A revista Cadernos de Ética e Filosofia Política, cujo número inaugural foi lançado em 1999, tem, ao longo de mais de duas décadas, ininterruptamente e periodicamente publicado artigos dedicados à área de Filosofia. Os Cadernos visam suprir em alguma medida a demanda por textos especializados e que atendam o estado atual da questão para o campo ao qual se destina, fornecendo bibliografia a um público interessado no caráter multifacetado da reflexão sobre a ética e a política. As questões relativas ao direito, à história, à religião e às artes não raro são por elas incorporadas, convertendo a um só tempo em sua matéria de investigação e seu cenário de intervenção. É esse caráter abrangente da ética e da filosofia política que lhes concede a virtude da vivacidade. Os Cadernos sempre procuraram corresponder e promover essa virtude, veiculando sobretudo a produção teórica discente, sem distinguir correntes ideológicas, linhas filosóficas ou áreas de saber incluídas nas mais diversas manifestações de reflexão. Aqui se encontrarão artigos, ensaios, resumos de teses e dissertações, resenhas, traduções de trechos de obras e de pequenas obras. Todos os trabalhos, de recepção dos artigos, envio para pareceristas, revisão, editoração e publicação são realizados pela equipe editorial, que se reúne regularmente e toma suas decisões editoriais de modo autônomo. A revista é editada em meio eletrônico, pelo sistema OJS, o que resulta em um ganho substancial de qualidade, pois facilita o acesso e a difusão dos textos. Somando-se a isso, contamos com um vasto corpo de pareceristas especializados nos temas, correntes filosóficas e autores enfocados pelos artigos, o que torna mais democrática a escolha dos textos destinados à publicação. Além disso, os Cadernos utilizam o sistema de avaliação na modalidade double-blind review, nos quais todos os manuscritos enviados passam por ao menos dois avaliadores. De 2017 até o presente momento, a revista somente recebe artigos no prazo aberto de chamadas, noticiadas nesse site e em outros meios. Finalmente, desde 2015 os Cadernos têm promovido eventos na área, buscando contribuir para o debate sobre a pesquisa filosófico-política no Brasil, bem como tem editado dossiês temáticos, conduzidos, conjuntamente com o corpo editorial da revista, com editores e editoras convidados. Convidamos os/as estudantes de pós-graduação em filosofia e pesquisadores/as interessados/as em publicar seus trabalhos a colaborar conosco, ajudando-nos a diminuir assim a distância entre a pesquisa individual e o diálogo aberto com autores e críticos.
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas
Propostas epistêmicas sobre o cânone filosófico: uma apresentação política
Copyright (c) 2025 Virginia Helena Ferreira da Costa, Mauro Dela Bandera https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
O fio democrático. Resenha do livro Ensaios sobre democracia: descrições de um corpo despedaçado, de Silvana de Souza Ramos
Copyright (c) 2025 Ricardo Polidoro Mendes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
A carne do cervo do índio selvagem: A teoria da propriedade do Locke e o colonialismo inglês na América
Copyright (c) 2025 Virginia H. Ferreira da Costa; Barbara Arneil https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Os usos da América em O Segundo Tratado sobre o Governo de Locke
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas M. Lessa; Herman Lebovics https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The return of the repressed: crisis and renewal of the philosophical Canon in the USP experience
This article investigates the history of philosophy as an institution, analyzing its mechanisms of exclusion and its potential for openness. It examines the French historiographical tradition, from Victor Cousin to Martial Gueroult, and its reception in Brazil, focusing on the experience of the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo (USP). It argues that the history of philosophy, although often operating as a normative and exclusionary field, carries within itself the key to its own renewal. The article maintains that the supposed current crisis of the canon represents not a degeneration, but a “return of the repressed”: an opportunity to reaffirm a philosophical reflection on the history of philosophy itself.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas Vinicius Correa Rodrigues https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Black metamorphoses - fugitive experiments [2.0]
Research on the history of the representations of slavery have drawn attention to the ubiquity of metaphorical, “figurative slavery” in philosophical and political discourse through the European ages. This slavery, however, depended on the fantasy of the tyrant as a kind of slaver uninvolved with the effective transformation of people in property. What happens if we turn away from the pages of Western political philosophy and think about freedom with the archive of Black fugitivity?
Copyright (c) 2025 Victor Galdino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Feminisms and the rewriting of the canon: the opposition between history and nature “Woman”
Where are the female philosophers? Why have the names of female philosophers been erased from the History of Philosophy? Against the backdrop of contemporary debates about what it means to be a “woman” and the historical, social and political creation of the difference between men and women in Western Judeo-Christian civilization, we propose a reflection on the canon of seventeenth-century European philosophy and the absence of female philosophers, recognized in their time, in these canonical storylines of the history of philosophy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tessa Moura Lacerda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Limits of the Language of Human Rights in Revolutionary France - The Case of the Declarations Addressed to the National Assembly and the Pamphlets of Olympes de Gouges (1789-1791)
The article investigates women's political participation through declarations, petitions, and motions addressed to the Constituent Assembly or directly to the people via pamphlets – particularly those of Olympe de Gouges. The central aim is to reveal the ambivalence of the language of rights and nature – central references of modern politics – in these documents produced between 1789 and 1791. A secondary objective is to outline the textual strategies women employed to assert the legitimacy of their political actions. This is significant because the Revolution necessitated the invention of a specific eloquence for the emerging public sphere. At first glance, the material analyzed might seem to reproduce the divide that political theory later reinforced between the private and public spheres, nature and politics, and the woman citizen detached from involuntary, survival-related familial ties. However, the argument put forth is that the complexity of these women's writing lies precisely in blurring these categories. The article concludes by demonstrating the relevance of a historical approach in political theory for a rigorous analysis of the core concepts underpinning contemporary political references.
Copyright (c) 2025 Roberta Soromenho Nicolete https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Slaves Without Masters and Masters Without Slaves, or Notes on the Jagunço System
Abstract: The article establishes a dialogue between the thought of Achille Mbembe and the notion of the “jagunço system” as an analytical tool to interpret new forms of domination and subjectivation in contemporary Brazil. It is argued that the rise of Bolsonarism has led to a shift in this system, by granting autonomy to the former enforcers of elite violence, who have now become protagonists of an identity-based politics marked by explicit violence and racism. This transformation signals the overcoming of the myth of racial democracy and the emergence of a new political rationality, whose contours can be understood considering Mbembe’s formulations on the “becoming-black of the world” and the production of “slaves without masters and masters without slaves” as expressions of the reconfiguration of capitalism and subjectivity in the 21st century.
Copyright (c) 2025 Caio Paz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Liberalism and colonialism in the work of John Locke
One of the central elements of the emergence of modernity is related to the process of formation of modern nation-states and this process, with its political and social consequences, has been one of the central elements of theoretical reflection by the fundamental authors of modern political thought. However, the emergence and expansion of colonialism also had a fundamental importance in the development of modern theoretical ideas and concepts. As part of the reinterpretation of the canon of this thought, carried out by recent research, an important debate has emerged about the relationship between liberalism and colonialism. Liberalism has been associated with the language of natural rights and the limits of power. However, current research has problematized the link between liberalism and colonial expansion. Recent works have highlighted that some characteristics, such as abstract universalism or a vision about the foundation of property rights, would allow understanding their link with colonial or imperial domination. The present work seeks, from this perspective, to analyze and problematize John Locke's writings as a work in which the colonial experience had a fundamental influence on the elaboration of some of his main theoretical formulations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Javier Amadeo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The racial contract: rereading modern theories through the lens of inverted epistemology
This text proposes to present a critical reading of modern and neo-contractualism from the perspective of the “racial contract” formulated by Charles Mills in his work of the same name, The Racial Contract. Using the concept of “inverted epistemology”, Mills argues that the social contract, far from being a universal pact among rational and free subjects, is historically structured as a strategic agreement that legitimizes “white supremacy” as an absolute political system. The analysis seeks to highlight how the exclusion of non-white subjects from the concept of humanity and from the social pact occurs through the construction and reproduction of an “epistemology of ignorance”, which is functional to the political project of white group domination. In this sense, Mills proposes a critical dialogue with the work A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, understanding it as an analysis that revitalizes the modern social contract – even though with radically different aspects – while maintaining the same exclusionary structure by disregarding the historical and material effects of structural racism. This, in some way, could still serve white supremacy, even though it claims to be equitable and impartial. In this way, the text will present some central questions that traverse this debate.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jéssica Kellen Rodrigues https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Two readings on colonialism as “agrarian pre-capitalism” in Locke’s theory of property
This article examines John Locke's theory of property from two interconnected perspectives: (1) Barbara Arneil’s “contextual reading,” which relates Locke to 17th-century English colonial debates; and (2) the “structural analysis” of the chapter on “Property” in the Second Treatise, highlighting how his notion of “improved labor” underpinned the expropriation of Indigenous lands by English colonizers in America. On the one hand, Arneil demonstrates that Locke not only internalized pro-colonization arguments circulating in his time, but also grounded them philosophically in natural law. On the other hand, a close and direct reading of Locke demonstrates a complexification of the theory of natural equality, since the natural right to property, based on human essence, is differentiated according to phases of the state of nature, with more justified rights of appropriation related to a “more advanced” stage of human natural “evolutionism,” when the pre-capitalist agrarian economy developed. It is concluded that Lockean theory, by hierarchizing forms of work and cultivation, reinforced an assimilationist logic – perennial in contemporary practices – that subordinates other peoples to “higher” thoughts and practices.
Copyright (c) 2025 Virgínia H. Ferreira da Costa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
From the Tupinambá to the Wendat: An Indigenous Political Philosophy in Modernity
The text argues for the relevance of Amerindian thought in shaping modern ideals of freedom and equality, highlighting the role of the Tupinambá and the Wendat chief Kondiaronk in the philosophical debates of the period. Since the time of Montaigne, the Tupinambá were already denouncing to Europeans the social inequality and political servitude experienced in the Old World. These dialogues were later taken up by Lahontan, who recorded conversations with Kondiaronk, revealing a sophisticated Indigenous critique of the European way of life. More than mere mouthpieces for European philosophers, the Amerindians are presented as political and intellectual agents, whose observations directly influenced Enlightenment thought. The text thus proposes a reversal of perspective: less a narrative of French lineage, and more a debate of Amerindian filiation, ranging from the Tupinambá of Brazil to the Wendat chief in Canada. Although one cannot speak of a homogeneous Indigenous political philosophy, there is a critical continuity between the discourses of the Tupinambá and Kondiaronk: the former exposed Europe’s social and political inequalities, while the latter – before Rousseau – showed how social inequality transformed into political inequality.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mauro Dela Bandera https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Resistance and Liberation: black women's political agency
This article examines the concept of freedom developed by Angela Davis grounded in the historical experience of Black women in the struggle against multiple forms of oppression. In contrast to the Western philosophical tradition, which defines freedom as a universal and abstract attribute, Davis proposes understanding it as a historical and collective process of liberation, forged in everyday practices of resistance. The Black woman, through organizing networks of care, solidarity, and insubordination, emerges as a foundational subject of this new formulation of freedom. The analysis focuses on Davis’s works from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, highlighting how her philosophy articulates theory, political practice, and militancy, while offering a radical critique of the criminalization of resistance and the social order that sustains exclusion. By shifting the concept of freedom from abstraction to the lived experiences of those historically denied it, Davis proposes a liberation philosophy rooted in Black women's insurgent praxis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Laíssa Ferreira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
For a Permanent Indigenization of Political Thought: Some Contemporary Variations of the “Counter-One”
This article proposes a dialogue between Clastres’ idea of “society against the state” (inspired by E. La Boétie's “Contre-Un”) and the political thought of contemporary indigenous intellectuals and leaders. It analyses contemporary drifts of this idea of “counter-state” by examining two problems that intersect: the problem of cosmopolitics (that is, the inadequacy of the figure of the polis to conceive of extra-human agencies and the plurality of worlds) and the problem of autonomy (that is, the creation of autonomous territories within states, which results in an interesting paradox).
Copyright (c) 2025 Renato Sztutman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Philosophical discourse and slavery in the 18th century: remarks on Condorcet and Cugoano
This article addresses some aspects of two important anti-slavery works published in the last decades of the 18th century: Condorcet's Reflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres, published in 1781, and Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, published in 1787. Although they share many aspects and partially involve a similar vocabulary of natural rights and freedom, this is an initial study intended to map some fundamental aspects that distinguish the two texts, beyond Condorcet's well-known gradualism and Cugoano's radicalism. Starting from the consideration of an example of philosophical discourse that sought to justify slavery, exemplified here by a passage from a famous work by Voltaire, the article analyzes aspects of the philosophical discourses of Condorcet and Cugoano to glimpse how they react to this mobilization of modern philosophical vocabulary and how their texts articulate more fundamental differences in the way of conceiving rights, freedom and the consequent need to abolish slavery.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rodrigo Brandão https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Apresentação à Carta ao marquês de Mirabeau
Copyright (c) 2000 Ricardo Monteagudo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2000 John Aubrey; Eunice Ostrensky https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2000 Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Ricardo Monteagudo, Maria Magdalena Matte Hiriart https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2000 Francis Bacon; Eunice Ostrensky https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Carta vai, carta vem: o romance epistolar em Montesquieu
This paper aims at examining the role of the epistolary style in the Lettres Persenes, the only work in which Montesquieu employed that literary genre.
Copyright (c) 2000 Antônio Carlos dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Momento maquiaveliano e momento shakespeareano
Hobbes' work inaugurates the central lines of modern political thought by thinking against (and here lie its tension and its tragedy) its most important and also its most disturbing discovery: the idea that the conflict is the irreductible nucleous of social and political relationships. Here is suggested that this idea of conflict as a key to understand political processes may be reinstalled by looking, beyond Hobbes, both at Maquiavelli's and at Shakespeare's worlds.
Copyright (c) 2000 Eduardo Rinesi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
This article aims at bringing to reflection some ideas of the Aristotelian political thought so to show that, rescuing the point of contact between Antiquity and Contemporary reflection, the dialogue between those two "worlds" reveals itself extremely appropriate.
Copyright (c) 2000 Luizir de Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Rousseau e Helvétius: os princípios da moralidade
In their controversies, C.-A. Helvétius and J. -J. Rousseau have pointed out two different, and generally opposite, ways to consider ethics - and politics. This paper, stressing the subject of interests and morals sentiments, aims at examining these controversies, first with a brief exposition of Rousseau's criticism to the reduction, made by Helvétius, of mental faculties to physical sensibility, and, afterwards, with Helvétius' criticism to the explanation of moral conscience in Émile, An inquiring into this polemic may be useful to bring light upon one al tha most fundamental problems of Rousseau's theory of contract, concerning lhe nature ol potitical obligation and moral duty.
Copyright (c) 2000 Natalia Maruyama https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The shadow of Machiavelli appears in Bodin's work. in Méthode pour la connaissance facile de l'histoire (1566), Machiaveili is praised as an historian and as the first to rescue the study of politics from darkness. In Les Six Livres de la République (1578), Bodin accuses Machiavelli of atheism, of incitement to tyrannical practices and of writing on politics, despite the lack of knowledge on laws and public right. This paper aims at discussing Bodin's reading of Machiavelli's thought, and the reasons why there was such a change between the two works above mentioned.
Copyright (c) 2000 Alberto Ribeiro de Barros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The French Enlightenment thought has some elements of Renaissance scepticism, which is a plain acknowledgement of the critical strength of the sceptic tradition. But, on the other hand, in the same thought there is a refusal to an earnest consideration of pirronic scepticism. This is to be chiefly ascribed to the differences between the respective conceptions about nature, and to their divergences concerning the role of reason.
Copyright (c) 2000 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Is artificial intelligence a responsible moral agent in digital democracy?
The objective of this article is to understand the impacts of artificial intelligence on digital democracy and moral responsibility. New information technologies and artificial intelligence seem to guarantee a kind of freedom and decision-making due to the interactivity they provide, but the fact is that the construction of artificial intelligent agents controls and influences our digital life. In this sense, the problem of this article is if the use of artificial intelligence has moral responsibility for our decisions in digital democracy? Our hypothesis is that if we ontologically distinguish human reality from artificial reality, then the moral responsibility for our decisions in digital democracy belongs to the users, creators and promoters of artificial intelligence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maurício Cavalcante Rios https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Colonialism, liberalism, and the politics of enmity: some interpretations of Achille Mbembe
This paper, the result of bibliographic, critical, and interpretative analysis, seeks to understand how philosopher Achille Mbembe incisively reveals the persistence of colonial structures of domination embedded at the core of Western liberalism and its politics of enmity. The aim is to investigate how the author highlights the invention of race, mobilized as a linguistic construct derived from bourgeois ideals – such as liberty and democracy – which, paradoxically, shaped oppressive realities that concealed and perpetuated economic, social, and political domination. In light of this, the objective is to understand how Mbembe’s analysis calls for a critical reassessment of these contradictions, emphasizing the urgent need to achieve a politics of life capable of reorganizing human relations based on a more global mode of thought and a greater openness to ethical recognition. The working hypothesis is that, for such a transformation to be possible, it is necessary to transcend the racist discourses constructed through normative legal declarations within the Western tradition, effectively confronting the colonial legacy and the contemporary practices of institutionalized exclusion and violence – thus rendering this approach not only political, but, above all, philosophical.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tarciano Silva Batista https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle, de Myisha Cherry
Resenha de: CHERRY, Myisha. The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Copyright (c) 2025 Letícia da Silva Bello https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Rationalism and Romanticism of John Stuart Mill
The dispute between the romantics and the rationalists, which was formed at the end of the Enlightenment century, continued throughout the XIX century. These two apparently opposing ideological currents played a significant role in discussions about the moral, political and epistemological importance of feeling and imagination. Contrary to dualist currents, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) argued that there is no dichotomy between the precepts of both positions with regard to the development of autonomy in human beings. In this article, we intend to show how Stuart Mill's philosophy draws on sources from both rationalism and romantic sources to promote authenticity in human agency and the comprehensiveness of morality.
Copyright (c) 2024 Isabel de Almeida Brand https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0