Class Two: The Activity of Philosophy and The Life of Reason [two readings] (Jan. 17)  How is appealing to reason different from appealing to authority, emotion, and selfinterest?  What are the criteria for determining whether your reasons for doing or believing something are justified (i.e., “good” reasons)?  According to Socrates, “the unexamined life is not worth living”: why?—especially ...

Abstract The article analyzes the relationship in Spinoza's thought between figures of philosopher, people, and crowd. This distinction is anchored his theory knowledge, passions, natural right plays a fundamental role conception political philosophy. Spinoza establishes direct connection these three forms regimes: while democracy human beings who are completely rational (the philosophers) can ...

Rodrigo Gonçalves [email protected] Ricardo Gudwin [email protected] Fernando Gomide [email protected] Electrical and Computer Engineering School (FEEC), State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) CP. 6101 CEP 13083-970, Campinas, SP, Brasil Abstract The discussion about the importance of emotions in the rational behavior of human being is not new. Neither is the discussion...

any extant conceptions of knowledge management systems are constrained by their overly rational, static and acontextual views of knowledge. The notion of a knowledge ecology may facilitate development of synergy between the data and information processing capacity of information technologies and the innovative and creative capacity of human beings. This article will attempt to develop an unders...

This paper examines Amartya Sen’s notion of ‘commitment’ in light of Geoffrey Brennan’s recent discussion thereof. Its aim is to elucidate one type of commitment which consists in following social norms. To this end, I discuss Sen’s ‘apples’ example from his ‘Rational fools’ essay (section 2). In section 3, I draw some implications of commitments in Sen’s work for the concept of ‘agent relativi...

You can think about planet Earth and its natural place for centuries, but to see how it reallymoves, you need to know the solar system, and all the bodies that interact with it. The basic laws of gravity are about ‘social’ push and pull. And what is true of physical bodies, is even more true of our human world, where bodies also have minds. You can think about human beings as isolated informati...