The creation of the Philosophy Department and the reopening of the Undergraduate Course in Philosophy at the Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL) during the 1990s started a series of activities that allowed for the viability of a stricto sensu Postgraduate Program in Philosophy. It was years of hard work and effort: with the qualification of its teaching staff, the development of research projects (with the financial support of CNPq and Fundação Araucária), the progressive improvement of its library with the aim of giving suitable support to the research activities of the professors at all levels, from Undergraduate to the Postgraduate ones, lato sensu and, finally, stricto sensu at Masters and Doctorate levels.

In this regard, consolidating our Masters and Doctorate Program is an act inextricably connected to the intention of fully giving attention to the inseparable bond between teaching and research that, since the undergraduate level, characterizes the efforts of UEL Philosophy Department and composes something like its “natural vocation”. In this sense, the Masters and Doctorate degrees offered by this Department mean the elevation of its academic efforts to an excellence level in stricto sensu Postgraduation.

In this way, the Postgraduation Philosophy Program is not only linking the professor’s commitment to developing and disseminating its research at Doctorate and Post-Doctorate levels with the formation of new researchers but is also serving an always-growing demand for an ever-renewed board of professionals with deep knowledge in the Philosophy area in the University itself, as well as in the North Parana, west of São Paulo and southwest of Mato Grosso do Sul regions.

We opted for Philosophy as an area of concentration as a result of a long decantation of topics in the History of Philosophy which represented a confluence of interests and the articulation of works already under development, be that in the form of groups and research projects, as well as congresses and conferences.    

Thus, after a laborious process of joint reflection, the professors of the Department were successful in projecting their academic and investigative efforts around two main research lines:

• Knowledge and Subjectivity
• Ethics and Political Philosophy

Such a general result, leading the professors to discussions culminating in this proposal, was considered extremely satisfactory. It allows for a convincing alignment of fundamental academic interests and serves as a form of benchmarking of the teaching and research activities throughout the years. 

Research Lines

Although each research line has its own characteristics, there is flexibility in some cases, as when a professor of a given line guides works from another one, given that some student’s projects touch upon philosophers and themes close to the professor’s specialties, but with topics not fitting for that particular line.

Research line 1: Knowledge and subjectivity

This line works both with specific questions of each theme and the intersection among them. The “Knowledge” thematic frame ranges from investigations about History of Science, justification, realism vs. anti-realism, truth status in sciences, science paradigms, rationality, logic and so on. In the “Subjectivity” thematic frame, one is concerned with questions such as nihilism, metaphysics and post-metaphysics, language, phenomenology, hermeneutics, difference, creation and biopolitics, the constitution of subjectivity in Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Psychology. In the intersection between these two thematic frames, there is the problematization of the status of subjectivity, rationality and knowledge in phenomenology, hermeneutics, language and epistemology, as well as the relation of this thematic with science, technology and the critique of Metaphysics.

Research line 2: Ethics and Political Philosophy

The main concern of this research line is the discussion of classic and contemporary themes regarding ethical and political reflection, such as the justification of State authority, legitimacy criteria of political power exercise, the conditions of citizenship exercise in pluralist societies, criteria for the correction of human being moral conduct, the conditions for the attribution of moral and legal responsibility, the relationship between moral, politics and law, the nature and basis for human rights justification, the specificity of ethical, political and legal spheres in comparison and contrast with other spheres of human investigation and its relation with other areas of human knowledge as sciences, technology and ontology. These themes are discussed both from historical and conceptual perspectives. From the historical one, one deals with these themes in dialogue with classical thinkers of the History of Philosophy and, from a conceptual perspective, one tries to examine the different answers to these problems considering their plausibility and justification under different methodological criteria.

Themes of interest

Aguinaldo Pavão

Themes and preferable problems:

• The foundation of morality in Schopenhauer.
• Freedom and moral responsibility in Schopenhauer.
• Justice and charity as virtues in Schopenhauer.
• Justice and theory of Law in Schopenhauer.
• The doctrine of Wisdom, sense of existence, metaphysic of love and metaphysic of death in Schopenhauer.
• The moral philosophy of Schopenhauer and its relationship with the moral philosophy of Kant.
• The relation between the legal and political philosophy of Kant with the political philosophy of Rawls.

Arlei de Espíndola

 Themes and preferable problems:

• The ethical, political, and pedagogical thought of Rousseau
• Rousseau and his reading sources in the antique thought.
• Philosophy modern Natural Law: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
• Rousseau and Montaigne (while reading source)
• Interlocution and connections among Feuerbach, Marx, and Rousseau.
• Contemporary reception of Rousseau’s political thought.

Preferable Authors: Rousseau; Hobbes; Locke; Feuerbach; Marx

Andrea Faggion

Themes and preferable problems:

• The relationship between Law and Morality
• Practical rationale and legal argumentation
• The Nature of the legal norm
• Coordination and social conventions
• Political Morality: the legitimacy of political/moral authority obligation to obey positive laws;
• Liberal Theories of justice
• Moral value.

Preferable Authors:

Robert Nozick, Hebert L. A., Jonh Finnis, Joseph Raz, Neil McCormick and Ronald Dworkin, among others, preferably belonging to the philosophical Anglo-American tradition.

Charles Feldhaus

Themes and preferable problems and authors:

• Moral Contemporary Philosophy (Jurgen Habermas, John Rawls, Peter Singer, Richard Hare, Allan Gibbard)
• Normative Theories: moral contra-actualism (Rawls), ethical-discursive conceptions (Habermas), utilitarian ethics (Singer and Hare)
• Meta-ethical theories: expressivism of norms (Gibbard), cognitivism without realism (Habermas)
• Applied Ethics: bioethics (Habermas, Singer, Hare)
• Political and Contemporary Philosophy (Jurgen Habermas, Jonh Rawls, Axel Honneth)
•  Theories of social justice with an emphasis in the discussion of questions about the equality point: utilitarianism (well-being), Rawls (primary assets), Dworkin (resources), Sen and Nussbaum (capacity; Honneth (recognition); Fraser (redistribution and recognition) ;
• Normative Theories of State of Law and Democracy:  proceduralist paradigm of Law (Habermas), political liberalism (Rawls), recognition paradigm (Honneth)

Eder Soares Santos

Themes and preferable problems:

• Ontology in Heidegger
• Ontology in psychoanalysis
• Theory of the personal maturity of Winnicott
• Paradigms of psychoanalysis
• Ennativism
• Western and Eastern Dialogue in philosophy

Fábio César Scherer

Themes and preferable problems:

• Analysis and synthesis methods
• Knowledge and heuristic theory
• Law and Political Philosophy
• History Philosophy
• Moral Philosophy
• New Kantism of the Marburg School
• Social justice conceptions

Preferable authors

Descartes, Leibniz, Wolf, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Lange, Hermann Cohen, Rodolf Stammler, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer and Leonard Nelson, among others, preferably related com a justice thematic of social or analysis and synthesis of the method.

Gelson Liston

Themes and preferable problems and authors:

• Logical Positivism: Carnap, Neurath, Friedman.
• Critical Rationalism: Popper.
• Epistemological Anarchism and Scientific Rationality: Feverabend

José Fernandes Weber

Themes and preferable problems and author of interest to the guidance:

• Play (Nietzsche, Fink, Gadamer).
• Imagination/Image (Fichte, Husserl, Fink, Bachelard, Flusser, Simondon).
• Philosophy of technique (Heidegger, Simondon, Flusser, Sloterdijk).
• Esthetics / Philosophy of Art/ Tragic (German Romantism, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nelson Rodrigues)
• Nihilism / metaphysics / Religion (Schopenhauer; Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Heidegger).
• Constitution of the Human/ animal-human Relation / Body (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sloterdijk).
• Formation (Bildung/Education while philosophical problem (Nietzsche, Classicism and Romanticism, Hölderlin, Fink)
• Life Wisdom, the art of living, experimentation, care, and exercise – contemporary approaches of “fend for yourself” (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Sloterdijk)

Marcos Nalli

Themes and preferable problems:

• Biopolitics and correlated themes.
• Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.
• The interface between Structuralism and Phenomenology
• Themes of Science and Technology History: evolutionism, genetics, eugenia, biotechnology and nanotechnology.
• Philosophy of technique

Preferable authors:

Michel Foucault; Giorgio Aqamben; Roberto Esposito; Edmund Husserl, Paul Ricouer; Gilbert Simondon; Gilles Deleuze; Jacques Derrida

Marcos Rodrigues

Themes and preferable problems:

• Historiographic and socio-constructivist focus on History and Philosophy of Science;
• The realist argument of the best explanation of inference and its criticism.
• History of Science of the following episodes:
  • Problems about the heredity of 19th century.
  • The origin and development of modern genetics.
  • Ignaz Semmelweis and the puerperal fever
  • Darwinist evolutionism.
  • The controversy of the spontaneous generation.
  • The construction and acceptance of the double helix model of DNA

Preferable Authors

Thomas Kuhn/ Larry Laudan/ Bruno Latour/ David Bloor/ Alexander Bird/ Paul Thagard

Maria Cristina Müller

Themes and preferable problems:

• Political Philosophy
• Ethics
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Human Rights

Preferable Authors:

1. All the themes and discussions of Hannah Arendt’s works;
2. Interlocutions with Hannah Arendt’s works; Some themes and aspects of Giorgio Agambem’s works, Frankfurt School and Immanuel Kant.

Mirian Donat

Themes and preferable problems:

• Language Philosophy
• Philosophy of Psychology
• Ethics
• Subjectivity

Preferable Authors:

Authors of the Philosophy of Language and analytical contemporary philosophy, especially Wittgenstein.

Rodrigo Cumpre Rabelo

Themes and preferable problems:

• Art philosophy/Philosophical Aesthetics
• Philosophical Anthropology
• Critical Marxist Philosophy
• The relationship between Aesthetics and Ontology
• Marxist Aesthetics