José Luís Garcia

O ethos da ciência e suas transformações contemporâneas, com especial atenção à biotecnologia

resumo Sensivelmente a partir da decada de 1980, assiste-se a intensificacao da conexao entre a ciencia, a industria, os interesses economicos privados e o poder politico. No cerne desse processo, encontram-se alteracoes profundas nos modos de producao dos conhecimentos e dos resultados cientificos, na natureza das suas instituicoes, nas epistemologias e na sua relacao com o mundo social e natural. A relacao moderna entre o conhecimento cientifico e a esfera da industria foi revolvida e, mais do que estar a servico da tecnologia e da industria, a ciencia encontra-se hoje determinada por elas. E nessa afinidade eletiva que se revela a mudanca dos saberes, em laboratorios universitarios e de outras organizacoes. Na sequencia da transformacao da ciencia em organizacao burocratica de grande escala devotada a producao, durante e apos a Segunda Guerra Mundial, entra em cena a nova tecnociencia empresarializada. No presente artigo, sao discutidas algumas das modificacoes no modo de producao das ciencias, com base no exemplo emblematico das novas biotecnologias, simultaneamente indicadoras e promotoras de um novo ethos cientifico.

Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century

Jacques Ellul does not need presentation. He has a vast trajectory as philosopher, economist and writer. The themes approached by Ellul ranged from technology, economy and sociology towards philosophy. This book, edited by three senior lecturers as Jeronimo, Garcia and Mitcham, explores the connection of capitalism with technology and human agency. Is technology functional to the interests of humankind?, or it is a new fresh instrument of control?. To catalog and give full description of 17 chapters is almost impossible in a book review, but what is important to discuss is the legacy of Ellul, who was a critique of technological world in XXth century, as well as his contradictions. The preliminary chapters are oriented to explain the reception and evolution of Ellul in United States as well as his view on the actual problems of ecology we are experiencing. The second section signals to the cultural glitches in communication process. The last one is reserved to a theological journey into the cosmology of modern world. The main thesis of Ellul was formulated as follows. Technology oppresses human beings by eroding their tradition and nature ability to imagine. That way, the ongoing advance of technology not only reduces the scope of symbols and symbolism but changes radically the capacity of culture to produce meaning. Managerial logic undermined the authentic democracy at the time the needs for efficacy rises. But the question is efficacy for what?. The life becomes in a great business which are controlled by the monopoly of patent and health services. It is vital not to lose the sight that the net of specialists attempts to discipline the social order to impose a limited body of knowledge that supposedly will mitigate the consequences of decision-making process. As

Mapping cultural policy in Portugal: From incentives to crisis

Abstract Taking into account the course of cultural policy in democratic Portugal, and against the backdrop of the international crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2011, this article seeks to interpret recent changes in the cultural sector in Portugal. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods it focuses on three main aspects: institutionalisation of democratic cultural policy; government funding; cultural organizations and facilities. The 2008 crisis put an end to a period in which investment tended to grow. We place Portugal in the broader European context, concluding that the Portuguese cultural scene may once again diverge from that of other European countries.

Risks, alternative knowledge strategies and democratic legitimacy: the conflict over co-incineration of hazardous industrial waste in Portugal

The decision to incinerate hazardous industrial waste in cement plants (the so-called ‘co-incineration’ process) gave rise to one of the most heated environmental conflicts ever to take place in Portugal. The bitterest period was between 1997 and 2002, after the government had made a decision. Strong protests by residents, environmental organizations, opposition parties, and some members of the scientific community forced the government to backtrack and to seek scientific legitimacy for the process through scientific expertise. The experts ratified the government’s decision, stating that the risks involved were socially acceptable. The conflict persisted over a decade and ended up clearing the way for a more sustainable method over which there was broad social consensus – a multi-functional method which makes it possible to treat, recover and regenerate most wastes. Focusing the analysis on this conflict, this paper has three aims: (1) to discuss the implications of the fact that expertise was ‘confiscated’ after the government had committed itself to the decision to implement co-incineration and by way of a reaction to the atmosphere of tension and protest; (2) to analyse the uses of the notions of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ in scientific reports from both experts and counter-experts’ committees, and their different assumptions about controllability and criteria for considering certain practices to be sufficiently safe for the public; and (3) to show how the existence of different technical scientific and political attitudes (one more closely tied to government and the corporate interests of the cement plants, the other closer to the environmental values of re-use and recycling and respect for the risk perception of residents who challenged the facilities) is closely bound up with problems of democratic legitimacy. This conflict showed how adopting more sustainable and lower-risk policies implies a broader view of democratic legitimacy, one which involves both civic movements and citizens themselves.

Fukushima: A Tsunami of Technological Order

Reflecting on the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, in Le Bluff technologique (1988: 109), Jacques Ellul reflected on the paradox of increased unpredictability linked to technological power defined in terms of efficiency. Modern technological progress brings with it the desire to control nature and tame chance by means of calculating rationality that reduces contingencies, yet contemporary technological society has increasingly been confronted with incalculable complexities and become vulnerable to unexpected threats. Far from disappearing, as modernity claimed, unpredictability has become endemic as a result of the prodigious multiplication and power of our means of action.

Hermínio Martins' Philosophical Sociology of Technology: A Short Introduction

1. A set of his texts on technology will be published in the book The Tech nocene: Reflections on Bodies, Minds, and Markets, edited by Ravi Rajan with Danielle Crawford (Martins forthcoming).

The portuguese empire: an introduction

The editors of Media and the Portuguese Empire offer in this introduction an overview of the historical circumstances and communication processes which marked the Portuguese expansion into Asia, Brazil and Africa. They provide a concise report on the dynamic processes which allowed a small country on the edge of Western Europe to govern the first of the European world empires to be established and the last to be dismantled, in the aftermath of a long colonial war. This was an empire that extended, by the end of the nineteenth century, from Macau, on the coast of China, to the Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde and S. Tome, including Timor and several enclaves on the Indian coast, as well as coastal territory covering lands which today are part of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

The First Stirrings of Anti-Colonial Discourse in the Portuguese Press

The Afro-Portuguese journalist Mario Domingues, a mulatto, was the first in imperial Portugal to make an argument in favour of independence for Africa, in a coherent, public form, in a large-circulation publication. Chapter 7 discusses the remarkable but little-known writings published by Domingues between 1919 and 1922, which denote an awareness of both the negro movements in the USA and of the work of figures like W.E. Burghardt Du Bois. Domingues’ writings reveal three positions: a systematic opposition to dissembled forms of slavery, which persisted in the former Portuguese colonies under the euphemistic label of forced labour; the denunciation of the racist ideology which governed colonisation and permeated Portuguese society and institutions; and an early concern with the importance of African independence.

85. What have we learnt? If glyphosate were to become a late lesson we have now ignored the early warnings

The current European Union reapproval procedure for glyphosate is developed as a case study testing whether the 12 precautionary lessons identified by European Environment Agency research as needed to avoid unnecessary harm to society have been incorporated into current regulatory approaches. The working hypothesis that those lessons have not been learnt to a significant degree could not be falsified.

Introduction: Ellul Returns

Many nineteenth century thinkers, convinced of the Enlightenment premise that both nature and society were intelligible, and carried away by the growing prestige of the sciences, saw progress as a natural human development and believed that rational criteria guided societal choices. Biological evolution also appeared to provide a model for change applicable to history. An associated triumphalism in modernity dominated European popular culture until the outbreak of World War I and the post-war rise of dictatorial regimes. Yet even then a positive view of science remained largely intact. Even after World War II, the Shoah, saturation bombings of civilians, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the industrialization of science proceeded at an ever faster pace, assisted by an increasing involvement of state power. The United States science adviser Vannevar Bush (1945) went so far as to present post-World War II science as an “endless frontier” and font of social benefits in healthcare, economic development, and military defense.