ACAFIC

STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
SAMUEL THOMAS KUHN.

Kuhn notes that most historians of science illustrates or supports the idea that science progresses by linear accumulation of findings and individual intentions. For the author of this essay, this continuous view of scientific development can only be applied to what he calls "normal science".

During long periods in which science is normal, the whole scientific community (researchers, but also teachers and students) body shape around a "disciplinary matrix" or paradigm that inspires. Erected to the status of dogma, these paradigms, such as the theory of motion of Aristotle or the corpuscular conception of light, guiding research and determine the areas in which its results will be interpreted. If there is an "anomaly", all strive to reduce it, so it can conform to "the box pre-trained and supplied by inflexible paradigm." Thus, normal science, contrary to what Popper says in The logic of scientific discovery, almost does not proceed by conjectures and refutations, but by the mul Acú of theories aimed at ratifying the foundations of the paradigm of the moment.

However, certain anomalies "resist" the efforts of assimilation of scientists. The paradigm then enter into force in crisis, science becomes extraordinary, and their agents are obliged to reject it for after a period of relative confusion, replace it with a new paradigm able to explain satisfactorily the phenomena judged " abnormal "under the previous system.

It is during these revolutions (passes from one paradigm to another) that science really progresses. For the abandonment of an old paradigm by the scientific community leads to a radical revision of its principles, methods and criteria to judge: "What before the revolution was a duck for the scientist, then it becomes a rabbit," Kuhn writes with undeniable sense of synthesis. Apart from scientific theories, it is our own world view that goes through changes when a paradigm is abandoned in favor of another.

Brazilian Edition: The structure of scientific revolutions the c, São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1996.

Study: Stengers, "La description of Kuhn et son application à la biologie contemporaine", in Annales de l'Institut de philosophie, Bruxelles, 1973.
Previously published February 27, 2010

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TRUTH AND METHOD, The outline of a philosophical hermeneutics,

Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 1960.

Hans Georg Gadamer, born in 1900.

Gadamer here addresses the problem of truth in the non-scientific. While modern thought, according scientistic orientation, states that the guarantee of truth based solely on scientific method, the author wants to show that this experiment can be performed from the art e. But the aesthetic consciousness should not be separated from the historical consciousness.

The analysis of the experience of truth revealed through art to discover a model that has value to all historical experience. The discovery of a work of art and a fact of history that belongs to history. This is what Gadamer expresses the notion of "consciousness of historical determination." This interpretation is the language that allows you to give life to works of the past. This is because the language is not simply an instrument of thought. An irreplaceable part of man's experience.

Study: P. Fruchon, "Comprehension et vérité dans les sciences of I'esprit", in Archives philosophiques, 1966, pp. 281-302.

RAYMOND KARL POPPER
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Conjectures and refutations,
Conjectures and Refutations, 1963.
Karl Raimund Popper was born in 1902.

Science progresses through trial and error, by conjectures and refutations - such is the central thesis of this book, which, as an extension of the logic of scientific research, communications and brings together essays on the history of philosophy, history of physical sciences, but also on politics and history. According to the criterion adopted by Popper falsifiability to distinguish science from pseudoscience, a theory is scientific only if the risk of being invalidated by an experimental test. Therefore, no theory, not even the most firmly established in the scientific community is safe from any further rebuttal.

It is therefore necessary to consider provisional, hypothetical or conjectural all laws or scientific theories, new theories are needed only as approximations better than the previous.

Against dogmatic attitude, which tries to check the laws in order to confirm them, Popper advocates a critical rationalism, unlike search refute them by subjecting them tirelessly proof testing. Thus the error - instead of being a failure or a failure of knowledge, as Bacon and Descartes believed - is a key step in the development of knowledge. There is more rational - writes Popper - than "boldly proposing theories, make every effort to show that they are wrong and doing our duty always guarantee that our attempts to criticism does not give results."

Brazilian Edition: Conjectures and refutations, Brasília, UnB, 1982.

Study: A. Verdan, Karl Popper or La connaissance sans certitude, Presses Polytechnique Romande, 1991.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER
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THINK THAT MEANS?,
Was heisst Denken?, 1954.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, l889-1976.

This book reproduces the text of two courses given in 1951-1952. Through reflection on the translation (Übersetzen), Heidegger argues the urgent need to relearn how to think, a time when science and technology killed the thought.

The transition from one language to another, allowed for the translation, there is a passage common way is to Being of beings. Therefore, it is from the Being of beings who learn to think of translation as well as everything there is to think. It is necessary to translate the words to be able to understand them and, conversely, we must understand them to be able to translate them. For what the words say is only told in their own language.

Every thought, for Heidegger, is necessarily translation. So the original question: "What is thinking?" Becomes "What is That which urges us to think?" What is at stake from there is the dignity of the question of Being of beings. As these last two words today are nothing but "empty words", the author should go back to the origins of Western thought to bring the thought to the mythical status that came out.

Study: M. Haar (under the direction of) Martin Heidegger, Cahiers de L'Herne, paragraph 45, L'Herne, 1983.
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EMMANUEL KANT
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WHAT IT MEANS TO GUIDE THE THINKING?
Was heisst: sich im Denken orientieren?, 1786.
EMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1804.

This booklet dedicated to defending freedom of thought remains the same positions "Dialectic" of the first Critique and the essay devoted to the Enlightenment (What is Enlightenment?, 1784). Since "thinking for yourself is get rid of the" barriers of a state of permanent guardianship, "the reference to thinking needs to be guided. And the reason being a "need to think", ie an ability to start, there must be guided second external rules, but according to subjective principles. They are advertising: the exercise of reason is free in the sense that advertising is aimed at as the second maximum of common sense: we must be able to think in place of each one.

In 1786 Kant intervened in the controversy that pitted the Mendelssohn Jacobi in defending the Aufklärung, this brief text was important for the recognition of Kant by the German public.

Study: A. Philonenko, L'oeuvre of Kant: la philosophie critique, 2 vols., Vrin, 1988-1989.

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Psychology of Intelligence,

La psychologie de L 'intelligence, 1947.

Jean Piaget, 1896-1980.

This book, which incorporates the content of a course given at the Collège de France in 1942, is the executive summary of the research of Piaget psychogenetic over intelligence.

Defined in broader sense as the ability to build structures movable and reversible, for the author intelligence is just a generic term for the various "clusters" of logical operations that man is capable of performing, the mere perception of an object (which is already built) to the prorated, through the sorting, matching, substitution, etc. abstraction.

Piaget states, as opposed to the German school of "psychology of thinking" (Denkpsychologie), that logic is "the mirror of pensamneto" and not the reverse.

Thus, intelligence is conceived as an equilibrium state of thought to which man arrives at the end of a long evolution in which various steps the author takes care to draw. Intelligence pre-verbal thinking oratory, there are changes increasingly complex and far between the subject and the objects seized by him.

If the rhythm characteristic of instinctive or reflexive behaviors (eating, drinking, playing himself) and intuitive thought and sensorimotor intelligence are marked by regulation, is the group that defines intelligence operative "form" for the final equilibrium which tend all cognitive processes.

Brazilian Edition: Psychology of Intelligence, Rio de Janeiro, Fundo de Cultura, 1967.

Study: J.-J. Ducret, Jean Piaget, biographie et parcours intellectuel, Delachaux et Niestlé, 1990.

Summary of philosophical work:

Eye and Mind

L'oeil et l'esprit, 1964.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1908-1961.

As Paul Klee, the painter is a "philosopher without knowing it, because painting is a reflection devoid of ideas: the closest sense of why spontaneous

of being in the world, it is "a presentation without a concept of universal being."

Merleau-Ponty sees in the gesture of the painter the expression of a new relationship to be the manifestation of this "secret and feverish genesis of things in our body."

The work is therefore a visible thing to see themselves, or the vision to make it visible: it is reflection. The painting is not, therefore, a copy of something that pre-exists with it, since Being is not nothing but chipping, it is what they express themselves through the "voices of silence", the logos of the world that is dumb " the spark of the sentient-sensitive. "

According to Sartre, this text "says it all since we are able to decipher it." Complex work, therefore, that anticipates and recalls, rather than explicit, future issues of The Visible and Invisible (unfinished work, Merleau-Ponty sought to lay the foundations of an ontology of the visible).

Study: X. Tilliette, Merleau-Ponty, Seghers, 1970.

Review

Illness As Metaphor by Susan Sontag (1933-2004), Rio de Janeiro: Edições Graal, 1984

In this book, Sontag shows how the representations of two major diseases of modern societies (cancer and tuberculosis) are produced by the fictional literature, medical discourse, psychiatric and military end up creating and reinforcing false beliefs about the illness processes, involving them, above all, a process fatal outcome, the vestibule of death.

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