Law, environmental policy and Kantian philosophy

Are Kantian philosophy and its principle of respect for persons inadequate to the protection of environmental values? This paper answers this question by elucidating how Kantian ethics can take environmental values seriously. In the period that starts with the Critique of Judgment in 1790 and ends with the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797, the subject would have been approached by Kant in a different manner; although the respect that we may owe to non-human nature is still grounded in our duties to mankind, the basis for such respect stems from nature’s aesthetic properties, and the duty to preserve nature lies in our duties to ourselves. Compared to the “market paradigm”, as it is called by Gillroy (the reference is to a conception of a public policy based on a criterion of economic efficiency or utility), Kantian philosophy can offer a better explanation of the relationship between environmental policy and the theory of justice. Kantian justice defines the “just state” as the one that protects the moral capacities of its “active” citizens, as presented in the first Part of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Kantian paradigm, the environmental risk becomes a “public” concern. That means it is not subsumed under an individual decision, based on a calculus

Mathematics Exercise Generator: the language of parameterized exercises

Nowadays, the process of teaching and learning is changing from a traditional model in which teachers were the source of information for a model in which teachers appear as advisors who carefully observe students, assist in the selection of information by identifying their learning needs and support students in their autonomous study. In this chapter, the authors describe an approach used in curricular units of first year in Science and Engineer degrees, which results from a connection of three projects born in University of Aveiro: MEGUA, SIACUA and PmatE, and the interconnections of their informatics platforms. Although any scientific area besides mathematics can use this tool, the authors focus in a case study using an example on a specific topic of Calculus courses for first year students on Engineering: Sequences and Series of Functions. The methodology described allows teachers to achieve further goals on learning strategies and students to have enough material to practice.publishe

Charge confinement and Klein tunneling from doping graphene

In the present work, we investigate how structural defects in graphene can change its transport properties. In particular, we show that breaking of the sublattice symmetry in a graphene monolayer overcomes the Klein effect, leading to confined states of massless Dirac fermions. Experimentally, this corresponds to chemical bonding of foreign atoms to carbon atoms, which attach themselves to preferential positions on one of the two sublattices. In addition, we consider the scattering off a tensor barrier, which describes the rotation of the honeycomb cells of a given region around an axis perpendicular to the graphene layer. We demonstrate that in this case the intervalley mixing between the Dirac points emerges, and that Klein tunneling occurs.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

O museu como um arquivo singular: o Parque Estadual de Canudos

SIAM. Series Iberoamericanas de Museología. Año 3, Vol.

On the characterization of finite differences “optimal” meshes

AbstractRegridding methods has become an important tool in the integration of PDE systems whose solutions exhibit sharp transitions in spatial derivatives. This paper improves the results presented in an earlier contribution of the author and F. Oliveira (1988). Theoretical justifications of finite differences regridding criteria for the transport and heat equations are presented. The nonuniform meshes in the physical space are generated by the use of coordinate transforms which map them into uniform meshes in the computational space. After the two mesh systems have been generated two approaches are used for solving the PDE: to construct the approximations on the uniform mesh in the computational space or to construct the finite-difference approximations on the nonuniform mesh in the physical space. In this paper we are concerned with the question of the relationship between the two approaches, namely the characterization of the mesh density (coordinate transform) which improves the spatial accuracy of the approximation in the physical (computational) space

La teoria della conoscenza di Francisco Macedo. Un filosofo a confronto con Tommaso e Scoto

Recensão de: La teoria della conoscenza di Francisco Macedo. Un filosofo a confronto con Tommaso e Scoto / Anna Tropia (2020). Roma: Carocci; Praga: Charles University Press, 190 pp. ISBN 978-88-290-0326-