LÓGICA INFORMAL - INFORMAL LOGIC

Entrada na STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY. Siga os links.

1. History 

2. What is argument/ation? 

3. An Example: Visual Argument 

4. NLD and Beyond 

5. Fallacy Theory 

6. An Example: Ad Hominem 

7. Rhetoric 

8. Dialectics 

9. Dialogue Theory 

10. The Components of Informal Logic 

11. New Horizons 

12. Informal Logic and Philosophy

Bibliography

- Groarke, Leo, "Informal Logic", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (1737–1809)

Herdeiro da tradição de Hume, Espinosa, Voltaire e do deísmo inglês do início do século XVIII, Paine apresenta a sua DEFESA DO DEÍSMO numa linguagem simples, acessível e irreverente que retirou o "deism out of the hands of the aristocracy and intellectuals and [brought] it to the people."

Excerts from THE AGE OF REASON (Follow the LINK):

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy."

PHILOSOPHY: WHAT FOR?

"Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed - to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible."John Campbell, Philosophers

 "The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of ‘philosophical propositions’, but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

"What is the aim of philosophy? To be clear-headed rather than confused;lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence." G.J. Warnock, Philosophers

"Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect." Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

O Primeiro Alcibíades - Platão

De todos os textos platónicos de autenticidade discutível, o presente encerra o maior mérito dialéctico e filosófico. Difere de outras composições platónicas: o objectivo é mais directamente ético e exortativo. 

Tema: Doutrina socrática do auto-conhecimento.

Faça o download AQUI.(tradução inglesa)

"- Alcibiades : Perhaps, Socrates, you are not aware that I was just going to ask you the very same question: What do you want? And what is your motive in annoying me, and always, wherever I am, making a point of coming?  I do really wonder what you mean, and should greatly like to know.

- Socrates : Then if, as you say, you desire to know, I suppose that you will be willing to hear, and I may consider myself to be speaking to an auditor who will remain, and will not run away?"

FELICIDADE - A PROPOSTA EPICURISTA (Vídeo)

Episódio da série televisiva do Channel 4  Philosophy: A Guide To Happiness.

Alain de Botton, autor de The Consolations of Philosophy, cuja estrutura, abordagem temática e simplicidade inspiram a série, apresenta

 

 

Autenticidade e inautenticidade existencial

A dificuldade de responder à exigência de "ser eu próprio" e sua relevância no projecto vital de cada homem fazem da busca da existência autêntica um dos temas abordados com mais frequência nas consultas de Aconselhamento Filosófico.

“A noção de inautenticidade tem grande relevo nos filósofos da existência. Já o advertimos. Heidegger considera uma inevitável estrutura humana a ‘queda na inautenticidade’: é a situação do homem que vive exclusivamente do ‘se’ (diz-se, faz-se, etc.), actuando sem assumir pessoal e originalmente o seu projecto vital, mas deixando-se simplesmente arrastar pelos condicionalismos vitais e sociais. É óbvio que essa existência perde assim grande parte do seu valor. E é também então quase óbvio formular que deve tratar de reencontrar a sua autenticidade.

Provavelmente, o conceito provém da moderna Psicologia profunda. (…) Lersh define autenticidade e inautenticidade como os dois modos (positivo ou negativo) de integração ‘vertical’ do fundo endotímico com o eu superior. Consequentemente, a vontade pode ser dita autêntica, quando a sua decisão ‘chega ao fundo’, quer dizer, arrebata consigo o fundo endotímico, integrando-o. O mesmo poderemos dizer do pensamento, enquanto ‘convicção’. São causas de inautenticidade as pressões da convivência social; assim como uma tendência à notoriedade, especialmente vigente em certos indivíduos. Em geral, a conduta psicologicamente inautêntica acusa pobreza de fundo. A solução está na busca da integração, que deverá começar pela aceitação da própria realidade tal como ela é.

(…) Radicalizando estas reflexões até torná-las ‘existenciais’, encontramos como definição de autenticidade a fidelidade ao próprio projecto vital. Isto supõe um duplo elemento: primeiro, a não abdicação da própria originalidade pela qual o projecto é projecto: o que verdadeiramente vive no homem, o seu enfrentar da realidade ‘desde si mesmo’, ao contrário do animal, que vive simplesmente entregue aos estímulos, respondendo-lhes segundo as leis específicas e as peculiaridades da circunstância externa.

Em segundo lugar, a autenticidade existencial supõe que o projecto vital que cada homem é está, de algum modo, dado no mesmo homem previamente à sua decisão. Uma decisão forçada contra o próprio fundo do homem, fá-lo inevitavelmente inautêntico. O homem tem que conformar-se consigo próprio. Heidegger, no final de algumas das suas análises em Ser e Tempo recorda o ‘sê tu próprio’, pronunciado tantas vezes pela diversas escolas morais."

José Gomez Cafarena, Metafísica Fundamental

Ortega y Gasset - a vida como problema a ser resolvido

"A vida é-nos dada, ou, melhor dito, é-nos atirada, ou somos atirados a ela; mas isso que nos é dado, a vida, é um problema que nós precisamos de resolver. E é assim não só nesses casos de especial dificuldade que qualificamos, peculiarmente, de conflitos e aflições, mas é-o sempre."

Ortega y Gasset, O Que é a Filosofia?, Lisboa, Edições Cotovia, p.168.

LA CONSULTATION PHILOSOPHIQUE: LES DIFFICULTÉS

ÍNDICE - Les frustrations - La parole comme prétexte - Douleur et péridurale - Universel et singulier - Accepter la pathologie Leia o artigo de OSCAR BRENIFIER AQUI.(Consultation Philosophique) "(...)Un des aspects de notre pratique qui pose problème au sujet, est le rapport à la parole que nous tentons d'installer. En effet, d'une part nous lui demandons de sacraliser la parole, puisque nous nous permettons de peser attentivement, ensemble, le moindre terme utilisé, puisque nous nous autorisons à creuser de l'intérieur, ensemble, les expressions utilisées et les arguments avancés, au point de les rendre parfois méconnaissables pour leur auteur, ce qui l'amènera de temps à autre à crier au scandale en voyant sa parole ainsi manipulée. Et d'autre part nous lui demandons de désacraliser la parole, puisque l'ensemble de cet exercice n'est composé que de mots et que peu importe la sincérité ou la vérité de ce qu'il avance: il s'agit simplement de jouer avec les idées, sans pour autant adhérer nécessairement à ce qui est dit. Seule nous intéressent la cohérence, les échos que se renvoient les paroles entre elles, la silhouette mentale qui se dégage lentement et imperceptiblement. Nous demandons simultanément au sujet de jouer à un simple jeu, ce qui implique une distanciation par rapport à ce qui est conçu comme le réel, et en même temps nous lui demandons de jouer aux mots avec le plus grand sérieux, avec la plus grande application, avec plus d'effort qu'il ne met généralement à construire son discours et à l'analyser.(...)"

Emotions as Engagements with the World

Why talk about emotional intelligence? The term itself, which was introduced to the American public by Daniel Goleman in a popular book some years ago, is important primarily for its shock value: emotional intelligence sounds like a contradiction in terms. Traditionally, we have viewed emotions, or what used to be called “passions,” as one distinct side of human nature. Reason, rationality, and intelligence, meanwhile, stand distinct and apart on the other side. Yet those of us who have studied emotions as part of the human experience long ago recognized the intelligence of emotions, so eliminating that false dichotomy and to show the interdependence of philosophy and psychology. 

Philosophers talk about ethics and the good life, whereas psychologists do rock-bottom science. Yet philosophy has always needed to appeal to empirical psychology, just as empirical psychology has always needed to refer to philosophy. One without the other is incomplete. 

A battle continues over the nature of emotion—whether it is primarily a physical feeling or some kind of intelligent engagement with the world. I make the existentialist case that our emotions are not dumb feelings or physiological reactions but sometimes intelligent, if often short-sighted, strategies for coping with the world.

Adaptado de Robert C. Solomon.

Henry David Thoreau - Life beyond Logic and The Ethics of Perception

If one were asked to name the cardinal virtue of Thoreau's philosophy, it would be hard to identify a better candidate than awareness. He attests to the importance of “being forever on the alert,” and of “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” (Walden, IV). This exercise may enable one to create remarkably minute descriptions of a sunset, a battle between red and black ants, or the shapes taken by thawing clay on a sand bank: but its primary value lies in the way it affects the quality of our experience. “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” (Walden, II). Awareness cannot be classified as exclusively a moral or an intellectual virtue, either, since knowing is an inescapably practical and evaluative activity. Thoreau has been interpreted as offering an original response to the major problem of modern philosophy, since he recognizes that knowledge is “dependent on the individual's ability to see,” and that “the world as known is thus radically dependent on character” (Tauber 2001, 4–5).  One of the common tenets of ancient philosophy which was abandoned in the period beginning with Descartes is that a person “could not have access to the truth” without undertaking a process of self-purification that would render him “susceptible to knowing the truth” (Foucault 1997, 278–279). For Thoreau, it was the work of a lifetime to cultivate one's receptivity to the beauty of the universe. Believing that “the perception of beauty is a moral test” (Journal, 6/21/52), Thoreau frequently chastises himself or humanity in general for failing in this respect. “How much of beauty—of color, as well as form—on which our eyes daily rest goes unperceived by us,” he laments (Journal, 8/1/60); and he worries that “Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her” (Walden, IX). Noticing that his sensory awareness has grown less acute since the time of his youth, he speculates that “the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains” (Journal, 7/16/51 & 2/5/52). In order to attain a clear and truthful view of things, we must refine all the perceptual faculties of our embodied consciousness, and become emotionally attuned to all the concrete features of the place in which we are located. We fully know only those facts that are “warm, moist, incarnated,” and palpably felt: “A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it” (Journal, 2/23/60).  Since our ability to appreciate the significance of phenomena is so easily dulled, it requires a certain discipline in order to become and remain a reliable knower of the world. Like Aristotle, Thoreau believes that the perception of truth “produces a pleasurable sensation”; and he adds that a “healthy and refined nature would always derive pleasure from the landscape” (Journal, 9/24/54 & 6/27/52). Nature will reward the most careful attention paid by a person who is appropriately disposed, but there is only “as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. The actual objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the persons are different” (Journal, 11/4/58). One who is in the right state to be capable of giving a “poetic and lively description” of things will find himself “in a living and beautiful world” (Journal, 10/13/60 & 12/31/59). Beauty, like color, does not lie only in the eye of the beholder: flowers, for example, are indeed beautiful and brightly colored. Nevertheless, beauty—and color, for that matter—can exist only where there is a beholder to perceive it (Journal, 6/15/52 & 1/21/38). From his experience in the field making observations of natural phenomena, Thoreau gained the insight “that he, the supposedly neutral observer, was always and unavoidably in the center of the observation” (McGregor 1997, 113). Because all perception of objects has a subjective aspect, the world can be defined as a sphere centered around each conscious perceiver: wherever we are located, “the universe is built around us, and we are central still” (Journal, 8/24/41). This does not mean that we are trapped inside of our own consciousness; rather, the point is that it is only through the lens of our own subjectivity that we have access to the external world.  What we are able to perceive, then, depends not only upon where we are physically situated: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we value, or how our attention is focused. “Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them…. A man sees only what concerns him” (“Autumnal Tints”). In other words, there is “no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective” (Journal, 5/6/54). Subjectivity is not an obstacle to truth, according to Thoreau. After all, he says, “the truest description, and that by which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires” (Journal, 10/13/60). A true account of the world must do justice to all the familiar properties of objects that the human mind is capable of perceiving. Whether this could be done by a scientific description is a vexing question for Thoreau, and one about which he shows considerable ambivalence. One of his concerns is that the scientist “discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit”; by contrast, there is “more humanity” in “the unscientific man's knowledge,” since the latter can explain how certain facts pertain to life (Journal, 9/5/51, 2/13/52). He accuses the naturalist of failing to understand color, much less beauty, and asks: “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?” (Journal, 10/5/61 & 12/25/51)  Thoreau sometimes characterizes science as an ideal discipline that will enrich our knowledge and experience: “The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience” (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Yet he also gives voice to the fear that by weighing and measuring things and collecting quantitative data he may actually be narrowing his vision. The scientist “studies nature as a dead language,” and would rather study a dead fish preserved in a jar than a living one in its native element (Journal, 5/10/53 & 11/30/58). In these same journal entries, Thoreau claims that he seeks to experience the significance of nature, and that “the beauty of the fish” is what is most worthy of being measured. On the other hand, when he finds a dead fish in the water, he brings it home to weigh and measure, covering several pages with his statistical findings (Journal, 8/20/54). This is only one of many examples of Thoreau's fascination with data-gathering, and yet he repeatedly questions its value, as if he does not know what to make of his own penchant for naturalistic research. At the very least, scientific investigations run the risk of being “trivial and petty,” so perhaps what one should do is “learn science and then forget it” (Journal, 1/21/53 & 4/22/52). But Thoreau is more deeply troubled by the possibility that “science is inhuman,” since objects “seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant,” and this is “not the means of acquiring true knowledge” (Journal, 5/1/59 & 5/28/54). Overall, his position is not that a mystical or imaginative awareness of the world is incompatible with knowledge of measurable facts, but that an exclusive focus on the latter would blind us to whatever aspects of reality fall outside the scope of our measurement.  One thing we can learn from all of Thoreau's comments on scientific inquiry is that he cares very much about the following question: what can we know about the world, and how are we able to know it? Although he admires the precision of scientific information, he wonders if what it delivers is always bound to be “something less than the vague poetic” (Journal, 1/5/50). In principle, a naturalistic approach to reality should be able to capture its beauty and significance; in practice, however, it may be “impossible for the same person to see things from the poet's point of view and that of the man of science” (Journal, 2/18/52). In that case, the best we can do is try to convey our intimations of the truth about the universe, and be willing to err on the side of obscurity and excess: “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in his waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression… . The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures” (Walden, XVIII). We should not arbitrarily limit our awareness to that which can be described with mathematical exactitude: perhaps the highest knowledge available to us, Thoreau suggests, consists in “a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before … it is the lighting up of the mist by the sun” (“Walking”). And perhaps this is not a regrettable fact: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (Walden, XVII). By acknowledging the limits of what we can know with certainty, we open ourselves up to a wider horizon of experience.  As one commentator points out, Thoreau's categories are more dynamic than Kant's, since they are constantly being redefined by what we perceive, even as they shape our way of seeing (Peck 1990, 84–85). Every now and then “something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of,” Thoreau says, which demonstrates that the “boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations” (Journal, 5/31/53). Since the thoughts of each knowing subject are “part of the meaning of the world,” it is legitimate to ask: “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees” (11/4/52 & 12/2/46). Truth is radically perspective-dependent, which means that insofar as we are different people we can only be expected to perceive different worlds (Walls 1995, 213). Thoreau's position might be described as perspectival realism, since he does not conclude that truth is relative but celebrates the diversity of the multifaceted reality that each of us knows in his own distinctive way. “How novel and original must be each new man's view of the universe!” he exclaims; “How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact,” for it suggests to us “what worlds remain to be unveiled” (Journal, 4/2/52 & 4/19/52). We may never comprehend the intimate relation between a significant fact and the perceiver who appreciates it, but we should trust that it is not in vain to view nature with “humane affections” (Journal, 2/20/57 & 6/30/52). With respect to any given phenomenon, the “point of interest” that concerns us lies neither in the coolly independent object nor in the subject alone, but somewhere in between (Journal, 11/5/57). Witnessing the rise of positivism and its ideal of complete objectivity, Thoreau attempts “to preserve an enchanted world and to place the passionate observer in the center of his or her universe” (Tauber 2001, 20). It is a noble goal, and one that remains quite relevant in the philosophical climate of the present day.

Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Edição portuguesa de WALDEN.