Arquivo para January, 2018
The good between Plato and Aristotle
31
Jan
The reason for this theme from classical antiquity to contemporaneity is the recognition for
various interpretations of everyday practice for the highest theorizing that our thought is still intricate from this idea of good.
Hans-Georg Gadamer in his book “The Idea of Good between Plato and Aristotle” (2009) disassembles from the beginning of the text “ideal and naive comparisons, such as” Plato, the idealist “,” Aristotle, the realist “” ( p.2) and affirms that this is the testimony of partiality “in the field of idealistic consciousness.” (idem).
He demonstrates this with Plato’s interpretation of Plato by Paul Natorp in approaching Plato and Galileo, where he interpreted “the idea” as “the natural law,” and who had been alerted by the break-up of Nicolai Hartmann with this kind of idealism, and (Robin, Taylor, Ross, Hardie, and Hicks) who showed the unity of the philosophy of the Logos with all “the conceptuality of Western thought” (page 3).
He recognizes that the knowledge that enjoys wide recognition is tekhné, while the knowledge that is most important to man: “on the Good it seems of another kind, unlike all known knowledge …” (p. 25), then this type is even more important for our day, as the “banality of evil” of Hanna Arendt or the “fragility of the goodness” of Martha Nussbaum, the theme is back.
How can this be said more directly: corruption, violence, terrorism, hunger and various types of intolerance demonstrate our ignorance even today on the subject.
In dense and complex analysis, Gadamer shows the Western foundation of this theme,
The author points out, from the Republic of Plato, that the idealized world of the State by the authors of Classical Antiquity, thought that this idea of State would harmonize society.
Plato in life observed the corruption of the Greek polis, Gadamer cites his Seventh Letter of the Republic: “unless a reformation of incredible dimensions occurred” (70),
There is the question of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom quoted by Gadamer: “Does Plato intend anything more than to characterize the conflict between theory and politics?” (p. 72), Gadamer’s answer will go (in a complex way) to an collective arete but we think that a true idea of the “common good” still needs to be made explicit with a reform of “incredible dimensions”.
GADAMER, H.G. O bem entre Platão e Aristóteles (The good between Plato and Aristotle). São Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes, 2009
Still about evil
30
Jan
We do not complete our reasoning on evil, two analyzes can still be made, and if we wish to comment
Kant three analyzes: Kant, Paul Ricoeur and Gadamer.
I shall be brief with Kant (1724-1804), although a deeper analysis is required going to Hegel, the central point of his thinking in this question is that evil as to origin is unfathomable, but for him there is the “idealist” clear) of radical evil, and so would be the choice between a good or a bad maxim, from which all others derive.
Paul Ricoeur affirms that Kant explains freedom for evil and evil for freedom, in a tautological reasoning therefore, Ricoeur will look for in source origin, that is, the rescue of the concept of evil must come based on original sources, from them we find the existential origin of evil, and so it is in symbols and myths.
We are interested in putting the technique and technology (study and development of the technique) in question, analyzing the original anthropological steps, so the question that the nomadic groups of 200 thousand years ago of homo sapiens migrate and incursions into new territories in groups is meaningful because it reveals an intension of expansion and “occupation.”
In an embryonic way, this reasoning is also written in Paul Riocuer, the author speaks of the influence in his thinking of Jean Nabert of Spinoza’s lapidary phrase “desire to be and effort to exist”, and that exerted decisive influence in the thought of Ricoeur (RICOEUR, 1995, p.23)
Ricoeur calls his vision of evil as “small ethics” as that which the subject finds himself involved with, is with a mal-being, a bad substance, a bad doing that results from the mistaken use of his freedom, there is still in him a remnant of Manichaeism.
Only then does he go to the symbolic evil (name of his main work on the theme), on a path from the symbolic to the mythological, and from there to the texts, implies the concept of evil linked to culture.
RICOEUR, P. Da Metafísica à Moral (From Metaphysics to Morals). Translate: Sílvia Menezes. Lisbon – Portugal: Piaget Institute, 1995
New discoveries of homo sapiens
29
Jan
In na Israeli cave called Misliya, facial fragments were found with the jaw and several teeth
that can be dated in about 200,000 years, Homo sapiens is older than we thought, and then migrated from Africa
Facial fragments, including the jaw part and several teeth were found at the archaeological site Misliya Cave, located on Mount Carmel , it bone are between 177,000 and 194,000 years old.
Co-author Rolf Quan told the magazine: “It’s an exciting discovery, it provides clear evidence that our ancestors migrated from Africa much sooner than we believed.”
The fossil that was called Misliya-1 has teeth like modern humans, as well as showing characteristics of the human species, and other evidence showed that they hunted large animals and used fire, stone tools and sophisticated blades for the time were also found on site.
Also group immigration through the rivers, suggests techniques of expansion of territory and strengthen the idea of homo sapiens.
Recently other fossils of about 300,000 years have been found in Morocco, and then in Israel, which were already lights on this immigration, and this reinforced the idea that they traced a route along the Nile valley (the need for water) and not by a route through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the coast of Saudi Arabia, then to the lesta of Asia and the Indian subcontinent, said another co-author Israel Hershkobitz of Tel Aviv University.
The fact that they went in small groups and along the rivers shows a strategy of conquest and not of nomadic tribes in exodus, which further strengthens the sapiens hypothesis.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/world-s-oldest-homo-sapiens-fossils-found-morocco
The humans of Mislya were nomadic and migrated throughout the region in search of food and sought caves to shelter.
A New Spirit of seeing things
26
Jan
Separation between mind and spirit is a contemporary construction, as well as the
relationship with objects, technology and other objectivities, such as money, for example, exert on Western thought, especially, certain mistrust.
The objective world that exists outside man must be understood in order to have a good relation with him, modernity says that man must “dominate” it, but nature and objects seem to rebel, not because machines control us, but because its use requires behavior changes and new relationships with society and context.
The existence of evil, which Augustine of Hippo said was the “absence of good,” and he was a Manichaean (the struggle of good and evil), and that for society in crisis is a set of symbolic facts, war, challenges among rival twists, xenophobia and other phobias, is closed in the fact that we live in an “evil” context that needs to be renewed.
One of the first things that must be renewed is thought, says Edgar Morin, but they also say good spiritualities and authors who work on human subjectivity.
A world without feeling is not because of the machines, but of the thought and social relations that surround us that are complicated in the current context.
In Mark 1: 27 we read: “And they were all amazed, and asked one another, What is this? A new teaching given with authority: He commands even the evil spirits, and they obey! ”
The fact that Jesus “healed” was for many at that time a new fact, with a certain amount of “exorcism” because of the fact that many diseases were not known, clarification about many things was obscure, but they did not fail to understand that there was ” a new teaching given with authority, “that is, a new spirit of seeing things
Oscar 2018 and news
25
Jan
I was ready to comment on the Oscar, but to my surprise the movie The Post – The Secret War,
directed by Steven Spielberg appears among the indicas, with Meryl Streep (candidate for best actress) and participation of Tom Hanks, tells the real story about the Vietnam War and the backstage of The Washington Post in 1971, which hits the big screen on Thursday in many national (brazilian) cinemas.
Two other Oscar-nominated premieres have been Artist of the Disaster and Visages, Villages that are also national film premieres and are worth watching.
Other good surprises have been the nominations for the films “Blade Runner 2049” for art direction, photography, special effects, sound editing and sound mixing, as well as director Jordan Peele for “Run!” movie.
It was also surprising actress Mary J. Blige is the first nomination in a year in two categories: best supporting actress and best original song in “Mudbound”
Deceptions 13 nominations for “The Shape of Water” the romantic fantasy directed by Mexican Guillermo del Toro, seems very exaggerated, and the omission of the movie The King of the show, which had several indications to the Golden Globe, won only “This is me “.
Surprisingly “Dunkirk” nominations by British Christopher Nolan (eight nominations), and the independent production “Three Announcements for a Crime” (with seven).
“The Destiny of a Nation,” a political film focused on the figure of Winston Churchill, obtained six nominations, even number from the drama “Ghost Plot”, just but exaggerated.
The fragility of goodness (or kindness)
24
Jan
The fragility of goodness: fortune and ethics in tragedy and Greek philosophy was
published in 1986, its author, Martha Nussbaum, was relatively unknown outside the academic world, but was already respected as a scholar of classical antiquity.
Until the publication of the Brazilian edition (2001, it became known in the Anglo-Saxon world for an involvement in the American political debate, with special emphasis on political philosophy.
A rough summary of the book can be said to say that from the discussion of the Greek tragedy of the fifth century BC and like the philosophers of the fourth century BC, the book addresses the tensions between the role of fortune (in the Greek sense it is more luck that money) in human existence and the aspiration to a morally fulfilled life.
So this discussion lies in the idea that there may be “a gap between being a good person and being able to live a flourishing human life,” so it speaks of a “rebirth”.
One of the strengths of the text is the way in which the meaningful knowledge of the textual corpus of classical antiquity and the philosophical competence of its author combine with the approach, so it is as if we are revisiting Greek philosophy, then “revival” is also philosophical, until certain point questionable because this was the project of rebirth.
Its merit is to read Western philosophy from the Greeks, and not exclusively in the Greeks, where it emphasizes the central role of morality that will reach the present day, the revival is then an adherence of the author to the Aristotelian method of approaching things but it can be said that there are three questions in a kind of “phenomenology” of human ethical life and the role that fortune plays there, and this can be observed in the text:
There are three Aristotelian aspects, the good way: love, friendship, political activity, etc., would be by definition vulnerable to risk, perish and impregnated with uncertainty.
Secondly, things regarded as valuable are plural, they may be incompatible with each other, and ultimately they are irreducible to a higher value, which can generate, at specific moments when they are not subject to human control, con fl icting and compelling requirements.
Thirdly, emotions, desires, and feelings bind us to objects, by definition, particular and contingent, exposing us to the precariousness and constitutive indeterminacy of the later.
It is a good Aristotelian trait, but I consider Gadamer’s analysis to combine the three Aristotelian aspects and the four platonic virtues: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice.
I think it is necessary today.
NUSSBAUM, Martha. (2001) The fragility of goodness: luck and ethics in greek tragedy and philosophy. 2. ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Evil and the Nature of Good
23
Jan
Augustine of Hippo was a wandering Manichean, with a bohemian life and full
of loves, he had a son, his mother Monica a fervent Christian asked for the conversion of the son, but Augustine judged the ignorant Christians too elaborate until he met Ambrose , who was the bishop of Hippo, who was an intellectual and had been mayor of Liguria and Emilia, who had the Mediolan capital, today Milan, later the people made him a bishop.
In the contact with Ambrose, Augustine becomes Christian and writes in this period The nature of the Good, where he contests the conception of Mani with respect to evil, and then the duality of principles that was based on the cosmological system of the manichean sect, is replaced by an ontology.
Augustine then worries about affirming that all nature is a good, since it proceeds from God and that evil, is not among created beings, but is constructed when not doing good.
Augustine knew Faust who was one of the great sages of the Manichean sect, but discovered that his knowledge was limited and restricted to Grammar, Cicero and something of Seneca.
In a more elaborate way, Augustine’s complete theory states that there is a corruption of the mode (modus), species (order), and order (ordo), which are ontological attributes of beings, and therefore there is no ontological evil, its philosophical-theological implications.
Augustine’s thinking on matter is not the dualism between spirit and matter, he says:
“He did not know that God is spirit and has no members endowed with length and breadth, nor is matter because matter is less in its part than in its whole. Even if matter were infinite, it would be smaller in some of its parts, limited by a certain space, than in its infinity! “(AGOSTINHO, 2006).
But what if evil happens how to react to it? Augustine clarifies this, in order to judge man with justice, conferring punishment or punishment upon him, the very social perception of evil, according to the actions or intentions of the practitioner, affirms: “[…] it is not unjust to give oneself to the perverse the power to harm one another, that the patience of the good may be proved, and the iniquity of the wicked be punished. ” 21 of his work “The nature of the good”.
Two contemporary works deal with these dilemmas: “The Fragility of Goodness,” by Martha Nussbaum and Paul Ricoeur’s “Symbolic of Evil,” evil is a philosophical question posed, not is therefore the Manichean question.
AUGUSTINE, Saint. Confessions. New York: Image Books, 1960 (Notes in Brazilian edition by Vozes Editor).
CES 2018 and the news
22
Jan
This international electronics fair in Las Vegas was held earlier this month between
January 8 and 12, showing several technology launches, ranging from TVs to state-of-the-art handsets, but the area of business and chips is promising further progress.
Following the security flurry of Intel chips, now associated with AMD, the company unveiled details of a new processor called Intel Core 8th. Generation, special with models to process Radeon RX graphics See M, being able to work with heavy loads of graphics and virtual reality.
Intel and AMD have revealed more details of the new processor they are working on together. Called “8th-generation Intel Core with Radeon RX Vega M graphics,” the chip will be targeted at PCs and laptops, focusing on graphics-heavy workloads such as Virtual Reality (VR).
Another highly commented issue at CES 2018 was Amazon’s digital assistant, Alexa (photo), which can already be used in cars, smartphones and also in offices, is likely to be incorporated into laptops and PCs soon.
Variations in laptops include thinning, the new version of Dell, the XPS 13 weighs 1.21 kg and is less than 12 mm thick, with a 4k almost borderless screen (called an infinity edge) and with a touch-sensitive version ( touch screen).
The ThinkPad X1 tablet from LeNovo was another novelty, a 12-inch display with a resolution called 3k (2160 x 1440), the battery also grew in power, which gives 10 hours of use, but with this it became heavier with 1.26 k (that is, not so much).
No hybrids appeared attacking people or androids controlling mankind (of course it is to remind some who have too much fantasy on the subject).
Theory, life and follow-up
19
Jan
Among the infernal dichotomies of modernity, certainly little remembered, but
always present is the rupture between theory and practice, empiricists defend the (practical) experience and idealists, the “pure” ideals, not by chance tried to complete themselves in modernity.
Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote in Praise of Theory that if we consider that “all men yearn by nature to know, and that the highest happiness of man resides in” pure theory, “and that its most intimate foundation is] a theoretical being, “if man draws to know he must elaborate what he thinks about things, even if they are grounded in practical relations, it is a theory, a theoretical “construct “.
We post on inventions, sameness and routine spirit, but perhaps the most pernicious in the life of man (which is very practical) is the difficulty of changing directions, habits, routine and mainly of thought, make a rupture, a conversion and then follow.
In history, whenever there was a change in thinking, some break occurred, Spinoza left Judaism and then Christianity when constructing his “theory”, Heidegger went to live in the middle of the black forest, in short, one must “change the route” to change the thinking .
In the bible the disciples of Jesus Simon and Andrew who caught fish, when they met the master, left their nets and went out to walk with him, and the master told them (Mark 1:17): “Jesus said to them,” Follow me and I will make you fishers of men, “and followed him.
But before Andrew and John, who were disciples of John the Baptist (for this he is in the previous text of Mark 1:14), they had gone to tell Peter that they had found the Messiah.
always present is the rupture between theory and practice, empiricists defend the (practical) experience and idealists, the “pure” ideals, not by chance tried to complete themselves in modernity.Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote in Praise of Theory that if we consider that “all men yearn by nature to know, and that the highest happiness of man resides in” pure theory, “and that its most intimate foundation is] a theoretical being, “if man draws to know he must elaborate what he thinks about things, even if they are grounded in practical relations, it is a theory, a theoretical “construct “.
We post on inventions, sameness and routine spirit, but perhaps the most pernicious in the life of man (which is very practical) is the difficulty of changing directions, habits, routine and mainly of thought, make a rupture, a conversion and then follow.
In history, whenever there was a change in thinking, some break occurred, Spinoza left Judaism and then Christianity when constructing his “theory”, Heidegger went to live in the middle of the black forest, in short, one must “change the route” to change the thinking .
In the bible the disciples of Jesus Simon and Andrew who caught fish, when they met the master, left their nets and went out to walk with him, and the master told them (Mark 1:17): “Jesus said to them,” Follow me and I will make you fishers of men, “and followed him.
But before Andrew and John, who were disciples of John the Baptist (for this he is in the previous text of Mark 1:14), they had gone to tell Peter that they had found the Messiah.
(Português) Mesmice e outridade
18
Jan
Mesmice e outridade
Para desenvolvermos a ideia de outridade recorremos ao que Edgar Morin (2010, p. 192) chama de memento ou de modo mais simplista “lembrete” que é a maneira de trabalhar conceitos sem defini-los, que significa dar fim e não admitir a dinâmica de conceitos:
“O método da complexidade pede para pensarmos nos conceitos sem nunca dá-los por concluídos, para quebrarmos as esferas fechadas, para restabelecermos as articulações entre o que foi separado, para tentarmos compreender a multidimensionalidade, para pensarmos na singularidade com a localidade, com a temporalidade, para nunca esquecermos as totalidades integradoras.”
Mas ao fazer uma busca na web descobri que o termo já existe, definido por Landowski mais ou menos assim: “calculadas, homólogas ao afastamento que seus públicos mantêm. Frente ao Outro é preciso resguardar-se, diz o enunciador mapeador, qualificando-o de exótico, ao exibi-lo para o display, mas, em outros casos, é preciso ocultá-lo do holofote, deixá-lo nas margens; assim, ele pode ser assimilado, admitido ou segregado; em certos casos, será necessário inscrevê-lo como inimigo, excluindo-o.»
Embora seja confundido com alteridade (é até apresentado como sinônimo), dois aspectos do conceito (usando Morin, sempre inacabado) a ideia de exíbi-lo num display, tipica do mundo digital, e ainda a ideia de escondê-lo dos holofotes, que significa não proclamá-lo de modo bombastico ou dogmático.
O termo foi criado por especialistas franceses, a partir das propostas do investigador francês Eric Landowski (do Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – CNRS).
A mesmice já sabemos, repetições de conceitos e ideias que com o passar dos anos ficam descontextualizadas e portanto perdem a essencia de seu significado, mesmo que ditas de forma aparentemente criativa, são meras invencionices destituídas de realidade e vida.
Assim tornam-se vazias e dogmáticas, pouco a pouco perde-se o interesse por elas.
MORIN, E. Ciência com consciência. Trad. Maria D. Alexandre e Maria Alice Sampaio dória, 14ª. Ed., Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 2010.
