Among Aristotle’s criticisms of the Form of the Good is his claim that the knowledge of such a Good could be of no practical relevance to everyday rational agency, e.g. on the part of craftspeople. This critique turns out to hinge ultimately on the deeply different assumptions made by Plato and Aristotle about the relation of ‘good’ and ‘good for’. Plato insists on the conceptual priority of the former; and Plato wins the argument.

Tục ngữ Việt Nam có những câu như “Nhất nghệ tinh, nhất thân vinh” hay “Một nghề thì sống, đống nghề thì chết” để đề cao người biết một nghề và biết rất sâu, tới mức độ thành đạt, vinh quang với nghề.

Trong bài cuối cùng của cuốn sách Meandering Sobriety, có tiêu đề “Starving nature for gluttonous nature-loving humans” (“Bỏ đói thiên nhiên cho con người háu ăn yêu thiên nhiên”), tác giả liệt kê 3 trường hợp thương vong của cua tuyết, cá kình và cỏ biển. Những cái chết này đều đại diện cho tổn thất môi trường sống cũng như sự mất mát về đa dạng sinh học.

Trong bài cuối cùng của cuốn sách Meandering Sobriety, có tiêu đề “Starving nature for gluttonous nature-loving humans” (“Bỏ đói thiên nhiên cho con người háu ăn yêu thiên nhiên”), tác giả liệt kê 3 trường hợp thương vong của cua tuyết, cá kình và cỏ biển. Những cái chết này đều đại diện cho tổn thất môi trường sống cũng như sự mất mát về đa dạng sinh học. Cuối cùng, thì thông điệp quan trọng nhất về môi sinh (...) cũng phải được nêu ra: S.O.S. Bây giờ, chúng ta chỉ còn việc chờ đợi những con người thông thái, uyên bác tiêu hóa thông tin và đưa ra các giải pháp xuất chúng. Trong khi đó, thì theo cùng cách mà tác giả đã làm, tiếp tục tìm hiểu thông tin ta sẽ được cập nhật vài vụ việc chết chóc chẳng kém phần đáng sợ và đều ở quy mô lớn. (shrink)

Ô nhiễm không khí được coi là “sát thủ vô hình” của cư dân đô thị. Theo ước tính của Tổ chức Y tế Thế giới (WHO), “sát thủ” này gây ra/liên quan đến cái chết của khoảng 60 nghìn người mỗi năm tại Việt Nam. Để góp phần giải quyết bài toán ô nhiễm môi trường không khí tại các đô thị ở Việt Nam, các nhà nghiên cứu tại Trường Đại học Kinh tế - ĐHQGHN cùng các cộng (...) sự trong và ngoài nước đã tập trung tìm hiểu nhận thức và nhu cầu cải thiện ô nhiễm không khí tại Hà Nội - một trong những đô thị năng động nhất thế giới và đang đối diện với tình trạng ô nhiễm không khí nặng nề. (shrink)

A new reading of Plato's account of conventionalism about names in the Cratylus. It argues that Hermogenes' position, according to which a name is whatever anybody 'sets down' as one, does not have the counterintuitive consequences usually claimed. At the same time, Plato's treatment of conventionalism needs to be related to his treatment of formally similar positions in ethics and politics. Plato is committed to standards of objective natural correctness in all such areas, despite the problematic consequences which, as he (...) himself shows, arise in the case of language. (shrink)

This discussion emphasises the diversity, philosophical seriousness and methodological distinctiveness of sophistic thought. Particular attention is given to their views on language, ethics, and the social construction of various norms, as well as to their varied, often undogmatic dialectical methods. The assumption that the sophists must have shared common doctrines (not merely overlapping interests and professional practices) is called into question.

Pyrrhonian sceptics claim, notoriously, to assent to the appearances without making claims about how things are. To see whether this is coherent we need to consider the philosophical history of ‘appearance’(phainesthai)-talk, and the closely related concept of an impression (phantasia). This history suggests that the sceptics resemble Plato in lacking the ‘non-epistemic’ or ‘non-doxastic’ conception of appearance developed by Aristotle and the Stoics. What is distinctive about the Pyrrhonian sceptic is simply that the degree of doxastic commitment involved in his (...) assent to an impression is asymptotally low. (shrink)

Socrates’ refutations of Thrasymachus in Republic I are unsatisfactory on a number of levels which need to be carefully distinguished. At the same time several of his arguments are more powerful than they initially appear. Of particular interest are those which turn on the idea of a craft, which represents a shared norm of practical rationality here contested by Socrates and Thrasymachus.

A generally ignored feature of Plato’s celebrated image of the cave in Republic VII is that the ascent from the cave is, in its initial stages, said to be brought about by force. What kind of ‘force’ is this, and why is it necessary? This paper considers three possible interpretations, and argues that each may have a role to play.

A generally ignored feature of Aristotle’s famous function argument is its reliance on the claim that practitioners of the crafts (technai) have functions: but this claim does important work. Aristotle is pointing to the fact that we judge everyday rational agency and agents by norms which are independent of their contingent desires: a good doctor is not just one who happens to achieve his personal goals through his work. But, Aristotle argues, such norms can only be binding on individuals if (...) human rational agency as such is governed by objective teleological norms.
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Plato’s depiction of the first city in the Republic (Book II), the so-called ‘city of pigs’, is often read as expressing nostalgia for an earlier, simpler era in which moral norms were secure. This goes naturally with readings of other Platonic texts (including Republic I and the Gorgias) as expressing a sense of moral decline or crisis in Plato’s own time. This image of Plato as a spokesman for ‘moral nostalgia’ is here traced in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations, and (...) rejected. Plato’s pessimism about human nature in fact precludes any easy assumption that things, or people, were better in the old days. (shrink)

Are the long, wildly inventive etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus just some kind of joke, or does Plato himself accept them? This standard question misses the most important feature of the etymologies: they are a competitive performance, an agôn by Socrates in which he shows that he can play the game of etymologists like Cratylus better than they can themselves. Such show-off performances are a recurrent feature of Platonic dialogue: they include Socrates’ speeches on eros in the Phaedrus, his rhetorical discourse (...) in the Menexenus, and his literary interpretation in the Protagoras. The paper compares these cases to work out the ground rules, purposes and implications of the Platonic agôn, and the Cratylus etymologies in particular. (shrink)

This paper explores in detail Gorgias' defense of rhetoric in Plato 's Gorgias, noting its connections to earlier and later texts such as Aristophanes' Clouds, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' Nicocles and Antidosis, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. The defense as Plato presents it is transparently inadequate; it reveals a deep inconsistency in Gorgias' conception of rhetoric and functions as a satirical precursor to his refutation by Socrates. Yet Gorgias' defense is appropriated, in a streamlined form, by later defenders of rhetoric such as Isocrates (...) and Aristotle. They present it as an effective reductio against a critique of rhetoric that depends on the "harm criterion." This is puzzling, since Plato 's own critique of rhetoric does not depend on the harm criterion. On the other hand, Plato does seem to embrace the harm criterion as a more general principle—as if pre-emptively embracing the reductio —in his arguments about the good in the Meno and Euthydemus. Nonetheless, Isocrates and Aristotle seem to be deliberately misreading Plato on rhetoric: where he intends to criticize its intrinsic nature, they respond as if he were merely complaining about its contingent effects. (shrink)

It is very difficult to get a clear picture of how the Stoic is supposed to deliberate. This paper considers a number of possible pictures, which cover such a wide range of options that some look Kantian and others utilitarian. Each has some textual support but is also unworkable in certain ways: there seem to be genuine and unresolved conflicts at the heart of Stoic ethics. And these are apparently due not to developmental changes within the school, but to the (...) Stoics’ having adopted implicitly incompatible solutions in response to different philosophical challenges. (shrink)

Simplicius’ project of harmonizing previous philosophers deserves to be taken seriously as both a philosophical and an interpretive project. Simplicius follows Aristotle himself in developing charitable interpretations of his predecessors: his distinctive project, in the Neoplatonic context, is the rehabilitation of the Presocratics (especially Parmenides, Anaxagoras and Empedocles) from a Platonic-Aristotelian perspective. Simplicius’ harmonizations involve hermeneutic techniques which are recognisably those of the serious historian of philosophy; and harmonization itself has a distinguished history as a constructive philosophical method.

Wittgenstein’s concepts shed light on the phenomenon of schizophrenia in at least three different ways: with a view to empathy, scientific explanation, or philosophical clarification. I consider two different “positive” wittgensteinian accounts―Campbell’s idea that delusions involve a mechanism of which different framework propositions are parts, Sass’ proposal that the schizophrenic patient can be described as a solipsist, and a Rhodes’ and Gipp’s account, where epistemic aspects of schizophrenia are explained as failures in the ordinary background of certainties. I argue that (...) none of them amounts to empathic-phenomenological understanding, but they provide examples of how philosophical concepts can contribute to scientific explanation, and to philosophical clarification respectively. (shrink)

This article develops a view of shape representation both in visual experience and in subpersonal visual processing. The view is that, in both cases, shape is represented in a ‘layered’ manner: an object is represented as having multiple shape properties, and these properties have varying degrees of abstraction. I argue that this view is supported both by the facts about visual phenomenology and by a large collection of evidence in perceptual psychology. Such evidence is provided by studies of shape discriminability, (...) apparent motion, multiple-object tracking, and structure-from-motion. Recent neuroscientific work has also corroborated this psychophysical evidence. Finally, I draw out implications of the layered view for processes of concept acquisition. 1 Introduction2 Metric Properties andShape Properties3 Metric Views4 Against Metric Views of Visual Shape Experience5 The Visual System Uses Abstract Shape Properties6 Against Metric Views of Visual Shape Representation7 Neural Underpinnings of Abstract Shape Perception8 Implications. (shrink)

Resumo: A crise na União Europeia e os programas de austeridade subsequentes fizeram emergir uma miríade de movimentos sociais, diversos na sua natureza e nos seus propósitos. O que se pretende aferir neste artigo é a relação e a conexão existentes entre o Estado, o poder económico, a sociedade civil e os movimentos sociais neste contexto específico de crise. Procuraremos, nesta breve abordagem, explanar alguns elementos de originalidade intrínsecos aos movimentos sociais hodiernos, patentes na sua forma de participação e organização, (...) assim como aplicar estas questões teóricas relevantes ao contexto português. A parte empírica, dada a escassez de estudos de caso existentes, será apoiada no último inquérito do European Social Survey, de 2012. Analisando um conjunto de perguntas aí explícitas, podemos compreender, de forma indirecta, algumas das dinâmicas que caracterizam estes movimentos. Abstract: The crisis in the European Union and the subsequent austerity programs have unleashed a myriad of social movements, diverse in its nature and purpose. The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship and connection between the State, economic power, civil society and social movements in this specific context of crisis. We will try, in this brief approach, to explain some elements of originality intrinsic to modern social movements, evident in their form of participation and organization, as well as to apply these theoretical questions relevant to the Portuguese context. The empirical part, given the paucity of existing case studies, will be supported in the last survey of the European Social Survey of 2012. By analyzing a set of questions explicit there, we can, indirectly, understand some of the dynamics that characterize these movements. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the moral dimensions of gender affirmation. I argue that the moral value of gender affirmation is rooted in what Iris Murdoch called loving attention. Loving attention is central to the moral value of gender affirmation because such affirmation is otherwise too fragile or insincere to have such value. Moral reasons to engage in acts that gender affirm derive from the commitment to give and express loving attention to trans people as a way of challenging their (...) marginalization. In the latter part of the paper, I will discuss how my arguments bear on recent arguments by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak (2018) on the use of gender-neutral language. They argue that we have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns for anyone. Their conclusion turns, in part, on a rejection of gender affirmation as a moral duty. The value of gender affirmation, rooted in our moral perception of trans people, should make us skeptical of this conclusion, in favor of a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to the ethics of gendering. (shrink)

O presente trabalho visa apresentar a solução dada por Santo Agostinho ao problema do mal, aliado à aparente contraditoriedade entre a presciência de Deus e a liberdade humana. Para isto, será útil como bibliografia principal do filósofo sua obra De libero arbitrio, um livro em forma de diálogo onde o pensador esclarece suas posições acerca do livre-arbítrio e da presciência divina.

Causal closure arguments against interactionist dualism are currently popular amongst physicalists. Such an argument appeals to some principles of the causal closure of the physical, together with certain other premises, to conclude that at least some mental events are identical with physical events. However, it is crucial to the success of any such argument that the physical causal closure principle to which it appeals is neither too strong nor too weak by certain standards. In this paper, it is argued that (...) various forms of naturalistic dualism, of an emergentist character, are consistent with the strongest physical causal closure principles that can plausibly be advocated. (shrink)

Shedding light on the political power and oppressive potential of language, theories of illocutionary silencing and discursive injustice show how gender, class and race can shape the pragmatics of speech, limiting in some circumstances the speaker’s ability to do things with her words. This article takes a close look at discursive injustice in trials for gender-based violence in connection with the phenomenon of misogyny. It argues that in the courtroom the testimony of the complainant is sometimes silenced by a sexist (...) ideology used in service of misogynistic ends. In particular, it argues that sexist social meanings can sometimes be enacted by the judge and accommodated by prosecutors, figuring as a component of the score in the language game of the trial and thus 1) determining what counts as sexual violence and 2) preventing complainants from making the moves they intend to make. (shrink)

The role of imagination in Descartes. The critic of Sartre to the concept of image in Descartes.

This paper addresses the question of what organisms are and therefore what kinds of biological entities qualify as organisms. For some time now, the concept of organismality has been eclipsed by the notion of individuality. Biological individuals are those systems that are units of selection. I develop a conception of organismality that does not rely on evolutionary considerations, but instead draws on development and ecology. On this account, organismality and individuality can come apart. Organisms, in my view, are as Godfrey-Smith (...) puts it “essentially persisters.” I argue that persistence is underpinned by differentiation, integration, development, and the constitutive embeddedness of organisms in their worlds. I examine two marginal cases, the Portuguese Man O’ War and the honey bee colony, and show that both count as organisms in light of my analysis. Next, I examine the case of holobionts, hosts plus their microsymbionts, and argue that they can be counted as organisms even though they may not be biological individuals. Finally, I consider the question of whether other, less tightly integrated biological systems might also be treated as organisms. (shrink)

We argue that the trend toward providing users with feasible and actionable explanations of AI decisions—known as recourse explanations—comes with ethical downsides. Specifically, we argue that recourse explanations face several conceptual pitfalls and can lead to problematic explanation hacking, which undermines their ethical status. As an alternative, we advocate that explanations of AI decisions should aim at understanding.

De uma perspectiva comportamentalista radical, o eu é um repertório verbal complexo, que, como tal, tem uma gênese social. O reconhecimento da origem social do “eu” abre caminho para uma análise política, incluindo uma discussão do pa- pel das relações de poder na constituição do eu. Entretanto, uma concepção radicalmente social do “eu”, como a proposta pelo comportamentalismo, suscita um problema político: se o eu é integralmente produto do ambiente social, de onde viria uma eventual “vontade” de romper com esse (...) sistema? Parece que para reconhecer a possibilidade de ação política transformadora seria preciso preservar uma noção descontextualizada de “eu”. Considerando essa dificuldade, o objetivo deste artigo é propor uma interpretação política da constituição do “eu” no âmbito do comportamentalismo radical, mantendo no horizonte a possibilidade de uma ação política transformadora. Para tanto, destacamos como “eus” oprimidos são tornados submissos, mas também como de certas contingências podem emergir “eus” subversivos, que se opõem a um sistema social opressivo. Esse “eu” subversivo é caracterizado por um repertório de autoconhecimento mais amplo, que inclui a discriminação do papel das relações de poder e do controle promovido por instituições. Concluímos, com isso, que um “eu” socialmente constituído pode ser politicamente ativo. (shrink)

Because corporate social responsibility can be beneficial to both companies and its stakeholders, interest in factors that support CSR performance has grown in recent years. A thorough integration of CSR in core business processes is particularly important for achieving effective long-term CSR practices. Here, we explored the individual CSR-related competencies that support CSR implementation in a corporate context. First, a systematic literature review was performed in which relevant scientific articles were identified and analyzed. Next, 28 CSR directors and managers were (...) interviewed. The literature review complemented with interview data resulted in the following eight distinct CSR-related competencies: Anticipating CSR challenges; Understanding CSR-relevant systems and subsystems; Understanding CSR-relevant standards; CSR management competencies, including Leading CSR programs, Managing CSR programs, and Identifying and realizing CSR-related business opportunities; Realizing CSR-supportive interpersonal processes; Employing CSR-supportive personal characteristics and attitudes; Personal value-driven competencies, including Ethical normative competencies, Balancing personal ethical values and business objectives, and Realizing self-regulated CSR-related behaviors and active involvement; and Reflecting on personal CSR views and experiences. Based on these results, implications for further research on this topic, as well as implications for practitioners, are discussed. (shrink)

The ability to perceive the shapes of things as enduring through changes in how they stimulate our sense organs is vital to our sense of stability in the world. But what sort of capacity is shape constancy, and how is it reflected in perceptual experience? This paper defends a pluralist account of shape constancy: There are multiple kinds of shape constancy centered on geometrical properties at various levels of abstraction, and properties at these various levels feature in the content of (...) perceptual experience, governing patterns of apparent shape similarity. I propose that the varieties of shape constancy are subserved by the syntactic complexity of perceptual shape representations. By assigning discrete constituents to various abstract shape parameters, these representations attune us to the preservation of certain abstract shape properties through changes in more determinate shape properties. Finally, I draw broader lessons concerning the nature and function of perceptual constancy. (shrink)

This paper is inspired by and develops on E. J. Lowe’s work, who writes in his book The Possibility of Metaphysics that ‘metaphysical possibility is an inescapable determinant of actuality’ (1998: 9). Metaphysics deals with possibilities – metaphysical possibilities – but is not able to determine what is actual without the help of empirical research. Accordingly, a delimitation of the space of possibilities is required. The resulting – controversial – picture is that we generally need to know whether something is (...) possible before we can know whether it is actual. In order to appreciate this picture, we need to understand Lowe’s slogan: ‘essence precedes existence’ (Lowe 2008: 40). This slogan has both an ontological and an epistemic reading. The ontological reading is related to the now familiar idea that essence grounds modality, as popularised by Kit Fine. The epistemic reading suggests that we can know the essence of some entity before we know whether or not that entity exists. However, this idea is often met with puzzlement and Lowe himself sadly passed away before he had a chance to clarify this framework. I will present the framework as I understand it, develop it on my own terms, and put forward a qualified defence of it. I will also illustrate how the framework can be put to use with a case study concerning the discovery of transuranic elements. (shrink)

Abstract: Alienation and slavery from Precious or what we don't want to see. It is our purpose to establish, in a parallel reading, these two films (highly rewarded), namely The Fence and Precious, that apparently being so different, are an illustration of the reality of life and the modern democratic world: the social uprooting and slavery. If in the movie of Phillip Noyce and Christone Olsen The Fence, is told a story of three young Aboriginal girls who are forcibly taken (...) to be transformed into domestic slaves, in the movie of Lee Daniels Precious, the young woman is already a servant in her own home and seeks the transformation of her life. Uniting these two stories, we find fundamental elements: illiteracy, ill-treatment, the idea of a migration (real or metaphysical), among others, but whose fundamental notion is the journey. If the film The Fence, the fence itself is used to conduct the three young Aboriginal to a real reunion with the family, in Precious, the metaphorical ‘fence’ is the limit of her world. From this interpretation, we will undertake our reflection about what we consider to be the alienation of the modern world and the silence we produce about them. (shrink)

When we perceive an object, we perceive the object from a perspective. As a consequence of the perspectival nature of perception, when we perceive, say, a circular coin from different angles, there is a respect in which the coin looks circular throughout, but also a respect in which the coin's appearance changes. More generally, perception of shape and size properties has both a constant aspect—an aspect that remains stable across changes in perspective—and a perspectival aspect—an aspect that changes depending on (...) one's perspective on the object. How should we account for the perspectival aspect of spatial perception? We present a framework within which to discuss the perspectival aspect of perception and put forward three desiderata that any account of the perspectival aspect of perception should satisfy. We discuss views on which the perspectival aspect of perception is analyzed in terms of constitutively mind-dependent appearance properties as well as views on which the perspectival aspect of perception is analyzed in terms of representations of mind-independent perspectival properties. (shrink)

Abstract. Following the tracks of Ryle and based upon the theory of complex systems, we shall develop a characterization of action-based consciousness as an embodied, embedded, selforganized process in which action and dispositions occupy a special place. From this perspective, consciousness is not a unique prerogative of humans, but it is spread all around, throughout the evolution of life. We argue that artificial systems such as robots currently lack the genuine embodied embeddedness that allows the type of self-organization that is (...) relevant to consciousness. -/- Sommario. Seguendo la linea tracciata da Ryle e basata sulla teorie dei sistemi complessi, svilupperemo una caratterizzazione della coscienza basata sull’azione come un processo incarnato, situato e auto organizzante nel quale le azioni e le disposizioni occupano un ruolo decisivo. Da questo punto di vista, la coscienza non è una prerogativa esclusiva degli esseri umani, ma è diffusa nel mondo naturale grazie ai processi evolutivi. Noi sosteniamo che i sistemi artificiali come i robot attualmente sono carenti del tipo di relazione con la corporeità e con l’ambiente che consente quel tipo di auto-organizzazione indispensabile per l’emergenza della coscienza. (shrink)

A prominent view holds that perception and memory are distinguished at least partly by their temporal orientation: Perception functions to represent the present, while memory functions to represent the past. Call this view perceptual presentism. This chapter critically examines perceptual presentism in light of contemporary perception science. I adduce evidence for three forms of perceptual sensitivity to the past: (i) shaping perception by past stimulus exposure, (ii) recruitment of mnemonic representations in perceptual processing, and (iii) perceptual representation of present objects (...) as possessing past properties. I argue that forms (i) and (ii) are consistent with perceptual presentism, while form (iii) poses a genuine threat to the view. While the empirical case for form (iii) remains inconclusive, I suggest that the most serious challenges to perceptual presentism derive from representations that integrate mnemonic and present-tensed elements in the performance of canonical perceptual functions, such as perceiving object continuity over time. (shrink)