Nosso texto propõe uma tentativa de melhor compreensão do sentido da noção de degeneração (Degeneration, Ausartung) em Schopenhauer, em contraste com o pensamento de Kant (Ausartung) referente aos temas da variação e da degeneração de um ponto de vista racial, evidenciando que os filósofos exibem contrastes importantes no que concerne à forma como ambos encaram o valor humano a partir das ideias de racialidade, pureza e miscigenação.

Este artigo examina o processo de envelhecimento através da perspectiva filosófica de Arthur Schopenhauer, explorando como seus conceitos fundamentais de vontade, representação e sofrimento podem oferecer insights valiosos para compreender a velhice na sociedade contemporânea. O estudo analisa a influência do pensamento schopenhaueriano na psicologia moderna e na gerontologia, com atenção especial ao trabalho de Irvin D. Yalom e sua aplicação na psicoterapia existencial. O artigo propõe uma visão mais humanizada do envelhecimento, contrastando com paradigmas etaristas predominantes, e sugere caminhos em direção a uma sociedade mais inclusiva e respeitosa com os idosos. Por meio de uma abordagem interdisciplinar que combina filosofia, psicologia e gerontologia, esta pesquisa demonstra como a sabedoria contemplativa de Schopenhauer pode transformar nossa compreensão do envelhecimento, passando do declínio para o potencial de crescimento espiritual e intelectual. Os achados sugerem que abraçar a consciência da mortalidade e desenvolver capacidades contemplativas pode levar ao que Schopenhauer denomina a arte de envelhecer - um processo de libertação da tirania do desejo e conquista de uma sabedoria mais profunda.

Este artigo tem como objetivo examinar aspectos da conjuntura pessimista contemporânea, analisando a retomada dos debates sobre os pessimismos reprodutivos e os fundamentos do pessimismo cósmico a partir do legado filosófico de Arthur Schopenhauer. Partindo de discussões contemporâneas sobre o pessimismo de raízes schopenhauerianas, investigaremos tendências nas humanidades que respondem ao sentimento de catástrofe a partir da especulação afirmativa que busca a composição de mundos futuros como forma de reabilitação. Mostramos que as vertentes pessimistas e negativas não apenas hesitam diante dessa resposta produtiva, mas frequentemente a rejeitam, problematizando ainda as expectativas de um futuro aberto alicerçado no êxito da proliferação humana - retomando assim as reflexões seminais de Schopenhauer desenvolvidas em O mundo como vontade e como representação e no segundo volume de Parerga e Paralipomena. Defendemos que, no contexto dos debates atuais, elementos centrais do pensamento pessimista merecem ter sua lógica e argumentação rigorosamente examinados, em especial pelo modo como atualizam pressupostos schopenhauerianos.

O presente trabalho é uma tradução de Einige Bemerkungen über Nietzsches Philosophie, apêndice do livro Erinnerungen an Friderich Nietzsche (1901), de Paul Deussen. Neste apêndice, diferente das demais partes do livro, Deussen não apenas tece algumas observações pessoais de sua conivência com Nietzsche, mas também busca comentar, sobretudo a partir da ótica da filosofia de Schopenhauer, sobre alguns aspectos centrais da filosofia de Nietzsche, a saber, o eterno retorno, o além-do-homem e a afirmação da vida. Apesar de sucintas, estas observações expressam uma tentativa particularmente instigante de Deussen: Reler o discípulo que rompeu com Schopenhauer à luz de seu antigo mestre.

In this article I respond to the criticisms of Flavio Williges and Rafael Vogelmann regarding my book The Heart and its Attitudes. I clarify that the notion of presence and heartfelt second-personal connection should not be confined to agents with deontic competence: we can also be mutually present and emotionally connected with children and animals. I further defend my distinction between deontic and heartfelt forgiveness, maintaining that the absence of affective content in the former does not undermine its second-personal character. Finally, I argue that what I describe as “personal anger”—even if not universally categorized as anger—is a genuine form of emotional appeal for recognition within intimate relationships, and should be understood as belonging to the domain of attitudes of the heart.

This article provides a critical examination of Stephen Darwall’s The Heart and its Attitudes, where he extends his second-personal account of morality beyond deontic attitudes of the will to include non-deontic “attitudes of the heart”, such as love, trust, and forgiveness. Darwall argues that both domains share a common structure of reciprocity. While recognizing the significance of this contribution, we raise three main concerns. First, Darwall’s treatment of forgiveness risks reducing deontic forgiveness to a purely normative stance, leaving aside its affective dimension. Second, his account of “personal anger” tends to conflate anger with demands for recognition and care, thereby diluting its normative structure, widely recognized since Aristotle. Third, his general characterization of second-personal attitudes in terms of reciprocity obscures the role of personhood and moral authority in grounding presence, leaving unclear whether attitudes such as love for animals can be adequately described as second-personal. We conclude that although Darwall convincingly highlights the neglected moral importance of attitudes of the heart, his framework requires further clarification to remain faithful to the phenomenology of moral emotions and the conceptual foundations of second-personal relations.

In this work, I discuss the concept of existential feelings recently developed by Matthew Ratcliffe in three steps. First, I examine the concept, taking into account its initial formulation and internal aspects. After presenting how this affective dimension resists the traditional body/cognition dichotomy in classical philosophy of emotion, I draw attention to the inconspicuous nature of these feelings and its structuring role in our intentional life. While it includes bodily elements that can be identified and described, its significance becomes most apparent when its proper functioning is disrupted. The unfolding of an ordinary experience, its “normality”, thus depends on a level of habituality and normalcy in which these feelings are not manifest. Second, I analyze the assumption that cases of illness provide us with a lens through which to access this tacit dimension. In line with Ratcliffe, I argue that psychiatric disorders offer a privileged standpoint for grasping this affective-structural dimension of our intentional life. However, despite their apparent diversity, I argue that pathological existential feelings must share something if they are to be clinically relevant. So, third and finally, I argue for a kind of unity underlying pathological existential feelings in psychiatric disorders. I propose that a distinctive sense of doubt can be meaningfully attributed to the lived experience of these conditions. The implications of this notion for a phenomenologically informed psychiatry are also explored.

The development of trusting relations is one of the central aspects of human sociality. Trust makes it possible for people to count on and cooperate with each other, creating the conditions for people to achieve goods and promote their interests and well-being. Yet, justifying trust can be a vexing task. This paper offers a proposal on the nature of trust and its possible justification that aims to combine both cognitive and emotional aspects into a unified account, seeking to reconcile two opposing tendencies in the literature, namely, rationalist and emotional views. Trust should be understood as a normative relation of a special sort and a combination of restricted rationality and emotional “amplification”. More specifically, it involves a complex two-level social emotion that plays a dual role: it partly responds to the truster’s available evidence about the trustworthiness of others, but also goes beyond this evidence by expressing a form of optimism that never eliminates vulnerability and risk. Thus, trust is a kind of practical optimism and openness cultivated within social environments. As such, the only possible justification for trust will be ultimately “subjective”.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists frequently construe emotional experience in terms of discrete episodes or states that can be individuated, enumerated, and assigned to different types. In this paper, I address (a) the source and status of this broad conception of the emotions, and (b) the extent to which it succeeds in accommodating the structure and variety of human emotional experiences. I argue that the emotions are a selective abstraction from the much richer phenomenology of emotional life. This abstraction originates neither in an everyday, commonsense picture of emotion nor in emotion theory. Instead, it is a chimerical hybrid of the two, which risks eclipsing the complexity, diversity, and nuances of human emotional life. I conclude by sketching a philosophical perspective that emphasizes the dynamic, temporally extended structure of emotional experience more so than individuation, enumeration, and classification.