Faith and sin prior to the Fragments -- Sin and salvation in the Philosophical fragments -- Anxiety and beyond -- Sin and salvation from the Three discourses -- To the three stages -- Sin and salvation in the Concluding unscientific postscript -- Sin, society, and the individual in the Two ages.

This study examines some antecedents and consequences of ethical leadership. Using a dataset from the King James Version of the Bible, I argue for and propose that maternal influence will lead to leaders being ethical while paternal influence appears to have no impact on leaders being ethical. I also argue and propose that ethical leaders are more likely to achieve longer tenures and to lead their organizations to better performance. I develop propositions based on the findings from the analysis of (...) my qualitative and quantitative data. (shrink)

In 1957, Edgar Lobel published an Oxyrhynchus papyrus containing anonymous commentaries to poems of Alcman which has not ceased to fascinate philologists and historians of ancient philosophy.

Resenha do livro de Juan Adolfo Bonaccini. Kant e o problema da coisa em si no Idealismo Alemáo : sua atualidade e relevância para a compreensáo do problema da Filosofia. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2003. 442 páginas [Coleçáo Metafísica 3].

Much behavioral welfare economics assumes that expected utility theory does not accurately describe most human choice under risk. A substantial literature instead evaluates welfare consequences by taking cumulative prospect theory as the natural default alternative, at least where description is concerned. We present evidence, based on a review of previous literature and new experimental data, that the most empirically adequate hypothesis about human choice under risk is that it is heterogeneous, and that where EUT does not apply, more choice is (...) characterized by rank-dependent utility models than by CPT. Most of the apparently loss-averse choice behavior results from probability weighting rather than from direct disutility experienced when an outcome is framed as a loss against an idiosyncratic reference point. We then consider implications of this finding for methodological debates about how to model welfare effects of policies, and argue that abandonment of a dogmatic belief in CPT as the correct theory of risk human choice exposes a conceptual error that is widespread in behavioral welfare economics. We provide concluding reflections on second-order, philosophical issues around the grounding of normative commitments in policy-focused economics. (shrink)

Dictionary of Paradox is a fascinating reference work for scholars, students, and the general public. It describes those paradoxes that are either especially interesting today or that have a continuing interest from the historical point of view.

Resenha do livro de Reboul, Olivier. Introduçáo à retórica . 2. ed. Traduçáo de Ivone Castilho Benedetti. Sáo Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2004. 253 páginas.

Resenha dolivro de: Menezes, Antônio Basílio N. Thomaz de (Org.). Ética, bioética : diálogos interdisciplinares. Natal: EDUFRN, 2006. 188 páginas.

Resenha do livro de Giovanna Borradori. A filosofia americana: conversações com Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre e Kuhn . Traduçáo de Álvaro Lorencini. Sáo Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2003, 223 páginas.

Abstrac: In an extended discussion, within the context of a"philosophy offorestry", of the relationships of the concepts of truth and of tree some fundamental aspects of occidental metaphysics are examined from a Heideggerian perspective. But the paper tries to go beyond Heidegger's thematization of metaphysics in the context of pre-Socratic philosophy by establishing Indo-European etymology as a more inclusive horizon. In this manner, the transition from anti-metaphysics to post-metaphysics is anticipated.

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice (...) environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

Resenha do livro de: Gareth B. Matthews. A Filosofia e a Criança.

The Derveni papyrus is the oldest literary papyrus ever found, and one of the very few from Greece itself, which makes it one of the most interesting new texts from the ancient Greek world to have been discovered this century. The eschatological doctrines and an allegorical commentary on an Orphic theogony in terms of Presocratic physics which it contains make it a uniquely important document for the history of ancient Greek religion, philosophy, and literary criticism. This book is the first (...) to have been published on the text. It includes a full and reliable translation of the Papyrus together with a range of articles by leading European and American classicists who are internationally recognised experts in Greek religion and philosophy. Professor K. Tsantsanoglou, who will publish the papyrus when work on it is complete, presents important new material and has checked all the articles against the Papyrus. Thus for the first time, material is provided which will authorize scholarship upon the Papyrus in a way hitherto impossible, will stimulate further work on it, and will make the book a standard reference work on the subject for years to come. (shrink)

Par le biais d’une approche idéal-typique, cet article fait apparaître, dans la manière apparemment idiosyncrasique dont Heidegger se réfère aux Grecs, une série de traits caractéristiques de la culture allemande.

Supper at Emmaus traces various important intellectual topics from the ancient world to the modern period. Generally, as in its treatment of the question of whether the long-standing contrast between cyclical and linear views of history is helpful, it introduces important thinkers who have considered the question. A preoccupation of the book is the appearance and reappearance across the centuries of patterns used to organize temporal and cultural experience. After an opening essay on transcendental truth and cultural relativism, the second (...) chapter traces a distinction, common in historical writings during the past two centuries, between an alleged ancient classical "cyclic" view of time and history, used to describe the claimed repetitiveness of and similarities between historical events ("nothing is new under the sun"), and a contrasting Jewish-Christian linear view, sometimes described as providential in that it moves through a series of unique events to some end intended by God. In the latter, history is "about something," the education of the human race or the redemption of humankind. As in each of the remaining essays, the book then attempts to draw out the limitations of what the current consensus on this topic has become. It does this for such things as our current understanding of religious toleration, humanism, natural law, and teleology. Some of the essays, such as those on debate about Augustine's understanding of marriage or the concluding illustrated essay on the baroque city of Lecce, are published for the first time. Others are based on previously published contributions to the scholarly literature, though generally each of these chapters concludes with a postscript that engages with current scholarly debate on the subject. (shrink)

Resenha do livro de Andrade, Abraháo Costa. O pote e a rodilha : tempo e imaginaçáo como história por fazer segundo o pensamento de Paul Ricoeur. Natal: EDUFRN, 2006. [Coleçáo Metafísica]. 134 páginas.

Nobody in this debate questions the point that neuroeconomics remains full of potential, and little else as yet. If so, that really is progress of sorts. I was getting afraid that we would have to open nominations for the Captain Ahab Award for obsessive work on the promotion of neuroeconomics.

Evidence of risk aversion in laboratory settings over small stakes leads to a priori implausible levels of risk aversion over large stakes under certain assumptions. One core assumption in statements of this calibration puzzle is that small-stakes risk aversion is observed over all levels of wealth, or over a â sufficiently largeâ range of wealth. Although this assumption is viewed as self-evident from the vast experimental literature showing risk aversion over laboratory stakes, it actually requires that lab wealth be varied (...) for a given subject as one evaluates the risk attitudes of the subject. We consider evidence from a simple design that tests this assumption, and find that the assumption is strikingly rejected for a large sample of subjects from a population of college students. We conclude that the implausible predictions that flow from these assumptions do not apply to one specialized population widely used to study economic behavior in laboratory experiments. (shrink)

Neste artigo revisa-se a literatura sobre paradoxos matemático-físicos gregos antigos. Trata-se de paradoxo de números irracionais, o dilema de Democritus, a antinomia de mudança, bem como os seguintes paradoxos de Zenon: a dicotomia, o Aquiles, os blocos móveis, o argumento contra a pluralidade, o dilema e a semente de painço.

The essay, based on four years of living and teaching philosophy in Brazil, is a series of aphorisms about food and hunger as concerns that have left their mark on the Brazilian mind. Alimentary jokes and homilies are retold, gustatory episodes are recalled, larders and cuisines remarked, markets and mealtimes remembered—with constant reference to the idiom of Brazilian Portuguese. The style of thinking is “postphilosophical” in the sense developed in Part II of the author's Negative Dialectics and the End of (...) Philosophy[Longwood, 1990]: it does not so much argue theses as it displays the character of the topic. (shrink)