Western representation of countries from the Global South implies a dichotomist view of business ethics: on the one hand, universal ethics largely reproduces commonsensical views of the South as ‘less ethical’, and on the other hand, voices from the South are often conditioned to present themselves as substantially indigenous and unambiguous to be accepted as legitimate ethical subjects. We join the growing interest in bridging this gap by drawing on studies from human geography, and ask to what extent the materiality (...) of moral dilemmas bespeaks the disputed underpinning ethical values of a given space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s perspective of the production of social space, we outline and apply the idea of ‘spatial ethics’ to organizations, in order to approach the entanglement between center and periphery. We analyze organizations in favelas, which are, for many authors, territories where experiences are extreme, and poverty and violence mix with vibrant culture and ingenuity. We critically approach the field of business ethics and suggest that one way of moving beyond the North–South debate is to consider that ethics cannot be transmitted or represented in empty milieus. (shrink)

It is of concern that, until now, Western and Southern theories have not been able to provide a full conceptual understanding of the complicity of the elites and states of former colonies outside the West with the political domination they suffer from their Western counterparts. Decolonial thought, by exploring global epistemic designs, can fully explain such political dependency, which, for Aníbal Quijano, results from the local elites’ goal to racially identify with their Western peers (self-humanization), obstructing local nationalization. We explore (...) why the racially dehumanized local elites believe they can humanize themselves. Our claim is that this happens because of modernity’s pretense that everyone can become civilized and, thereby, human, hiding the fact that hu(man)s are only heterosexual men that are simultaneously Western, white and Christian. Only by focusing on the enunciation of Western knowledge, instead of on its enunciated content, can we make that argument. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that if one adopts conditional probabilities as the primitive concept of probability, one must deal with the fact that even in very ordinary circumstances at least some probability values may be imprecise, and that some probability questions may fail to have numerically precise answers.

According to the actualist view, what is essential to the truth conditions of a future-tensed sentence ‘it will be the case that ϕ’ is reference to the unique course of events that will become actual. On the other hand, the modal view has it that the truth conditions of such a sentence require that the truth of ϕ be already “settled” at the time of utterance, where “being settled at time t” is defined by universal quantification over a domain of (...) courses of events, the futures compatible with what has happened up to time t. On the proposal we discuss in this paper, the actualist view and the modal view are seen as two related attitudes that speakers can have when they evaluate future-tensed sentences, and the corresponding interpretations undergo a unified semantic treatment based on a contextual notion of settledness. A central feature of our approach is a dynamic view of contexts of utterance, whereby the world of the utterance is not fixed once and for all, as different worlds, by the passing of time, can play this role in turn. Finally, one major goal of the paper is to show how the unified analysis we propose accounts for a particularly interesting interpretation of future-tensed sentences, often referred to as ‘epistemic reading’. (shrink)

BackgroundHeavy media use has been linked to sleep problems in children, which may also extend to the infancy period. While international parent-advisory agencies, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, advise no screen time before 18 months, parents often do not follow this recommendation. Research on Italian infants’ early access to media is sparse, and only very few studies have investigated links with sleeping habits.MethodTo address this gap, we examined concurrent associations between parent-reported surveys of child technology use and sleeping (...) patterns. The Italian version of the 60 item Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure Survey, developed as part of a larger international study,, the Brief Screening Questionnaire for Infant Sleep Problems Sadeh, 2004) were completed online by 264 Italian parents of 8- to 36-month-olds and a subset completed the Parenting Stress Index Abidin, 1995) between April 2017 and April 2018.ResultsMore devices located in the child’s room and the more time spent watching TV or using an iPad were associated with less hours of sleep at night. Furthermore, more time spent watching TV or using a smartphone, as well as the number of devices in the room was associated with going to sleep later at night. Instrumental media use was associated with less sleep.ConclusionLike other countries, Italian infants have high levels of exposure to media, and differences in media patterns were associated with sleep patterns. Cultural factors influence both instrumental reasons for media use and sleep practices. Further research should explore how media use may serve to regulate emotion as a function of both contextual factors and individual differences. (shrink)

Resenha do libro: ARENAS, Luis; DEL CASTILLO, Ramón; FAERNA, Ángel M. John Dewey: una estética de este mundo. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2018, 447p. ISBN 978-84-17358-59-4.

SAGGI DI VITTORIO MARCHIS, UMBERTO BOTTAZZINI, FABIO TOSCANO, MASSIMO NEGROTTI, GIUSEPPE O. LONGO, STEFANO A. E. LEONI, ALBERTO CASADEI, SILVANO TAGLIAGAMBE.

ABSTRACT I present a new model of the self-regulation of virtue that integrates perspectives on emotion, cognition, and motivation. Across three vignette-based studies in US/uk (N = 1,540), I developed through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis a multi-item measure of broadening and defensive responses, the Self-Regulation of Virtue Inventory (SRVI). I applied that measurement model to two new scenarios portraying prototypical moral exemplars (selected from a set of 12) and fitted structural models that identify key antecedents: motivational dispositions (regulatory focus (...) and hedonic orientation) and moral comparisons (opinion- and ability-based). The findings were consistent with network analysis, providing initial evidence of their robustness. By integrating literatures on motivation, emotion, social cognition and comparison within a self-regulation framework, I provide initial evidence to advance theory on moral self-regulation and moral education, with practical implications on how to maximise the upsides of virtue while mitigating or channelling its possible drawbacks. (shrink)

Fábio Alves dos Santos (1954-2013) cursou Pedagogia, Ciências Sociais e Teologia, era Especialista em Filosofia da Religião (PUC Minas), Advogado (PUC Minas) e Mestre em Direito Constitucional (UFMG). Lecionou na PUC Minas como professor de Cultura Religiosa e depois como professor no Curso de Direito, atuando principalmente no Serviço de Assistência Judiciária – SAJ, especialmente cuidado de causas populares como as da ASMARE (Associação dos Catadores de Papel, Papelão e Material Reaproveitável de Belo Horizonte), da Pastoral de Rua, da (...) Pastoral Carcerária, de movimentos de “Sem Casa”, de ocupações e tantos outros grupos. Fábio sofria de grave problema de visão há mais de 15 anos. Quase ficou cego depois de diversas cirurgias de miopia. Isso, porém, não o impedia de seguir seu constante compromisso com as lutas populares. Na última entrevista que concedeu, menos de um mês antes de sua morte (19 de outubro de 2013), depois de duro sofrimento de quase dois anos, no tratamento de um câncer no pâncreas, conta um pouco de sua vida, sua luta e sua percepção de várias realidades, especialmente da Igreja e da pastoral. Militante formado na Teologia da Libertação, de profunda espiritualidade, marcada por traços da religiosidade popular nordestina e comprometida com a libertação, Fábio Alves também buscou em sua vida abrir-se à teologia do pluralismo religioso, especialmente com o Santo Daime, em cuja tradição religiosa chegou a ser “fardado”, mantendo uma profunda atitude espiritual aberta ao diálogo inter-religioso. Sua primeira publicação foi “Começo de mundo novo: sofrimento, luta e vitória dos posseiros de Santana dos Frades”, Sergipe, numa versão popular em 1981 e outra pela Editora Vozes (1990). Fruto de sua dissertação de mestrado, publicou o livro “Direito Agrário: política fundiária no Brasil (1995). Em 2001 saiu seu último livro, uma coletânea de artigos publicados em diversos jornais: “Em defesa da vida”. Num artigo em Horizonte (2004), juntamente com o advogado, amigo e colega Prof. Cristiano de Melo Bastos, discutiu “A prática jurídica na missão da PUC Minas”. Palavras-chave : Teologia da Libertação. Militância. Igreja Católica. Pastoral. Lutas populares. (shrink)

Focused on city-scale automation, and using self-driving cars (SDCs) as a case study, this article reflects on the role of AI—and in particular, computer vision systems used for mapping and navigation—as a catalyst for urban transformation. Urban research commonly presents AI and cities as having a one-way cause-and-effect relationship, giving undue weight to AI’s impact on cities and overlooking the role of cities in shaping AI. Working at the intersection of data science and social research, this paper aims to counter (...) this trend by exploring the reverse perspective: how do cities affect the development, and expose the present limits, of SDCs? The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, by comparing urban and nonurban environments and thoroughly examining the relationship between computer vision and city-specific sociality and form, it defines machine autonomy/automation as a function of the sociotechnical milieu in which an AI system operates. Second, and related, the paper problematizes the notion of SDCs as autonomous technologies and the role it plays in envisioning contending policy arrangements and technical solutions for achieving full driving automation. Finally, the article offers insight into a materialist and spatialized understanding of AI—namely, not as an abstract quality susceptible to replication within discrete machines, but rather as a distributed property emerging through embodied interactions among a multiplicity of agents (human, non-human, and technological) within/with their environments. (shrink)

Describing and defining what 'Japan style' is, this book explores specific achievements in Japanese art and architecture, offering an analysis of the Japanese culture, its vision of the world and of humankind.

People argue to reconcile differences of opinion, but reconciliation may fail to happen. In these cases, most theorists assume arguers are left with the same disagreement from which they started. This is too optimistic, since disagreement might instead escalate, and this may happen because of the argumentative practice, not in spite of it. These dangers depend on epistemological, pragmatic, and cultural factors, and show why arguers should be careful in picking their dialogical fights.

In a recent article, P. Roger Turner and Justin Capes argue that no one is, or ever was, even partly morally responsible for certain world-indexed truths. Here we present our reasons for thinking that their argument is unsound: It depends on the premise that possible worlds are maximally consistent states of affairs, which is, under plausible assumptions concerning states of affairs, demonstrably false. Our argument to show this is based on Bertrand Russell’s original ‘paradox of propositions’. We should then opt (...) for a different approach to explain world-indexed truths whose upshot is that we may be morally responsible for some of them. The result to the effect that there are no maximally consistent states of affairs is independently interesting though, since this notion motivates an account of the nature of possible worlds in the metaphysics of modality. We also register in this article, independently of our response to Turner and Capes, and in the spirit of Russell’s aforementioned paradox and many other versions thereof, a proof of the claim that there is no set of all true propositions one can render false. (shrink)

O presente trabalho visa expor, utilizando dupla perspectiva, as tecnociências e suas inovações como resultantes do modo de produção capitalista e no que isso implica. Num primeiro momento, será apresentada a perspectiva utilizada por Deuleuze e Guattari em Mil Platôs para denotar a importância do Estado como garantidor de um modo de produção e como agenciador, via ordem jurídica, das linhas de fuga que emergem da sociedade, inclusive no que toca às inovações trazidas pelo desenvolvimento e ampliação dos conhecimentos e (...) dos saberes. Na sequência, de forma complementar, serão abordados o capitalismo em si e alguns de seus fundamentos relevantes para a compreensão das consequências possíveis para as inovações tecnocientíficas, isso a partir de postulados da teoria materialista-histórica. Após, irá se procurar demonstrar a realização de um estatuto ético-jurídico brasileiro como agenciamento das modificações e inovações que dizem com uso de células tronco para pesquisas. (shrink)

One of the major challenges in the philosophy of religion is theological fatalism—roughly, the claim that divine omniscience is incompatible with free will. In this article, I present new reasons to be skeptical of what I consider to be the strongest argument for theological fatalism. First, I argue that divine foreknowledge is not necessary for an argument against free will if we take into account divine knowledge of contingent a priori truths. Second, I show that this argument can be generalized (...) so that ordinary human knowledge of contingent a priori truths also leads to an argument against free will. This, I believe, results in an absurd conclusion that is unacceptable to both theists and non-theists. But if there is something wrong with this argument, there is something wrong, too, with the argument for theological fatalism. Although there is a range of possible responses, I suggest that the core issue in all cases is a closure principle—specifically, the principle that ‘no choice about’ is closed under entailment (or strict implication). (shrink)

Argumentation theorists often disagree about which scheme best represents a given type of argument. Unfortunately, authors sometimes become involved in fruitless pseudo-agreement because they fail to perceive that their supposedly competing schemes are means for achieving different practical or theoretical goals. This paper explains some of the different purposes that an argument scheme may serve, and it indicates how the relevant type of pseudo-disagreement may be avoided.

In recent times, representation theory has become one of the most productive and interesting sub-fields in democratic theory. Arguably, the most important theoretical innovation are the so-called ‘constructivist’ approaches to political representation. These approaches play a central role in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation and The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, two impressive volumes that take stock of the state of the art in representation theory. I discuss the two volumes by focusing on three broader and (...) interconnected themes: the problem that constructivism is meant to respond to, the tendency of representation theorists to expand the possibilities of representation as broadly as possible, and the normative aspects of political representation and how constructivists deal with them. (shrink)

Richard Feldman’s well-known principle about disagreement and evidence – usually encapsulated in the slogan, ‘evidence of evidence is evidence’, (EEE) – invites the question, what should a rational believer do when faced by such evidence, especially when the disagreement is with an epistemic peer? The question has been the subject of much controversy. However, it has been recently suggested both that the principle is subject to counterexamples and that it is trivial. If either is the case, the question of what (...) to do in the face of evidence of evi- dence becomes less pressing. We contend that even if one or the other of these suggestions is right about (EEE) as a general principle about evidence, they leave it untouched insofar as it plays a role in the debates about the rational way to respond to disagreement and, in particular, to disagreement by an epistemic peer. This is because in such cases the evidence about which one has evidence and which is supposed to provide evidence against one's belief is the mere fact of someone’s disagreeing, rather than something that is related to the content of the proposition about which the parties disagree. We go on to argue that, so understood, the principle is false. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of the notion of artificial moral agent (AMA) and of its impact on human beings’ self-understanding as moral agents. Firstly, I introduce the topic by presenting what I call the Continuity Approach. Its main claim holds that AMAs and human moral agents exhibit no significant qualitative difference and, therefore, should be considered homogeneous entities. Secondly, I focus on the consequences this approach leads to. In order to do this I take (...) into consideration the work of Bostrom and Dietrich, who have radically assumed this viewpoint and thoroughly explored its implications. Thirdly, I present an alternative approach to AMAs—the Discontinuity Approach—which underscores an essential difference between human moral agents and AMAs by tackling the matter from another angle. In this section I concentrate on the work of Johnson and Bryson and I highlight the link between their claims and Heidegger’s and Jonas’s sug-gestions concerning the relationship between human beings and technological products. In conclusion I argue that, although the Continuity Approach turns out to be a necessary postulate to the machine ethics project, the Discontinuity Approach highlights a relevant distinction between AMAs and human moral agents. On this account, the Discontinuity Approach generates a clearer understanding of what AMAs are, of how we should face the moral issues they pose, and, finally, of the difference that separates machine ethics from moral philosophy. (shrink)

This short piece discusses Hélène Landemore’s proposal of an ‘open democracy’, as outlined in her recent book _Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century_. Acknowledging the value of Landemore’s radical and ambitious proposals, I draw attention to a number of shortcomings and blind spots that have to do with how the case for an ‘open democracy’ is made: through an unduly brief and dismissive treatment of political parties; a methodological insensitivity to empirical variations of democratic performance and citizens’ (...) evaluations of the latter; a failure to distinguish between higher and ordinary law-making in the discussion of the central Icelandic case; and, finally, a surprising concession that realising an open democracy is all but infeasible in established constitutional democracies. If open democracy is to be an attractive ideal, these issues must arguably be addressed. (shrink)

This article scrutinizes discourse surrounding the Russia-Ukraine war in Western nations, where, despite widespread support for Ukraine, a contingent advocates for peace by rejecting military aid. This “pacifist” stance gains traction through public demonstrations in European countries and political endorsement. However, by opposing military aid while advocating peace, these messages, while ostensibly altruistic, distort genuine efforts for establishing peace in Ukraine. The article argues that recent developments from the philosophy of language, combined with the realities of Russia’s invasion and main (...) war objectives, provide clarity on this phenomenon, making a case for considering such calls for peace as propagandistic, perverting the meaning of the word. (shrink)

Music, literature, history. These things are not quite alike. But in Europe, before the advent of recording machines that made it possible for sounds to be recorded and played back, the three activities relied on the same technology of preservation. They were kept in/as books. Bookishness, in European and colonial imaginaries, was an often-idealized, powerful means of keeping things from slipping away. An understanding of bookish things as a repository can be evinced in laws that required preserving a copy of (...) newly published literary works and music for the benefit of posterity; or in popular novels where a book featured as the chronicler (both recorder and narrator) of its own adventures, beyond the lifespans of individual users. Scholars have paid specialist attention to the ontological differences among music, literature, and history when they are kept as books. Discipline-specific trainings and conversations tend to emphasize how different these objects and practices are. Yet focusing on their shared mode of bookish preservation offers other rewards. Our multi-authored article is a creative experiment in bringing together musicologists, literary scholars, and historians to test the potential, for our own fields and with implications for other humanities disciplines, of foregrounding this technological convergence. We propose the more capacious categories of bookkeepers (people who keep things as books) and cultures of note-taking (whether glossing a textbook or notating music) as fruitful avenues to avoid writing the artificially separate histories of creation versus consumption, public versus personal, authoritative versus amateurish, or artistic versus documentary practices. Music, broadly conceived, and the nineteenth-century album (a book of blank pages to keep verses, music, memories, and many more things) serve as the starting point for our reflections. Both exhibit a tangential connection to the normative codes of what Roger Chartier called “the order of books.” In considering actors/artifacts/acts at the very margins of textuality, or existing in a perverse relationship with bookishness, our aim is to redraw the knowledge-making structures we use to investigate our objects of study, calling attention to the intermedial and social practices, and cultures of remembrance, in which they are historically imbricated. (shrink)

Why are enthymemes so frequent? Are we dumb arguers, smart rhetoricians, or parsimonious reasoners? This paper investigates systematic use of enthymemes, criticizing the application of the principle of charity to their interpretation. In contrast, I propose to analyze enthymematic argumentation in terms of parsimony, i.e. as a manifestation of the rational tendency to economize over scant resources. Consequences of this view on the current debate on enthymemes and on their rational reconstruction are discussed.

The aim of this article is to present and discuss the language of the «givens», a typical stylistic resource of Greek mathematics and one of the major features of the proof format of analysis and synthesis. I shall analyze its expressive function and its peculiarities, as well as its general role as a deductive tool, explaining at the same time its particular applications in subgenres of a geometrical proposition like the locus theorems and the so-called «porisms». The main interpretative theses (...) of this study are the following: the language of the «givens» (1) is the standard idiom in which “existence and uniqueness” of a mathematical object was proved, (2) was conceived as an unified framework reducing to a strictly deductive format disparate argumentative steps such as deductions, constructions, and calculations. (shrink)

In this paper we present tableau methods for two-dimensional modal logics. Although models for such logics are well known, proof systems remain rather unexplored as most of their developments have been purely axiomatic. The logics herein considered contain first-order quantifiers with identity, and all the formulas in the language are doubly-indexed in the proof systems, with the upper indices intuitively representing the actual or reference worlds, and the lower indices representing worlds of evaluation—first and second dimensions, respectively. The tableaux modulate (...) over different notions of validity such as local, general, and diagonal, besides being general enough for several two-dimensional logics proposed in the literature. We also motivate the introduction of a new operator into two-dimensional languages and explore some of the philosophical questions raised by it concerning the relations there are between actuality, necessity, and the a priori, that seem to undermine traditional intuitive interpretations of two-dimensional operators. (shrink)

In this paper I will offer a survey of Quentin Meillassoux’s thought, focusing on what I identify as the central node of his thought, the link between mathematics and contingency. I will then proceed to question the compatibility of his principle of radical contingency with the philosophy—and the practice—of science, and I will propose a possible solution to this problem by pushing Meillassoux along the Pythagorean path. Finally, I will argue that 1) his project of evacuating metaphysical necessity via a (...) mathematization of reality can be read on a continuum with the critiques of metaphysics of presence (and with the special status assigned to mathematical formalism) operated by Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou; and 2) his philosophy can be understood as a philosophy of science only if we allow speculations aimed at subverting core metaphysical conceptual structures to have a bearing upon empirically-based scientific practice. (shrink)

In this essay I will try to demonstrate that the principle of self-determination is based on a formal and individualistic view of liberty rights. I also propose a different perspective that takes into account the relationships rather than the individual. I will show how this result can only be achieved through a different ascription of rights to individuals: in particular, I will try to demonstrate 1) that any social practices express specific values, 2) that these values are the result of (...) historical and cultural circumstances, 3) that they are subject to an ongoing public debate, and finally 4) that only if the individual praxis is consistent with these values can it lead to recognition of rights. (shrink)

The ubiquity of technology in our lives and its culmination in artificial intelligence raises questions about its role in our moral considerations. In this paper, we address a moral concern in relation to technological systems given their deep integration in our lives. Coeckelbergh develops a social-relational account, suggesting that it can point us toward a dynamic, historicised evaluation of moral concern. While agreeing with Coeckelbergh’s move away from grounding moral concern in the ontological properties of entities, we suggest that it (...) problematically upholds moral relativism. We suggest that the role of power, as described by Arendt and Foucault, is significant in social relations and as curating moral possibilities. This produces a clearer picture of the relations at hand and opens up the possibility that relations may be deemed violent. Violence as such gives us some way of evaluating the morality of a social relation, moving away from Coeckelbergh’s seeming relativism while retaining his emphasis on social–historical moral precedent. (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)

Book 1 of Euclid's Elements opens with a set of unproved assumptions: definitions, postulates, and ‘common notions’. The common notions are general rules validating deductions that involve the relations of equality and congruence. The attested postulates are five in number, even if a part of the manuscript tradition adds a sixth, almost surely spurious, that in some manuscripts features as the ninth, and last, common notion. The postulates are called αἰτήματα both in the manuscripts of the Elements and in the (...) ancient exegetic tradition. It is not said, however, that this denomination is original, as it coincides with the nomen rei actae associated with the verbal form introducing the postulates themselves. Since antiquity it has been recognized that the postulates naturally split into two groups of quite different character: the first three are rules licensing basic constructions, the fourth and the fifth are assertions stating properties of particular geometric objects. I transcribe postulates 1–3 in the text established by Heiberg : ᾐτήσθω ἀπὸ παντὸς σημείου ἐπὶ πᾶν σημεῖον εὐθεῖαν γραμμὴν ἀγαγεῖνκαὶ πεπερασμένην εὐθεῖαν κατὰ τὸ συνεχὲς ἐπ᾽ εὐθείας ἐκβαλεῖνκαὶ παντὶ κέντρῳ καὶ διαστήματι κύκλον γράϕεσθαι. (shrink)

Unworkable discusses the ongoing implosion of our globalized world from three distinct angles: the capitalist elimination of labor through technological automation, the dissolution of our shared social narratives, and the subtle imposition of an increasingly pervasive ideological order. Aiming to root out the lost cause of this implosion, Fabio Vighi returns to Marx by way of Hegel, Lacan, Gorz, Baudrillard, and other thinkers who, in different ways, have reflected on the complex dialectical structure of modernity and its hidden conditions of (...) possibility. Capitalism, Vighi argues, fundamentally redefined the meaning of work and prevented the emergence of alternative forms of life. In our own time, the delusions of work and the values that propel life under capitalism have become, in Vighi's analysis, unworkable. And yet, even as we become an increasingly "workless" society, we continue to abide by the same laws of productivity and profit. (shrink)

The right to health implies, among other things, that individuals and communities must be allowed to have a voice in decisions concerning the definition of their well-being. The article argues for a more active participation of ethnocultural minorities in healthcare decisions and highlights the relevance of strategies aimed at creating a bottom-up engagement of people and groups, as well as of measures aimed at a broader organizational flexibility, in order to meet migrants’ and minorities’ needs. Finally, the article clarifies that (...) these strategies are not simply the outcome of a welcoming attitude of the Western healthcare system but may be interpreted as a specific duty resulting from the notion of “particularly vulnerable groups,” as formulated by the ECtHR in its case law: when vulnerable groups are at stake, every decision about state actions and rules regarding healthcare should start from an a consideration of the specific conditions and needs of people belonging to vulnerable minority groups. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an exposition and critique of the Organic View of Ethical Status, as outlined by Torrance (2008). A key presupposition of this view is that only moral patients can be moral agents. It is claimed that because artificial agents lack sentience, they cannot be proper subjects of moral concern (i.e. moral patients). This account of moral standing in principle excludes machines from participating in our moral universe. I will argue that the Organic View operationalises anthropocentric intuitions (...) regarding sentience ascription, and by extension how we identify moral patients. The main difference between the argument I provide here and traditional arguments surrounding moral attributability is that I do not necessarily defend the view that internal states ground our ascriptions of moral patiency. This is in contrast to views such as those defended by Singer (1975, 2011) and Torrance (2008), where concepts such as sentience play starring roles. I will raise both conceptual and epistemic issues with regards to this sense of sentience. While this does not preclude the usage of sentience outright, it suggests that we should be more careful in our usage of internal mental states to ground our moral ascriptions. Following from this I suggest other avenues for further exploration into machine moral patiency which may not have the same shortcomings as the Organic View. (shrink)

A título de reflexão inicial, consideramos que a difusão de conhecimentos novos ou tradicionais dos campos da educação, em específico, da educação nas ciências humanas e sociais, são espacializados e ordenados por dimensões e fatores de natureza geográfica, filosófica e político-pedagógica. Geográfica porque obedece ao contexto de mudanças territoriais que os espaços de construção do saber, como escolas e universidades, perpassam ao longo de sua trajetória como instituições onde o ensinar, formar e aprender se modificam ao longo da história educacional. (...) Filosófica ao serem representados por teorias e noções acerca da formação intelectual, estética e moral do indivíduo, isto é, saberes inerentes ao processo de constituição laboral e discursiva dos profissionais da educação e seus aprendizes. E político-pedagógica porque comportamentos, identidades e aprendizagens são pautados em projetos e objetivos críticos e mobilizadores de sociedade e educação, principalmente em elementos dinâmicos como concepções de cidadania, juventude, ciência e cultura. Pensando deste modo, pretendemos discutir como pode ocorrer a difusão do campo educação geográfica na perspectiva da teoria da ação comunicativa. Consoante a isso, as discussões das obras de Habermas serão de natureza interpretativa e produzidas mediante leitura de seus principais conceitos e categorias. Por conseguinte, formularemos, em cinco tópicos, orientações de caráter técnico-conceitual sobre como os preceitos dos estudos em educação geográfica poderão ser aludidos na forma e conteúdo da filosofia de Habermas. Logo, entender e territorializar comunicativamente o conhecimento educacional da Geografia significa empreender modificações nos sistemas de produção pedagógica e científica da própria Geografia, em específico, nos seus respectivos agentes e saberes didáticos e curriculares. (shrink)