La obra de Yosman Botero siempre ha orbitado entre paradojas. Desde los mismos lugares suplementarios de su obra, como los títulos de sus series Full of Emptiness (2013), Immaterial matter (2014) y Postcolombino (2016) se plantea una encrucijada tanto de la “supervivencia de las imágenes” del arte como de su capacidad comunicativa de la realidad: ya sea esta la experiencia del arte o la realidad social colombiana, o lo que sea que entendemos por “lo real”, tan cara a las (...) propuestas simulacionistas y posapropiacionistas de las décadas del setenta y ochenta. Y digo paradojas porque aquí se juega en los terrenos de una intención inexpresiva ante los procesos de creación de la imagen: Opie, Haring, Negret, Davies, Los Simpsons, Velásquez, o el conflicto colombiano, no son más que el mundo al que Yosman Botero se refiere; pero es un mundo sometido a los procesos de reproducción y mediación cultural, y reflejado en las imágenes. (shrink)

Several studies have shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality and blame to agents who perform actions that have harmful consequences. This kind of bias has problematic implications for jury decisions because it predicts that judgment in juries will malfunction if an action has a blameworthy effect. Most of these studies include in their design a vignette in which it is clear that agents have foreknowledge of the effects of their actions. This kind of design fails to replicate (...) trial situations where, in most cases, it is impossible to know with certainty whether agents have foreknowledge of the effects of their actions. In the present study, we adopt an alternative design that includes vignettes in which there is no direct evidence of foreknowledge to investigate the relationship between intentionality and blame in actions that have harmful and helpful effects. We find that people are still more likely to attribute intentionality to actions that produce harmful effects than actions that produce good effects. However, we find that people tend to attribute more blame when they have direct evidence of foreknowledge than when presented with an alternative design that does not include foreknowledge. Results indicate the relevant role that evidence of foreknowledge plays in experimental designs that study blame attribution. (shrink)

In this paper I address the question whether self-knowledge is compatible with an externalist individuation of mental content. Against some approaches, I consider self-knowledge as a genuine cognitive achievement. Though it is neither incorrigible nor infallible, self-knowledge is direct, a priori (no based on empirical investigation), presumptively true and authoritative. The problem is whether self-knowledge, so understood, is compatible with externalism. My answer will be affirmative. I will defend this species of compatibilism against several objections, in particular those based on (...) the possibility of an individual’s being unwittingly switched between worlds. (shrink)

The complex world of thought and sensitivity in the sphere of contemporary art has entailed the revision and exclusion of disciplines aimed at providing a model to explain and conceptualize reality. Art history, as one such discipline, has had many of its contributions questioned from Gombrich’s epistemological reformulation to the postmodern discourses, which extol the death of the author, the post-structuralist idea of tradition as a textual phenomenon, and the declaration of the death of history as a consequence of the (...) hybridization of disciplines and of other bran- ches of human knowledge. Nevertheless, it can be demonstrated that proposals as those by Julius von Schlosser and Giulio Carlo Argan enclose reflections and methodological aspects which can help us face the task of understanding and visualizing the mediating role of historians in the culture of sensitivity, and the art modulations that have resulted from the blows of history and that, in turn, have shaped both art and art history into what they are or can be to us today. (shrink)

The philosophical conception of mechanistic explanation is grounded on a limited number of canonical examples. These examples provide an overly narrow view of contemporary scientific practice, because they do not reflect the extent to which the heuristic strategies and descriptive practices that contribute to mechanistic explanation have evolved beyond the well-known methods of decomposition, localization, and pictorial representation. Recent examples from evolutionary robotics and network approaches to biology and neuroscience demonstrate the increasingly important role played by computer simulations and mathematical (...) representations in the epistemic practices of mechanism discovery and mechanism description. These examples also indicate that the scope of mechanistic explanation must be re-examined: With new and increasingly powerful methods of discovery and description comes the possibility of describing mechanisms far more complex than traditionally assumed. (shrink)

Franz Brentano is not usually associated with mathematics. Generally, only Brentano’s discussion of the continuum and his critique of the mathematical accounts of it is treated in the literature. It is this detailed critique which suggests that Brentano had more than a superficial familiarity with mathematics. Indeed, considering the authors and works quoted in his lectures, Brentano appears well-informed and quite interested in the mathematical research of his time. I specifically address his lectures here as there is much less to (...) be found about mathematics in his published works. Besides Brentano’s own work, it is quite remarkable to see that practically all of his better-known students sooner or later produced a work on the philosophy of mathematics. This also encourages the supposition not just of a common interest in the matter, but of a common theoretical core. All this prompts the question: Can we speak of a Brentanist philosophy of mathematics? (shrink)

In this paper I give a reconstruction of Dummett’s main arguments concerning the theory of the occult origin of the Tarot, and discuss the reasons behind the success of the Tarot pack – in particular the Major Arcana – in the history of card games. I also provide some indication of the links between Dummett’s interest in the history of card games and aspects of his philosophical background. As I am not an expert on card games, this paper is mainly (...) a personal tribute to a side of Dummett’s work to which philosophers have in general paid little attention. (shrink)

In this paper I apply a well known tension between cognitive and semantic aspects in Frege’s notion of sense to his treatment of indexicals. I first discusses Burge’s attack against the identification of sense and meaning, and Kripke’s answer supporting such identification. After showing different problems for both interpreters, the author claims that the tension in Frege’s conception of sense (semantic and cognitive) accounts for some shortcomings of both views, and that considering the tension helps in understanding apparently contradictory Fregean (...) claims about sameness of sense of sentences with indexicals. I conclude that the Fregean notion of sense, also in its cognitive aspect, cannot be reduced to linguistic meaning, and that the Fregean tension between two notions of sense may also explain the discussion Frege gives on the indexical “I”, proposing to develop a picture of indexicals as hidden complex demonstratives, as originally suggested by Burge. (shrink)

The frame problem, a long-standing issue in Artificial Intelligence (AI), revolves around determining the relevance of information in an ever-changing array of contexts, posing a formidable challenge in modeling human reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that emotions are able to solve, or at least enable a substantial step towards a solution. I argue that, while emotions are integral to cognitive processes, they do not offer a solution to the frame problem, nor can they play (...) a significant role in a solution. In the course of the argument, I’ll show why some previous claims that emotions could be helpful towards a solution rely on a problematic analysis of what the frame problem is. Ultimately, the conclusion is that no context-dependent feature can play a non-trivial role in solutions to the frame problem, and that is the case of emotions. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss a well-known oscillation in Frege’s conception of sense. My point is only partially concerned with his two different criteria of sense identity, and touches upon a more specific point: what happens if we apply Frege’s intuitive criterion for the difference of thoughts to logically equivalent sentences? I will try to make a schematic argument here that will preempt any endeavor to make Frege more coherent than he really is. In sections A and B, I (...) will present two alternative Fregean ways to treat the sense of logically equivalent sentences. Frege really oscillated between two alternative conceptions of sense, and his inability to detect the contrast between the two alternative conceptions is partly due to his strong conception of rationality. To apply the criterion of difference of thoughts to logical matters, we may also use a weak notion of rationality, or at least a notion of rationality of human agents, with limited computational resources. The distinctions towards which Frege was striving are better understood nowadays from the point of view of the treatment of limited rationality, which imposes itself even in logical matters. (shrink)

Although the idea of the Anthropocene originated in the earth sciences, there have been increasing calls for questions about the Anthropocene to be addressed by pan-disciplinary groups of researchers from across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We use data analysis techniques from corpus linguistics to examine academic texts about the Anthropocene from these disciplinary families. We read the data to suggest that barriers to a broadly interdisciplinary study of the Anthropocene are high, but we are also able to (...) identify some areas of common ground that could serve as interdisciplinary bridges. (shrink)

Counselling y cuidados paliativos es el título del libro escrito por la doctora Esperanza Santos y el profesor José Carlos Bermejo. En esta obra, de fácil lectura y con consejos muy prácticos y útiles, se presentan elementos fundamentales para brindar un acompañamiento de óptima calidad en el cuidado paliativo, así como la posibilidad de hacer un autoexamen de cómo los cuidadores de los pacientes prestan sus servicios e incluso para no caer en burnout. Este libro es de gran utilidad, (...) tanto para los profesionales de la salud que trabajan en las unidades de cuidados paliativos, como para personas que dedican gran parte de su tiempo al cuidado de familiares con enfermedades terminales, o que pasan por procesos prolongados de enfermedad. Con ejemplos de conversaciones de la vida real entre cuidadores y pacientes, la lectura del libro se hace, a la vez, agradable, divertida y profundamente reflexiva. (shrink)

En su artículo de 2000, Hookway pretende argumentar que el principio de justificación inferencial de Fumerton no tiene las consecuencias escépticas que Fumerton observa en él. Nosotros consideramos que Hookway está en lo cierto. Sin embargo, después de hacer algunos comentarios acerca de sus principales consideraciones a favor de esta tesis, desarrollamos una línea argumentativa independiente que refuerce esa misma conclusión.

Context is a concept used by philosophers and scientists with many different definitions. Since Dummett we speak of "context principle" in Frege and Wittgenstein: "an expression has a meaning only in the context of a sentence". The context principle finds an extension in some of Wittgenstein's ideas, especially in his famous passage where he says that "to understand a sentence is to understand a language". Given that Wittgenstein believes that "the" language does not exist but only language games exist, we (...) should conclude that he is speaking of the need to consider any sentence always in the context of a language game1. This general attitude is certainly attuned with the contemporary tendency to place contextual restrictions to the interpretations of our sentences. However we find so many kinds and forms of restrictions that this general attitude is not enough to give us a viable tool to find an order in the web of so many different theories of context. To look for an order or, at least a clarification, we may start with two contrasting paradigms of theories: the "objective" theory of contexts, where context is a set of features of the world, and the "subjective" theories of context, where context is the cognitive background of a speaker or agent in respect to a situation2. We have here not only two different ways of using the term "context" but also two different conceptions of semantics and philosophy. The different conceptions are normally associated, respectively, with the classical paradigm of model theoretic semantics (Kaplan, Lewis Stalnaker) on one hand and with the A.I. paradigm (McCarthy, Buvac, Giunchiglia) on the other hand. For sake of simplicity I will restrict my attention3 mainly to Kaplan 1989 and to McCarthy 1993 and Giunchiglia 1993. The two different conceptions can be summarised with the following schema: a) context as: set of features of the world.. (shrink)

I wonder whether the idea of knowing how as kind of knowing that with a peculiar mode of presentation really helps in the debate between philosophers and scientists.

In this paper I offer a defence of a Russellian analysis of the referential uses of incomplete (mis)descriptions, in a contextual setting. With regard to the debate between a unificationist and an ambiguity approach to the formal treatment of definite descriptions (introduction), I will support the former against the latter. In 1. I explain what I mean by "essentially" incomplete descriptions: incomplete descriptions are context dependent descriptions. In 2. I examine one of the best versions of the unificationist “explicit” approach (...) given by Buchanan and Ostertag. I then show that this proposal seems unable to treat the normal uses of misdescriptions. I then accept the challenge of treating misdescriptions as a key to solving the problem of context dependent descriptions. In 3. I briefly discuss Michael Devitt’s and Joseph Almog’s treatments of referential descriptions, showing that they find it difficult to explain misdescriptions. In 4. I suggest an alternative approach to DD as contextuals, under a normative epistemic stance. Definite descriptions express (i) what a speaker should have in mind in using certain words in a certain context and (ii) what a normal speaker is justified in saying in a context, given a common basic knowledge of the lexicon. In 5. I define a procedure running on contextual parameters (partiality, perspective and approximation) as a means of representing the role of pragmatics as a filter for semantic interpretation. In 6. I defend my procedural approach against possible objections concerning the problem of the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics, relying on the distinction between semantics and theory of meaning. (shrink)

With millions of animals brought into existence and raised for food every year, their negative impact upon the environment and the staggering growth in the number of chronic diseases caused by meat and dairy diets make a global move toward ethical veganism imperative. Typi-cally, utilitarians and deontologists have led this discussion. The purpose of this paper is to pro-pose a virtuous approach to ethical veganism. Virtue ethics can be used to construct a defense of ethical veganism by relying on the (...) virtues of compassion and fairness. Exercising these values in our relations with animals involves acknowledging their moral value, thus seeing that they are not our property or our food. It is important to emphasize that this argument applies only to well-developed societies that need not rely upon animals as sources of food, clothing, and various by-products. (shrink)

Si no me falla la memoria, fue el dibujante Álvaro Barrios quien afirmó que el trabajo del artista contemporáneo colombiano se desarrolla según una agenda de trabajo. Si miramos algunos fenómenos del arte último en Colombia, podemos señalar que su agenda está determinada por el intento de comprensión de los procesos de la violencia en el país, a partir de una amplia gama de aproximaciones al concepto de memoria que ha tenido resonancia en las disciplinas humanísticas, las investigaciones académicas, el (...) uso político del concepto por parte de la legislación estatal, y una gran diversidad de eventos artísticos. Desde el ámbito del arte, exposiciones como Destierro y reparación (2008), Tapices de Mampuján (2010), La guerra que no hemos visto (2009) o La piel de la memoria (2011), han discutido sobre la violencia en Colombia desde la aproximación a los procesos de comprensión de la memoria y nuestro pasado reciente. Así, la imbricación de violencia y memoria se manifiesta en la visión del pasado y en los efectos que este puede desplegar sobre el presente, en tanto se ha considerado, incluso, a la memoria como una instancia de reconciliación social. (shrink)

We present an account of the evolutionary development of the experiences of empathy that marked the beginning of morality and art. We argue that aesthetic and moral capacities provided an important foundation for later epistemic developments. The distinction between phenomenal consciousness and attention is discussed, and a role for phenomenology in cognitive archeology is justified-critical sources of evidence used in our analysis are based on the archeological record. We claim that what made our species unique was a form of meditative (...) and empathic thinking that made large-scale human cooperation possible through pre-linguistic, empathic communication. A critical aspect of this proposal is that the transformation that led to the dawn of our species was not initially driven by semantic or epistemic factors, although clearly, these factors increased the gap between us and other species dramatically later on. Our proposal suggests that recent philosophy of mind and psychology might have "epistemicized" phenomenal consciousness too much by construing it in terms of semantic content rather than by describing it in terms of empathic and meditative thinking. Instead of the prevailing approach, we favor the type of subjectivity that is fundamentally "other-involving" as essential, because on our account, a necessary condition for subjectivity is the empathic understanding of other individuals' psychology, not through inference or judgment, but through immediate conscious engagement. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to improve and give further support to a defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) against Frankfurt cases which I put forward in some previous work. In the present paper I concentrate on a recent Frankfurt case, Pereboom's "Tax Evasion". After presenting the essentials of my defense of PAP and applying it to this case, I go on to consider several objections that have been (or might be) raised against it and argue (...) that they don't succeed. I conclude by pointing out that my criticism of Pereboom's example suggests a general strategy against other actual or possible Frankfurt cases. (shrink)

In his article 'Individualism and Descartes' (Teorema, vol. 16, pp. 71-86), William Ferraiolo puts into question the widely accepted interpretation of Descartes as an individualist about mental content. In this paper, I defend this interpretation of Descartes thought against Ferraiolo's objections. I hold, first, that the interpretation is not historically misguided. Second, I try to show that Descartes’s endorsement of anti-individualism would lead either to depriving skeptical hypotheses of their force or to rejecting the epistemological privilege of the first person. (...) Finally, I argue that Ferraiolo’s objections to the individualistic interpretation rest on two important errors: a misapprehension of the argumentative order of the Meditations and a confusion between the notions of causal and constitutive dependence of content on the external environment. (shrink)

Keith Donnellan wrote his paper on definite descriptions in 1966 at Cornell University, an environment where nearly everybody was discussing Wittgenstein’s ideas of meaning as use. However, his idea of different uses of definite descriptions became one of the fundamental tenets against descriptivism, which was considered one of the main legacies of the Frege–Russell– Wittgenstein view; and I wonder whether a more Wittgensteinian interpretation of Donnellan’s work is possible.

The volume contains 11 contributions of the best experts on the topics of fate, fortune and free will, in reference to Ancient Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Plotinus.

In this paper I shall deal with the role of "understanding a thought" in the debate on the definition of the content of an assertion. I shall present a well known tension in Frege's writings, between a cognitive and semantic notion of sense. This tension is at the source of some of the major contemporary discussions, mainly because of the negative influence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which did not give in-depth consideration to the tension found in Frege. However many contemporary authors, (...) after the first attempt by Carnap himself, have tried to make room both for a cognitive and semantic aspect of meaning. I claim that at least some of these attempts (Dummett, Perry and Chalmers) are seriously flawed, mainly due to the difficulty in making a proper connection between the two different conceptions of sense. I shall outline an alternative project, which takes into consideration Frege's requirements on antipsychologism and of the objectivity of thought, while maintaining a close connection between the two aspects of sense. (shrink)

Julien Freund's political theory, particularly known for his 1965 opus magnum "L'essence du politique", rests on epistemological and philosophical foundations that he himself condensed into his "theory of essence." Although he first applied this theoretical model to politics, he conceived it as a tool for the global analysis of social phenomena from an onto-phenomenological and, in this same sense, anthropological perspective. However, there has not yet been a complete exposition of this theory, to which we now aim to dedicate a (...) first systematic study, focusing especially on two problems: the historical context in which the theory was forged and its general epistemological intent, which can only be adequately understood in its original metaphysical significance. (shrink)

In this paper we give some formal examples of ideas developed by Penco in two papers on the tension inside Frege's notion of sense (see Penco 2003). The paper attempts to compose the tension between semantic and cognitive aspects of sense, through the idea of sense as proof or procedure – not as an alternative to the idea of sense as truth condition, but as complementary to it (as it happens sometimes in the old tradition of procedural semantics).

En medio de tanta charla irresponsable que inunda los diversos medios de comunicación y las tribunas gubernamentales sobre la educación, en el que se figura la viabilidad del país desde lo económico y no desde lo civilizado, recordé las “uvas verdes”, esa referencia que Gombrich utilizó en una de sus tantas conferencias sobre las humanidades. La fábula de Esopo da qué pensar sobre la valoración de las humanidades en la malla de las instituciones de educación superior. Los juicios despreciables que (...) aparecen bajo la forma de la innovación, a partir de indicadores y criterios de examinabilidad que promueve el gobierno, los ministerios y Colciencias, son solo una muestra de cómo esa charla fácil pretende circunscribir a las humanidades en el nuevo paraíso medible del ámbito académico. (shrink)

This present collection of (translations of) reviews is intended to help obtain a more balanced picture of the reception and impact of Edmund Husserl’s first book, the 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic. One of the insights to be gained from this non-exhaustive collection of reviews is that the Philosophy of Arithmetic had a much more widespread reception than hitherto assumed: in the present collection alone there already are fourteen, all published between 1891 and 1895. Three of the reviews appeared in mathematical (...) journals (Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik, Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, and Zeitschrift für mathema- tischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht), three were published in English journals (The Philosophical Review, The Monist, Mind), two were written by other members of the School of Brentano (Franz Hillebrand and Alois Höfler). Some of the reviews and notices appear to be very superficial, consisting merely of para- phrases (often without references) and lists of topics taken from the table of con- tents, presenting barely acceptable summaries. Others, among which Höfler might be the most significant, engage much more deeply with the topics and problems that Husserl addresses, analyzing his approach in the context of the mathematics of his time and the School of Brentano. (shrink)

This work aims to contribute to the explanation of cognitive capacities that are essential to human intelligence: commonsense and situation holism. The attempt to explain them within the field of cognitive sciences raises a foundational challenge. How can human cognition distinguish what’s relevant and what’s not in an open-ended set of contexts? The challenge is characterized by a circularity. Potential solutions end up relying on the very capacity that they should be explaining, i.e. the sensitivity to what’s contextually relevant. The (...) argument here developed is an attempt to get out of this circularity. It is grounded on a bi-dimensional analysis of the problem. The first one is representational and is about how cognitive knowledge on what’s relevant can be stored. This dimension is related to the frame problem from artificial intelligence. I claim that this representational aspect of the issue can be neutralized by abandoning language-like representational schemes and sticking to a plurality of structural ones. They allow representational states to play a clear and non-trivial explanatory role while enabling a kind of representational productivity that is not bothered by the frame problem. The second dimension is the inferential one. It encompasses our relevance-sensitive inferential productivity, i.e. our capacity to efficiently infer what’s relevant in indefinitely many contexts, including ones we’ve never faced before. I argue that such relevance sensitivity cannot be neither innate, for innate mechanisms result in the aforementioned circularity, nor learned through innate mechanisms, for learning processes themselves rely on relevance sensitivity. The suggested alternative is that relevance sensitivity is a cognitive gadget. A kind of mental mechanism that is culturally, rather than genetically, inherited. This possibility is rendered plausible within Cecilia Heyes’ “cognitive gadgets” framework. She shows how developmental tweaks and biases culturally established can participate in the constitution of cognitive mechanisms. Thus, cultural elements can participate in human cognition not only as information sources, but also in the form of tweaks that bias the processing of that information towards what’s culturally established as contextually relevant. (shrink)

Abordagens pós-cognitivistas mais recentes têm lançado duras críticas à noção de representação mental, procurando ao invés disso pensar a mente e a cognição em termos de ações corporificadas do organismo em seu meio. Embora concordemos com essa concepção, não está claro que ela implique necessariamente a rejeição de qualquer tipo de vocabulário representacional. O objetivo deste artigo é argumentar que representações podem nos comprar uma dimensão explicativa adicional não disponível por outros meios e sugerir que, ao menos em alguns casos, (...) elas podem participar da explicação de performances ou capacidades cognitivas. A noção de representação apresentada, como deixaremos claro ao longo do artigo, não viola os preceitos metodológicos mais caros à cognição 4E em geral e ao enativismo em particular, podendo, portanto, ser utilizada como uma ferramenta teórica útil em investigações sobre a natureza corporificada e situada da mente. (shrink)

Some metaphysicians believe that metaphysical modality is explainable by the essences of objects. In §II, I spell out the definitional view of essence, and in §III, a working notion of metaphysical explanation. Then, in §IV, I consider and reject five natural ways to explain necessity by essence: in terms of the principle that essential properties can't change, in terms of the supposed obviousness of the necessity of essential truth, in terms of the logical necessity of definitions, in terms of Fine's (...) logic of essence, and in terms of the theory of real definitions. I will conclude that the present evidence favours rejecting the hypothesis that modality is explainable by essence. (shrink)

The incense used in some cults and oracles in antiquity seems to have possessed the power to induce visions and prophecies. a study of its components, from an ethnobotanical perspective, reveals us their psychoactive power.

Nota do tradutor: O escopo da psicologia é o primeiro capítulo do tratado The principles of psychology (Os princípios de psicologia) de William James (1842-1910), publicado originalmente em 1890. Nesse capítulo inaugural, James enfrenta uma questão central e perene na psicologia: a necessidade (e dificuldade) da demarcação do campo psicológico. Como representante de uma tradição que ainda falava da psicologia no singular, James vê na multiplicidade de assuntos, métodos e problemas da psicologia um desafio para uma disciplina que se pretendia (...) científica. De um lado, era necessário assumir o caráter plural dos assuntos que merecem ser agrupados pela palavra psicologia, negando um reducionismo grosseiro, que, em favor de uma integração teórica, alijasse a “vida mental” de sua riqueza imanente. De outro lado, havia ainda a esperança de uma sistematização que pudesse evitar a completa fragmentação do campo psicológico. A história parece ter mostrado que a preocupação de James era, de fato, legítima, pois o que se viu a partir do século XX foi o fracasso de diferentes sistemas de psicologia, levando a um círculo vicioso no qual a dificuldade de demarcação do campo psicológico fragmenta cada vez mais a psicologia, o que, por sua vez, torna ainda mais distante a possibilidade de se encontrar critérios que possam sistematizar toda essa diversidade. Nesse sentido, O escopo da psicologia não é apenas uma introdução ao livro Os princípios de psicologia, mas uma introdução à psicologia moderna. (shrink)

Although there have never been so many professional philosophers as today, most of the questions discussed by today’s philosophers are of no interest to cultured people at large. Specifically, several scientists have maintained that philosophy has become an irrelevant subject. Thus philosophy is at a crossroads: either to continue on the present line, which relegates it into irrelevance, or to analyse the reasons of the irrelevance and seek an escape. This paper is an attempt to explore the second alternative.

The project of growing meat artificially represents for some the next best thing to humanity. If successful, it could be the solution to several problems, such as feed- ing a growing global population while reducing the environmental impact of raising animals for food and, of course, reducing the amount and degree of animal cruelty and suffering that is involved in animal farming. In this paper, I argue that the issue of the morality of such a project has been framed only (...) in terms of the best conse- quences for the environment, animals, and humans, or in terms of deontic princi- ples. I argue that to appreciate how deep and difficult this issue is, it is necessary to consider it in terms of a virtue-oriented approach. Such an approach will reveal aspects that are not apparent, not contemplated by typical approaches, but are essen- tial to our understanding of the morality of lab-grown meat. As I argue, evaluating the issue from a virtue-oriented perspective suggests that the project of in vitro meat should not be supported because it stems from unvirtuous motivations. (shrink)

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory (...) of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin.We also describe another family of paths motivated by a” circularity” approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question. (shrink)

This paper explores the scope and limits of rational consensus through mutual respect, with the primary focus on the best known formal model of consensus: the Lehrer–Wagner model. We consider various arguments against the rationality of the Lehrer–Wagner model as a model of consensus about factual matters. We conclude that models such as this face problems in achieving rational consensus on disagreements about unknown factual matters, but that they hold considerable promise as models of how to rationally resolve non-factual disagreements.

Resumo: Este artigo visa explorar a questão da educação em Platão a partir da contextualização histórica, pensando o modelo de Atenas, Lesbos e Esparta, e da perspectiva por onde uma má paideía, a baixa qualidade na formação de cidadãos, se torna a principal causa geradora da ruptura social. Foi feita, então, uma reflexão sobre as possibilidades de educação que atenienses de classes sociais distintas teriam e sobre a proposta platônica fundamentada na combinação entre a ginástica e a música, para que (...) se desenvolvesse um perfil de cidadão com ideais coletivos sólidos a ponto de se evitar a stásis. Palavras-chave: Platão, educação, dissensão, stásis, paideía. Abstract:This article aims to explore the question of education in Plato from the historical context, thinking the model of Athens, Lesbos and Sparta, and from the perspective where a bad paideía, the low quality in the formation of citizens, becomes the main generating cause of social disruption. Then, a reflection was made on the educational possibilities that Athenians from different social classes would have and on the Platonic proposal based on the combination of gymnastics and music, so that a citizen profile with solid collective ideals would be developed to the point of avoiding stásis. Keywords: Plato, education, dissension, stásis, paideía. (shrink)

Many moral philosophers have criticized intensive animal farming because it can be harmful to the environment, it causes pain and misery to a large number of animals, and furthermore eating meat and animal-based products can be unhealthful. The issue of industrially farmed animals has become one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time. On the one hand, utilitarians have argued that we should become vegetarians or vegans because the practices of raising animals for food are immoral since they (...) minimize the overall happiness. Deontologists, on the other hand, have argued that the practices of raising animals for food are immoral because animals have certain rights and we have duties toward them. Some virtue ethicists remain unconvinced of deontic and consequentialist arguments against the exploitation of animals and suggest that a virtue-based approach is better equipped to show what is immoral about raising and using animals for food, and what is virtuous about ethical veganism. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, an agent is morally responsible for an action of hers only if she could have done otherwise. The notion of a robust alternative plays a prominent role in recent attacks on PAP based on so-called Frankfurt cases. In this paper I defend the truth of PAP for blameworthy actions against Frankfurt cases recently proposed by Derk Pereboom and David Widerker. My defence rests on some intuitively plausible principles that yield a new understanding of (...) the concept of a robust alternative. I will leave aside whether PAP also holds for praiseworthy actions -/- Según el Principio de Posibilidades Alternativas, un agente es moralmente responsable de una acción sólo si hubiera podido actuar de otro modo. La noción de alternativa robusta desempeña un papel prominente en ataques recientes al PPA basados en los llamados casos Frankfurt. En este artículo defiendo el PPA para la culpabilidad moral frente a casos Frankfurt propuestos recientemente por Derk Pereboom y David Widerker. Mi defensa descansa en algunos principios intuitivamente plausibles que dan lugar a una comprensión nueva del concepto de alternativa robusta. No trataré la cuestión de la verdad del PPA para acciones moralmente laudables. (shrink)

En este artículo discuto cómo es que la idea intuitiva de que las cosas podrían cambiar, combinada con principios excesivamente plausibles, nos lleva a la paradoja de Chisholm. Arguyo que la mejor respuesta a esta paradoja –pues efectúa la menor mutilación a nuestros principios teóricos y asunciones intuitivas– es la postura esencialista. Primero expongo algunas motivaciones para hacer una teoría metafísica que explique la modalidad de re. Luego reviso los principios a los que estaremos regresando en el curso del artículo. (...) Entonces muestro cómo ellos, conjuntamente, implican la paradoja de Chisholm. Después reviso las posibles fuentes de esta paradoja, rechazando varias salidas posibles. Argumento que la fuente de la paradoja está en que nuestros principios teóricos son demasiado liberales, y que la opción esencialista subsana este defecto. (shrink)

Benchmarking automated theorem proving (ATP) systems using standardized problem sets is a well-established method for measuring their performance. However, the availability of such libraries for non-classical logics is very limited. In this work we propose a library for benchmarking Girard's (propositional) intuitionistic linear logic. For a quick bootstrapping of the collection of problems, and for discussing the selection of relevant problems and understanding their meaning as linear logic theorems, we use translations of the collection of Kleene's intuitionistic theorems in the (...) traditional monograph "Introduction to Metamathematics". We analyze four different translations of intuitionistic logic into linear logic and compare their proofs using a linear logic based prover with focusing. In order to enhance the set of problems in our library, we apply the three provability-preserving translations to the propositional benchmarks in the ILTP Library. Finally, we generate a comprehensive set of reachability problems for Petri nets and encode such problems as linear logic sequents, thus enlarging our collection of problems. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that two prevailing theories about cognitive penetration are too extreme, namely, the view that cognitive penetration is pervasive and the view that there is a sharp and fundamental distinction between cognition and perception, which precludes any type of cognitive penetration. These opposite views have clear merits and empirical support. To eliminate this puzzling situation, we present an alternative theoretical approach that incorporates the merits of these views into a broader and more nuanced explanatory (...) framework. A key argument we present in favor of this framework concerns the evolution of intentionality and perceptual capacities. An implication of this argument is that cases of cognitive penetration must have evolved more recently and that this is compatible with the cognitive impenetrability of early perceptual stages of processing information. A theoretical approach that explains why this should be the case is the consciousness and attention dissociation framework. The paper discusses why concepts, particularly issues concerning concept acquisition, play an important role in the interaction between perception and cognition. (shrink)

Tradução para o português do livro "Ensaios sobre Strawson", de Carlos Caorsi. Editora da unijuí, 2014. Sumário: Apresentação; A teoria da verdade em Strawson, Mauricio Beuchot; Réplica a Mauricio Beuchot, Peter F. Strawson; Strawson: entre a lógica tradicional e a lógica clássica, Robert Calabria; Réplica a Robert Clabria, Peter F. Strawson; Referência e termos singulares, Carlos E. Caorsi; Réplica a Carlos E. Caorsi, Peter F. Strawson; Strawson e a metafísica, Juan C. D’Alessio; Réplica a Juan C. D’Alessio, (...) Peter F. Strawson; A meta-metafísica de Strawson: identificação versus individuação, Jorge J. E. Gracia; Réplica a Jorge J. E. Gracia, Peter F. Strawson; Algumas distinções sobre a noção de indivíduo, Jesús Mosterín; Réplica a Jesús Mosterín, Peter F. Strawson; Sobre a percepção e seus objetos em Strawson, Ernest Sosa; Réplica a Ernest Sosa, Peter F. Strawson; Limitações ao exercício da perplexidade, Teresa de Jesús Zavalía; Réplica a Tereza de Jesús Zavalía, Peter F. Strawson; Publicações de P. F. Strawson . (shrink)

In this paper we give some suggestions from etymology on the contrast between Kaplan’s direct reference theory and a neo-Fregean view on indexicals. After a short summary of the philosophical debate on indexicals (§1), we use some remarks about the hidden presence of a demonstrative root in all indexicals to derive some provisional doubts concerning Kaplan’s criticism of what he calls “sloppy thinker” (§2). To support those doubts, we will summarise some etymological data on the derivation of the so-called “pure (...) indexicals” from an original demonstrative root (§ 3). The aim of the paper is to consider etymological data as providing evidence for alternative theories of language and fostering new directions in linguistic and philosophical research on specific topics. (shrink)