Anthropology

Between medieval sapienza and the duty of silence...because it can be harmfull for other, takes care to transmit and inform in a cultural way.

Society or individuals? WHat must be saved? There's any hope to social and virtual violence or It is Just the way It Is?

An essay on the role of the philosopher in society nowadays.

The Loss of Criteria: essay on the pathological reverie of non-being and not-willing to know. Pathological essay on Being and Not Being Universal Dualism about Contextualism.

Portuguese Discoveries and Erasure's theme "Ship of Fouls", navigating in an age of loneliness and excelera

Anthropology in Social Sciences

Cognitive Sciences, Misc in Cognitive Sciences

Neuroscience in Cognitive Sciences

Philosophy, General Works

Political Science in Social Sciences

Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Cognitive Sciences

Psychology in Cognitive Sciences

Sociology in Social Sciences

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Body and Soul, the infinite dualism of existenz.

the study of ants and insects com understand human behaviour and discourse, his politics and ways do keep alive some dreams that can come true.

This paper introduces the "Status Loss Theory of Humor," as detailed in "How Humor Works" and "How Humor Works, Part II," in a single page. This theory has the potential to fully, clearly, and naturally explain the human humor instinct, and has made predictions that are being confirmed by other studies.

This paper takes the Status Loss Theory (introduced and explained in the first "How Humor Works" paper), and applies it to 40 real-world examples, including memes, radio and TV shows, movie and comic book tropes, song parodies, humor sayings, stand-up comedy cliches, known psychological quirks of humor, and more, to demonstrate the theory's potential to function as the first clear, complete, logical, and simple basis for defining, studying, and understanding humor in all of its forms.

This article advances a function-first account of social and individual consciousness as the engine of cumulative cultural evolution. At the social level, joint attention (a We-mode) objectifies shared scenes and compels coordination; at the individual level, consciousness is modeled as an internalized listener that selectively admits thoughts bearing familiarity/affiliative markers. This selection compresses the meaning space and steers learning toward culturally alignable content, enabling rapid acquisition of language and shared meanings in children and scalable coordination in pre-linguistic populations. Together, these (...) mechanisms convert cheap, noisy variation—random thoughts, gestures, proto-utterances—into high-fidelity, transmissible representations, powering cultural accumulation across distance and time. The account yields testable predictions: (i) conversational asymmetries that privilege listener selectivity across cultures; (ii) developmental universals in early joint attention and fast learning under sparse input; and (iii) unconscious-to-conscious latency signatures consistent with filtering dynamics. By treating consciousness primarily as a selection-and-alignment device for human-relevant meanings, the view reframes qualia as the felt aftermath of acceptance by the internal listener and explains how social and individual consciousness jointly function as a cultural-evolution engine rather than as mere by-products. (shrink)

Before we can understand the way people live their lives, we must first understand the process that takes place in forming who they are. This is a chapter from a forthcoming book I will be releasing which explores why criminals seek out crime as an immortality project - as described in Denial of Death.

Slavery is among the most morally charged subjects in the study of premodern societies, and discussions of slavery in early Islam often suffer from anachronism, selective evidence, or polemical treatment. This article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of slavery in the early Islamic community through the combined lenses of game theory, comparative anthropology, non-ideal ethics, and historical context. Drawing on models of cooperation and deterrence in stateless societies, the paper reconstructs the incentive structures governing war captivity, population management, and alliance maintenance (...) in seventh-century Arabia. It argues that the Prophet Muhammad’s policies toward slavery are best understood not as expressions of ideal theory—imagining moral action unconstrained by social and institutional limitations—but as interventions within a highly restricted feasible set. Within these constraints, Islam functioned as a harm-reduction institution: restricting sources of enslavement, encouraging emancipation, improving treatment standards, and introducing legal mechanisms that eroded the practice over time. By situating early Islamic reforms alongside Greco-Roman, Jewish, Near Eastern, and African slavery systems, the study demonstrates that Islam represented a significant upward moral shift relative to regional norms. The article concludes by examining how these reforms influenced long-term transformations in Islamic societies, ultimately contributing to the gradual abolition of slavery in the modern era. The aim is neither apologetic nor condemnatory, but to reconstruct the moral and strategic logic of slavery in a world where institutional alternatives did not exist and survival hinged on the navigation of severe constraints. (shrink)

Modern debates about early marriage in Islamic history frequently collapse into moral anachronism, projecting contemporary psychological, legal, and institutional categories onto a premodern world structured by radically different conditions. This article develops a framework of contextual moral realism to explain why early adolescent marriage was morally intelligible—and often perceived as protective—in seventh-century Arabia, while being morally impermissible under modern conditions. Drawing on anthropology, moral philosophy, Islamic legal theory, historical demography, and comparative civilizational analysis, the study reconstructs the social ecology that (...) shaped premodern moral reasoning: extended kinship households, absence of state protection, high mortality, early economic integration, and collective guardianship. The article argues that Islamic law neither invented nor idealized early marriage, nor grounded its permissibility in individual autonomy or self-authorship. Rather, it regulated an inherited practice in accordance with enduring moral aims internal to the Sharīʿa—protection of the vulnerable, harm minimization, preservation of bodily integrity and lineage, and maintenance of social stability—applied within severe structural constraints. By tracing consistent patterns across domains such as marriage, slavery reform, and political crisis management, the study shows that Prophetic ethics exhibit remarkable coherence under non-ideal conditions. When modern institutions transform vulnerability, knowledge, and responsibility, the same Islamic moral principles require different applications. The resulting shift represents continuity of moral purpose rather than ethical contradiction, and does not depend on liberal conceptions of autonomy as the basis of moral judgment. (shrink)

This study develops a critical framework for evaluating ad hoc inflation in Qur’anic borrowing theories—explanations that multiply hypothetical intermediaries, lost sources, or selective adaptations in order to sustain the claim that the Qur’an derives its narratives from Jewish or Christian precedent. By systematically comparing the Qur’anic portrayals of Moses, Pharaoh, Joseph, Mary, Jesus, Lot, and Solomon with the spectrum of Late Antique traditions, archaeological evidence, linguistic data, and ancient Near Eastern cultural contexts, the analysis identifies domains where the Qur’anic material (...) diverges sharply from known Christian, Jewish, Gnostic, and folkloric accounts while exhibiting internal coherence and historically resonant detail. These divergences occur precisely in places where borrowing models would predict dependence or replication. The study argues that, methodologically, each additional layer of hypothetical transmission required to explain such divergences increases model complexity without increasing explanatory power. A more disciplined comparative approach reveals that the Qur’anic narratives often preserve structural, legal, linguistic, and geographical patterns unattested in the alleged source traditions, while avoiding their contradictions, anachronisms, and theological motivations. The proposed framework provides a clearer set of criteria for distinguishing genuine literary dependence from conjectural reconstruction, thereby offering a more rigorous basis for future work in Qur’anic historiography and Late Antique textual interactions. (shrink)

This paper offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the Banu Qurayza affair by integrating game theory, moral philosophy, anthropological insights into tribal societies, and historical scholarship on early Islamic Medina. Rather than defending or condemning any historical actor, the study seeks to explain how decision-making unfolds under existential threat and institutional scarcity. The incident is interpreted as the collapse of a repeated-cooperation system into a one-shot existential game following the near-annihilation threat posed by the Confederate forces during the Battle of the (...) Trench (627 CE). Within this game-theoretic framework, the Banu Qurayza’s negotiations with the besieging coalition are modeled as a rational—though probabilistically mistaken—attempt to defect when Muslim survival appeared unlikely. The Prophet’s subsequent acceptance of an arbitrated ruling, delivered by Saʿd ibn Muʿādh and grounded in the tribe’s own legal tradition, is examined in light of tribal arbitration norms, incentive structures, and the absence of state institutions such as prisons, centralized courts, or police. The study argues that ethical judgments in premodern, stateless societies cannot be evaluated using modern institutional assumptions; moral responsibility operates under constraints shaped by feasibility, survival imperatives, and normative expectations internal to the culture. The Prophet’s prior record of leniency toward other treaty violators is analyzed as part of a broader ethical pattern in which mercy predominates until it threatens the community’s survival. Drawing on analogies from modern political ethics—including the behavior of Scandinavian politicians who operate within highly institutionalized moral landscapes—the paper emphasizes that moral agency is always conditioned by available structures. It further contends that the Qurayza ruling—although severe by contemporary standards—was viewed by contemporaries as legitimate, consistent with Near Eastern norms for wartime treason, and effective in restoring a stable equilibrium that prevented future covenant collapses. By situating the affair within rational-choice theory, tribal legal anthropology, and contextual ethics, the paper demonstrates how strategic rationality and moral responsibility can converge during crises. The analysis challenges simplistic portrayals that project either modern humanitarian frameworks or polemical narratives onto ancient contexts. Instead, it proposes a nuanced reconstruction in which the Prophet’s overriding obligation—the preservation of a vulnerable community under existential threat—shaped a decision that was simultaneously strategic, culturally coherent, and ethically intelligible within its historical world. The goal of the paper is explanatory, not prescriptive: to clarify how leaders in stateless societies navigate treason, survival imperatives, and moral constraints when institutional alternatives are unavailable . (shrink)

This paper offers a critical examination of Krishna’s role as a negotiator in the Mahabharata, often bringing admiration from people. While Krishna’s diplomatic mission to Hastinapura demonstrates his persuasion skills, strategic decision making and communication skills. However, despite excelling at negotiations he still couldn’t bring resolve the issue between the parties. We can further reduce this failure to structural, psychological, and political limitation on peace-making. Further with reference from various sources like Machiavellian political realism, Greek mythologies, psychological theories of aggression, (...) international legal history, and Russian literary philosophy, the paper argues that existence of conflict or rather war isn’t merely due to poor negotiation but because human beings repeatedly prefer power, identity, and emotional certainty over compromise. This paper not only explores Krishna’s negotiation skills, this paper further tries to understand what more could have been done, while acknowledging that even the most skilled negotiators may fail in the face of human preferences. (shrink)

This presentation is about an evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness linked to a human specific anxiety. It is a continuation of other works (2011 Book chapter, 2014 TSC Poster). AIM: Present a scenario describing an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness that introduces a human specific anxiety which is active in our human lives. METHOD: The scenario starts with our pre-human ancestors which were capable to manage representations and to partly identify with their conspecifics (Olds 2006, DeWaal 2008). These identifications brought our ancestors (...) to merge the representations of their conspecifics with the limited auto-representation of their own entity. The result was an auto-representation becoming about an entity existing in environment. This process is proposed as having progressively generated an ancestral form of self-consciousness as object and as subject. These identifications took place also with suffering conspecifics and have imposed to our ancestors a huge anxiety increase that had to be limited. Tools developed for that limitation (caring, collaboration, empathy, ToM, ...) have linked consciousness to anxiety management while also procuring evolutionary benefits. Human minds now contain an unconscious part of that ancestral anxiety that guides many of our mental states. RESULT: An evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness is made available as linked to a specific anxiety management that characterizes human minds. Continuations are introduced, some related to mental health. CONCLUSION: The proposed evolutionary scenario presents self-consciousness and a specific human anxiety as sharing a same evolutionary nature. This new source of anxiety needs more investigations. (shrink)

rails to total abstraction, to conjure a perfect social system, between fulfilment of individual and colective will.

Long Range and short range, guns and violence, everyday life in cities and streets, between social and group identity and faith and religious belief, the vision to the "things of the world that cannot be seen" (Heróis do Mar).

Saturation, intoxication to the medias of realization and porsuit of happyness.

Vacuity, vanity, proposal of a elapsed time fadeaway, an essay in portuguese language, soon on english.

Fear. Cerimonial Fear, as the Judge could be God, wich represents, some way, the entire society, dead or alive.

Giving away of some kind of philosophy, to a new shore and horizons.

Tulisan ini bermuara pada citizenship education yang dilihat dalam perspektif kemungkinan perkembangannya di masa depan dihubungkan dengan pendidikan karakter. Istilah Pendidikan Kewarganegaraan dan Karakter (PKnK) diintrodusir penulis untuk menunjuk pada kelekatan orientatif-koherensif kedua disiplin tersebut, selain dari mengadopsi istilah CCE (Character and Citizenship Education) Singapura.

The present philosophical and anthropological endeavor aims to radically reinterpretation the constitution of humanity and the human being, portraying it as a trajectory of fierce virulence—a turbulent, staged ontification unfolding at the highly tense, profoundly confrontational confluence of raw biological immanence and the trans-biological leap of the mind and spirit. Transcending reductive, elementally scientistic paradigms, this work introduces a confrontational theoretical model: an ontological-agonistic perspective. Through this analytical lens, the dramatic rupture of man from nature and the subsequent genesis of (...) culture and civilization are no longer conceptualized as passive, harmonious biological adaptations to environmental pressures. Instead, they are recognized as the direct product of catastrophic ontological tears and phylogenetic fractures, triggered by a constitutive anatomical vulnerability and incessantly governed by the titanic collision between the dismergent force (the centrifugal vector rooted in natural amorphisation and dissolution) and the promergent force (the centripetal vector driving the integration, architecture, and ascension of the ordering values of the spirit). The study initially examines the primary anthropogenetic premises, subsequently engaging with classical theories precisely to establish and justify a staged ontological-agonistic framework. This model is comprised of stringent ontic sequences compelled by the harsh logic of confrontation, survival, and defiant self-transcendence. It maps the violent metamorphosis of the human experience across five distinct phases: beginning with the primary contact and collision between burgeoning cognition and the raw resistance of nature; advancing through the confrontational accumulation of technical resources and tools; moving into the normative-coercive structuring of early communities through ritual discipline; progressing to the formal-institutional establishment of state-level civilization; and culminating in the supreme phase of ontification proper or existential statuation. In this final stage, the symbolic universe constructed by man through suffering, sacrifice, and ascetic discipline becomes consubstantial with his very being, demonstrating absolute ontological autonomy and the sovereign capacity to subjugate and dictate over the biological substrate. The conclusions synthesize this trajectory of heroic, agonistic, and defiant self-grounding of the human condition, while opening a legitimate interrogative window toward the future macro-structural dynamics of global society—now marked by unprecedented configurations of tension and systemic control—viewed through the same conceptual prism of a fertile, generative ontology of agonism. Keywords: Homo sapiens, anthropogenesis, humanogenesis, ontification proper, existential statuation, dismergence, promergence, agonistic ontology, constitutive vulnerability, symbolic autonomy, staged model, cultural emergence, human being, humanity, society. (shrink)

semiology of social and global transformations on public relations and, by consequence, of human intimacy.

Evolution of good will during spring days on a southern country, with lots of good food and rede wine (I lost my walet).

A new dimension beyond criticism, pessimism and dispute.

happyness porsued by a robot, realization of futuristic and transcendent dreams of man.

social and existential memory abou the self an otherhood.

Road accidents are as same as fatal than domestic violence in Portugal.

Autonomy as a desonesty, i.e., exogamic behaviour does not betray family values.

the event, on the evening of time, should be a place in our society for optimism?

for a better literature, to understand literary tradition in Portugal.

the path to heroism, physical and intelectual effort.

One after Other, Legionella and Covid have marked everyday life on Portugal and on the world in the last two-there years, creating a kind of vão (bay), rebaixamento, in the moeur of society and individuals.

actor progressing social life and scale on screen.

from sensation to imposition of media tought.

Some ideas on Political Philosophy and Social Anthropology.

biography as a revenge to some ideal ideals.

Anemia, the syntoms of a great disease in the heart of society.

recolection and the street, probably two similar ways to percieve the world and the self.

Prison, porsuing the work of Erwing Goffman, and Paul Valéry, au-delá of Victor Turner.

some literary day about philosophical topics and some anthropological items.

is happyness productive? See book by Roger Scruton, "On Pessimism".