MANUSCRITO brings new contributions to many topics in philosophy

Marco Ruffino, Editor, University of Campinas-UNICAMP, CNPq, Campinas, SP, Brazil

Manuscrito is an international journal of philosophy publishing articles on a wide range of philosophical topics, especially in the history of philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of the formal sciences, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy and philosophy of mind. The journal does not privilege any particular philosophical approach. Its purpose is to reflect the progress of philosophy as a whole and to increase the exchange of ideas and arguments between different contemporary schools of thought.

In “Epistemic immodesty and embodied rationality”, Rolla presents the dream argument as a moderate skeptical possibility that can be reasonably motivated. He does this based on Pritchard’s distinction (2012, 2016) between favoring and discriminating epistemic grounds, and on how those grounds bear on the elimination of skeptical possibilities. In order to block the dream argument skeptical conclusion, he presents a version of phenomenological disjunctivism based on Noë’s actionist account of perceptual consciousness (2012).

In “From the Begriffsschrift to ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’: Frege as epistemologist and ontologist”, Rosenkrantz argues – against the orthodox Fregean scholarship – that the problems Frege discusses in the Begriffsschrift and in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” are not the same. For him, the problem of the Begriffsschrift is epistemological; that of “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” is ontological.  The two problems and Frege’s solutions to them are explained in the article.

In “Neopythagoreanism in the work of Johannes Kepler”, Cardona argues that the methodology in the Johannes Kepler´s work is guided by two principles of Pythagorean nature, they are: (i) sameness is made known by sameness, and (ii) harmony arises from establishing a limit to what is unlimited. He presents a general outline of those principles and indicates how they are present in Kepler’s investigations. He then examines two particular cases in the light of that schema.

In “The multitemporality of life: An analysis from philosophy of biology”, Rendón, Pallitto and Folguera aim to analyze developmental and evolutionary processes’ temporality in different biological fields of study. To that end, they propose a taxonomy for the analysis of the temporal characteristics of biological processes. They conclude that biological processes’ temporality is extremely complex since not only different fields of study present differing temporal characteristics, but also each kind of biological process shows diverse temporalities.

In “Supervaluar o revisar”, Teijeiro proposes a criterion for comparing solutions to the Sorites paradox. First, she offers a coarse taxonomy of theories of vagueness that classifies them into two big groups: those which consider Sorites to be a logical problem, and those which do not. Then, she proposes a general criterion for comparing theories of the first type. Lastly, she shows how it applies to two particular cases: one version of Supervaluationism and a Revision Theory for vague terms.

In “Suerte, seguridad y el problema de la generalidad”, Paz deals with the problem of epistemic luck. He argues that Prichard’s (2015) defense of the safety condition based on a general notion of luck is not sufficient to characterize safety. He claims that Pritchard´s safety condition is vulnerable to the generality problem for reliabilism and that the notion of luck does not provide conceptual resources to solve it. He proposes a naturalistic solution to the problem based on epistemic considerations.

In “McDowell e as estátuas de Dédalo”, Torres deals with the notion of ‘demonstrative concept’, which was introduced in philosophy by John McDowell in Mind and world. Torres first offers a reconstruction of McDowell’s theoretical innovation, trying to clarify several points related to demonstrative concepts. He then offers a critical discussion of this notion.

Valente and Dal Magro review Danielle Macbeth’s book Realizing reason: A narrative of truth and knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In this book, Macbeth critically presents the development of mathematical practices in the Western world while offering a revaluation of its present stage by means of a reconsideration of Gottlob Frege’s philosophical contributions. In this review, they present a summary of each chapter’s contents and make general considerations about them.

Faggion reviews Harry Frankfurt’s book On inequality (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015). The focus of the book is a major theme in contemporary theories of justice: equality. Frankfurt’s critique of equality, however, is not grounded in libertarian arguments or an ideal of the minimal state. Rather, it aims to clarify a cluster of alleged conceptual confusions about equality as a constitutive moral value.

References

NOË, A. Varieties of perception. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012.

PRITCHARD, D. Epistemological disjunctivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

PRITCHARD, D. Anti-luck epistemology and the Gettier problem”, Philosophical Studies, vol. 172, no. 1, pp. 93-111, 2015.

To read the articles, access

Manuscrito vol.39 no.4 Campinas Oct./Dec. 2016

External link

Manuscrito – MAN: www.scielo.br/man