Arquivo para a ‘Information ethics’ Categoria
Truth is ontological, is it logical or is it power
20
Aug
The sophists said that man is the measure of things (Protagoras),
not to affirm any ontological principle, only to reaffirm the current status quo that ultimately is power, they used the art of persuasion (Gorgias) for this and lastly they affirmed the convenience of the strongest (Trasímaco), almost all appear in the dialogues of Plato, through the dialogues of Socrates) and whose concern was to contest them to affirm the democracy of the polis.
Then we lived for several centuries organizing the laws until the transition from the Greek city-state to the post-middle age towns, where liberalism will grow until it becomes the modern state, creating the concept of nation and the social contract that governs a specific people .
For the modern epistemological view, truth is linked to the object (the thing itself) and this makes it relative, since it is subject to space, time and categories, this concept comes from Aristotle, but it was on him that the thought of middle ages were divided between nominalists and realists, but for both and also for Descartes who will establish the res-extensive (matter), the res-cogitans (thinking thing) and the divine res (perfect, infinite thinking thing).
It is Kant who makes the connection of the thinking thing about the object becoming relative, since such truth is to the knowing subject having then a subjective face, proper to the subject, for him the “thing in itself” (the object) becomes “The thing in me” (subject to subjectivity).
This means that before the object, the conscience develops the work in the production of the truth according to the space in which that object is occupying, the time that it is situated and in which category it fits, then it is a matter of categorizing and organizing the objects around concepts.
It is not difficult to understand that this creates a logical structure that will initially create a positivist logic and later a logical empiricism, or a neologicism, in both currents any metaphysical aspect is denied, so logic is no longer a function of an argumentative construction , but from a calculation of propositions that follows a logical structure, ultimately it is also what justifies power and its machinations.
We return to the sophist narratives, the idea that it is the power that says what is true, so it is a matter of conquering it many times in a logic in which the ends justify the means, thus corruption is justified, the absence of virtues morals and even death.
The ontological truth seemed to have succumbed, but it was hermeneutics and phenomenology that brought modern ontology back to its roots, Franz Brentano will use a subcategory of the ontological concept of consciousness, by elevating intentionality to a higher category and making it a “mental phenomenon” .
Husserl, a student of Brentano, will recreate the intentionality and remove it from the psychological aspect still with an empiric remnant, and will say that it only makes sense to call consciousness, the “awareness of something”, this means that there is no awareness of the thing-in- itself, but the intentionality in the awareness of something.
Intentionality distinguishes property from mental phenomenon: being necessarily directed towards an object, whether real or imaginary. It is in this sense, and in Husserl’s phenomenology, that this term is used in contemporary philosophy, also by Heidegger, but which will recover and transform the idea of Being.
However, it is necessary to remember that Heidegger in My Way in Phenomenology, was due to the reading in 1907 of Brentano’s dissertation written in 1862: “The multiple meaning of being in Aristotle” (Brentano, 1862) and this meant a resumption of the path of his master Edmund Husserl.
Heidegger, unlike Brentano, denies the fundamental characterization of being as a substance, since, Brentano was still linked to the medieval interpretive tradition, disregarding the dimension of the role in language, for this reason he will properly say that his Dasein is a “new question” .
The true-being (the ontological truth) as being-discoverer [Wahrsein (Wahrheit) besagt entdeckend-sein] is the way in which aletheia appears, it is what Heidegger calls unveiling, taking it literally (but translated that is already an interpretation):
“The statement is true means: it discovers the being in itself. He enunciates, indicates, “lets see” (apophansis) the being in his being and being discovered. The true-being (truth) of the statement must be understood in the sense of being-discoverer. ” (HEIDEGGER, 2009, p. 289)
HEIDEGGER, M. (2009) Ser e Tempo (Being and Time). 4ª ed. Trad. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. (Brazilian edition) Petrópolis: São Paulo.
The pandemic and the doxa
18
Aug
Mere opinion on topics as complex as the treatment of the pandemic 
exposed the world to mere opinion or “doxa” as the Greeks called what was opposed to episteme or organized and systematized knowledge.
The number of curious solutions in the fight against the virus is enormous: using lemon to ozone, the remedies that are effective for other diseases such as the use of chloroquine for malaria, uses of teas and hot water, certain fruits and vegetables, FioCruz that accompanies the Oxford vaccine development carried out a survey, which gives 73% of the news about coronavirus cures as false, mostly home recipes with no effect on the disease.
All life in Plato’s time (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) happened around the polis, where there was already the citizen of the polis, the politician, but still dominated the sophists, who sought only arguments to favor power , without worrying about justice and truth.
In the book Plato’s Republic the term episteme, which previously supported the possibility of being a skill for something, now acquires the content of knowledge full of certainty, an evident knowledge that is linked to the reality of Eidos (the Idea for the ancients), with this episteme is true knowledge and totally opposed to doxa, reduced to simple opinion.
It is in the relationship between epistemology and ethics, that it is possible to consider the action from a doxa point of view, although it does not mean a basis for this type of ethical knowledge in Plato, as he will appear with Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), in particular in his book “Ética a Nicômaco”.
The problem of determining these concepts by linking them to ethical issues appears in the first dialogues until the Republic, which remains afterwards in the dialogues about the Laws, making it possible to address this issue in later dialogues.
Plato uses the concepts of nous (Republic VI 511d4) and noesis (Republic VI 511e1), the doxa is in the world of sensitive reality, while the episteme is in dianoetic knowledge (dianoia, it is the way of thinking lower than noesis) that its object is the noeta, but they are inferior to the dialectic (República VII 533d).
Aristotle will deny the existence of eide (pure thought) in Platonic terms, so his episteme will designate for him the knowledge of the necessary causes (it is developed in the first analytics) and consists of demonstration (apodeixis) and sensation (aisthesis) becomes if necessary for the episteme.
In order not to complicate too much, the Greeks are, it is in Metaphysics (E 1, 1025b-1026a.) That the term episteme will designate a systematic organization of rational knowledge, thus coming to point to theoretical knowledge, in opposition to practical knowledge and poietic (Nicomachean Ethics VI 3, 1139b14-36).
Whatever the form of systematic knowledge, science has its ways and to deny them is to put all of humanity to the test, neither home recipes nor vaccines without the conditions for testing are acceptable, caution is necessary, we have already paid a price too much for deaths in the pandemic, the cure is to eliminate the possibilities of reinfection and side effects, it is the dose of the poison that makes the medicine, but the reverse is also true.
The tragedy of modern culture
12
Aug
Theodore Dalrymple, pseudonym of the English physician and 
psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, who proposed a reflection on the moral decay of modern culture, the effect of the politically correct dangerous on society (as if it were a single political position) and the consequences for the true culture of peoples, your book Anything goes (2016) is a profound “clinical” analysis of what kind of cultural crisis we are experiencing.
The author collaborates with several periodicals The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer and The Spectator, it is a conservative point of view that looks at history without a doubt, but it is nevertheless important to make some observations about contemporary life and see how many others wear out the current culture.
She won her first Freedom in Flanders in 2011, a region that speaks Flemish two thirds of Belgium, after praising her as an educated woman, she will criticize her nationalism: “I requested a room… the receptionist answered me in English, but not because of my accent with my wife, who is Parisian, she did the same.
We were thus introduced to Flemish nationalism, which demonstrates that no country is too small for national separatism” (page 30), the other region is French-speaking Wallonia, but only Flemish in Flanders, even if they know French .
He reveals his true identity in the book by saying “as a doctor and psychiatrist, I spent a terrible period of my career trying to take people on a path that seemed appropriate and beneficial to them” (p. 81) and then confesses his failure, he says that their patients were “self-destructive, which, if looked at impartially and with a minimum of common sense, could not lead to anything other than anguish” (idem), but it is not their high point.
In another line, but also in defense of the culture that has arisen among the peoples of the planet, with clear and unmistakable roots, Byung-Chul Han, a Korean philosopher migrated to Germany, also criticizes the culture of the smooth, the absence of imperfections and grooves that are confused in art with the politically correct.
Wrote Byung-Chul wrote that beauty today is smooth, does not show resistance, does not break and requires likes, distance invites only touch, there is no negativity that is opposite, without it, surprise and wonder disappear: “without distance no it is possible to have mystique, demystification makes everything fruiting and consumable. ”, there is no otherness of the Other, there is only room for an aestheticized and homogenized diversity, and thus consumable and explored.
It is not about defending tradition, good critics and good reformers always engage in dialogue with the opposite side, but what is involved is forgetfulness and even contempt for the roots of each culture and a massification that wants to make everything uniform and misshapen .
It is only one side of the culture that reaches the thought that has become vulgar and sophist, of the religion that has become ideological or fundamentalist, and of the culture that we all descend from that is ignored, the social and moral consequences are only the visible part of that occurs in the foundations of modern society.
DALRYMPLE, Thedore. (2016) Qualquer coisa serve. (Our culture: what´s left of it). trad. Hugo Langone. São Paulo: É Realizações.
Cultural differences of the pre-Socratic and the modern
05
Aug
It was Karl Popper who drew attention to the origin of modern Enlightenment,
so it is not possible to criticize contemporary Enlightenment idealism and empiricism without an attentive re-reading of the history of Western thought.
First because it is the history of thought, much of the civilizing night is in the crisis of thought, warns Morin, and also Marx when making the Critique in Theses on Feuerbach (1845) actually pointed to the idealism present in modern Christianity, but the root Jewish-Christian is another, the division occurs in two points of history the liberation by the Maccabees (167 BC – 37 BC) and the incursions of the apostle Paul.
Returning to the pre-Socratic Enlightenment, the root of Western thought, Popper made a foray into the three greatest philosophers of this period Xenophanes, Parmenides and Heraclitus: “the greatest and most inventive period in Greek philosophy”. The author notes that the “adventure of Greek critical rationalism”, and identifies a principle of crisis already in Aristotle who after developing his episteme: “he killed critical science, to which he himself made a major contribution.”
As Popper develops “it was this conception of demonstrable knowledge, presented by Aristotle, that eclipsed the critical attitude developed by the pre-Socratics, and thus all the modern inheritance of this demonstrable“ logic ”, although admitting Popper’s development as this enlightenment having ontological (and not logical) roots, the famous maxim of Parmenides: “being is and non-being is not”, with no third hypothesis besides dual logic and an included third, besides the classic excluded third, there is no third hypothesis.
Only in the 20th century with quantum physics formulating the already proven hypothesis of a third state of matter called “tunneling”, and Barsarab Nicolescu’s proposal for the third included, can one be thinking about a being and not be simultaneous, in the Trinitarian god there is also a third possibility.
Only in the 20th century with quantum physics formulating the already proven hypothesis of a third state of matter called “tunneling”, and Barsarab Nicolescu’s proposal for the third included, can one be thinking about a being and not be simultaneous.
It is not a question of affirming the paradox of the existence of something and its contrary, there would be an evident reciprocal annulment, there would be no possibility of predictions and the scientific approach of the world would be collapsed, which Quantum Physics admits, and Barsarab is based on this. is that there are countless immutable connections on which to experiment or interpret results, it is both Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” and Popper’s “falsifiability” method.
It does not abolish the logic of Yes and No by Parmenides and Aristotle, it only admits a third hypothesis, the philosophical, social and political consequences are evident, the scientific is what was formulated as transdisciplinarity, while we are confining the third to a specialized disciplinary theory hypothesis seems unfounded or non-existent, if it looks from another angle it appears.
Edgar Morin’s complex thinking goes in the same direction, but let’s leave that for the next post.
POPPER, K. The world of Parmenides: pre-Socratic enlightenment. Portuguese translation: Roberto Leal Ferreira. BR-SP: UNESP, 2014.
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The historical origin of hiding pandemic data
03
Aug
The idea of hiding data about the pandemic had already occurred in the Spanish flu,
which received this name only for political reasons since Spain remained neutral during the First World War, the original name was trench flu because it affected many soldiers and weakened some armies.
The idea of hiding the disease was even supported by prestigious institutions, such as the Royal Academy of Medicine in London, until the end and 1918 few believed in the flu.
The name of Spanish influenza is also old, Brazilian newspapers (there was an article from the magazine A Careta, n. 537) used the name but as now the beginning of the fight against the disease was troubled, and the coercive measures defended by the sanitary Oswaldo Cruz were seen as a sanitary tyranny in the country and political groups opposed to the Wenceslau Braz (see the Brazilian daily) government saw the flu as a government pretext for intervention in the lives of the population.
Political use has also been made, but at this serious moment in history, it is desirable that true humanitarian spirits disarm themselves to defend the lives of the population, the action of doctors, aid groups and efforts for the vaccine.
The insistence on polarizing in such a tragic moment reveals only the decadence of the most expensive values of compassion and solidarity, even by groups that should be more committed to joining efforts, and curiously we find even those on the other side of both solidarity and those seeking divert attention from the real enemy: the pandemic that affects everyone.
In the country, lost the opportunity to do a #lockDown when the disease was still located in some regions, now it has spread throughout the country and only the measures already known should continue to be adopted, I see medical teams and support services reaching depletion , the cases of infection of this true heroes continue to grow.
What is new is a worldwide tension in truly worrying limits, the departure from abandoning the basic foundations of society and attitudes that vary between conformism and the simple abandonment of any measure of protection and social isolation, such as the march of thousands of people in Germany.
The levels of the pandemic in Brazil remain stable, neither is it true that the pandemic is under control, nor is it true that there is a genocide in the country, simply the measures that could be taken were not, and time passed and the disease spread.
We are left with the hope of the vaccine, that of Oxford, one of the most reliable due to scientific criteria, the transparency of the working scientists (a detailed article was published in The Lancet magazine) and the rigor of the vaccine’s release stages, without being hit.
The post-pandemic is frightening because there are no attitudes of sobriety and balance even in conscious sectors of society, the impression of a humanism that is more political than true.
There is no healthy citizenship without areté
31
Jul
The construction of wisdom and virtue (the Greek arete) in the fight against doxa
(mere opinion of the relative truth) and the sophists, who despite being wise were corrupted by the taste of power, passions and instincts, made Socrates, who we know him from Plato’s dialogues, and Plato himself to build a new model of citizenship that needed to educate, to leave the Cave for the light and to organize knowledge for the true Good.
It is a fact that the sense of excellence was adopted by state authorities, but its etymological origin remains valid and to defend it is to defend the good, otherwise we fall into sophist relativism, any truth and any argument is valid, the Socratic maieutics is still valid and to ask is to dialogue.
Martha Nussbaum, one of the most renowned philosophers today in classical antiquity, pointed out in her book The Fragility of Goodness: “… indolence, error and ethical blindness cause countless tragedies”, are relevant aspects that Democrats must remember for the defense of democracy and the risk that modern sophists will seize power and manipulate opinions, these are not just fake news, mistaken and authoritarian positions, it is necessary to defend the values of true citizenship, areté (in picture sculpture in Ephesus).
We have already explained the biblical meaning of the net, the fishing and the casting of the nets, in another passage after returning from the Sea of Galilee Jesus and the disciples meet the crowd, and since the place is deserted, the apostles think of dismissing the crowd for lack of food, but Jesus says to see what was food and makes the well-known miracle of the multiplication of bread and fish, from 5 loaves and 2 fish.
It is clear that Christian virtue is beyond the proposal of the Greeks, it extends personal morality and the understanding of mercy, but it does not exclude the citizen arete and dominion of instincts and passions, nowadays so flourishing and reaching even the religious , poor reading of the multiplication of bread and fish that is more related to Christian arete than polis, as they were “in a deserted place” (Mt 14,15), that is, a kind of “retreat” of the polis.
The virtue of compassion is necessary for the distribution of goods, the process of concentration of wealth has accelerated with the pandemic, without collecting the few loaves and fish left of an economy in crisis to help thousands who are hungry, jobless and many without hope, this should be the real new normal if we want better days, only if there are better days for everyone without forgetting the millions who lost jobs, hope and family in this pandemic.
Areté. virtue and ethics of the State
30
Jul
The ethics of classical antiquity thus had two bases to aretê, virtue (understood as citizen formation but with moral values) while the ethics of the sophists who made Greek democracy go into crisis defended a relative truth and man gave up his passions and instincts .
At the beginning of the Roman period, these two currents reappear with the Neoplatonists, Epicureans and Stoics, on the one hand, defending an ascetic morality and, on the other, thinkers such as Cicero and Lucrécio, who included a set of laws and rights in the period of the Roman Empire, of which the modern law has a strong influence, it is what we call the State ethics, to differentiate the concept of ethics from the city-state of Plato and Aristotle who also defended the virtues, the Greek arete.
Although it is not possible to make a clear allusion to the sophists in the period of the Roman empire, their thinkers are legislators, the Neoplatonists are current out of power and take refuge in Christian and Muslim thinkers, such as Saint Augustine, Alfarabi and some Stoic thinkers who would bring influences in the Roman power, like Seneca who was Nero’s tutor, although they defended virtue did not defend an ascetic morality.
Epistemic influences emerge in this period, such as the quarrel with the universals of Boécio and later Abelardo, Duns Scotto and Tomás de Aquino, will resume questions about being and essence, the existence of Universals (what we call the concept) or just private individuals.
In the treatise on virtues Tomás de Aquino made the difference between moral and intellectual virtues, considering that the holy philosopher made a review of Aristotelian ethics, incorporating Christian values, while the moral virtues perfect the speculative and practical aspects, the moral virtues will improve the appetite potentials, name given to the passions and instincts whose discussion comes from the period of the sophists.
Idealistic morality will follow the Kantian maxim: “act in such a way that it can become a universal law”, while creating the transcendental subject outside any religious characteristic, he has a subjective cognitive capacity having: reason, understanding (of the categories ) and sensitivity (pure forms of intuition, space and time), based on this morality that Hegel will elaborate the morality of the State.
In line with Kantian morality, Hegel will elaborate ethics, elaborated on the question of “self-determination of the will”, no longer in subjectivity or in the transcendental, but in the objective unfolding of free wills, that is how the State is the regulator of free wills , and ethics is a quality of ethics, which remains in the private field, and which the State through its laws can make it objective, so the inner moral qualities and virtues are valid only for these aspects and according to the state’s determinations that can interfere in subjective life.
Modern sophistry and practical wisdom
29
Jul
Sophists accredit education and are not born, but because it is a relative age 
and a code of ethics that prevents or satisfies human instincts and passions, even though Socrates worked out happiness as a combination of virtues (in Greek it means time of moral and political excellence, today in opposite fields), and its method is irony and pharmaceutical.
We explicitly explain in the post that irony is not about proximity or skepticism, that there are exceptions to Greek origin, but that the Greek word has a definite meaning, but with successive verbs in a discussion that Socrates left against each other . part of his method is mayo-art, which is the art of parity, which is not the end or the social method, because irony takes or the opponent realizes that his preconcepters have the capacity to reflect and only conceive ideas that lead the truth.
We retaliate so much that the sophists assume that, as far as they are concerned, they do not formulate formulas, but that they satisfy their instincts in a way that satisfies the idea of virtuous politics and ethics or at a moderate pace by Socrates when the illusion is natural. because of its instinctive benefits.
Plato, as a disciple of Socrates, does not believe that Socrates himself is in Plato and refuses the Protagoras’ sophistry, or the dialogue that takes place in the virtuous vise, whether incisive or not, and this is the fundamental point for Plato’s birth. , second historians, approximately 384-383 BC, located in the gardens in the suburbs of Athens (pictured in the mosaic of Pompeii, now in the Archaeological Museum of Naples).
It is mandatory to educate or homosexuals for the sake of seriousness and assimilation to the decadence of Greek democracy brought about by the sophist school, so that you can have a relative opinion and verdict, but it is based on whether you are sensible or intelligent, dialectical or basic here, where it will be essential and overcoming doxa, an opinion and a construct of epistemia, knowledge organized in universal universes.
The evolution of dialogues, especially in Plato’s Republic, shows the dialectical evolution (it is not and could not be Hegelian for historical reasons) of the terms of the episteme until it constitutes an ethical structure that leads to the formulation of laws, but ethics as we know it today it comes from the school of one of Plato’s students, Aristotle, who elaborated “Ethics to Nicomachus”, a teleological and eudaimonist conception (Eudaimonia was happiness for the ancient Greeks), around a practical rationality, what the Greeks called phronesis, one of the elements of ethics, that it is logos plus ethos.
Aristotle created then wisdom as a virtue of practical thought, or just practical wisdom, the objective is to describe the phenomena of human action through the dialectical examination of opinions, the residue of the Socratic method, but to discover in them immutable principles, thus it is possible to overcome the doxa and reach episteme knowledge, one can describe this dialectic as knowing-understanding-knowing.
Later Aristotle. one of the students of his Platonic school, is going to do his Lyceum, which was essentially made by walking, therefore also called peripatetics, but the school has a gynasium for physical exercises, and also for socializing the acquired knowledge.
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics will rework the Phrase by systematizing Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, creating a hermeneutic philosophy.
How to live a crisis and the stable plateau
27
Jul
Edgar Morin and Patrick Viveret wrote in 2010 “How to live in times of crisis” 
(Portuguese edition of 2013), and they certainly were not considered a pandemic, but they are already being seen as a potential horizon for humanity, and that horizon has certainly been aggravated .
Thus, philosophers and other types of visionaries who try to have a peaceful future have no foundation, or may even have, but based on philosophies and thoughts already overcome, a pandemic that demands even more from the great strategists and humanitarian thinkers.
On page 37 of the book it shows the symptoms of the crisis: “Wall Street knows only two feelings, euphoria and panic”, even without knowing it is what they think or promise “happiness”, but it is false and it follows depression, once analyzed more sensible can prepare for the next challenge.
The stable plateau has arrived, in terms of deaths, because the infection data are inaccurate, shows these peaks, now it is moving towards a stable plateau not only in Brazil, but in the world as a whole, it is because the infection cycle has reached the whole world, and in Brazil an entire country.
The cycle can be perceived as not as isolated poles of infection, even countries without new cycles that can be affected, but note that New Zealand and Taiwan are islands, so isolated by sea, they are more controllable, but trade can also reduce these countries.
Edgar Morin and his collaborator published in the book “Three mutations” important in the crisis and which are valid for a social situation of the pandemic, as they represent the ancient world, the world “nation states, industrial society, a segmented organization (see conflicts in the USA x China)… or the ecological challenge poses a question about what we are going to do with our planet ”(p. 57).
An industrial revolution put life in a frenetic way of life, “a classic industrial society that organizes itself in the classic sesame that you make of your life?”, And that remains a question that questions everyone, or recently launched in Portuguese “You have to change your life” by Peter Sloterdijk puts this around anthropotechnics, bringing to the debate a technical question.
MORIN, E.; VIVERET, P. Como viver em tempo de crise? (How to live in times of crisis?) Tradução: Clóvis Marques. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand do Brasil, 2013.
The eschatology of goodness
24
Jul
Just as any worldview has some allegory for the beginning and end, in the case
of the Christian Genesis and Heaven and Hell, and others propose that we are born of plants or animals, or that we come back to life through reincarnation, the good has its eschatology, while evil is a symbolic “structure”.
It is not just the definition of religious views, also in the classical philosophy Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in Ethics, Nicomachus addressed the issue and we have already made some posts here, but it was Democritus who defined our current situation more closely, saying that good depends of man’s inner desire, the good man not only practices good, but always desires it.
So it is in human history too, without historical determinism or romanticism, we walk for good if we exercise from within each man, but socially practicing what the Greeks called “virtue”, but we also have the vicious cycle of evil.
The vicious cycle of evil leads to a “crisis” of good, symbolic evil can be structured in such a way that a given social structure can lead to an end, it can be the end of an era that is very tragic, but it can also lead to a serious civilizing crisis if there is no way out.
Humanity has always found ways out, this gives hope, but tragedies are part of the change, and the severity of the tragedy depends on the resilience of good, although it is fragile that can indicate the new path, a way out for earthly citizenship, for the future human civilizing.
Biblical reading indicates three metaphors for the eschatology of goodness, and compares the “kingdom of heaven” (Mt 13, 24-43) with the planting of the growing tares and wheat that should only be harvested and separated from the eschatological end. mal (the chaff), the second parable the mustard seed, the smallest of the seeds, which gives a beautiful and leafy tree where “the birds come to make their nests”, and the third is a bread recipe, a woman mixes three portions of flour.
The third “parable” the woman mixes three portions of flour, one part should only be fermented, those would be those that have the virtue of good and it should be practiced in order to produce good fermentation in the rest of the dough, the other two portions, then yeast is good.
