Analisa a representação de informações referentes à identidade e a religião islâmica no esquema de classificação bibli-ográfica mais utilizado do mundo. Investiga a existência de desvios na representação de assuntos referentes a culturas não alinhadas à cultura ocidental na 23ª edição da Classificação Decimal de Dewey (CDD23). Conceitua Organização do Conhecimento em sentido restrito como organização das informações em registros bibliográficos e, em sentido amplo, como a organização social do trabalho mental. Define Sistemas de Organização do Conhecimento, enquanto sistemas conceituais (...) atuantes como tipos de representação do conhecimento sendo frutos da organização do conhe-cimento. Aborda a construção do conceito de Islamismo no Ocidente considerando as transformações de sentido mo-duladas pelo contexto sociocultural, conferindo ao Islã a imagem da violência. Define Religião segundo Durkheim como sistema unificado de crenças e de práticas relativo a coisas sagradas; e segundo Hans Mol como a identidade sacralizada. Aponta que a parcialidade na organização do conhecimento permite que documentos relativos à cultura e à identidade de grupos sociais não alinhados jamais sejam recuperados. Objetiva identificar como os assuntos referen-tes a culturas não alinhadas com o ocidente estão organizados; verificar a influência do contexto sociocultural na representação e recuperação da informação em bases de dados de culturas diversas; analisar o Islamismo e suas rela-ções conceituais na CDD. Para alcançar os objetivos propostos realizamos estudosna CDD23 segundo a metodologia de Miranda (2009), pesquisa bibliografica em bases de dados de diferentes culturas com ênfase nas influências do contexto sociocultural na produção cientifica pertinente a cultura Islâmica. Os resultados do estudo da representação do Islamismo na CDD23 demonstaram a existência de desvios (biases) de representação históricas da CDD, evidenci-ados tanto na seleção terminológica quanto em sua estrutura conceitual. Os resultados do levantamento bibliográfico nas bases de dados demonstram uma produção cientifica sobre assuntos referentes a cultura e identidade muçulmana numerosa e diversificada nas bases de dados de natureza global (DOAJ) e não ocidental (AJOL) e uma baixa produção na base de dados ocidental (Scielo). Reitera a necessidade da conduta ética por parte do profissional na classificação de assuntos não alinhadas a cultura ocidental. (shrink)

No mês de Novembro de 2017, em ocasião do Dia Mundial da Filosofia da UNESCO, a Cátedra UNESCO Archai, do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Metafísica da Universidade de Brasilia, organizou um hangout Unesco sobre o tema Filosofia, gênero e feminismo, do qual participaram diversxs colegas brasileirxs, especialistas do tema, acima assinadxs. A gravação integral do hangout está disponível aqui: https://youtu.be/LH5LwTegGG4. Segue abaixo uma transcrição, revista e adaptada pelxs autorxs.

O presente artigo aborda o conceito de reputação em uma perspectiva pragmatista. A partir de pressupostos teóricos, propomos o conceito de reputação em dois estágios: o primeiro refere-se a padrões de julgamento para uma categoria de objetos; o segundo, à aplicação dos padrões na atribuição de reputação para um objeto daquela categoria. Os resultados da investigação indicam uma abordagem de avaliação de reputação aplicável, sobretudo, no campo da comunicação. A perspectiva proposta tem como essência a análise para além do cartesianismo (...) sujeito-objeto – o que indica potência investigativa na descrição de fenômenos sociais relacionados a reputação. (shrink)

Uma das questões mais interessantes do debate contemporâneo sobre a justiça, no âmbito da teoria política normativa, diz respeito sobre qual foco deveria ocupar a posição central de uma visão igualitarista: igualdade baseada em satisfação de necessidades básicas, bens primários como propõe Rawls, igualdade de recursos como defende Dworkin ou, como quer Amartya Sen, igualdade de capacidades? Com o que, afinal, os igualitaristas deveriam se preocupar? Este trabalho tem o objetivo de analisar criticamente essas três perspectivas.

Although the prevalence of facial recognition-based COVID-19 surveillance tools and techniques, China does not have a facial recognition law to protect its residents’ facial data. Oftentimes, neither the public nor the government knows where people’s facial images are stored, how they have been used, who might use or misuse them, and to what extent. This reality is alarming, particularly factoring in the wide range of unintended consequences already caused by good-intentioned measures and mandates amid the pandemic. Biometric data are matters (...) of personal rights and national security. In light of worrisome technologies such as deep-fake pornography, the protection of biometric data is also central to the protection of the dignity of the citizens and the government, if not the industry as well. This paper discusses the urgent need for the Chinese government to establish rigorous and timely facial recognition laws to protect the public’s privacy, security, and dignity amid COVID-19 and beyond. (shrink)

The scientific community has debated the importance of “return” activities after ethnobiological studies. This issue has provoked debate because it touches on the ethics of research and the relationships with the people involved in these studies. This case study aimed to investigate community perception of an ethnobotany research project that was carried out in the semi-arid region of northeastern Brazil. Furthermore, we reported how the residents of this rural community felt about participating in the activities of “return” that arose from (...) the projects. Our findings demonstrate that “return” activities should be planned from the design phase of the research until its closure as a lifelong process that allows the communities involved to gradually take ownership of the information and actions that are being generated. Similarly, we argue that such activities must be negotiated with the people of the community so that they have decision-making power and autonomy to decide what is most relevant to their lives. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo apresentar as contribuições da estética da existência em Foucault para o âmbito da educação. Inicialmente será apresentado, em linhas gerais, os três domínios de sua produção teórica: Arqueologia do Saber, Genealogia do Poder e Estética da Existência. Posteriormente, será exposto mais profundamente a terceira fase de sua obra, destacando as ideias acerca do conceito do Cuidado de Si e a sua relação com o ambiente escolar e a formação docente. A estética da existência caracteriza-se (...) como o terceiro domínio foucaultiano e concerne na ideia da vida como obra de arte, onde por meio das práticas de si, cuidado de si, governo de si, _parrhesía_ e exame de consciência o sujeito torna-se capaz de estilizar sua existência, moldando sua vida e sendo artesão de si mesmo. Os apostes teóricos que fundamentam a pesquisa, além do Michel Foucault, são: Veiga-Neto (2016), Brandão (2011), Barcelos, Rabelo e Rodrigues (2009), entre outros autores. Esses correlacionam a obra do Filósofo Michel Foucault com a Educação. A partir da relação estabelecida entre a Estética da Existência e a Educação, percebeu-se que a escola têm sido, desde a sua fundação até os dias de hoje, um espaço que prioriza a disciplina e a normatização. Portanto, faz-se necessário introduzir nesse espaço saberes que possibilitem um novo modo de formar os sujeitos para que esses sejam conscientes e desfrutem da sua liberdade, que por muitas vezes lhes é retirada. (shrink)

According to non-conceptualist interpretations, Kant held that the application of concepts is not necessary for perceptual experience. Some have motivated non-conceptualism by noting the affinities between Kant's account of perception and contemporary relational theories of perception. In this paper I argue (i) that non-conceptualism cannot provide an account of the Transcendental Deduction and thus ought to be rejected; and (ii) that this has no bearing on the issue of whether Kant endorsed a relational account of perceptual experience.

In the first part of this chapter, I summarise some of the issues in the philosophy of mind which are addressed in Kant’s Critical writings. In the second part, I chart some of the ways in which that discussion influenced twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind and identify some of the themes which characterise Kantian approaches in the philosophy of mind.

‘How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?’ So asks Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. It is this question, rather than any concern about pretence or deception, which forms the basis for the philosophical problem of other minds. Responses to this problem have tended to cluster around two solutions: either we know others’ minds through perception; or we know others’ minds through a form of inference. In the (...) first part of this paper I argue that this debate is best understood as concerning the question of whether our knowledge of others’ minds is based on perception or based on evidence. In the second part of the paper I suggest that our ordinary ways of thinking take our knowledge of others’ minds to be both non- evidential and non-perceptual. A satisfactory resolution to the philosophical problem of other minds thus requires us to take seriously the idea that we have a way of knowing about others’ minds which is both non-evidential and non-perceptual. I suggest that our knowledge of others’ minds which is based on their expressions – our expressive knowledge - may fit this bill. (shrink)

We are used to regarding actions and other events, such as Brutus’ stabbing of Caesar or the sinking of the Titanic, as occupying intervals of some underlying linearly ordered temporal dimension. This attitude is so natural and compelling that one is tempted to disregard the obvious difference between time periods and actual happenings in favor of the former: events become mere “intervals cum description”.1 On the other hand, in ordinary circumstances the point of talking about time is to talk about (...) what actually happens or might happen at some time or another. We talk about ‘now’ and ‘then’ in an effort to put some order in our description of what goes on. And since different events seem to overlap in so many different ways, a full account of their temporal relations seems to run afoul of a reductionist strategy. This raises two philosophical questions. The first is whether we can actually go beyond time, as it were, i.e., whether we can take events as bona fide entities and deal with them directly, just as we can deal with spatial entities such as physical bodies or masses without confining ourselves to their spatial representations. This is a controversial issue (though probably not as controversial as it used to be), and ties in with a number of unsettled problems concerning, e.g., the structure of causality or the definition of adequate identity and individuation criteria for events. 2 The second question is whether we can perhaps do without time, i.e., whether we can dispense with time points or intervals as an independent ontological category and focus only on actual or potential happenings, in opposition to the form of reductionism mentioned above—in short, whether we can account for the temporal dimension in terms of suitable relations among events. This is also a highly controversial issue, and relates to the classical dispute concerning relational vs. absolutist conceptions of (space and) time.3 It is this second question that we intend to focus on here.. (shrink)

In the essays which make up The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch gives us a picture of moral life in which ‘the metaphor of vision [is] almost irresistibly suggested’. This chapter aims to clarify the role played by the metaphor of vision in Murdoch’s philosophical thinking. I’ll examine two different things which might be meant by the term ‘moral vision’: vision of moral things or vision which is itself moral. The suggestion will be that whilst both capture something important about (...) Murdoch’s work, each may mislead about what is distinctive in her views. For Murdoch, I shall suggest, there is no distinctively moral vision. There is only vision: a loving gaze directed upon the reality of others. (shrink)

One formulation of the Categorical Imperative tells us to treat humanity as an end in itself. It has become common to think that ‘humanity’ (die Menschheit) here refers to some minimal power of rationality that is necessarily possessed by any rational agent, but I argue that this common reading is misguided. Instead, ‘humanity’ refers to a good will, the will of a being who is committed to moral principles. This good will reading of ‘humanity’ is not only suggested by passages (...) in which Kant specifically discusses humanity, but also is more consistent with the main ideas of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

Not all symmetries are on a par. For instance, within Newtonian mechanics, we seem to have a good grasp on the empirical significance of boosts, by applying it to subsystems. This is exemplified by the thought experiment known as Galileo’s ship: the inertial state of motion of a ship is immaterial to how events unfold in the cabin, but is registered in the values of relational quantities such as the distance and velocity of the ship relative to the shore. But (...) the significance of gauge symmetries seems less clear. For example, can gauge transformations in Yang-Mills theory—taken as mere descriptive redundancy—exhibit a similar relational empirical significance as the boosts of Galileo’s ship? This question has been debated in the last fifteen years in philosophy of physics. I will argue that the answer is ‘yes’, but only for a finite subset of gauge transformations, and under special conditions. Under those conditions, we can mathematically identify empirical significance with a failure of supervenience: the state of the Universe is not uniquely determined by the intrinsic state of its isolated subsystems. Empirical significance is therefore encoded in those relations between subsystems that stand apart from their intrinsic states. (shrink)

We introduce a typed version of the intuitionistic epsilon calculus. We give a categorical semantics of it introducing a class of categories which we call \-categories. We compare our results with earlier ones of Bell :323–337, 1993).

The consumption of traditional meat is currently being challenged by the rise of meat alternatives claimed to be more beneficial for the environment and non-human animals. One of the peculiarities of these products lies in their attempt to replace meat through the close imitation of its sensory qualities, which poses relevant philosophical questions: What are the purported reasons that motivate this imitation, instead of the promotion of different but sustainable foods that break with the imagery of meat eating? And, if (...) eating meat is considered morally wrong, what is the moral status of the simulation of a wrong act? Our aim is to address these questions to shed new light on the ethical claims that constitute, in fact, one of the major advantages of these products. Firstly, we introduce the aims and functions of simulating meat sensory qualities. Subsequently, we investigate whether the imitation of meat can be found morally acceptable on consequentialist grounds. Lastly, we raise the question of whether there is room for claiming that imitating meat is morally wrong even if its consequences are overall better, from the point of view of non-consequentialist ethical frameworks. We conclude that there are not compelling reasons for considering meat imitation as morally undesirable. (shrink)

Barbour’s interpretation of Mach’s principle led him to postulate that gravity should be formulated as a dynamical theory of spatial conformal geometry, or in his terminology, “shapes.” Recently, it was shown that the dynamics of General Relativity can indeed be formulated as the dynamics of shapes. This new Shape Dynamics theory, unlike earlier proposals by Barbour and his collaborators, implements local spatial conformal invariance as a gauge symmetry that replaces refoliation invariance in General Relativity. It is the purpose of this (...) paper to answer frequent questions about (new) Shape Dynamics, such as its relation to Poincaré invariance, General Relativity, Constant Mean (extrinsic) Curvature gauge, earlier Shape Dynamics, and finally the conformal approach to the initial value problem of General Relativity. Some of these relations can be clarified by considering a simple model: free electrodynamics and its dual shift symmetric formulation. This model also serves as an example where symmetry trading is used for usual gauge theories. (shrink)

Questions about the meanings of racialized representations must be included as part of developing an ethical game design practice. This paper examines the various ways in which race and racial contexts are repre-sented in a selected range of commercially available e-games, namely war, sports and action-adventure games. The analysis focuses on the use of racial slurs and the contingencies of historical re-representation in war games; the limited representation of black masculinity in sports games and the romanticization of ‘ghetto play’ in (...) urban street games; and the pathologization and fetishization of race in ‘crime sim’ action-adventure games such as True Crime: Streets of LA. This paper argues for, firstly, a continuous critical engagement with these dominant representations in all their evolving forms; secondly, the necessary inclusion of reflexive precepts in e-games development contexts; and thirdly, the importance of advocating for more diverse and equitable racialized representations in commercial e-games. (shrink)

Temporal reference in natural language is inherently context dependent: what counts as a moment in one context may be structurally analysed in another context, and vice versa. In this note we outline a way of accounting for this phenomenon within event-based semantics.

Enciclopédia não está entre os termos mais conhecidos de Michel Foucault. Todavia, ao olhar com atenção para algumas ocorrências desse termo ao longo de sua carreira, com uma especial ênfase aos anos de 1960 e 1970, algo se revela ao leitor atento. O intuito desse texto é discernir esse termo no vocabulário foucaultiano, mostrando sua dupla face. Se por um lado, Foucault se refere tecnicamente à Enciclopédia editada por Denis Diderot e Jean D’Alembert; por outro, ele recorre ao termo sugerindo (...) outra prática que não simplesmente elabora um memorial de nossos saberes, mas ultrapassa essa fronteira na direção do que ele chamará de heterotópico. No primeiro momento, o caráter crítico da abordagem levará a considerações sobre os limites do projeto enciclopédico, e as consequências práticas das políticas de memória e esquecimento que ele implica. Num segundo momento, a partir de fontes importantes como Nietzsche, Freud e Marx, compreenderemos as possibilidades de uma nova dobra na história das técnicas de interpretar, em busca de uma ressignificação foucaultiana das enciclopédias. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:While studying the history of the Liber figurarum by Joachim of Fiore, I have used the distinction among his followers between Joachimist and Joachites,1 that is between the pupils who respected Joachim’s ideas and the ones who re-created his message, combining his ideas with other apocalyptic themes borrowed from different authors or traditions. Both groups considered Joachim to be a starting point in the history of the Church, but (...) in a dissimilar way: this break sometimes encouraged conflicts and struggles. The meeting between Franciscanism and Joachimism was influenced by such quarrels and perhaps stimulated them. Both the Florensians and the Franciscans divided themselves roughly between Joachimists and Joachites.This fluctuation of opinions becomes clear if one follows the diffusion of the Liber figurarum and the transformations in the cycle of illustrations linked to Joachim’s ideas.The Liber figurarum represents the swan song of a civilization based on figurae, which expressed itself in many forms during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Joachim’s iconographic tradition is actually perfectly in tune with the early medieval tradition of Southern Italy, rooted in the iconography of late antiquity. The key word to describe its most profound essence is “kaleidoscopic.”2 This word, used by Reeves to define Joachim’s outlook, shows the method and the merit of Joachim’s images, grafted onto the trunk of an ancient plant that had deep roots in Southern Italy. Like a kaleidoscope, an image can easily change into a concept, and the concept can easily turn into an image that is at the same time astonishing and coherent. At the base of this unpredictable metamorphic process is the conviction, widespread in the ancient world, because of Plato, that there was an inseparable link between and idea in itself and its external, sensible manifestation. We have an important application of one such kaleidoscope in the art of memory theories.3This notion of idea and copy helped shape late antiquity and early medieval codices. An example is the conjuring effect of two uncovered facades opening the book; a technique we already find in copies of Cassiodorus’s Institutiones and in the Liber Figurarum. Another example is the fading of text into images as in calligrams; or the text moves around an image, changing the direction of perception in relation to the image. Kaleidoscopes also include figures breaking up into other figures, effects which happen when different geometrical figures cross and can be seen in different ways such as when “realistic” figures split or double before our eyes, like Joachim’s eagle-trees. To underline the amazing appearance of a text’s metamorphosis into an image and vice versa, we can have a figure larger than the written part of a page that goes beyond the layout of the manuscript’s leaves. But we can also have small figures in the white margin set on the same line, like visual notes to the text. Sometimes there are also figures that show where a gloss is, for example in the calligrams of the Cassiodorian codice, in some calligrams of the Liber Figurarum and in the psaltery representations in the margins of the Psalterium Decem Chordarum of ms. 322 of the Biblioteca Antoniana Padova. In this process, in which mnemonic inspiration is really, there is continuous interaction between text and margin, between words and images, which contributes to a better understanding of the meaning. In the same way, the methods we have already described allowed an active, watchful, lively use of the hand written single page. You can take visual possession of it or even take hold of it and move it around to read what is written in the opposite direction of the image. The codex will turn from a lector’s hand to the master’s hand and, from it, to the hand of.. (shrink)

The present collection of essays brings into dialogue Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) by comparing their cultural and intellectual legacy. Pasolini and Fassbinder are amongst the last radical filmmakers to have emerged in Europe. Born in Italy and Germany, they inherited a traumatic social and political past which is reflected in their works through a number of similarly articulated and unresolved tensions: high and popular cultures, theatre, literature and cinema, ideology and narration, major and minor codes (...) of expression. The essays in this book examine the uncompromising character of Pasolini's and Fassbinder's films. Constantly oscillating between utopia and nihilism, these works invite us to reconsider subjective and collective questions which from today's perspective seem lost forever. (shrink)

Democracy can be a means to independently valuable ends and/or it can be intrinsically (or non-instrumentally) valuable. One powerful non-instrumental defence of democracy is based on the idea that only it can publicly justify political authority. I contend that this is an argument about the reasonable acceptability of political authority and about the requirements of publicity and that satisfying these requirements has nothing to do with whether a society is democratic or not. Democracy, then, plays no role in publicly justifying (...) political authority. I also show that any non-instrumental defence of democracy must make claims about what justice requires and make several further claims that require substantial justification. (shrink)

My dissertation concerns the nature of linguistic understanding. A standard view about linguistic understanding is that it is a propositional knowledge state. The following is an instance of this view: given a speaker S and an expression alpha that means M, S understand alpha just in case S knows that alpha means M. I refer to this as the epistemic view of linguistic understanding. The epistemic view would appear to be a mere conceptual truth about linguistic understanding, since it is (...) entailed by the following two claims that themselves seem to be mere conceptual truths: S understands alpha iff S knows what alpha means, and---given that a means M--- S knows what alpha means iff S knows that alpha means M. I argue, however, that this is not a mere conceptual truth. Contrary to the epistemic view, propositional knowledge of the meaning of alpha is not necessary for understanding alpha. I argue that linguistic understanding does not even require belief. My positive proposal is that our understanding of language is typically realized, at least in native speakers, as a perceptual capacity. Evidence from cognitive neuropsychology suggests that our perceptual experience of language comes to us already semantically interpreted. We perceive a speaker's utterance as having content, and it is by perceiving the speaker's utterances as having the right content that we understand what the speaker says. We count as understanding language in virtue of having this capacity to understand what speakers say when they use language. This notion of perceiving an utterance as having content gets analyzed in terms of Dretske's account of representation in terms of a teleological notion of function: you perceive a speaker's utterance as having content when the utterance produces in you a perceptual state that has a certain function in your psychology. I show how this view about the nature of linguistic understanding provides an attractive account of how identity claims can be semantically informative, as opposed to merely pragmatically informative, an account that avoids the standard difficulties for Fregean views that attempt to account for the informativeness of identity claims in terms of their semantics. (shrink)

The aim of the present study, based on data from 20 countries, is to identify the pattern of variables (at country, school and student levels), which are typical of students performing below the low international benchmark compared to students performing at the advanced performance benchmark, in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006. The dependent variable of the analysis is a dichotomous variable, the values of which represent the two different performance groups of students. The independent variables are (...) two sets of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development educational indicators, variables from PIRLS 2006 Reading Curriculum Questionnaire data, variables and indices based on data obtained from questionnaires for teachers, schools, parents and students. The analysis is based on classification and regression trees, which is a full hierarchical non-parametric method suited to detecting and interpreting complex reciprocal influences between a large number of independent variables. The results show that pupils? performance can be predicted by the relationships between country-level variables (the changes in teachers? salaries at the top of the salary scale), school context variables (e.g. percentages of students from economically affluent home) and home educational resources and variables at student level (e.g. students? reading self-concept). (shrink)

This article argues against the claim that democracy is a necessary condition of political legitimacy. Instead, I propose a weaker set of conditions. First, I explain the case for the necessity of democracy. This is that only democracy can address the ‘egalitarian challenge’, i.e. ‘if we are all equal, why should only some of us wield political power?’. I show that if democracy really is a necessary condition of political legitimacy, then (what I label) the problems of domestic justice and (...) of international legitimacy become intractable. I then argue that the egalitarian challenge is addressed where the requirements of (1) horizontal equality, (2) acceptable vertical inequality, and (3) publicity, are met and where (4) citizens have some institutionalized opportunity for a voice in decisions. I show that these conditions can be realized in non-democratic form and conclude by explaining how the four conditions can be employed to make the problems of domestic justice and of international legitimacy more tractable. Overall, my ambitions are limited. I do not offer an all-things-considered case against democracy but I do show that (some) forms of non-democratic government are permissible. (shrink)

The most plausible pro-life argument claims that abortion is seriously wrong because it deprives the foetus of something valuable. This paper examines two recent versions of this argument. Don Marquis's version takes the valuable thing to be a 'future like ours', a future containing valuable experiences and activities. Jim Stone's version takes the valuable thing to be a future containing conscious goods, which it is the foetus's biological nature to make itself have. I give three grounds for rejecting these arguments. (...) First, they lead to unacceptable inequalities in the wrongness of killing. Second, they lead to counterintuitive results in a range of imaginary cases. Third, they ignore the role of psychological connectedness in determining the magnitude or seriousness of deprivation-based harms: because the foetus is only weakly psychologically connected to its own future, it cannot be seriously harmed by being deprived of that future. (shrink)

Although risky decision-making has been posited to contribute to the maladaptive behavior of individuals with psychopathic tendencies, the performance of psychopathic groups on a common task of risky decision-making, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), has been equivocal. Different aspects of psychopathy (personality traits, antisocial deviance) and/or moderating variables may help to explain these inconsistent findings. In a sample of college students (N = 129, age 18–27), we examined the relationship between primary and secondary psychopathic (...) features and IGT performance. A measure of impulsivity was included to investigate its potential as a moderator. In a joint model including main effects and interactions between primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy and impulsivity, only secondary psychopathy was significantly related to risky IGT performance, and this effect was not moderated by the other variables. This finding supports the growing literature suggesting that secondary psychopathy is a better predictor of decision-making problems than the primary psychopathic personality traits of lack of empathy and remorselessness. (shrink)

Das Verdienst der erkenntnistheoretischen Überlegungen von Evandro Agazzi besteht in folgendem Vorschlag: Die Wissenschaftsgeschichte sollte als Treffpunkt zwischen philosophischer Reflexion und wissenschaftlicher Forschung verstanden und untersucht werden. Wissenschaft und Philosophie sind damit eng miteinander verbunden. Mit den Worten Kants, ist Wissenschaft ohne Philosophie blind und Philosophie ohne Wissenschaft leer. Und nicht nur das: Für Agazzi hilft die Wissenschaftsphilosophie der Gesellschaft als Ganzes, den kulturellen (und menschlichen) Wert der Wissenschaft besser zu verstehen. Umgekehrt hilft uns die Wissenschaftsgeschichte, den immerwährenden Fortschritt unseres (...) Wissens zu verstehen. Warum ist das so? Weil wir die progressive Natur unserer wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse nicht außer Acht lassen dürfen.Der wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Ansatz hilft uns auch zu verstehen, dass die wissenschaftliche Entwicklung immer im Rahmen verschiedener Entscheidungen stattfindet. Umgekehrt hilft die erkenntnistheoretische Reflexion auch der historischen Forschung, die Entwicklung unseres kognitiven und technischen Erbes besser zu verstehen. Auf dieser Grundlage setzte sich Agazzi − in Zusammenarbeit mit Ludovico Geymonat − für die Verbreitung der institutionellen Präsenz der Wissenschaftsphilosophie und der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (sowie der mathematischen Logik) an den Universitäten ein, insbesondere in Italien. Heute stehen wir alle wie Zwerge auf den Schultern von Riesen, denn wir können die Zusammenhänge zwischen Wissenschaft und Philosophie besser verstehen, gerade weil wir auf die historischen Beiträge von Evandro Agazzi zurückgreifen können. (shrink)

Una de las críticas recurrentes a la concepción de la guerra de Maquiavelo es que considera este fenómeno como algo totalmente “natural”. La guerra pertenece a la “naturaleza de las cosas” y por lo tanto es inútil preguntarse si es posible que exista un mundo libre de guerras, ni si la forma de hacer la guerra tiene que obedecer a un sistema de reglas establecidas en el ámbito de la ley. Sin embargo, la idea maquiaveliana de la guerra como algo (...) “natural” no resulta del “sentido común” o de la experiencia inmediata. Al contrario, se trata de una concepción filosófica, se podría decir incluso ontológica, que depende de una idea de “orden” y de “naturaleza” que remite, en última instancia, al atomismo antiguo. (shrink)

We consider the problem of finding, in the ambit of modal logic, a minimal characterization for finite Kripke frames, i.e., a formula which, given a frame, axiomatizes its theory employing the lowest possible number of variables and implies the other axiomatizations. We show that every finite transitive frame admits a minimal characterization over K4, and that this result can not be extended to K.