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. No quadriênio 2021-2024 da Qualis Capes, a revista foi classifica no estrato A2 na área de Filosofia. 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
O Tema da felicidade em Jean Jacques Rousseau
O pensamento de Rousseau pode ser entendido como uma longa meditação sobre a felicidade. Embora seus dois Discursos tenham sido obras de tom pessimista, pois neles Rousseau descreve como os homens se corromperam e perderam sua independência, nada impediu que, em outros textos, ele analisasse como os homens poderiam ter conservado sua felicidade e liberdade, se assim o quisessem. Rousseau, na verdade, preocupou-se obsessivamente com a questão da felicidade humana e várias de suas obras dão-nos disso provas. Dentre as três formas de felicidade: a do homem natural, a do homem no estado civil e a do cosmopolita, Rousseau elegerá uma como ideal.
Rousseau - felicidade - sentimento de existência - patriotismo
Copyright (c) 1999 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
O espírito alienado de si: o homem social
O despertar da faculdade de comparar e julgar se faz em Rousseau sob o signo da ambigüidade. Ao mesmo tempo em que introduz no caos de impressões predominante, num primeiro momento, uma ordem em virtude da qual os objetos e suas relações passam a ser percebidas, essa faculdade conduz à irrupção das preferências, à expansão dos desejos, à ânsia de se distinguir. O texto aqui apresentado procura apreender esse momento em que a sociabilidade irá se constituir por um processo de exteriorização em que o transporte para fora de si operado pela imaginação se traduz no ingresso na esfera da representação.
Deicídio e reação: Rousseau contra os materialistas do seu tempo
O artigo tem como objetivo principal traçar um panorama da discussão religiosa e metafísica na França do século XVIII enfatizando as objeções e as advertências de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, na "Profissão de fé do vigário saboiano", em relação às conseqüências do materialismo ateu na moral.
Kant e a política como realização do direito
A problemática da aplicação dos princípios práticos percorre toda a doutrina do direito de Kant. É nossa intenção analisar, ainda que brevemente, como, para Kant, a política se põe como tarefa de realização do direito, ou melhor, dos princípios puros do direito, ou direito racional. Mas, uma vez que essa realização não se dá de modo imediato, é necessário justamente dar conta de seus princípios intermediários - sobretudo o princípio da representação, e a distinção entre modo de governar e forma de dominação -, assim como da questão da lei permissiva. Além disso, se procura estabelecer um fio vermelho ligando política e justiça social.
Copyright (c) 1999 Daniel Tourinho Peres https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
As imagens da revolução que encerram o Leviatã e o Behemoth indicam distintos momentos da filosofia política de Hobbes. O artigo procura comparar essas imagens, enfatizando como Hobbes em 1651 vê o fim do governo de Carlos I e O surgimento da República, para em 1668 assinalar o fracasso do governo de Cromwell e o conseqüente retorno da monarquia Stuart.
Copyright (c) 2026 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
O preço das coisas e a estima das pessoas em Pufendorf
Segundo Pufendorf, a linguagem, assim como todos os outros seres morais, é instituída pelo homem. O ato de nomear acrescenta às coisas algo que elas não possuem naturalmente. Não se alterou a essência das coisas, mas as relações entre as pessoas. A designação da propriedade é assim uma relação entre pessoas. O ato de instituir coisas morais é um movimento da vontade que cria um mundo totalmente artificial. O mesmo ocorre em relação às pessoas no processo de criação do seu grau de estima que constitui o mundo da opinião.
Uma querela filosófica na historiografia rousseauísta
O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a argüição do professor Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes à dissertação do professor Milton Meira do Nascimento. Trata-se de duas concepções divergentes sobre o legislador em Rousseau, sobre a relação entre a história e o direito na obra de Rousseau. Para isso, é preciso verificar como a reprovação ao pacto dos ricos no Segundo Discurso reaparece na recusa da representação política no Contrato Social. Há uma diferença conceitual entre a soberania do povo e a legitimidade do Governo que causa muita disputa entre os comentadores.
A noção de negatividade política no pensamento de Maquiavel
O conflito no interior da ordem política pode ser tomado como o princípio que compõe e articula o fortalecimento e a destruição do poder, segundo o pensamento maquiaveliano. Quando ele resulta da "potenza", é o elemento estruturante do debate sobre a liberdade. No entanto, podemos considerar a "negatividade" como a natureza do conflito que nega os princípios da liberdade, bem como os próprios princípios da política. Assim, embora ausente das obras maquiavelianas, o conceito de "negatividade" serve como chave para entendermos o enfraquecimento e a dissolução do poder nestas obras, principalmente nas Histórias Florentinas.
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