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Julio Cabrera

78 quotes

“What is meant by "ethics" in this initial context of reflection cannot be anything too complicated or strongly committed to particular ethical theories, but rather quite a basic concept that could be accepted by them all. I propose to speak of a "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" (FEA from now on) to refer to the following concept: In decisions and actions, we must take also into account the moral and sensitive interests of others and not only our own, trying not to give systematic primacy to the latter just because they are our interests.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Between two deaths: from born death to dead death, 2011
“Regretting having to die should be structurally identical to regretting being born, because it is not in our power being born in a non-mortal way.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Between two deaths: from born death to dead death, 2011
“The best would have been not to be born. Not being born is, in a negative ethics, the absolute good; but it is, precisely, the good that cannot be sought. (Attention: the situation is more radical than in the case of goods that can be sought but never achieved; not being born cannot even be sought).”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Summary of the ethical question in Julio Cabrera's Philosophy, 2014, p. 8
“People talk about the "wonderful experience of parenthood". Have you ever wondered why it is so wonderful? It may be wonderful because it is very manipulative; manipulating gives a lot of pleasure, because you have a person in your hands. When the child is small you wear it as you want, comb as you want, cut the hair, put on the table, as I have frequently seen it. The adults play with the child, people who would have no subject of conversation or interaction, when their empty, insignificant gray lives would come to light, the child saves them.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Birth as a bioethical problem: first steps towards a radical bioethics, 2018, 44:38–45:22 min.
“Young children continue to cry a lot for several years; they cry and cry endlessly; they may bother us often, but they are right and we have to be moved by their crying and accept it as a perfectly fair reaction to what has been done to them; some cry until quite advanced ages, until finding other forms of protest and manifestation of their suffering; even as adults, we continue to cry in a variety of ways.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Acerca da superioridade intelectual e existencial do pessimismo sobre o otimismo (replica a Marcus Valério), 2010, p. 26
“Parents know perfectly well that they are giving a product of doubtful quality only for their own accomplishment and happiness; in admitting that the person may want to return it, they themselves fully realize the dubious value of the gift.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Acerca da superioridade intelectual e existencial do pessimismo sobre o otimismo (replica a Marcus Valério), 2010, p. 28
“The problem is that they come here and talk about their philosophical problems in their language, and we go there and talk about their philosophical problems in their language.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A questão da filosofia no Brasil no contexto da reflexão sobre civilização e barbárie no pensamento argentino, 2009
“We do not just live in an English-speaking world. We live in an English-writing and English-reading world, an English thinking-world. If we write philosophy in Spanish or Portuguese (for example), our thoughts simply do not come into existence; they remain in a kind of limbo, not even as bad or trivial (this would show some kind of visibility), but as not existent at all.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why philosophy not written in English does not exist: hegemonic language as ontological policy. The case of South-American antinatalism, 2018, p. 1
“Killing someone and giving birth to someone are two violent actions through which, magically, man tries to put himself in God’s place. The victim of a homicide is always helpless, but never as helpless as the victim of a birth. There is as much innocent blood spilled in a childbirth as in a homicide. If procreation is a free choice, then life is fundamentally unnecessary pain.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Projeto de Ética Negativa (1989), back cover ‎
“If freedom, according to traditional morality itself, is a fundamental ethical value, the very basis of ethics, one must be aware that the creation of a child may be the first huge disrespect of the freedom of the human person. The issue of freedom suffers here from the same problem as the issue of pain: it is a matter of ethical value that the traditional affirmative ethics is unable to radicalize.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Projeto de Ética Negativa (1989), p. 28 ‎
“Philosophers have always spoken of life as a "preparation for death", and of philosophy as a "learning to die". But there is a wisdom prior to that: learning to abstain; not putting anyone in the situation of having to learn to die.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Porque te amo, não nascerás! Nascituri te salutant, 2009, p. 79
“We are not nihilistic towards life - it is life that is nihilistic towards us. It is life that denies us, expels us, and kills us. Do we not want to live intensely and forever? Are we the ones denying life? Is it not life that denies us day by day?”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Devorando Nietzsche: por um niilismo sul-americano (2022), pp. 76-77
“It is not morality that denies life - it is life that denies itself, that kills itself by killing us. Life is suicidal. We try to live intensely, but life, intensely, kills us. Life itself is skeptical - it doesn't believe in anything it creates. It creates only to destroy what it has created. It doesn't need nihilists to deny itself, nor does it need suicides to commit suicide. We suffer because we are part of life's suicide weapon, part of what it daily kills.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Devorando Nietzsche: por um niilismo sul-americano (2022), p. 77
“This minority that remains tense, that is unable to get distracted, that cannot relax, that listens to others, that is moved by their stories, that maintains an acute sensitivity to the problems and sufferings of others - this minority is usually sick, even physically, like the Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's novel "The Idiot," who was capable of a sublime surrender to others only due to suffering from epilepsy. "Normal" people are laid-back and therefore insensitive and morally inconsiderate, those who yawn while their friend is telling them about their most terrible problems.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Devorando Nietzsche: por um niilismo sul-americano (2022), p. 80
“I start from the perspective that all that philosophers thought and developed in terms of reflection on language, whatever their perspective and methodology of access (analytic, hermeneutics, phenomenology, transcendental philosophy, critique of ideologies, psychoanalysis) should be considered as "philosophy of language" (...) My idea is that these issues are best viewed not from a single perspective, but from the confluence of several of them.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Margens das filosofias da linguagem, Editora da UnB, Brasilia, 2009 (1st reprint), p. 14
“To paraphrase what Norberto Bobbio (...) once said about Marxism, "one of my favorite phrases is that today one cannot be a good Marxist being only a Marxist. But the Marxist has an irresistible tendency to be just... Marxist, "one could say that today one cannot be a good analytic philosopher being only analytical. But the analytic has an irresistible tendency to be just... analytical.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Margens das filosofias da linguagem, Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2009 (1st reprint), p. 15
“Theory of knowledge, ethics and aesthetics are not only three academic disciplines, but three major human accesses to the world (...) Making the world meaningful is an epistemological-ethical-aesthetic undertaking (...) Different philosophies of language will accentuate one or other of these functions. (...) Knowing the world is not all that man does with it, and many thinkers (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud) have already doubted that knowing it should be considered as the most basic and profound relation that man can establish with the world.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Margens das filosofias da linguagem, Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2009 (1st reprint), p. 21
“(...) "meanings", besides having objective dimensions, are also hermeneutic and temporal-historical instances, precisely those that the analytical philosophize cannot grasp, because they are situated beyond their limits of understanding. "Meanings" are instances that can only be fully studied by other philosophies of language, capable of incorporating these experiential elements.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Margens das filosofias da linguagem, Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2009 (1st reprint), p. 55
“Heidegger's text [On the Essence of Language] will not be indicative of an object already made, but will consist of clues about how to live an experience with speech, an experience that is not "narrated" in the text, but elicited by him. The text will try to put the reader in a kind of scope or "environment" that gives opportunity to this experience.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Margens das filosofias da linguagem, Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2009 (1st reprint), p. 144
“Let us think, for example, of the experience of speaking a foreign language and what happens when one speaks "perfectly and without error", when one speaks German "as a German", and in what happens, on the contrary, when one speaks imperfectly, when, through the babble of one who "does not master a language", a vital dimension is shown that is hidden in the perfectly "dominated" language.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Margens das filosofias da linguagem, Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2009 (1st reprint), p. 145
“Psychoanalysis is not science. But very few things are science. Nor is Kant's ethics a science, but it is a high-level reflection about the human being in his relation with the world, as is Freud's reflection. What seems curious is the scarce insistence about the fact that Kantian ethics is not science, while everyone seems so preoccupied with stressing the non-scientificity of psychoanalysis.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Margens das filosofias da linguagem, Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2009 (1st reprint), p. 224
“Psychoanalysis's interest in discursive breakdown is not merely theoretical, but also because it is regularly marked by suffering, by some kind of emotional involvement (...) Suffering is not an external "accompaniment" to linguistic anomalies, but a constituent part of them. The discursive break is the manifestation of a psychic break. The generation of language anomalies and discontinuities is linked to the attempt to avoid displeasure. The actual compactness of the linguistic chain, that is, the correct filling of it through authentic signs would generate unbearable suffering.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Margens das filosofias da linguagem, Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2009 (1st reprint), p. 230
“The study of "lexical inferences" (if they exist) should be something that oscillates (...) between ML [Mathematical Logic] and informal logic. In historical terms, we like to say that this is a wittgensteinean undertaking of the intermediate period (...) something that has already passed beyond the deception of the one-dimensional semantics of the Tractatus, but which has not yet fallen into the dense multidimensionality of Philosophical Investigations (...)”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Inferências lexicais e Interpretação de redes de predicados. Editora da UnB, Brasília, 2007 (co-authored by Olavo da Silva Filho), p. 15
“The current professionalized philosophy has been openly understood as "apathetic," without pathos, exclusively driven by the intellect and leaving aside emotions and sentimental impacts. Only a few philosophers of the last two centuries (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Heidegger) have resisted this tradition by questioning the hegemony of intellectualist reason and the systematic exclusion of the emotional component in the task of grasping the world. In this sense, we can call these thinkers of the European tradition "cinematographic".”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 9
“Wouldn't much of what Heidegger, for example, tries to say, almost without success, forcing the German language, forcing it to generate difficultly intelligible phrases, or Hegel's attempts to think the work of the concept "temporarily" putting it "on movement" wouldn't be much better exposed through the images arising from the calm and thoughtful displacement of a cinematic camera?”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 19
“Cinema does not eliminate the requirement of truth and universality, but (...) redefines them within the logopathic phenomenon (...) the universality of cinema is peculiar, it belongs more to the order of possibility than to necessity. Cinema is universal, not in the sense of "necessarily happens to everyone", but in the sense of "could happen to anyone”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 25
“(...) the cinematographic image cannot show without questioning, without destructuring, repositioning, twisting, distorting. Cinema cannot be the pure "record of the real" that the photographic conception of cinema usually formulates (and which currents like Italian neorealism have tried to take advantage of).”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 43
“By exerting this effect of shock, visual violence, assault on sensibility, aggressiveness in the show, it is possible for the viewer to acquire acute awareness of a moral or epistemological problem as may not happen to him by reading a treatise on the subject. This "sensitization of concepts" may even question some of the traditional solutions of philosophical questions offered by the concept written throughout the history of philosophy (...)”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015(2nd edition), p. 47
“By exerting this effect of shock, visual violence, assault on sensibility, aggressiveness in the activity of showing, it is possible for the viewer to acquire acute awareness of a moral or epistemological problem as may not happen to him by reading a treatise on the subject. This "sensitization of concepts" may even question some of the traditional solutions of philosophical questions offered by the concept written throughout the history of philosophy (...)”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 47
“Films do not "have" a meaning that has to be interpreted, but they establish with the viewer an interrelationship from which an unintended meaning arises which was nowhere waiting to be found.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015, (2nd edition), p. 54
“Blow-up [Antonioni] shows what Descartes says: our senses deceive us. However, there is no cogito in the images of this film that helps to overcome the unbearable state of doubt provoked by the ambiguity of the facts. Thomas [the young photographer of this film] cannot protect himself in any cozy subjectivity; on the contrary, it is his subjectivity that is stolen by the mysterious force of things.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015, (2nd edition), p. 171
“A "quiet" movie in which "nothing happens", where people are shown looking through the windows, walking the streets, living in completely banal situations, or simply looking at each other without saying anything, does not satisfy the spectator eager for novelty ( ...) this type of spectator usually says, after watching an ontological film, that he did not like it because in it "nothing happens": precisely the kind of attitude that Heidegger intends to provoke in his writings, making the absence of pressing entities put us in touch with the being.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 366
“(...) Paradoxically, the silent cinema inaugurates the act of saying, and the audio cinema the act of silencing. Saying does not need words, but silencing does. The lack of sound was not a "limitation" for silent movies, but rather the lack of silence. And this does not seem to be a strictly Wittgensteinian type of limit.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cine: 100 años de Filosofía. Gedisa, Barcelona, 2015 (2nd edition), p. 426
“Helplessness is hidden or camouflaged under the professionalised forms of philosophizing, both in analytical philosophy and in the studies of the "experts on Nietzsche". The fragility intrinsic to all philosophizing (all living) is disguised as an apparently firm, secure and technical way of "mastering subjects" and constructing arguments. But even there, philosophizing cannot hide its original helplessness.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diário de um filósofo no Brasil. Editora Unijuí, Ijuí, 2013 (2nd edition), p. 22
“(...) "institutional philosophy" has transformed philosophical activity into a series of automatic and lifeless movements; in an enormous apparatus where teachers and students appear submitted to static and meaningless routines. (...) students often write their work far from what they would really like to do, works that will be read absentmindedly (and then shelved in large thesis banks that nobody consults) by professors increasingly busy with administrative and political tasks, and who also offer, absentmindedly, the classes that their students will listen for by obligation.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diário de um filósofo no Brasil. Editora Unijuí, Ijuí, 2013 (2nd edition), p. 80
“At least two different ways of receiving the European legacy could be clearly formulated: (1) Continue to expose and spread the thought generated in Europe; or: (2) Try to receive this legacy in order to assume the same creative attitude that the Europeans have taken to build, value and spread their own philosophy. In option (1), Europe bequeathed us an object of study; in the alternative (2), Europe bequeaths us an attitude. Assuming the first alternative, we present the contents of European philosophy; assuming the second, we try to make philosophy as the Europeans did theirs.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diário de um filósofo no Brasil. Editora Unijuí, Ijuí, 2013 (2nd edition), p. 219-220
“In a first moment, philosophizing is, for me, the fundamental way of man's installation in the world: a way that is insecure, fearful, ignorant, unsatisfied, desirous, incomplete, and suffering. I link philosophizing with despair. Philosophizing is the very cry of finitude, whatever the scope or level where it manifests itself. These primary feelings are present in all people, so that at this first moment, and as was always said before the professionalization of philosophy, we are all philosophers for the simple and terrible fact that we are in the peculiar human way of being: finite, mortal, threatened, helpless, ignorant, and questioning beings, thrown into an unwelcoming world. In the midst of the tumult of their daily concerns and personal dramas, from time to time the essential questions arise in all people, literate or illiterate, inevitably: meaning, death, pain. These questions are immediately buried by the majority, or put aside; for long periods, one lives as if they didn't exist. In a second thought, on the contrary, almost nobody is a philosopher, not even most philosophy professors. For philosophers are those questioning and wanting beings who turn their threatened finitude into an obsessive quest for knowledge and a powerful form of sensibility (and sexuality!) that manifests total priority over any other concern; not because the philosopher sets out to do so, but because he is compulsively cast into this peculiar form of existence. It is as if the philosopher, in this second sense, exacerbates or brings to a paroxysm that which is a fleeting and dispensable moment for most people. The philosopher is the one for whom those anxious and uncomfortable questions are his permanent atmosphere, the air he breathes, the center of gravitation of his way of being. The obsession with knowledge, the susceptibility to all that is finite, incomplete and insecure, to the constant threat of the world, to despair without consolation, bring new misfortunes to the philosopher, not something like a "wisdom of life." On the contrary, humans who simply live the drama of being human without reflecting it, possess strengths, defenses, and wisdoms that the philosopher loses in the very instant he sets out to reflect. In this sense, the genuine philosopher has no wisdom to offer; on the contrary, he will spend his life trying to recover, through thought, the wisdom he believed he had when he was not a philosopher (Wittgenstein: a tragicomic example of this).”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Filosofia (2011)
“The moral tradition says: we have many natural tendencies, but as ethical human beings we have to try to overcome natural impulses. For example, we are naturally violent; human beings are naturally very selfish, trying to focus their decisions on themselves, but ethics is always saying: you have to fight against these natural tendencies. You cannot be all the violent that nature commands, you cannot be everything selfish that nature asks for. So if you tell me that procreation is natural, being natural does not show it to be moral. On the contrary, forgotten Brazilian philosophers like Tobias Barreto put exactly the opposite. Tobias Barreto thought that when something is natural it is bad, and we have to fight it. (The enslavement of one people over others is natural, but it is cultural that slavery must not exist.) So do not tell me that procreation is natural and so we have to do it. All human morality is unnatural; all human morality is artificial, just as our feeding systems in our sophisticated restaurants are also artificial and unnatural. What is the animal that eats the way we eat? Even our sexuality is artificial; it is not purely instinctual, but largely symbolic. If you had that argument in your sleeve, you would still have to show that what comes from nature is moral, because there are many arguments showing that what comes from nature can be opposite of morality.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Birth as a bioethical problem: first steps towards a radical bioethics, 2018, 47:49–49:30 min.
“MV says that the rejection of life appears in later states, but that at the time of birth, and already before, everything is acceptance of life. But, is this so?? What can be said of the outcry with which children are born, of the primordial cry, of the first traumatic contact (studied by Freud) with the world? Is the child’s outcry not already his first philosophical opinion about the world? Why is he not born laughing, or at least calm? When the baby is dumped into the world at the time of childbirth, his first reaction is pessimistic, a protest against disregard and disturbance, an initial outcry that he did not have to learn, as he will have to learn to laugh in the first few weeks or even months of life (which already marks, in the very inaugural act of being, the pessimistic asymmetry: the baby learns to laugh, but is born crying); the baby is born, forced by the desires of others, in an initial desperation, in a cry of deep and abysmal helplessness, in a primordial terror that, immediately, through movements, caresses, comforts, etc., adults will try to soften; movements that will be repeated throughout his life: initial despair followed by protective comforts; but the comforts are posterior to the despair; the despair comes first, and the comforts are the reactions. They are not on the same level. Asymmetry!”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Acerca da superioridade intelectual e existencial do pessimismo sobre o otimismo (replica a Marcus Valério), 2010, p. 24-25
“What we notice, for example, when we get involved in ethical discussions on procreation, abortion or death penalty or in logical debates on analyticity, non-classic logics or lexical connections, is that the opposite positions are perfectly tenable, although they are not the positions that we ourselves prefer to take. We understand that our position about, for example, abortion, comes from a set of previous assumptions, preferences, dislikes, past experiences, education and so on, all elements and circumstances that oriented our choice of categories, concepts and modes of reasoning that certainly should greatly differ from the set of arguments of our interlocutors in a dialogue about the matter. Anything we can present about controversial topics like these would be normally opposed or refused by the other party through all kinds of objections. Opposition is not an anomaly, but the current form in which philosophy develops. Two human beings engaging in a discussion about philosophical questions are going naturally and per force to differ in substance and method in almost any topic at issue. What is the point in trying to impose one's own perspective?”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The negative approach to argumentation, 2011
“Despite Singer's proud affirmative statement that he has finally discovered the definitive solution to the problem of abortion and can finally settle the issue, his "proof" depends on many possible sub-arguments (which he prefers not to "see"). His pro-abortion argument can only be established if we accept some kind of utilitarian ethics according to which the well-being of concrete human beings is above any abstract or metaphysical idea of the "human person" (something that would make them "intrinsically valuable"). It also depends on the idea that what is ethically relevant is that humans do not suffer unnecessary pain, and on the thesis that a human being can be defined by a set of well-defined relevant properties (the famous "indicators of humanity"). It also depends on a very specific definition of the terms "homicide" and "innocent" in the expression "innocent human being", and on the deactivation of the idea of "potentiality", in the sense that someone can be potentially a thing at time t + 1, which would give him rights at t. It is a large number of assumptions without which the "objective" and "definitive" conclusion would not follow. Any debater who does not accept at least one of these assumptions will not accept Singer's "indisputable results". And contrary to what he says, those who do not accept them are not "simply wrong", but they assume other perfectly plausible, sustainable and rational assumptions and Gestalten within the network of arguments. Singer drastically ignores all the questions and obstacles in his line of argument (e.g., the controversy over "indicators of humanity"), and it is only in this way that he can still feed the illusion of having "solved" the problem of abortion.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introdução a uma abordagem negativa da argumentação, 2017, p. 164
“One of the most curious questions that I hear in discussions about philosophy in Brazil is that my approach is "markedly political," as if I were introducing politics into the aseptic and uncontaminated body of "pure philosophy" (... ) I want to say from the outset that the ideas that European philosophy is a universal philosophy, and that thoughts born in Latin America or Africa are national, are end-to-end policies; they are part of a policy that, having been instituted and enforced in a hegemonic way, hides its own ideological traits by presenting itself as if it were merely the absolute and objective truth.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Europeu não significa universal, brasileiro não significa nacional. Revista Nabuco, Year 1, number 2, December 2014-January 2015, p. 15.
“It may be accepted that philosophical thoughts are universal in the sense of being of interest to humans from anywhere on the planet (...) However, if we do not want to formulate this universality in metaphysical or transcendental terms, we will have to conceive it as the result of a historical process, with a provenance, a circumstance and a perspective, which does not damage the universality of the thought (...) but situates it. What is denied is the idea that philosophical thoughts can arise directly from human reason, from a vision of nowhere. The universality of thoughts does not exempt them from having an origin (...)”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Europeu não significa universal, brasileiro não significa nacional. Revista Nabuco, Year 1, number 2, December 2014-January 2015, p. 18.
“The place of birth as an organizing center is part of the circumstances of thought, but does not exhaust them. The "from Brazil" is not only a national reference, but an existential-historical circumstance, linked to the particular configuration of the world that we make when we see it from South America and not from Ethiopia or Canada. Names like "Brazil," "Israel," or "Paris," do not allude to nations, but to organizational prospects of the world. While it makes some sense to state that in a globalized world the narrow idea of nation is diluted, it may be fallacious to say that globalization suppresses perspectives and circumstances from which this globalization is to be lived and thought.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Europeu não significa universal, brasileiro não significa nacional. Revista Nabuco, Year 1, number 2, December 2014-January 2015, p. 33.
“Students are taught to do philosophy only in one way, in a single style and supported in a single tradition, by studying thoughts from only four or five countries on the planet. Latin American problems and authors (...) seem relevant to the future of young students of philosophy, by posing critical questions to them rather than simply inserting them as workers and consumers of philosophy within a supposedly objective system. Instead of deciding for the student in a paternalistic way, we should find a space for information and discussion where all ways of doing philosophy are presented, discussed and eventually excluded, because even to exclude philosophies they must appear.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Europeu não significa universal, brasileiro não significa nacional. Revista Nabuco, Year 1, number 2, December 2014-January 2015, p. 46.
“In the light of natural ontology, it is not correct the argument that we do not know anything about our possible offsprings, for example, about the capacity they will have to overcome structural pain; because even we do not know, for example, whether they will enjoy traveling, working or studying classical languages, we do know they will be indigent, decadent, vacating beings who will start dying since birth, who will face and be characterized by systematic dysfunctions, who will have to constitute their own beings as beings-against-the-others – in the sense of dealing with aggressiveness and having to discharge it over others – who will lose those they love and be lost by those who love them, and time will take everything they manage to build.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A critique of affirmative morality (A reflection on death, birth and the value of life), (2014), p. 54 ‎
“We undoubtedly would not morally justify the behavior of someone who sent a colleague to a dangerous situation by saying: "I sent him there because I know he is strong and he will manage well". The "strengths" of the newborn do not relieve in anything the moral responsibility of the procreator. Anyone would answer: "This is irrelevant. Your role in the matter consisted of sending people to a situation you know was difficult and painful and you could avoid it. Your predictions about their reacting manners do not decrease in anything your responsibility". In the case of procreation, the reasoning could be the same, and in a notorious emphatic way, since in any intra-worldly situation with already existing people in which we send someone to a position known as painful, the other one could always run away from pain to the extent his being is already in the world and he could predict danger and try to avoid being exposed to a disregarding and manipulative maneuver. In the case of the one who is being born, by contrast, this is not possible at all because it is precisely his very being that is being manufactured and used. Concerning birth, therefore, manipulation seems to be total.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A critique of affirmative morality (A reflection on death, birth and the value of life), (2014), pp. 54-55 ‎
“Thus, whoever has said to procreate for love, as others kill for hate, might have said a truth, but, no doubt, this person has not given any moral justification for procreation. Saying you have had a child "for love" is a manner of saying you have had him or her compulsively, according to the wild rhythms of life. In a similar way, we might intensely love our parents and, at the same time, consider fatherhood ethically-rationally problematic, and visualize we have been manipulated by them. I may continue to love after having detected immorality, there is nothing contradictory on that. Neither would morally justify a homicide saying we have done it for hate, nor a suicide saying we have done it "for hate against ourselves". Something can continue to be ethically problematic even when guided by love.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A critique of affirmative morality (A reflection on death, birth and the value of life), (2014), p. 59 ‎
“People proclaim that "the experience of parenthood is extraordinary" and recommend it to all (and denigrate those who have not gone through it). But we can wonder: "Extraordinary for whom?" It is certainly extraordinary for the parents. When they say that not only they will be happy and satisfied with the experience but also their children, they do not realize the immense asymmetry and mismatch between these two experiences, the experience of creating and of being created. The created child is compelled to accept the experience, to make it good and interesting (and even extraordinary); what other option would they have? This obligation is not present in the parents, where the "extraordinary" nature of the experience is part of an engaging and unilateral project. The situations of both parties are not comparable. Thus, when some reply: "There is no sense in you wanting to show that life is bad; you cannot decide for your child; maybe they will like to live," what does that mean? Of course, in a sense, they are compelled to like life! But this "liking" will always be a desperate acceptance. The created child is not in a position of really liking life. They could like it if they had really chosen to come into being. Faced with the fait accompli, they are forced to cling desperately to life. Either they "like it" or they will be destroyed (by a mental illness, or by the hostility of others).”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Porque te amo, não nascerás! Nascituri te salutant, 2009, pp. 25–26
“The being of human life is to have arisen as a force contrary to the internal terminality of being: the human being decays, deteriorates and dies in the sense of doing all this in an oppositional, reactive, escaping manner, as if the being given to humans could not be lived in its positivity but always negatively, reactively, creatively. But the terminality of being will eventually occupy all the creative space, swallowing the “mortal-being” that decays, deteriorates and dies. In its place will appear the hole that constituted it from the very beginning and that only now became totally evident.”
Julio Cabrera (born 1944) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Porque te amo, não nascerás! Nascituri te salutant, 2009, p. 34