Inauguration speech at chair number 18 of the Brasilian Academy of Philosophy.

El presente trabajo parte de un supuesto: la historia como un espacio semiotico que se edifica sobre la base de un sistema de categorias. En este sentido, los signos con los cuales se construye la realidad "ideal" de la historia se articulan en razon de correspondencias especificas determinadas por un esquema particular de relacion. Asi pues, el proposito de la este estudio es mostrar un espacio especulativo que de cuenta de las categorias de la filosofia de la historia, con las (...) cuales se construye un esquema semiotico para el analisis de la historia y la cultura. En razon de esto, se intenta describir, por una parte, algunas corrientes de la filosofia de la historia; por otra, la vertiente constructivista que establece un esquema para la articulacion en sentido ideal del hecho historico. De la relacion entre ambas vertientes se busca exponer la utilidad del lenguaje, categorias y relaciones, como instrumento teorico en la actividad analitica e interpretativa en aras de poder determinar el proceso historico como manifestacion semiotica de una cultura, pueblo, nacion.. (shrink)

This paper investigates some classical oppositional categories, like synthetic versus analytic, posterior versus prior, imagination versus grammar, metaphor versus hermeneutics, metaphysics versus observation, innovation versus routine, and image versus sound, and the role they play in epistemology and philosophy of science. The epistemological framework of _objective cognitive constructivism_ is of special interest in these investigations. Oppositional relations are formally represented using algebraic lattice structures like the cube and the hexagon of opposition, with applications in the contexts of modern color theory, (...) Kantian philosophy, Jungian psychology, and linguistics. (shrink)

(1991). Life as emergence: The roots of a new paradigm in theoretical biology. World Futures: Vol. 32, Creative Evolution in Nature, Mind, and Society, pp. 133-149.

El concepto de infinito en Descartes hace referencia a las categorías desubstancia y cantidad, por eso difiere del de la teoría moderna del continuomatemático, relativo a la de cualidad. El cartesianismo se soporta en eseinfinito que equivale a Dios, cuya demostración lo supone, y luego explicael cogito como consecuencia de Dios, así mismo explica el mundo y suinteligibilidad. La vida humana es sui generis porque transcurre entre lofinito y lo infinito inabarcable, también se realiza según la necesidad y segúnla libertad. (...) Esta visión del hombre convoca a Descartes a buscar la verdadcon el propósito práctico de vivir lo mejor que se pueda. (shrink)

Este trabajo compara las metáforas asociadas con la identidad y la subjetividad mestiza en dos ensayos de la literatura latinoamericana: El laberinto de la soledad (1950) de Octavio Paz y Guatemala, las líneas de su mano (1955) de Luis Cardoza y Aragón. Las nociones de identidad y subjetividad se leen como procesos envolventes y chispeantes, donde el malestar y la contradicción son inherentes al proceso afirmativo de las experiencias mexicana y guatemalteca. Se concluye que los textos expresan en su faceta (...) más poética una vivencia de la identidad y subjetividad mestiza semejante a la subjetividad ch’ixi, planteada por la socióloga boliviana Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui como un espacio de fricción y malestar que no permite la pacificación de la unidad, pero se abre la posibilidad de nuevos y plurales reconocimientos. (shrink)

O intuito deste artigo é responder: qual a religião de Voltaire? O filósofo teria um modelo de religião a propor? Como sabemos que a resposta é positiva, trabalhamos com as principais obras de Voltaire para entender quais são os fundamentos mais importantes de sua religião, quais são as questões que mais aparecem nas obras do filósofo e como elas são respondidas. Para isso, apresentaremos a relação das ideias de Voltaire com o cristianismo vigente em sua época, e a posição do (...) filósofo a respeito de Deus, da alma e do livre-arbítrio, bem como o modelo de religião proposto pelo autor do Cândido. (shrink)

Does the fact that my actions cause someone to lack access to the objects of her human rights make me a human rights violator? Is behaving in such a way that we deprive someone of access to the objects of her human rights even when we could have avoided behaving in such a way, sufficient to maintain that we have violated her human rights? When an affluent country pursues domestic policies that will foreseeably cause massive deprivation abroad in order to (...) improve its already prosperous economy, has this country violated the human rights of the very poor just by doing so? If international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization pursue policies that lead to an increase in the global poverty rate, are such organizations human rights violators? Can an individual undertaking certain actions in the market place that render insecure the access of the worst-off to the objects of their human rights be blamed for violating their rights?In this article I discuss the thesis that claims that whenever we cause, or contribute to the cause of, someone else's lack of access to the objects of her human rights, we are human rights violators. I contend that this thesis, which seems to underpin the arguments of many cosmopolitan authors taking part of the global justice debate, is mistaken. In order to achieve this end, I analyze several alternative formulations of the causal thesis. My conclusion is that before it can be said that an agent has violated someone else's human rights, it has to be proven that this agent has caused, or contributed to the cause of, a state of affairs where someone lacks access to the object of some of her human rights, by infringing a duty not to do so. Furthermore, I maintain that this must be a perfect, as opposed to an imperfect, duty. (shrink)

Ever since Aristotle, ontology has been assumed to have a single meaning. Classic ontology branched into three directions established by Kant--the three chief manifestations of reality: cosmology, psychology, and theology--and in its quality of pure ontology became the study exclusively of being. On the other hand, the three dialectical branches have been losing their validity and are being replaced by regional ontologies which take explicit account of their several objects. Four territories today present themselves for intensive speculative cultivation; quantity, matter, (...) life, and spirit. Theology has returned to its classic position at the side of pure ontology. The ideas of object and of concept are radically opposite, but nevertheless are closely related in the context of knowledge; an object is the source of a concept. A concept is formed by one or several objective instances, but does not include all of them; there are more or less determinate objects, some of which have undergone conceptual modification while others remain quite obscure, all of which indicates that the world of reality is not so evident or firm as it appears to common sense. The ideas of being and of objects bring us again to the consideration of the metaphysical theme of the individual. Neither being nor object is the concrete individual; the problem of the individual remains involved in the whole problem of substance as it was discussed in classic metaphysics, because it was completely grounded in this metaphysics and is best discussed and appreciated as the problem of the incommunicable and subsistent. Regional ontology, in fixing its attention entirely on the object, thereby limits itself and makes clear its methodological orientation. Regional ontology by no means is to be considered as a theory of science; any theory, concrete or general is subject to a synthetic process in which facts and proofs immediately given incorporate the theory into the patrimony and positive achievements of intelligence. A theory is a scientific synthesis, and although its fundamental role is logical, its origin implies experimental functions. Regional ontology can be considered as a theory of objects, but its validation does not come from science itself; rather, it is the validation of scientific facts. Ontology might be called a theory a priori, but in that case the terms "theory" and "a priori" would be contradictory since the former requires experience and the latter renounces all experimental data. Ontology operates by means of general essences which objects of the same denomination have in common; thus we speak of the realm of quantity, the realm of matter, the realm of life, and the realm of spirit. The mathematical as well as the natural, biological, and spiritual sciences clearly have different objective planes which correspond to different ontological categories, which are foreign to the experiencing subject because it knows them only concretely as phenomena. The metaphysical basis of mathematics is quantity, a real accident of matter. Quantity examined according to the ontology of mathematics arises from matter, finding its origin in matter as the quality related to form. The ontology of the physicochemical sciences is concerned with the contents of quantity, with the internal object by which quantity is numbered and given its nature. Matter presents a problem to philosophy no less important than the problem it presents to the sciences whose data are mere approximations to matter. Natural sciences which seem very intelligible resolve themselves into a morass of questions when one tries to reduce them to science strictly so-called. In present-day philosophy we say that the nature and structure of objects and beings, both inorganic and organic, are in practice external to human action, taking "human" in the sense of spiritual being. The instability of living being, in contrast to the internal equilibrium of inanimate being, makes it appear less intelligible. On the plane of ontology of life, man is the central problem, even though he is one of the most definite and individualized of beings. Man's life culminates in freedom, which makes man a responsible being, in this respect resembling God. Though less unknown than mathematical, material, and biological objects, mental objects are more difficult and involve subtle and risky problems. The first great phenomenon offered to the philosophy which penetrates the field of the ontology of the social sciences is the identity between the object and the subject, since the subject, who as far as possible refers systematically to the pure object, continually treads the boundary of reality and arrives at himself; that is, the inquiring subject becomes simultaneously the object investigated--a kind of cognitive identity possible in reflection. The second problem of this field of philosophy is the consideration of "I" as absolutely empty of objectivity. For contemporary philosophy, spirit is the world of values, and it is not so important to determine the pure reality of spirit as to understand its life, its activity, and its specific manifestation which is the world of culture. The social sciences deal with man as a spiritual being, and with the facts of culture. The values produced by culture constitute a hierarchy which goes from the most humble to the most elevated, from plain economic interest to an intense desire for God. Culture is produced by the objectification of values; spirit becomes fixed in certain entities which are cultural objects: a theory, a machine, a concert. Man acts as the creator of a culture, but the culture in turn spiritually actuates and nourishes him. The sciences of spirit go from signs to their meaning, from the expression to the living. The point of departure in historical knowledge is our own vital experience, the very life which flows within us. Only life understands life. Here we find the reason why culture indicates the maximum expression of life; in culture, man contemplates himself, and in himself he contemplates all the beings of creation. (shrink)

This study integrates corpus-assisted text analysis with frame semantics to study a social problem. Taking a cognitive-linguistic approach to critical discourse studies, in this article I examine the linguistic construction of minors in a corpus of 489 articles from the Uruguayan newspaper El País in the context of the so-called ‘Criminal Imputability Referendum’. Throughout, I focus on the construal operation of framing and identify a host of discursive patterns via which minors and adolescents are recurrently placed within the semantic frame (...) CRIME, and within this, they profile the frame elements of perpetrators of violent crimes rather than victims. I argue that, in the context of the referendum, these discursive strategies run the risk of facilitating the consolidation of a strong conceptual link whereby youth become readily associated with criminality, and are subservient to the political views of groups supporting a lower cut-off age for criminal responsibility and more stringent punishments. The observations arrived at in this instance set the foundations for a future experimental study testing whether the discursive patterns unearthed here have an effect on how readers conceptualize minors outside the texts. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical dilemma of conflicting loyalties found in whistleblowing. Central to this dilemma is the internal/external disclosure dichotomy; disclosure of organisational wrongdoing to an external recipient is seen as disloyal, whilst disclosure to an internal recipient is seen as loyal. Understanding how the organisation and society have dealt with these problems over the last 30 years is undertaken through an analysis of Vandekerckhove’s project, which seeks to place the normative legitimisations of whistleblowing legislation and organisational whistleblowing policies (...) within a globalisation semantic able to contain this conflict between society and the organisation. This project fails, it is argued, because of Vandekerckhove’s particular understanding of the organisation as an autopoietic system, i.e. an operationally closed system. A case is made to understand organisations as complex systems, i.e. operationally open systems. Critical Complexity theory sees the identities of systems and components as coterminous. In the context of the organisation, this means that the identities of the corporation and its corporate members arise and die together. The whistleblower’s disclosure reconfigures the organisation by forcing the organisation to open up and make its boundaries flexible, making the designation ‘internal’ or ‘external’ to the organisation, and, therefore, who qualifies as a recipient of a disclosure of wrongdoing, flexible. The organisation is restrained from retailing against the whistleblower, because its identities are coterminous. Furthermore, as the disclosure cannot be categorically defined as either internal or external, the question of whether an external disclosure can qualify as an act of organisational loyalty becomes moot. (shrink)

Nos últimos anos, cada vez mais os "ismos" estão sendo deixados de lado. Neste sentido, quando se fala de aristotelismo ou de averroísmo de Marsílio de Pádua, torna-se necessário examinar o que se entende precisamente por tais atributos e, depois, até que ponto, mesmo de forma aproximativa, eles podem ser aplicados a Marsílio.

This article provides a critical reading of the ‘Parecer CNE-CES 60, de 2014’, from the Ministry of education, Brazil, which defines the curriculum guidelines for courses of Baccalaureate in Theology. In its first section it discusses the theoretical background of the ‘Parecer’, questioning its illuminist orientation, as well as its pedagogical theory focused on contents and not on the students activities. It aims to show that are two opposed educational paradigms in the ‘Parecer’, the illuminist and the constructivist, although the (...) illuminist is the dominant one. It also question the view of the theologian present in the ‘Parecer’, marked by significant absences from the professional field of religious work. In the second section, the article presents a sample of particular interpretation of the ‘Parecer’, indicating the guidelines of a curriculum based on the constructivist paradigm. It dedicates special attention to the occult dimension of the curriculum and to an articulation of the student’s activities in relationship to the disciplines of the course. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger vislumbró en el accionar de la técnica la pregunta fundamental por el Ser; se presentan aquí los elementos para plantear una filosofía de la tecnología implícita en algunos apartados de las obras de este autor; entre ellos, el disponer, el traer a la memoria, la causalidad, la producción, el pensar, el depósito y los peligros. Se busca llevar más allá y traer a nuestra época sus reflexiones para presentar un tratamiento sistemático de los aportes y peligros de la (...) tecnología. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to PAULO MARGUTTI's paper "SENTIDO DA VIDA E VALOR DA VIDA: UMA DIFERENÇA CRUCIAL? (Discussão das idéias de Júlio Cabrera)" published in PHILÓSOPHOS , V. 9, Nº 1, 2004.

O pensamento político de Francisco Pinto da Cunha Leal (1880-1970) sofreu uma constante evolução ao longo da sua vida pública. A emergência do Estado Novo, nos anos 30 e 40 do século XX, tornou-o num oposicionista, levando-o a denunciar as suas violências e a desconstruir os seus mitos numa intransigente defesa da democracia. Nos inícios dos anos 60, confrontado com as novas realidades políticas, nascidas da Guerra Fria (1947-1991) e da crise do sistema colonial português (1961), aproveitando a relativa tolerância (...) do Salazarismo a nível editorial, esforça-se por fornecer, nos livros que publica, uma alternativa democrática ao pensamento dominante. O presente texto procura analisar a sua reflexão política numa época caracterizada pelo aparecimento de uma nova geração de contestatários do regime. (shrink)

This paper has two objectives: to explore how inverting questions in the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (Kennedy, 2004) can be a useful tool for triggering thought processes; and, more generally, to explore the importance of inverting the role traditionally given to children as bystanders to their own education and thought processes. On this basis, we will assume that children have an epistemic and political voice and that this voicing, placed on equal standing with the adult voice, is long overdue. It (...) is undeniable that questions have a central role in P4C sessions (Costa-Carvalho E Mendonça, 2020; Costa-Carvalho E Kohan, 2020) and that, in the context of any given community of philosophical inquiry, they can trigger (Kennedy, 2004) a wide range of thought processes. Some questions may be too vague and require sharpening to adequately address the problem at hand, while others may promote a metacognitive approach to the issue under discussion, and to the entire thought process that sustains it. We will explore how inverting questions may be useful in this context. Moreover, we will consider how this thought anastrophé may emerge in concrete philosophical discussions with children. Our argument will, therefore, navigate the intersection between language and thought, logic and semantics, and theory and practice. Assuming that the term “inversion” may offer different understandings, we will try to outline this rhizomatic approach (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) to the concept. We will focus primarily on the child’s point of view, which we hold to be epistemologically privileged (Kennedy, 2020). It is our core belief that children´s voices should be granted scientific and political standing and that an epistemic inversion between adulthood and childhood in education must be explored. (shrink)