RCAAP Repository

One of the ethical problems that continues to puzzle philosophers today is why should we act with nobility, generosity or compassion—as opposed to calculation, pettiness or cruelty. In close connection with this question is the further question "what counts as a reason to act?" and concerns about the role of education into the kind of altruistic behavior that seems excluded by the principle of utility often used by policymakers. Proponents of utilitarianism seek to explain how the principle of utility motivates human conduct. John Stuart Mill, in his seminal work, argues that individuals are motivated to act morally through "sanctions", which can be external or internal. Mill's external sanctions include sympathy and the fear of displeasing others. This paper argues that all of them can lead us to act contrary to the principle of utility that he defends — being, therefore, merely contingent motivations. The "sanction" of conscience is, on the contrary, a subjective feeling of duty, even though in the utilitarian framework Mill argues that this internal sanction is inculcated in the subject through education. Moral education essentially consists of the progressive formation of an association between pain (latu sensu) and non-compliance with duty. This association cannot be dissolved by critical analysis, because it is rooted in a desire for fundamental unity present in the human nature. Mill believes that this desire for unity is characteristic of the "modern age" in which he lives and that this desire spreads by "contagion". This text seeks to show that Mill's explanation of this propagation process is not satisfactory and that it can even be said that the author assumes a very optimistic human psychology. Even so, the conception of a "contagious desire" that underlies moral motivation is creative and potentially fruitful, representing a great innovation on the part of Mill; an innovation that has been largely overlooked in academic literature on the problem. We will make an attempt at briefly pointing out some of the consequences of such an abandonment.

Mature Winston Churchill, writing his memoirs on his youthful days reflects on his tardy found desire of academic type knowledge and the wonders and joys he discovered practising philosophy in a Socratic mood, manifesting his view on education, higher and lower. This article also discusses the possible influence of his odd education path on his ability to comprehend political reality in a very different way, allowing him to perceive Hitler’s aims with almost pinpoint accuracy.

Due to the sad times we are living in, I have chosen as a topic for my article "Longing and Saudade", the English and Portuguese words for the nostalgic yearning we feel when we lose a loved one. It is often considered that it conveys a typically Portuguese emotion connected to the period of the Discoveries. However, it is also expressed in literature, painting, sculpture and music, all over the world. Therefore, I have chosen examples in painting from different countries, such as Brazil, United States, India, France, Germany and the United Arab Emirates. I have done the same in the areas of sculpture and funerary art and allude to the importance of the theme in relation between migration and music in Ireland and Greece but giving special relevance to "Fado", that has been considered as a symbol of Portugal. Amália Rodrigues sang it all over the world as Cesária Évora also did with "morna", the Cape Verdean music. In Portuguese Literature people write about "Saudade" since the 15th century (Leal Conselheiro) and there was even a cultural movement called "saudosismo" in the 19th century. From Germany, I mention Goethe and his poem "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" ("Only he who knows yearning") that has been set music around the world.

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The art of the Italian Renaissance represents a return to the classic ideal of mimesis. Based on rigorous and complex models of universal representation, such as perspective, the images had an 'emotional vitality' that did not exist in medieval representations. These artists had a desire to know in depth that would lead, some of them, to dissect the human body, giving rise to the visual culture of medicine. Seeing and showing the inside of the body through the theory of art has decisively revolutionized the ways of thinking and representing body identity. One of the pioneers of this revolution is an artist, Leonardo da Vinci. His anatomical drawings, of great accuracy and graphic beauty, were the first scientific images of the interior of the human body. Devoid of allegories or other modes of expression, usually used by artists in their representation strategies, Leonaardo’s anatomical drawings show the visual reality of the body. Not only the reality of the body as a thing, a corpse, but also the reality of the living body in action, whose dynamics he portrays exemplarily through the drawings of movement sequences, in which anatomy is linked to physiology, an animate anatomy that only later, in the century XVII, would begin to develop. This article reproduces the text and the imges of the conference that the author gave at the colloquium “Leonardo da Vinci’s genius in the 500th anniversary of his death" at the Lisbon Science Academy, on the 4th of June 2019.

A considerable part of my teaching and research at university level has focused on medieval English culture, especially after the Norman conquest (1066); still, borrowing Jane Austen’s opening narratorial words in Emma (1816), "It is a truth universally acknowledged…" that the medieval period is not usually remembered for its scientific sophistication or excellence… This article will seek to reassess that image by looking into a Franciscan friar connected with the rise of experimental science in 13th century Oxford: Roger Bacon (1214?-1292 or 1294).

This article aims to reflect on time, in particular on some of our temporal experiences. Considering the flow that constitutes what we can designate as "objective time", we frame it inter-subjectively through the categories of the past, present and future, but we feel it, live it and understand it subjectively. It is on this last dimension that this article focuses. Based on a reflection by Hannah Arendt on the time of the "thinking ego", we will try to frame the time of our life and the time of the world where we live. Hannah Arendt refers to a non-sequential image of the past and the future, which suggests that all men are situated in an uneasy present, between two forces that correspond to those temporal categories. Effectively, we spend our lives remembering and anticipating, supported respectively by the fear of the future and the security of the past. This existential condition prevents us from being present, that is, from establishing a present for ourselves, which is fundamental to the tranquility required by the exercise of thought. Thus, according to Hannah Arendt, when we think we are inevitably located in the present, and therefore between the past and the future, but we endow it with a specific timelessness that corresponds to the suspension of our activities in the world in order to be able to think. Now, from that privileged position, we can dare to discover other subjective experiences of the time, namely, the bi-directionality inherent in the contrast between the time of our life and the time of the world in which we are allowed to live. These times intersect in the present, but they assume a quite different direction: the world settles in the past, while we are moving towards a future that constantly challenges us.

As our world is becoming a global village, developing the area of Intercultural Studies and Language Learning is one of the best solutions to understand the differences and to deal with inequality in defence of the common good for humanity. Interculturality is a movement that starts with the appreciation of the other cultures thus defending the interaction as coequal with all of them. We know that each culture has a specific value that does not overcome the worth of the other but that they both interlock and complement each other. Interculturality is a journey of dialog, exchange, mutual listening, discovery and sharing that helps us to be open to the world. This intercultural dimension invites us to say "We" instead of "I", and, as we do it, we will search and find what is beneficial for all of us.

Having read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Churchill understood what he calls "the granite pillars" of the Nazi Leader’s policy, thus knowing, step by step, what the Dictator wanted to do, was going to do. This allowed Churchill to start counter acting successfully Hitler’s actions even before being the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Thus Mein Kampf became both Hitler’s and Churchill’s guide, leading them in quite opposite directions.

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This article assumes that the pandemic context has negative consequences in ethical and political terms. Social isolation keeps us more and more away from our peers and the risk of our survival legitimizes a politics centered on exclusively vital concerns. In political terms, this situation can be understood as the culmination of a biopolitics that, according to Foucault, has been installed since the 18th century and, according to Agamben, is fully realized in the contemporary world. His texts on the pandemic are marked by three fundamental characteristics: denialism, criticism of government action and a concern for the future. This article highlights this last characteristic, understanding the enormous risks we face when it is only survival that is at stake. However, it is equally important to understand that the radicalization of biopolitics that we see in the current world, which is a novelty, brings with it the opportunity to think that all crises provide. It is time to ask ourselves about the postpandemic world that we want. It will certainly be a world that is ethically more supportive and in which political participation allows to discuss and exercise freedom and rights in a qualified life that transcends mere survival.

Between the poem "Esperança", written by Torga in 1944 (in Libertação) and the poem "Esperança", from 1986 (in the Diário), forty-two years of poetry elapse. Other poems with the same title and, above all, many more with the same theme punctuate the author's poetics. In Torga’s work (characterized, simultaneously, as a representative of "humanist despair and "creature of hope") - the theme of the hope is contradictory and problematic, but dominant, permeating throughout the author's work. From five poems, all of them entitled "Esperança", and another five dozen compositions that, under another title, develop and problematize the same thematic vein throughout Miguel Torga's literary career – I will seek, in this work, to identify some of the extensions, intersections and implications of a motif that seems to me to configure, in Torga, an elementary poetic nucleus. On the one hand, it will be necessary to point out the direct links between the motive of hope and the imaginary of the death of death, the victory of life, woven in the natural succession of a cyclical temporality, based on the continuity of Nature – on the "permanent surrender of life". On the other hand, it will be observed, associated with this, the intermittent but constant valorization of a Christic imaginary, fed by the figures of the martyr - the poet, the revolutionary, the saint - in one way or another always "risen", upright in his humility, in his effort and in his sacrifice. Finally, we must consider the sober, but permanent, eroticization of life, "this beautiful prostitute" – or the eternal Nature, which is reborn, insolent, in each morning of sap and in the unrestrained hunger to live.

The conceptual multiplicity found in the historiography of Portuguese cinema is, above all, inseparable from the mentalities and the time in which each work is situated. The Social and Human Sciences have, in recent decades, promoted several incursions into Portuguese Cinema and successfully leaning on the theoreticalpractical component. However, knowing how difficult it is to fill cinemas that display Portuguese films the question is raised about the high degree of disengagement and on which side will be the responsibility: of the author or the public? From an interview with filmmakers Luís Ismael and Paulo A. M. Oliveira, directors of a new national "vague", the current text strives to approach this cultural sphere that, still taking with it the world, deserves a national denomination.

At a time when, just over half a century on, the exploration of Mars seems to herald a new "space age", this position paper seeks to share some passing thoughts and brief notes inspired by one of the major scientific, technological and epic events of the 20th century: the landing on the Moon (July 1969).