One of the difficulties in understanding the meaning of perception in Merleau-Ponty’s work comes from the ambiguous tone of his descriptions. Therefore, to understand it thoroughly one should question the origin of this tone and inquire about the relationship between perception and language and, more particularly, between philosophy and literature. This is what is at stake in his last courses at the Collège de France, where Merleau-Ponty envisages perception as being associated with literature and as having a special kinship to (...) the notion of “poetic vision,” which appears in Rimbaud’s first ‘Letter from the Seer’.L’une des difficultés qui se posent pour comprendre le sens de la perception chez Merleau-Ponty vient du ton ambigu de ses descriptions. C’est ainsi que pour comprendre ce qu’il entend par perception, il faudrait questionner l’origine de ce ton et interroger le rapport que la perception entretient avec le langage, et plus particulièrement celui que la philosophie entretient avec la littérature. Voilà justement l’une des questions abordées dans ses derniers cours au Collège de France, où il comprend la perception comme associée à la littérature et ayant une proximité particulière avec la notion de «vision poétique» qui apparaît dans la première «Lettre du voyant» de Rimbaud. (shrink)

Informatics is generally understood as a “new technology” and is therewith discussed according to technological aspects such as speed, data retrieval, information control and so on. Its widespread use from home appliances to enterprises and universities is not the result of a clear-cut analysis of its inner possibilities but is rather dependent on all sorts of ideological promises of unlimited progress. We will discuss the theoretical definition of informatics proposed in 1936 by Alan Turing in order to show that it (...) should be taken as final and complete. This definition has no relation to the technology because Turing defines computers as doing the work of solving problems with numbers. This formal definition implies nonetheless a relation to the non-formalized elements around informatics, which we shall discuss through the Greek notion of téchne. (shrink)

Este artigo discute os textos de Hannah Arendt a partir de um problema particular: aquele relativo à procura da compreensão. Esse problema é importante não apenas porque seus textos realizam uma contribuição decisiva para a compreensão daquilo que a política se tornou a partir do século XX, mas, sobretudo, porque ele nomeia o ponto sensível de sua escrita.

Procuraremos investigar as condições filosóficas que permitiram que o pensamento de Heidegger tenha identificado, nos anos 1930, a questão da comunidade àquela da Alemanha. Trata-se de mostrar que isso se deve ao modo pelo qual ele compreendeu o contexto de surgimento de sua investigação. Na sequência de sua obra (em particular no conjunto de estudos sobre poesia da década de 1950, reunidos em A Caminho da Linguagem), Heidegger procurará interrogar uma transformação desse contexto que impedirá todo pensamento da comunidade em (...) termos de limites locais. (shrink)

Estudaremos a investigação heideggeriana procurando mostrar o papel central nela desempenhado pela questão da medida do habitar humano. Nosso estudo terá como marcos principais os cursos sobre Hölderlin que discutem de maneira mais aprofundada o poema “No azul adorável”, que introduz essa questão no início de sua segunda estrofe: o curso de 1934- 1935, sobre a “Germânia” e “O Reno”, e o de 1942, sobre “O Ister”. Veremos que o encontro de Heidegger com essa questão determinará uma mudança decisiva no (...) sentido de sua investigação. (shrink)

Acknowledgments I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Jakob Amstutz for his continual feedback during my writing of this work. ...

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 6, Page 60-62, June 2011.

The chapter 'Of power' of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a very fine discussion of agency and a very complex piece of philosophy. It is the result of the superimposition of at least three layers of text (those of the first, second and fifth editions of the Essay), expressive of widely differing views of the same matters. The argument concerning agency and free will that it puts forward (as it now stands, reporting Locke's last word on the subject) is (...) thus beset with problems, and even inconsistencies. But these textual and analytical difficulties should not hide from us the relevance and, in a way, the deep coherence of Locke's philosophy of action. In what follows, I will attempt to cast some light on this complicated interpretive and conceptual matter, by a careful reading of some parts of Locke's discussion. The first section shows how accounting for the evaluation and choice of remote goods, in terms of their real value and in preference to smaller, nearer ones, is a crucial problem for Locke's philosophy of action. The second section reads Locke's move from an internalist to an externalist view of motivation as a first, conceptually complex step towards such an account; and shows how this is linked to a change in the concept of will. The third and fourth sections reconstruct Locke's account (a pattern of suspension and examination of occurrent desire); discuss the role of the motivational and normative concept of happiness; and cast some doubt on the consistency of Locke's position. (shrink)

Authors De Marco and colleagues have presented a new model on the concept of invasiveness, redefining both its technical definition and practical implementation.1 While the authors raise valid critiques regarding the discrepancy in definitions, I cannot help but wonder about the purpose of redefining terms for which little confusion, if any, exists? This commentary seeks to scrutinise the rationale supporting the new model in the absence of significant clinical confusion and to explore the implications for clinical practice. Initially, one may (...) notice there is no mention of clinical relevancy, confusion among patients or whether the discrepancy in terms is causing miscommunication. It seems reasonable that some clinical confusion may exist, but so too does a similar imbalance of terms when speaking technically across the specialties; take depression and its definition as a primary example. While I certainly agree with the illustration of non-invasive prenatal testing being compared with venous blood draws as a disparity in terminology, little evidence suggests confusion concerning the nosology.2 The medical community, including both physicians and patients, recognises that the terminology is specifically used within the …. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility of developing a hybrid version of dispositional theories of aesthetic values. On such a theory, uses of aesthetic predicates express relational second-order dispositional properties. If the theory is not absolutist, it allows for the relativity of aesthetic values. But it may be objected to on the grounds that it fails to explain disagreement among subjects who are not disposed alike. This paper explores the possibility of adapting recent proposals of hybrid expressivist theories for moral predicates (...) to the case of aesthetic predicates. Hybrid expressivist theories make no explicit commitment about the kind of property expressed by the predicate, but make explicit commitments to implicated (or presupposed)expressive content. It is argued that dispositionalism about the properties expressed by aesthetic predicates, combined with expressive implicatures (or presuppositions), can account for aesthetic disagreements even in cases where subjects are not relevantly alike. (shrink)

No artigo que se segue, temos por objetivo proceder uma análise comparativista entre a narrativa literária das tragédias de Sófocles e a filosofia de Aristóteles. Propomos uma leitura que tende a evidenciar a existência de uma proto-ética no universo mítico-trágico escrito pelo tragediógrafo de Colona e sua validação filosófica desenvolvida na obra ética do filósofo de Estagira. Desta forma, as personagens das tragédias de Sófocles serão compreendidas como metáforas do agir ético pensado e sistematizado por Aristóteles na sua Ethica Nicomachea. (...) Assim procedendo, pensamos lançar uma possibilidade interpretativa sobre o processo de formação do entimento da ética ao longo da construção da consciência histórica do homem e da solidificação do agir-ético no campo da filosófia, sendo a literatura, neste caso, ferramenta fundamenal para se perceber o processo histórico das transformações sócio-culturais próprias do período transitorial da Grécia Arcaica para a Grécia Clássica e da gradativa racionalização do universo político da Grécia. (shrink)

A central issue of cognitive neuroscience is to understand how a large collection of coupled neurons combines external signals with internal memories into new coherent patterns of meaning. An external stimulus localized at some input spreads over a large assembly of coupled neurons, building up a collective state univocally corresponding to the stimulus. Thus, the synchronization of spike trains of many individual neurons is the basis of a coherent perception. Based on recent investigations of homoclinic chaotic systems and their synchronization, (...) a novel conjecture for the dynamics of single neurons and, consequently, for neuron assemblies is formulated. Homoclinic chaos is proposed as a suitable way to code information in time by trains of equal spikes occurring at apparently erratic times. In order to classify the set of different perceptions, the percept space can be given a metric structure by introducing a distance measure between distinct percepts. The distance in percept space is conjugate to the duration of the perception in the sense that an uncertainty relation in percept space is associated with time-limited perceptions. This coding of different percepts by synchronized spike trains entails fundamental quantum features which are not restricted to microscopic phenomena. It is conjectured that they are related to the details of the perceptual chain rather than depending on Planck's action. (shrink)

O artigo apresenta uma análise sobre o processo de transformação das mentalidades do homem grego na transição dos universos arcaico e clássico. Neste sentido, analisa-se a gradativa laicização dos processos sociopolíticos no universo cultural do dito período de transição a partir da efetivação do lógos como meio de reconhecimento da realidade e efetivação política na pólis. Analisar-se-á, ainda, numa perspectiva de história das mentalidades, o processo que levará o homem ao reconhecimento das suas historicidade e eticidade. As fontes escolhidas para (...) o debate proposto são as tragédias sofoclianas, em especial Édipo Rei, e a ética aristotélica. (shrink)

Negative freedom (as opposed to positive freedom) has been widely considered an inherently non problematic notion. This paper attempts to show that, if considered as a good with a minimally objective structure, negative freedom can disrupt the capacity for deliberating in a substantively (that is, non purely formal, decision-theoretic) rational way. The argument turns on the notion of non-satiation, as a property of the objective value of some goods of not changing when the availability of the good is increased. Two (...) classes of non-satiating goods are distinguished, one of which has disruptive consequences for rational deliberation. Negative freedom belongs to this last class; and its non-satiating conceptual nature is defended by means of a simple dispositional analysis of value. It is suggested that also rationality itself can be regarded as a non-satiating good that can disrupt deliberation. (shrink)

Entification is now displayed in its nude and native state, and serves to explain the constant mental process, and the true nature of the representations of ...

This chapter contains section titled: Direct Passions Pleasure and Desire Reason and Passion References Further Reading.

Intuitions about retractions have been used to motivate truth relativism about certain types of claims. Among these figure epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, or personal taste claims. On MacFarlane’s prominent relativist proposal, sentences like “the ice cream might be in the freezer” or “Pocoyo is funny” are only assigned a truth-value relative to contexts of utterance and contexts of assessment. Retractions play a crucial role in the argument for assessment-relativism. A retraction of a past assertion is supposed to be mandatory whenever (...) the asserted sentence is not true at the context of use and the context of assessment. If retractions were not obligatory in these conditions, there would be no normative difference between assessment-relativism and contextualism. The main goal of this paper is to undermine the claim that retractions reveal this normative difference. To this effect, the paper offers a review of three important objections to the obligatoriness of retractions. Taken together, these objections make a strong case against the alleged support that retractions give to assessment-relativism. The objections are moreover supported by recent experimental results that are also discussed. This will satisfy a further goal, which is to undermine the idea that there is a constitutive retraction rule. The paper also discusses two ways to understand what such a rule would be constitutive of, and concludes with a discussion of how to describe what retractions are. (shrink)

Abstract:I suggest that Hume’s recantation, in the Appendix to the Treatise, of his account of the idea of personal identity in section 1.4.6 hinges on the contrast between the first-personal cognitive roles of that idea and its imagination-based explanation. In stark, if implicit, contrast with Locke, Hume’s account divorces personal identity from consciousness, considering oneself as oneself. But, later in the Appendix, Hume realized, if imperfectly, that something was missing from the idea of self he had constructed. I suggest that (...) what is missing is the intimate consciousness of ourselves that idea should allow us to achieve. While Hume despaired to find a solution to this problem, a change in the background of his earlier theory—a change he had available and which is perhaps alluded to in a letter to Kames—could have made his original account consistent with the first-personal features of the idea of self. (shrink)

Hepatocellular carcinoma represents the third leading cause of cancer-related death. Because HCC is multicentric with time, excluding the few transplanted patients, sooner or later it becomes untreatable with loco-regional therapies and, until some years ago, it was not responsive to systemic therapies. In 2005 a randomized trial indicated the efficacy of a product containing stem cell differentiation stage factors taken from zebrafish embryos during the stage in which the totipotent stem cells are differentiating into the pluripotent adult stem cells. In (...) such a trial the patients, with “intermediate” and “advanced” HCC according to Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer/American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases guidelines, presented benefit in terms of performance status and objective tumoral response, with some cases of complete response, that is, sustained disappearance of the neoplastic areas or blood supply therein, accompanied by normalization of alpha-fetoprotein... (shrink)