Arquivo para February 10th, 2017
Forgive me Todorov!
10
Feb
I discover only today, who died on February 7 of this year in Paris, Tzvetan 
Todorov, philosopher and literary critic bulgáro, little known, but not less important for our century.
I have as his strongest phrase, one that made him a prophet of the invasion of Islam in Europe, he said long before the emigration crisis: “We can measure our degree of barbarity or civilization by how we perceive and welcome others, the different . ”
An interview he gave in France (Radio France Culture, 2009), helps to see this prophecy of Todorov: “” I wrote my first book of History of Ideas, which is called ‘We and the Others’. It was a work on the plurality of cultures analyzed from the point of view of the French tradition. I studied authors from Montaigne (…) to Levi-Strauss. I have tried to see how these authors treated this difficult question for us today: the unity of humanity and the plurality of cultures. In this series of authors, I discovered that the ones I felt closest to were the humanists. ”
In Brazil, he gave an interview to the Borders of Thought in 2012, in which he stated: “I realized that, as a historian and essayist, I took advantage of literature more than literature studies, and read novels, poetry, and Different histories than literary analyzes or written theses on literature, which seem to me nowadays to be directed almost exclusively to other specialists in literature. While the novel interests everyone, and I feel closer to everyone than the experts. ”
His most famous books are: The conquest of America: the question of the Other, São Paulo, SP: Martins Fontes, 1982 (pdf), The Man Uprooted. São Paulo: Editora Record, 1999, The Fear of the Barbarians: beyond the clash of civilizations. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2010, The Intimate Enemies of Democracy. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012, Life in common: essay on general anthropology. São Paulo: Unesp Publishing House, 2014.
Lesser known books, but no less important: I consider a classic the book Theories of the symbol. São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2014, Symbolism and interpretation. São Paulo: Unesp Publishing, 2014 and Theory of literature: texts of the Russian formalists. São Paulo: Unesp Publishing House, 2013.
He died at age 77, in the city of Paris, was born in march 1st , Sofia, Bulgarian in 1939, though considered within the structuralist chain, without thought transcended it and is one of our important contemporaries to be read.
I share with her the idea that both fascism and Stalinism stem from the idea that we have been giving it powers over citizens, who have difficulty controlling it.
He received in 2008 the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, according to the document for representing “the spirit of unity of Europe, East and West, and commitment to the ideals of freedom, equality, integration and justice.”
Translate into simple things can complicate
10
Feb
Networks are simple, but any analysis using even simple concepts such as 
“weak links,” “bridges,” “centrality,” and “degrees of separation” can, as the number of actors in a network increases, exponentially increase its complexity.
There are many everyday reasonings that lead to this misguided thought, the simple idea that life, its origin in the universe, what we do and what we are, has simple answers leads to a mistaken simplistic reasoning, from the scientific to the religious.
The idea that God exists or not for example is complex, because its three structuring elements are not simple: faith that is belief in what is not evident (not so simple), hope whose element can often arrive at the absurdity that is – the same in situations of despair, war or any extreme gravity; And finally: charity (in the sense of agape love) which is perhaps the most impossible thing to codify, yet easy to feel how much it really is in her presence.
But scientific reasoning is the most complex, from the formulas of reductionists such as Wilhem Ockham, English nominalist of the eleventh century who created the famous Ockham Razor, which if it is between two explanations of a certain object, I get the simplest, but it questions remains: who guarantees that the correct explanation is not the complex one.
Nominalism was fought by the realists, and the fundamental problem is whether or not there are universal, which are realities in themselves, and transcendent in relation to private ones, that is, the qualities (Plato enunciated the formula universais ante rem), or Properties since things are immanent qualities (for Aristotle: university in re).
From Duns Scotus, who called the razor principle of economics (of reasoning?) And later Descartes and Kant, although Kant’s masterpiece was a critique of Descartes: Critique of pure reason, but what lies at the base Of this discourse, is sometimes forgotten, or neglected: subjectivity, the transcendent, and the faith.
Duns Scotus, who is at the origin of this thought, curiously asserts that the truths of faith could not be understood by reason, the contrary that had been said by Thomas Aquinas, which was realistic, and what Kant desires in criticizing “pure reason” is Fact that it can not subsist on its own, needs to “transcend” to the object, creates a subjectivism of its own to which some fundamentalist currents will associate, Kant was a descendant of Puritan Protestants.
His task at the epistemological level was to try to make a synthesis between Descartes and Leibniz’s rationalism and the empiricism of Hume, Locke and Berkeley, but he will be especially useful to nascent liberalism, although this connection is complex, one can simplify it to taste Of simplism: to separate subject and object.
Yes, it is not only this, but Hegel will finish the task of liberal idealism: to construct an eternal idea of State, to organize religion in a way that is convenient to “subjectivism”, removing it from concrete and objective things, and finally to create a “Phenomenology of the Spirit” .
Those who wish to make this understanding a reductionist and simplistic task will read history as those who wished to write it did so, separate the subjective: religious, historical, political, and even religious, from concrete historical consciousness: facts, miseries and corruptions .
The apology of ignorance, the absence of deep thought serve whom? Post-true mentality.
