In ethology, and more generally in the study of animal behavior, observations are _theory-laden_. A review of theories of animal behavior reveals that the animal is a variable _object_, shaped by variable levels of causality. This approach to animal behavior, which differs radically from the way psychology studies human behavior, is a consequence of the difficulty of treating animals as _subjects_ in ethology, where they are most often studied _in the third person_. However, there is a subjectivist tradition in the (...) study of animal behavior, influenced by a phenomenological background. Our aim to promote a _at first person_ approach has led us to propose an etho-phenomenology based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Francisco Varela’s enaction theory and constructivist psychology. However, in order to legitimize this approach to animal behavior, we apply it here to behaviors that seem abnormal according to traditional explanatory frameworks, such as actospatiality, tail carrying in mice or expressing ambivalence displayed through color in octopuses. Furthermore, to explore issues such as human-animal communication, the etho-phenomenological perspective is combined with the notion of participatory sense-making, leading us to propose a theory of emotional hybridization. (shrink)

This article is a review of Franz Brenatno’s material ontology. We support the thesis that Brentano defends an original type of monism. This monism can be seen as the conjunction of three theories: reism (the thesis that there are only concrete individual things), priority monism (the thesis that there is only one substance), and supersubstantivalism (the thesis that this substance is space).

In this article, my objective is to confront a structural reading with an ontological reading concerning the genesis and clinical interpretation of dreams, regarding the formal operators who guide both readings, highlighting their differences. Beyond the “symbolic operator” - tasked with explaining the formation of unconscious desires that the dream would fulfill - it is my purpose to discuss the difference how - in each reading - the “real operator” is employed. In both, the real is pointed out as what (...) would explain the emergence of anguish before which the dream would find a limit, leading the dreamer to awake. Therefore, according to each of the readings, the real concerns very different occurrences. And the question I intend to answer in this article is: how does each of these ways of understanding the real affect the comprehension of what anguish is in the dream field? In what sense, for Merleau-Ponty, can the dream be understood as a surreal passage? (shrink)

Dialectica, Volume 73, Issue 4, Page 591-597, December 2019.