired before its lasting importance was eventually recognized. We must keep in mind that, although he lived in the US and became a citizen in 1956, he always kept his sights on his native land. He watched the transformations of French thought from the other side of the ocean; he forged his own writing strategies in response to (...) French thought; and it was within the context of French debates that he chose to formulate, through the conjoined hypotheses concerning mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and Judeo-Christian writing, the founding event of his... (shrink)

This study explores the efficacy of a specific tool – the articulation of the ideal self – in job engagement, psychological well-being, and organizational citizenship behavior. We hypothesized that employees who can visualize their jobs as part of their ideal self – in particular how it helps in its development and realization – would feel higher levels of engagement and fulfillment in their lives, as well as engage in greater amounts of helping and voice OCB. A total of 239 full (...) time employees from five companies in Costa Rica filled out the ideal self questionnaire, the job engagement, and psychological well-being surveys, and were evaluated by their peers on task behavior and helping and voice OCB. Results of the SEM model showed that the ideal self was positively related to job engagement, psychological well-being and helping and voice. These findings contribute to the research on the impact and importance for organizations to help employees find meaningfulness in their work. (shrink)

Job satisfaction is a core variable in the study and practice of organizational psychology because of its implications for desirable work outcomes. Knowledge of its antecedents is abundant and informative, but there are still psychological processes underlying job satisfaction that have not received complete attention. This is the case of employee emotion regulation. In this study, we argue that employees’ behaviors directed to manage their affective states participate in their level of job satisfaction and hypothesize that employee affect-improving and -worsening (...) emotion regulation behaviors increase and decrease, respectively, job satisfaction, through the experience of positive and negative affect. Using a diary study with a sample of professionals from diverse jobs and organizations, for the most part, the mediational hypotheses were supported by the results albeit a more complex relationship was found in the case of affect worsening emotion regulation. This study contributes to expanding the job satisfaction and emotion regulation literatures and informs practitioners in people management in organizations about another route to foster and sustain positive attitudes at work. (shrink)

The psychological work environment is composed of both stressful and motivational work conditions at different levels of analysis. However, most relevant theory and research lack an integrative conceptualization and appropriate instrumentation to account for this work context structure. These limitations are particularly present in non-mainstream populations, such as the Spanish community of researchers and practitioners. In this study, based on the job demands–resources model, we present an updated conceptualization in which stressful and motivational psychosocial factors are integrated and defined at (...) the job, the group, and the organizational level of analysis into a single conceptualization. Furthermore, derived from this conceptualization, we present a study of the development and validation of a questionnaire to account for the psychosocial work environment in Spanish, labeled Psychosocial Factors Questionnaire 75, which provides measures for 23 different psychosocial factors. The results of this study supported the questionnaire’s construct, convergent, divergent, and predictive validity, together with its reliability. Thus, this conceptualization and questionnaire provides researchers and partitioners with a more comprehensive approach to the assessment of the psychosocial work environment and promises benefits for interventions in the workplace. (shrink)

The measurement of science and technology is now fifty years old. It owes a large part of its existence to the work of the National Science Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the centrality of S&T statistics in science studies, it is surprising that no history of the measurement exists in the literature. This article outlines such a history. The history is cast in the light of social statistics. Like social statistics, (...) S&T indicators are produced mainly by governments but differ in a number of aspects. First, they have not been developed to control individuals. Second, they have taken shape from the start at the international level. Third, they reflect a consensus among states and their organizations. This article shows that this specificity is due to the sociopolitics that drives S&T measurement. (shrink)

The paper discusses Dr. Floris Tomasini's paper “What Is Bioethics: Notes toward a New Approach?”. Based on Tomasini's account of methodological and ethical pluralism, the paper explores the demarcation problem of bioethics and suggests a full methodological laissez-faire.

This book revisits the encounter between Chinese and Western philosophy while unfolding questions about the way "comparative philosophy" is conducted today. In the vulgate of intellectual history, "Western thought" has constructed a substantialist view of reality that puts "relations" and "processes" into a subordinate position. The same view explains for the primacy given to the autonomy of individual beings. In contrast, according to the same vulgate, Chinese thought has been mainly stressing the fluidity of all phenomena and forms of life (...) so as to best adapt to their overarching patterns. I label such vision the Disneyland of comparative philosophy. It deciphers texts, partly in function of concepts that it extracts from them, partly according to notions that are superimposed over these texts. The two first chapters are focused upon the Western version of the "Disneyland of comparative philosophy." The third chapter shifts to Chinese narratives about local, comparative and global philosophies. In contrast to these approaches, the fourth chapter offers a blueprint as to the way to engage different philosophical traditions into tasks they define and share together. A last chapter presents four cases of ongoing transcultural philosophical dialogues and the promises they bear. Once it develops outside pre-formatted narratives, the web shaped by our philosophies and wisdoms suggests the outlines of a world that we could inhabit together. (shrink)

This is an investigation into the fundamental connections between the referential use of language and our rich human experience. All types of experience — perceptual, practical, scientific, literary, esthetic, ludic,... — are tightly unified into one total experience by the structure of reference to real or possible items. Singular reference is essential for locating ourselves in our own corner of the world. General reference, by means of quantifiers, is our main tool in ascertaining the accessible patterns of the world. Both (...) are primitive and mutually irreducible. (Often this has been denied.) The unity of total experience is constructed through the biographical unity of a person, and the sociological unity of the communications across a community. This unity of experience is wrought out by an underlying unitary system of reference. We need, therefore, a comprehensive theory of individuation, existence, predication, and truth. One such a theory is Guise Theory. (shrink)

In his The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press, 1958), S. Toulmin presents serious charges against ordinary logical theory, e.g., that it does not distinguish between analytic or formally valid or conclusive or warrant-using arguments, that the distinction between premises and conclusion is a bad oversimplification, that "major premise" conceals the distinction between inference-warrant and inference-backings, that logicians have been mistakenly working under an ideal of geometrical form. The paper argues that none of the charges is proven, that most of (...) them cannot be proven, that Toulmin's new logic is at best only vaguely hinted at and that his suggestions are positively obscure or mistaken. (shrink)

Inter-organizational models are both a well-documented phenomena and a well-established domain in management and business ethics. Those models rest on collaborative capabilities. However, mainstream theories and practices aimed at developing these capabilities are based on a narrow set of assumptions and ethical principles about human nature and relationships, which constrain the very development of capabilities sought by them. This article presents an Aristotelic–Thomistic approach to collaborative entrepreneurship within and across communities of firms operating in complementary markets. Adopting a scholarship of (...) integration approach and evaluating the six studies of communities of organizations, we contribute an inter-organizational network model based on the assumptions about human motives and choice offered by Aristotle. We argue that the sustainability of inter-organizational communities depends on how rich is the set of assumptions about human nature upon which they are based. In order to develop and sustain collaborative capabilities in inter-organizational communities, a set of assumptions that takes both self-regarding and others’-regarding preferences as ends is required to avoid any kind of instrumentalization of collaboration, which is an end in itself. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Some basic mathematical facts pertaining to " Catastrophe Theory" are sketched. The alleged applications to the social sciences are studied. Three representative models, due to E.C. Zeeman, are described in detail, and critically analyzed. The models are found to be vaguely formulated, to be based on false hypotheses, to lead to few nontrivial predictions. Moreover, most of those predictions do not agree with reality. Finally, the only nontrivial mathematical result used in these models - Thom 's theorem - is found (...) to be incorrectly applied. It is concluded that no justification exists for the claim that Catastrophe Theory can be applied to the social sciences. (shrink)

Perelman a remis à l'honneur la rhétorique en 1958 et l'a appliquée à la philosophie morale, politique et juridique aussitôt, montrant ainsi la fécondité de son approche. Reprenant l'œuvre d'Aristote et la poursuivant, il a fait de la rhétorique et de l'argumentation la nouvelle matrice des sciences humaines après la mort du structuralisme. A l'occasion du centenaire de sa naissance, les auteurs réunis ici lui rendent hommage, mais aussi poursuivent, par leurs propres recherches, l'idée que la rhétorique comme l'argumentation sont (...) centrales. (shrink)

For centuries, _innovation_ was a political and contested concept and linguistic weapon used against one's enemy. To support their case, opponents of innovation made use of arguments from ethos and pathos to give power and sustenance to their criticisms and to challenge the innovators. However, since the nineteenth century the arguments have changed completely. _Innovation_ gradually got rehabilitated. This article looks at one type of rehabilitation: the semantic rehabilitation. People started to reread history and to redescribe what _innovation_ is. What (...) was bad innovation became good innovation because of long-lasting and beneficial effects, so it was believed. (shrink)

Introducción a la comprensión del mito -- Los orígenes de la tradición mitológica occidental -- Poética de las tradiciones narrativas -- La recepción del mito en la cultura audiovisual contemporánea -- Los argumentos universales -- Los argumentos universales (II): el viaje a un planeta desconocido.

In this book, Benoît Dubreuil explores the creation and destruction of hierarchies in human evolution. Combining the methods of archaeology, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience and primatology, he offers a natural history of hierarchies from the point of view of both cultural and biological evolution. This volume explains why dominance hierarchies typical of primate societies disappeared in the human lineage and why the emergence of large-scale societies during the Neolithic period implied increased social differentiation, the creation of status hierarchies, and, eventually, political (...) centralisation. (shrink)

The recent literature on social norms has stressed the centrality of emotions in explaining punishment and norm enforcement. This article discusses four negative emotions (righteous anger, indignation, contempt, and disgust) and examines their relationship to punitive behavior. I argue that righteous anger and indignation are both punitive emotions strictly speaking, but induce punishments of different intensity and have distinct elicitors. Contempt and disgust, for their part, cannot be straightforwardly considered punitive emotions, although they often blend with a colder form of (...) indignation to favor low-cost, indirect, and collective forms of punishment such as mockery, exclusion, and ostracism. (shrink)

Following a common assumption, when one inquires into a question, one has an inquisitive attitude towards it. More precisely, I shall assume that there is an inquisitive attitude towards Q that all of those who inquire into Q have in common and in virtue of which they can be said to be in an inquisitive state of mind towards Q. This paper is about the nature of this attitude. I elucidate it by examining whether it boils down to doubt, curiosity, (...) epistemic desire, or wondering. I shall do this by examining whether having these attitudes is necessary and sufficient for being in an inquisitive state of mind. The test will prove negative for the first three, but the case of wondering is more complex. (shrink)

La théologie de Karl Rahner mérite-t-elle le label de «classique»? Pour instruire le débat, l’article présente quatre dissertations doctorales récentes , ainsi qu’un ouvrage collectif, consacrés à l’oeuvre de Rahner. Nature et grâce, christologie et triadologie, théologie et anthropologie, athéisme et sciences naturelles, expérience et subjectivité, épistémologie et apologétique: les thèmes abordés par ces études témoignent de la diversité des questions traitées par le corpus rahnérien. De cet examen, trois lignes de force caractéristiques du style de cette théologie peuvent être (...) dégagées: modestie du langage théologique, rigueur des critères de validation, audace spéculative et systématique. En contrepoint critique, trois questions peuvent légitimement être avancées concernant l’universalité du langage employé et de l’expérience décrite, la fidélité au mystère et les points aveugles du système. Il y a fort à parier que l’avenir confirme le diagnostic qui s’impose à l’issue de cette étude, à savoir qu’il convient de considérer Rahner comme un classique de la discipline théologique pour avoir proposé, en un moment critique de son histoire, une voie de renouvellement tout à la fois grandiose et contestable. (shrink)

This paper studies how in his Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith answered to Mandeville on the role of pride and vanity in the economic and social dynamics of commercial societies. We show why vanity supersedes pride in his analysis and how he offers a more positive view of these two passions. We study in particular the economic and social consequences of pride and vanity and describe the psychological foundations of excessive self-esteem that these passions entail.

IntroductionArticles published in scientific journals, concerning the present and future of the lecture format in university education in the twenty-first century are framed within organizational settings that drive teaching methodologies in line with educational policies. The following two research questions have arisen from articles in which debate the continuity of this teaching modality and propose improvements of a different nature: Is there an interest in renovating the lecture format among the international research community whose remit is university teaching methods? and (...) What improvements to the lecture format do the reviewed articles suggest, within the framework of the communicative matrix of interactive learning?MethodWe have carried out a systematic review guided by the PRISMA approach, emphasizing the interest in methodological conceptual commitment, paying attention to documents published in journals with an impact factor. The search strategy was applied homogeneously in three databases: ERIC, PsycInfo, and Web of Science, following the systematic process of inclusion/exclusion.ResultsForty-five articles were selected with a range of 0–78 quotations, from different fields of knowledge and five continents; 12 articles are from journals with a JCR impact factor. The journal articles cover communicative, cognitive and active-practical perspectives ; the predominant governing aim of the analyzed improvements is connected with the attendees’ academic performance results ; the reviewed studies belong mainly to the quantitative paradigm. The considerations derived from the results cover formative, technical and/or critical aspects.Discussion and conclusionsWhilst positively valuing all these efforts promoted by the European Higher Education Area, we have also verified the lack of contributions in line with our concerns that embrace the need to develop an in-depth conceptualization, supported by a methodology that is sensitive to the complexity of the oral communication format between an expert actor and non-specialized actors who wish to connect and collaborate with the expert in the production of knowledge. (shrink)