Romanticism fabricated a poet of vast oracular powers largely from superstitious notions and suspicious philosophies which the Renaissance had gathered up somewhat by chance with the rational part of the Graeco-Roman legacy. The model was surely an imposture and, historically considered, a scandal. Seer, sage, prophet, mage—the pretensions varied, but all were titles to transcendent disclosure in times increasingly committed, at least officially, to a unified scientific view. That the poet could be confirmed to any degree in this anachronistic role (...) was probably owing to the circumstance that the general cultural reflex following the Enlightenment reawakened widespread interest in those dark and excluded passages of the human spirit which mystics and seers were thought to frequent. Poets who pretended to voyance benefited from the muffled but persistent rumor of profound mysteries accessible to the high priests of Kabbala and the Corpus Hermeticum, to Illuminists, Rosicrucians, and Neopythagoreans. Western Europe had never ceased to acknowledge, even in such unlikely periods as the later Middle Ages, the aboriginal priestly and prophetic functions of the poet; but romanticism contrived—out of occultism and neoplatonism, antirationalism and anticlassicism—such a warrant for unabashed oracular saying as Antiquity had scarcely imagined. While perhaps none of the romantic was actually prepared to grant the poet his ancient powers in full measure, few seemed inclined to diminish the stature of the heroic abstraction, who symbolically contested the claims of naturalism and positivism. (shrink)

Wiggins and his colleagues (2004) are to be commended for their willingness to raise the question of the ethics of undertaking the world's first face transplant prior to initiating the experiment....

We prove two theorems which in a certain sense show that the number of normal measures a measurable cardinal κ can carry is independent of a given fixed behavior of the continuum function on any set having measure 1 with respect to every normal measure over κ . First, starting with a model V ⊨ “ZFC + GCH + o = δ*” for δ* ≤ κ+ any finite or infinite cardinal, we force and construct an inner model N ⊆ V (...) [G] so thatN ⊨ “ZF + [DCδ] + ¬ACκ + κ carries exactly δ* normal measures + 2δ = δ++ on a set having measure 1 with respect to every normal measure over κ”.There is nothing special about 2δ = δ here, and other stated values for the continuum function will be possible as well. Then, starting with a modelV ⊨ “ZFC + GCH + κis supercompact”,we force and construct models of AC in which, roughly speaking, regardless of the specified behavior of the continuum function below κ on any set having measure 1 with respect to every normal measure over κ, κ can in essence carry any number of normal measures δ* ≥ κ++. (shrink)

Procuro explorar uma possível base biológica que tenha relevância explicativa entre elementos da ética e o comportamento humano.

Narrative ethics holds that if you ask someone what goodness is, as a basis of action, most people will first appeal to various abstractions, each of which can be defined only by other abstractions that in turn require further definition. If you persist in asking what each of these abstractions actually means, eventually that person will have to tell you a story and expect you to recognize goodness in the story. Goodness and badness need stories to make them thinkable and (...) to translate them into individual and collective actions. Yet after more than two decades of considering the issue, I do not believe that a collection of stories can by itself guide actions in ways that are sufficient to respond to ethical troubles in institutional settings. The question will always remain open for me, but my present belief is that narrative bioethics is always hyphenated, in the sense that guidance from stories needs to be allied with other ethical guidance. Each side of the hyphen qualifies the other side. The hyphenation I will argue for in this essay is “narrative-deontology.”. (shrink)

This book interprets Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles with the openness toward experience recommended by John Dewey's Art as Experience. The characters of Tess are considered as real people with sexual bodies and complex minds. Efron identifies the "experience blockers" that the critical tradition has stumbled upon, and defends Hardy's involvement in telling his story. Efron offers a new way of evaluating literature inspired by Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics.

We determine exact consistency strengths for various failures of the Singular Cardinals Hypothesis (SCH) in the setting of the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom system ZF without the Axiom of Choice (AC). By the new notion of parallel Prikry forcing that we introduce, we obtain surjective failures of SCH using only one measurable cardinal, including a surjective failure of Shelah's pcf theorem about the size of the power set of $\aleph _{\omega}$ . Using symmetric collapses to $\aleph _{\omega}$ , $\aleph _{\omega _{1}}$ , (...) or $\aleph _{\omega _{2}}$ , we show that injective failures at $\aleph _{\omega}$ , $\aleph _{\omega _{1}}$ , or $\aleph _{\omega _{2}}$ can have relatively mild consistency strengths in terms of Mitchell orders of measurable cardinals. Injective failures of both the aforementioned theorem of Shelah and Silver's theorem that GCH cannot first fail at a singular strong limit cardinal of uncountable cofinality are also obtained. Lower bounds are shown by core model techniques and methods due to Gitik and Mitchell. (shrink)

The naive misunderstanding among economists of the relationship between economics and philosophy is as profound as it is prevalent. To be sure, economists have concerned themselves with the philosophy of economics only so much as to familiarize themselves with methodology and its application to economic inquiry. Since economics is the oldest and perhaps the most “respectable” of the social sciences its scholars have developed a phobia for anything they might suspect to be even remotely unscientific. Consequently, they have erroneously narrowed (...) their understanding of the nature of economics. This narrowness prevails largely because most economists possess little or no training in general philosophy and especially in the philosophy of science. As a result of this apparent deficiency there exists in the minds of these economists confusion and inability to distinguish between teleology, axiology, and ethics as they do or do not apply to economics. (shrink)

A study in "intermediate" metaphysics combining elements of empiricism, analysis, and partial skepticism with a systematic account of nature, man, and God. The book concludes with a conative interpretation of mysticism.