Arquivo para a ‘Information Science’ Categoria
New Pandemic and Community
06
Dec
Even in the case of the same virus, it is a new pandemic, the new 
variant called omega by the WHO has to circumvent vaccines, we knew this already from other infectious diseases, if not eradicated the disease can return and in this case the variants manifest increasingly complex a new of infection spreads.
Many activists, scientists and also the WHO defended that a more equitable distribution of vaccines around the world would help combat covid 19, so the third dose (necessary, but in another step) was taken from vaccines that could be donated to poorer countries , like most African countries, the sociologist Mbembe’s Necropolitics from Cameroon reminds us of this, choosing who should die, but in this case it implies a global Necropolitics, as without a coimmunity the Pandemic returns.
The word coimmunity coined by Sloterdijk was thought in a broader sense, long before the pandemic, it makes sense now that we look at a global problem.
The good news is that even though it can infect people who have already been vaccinated, the infection is less serious if already vaccinated, according to Brazilian geneticist Salmo Raskin, director of the Genetika Laboratory in Paraná, it was already clear that the variant was not subject to initial infection, both infected. as vaccinated they are not immune to this omega strain.
The number of infections grows in Europe, according to data from Reuters, every three days there is a million new cases being registered, which in total since the beginning of the pandemic has surpassed 75 million infected, the number of deaths is also growing: Italy registered 43 deaths, the numerous countries that continue to fall are Russia and Ukraine, but it is noteworthy that they were the first to grow in infections and the numbers are still high.
Even so, there are protests against new restrictions measures due to the new wave, Germany had a demonstration this weekend.
The problem in Europe is not yet the omega variant, but the low rate of vaccination, called vaccine hesitation, and they still say it is a global phenomenon, however in many countries vaccination is progressing, in Brazil we are already close to 80% vaccinated although it does not give immunity to the omega variant, it reduces its lethality.
In Brazil, several year-end festivities have been canceled, and protective measures must be taken urgently.
History, the great clearing and parousia
03
Dec
Christmas is near and the birth of Jesus is a historical fact because
the Census ordered by the emperor of Rome Caesar Augustus, regarding the date there is controversy for it would be between 4-5 BC, when Quininus was Governor of Syria as described in the Bible (Lc 2.2), but it is certain that the census was carried out and this was precisely the reason why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, where the prophecy said that from there the savior would be born, and thus he “was numbered among men”.
History is also punctuated by divine interventions, in the decadence of Rome the monasteries were born, where the culinary culture, the first guilds and offices and also an earlier stage of printed writing is carried out, through the copyists, the first schools and later the first universities, with a strong theological influence as it could not be otherwise, but this is all history, also in the renaissance art and culture had a strong influence (theological).
We enter modernity, the work that we read punctually in this week’s posts “all in the same boat” by Sloterdijk, mentions an important fact, in addition to citing the classic work of the Decamerão by Boccaccio as “small community in the midst of the big disaster” ( Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 75), makes an analysis of the Black Death (which happened in the 130’s) and which devastated Europe with more than 100 million people dead when the population was much smaller than today, and its political influence.
In a footnote he cites the work of Henrik Siewierki (translated by Estação Liberdade in 2001) “A mass for the city of Arras” where he analyzes the psychological and political consequences of the plague, also the psychologist Franz Renggli, in his book Self-destruction by abandonment , developed the hypothesis of the influence on modernity of the plague, and also of the degradation of the mother-child relationship that would have caused a kind of immunological, collective and psychosomatic weakness that favored the virus of that plague.
All this analysis is interesting in the midst of the Pandemic’s return to Europe, while it is undoubtedly a scourge, it can fuel a new clearing on our community, that is, the idea of a mutual and solidary defense in view of a catastrophe even greater than the one we’ve already encountered.
All this analysis is interesting in the midst of the Pandemic’s return to Europe, while it is undoubtedly a scourge, it can fuel a new clearing on our coimmunity (category of Sloterdijk), that is, the idea of a mutual and solidary defense in view of a catastrophe even greater than we have already encountered.
It serves to “make the paths smooth”, as the biblical reading says when John, the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, announced in the desert using the words of the prophet Isaiah: “this is the voice of the one who cries out in the desert: ‘prepare the way of the Lord , make your paths straight’” (Lk 3,4) and it seems favorable to our time of scourge and desert.
It is important to remember that the first two weeks of Christmas celebrate not the coming of Jesus in Bethlehem, but the Parusia, that is, the preparation for his second coming.
Cultural diversity and hopes
02
Dec
In his book “In the same boat: essays on hyperpolitics” Peter Sloterdijk
points out that: “historical appearance teaches every observer that human groups in pioneer regions, during the last three or four thousand years, must have been able to sail on their old rafts of such that groupings of rafts could emerge in great style” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 73), which means that old cultural habits resist time, even though I consider “mentally poor and yet significant the term ‘culture’” . (idem).
It emphasizes that the decay of superstructures “reveals that they have almost nothing to give to individuals in their efforts to continue life” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 74), and more than that, it can be recognized that “as soon as the opus decays commune, people can only regenerate as smaller units” (idem).
Thus, it is in these smaller units that a new opus commune can be regenerated and elaborated, taking up the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio where there is the survival of the small community in the face of the “large disaster”, recalling the period of the plague that can be a parallel with the In the current pandemic, there the Fiorentinos “no longer know whether to fear contamination or looting or hunger any longer, they fall into a disorientation equivalent to paralysis” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 75), the first version of “in the same boat ” is from 1993.
In a period that followed the Babylonian, Egyptian, Syrian and Persian empires, it was in the small Greek communities that the idea of city-state polis was born and that reached the modern republic, it was the Fiorentine Renaissance that an artistic-cultural revolution was born that led the human spirit the first great navigations and the expansion of mercantilism, and it was from Franco-German rationalism that the bourgeois liberal revolution was born and today where are these small groups capable of rescuing civilization?
There are new cosmovisions that are reborn (they seek their first cultural forms) in Africa such as the philosopher Achiles Mbembé and his necropolitics, a reaction to the power to dictate who can live and who can die, in Latin America the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, the philosopher, psychiatrist and essayist Frantz Fanon, born in the French Antilles.
The central problem of these thoughts is decoloniality, that is, the idea that modernity and its political project made use of colonization and there will be no significant changes in the superstructures of power if this way of thinking is not subjected to criticism and the unmasking of its objectives .
That’s where hopes can be born, a reconfiguration of the globe where peoples have the right to their freedom, their cultural and social expression, with a dignified life.
The desert without inner life
30
Nov
Living only on the outside, projected onto the world, led to a
special kind of anguish, anguish is an aspect of philosophy, one that is linked to the concept of emptiness, a certain type of philosophy and some forms of the concept “God is dead”, yes because there is another one, one of them is men try in vain to kill Him as if it were possible, as if it were possible to deny some intentionality in the creation of the universe, yes it can be multiverse, but also for it there must be an intentionality.
The philosophical movement that gave voice to the feeling of “alienation and despair” came precisely from “man’s recognition of his fundamental loneliness in an indifferent universe”, the highlighted sentences are by Anthony Downs, an American political economist, who died in October of this year .
The reason why we must know the origin and development of certain concepts that seem just straw and without substance (because they are not observed in depth), is that they come to dominate a large part of contemporary life, such as the idealism that almost dominated all the isms of our time, including socialism and a certain type of Christianity (in picture the work of de Albert György).
The isms of our time are nothing but the rationalization of some form of idealism present in Descartes’ Western culture, passing through Kant to Hegel, his rejection based on the existentialism of Kierkegaard who insisted on the irreducibility of the subjective and personal dimension of human life, the existentialism took several forms, but it is the return to the question of Being and ontology that I consider an essential part of rediscovering the golden thread of the human spirit, or of the personal and subjective dimension as thought by Kierkegaard, part of an essential question that is “ because there is everything and not nothing”, and the nothing is clear is emptiness.
However, Kierkegaard also worked on the issue of anguish, which can be associated with emptiness or with the modern feeling of a form of alienation, his concept is different, it is the vertigo of freedom, advocated by modern man, it is through it that man feels repulsion and attraction, you can do anything, but not everything is convenient.
In “The concept of anguish”, Kierkegaard writes: “”a determination of the dreaming spirit (…) is the reality of freedom as pure as possible” (KIERKEGAARD, 1968, p. 45).
Soren Kierkegaard was born in Denmark in 1813 and had a life full of personal and family problems, in a space of twenty years he saw the death of two brothers and three sisters and then his mother, the disappointment in love with his fiancee Regina Olsen culminates in his own life what it expressed in philosophy.
The concept of anxiety became central in the development of existentialist philosophy, it is present in Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre, but it has not been left out in previous philosophies such as Husserl’s phenomenology and rather in Franz-Brentano’s social psychology.
It is Heidegger who makes the issue of anguish a problem of everyday life, writes: “The being-to-death is, essentially, anguish. This is undoubtedly witnessed, although “only” indirectly, by the already-characterized para-to-death being, at the moment when anguish becomes a cowardly fear and, overcoming it, denounces the cowardice of anguish. (HEIDEGGER, 1998, p. 50).
Therefore, for Heidegger, anguish is an existential determinant and it manifests itself in the daily life of being-in-the-world, in the words of Hanna Arendt, it is a “human condition”.
The issue comes up again because of the pathological form it took in the Pandemic, precisely the deprivation of freedom, see that Kierkegaard’s concept makes sense.
Heidegger, M. The Origin of the Work of Art. In: Forest paths (Holzwege). Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1998 (in portuguese).
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anguish. Lisbon: Hemus editora, 1968 (in portuguese).
New variant and concern in Europe
29
Nov
The new variant of the covid-19 virus, called omicron by the
WHO, is already present on three continents and the trend is to reach everyone in Brazil, both the director-president of the National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa, Brazil), Antonio Barra Torres, and the director of the Butantan Institute state that it is inevitable that it will arrive in the country.
The variant is the B.1.1.529 strain and was identified for the first time in South Africa on November 9, according to WHO information, where 100 cases of the variant were identified, especially in the populous province of Gauteng, but it has already spread. by Botswana, eSwatini (former Swaziland), Lesotho, Namibia and Zimbabwe, countries that Brazil closed the border.
In Brazil, a passenger on a flight that passed through South Africa tested positive last Saturday 11/27 and disembarked in Guarulhos (SP), the other passengers are also being monitored, it is still not possible to identify whether the contagion was due to the new strain.
What is known for now is that the variant can affect contagion and lethality rates, but the genetic sequencing may still take a few more days to complete, director Tulio de Oliveira of the Center for Epidemic Responses and Innovations at the University of KwaZulu -Natal, stated that this variant is “an unusual constellation of mutations”, while the delta variant had only two mutations, for example, in relation to the original coronavirus strain.
Meanwhile, the number of deaths is growing again in Europe (see graph), the average of deaths reached the highest level since February 2021, when the continent started to recover, for every million inhabitants the rate is 5.2 daily deaths on average from the new coronavirus in the last 7 days.
With the new strain and variants it is necessary to resume care, wait for studies on the strain and the effectiveness of vaccines, Pfizer has already announced that it must have changes to ensure immunity.
We reached 70% of the complete vaccination in Brazil, but with the new strain it is not possible to assert total immunity.
Note: Today (29/11) Australia has suspended the reopening and Japan has closed its borders.
The Civilization Crisis
23
Nov
It is not just an idea of the apocalyptic, the pessimistic and the tragedies, dark spirits who do not really reflect on reality, it is those who think humanism, who look to a polarized, fragile and powerless life in the face of a pandemic (see Europa in the previous post) is the crisis of fragility that does not see itself as fragile.
Arrogants, pseudo-sages, and pseudo-prophets are on call, but even an optimist like Edgar Morin bends over when he sees a system that cannot deal with its fundamental problems, it disintegrates, thus began his recent lecture on the metamorphosis of humanity, he told the event : “he becomes even more barbaric”, but remember that this is not the first and probably not the last metamorphosis of humanity, we were at the origin (he said for over 100,000 years) hunters and gatherers.
There was no army, no state or classes, but little by little some groups wanted to dominate others, this happened in India, China and the Middle East, in the Andes where an Inca Empire was organized and in Mexico (where he gave the lecture).
These societies have metamorphosed for better or worse, he has not made a statement about this, but he thinks that a metamorphosis over our nation-states is possible.
It states that it is necessary to have hope, but hope is not certainty, the hope that in the past was a belief now, but if hope exists it is the necessary leaven for great transformations, and it is understood that this is the moment we are living this reality, in a postmodern or post-postmodern world, there is a transformation.
It remains for us to know which one leads us to destruction, and which one is truly the bearer of hope, it doesn’t give great tips, but let’s do an exercise.
The first great destruction is war, with the arsenal of ultra powerful weapons, even interplanetary, there are several objects around the planet, it is necessary to defend peace with the same force that we defend justice, a war would now be a catastrophe.
The second major destruction is social imbalance, insecurity and the lack of a sustainable plan for the use of natural resources, the large meetings only discuss the issue of pollution and deforestation in some regions of the planet, when they should discuss the planet as a All in all, nature shows signs of exhaustion and a greater imbalance in natural forces, of planetary proportions, is expected.
As Edgar Morin says, it is necessary to have hope, we have already gone through other stages of the civilizing process through similar situations, of course the proportion is now planetary.
Edgar Morin – Do esgotamento à metamorfose dos sistemas – YouTube
Covid alert and Christmas parties
22
Nov
Europe is once again concerned about Covid’s infection rates,
when everything seemed to be moving towards a happy end-of-the-year outcome, the arrival of winter, little vaccination and doubts about vaccines even by health professionals, made the indexes grow again.
Last Thursday, Germany registered a daily record of 50,000 new infections in 24 hours, in Russia 40,000 cases, Eastern European nations: Slovenia, Croatia, Georgia, Slovakia and Lithuania have the highest rates of new cases of the disease, too in France and the United Kingdom the number of cases is growing (picture).
Portugal, which has the highest vaccination rate, close to 90%, will resume preventive measures such as the use of masks, in Austria and the Netherlands there are lockdown measures, the protests against this new restriction measure provoked a confrontation with the police in the weekend.
In an interview given to the BBC, Hans Kluge, WHO regional director said there could be 500,000 new deaths in Europe by March if measures are not taken.
We are in a hot climate, the moving average of cases and deaths in Brazil is decreasing, but the parties and a certain relaxation in preventive measures are worrying, there are no measures in any part of the country concerned with a possible new one, where it seems distant, but remember the 2019 carnival when there were some signs and we didn’t worry, the consequences came in March of that year.
Measures in shopping malls, supermarkets, concerts and sports squares are totally relaxed and we will only know the consequences at the beginning of 2022, even if only preventive, these measures can help prevent a new outbreak that would leave the country even more in despair, what we observe is a concern only with liberation, the election year is approaching and no one wants to take unpopular measures, but health should come first, even in relation to the economy already in crisis.
If we’re going to pay to see it, the cost could be high.
The truth among men
19
Nov
Gadamer establishes the need for co-reference for the construction 
of truth among men, the philosopher Socrates also said that the truth is not with men, but among men, so every self-referential discourse, even that appropriated by a group no longer has a truth growing and becomes just rhetoric.
Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995) developed the aspect of human finitude, as that which gives a provisional totality, in his book Totalidade e Infinito where he discusses the theme of alterity, with a central issue that is not being able to objectify the Other , and it is not about subjectivity, but the possibility of thinking of the Other in its absolute Otherness, in other words, as a totally other.
His book cannot be understood without an analysis focused on Husserl and Heidegger because of its phenomenological option in which it is affiliated, thus developing in this first chapter the category of alternation, while the second will deal with interiority, there appear notions of categories such as: jouissance , economy, home, ownership, work and the feminine is a topic that is so current in the question of gender and reflects the relationship of the Self with the real, enabling the building of a being at the same time separate and open to the outside.
Thus, the third chapter relates to the exteriority that underlies an ethics proposed by Lévinas, how an opening is given or built in Being, through the analysis of the categories of Infinity, Face and Exteriority, they are fundamental for the understanding of the Levinasian universe. .
The problem of human finitude in the aspect of truth can refer to a transcendence different from the idealist proposal, where the imperative category is linked to the concept of subjectivity: “acts in such a way that it is a model for others”, thus it is possible to develop in a personal universe an ethics, while for Lévinas, as it is for Gadamer and it was for Socrates, truth can only exist in a process of dialog with the Other and with the outside, every closure is self-referential.
Thus the “Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely strange, but his face, where his epiphany takes place and which appeals to me, breaks with the world that may be common to us and whose potentialities are inscribed in our nature and which we also develop in our existence” (Lévinas, 2008), here an epiphany that is only human.
We approach the Christmas feasts, in the Christian liturgy it is the feast of the divine epiphany, the divine manifestation to the peoples, for many only the feast of the wise men or the baptism of Jesus, but for those who think that the truth is “among men”, the presence of God with Us (Emmanuel) happens from the birth of the God-child.
In the biblical text (Jn 18: 37), when asked by Pilate if Jesus was the king of the Jews, he replied: “You say: I am king. I was born and came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice”, thus this truth among men is also established for Christian culture as the incarnate word.
Truth and finities´s humans
18
Nov
Not only did Hans Georg Gadamer write about the truth regarding
Human finitude, Emmanuel Lévinas also developed the theme.
In Gadamer, the conclusion about the truth of human experience is the awareness of its finitude, that is, it is knowing your own limits, knowing that you are not lord of time and the future, nowadays that you are not lord of nature and its behavior , the great Enlightenment ideal, and so it has its limits and its plans are insecure.
Thus, in Gadamer, the issue of rhetoric and discourse is not exactly an issue and the question is not really called into question, to be able to question it is necessary to really want to know the truth and it may be outside the limits of the questioner, says in your text:
“To ask, you have to want to know, that is, to know that you don’t know. And in the exchange of questions and answers, of knowing and not knowing, described by Plato as a comedy, one ends up recognizing that for all knowledge and discourse in which one wants to know the content of things, the question takes precedence. A conversation that wants to explain something needs to break these things through with a question” (GADAMER, 2008, p. 474).
Thus, it will be inscribed beyond prejudice, and in the constitution of new horizons, thus understanding the text or a fragment of the past, for Gadamer is to understand it from the issue that should be seen as a process of continuous fusion or broadening of horizons through which the interpreter participates with others in the long and arduous path of meaning, he goes beyond the romantic and historical Enlightenment point of view, which is unacceptable: the symbolic and plural language, characteristic of the narrativity of things.
But what does this mean? what this means for the philosophical hermeneutics that recognizes human finitude, there is no immediate possibility of a coincidence with the real, as every human understanding is linguistically mediated as every language is, in the Aristotelian view, a hermenia (interpreter) originating from the real and this it can be extended to cultures, to peoples, and especially to native peoples, primary sources of discourse and their own language.
As man is finite, only in language can his fundamental dialogical power reach what Western philosophy calls objectivity (proper ideality), but it must go beyond the point of view of the anonymous transcendental subject (idealist subjectivity) to reach the dimension of co. -reference of concrete men, of others.
Concreteness is thus the word that decenters and challenges, places what is said in otherness, and its perspective of tracing a fusion of new horizons does not end.
GADAMER, H.G. Truth and Method I. Fundamental features of a philosophical hermeneutics. 10th ed. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 2008
The truth and the method
17
Nov
Hans Georg Gadamer is the heir to Heidegger’s ontological
hermeneutics, and he developed philosophical hermeneutics through his masterpiece Truth and Method, first published in 1960.
To develop it, it needed to revolutionize modern Western hermeneutics, through the critique of aesthetics, the theory of historical understanding and the development of the ontology of language, to complement the Heideggerian method of the hermeneutic circle.
The publication of Truth and Method still means, today, a new study in the science of interpretation, which enters an important phase called philosophical hermeneutics, which should help human disciplines to seek, from experience, the understanding of their own being, constituting a a new philosophical attempt to assess understanding itself as a process of knowledge of the ontological status of man, thus founding a new anthropology.
As a philosophy of language, we are in the middle of a linguistic turn, it is not just access to the thing and not the truth, as the correspondence between word and thing only occurs when the thing is known, thus learning (teaching, search , question, answer and the information itself) is only done by thinking that leads things to the world of ideas, and thus words are no more than representation of signs to which meaning is attributed. and begins his study by Humboldt.
It was Wilhelm von Humboldt who used the theory of the human “strength of the spirit” as a source of language production, his thesis addresses an “idealist philosophy that highlights the subject’s participation in the apprehension of the world, but also the metaphysics of individuality, developed by the first time by Leibniz” (GADAMER, 2008, p. 568).
As a way of questioning the history developed in an idealistic way, Gadamer, when criticizing Dilthey, starts from preconceptions, where the historian “submits the otherness of the object to the previous concepts themselves” (Gadamer, 2008, 513), and is thus illustrated in his text: “despite all scientific methodology, he behaves in the same way as anyone who, a child of his time, is uncritically dominated by previous concepts and prejudices of his own time” (Idem).
For a new understanding, as a starting point for a new anthropology, interpreting is not a means of reaching understanding, but entering into the very content of what one wants to assign a meaning in a unitary or unilateral way, but that the “Thing of which speaks the text comes to the speech” (GADAMER, 2008, p. 515).
The text at the end questions linguistics itself, which states that each language does this in its own way, but the author emphasizes another focus looking for a unity between thinking and speaking, this infers from the fact that any written tradition can only be understood, despite the great multiplicity of ways of speaking, identifying an existing unity between language and thought, thought and speech, and in this case what is the conceptuality of all understanding? Conceptual interpretation is the way in which the hermeneutic experience is carried out.
As all understanding is an application of language, the interpreter is always in a continuous development of concepts, language remains alive both in speaking and in understanding the entire process of understanding, interpreting and thinking.
GADAMER, H.G. Truth and Method I. Fundamental features of a philosophical hermeneutics. 10th ed. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 2008
