O espelho dos hieróglifos: da ruína das letras egípcias à sua reinvenção quimérica entre os séc. XV e XVII

This master thesis is an overview of how the Egyptian writing became a ruin, and then was mythunderstood by the Western culture through speculations based on its figurative appeal or by its magical nature this invention results not only in new idea of writing, but also in many graphical experiments which take part in the creation of the Renaissance and Baroque visual identity

A metafísica de Isaac Newton

The general objective of this dissertation is to analyze the metaphysical aspects of "rational mechanics" of Isaac Newton, clarifying, by scientific and philosophical discourse, their main elements, with emphasis to the presence of one entity infinitely rational behind all the phenomena of nature, and to the Newton's insight as certain empiricist which, however, accepts deductions metaphysics; a philosopher-scientist. The specific objectives are detailed below: a) brief presentation of the development of modern science, since the Pre-Socratics, seeking to understand the historical conjecture that enabled the rise of Newtonian mechanics; b) presentation of the elements of scientific methodology and philosophical, aimed at comprehension of certain "Newtonian methodology", understanding how this specific methodology able to present empirical aspects, mathematics, philosophic and religious in communion; c) to understand, from the Newtonian concepts, both concerning man's role in the world as the "notional notions" of mass, space, time and movement, necessary for analysis and understanding of certain metaphysical aspects in the Newtonian physics; d) to present the Newtonian concepts related to the ether, to understand why it necessarily assumes metaphysics characteristics and mediation between the bodies; e) to present and understand the factors that lead the empiricist Newton to assume the religion in his mechanics, as well as, the existence and functions of God in nature, to object to the higher content of his metaphysics; f) to highlight the metaphysical elements of his classical mechanics, that confirm the presence of concepts like God Creator and Preserver of the natural laws; g) at last, to analyze the importance of Newton to the modern metaphysics and the legacy to philosophy of science at sec. XVII to science contemporary

Efeito do alerta e valência emocional nos componentes de lembrança e familiaridade da memória episódica

The episodic memory system allows us to retrieve information about events, including its contextual aspects. It has been suggested that episodic memory is composed by two independent components: recollection and familiarity. Recollection is related to the vivid e detailed retrieval of item and contextual information, while familiarity is the capability to recognize items previously seen as familiars. Despite the fact that emotion is one of the most influent process on memory, only a few studies have investigated its effect on recollection and familiarity. Another limitation of studies about the effect of emotion on memory is that the majority of them have not adequately considered the differential effects of arousal and positive/negative valence. The main purpose of the current work is to investigate the independent effect of emotional valence and arousal on recollection and familiarity, as well as to test some hypothesis that have been suggested about the effect of emotion on episodic memory. The participants of the research performed a recognition task for three lists of emotional pictures: high arousal negative, high arousal positive and low arousal positive. At the test session, participants also rated the confidence level of their responses. The confidence ratings were used to plot ROC curves and estimate the contributions of recollection and familiarity of recognition performance. As the main results, we found that negative valence enhanced the component of recollection without any effect on familiarity or recognition accuracy. Arousal did not affect recognition performance or their components, but high arousal was associated with a higher proportion of false memories. This work highlight the importance of to consider both the emotional dimensions and episodic memory components in the study of emotion effect on episodic memory, since they interact in complex and independent way