Antes de tecer qualquer tipo de homenagem ou traçar elogios, é necessário alertar ao leitor do risco e, talvez, da insuficiência das palavras. O alerta se deve ao fato das palavras não exprimirem com precisão o olhar que acolhe, a voz que direciona sem cercear a liberdade de escolher por si só qual caminho seguir. É assim que brevemente podemos aproximar o conceito de “cuidado” ao professor Dr. Luizir Oliveira, ou simplesmente Luizir.

Democratic decline in various Latin American countries has been accompanied by religious sectors growth. This article aims at interpreting the public presence of Christian churches and their political representatives based on translation as hermeneutical process in which the relationship between religion and public space is observed. Through bibliographical analysis, the text identifies in Ricoeurian translation based hermeneutic applied to religious studies the possibility of interpreting concrete intersubjective and intercontextual translation which are already present in the public space, mainly in two (...) ways: in an intralinguistic dynamics, i.e., the relationship between Christian groups that sufficiently converge onto programmatic actions regarding economic and moral agenda; and in an interlinguistic dimension in the relationship between religious groups and elitist democratic models which constant crisis situation is perhaps beneficial to some sectors. The metaphor of religions as languages also allows the identification of hermeneutic incompatibilities between distinguished theological discourses in the public space, even when they originate from the same tradition. Therefore, translation as hermeneutic process applied to the analysis of religious discourse may become another tool to the field of studies on religion and public space. (shrink)

Ao se ocupar da pesquisa acerca da teoria teológica da religião formulada a partir do pensamento do teólogo jesuíta estadunidense David Tracy, o presente texto objetiva recolher impulsos para o estudo teológico da religião. Para tanto, examinam-se as obras _Blessed Rage for Order: the new pluralism in Theology_, _A imaginação analógica: a teologia cristã e a cultura do pluralismo _ e _Plurality and ambiguity_: _hermeneutics, religion, hope_ no que tange à definição de religião. Como resultado das contribuições tracyanas ao estudo (...) teológico da religião destacam-se: 1. Uma abordagem não totalizante da religião; 2. A percepção das pluralidades e ambiguidades que envolvem a investigação da religião e das interpretações da religião; 3. A imaginação analógica entre os estudos da religião e os estudos da arte. 4. A conversação com os clássicos religiosos; 5. Uma dimensão profética das religiões e dos estudos da religião. (shrink)

For centuries, philosophers have identified beauty with what brings pleasure. Dominic McIver Lopes challenges this interpretation by offering an entirely new theory of beauty - that beauty engages us in action, in concert with others, in the context of social networks - and sheds light on why aesthetic engagement is crucial for quality of life.

One of the key insights of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is the idea that gender-based subordination is not just something done to women, but also something women do to themselves. This raises a question about ethical responsibility: if women are complicit, or actively implicated in their own oppression, are they at fault? Recent Beauvoir scholarship remains divided on this point. Here, I argue that Beauvoir did, in fact, ethically criticize many women for their complicity, as a sign of (...) what she called “bad faith”. I challenge recent accounts by Nancy Bauer and Manon Garcia, who both read Beauvoir as exonerating complicit women. According to this reading, women emerge as human “freedoms” within a social world where a “destiny” of inferiority is already prepared for them. Their self-subordination is then an inevitable product of acting in a patriarchal world. I argue, however, that this interpretation generates a crucial tension, leading Bauer and Garcia to call on women to stop being complicit, while also claiming they cannot avoid complicity. I propose instead a different interpretation, on which feminine complicity is often fueled by criticizable ethical attitudes that are far from inevitable. By revisiting Beauvoir’s notion of “bad faith”, I show that this account is compatible with recognizing the limitations imposed on women’s agency and I show that this feminist ethical criticism is itself an important part of a collective project of social transformation. (shrink)

Four Arts of Photography explores the history of photography through the lens of philosophy and proposes a new understanding of the art form for the 21st century.

Images have power - for good or ill. They may challenge us to see things anew and, in widening our experience, profoundly change who we are. The change can be ugly, as with propaganda, or enriching, as with many works of art. Sight and Sensibility explores the impact of images on what we know, how we see, and the moral assessments we make. Dominic Lopes shows how these are part of, not separate from, the aesthetic appeal of images. His (...) book will be essential reading for anyone working in aesthetics and art theory, and for all those intrigued by the power of images to affect our lives. '...tightly focused and carefully argued... an exceptionally interesting contribution to the philosophy of art: it contains subtle, concise, and convincing discussions of a number of difficult concepts and contentious doctrines... lucid and meticulous'. (shrink)

Working with a minimal theory of culture, according to which cultures are group-level patterns of specific types of activities, together with a modest theory of values as features that figure in reasons to promote or inhibit, this chapter provides constitutive accounts of hedonic, aesthetic, and artistic cultures, each organized around values in different ways. Hedonic cultures generate hedonic payoffs. Aesthetic cultures coordinate sundry activities around distinctive vocabularies of aesthetic value. Artistic cultures are ones where media of making are leveraged in (...) order to generate any of a range of different varieties of value. The argument for this three-way division of the geography of taste is that it provides an effective framework for empirical investigations of the striking degree of variation within each of the three cultures of taste. (shrink)

This book offers a bold new approach to the philosophy of art. General theories of art don't work: they can't deal with problem cases. Instead of trying to define art, we should accept that a work of art is nothing but a work in one of the arts. Lopes's buck passing theory works well for the avant garde, illuminating its radical provocations.

In recent years, online “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities have been linked to various deadly attacks targeting women. Why do these men react to romantic rejection with not just disappointment, but murderous rage? Feminists have claimed this is because incels desire women as objects or, alternatively, because they feel entitled to women’s attention. I argue that both of these explanatory models are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence toward women—for their oscillation between obsessive desire and violent hatred. (...) I propose instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian “Other.” For Beauvoir, when men conceive of women as Others, they represent them as simultaneously human subjects and embodiments of the natural world. Women function then as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. I go on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Rodger’s autobiographical manifesto, “My Twisted World.” I show how this Beauvoirian model sheds light on Rodger’s racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence toward women. It therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement. (shrink)

Meaning of place is usually approached as slow social cognitive construction. However, grounded on the theory of affordances, it may also stem from direct perception-action processes, which enable the formation of immediate perceived functional, social or symbolic meaning of place (Raymond, Kyttä, & Stedman, 2017). In the present study, affordances of places, which are perceived by a specific perceiver in a specific place, were mapped using a web-map survey. Each place offers opportunities for interaction, behavior, use, feeling or meaning, which (...) is directly perceived and actualized there. This paper aims at identifying the degree of youth-friendliness of urban neighborhoods using the hypothetical intertwined model of independent mobility and actualized affordances (Kyttä, 2004) combined with place use and meaning (Broberg, Kyttä, & Fagerholm, 2013). SoftGISchildren methodology (Broberg, Kyttä, et al., 2013) was adopted to carry out a cross-sectional research, involving 145 sixth to ninth graders of the Great Lisbon area. SoftGIS integrates Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS), enabling collection and place mapping of daily subjective environmental experiences in the physical environment, consequently allowing for individuals to be actively engaged in public processes of participation (Brown & Kyttä,2014). A place based web survey called “Ideal City: a game of graphic imagination” was adopted. Participants were asked to map their home place, select and mark social, functional, leisure and emotional place transactions, and report actual and ideal mobility to these places. Findings on mobility showed that shorter distances to meaningful affordances of places promote active and independent travel; ideally, youths would like to be more frequently active and more frequently autonomous. As for meaningful places, a total of 1632 affordances were localized, with a higher number on social category. Neighborhood area (500 meters around home place) was assessed as youth-friendly, where active and independent travel occurred more frequently, and social affordances were the most expressive type. Relational and affectional experience in the neighborhood places was meaningful for youth. Municipalities should consider these features when planning, designing and managing residential areas aiming for the well-being and health of young citizens; and include youths as specialists of space (spatialists) in planning participatory processes (PPGIS). (shrink)

The representation of color by pictures raises worthwhile questions for philosophers and psychologists. Moreover, philosophers and psychologists interested in answering these questions will benefit by paying attention to each other's work. Failure to recognize the potential for interdisciplinary cooperation can be attributed to tacit acceptance of the resemblance theory of pictorial color. I argue that this theory is inadequate, so philosophers of art have work to do devising an alternative. At the same time, if the resemblance theory is false, then (...) color depiction has interesting implications for color science. Empirical researchers must rethink the widespread assumption that color recognition requires color constancy. I suggest that a neuropsychological account of color recognition will be instrumental to completing the philosophical task, but by the same token scientists might do well not to proceed without casting an eye to the work of philosophers of art. (shrink)

The Afro-Brazilian connections between the coast of West Africa and Brazil date back to the transatlantic slave trade and the Muslim uprising in Bahia in 1933. After this major rebellion, many former slaves returned to West Africa bearing a large Brazilian cultural imprint consisting of architectural skills, culinary traditions, and song and dance. They also brought back Brazilian names and cosmopolitan outlooks. From Africa, enslaved Africans carried with them to Brazil philosophical and cosmological outlooks and indeed, culture generally. Some of (...) these cross-fertilizations are what are interrogated in this intellectual and cultural exchange. (shrink)

Formative intervention methodologies, such as the Change Laboratory, are increasingly being used in work environments. However, the learning process entailed in the application of these methodologies has received insufficient attention and may be facilitated through the use of learning platforms. We examined the development of learning and training strategies for implementing formative interventions, drawing on the experiences of a research group focusing on workers’ health. Information obtained from individuals involved in CL formative activities was analyzed and interpreted using Cultural-Historical Activity (...) Theory and the theory of expansive learning. The process of learning to implement formative interventions unfolded gradually, beginning with the interventionists’ initial exposure to abstract concepts that they subsequently internalized via various mediations and applied in concrete situations. Four key interventionist training strategies used to foster collective learning were identified: promoting dialogues and exchange of experiences, creating environments for continuous learning and permanent discussion, creating spaces for experimentation and the practical application of concepts, and the use of the double stimulation method during training programs. (shrink)

The idea that women qua women can be dehumanized has been dismissed by feminist philosophers, like Kate Manne, and by philosophers of dehumanization, like David Livingstone Smith. Against these skeptics, I argue that we can and should use dehumanization to explain an important strand of misogyny. When they are dehumanized, women are represented simultaneously as human and as inhuman embodiments of the natural world. They therefore appear as magical, contaminating, sexualized threats towards whom violence is acceptable or even necessary. Misogynistic (...) dehumanization is important to understanding atrocities like the early modern European witch-hunts, but also contemporary phenomena like incel violence. (shrink)

But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness. (Styron, 1990, p. 62)There is nothing wrong with our biology or our intelligence; sometimes we are just stuck. (Cvetkov...

Pictures enable us to see emotions expressed in them. However, these pictorial expressions need not resemble real-world expressions. A picture expresses the emotion that it has a specifically pictorial function of indicating.

Pack includes 2 titles from the popular Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies Series: Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings - An Anthology Edited by Eileen John and Dominic McIver Lopes ISBN: 9781405112086 Essential readings in the philosophy of literature are brought together for the first time in this anthology. Contains forty-five substantial and carefully chosen essays and extracts Provides a balanced and coherent overview of developments in the field during the past thirty years, including influential work on fiction, interpretation, metaphor, (...) literary value, and the definition and ontology of literature Includes an additional historical section featuring generous selections of the writings of early pioneers such as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Hume Serves as an ideal introduction to the philosophy of literature or the philosophy of art, as well as a handy compilation of contributions to the field by its leading figures Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology Edited by Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi ISBN: 9781405120272 Designed for classroom use, this authoritative anthology presents key selections from the best contemporary work in philosophy of film. The featured essays have been specially chosen for their clarity, philosophical depth, and consonance with the current move towards cognitive film theory Eight sections with introductions cover topics such as the nature of film, film as art, documentary cinema, narration and emotion in film, film criticism, and film's relation to knowledge and morality Issues addressed include the objectivity of documentary films, fear of movie monsters, and moral questions surrounding the viewing of pornography Replete with examples and discussion of moving pictures throughout. (shrink)

Instances of natural beauty are widely regarded as counterexamples to practice-based theories of aesthetic value. They are not. To see that they are not, we require the correct account of natural beauty and the correct account of social practices.

Scepticism about the power of pictures to convey moral messages and to improve the quality of moral reflection is unfounded, as is scepticism about links between moral and aesthetic evaluation. Pictures can afford moral insights, especially as vehicles for seeing- in. However, this amplifies—it does not diminish—the force of critiques of some pictures, including the feminist critique of the male gaze.

Empirical research on aesthetic response poses two challenges to philosophy. The more familiar challenge is that scientific explanations of aesthetic responses debunk what we take to be our reasons for those responses. One reaction to this challenge is an accommodation strategy that seeks to reconcile the scientific findings with an improved understanding of our normative reasons. This paper presents a more fundamental challenge: a well-established body of research in social psychology indicates that we routinely confabulate the reasons we give for (...) our aesthetic response. This challenges the accommodation strategy and suggests that philosophy should adopt a more radical naturalism about aesthetic response. (shrink)

At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation through the lens of Simone de (...) Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism: a form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today – well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance. (shrink)

Philosophers have championed contextualist and relativist semantics for aesthetic discourse that attempt to explain faultless disagreement. However, both types of semantics do a good job explaining faultless disagreement. As a rule, more explananda assist in theory choice. This chapter proposes that three more facts need explaining. Aesthetic disputes revolve around objects, even as they express attitudes. They also extend into lengthy exchanges wherein reasons are offered and withdrawn. Finally, they play a role in the formation and regulation of aesthetic practices. (...) Different views about the point of aesthetic disputes interpret these three facts differently. One option has it that we use aesthetic disputes to align with peers who share the same preferences. This option is friendly to relativist semantics. The alternative states that we use aesthetic disputes to coordinate language and concepts to fit aesthetic genres. This option mandates contextualist semantics. The weight of evidence tilts towards contextualism. (shrink)

This article focuses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art as branches of so-called analytic philosophy. It begins with a historical overview of aesthetics and the philosophy of art before turning to a discussion of how the philosophy of art bears upon human culture. It then considers the methods used in attacking problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of art by highlighting the distinctions between pure and applied philosophy, between internal and external perspectives on aesthetic and artistic phenomena, and between (...) first-order and second-order methods. It also examines how aesthetics and the philosophy of art are affected as the arts evolve and as empirical studies of aesthetic and artistic phenomena become well established in the social and behavioural sciences as well as the humanities. (shrink)

Cognitive evaluations of pictures imply aesthetic evaluations of pictures given the right conception of cognitive evaluation. Knowledge has cognitive value, but so do some personal character traits—intellectual virtues. Pictures foster virtues of perception, and that is part of their aesthetic value.

Section:ChooseTop of pageAbstract < (...) and despite the difficulties in obtaining information, private collectors and local and provincial museums had taken an interest in archaeological and ethnographic materials in the country. In this present contribution, attention is focused on the search for information about private collections, a topic that has been little investigated. By tackling new archival sources, the article presents information about some provincial natural history museums and their international exchanges. Second, it deals with the museums of the Historical and Geographical Institutes, while the third part concentrates on collection initiatives in the province of São Paulo in southeast Brazil. Thus, this paper based on archival sources reveals new museums and collections beyond those mentioned in prior historiography centered on the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro. The article identifies the processes of building collections in these local, provincial museums, and examines the contradictory perspectives on what objects were considered worthy to represent the museums' ideals of modernization as they tried to keep up with what was known about international museums. It also argues that these local museums, conversely, sought to display their own projects in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the larger national or regional museums. (shrink)

Dissertação: LOPES, Albert Drummond. A infecção da alma: um estudo do combate à imoralidade no jornal O Diário no período do Estado Novo. 2014. Dissertação , Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciências da Religião, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte.

Filosofias africanas é uma viagem ao pensamento africano pelos ganhadores do Prêmio Jabuti – Livro do ano. Num sentido amplo, o termo “filosofia” designa a busca do conhecimento iniciado quando os seres humanos começaram a tentar compreender o mundo por meio da razão. O termo pode também definir o conjunto de concepções, práticas ou teóricas, acerca da existência, dos seres, do ser humano e do papel de cada um no Universo. Na prática acadêmica, é usado para designar o “conjunto de (...) concepções metafísicas (gerais e abstratas) sobre o mundo”. A grande crítica que se faz às tentativas de caracterizar o pensamento tradicional africano como filosofia é a de que, na África, os nativos, defrontados com a grande incógnita que é o Universo, seriam incapazes de ir além do temor e da reverência, próprios das mentes ditas “primitivas”. A partir daí, o chamado “racismo científico”, um dos pilares do colonialismo no século XIX – desqualificando as fontes do saber africano conhecidas desde a Antiguidade –, negou a possibilidade de os africanos produzirem filosofia. Então, o reconhecimento como filósofos, no sentido estrito do termo, de pensadores nascidos na África e de uma linha filosófica deles originada só ocorreu a partir do século XX. Filosofias africanas trata tanto dos saberes ancestrais africanos, sua essência preservada nos provérbios, na diversidade multicultural e nos ensinamentos passados durante gerações por meio da oralidade, quanto da contribuição de filósofos africanos e afrodescendentes contemporâneos na atualização desses saberes, muitos dos quais pautados no decolonialismo. Nei Lopes e Luiz Antonio Simas, de maneira didática, mais uma vez escreveram uma obra que evidencia a complexidade, sofisticação e profundidade do pensamento africano e das perspectivas de mundo que sua filosofia provoca. (shrink)

Provides an account of what it is for works of academic philosophy to be beautiful in their content or in their mode of expression.

O presente artigo propõe-se a analisar as vantagens do acesso aos documentos digitais e ao mesmo tempo, apontar desafios encontrados ao pesquisar em documentos impressos. Neste intuito, discorre-se brevemente sobre uma experiência vivida ao pesquisar em acervos físicos e digitais em bibliotecas portuguesas. Como fundamentação teórica, busca dar ênfase aos documentos de valor histórico e ressaltar a relevância do uso da tecnologia no acesso à informação. Como resultado, o estudo permitiu constatar que o uso da tecnologia da informação aplicada ao (...) patrimônio documental oferece inúmeros ganhos tanto em relação à redução de tempo quanto aos custos empregados com a reprodução de cópias e da massa documental acumulada. Por fim, pode-se perceber que ainda é insignificante o número de instituições que investem nesses recursos, o que dificulta o acesso a esse patrimônio e consequentemente compromete o papel de responsabilidade social, o de disponibilizar os documentos à sociedade em tempo hábil. (shrink)