Deception has recently received a significant amount of attention. One of main reasons is that it lies at the intersection of various areas of research, such as the evolution of cooperation, animal communication, ethics or epistemology. This essay focuses on the biological approach to deception and argues that standard definitions put forward by most biologists and philosophers are inadequate. We provide a functional account of deception which solves the problems of extant accounts in virtue of two characteristics: deceptive states have (...) the function of causing a misinformative states and they do not necessarily provide direct benefits to the deceivers and losses to the targets. (shrink)

This article aims to combine the strengths of Erich Fromm’s and John Dewey’s social philosophies. I argue that the merits of this comparison become particularly clear when the theories are outlined and compared in the following three steps. First, a social theoretical common ground of Dewey and Fromm will be illustrated. Their “World War genealogies” share the same defense mechanism as the major explanation of the Germans’ tendency to voluntary submission, which involves a strong feeling of powerlessness. Against this background, (...) the next step elaborates the ethical side of their argument. Already the World War genealogies are written with melioristic intent, and especially later works (in case of both authors) elaborate the respective ethical theory as well as the ideas concerning melioristic social science and social psychology. These ethics aim at good communication (in a broad sense), while the melioristic social research focuses on the concrete manifestations of social character, allowing to empirically identify hindering and facilitating factors of social amelioration. Both can be linked using the concept of communicative power(lessness). By way of outlook, I will finally consider the combination of a democratic, communication-oriented ethics with qualitative sociopsychoanalytic research in Fromm’s sense as a straightforward and promising approach for an interdisciplinary social philosophy. (shrink)

This paper presents and discusses design studio outcomes developed in response to a studio brief linked to the Fun Palace Futures initiative of the Royal British Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in honour of architect Cedric Price and artist Joan Littlewood. The studio brief was collaboratively developed by the authors. Its core question was: How could the thoughts that guided the development and design of the Fun Palace – a project that was never built but is still today cited (...) as a model for thinking flexible and open architecture – be re-interpreted and renewed for the future? This line of thinking guided the initial and experimental research phase, during which students developed an understanding of what indeterminacy is or could be. The paper shows that through the translation of some of the essential principles of the Fun Palace project into pedagogical instruments, students were enabled to approach the questions of indeterminacy in an open and innovative manner. The paper argues that the use of a variety of media, which often went far beyond the conventional architectural pallet, and the introduction of media shifts were crucial in assisting the students in developing their own tools for creating a new kind of open and flexible architecture. The paper presents this pedagogic approach. We show that the conditions of indeterminacy, uncertainty, chance and change, hold potential for framing the design and creation of a new kind of dynamic architecture, and for initiating experimental architectural thinking in a design studio setting. (shrink)

Pode-se dizer que desde o início da ciência moderna muito se falou sobre virtudes teóricas tais como simplicidade, unificação, adequação empírica, fecundidade, coerência, etc., isto é, virtudes de uma boa teoria, mas pouco se falou das virtudes dos cientistas enquanto agentes. Todavia, hoje em dia, cada vez mais vem crescendo um interesse sobre qual é o papel das virtudes e dos vícios epistêmicos dos cientistas. Além de diversos artigos, já existem dois importantes livros os quais possuem diversos contribuidores: “Virtue Epistemology (...) Naturalized: Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science” organizado por Abrol Fairweather em 2014 e “Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities” organizado por Jeroen Van Dongen e Paul Herman em 2017. Contudo a atenção maior foi direcionada às virtudes epistêmicas e não aos vícios epistêmicos. Nesses dois livros citados acima, com o total de 29 capítulos, apenas 1 deles é dedicado ao vício epistêmico. O que não é de todo inesperado, se, de maneira análoga, temos em mente que apenas agora com os trabalhos de Quassim Cassam surgiu uma epistemologia do vício. É nesse cenário que Cedric Paternotte e Milena Ivanova entram na discussão com o artigo “Virtues and Vices in Scientific Practice” publicado em 2017. Apesar de eles apontarem o papel das virtudes e dos vícios na prática científica, será contemplado apenas o que eles falam sobre o vício epistêmico na ciência. O que é dito nesse artigo é simples e controverso: o vício epistêmico pode ter função benéfica para o sucesso científico. Na seção I será explicado brevemente o que são as virtudes epistêmicas, em II fala-se um pouco do cenário das virtudes na história da ciência, III será dedicado a argumentação de Paternotte e Ivanova e, por fim, IV fornecerá três breves comentários sobre a posição dos autores. (shrink)