According to a leading view, emotions such as admiration, contempt, pride, and shame are important vehicles of agential development. Through admiration and contempt, we establish models and countermodels against which to shape our character; through pride and shame, we get a sense of how we measure up to them. Critics of this view object that these emotions always deliver uncompromising evaluations: admiration casts people in a completely positive light, while contempt casts aspersion on them. Therefore, insofar as they lack the (...) capacity for nuance, these emotions are systematically unfitting and misleading. This paper discusses this objection as originally formulated by John Doris as well as Macalester Bell’s response. Drawing from research on emotional intentionality, it will be argued that Doris’ and Bell’s accounts are respectively misguided criticisms and inadequate defences of these emotions. Their mistake lies in an invalid transition from the claim that these emotions are intentionally directed towards persons to the claim that they deliver global evaluations of those towards whom they are directed. By rejecting this inference, it will be shown that these emotions can deliver nuanced and fitting evaluations in a way Doris’ objection overlooks and Bell’s response precludes us from articulating. (shrink)

The problem of universals is one of the main philosophical issues. In this book the author reconstructs the history of the problem from Boethius to John of Salisbury, considering a selection of medieval representative texts.

In this paper it is argued that qualitative theories (Q-theories) can be used to describe the statistical structure of cross classified populations and that the notion of verisimilitude provides an appropriate tool for measuring the statistical adequacy of Q-theories. First of all, a short outline of the post-Popperian approaches to verisimilitude and of the related verisimilitudinarian non-falsificationist methodologies (VNF-methodologies) is given. Secondly, the notion of Q-theory is explicated, and the qualitative verisimilitude of Q-theories is defined. Afterwards, appropriate measures for the (...) statistical verisimilitude of Q-theories are introduced, so to obtain a clear formulation of the intuitive idea that the statistical truth about cross classified populations can be approached by falsified Q-theories. Finally, it is argued that some basic intuitions underlying VNF-methodologies are shared by the so-called prediction logic, developed by the statisticians and social scientists David K. Hildebrand, James D. Laing and Howard Rosenthal. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 359-374, September 2022.

That emotions are especially valuable for our well-being has become a widely agreed upon claim. In this article, we argue that many of the ways in which the emotions are commonly considered to be prudentially valuable – hedonically, experientially, and adaptively – are not specific to the emotions: they are in fact shared by other affective reactions such as drives and sensory affects. This may suggest that emotions are not prudentially valuable in any distinctive manner. We challenge this suggestion by (...) arguing that, unlike other affective reactions, emotions provide unique contexts in which to refine our general sensibility to a wide variety of evaluative properties – and that in this sense they are prudentially valuable in a distinctive way. (shrink)

In the present paper I aim to discuss the philosophical foundations of the early correspondence principle, by comparing the conceptual structure underlying the first correspondence principle with the procedure of analogy that Immanuel Kant introduced in the Critique of Judgment from 1790. On such a comparison, I will seek to demonstrate the consistency of the conceptual ratio according to which the correspondence principle is to the classical "concepts" of space and time, as these a priori forms of intuition, in Kant, (...) are related to the separate faculty of pure intuition. As a result, it will turn out that the conceptual structure of the correspondence principle suits to the Kantian doctrine of a separate faculty of pure intuition, which is divided from the faculty of understanding. The aim is to shed new light on the line of reasoning underlying Niels Bohr's analogical thinking in quantum physics. (shrink)

Most discussions of Rawls’s philosophy tend to neglect the strong communitarian strand of his theory: so much so that in the debate between liberals and communitarians Rawls’s account of community has been for the most part intriguingly absent. This article is an attempt to fill in the gap by offering a discussion of the Rawlsian understanding of community as it was presented in A Theory of Justice and its possible implications for a pluralist society. At the same time, I want (...) to take issue with one of the most influential critiques leveled against Rawls’s conception of the self: namely, Sandel’s critique of the ‘individuated subject’ that, in his view, underlies justice as fairness. Rawls’s constructions, so Sandel argues, rest on an unencumbered self that is individuated in advance and whose identity is fixed once and for all. (shrink)

Reasons-first theorists claim that facts about reasons for attitudes are normatively primitive, and that all other normative facts ultimately reduce to facts about reasons. According to their view, for example, the fact that something is good ultimately reduces to facts about reasons to favour it. I argue that these theories face a challenging dilemma due to the normativity of arational lifeforms, for instance the fact that water is good for plants. If all normative facts are, ultimately, facts about reasons for (...) attitudes, then reasons-first theorists must either (a) show that these facts do reduce to facts about reasons, or (b) concede that they do not and, instead, show that this is not a problem for their view. Both options, however, are riddled with difficulties—or so I will try to argue. (shrink)

RESUMO A recente publicação de Faria tem como objetivo demonstrar que, “se o anti-individualismo estiver correto, então a obscuridade da validade é mais ampla do que necessitamos presumir para os objetivos atuais.” Através da rejeição de “uma variedade de movimentos exculpatórios, projetados para blindar a racionalidade de um pensador possivelmente azarado,” Faria sugere que o externalismo de conteúdo pode afetar drasticamente nossa autocompreensão como seres racionais. Temo que tenha que discordar. Faria superintelectualiza o pensamento, sempre performado da perspectiva de primeira (...) pessoa e é sujeito ao controle reflexivo pelo pensador. Para ter certeza, o externalismo de conteúdo mostra que um pensamento saudável é contingente no amplo ambiente e, assim, não depende exclusivamente das habilidades lógicas do ser vivo, mas é uma questão de sorte lógica. Apesar disso, o externalismo de conteúdo não é ameaça à racionalidade. Meu diagnóstico: através da adoção da estratégia de Wittgenstein de “trazer as palavras de volta pra casa”, Faria negligencia as conquistas da ciência cognitiva: na sua forma mais simples, a “inferência transitiva,” a racionalidade pervade o reino animal. (shrink)

Nesse trabalho, pretendo poder mostrar que é um grave equívoco interpretarmos o papel das representações sensíveis na obra teórica de Kant como conteúdos não-conceituais (na acepção contemporânea técnica do termo “conteúdo” que, tais como dêiticos mentais, representariam o que aparece no espaço e no tempo de forma de re. A interpretação alternativa que me parece adequada é a seguinte: sem possuírem um conteúdo representacional próprio, a representação sensível deve ser entendida fundamentalmente como uma relação cognitiva entre o sujeito e as (...) entidades objetivas no espaço e no tempo com as quais ele está contato epistêmico. Nos termos dessa relação, a referência imediata da intuição sensível ao seu respectivo objeto é entendida como uma forma de conhecimento por contato com tais entidades. Denomino a minha própria interpretação de relacionismo. (shrink)

This volume offers a significant overview of authors, works and characteristics of philosophy in Latin America in the 16th - 18th centuries, i.e. essentially "colonial scholasticism": this is actually a remarkable chapter in the history of Baroque or Modern scholasticism. This volume is a collection of studies on Latin American scholasticism originally presented at the Fourth International Conference of Medieval Philosophy at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, November 12-14, 2012. These essays provide (...) a significant overview of authors, works and areas of interest associated to scholastic thought in the 16th-18th centuries, focusing particularly on Latin American or European-born authors whose philosophical and theological careers were significantly set in Latin American soil and, due to their education, reveal a profound acquaintance with European philosophical theories and problems. The reception and development of Medieval thought in Baroque scholasticism, the connections between European philosophy, mainly Iberian scholasticism, and philosophical-theological debates in the New World, and the revisiting by Latin American scholars of Medieval schools of thought and theoretical patterns taught in Europe, prompted by the encounter with several peoples living in the new continent and the search and justification for models of colonization, are some of the relevant issues discussed in here. The studies collected in this volume place colonial scholasticism in the history of ideas by letting authors and their writings speak for themselves. (shrink)

It is an established Hellenistic topos that philosophy is the ‘medicine’ of the soul, in charge of ‘healing’ the soul in the same way as medicine is in charge of healing the body. The ‘diseases’ of the soul deemed to be in need of healing are its passions, that is, its fears and desires, and the moral ‘health’ that philosophers pledge to grant their followers is freedom from passions and hence peace of mind.

After discussion of the mainstream definition of ontology, and a short analysis of the Aristotelian's principles, the paper addresses the problem of the categorial nature of the future by distinguishing (a) possibility from potentiality and (b) forward from upward emergence.