This book brings together a number of researchers of different nationalities to reflect on religion and philosophy in ancient Greece. These scholars have been convened by the Brazilian research group Delphos and discuss, in particular, how religious and philosophical thought intertwined during this period. Among the papers collected here, several are devoted to epic and philosophical literature before Plato. The others deal, alongside this great classical philosopher, with Aristotle and Philo of Alexandria. These contributions allow us to recognise how the (...) vision of the cosmos, metaphysics and human life are intertwined in Greek thought. A journey is made from traditional Greek religion to its philosophical reinterpretations, reaching as far as the monotheistic God of Judaism made known in the Hellenic language. The nature of the cosmos, investigated scientifically, is no stranger to the Greeks' view of the divine, but neither is ethics, with all its demands. Thus, these studies provide a kaleidoscopic view of the various points of view from which nature, the human condition and divinity are approached through the eyes of ancient Greek literature. (shrink)

Среди выдающихся латиноамериканских философов, которые так или иначе занимаются аксиологическими nроблемами, находится месиканец Эдуардo Гарсия Майнез. По мнению Майнеза, каnитальные проблемы аксиологии могут быть сведены к четырем: а) проблема существования ценности; б) nроблема оценочного nознания; в) проблема реализации ценности; д) проблема свободы выбора личностью ценности. В данной работе анализируется в основном те идеи этого автора, которые касаются nервой из этих больших nроблем - вопроса о существовании ценностей. Entre los más destacados filósofos mexicanos que trabajan la problemática axiológica se encuentra el (...) mexicano Eduardo García Maynez. En opinión de Maynez los problemas capitales de la axiología son cuatro: a) el problema de la existencia del valor; b) el problema del conocimiento valorativo; c) el problema de la realización del valor; d) el problema de la libertad del hombre en la elección del valor. En este trabajo se analiza, en los fundamental, las ideas de este autor referidas al primero de estos grandes problemas: el tema de la existencia de los valores. (shrink)

El trabajo abordó críticamente la concepción axiológica del filósofo mexicano Eduardo García Maynez (1908-1993), quien defendió una postura objetivista en axiología, muy cercana a la del pensador alemán Nicolai Hartmann. Para García Maynez los problemas capitales de la axiología pueden ser reducidos a cuatro: 1.- El problema de la existencia del valor; 2.- El problema del conocimiento estimativo o valorativo; 3.- El problema de la realización de lo valioso; 4.- -El problema de la libertad de la persona (...) frente a los valores. En este trabajo se analizaron las principales ideas de este autor, fundamentalmente en relación con el primero de estos grandes problemas: el de la existencia de! Valor . (shrink)

This paper explores the contrast between two meanings of thinking: (i) one implied by the Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, the two thinkers that have arguably the deepest influence on the constellation of Western philosophical problems and (ii) another implied by the philosophical-anthropological project of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The thesis here defended is that, in the Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, thinking is related to ruling and legislating over the experience through concepts, while in Viveiros de Castros' (...) theoretical enterprise, thinking is rather to explore the limits of conceptual constructions when confronted with the experience of alterity. (shrink)

En el trabajo se hace un recorrido por los principales autores latinoamericanos que trabajan el tema de los valores en el siglo XX. Se trata de apresar algunas regularidades generales en el itinerario del pensamiento axiológico en América Latina durante la pasada centuria.

Reseña al libro de María Rosa Palazón Mayoral titulado "La estética en México. Siglo XX. Diálogo entre filósofos". El libro reseñado es de gran importancia al compilar las propuestas teóricas sobre el tema de pensadores tan destacados como Antonio Caso, José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Samuel Ramos, Eduardo Nicol, María Zambrano, Ramón Xirau, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Joaquín Sánchez Mcgrégor, Bolívar Echeverría, Néstor García Canclini, María Noël Lapoujade, Ana María Martínez de la Escalera, Silvia Durán Payán y muchos otros.

In this article, we will present a number of technical results concerning Classical Logic, ST and related systems. Our main contribution consists in offering a novel identity criterion for logics in general and, therefore, for Classical Logic. In particular, we will firstly generalize the ST phenomenon, thereby obtaining a recursively defined hierarchy of strict-tolerant systems. Secondly, we will prove that the logics in this hierarchy are progressively more classical, although not entirely classical. We will claim that a logic is to (...) be identified with an infinite sequence of consequence relations holding between increasingly complex relata: formulae, inferences, metainferences, and so on. As a result, the present proposal allows not only to differentiate Classical Logic from ST, but also from other systems sharing with it their valid metainferences. Finally, we show how these results have interesting consequences for some topics in the philosophical logic literature, among them for the debate around Logical Pluralism. The reason being that the discussion concerning this topic is usually carried out employing a rivalry criterion for logics that will need to be modified in light of the present investigation, according to which two logics can be non-identical even if they share the same valid inferences. (shrink)

Rejecting the Cut rule has been proposed as a strategy to avoid both the usual semantic paradoxes and the so-called v-Curry paradox. In this paper we consider if a Cut-free theory is capable of accurately representing its own notion of validity. We claim that the standard rules governing the validity predicate are too weak for this purpose and we show that although it is possible to strengthen these rules, the most obvious way of doing so brings with it a serious (...) problem: an internalized version of Cut can be proved for a Curry-like sentence. We also evaluate a number of possible ways of escaping this difficulty. (shrink)

I argue for a substantive interpretation of Carlos Vaz Ferreira’s account of intellectual flourishing as intellectual liberation. For Vaz Ferreira, I argue, there is an inescapable master-slave dynamic between language and language users, so that flourishing intellectually essentially involves a type of mastery of language that frees up thinking from enslaving linguistic/conceptual confusions and thus facilitates the acquisition of truth. Central to this project are Vaz Ferreira’s most interesting, and radical, views on the nature of language signification and thus on (...) human’s ability to accurately describe and know reality, for failing to keep these linguistic limitations in mind, Vaz Ferreira argues, is a central way for language to enslave humans to confused thinking and thus prevent their intellectual flourishing. (shrink)

In some recent articles, Cobreros, Egré, Ripley, & van Rooij have defended the idea that abandoning transitivity may lead to a solution to the trouble caused by semantic paradoxes. For that purpose, they develop the Strict-Tolerant approach, which leads them to entertain a nontransitive theory of truth, where the structural rule of Cut is not generally valid. However, that Cut fails in general in the target theory of truth does not mean that there are not certain safe instances of Cut (...) involving semantic notions. In this article we intend to meet the challenge of answering how to regain all the safe instances of Cut, in the language of the theory, making essential use of a unary recovery operator. To fulfill this goal, we will work within the so-called Goodship Project, which suggests that in order to have nontrivial naïve theories it is sufficient to formulate the corresponding self-referential sentences with suitable biconditionals. Nevertheless, a secondary aim of this article is to propose a novel way to carry this project out, showing that the biconditionals in question can be totally classical. In the context of this article, these biconditionals will be essentially used in expressing the self-referential sentences and, thus, as a collateral result of our work we will prove that none of the recoveries expected of the target theory can be nontrivially achieved if self-reference is expressed through identities. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the extent to which the very existence of substructural logics puts the Tarskian conception of logical systems in jeopardy. In order to do this, we highlight the importance of the presence of different levels of entailment in a given logic, looking not only at inferences between collections of formulae but also at inferences between collections of inferences—and more. We discuss appropriate refinements or modifications of the usual Tarskian identity criterion for logical systems, and propose an (...) alternative of our own. After that, we consider a number of objections to our account and evaluate a substantially different approach to the same problem. (shrink)

When discussing Logical Pluralism several critics argue that such an open-minded position is untenable. The key to this conclusion is that, given a number of widely accepted assumptions, the pluralist view collapses into Logical Monism. In this paper we show that the arguments usually employed to arrive at this conclusion do not work. The main reason for this is the existence of certain substructural logics which have the same set of valid inferences as Classical Logic—although they are, in a clear (...) sense, non-identical to it. We argue that this phenomenon can be generalized, given the existence of logics which coincide with Classical Logic regarding a number of metainferential levels—although they are, again, clearly different systems. We claim this highlights the need to arrive at a more refined version of the Collapse Argument, which we discuss at the end of the paper. (shrink)

Call ‘a substance’ a person who is at home in a relatively stable and unified sense-making framework: a social structure that to some degree specifies which categories are important for interpreting reality, which goals are worth pursing, which character traits are admirable, etc. Call ‘an accident’ a person who is not at home in one such framework. It is tempting to think that being a substance is preferable, but I present some considerations for thinking otherwise. Mexican philosophers Emilio Uranga and (...) Jorge Portilla, I argue, present notions of accidentality as decolonial tools. Uranga’s account enables Mexicans to have positive valuation of their being independently of the approving gaze of the colonizers and their standards of value. Portilla’s thought distinguishes between pernicious accidentality resulting from the disintegration of sense-making frameworks and authentic accidentality as a condition for freedom, self-creation, and ultimately for individual and communal liberation. (shrink)

I defend a Deferred Ostension view of quotation, on which quotation-marks are the linguistic bearers of reference, functioning like a demonstrative; the quoted material merely plays the role of a demonstratum. On this view, the quoted material works like Nunberg’s indexes in his account of deferred ostensión in general. The referent is obtained through some contextually suggested relation; in the default case the relation will be … instantiates the linguistic type __, but there are other possibilities. In this way, the (...) deferred ostension view deals with a problem I pointed out for the identity proposal in my earlier work, that we do not merely refer with quotations to expression-types, but also to other entities related in some way to the relevant token we use: features exhibited by the token distinct from those constituting its linguistic type, features exhibited by other tokens of the same type but not by the one actually used (as when, by using a graphic token, we refer to its phonetic type), or even other related tokens (see the examples on p. 261 of García-Carpintero 1994). (shrink)

In this paper, we present a non-trivial and expressively complete paraconsistent naïve theory of truth, as a step in the route towards semantic closure. We achieve this goal by expressing self-reference with a weak procedure, that uses equivalences between expressions of the language, as opposed to a strong procedure, that uses identities. Finally, we make some remarks regarding the sense in which the theory of truth discussed has a property closely related to functional completeness, and we present a sound and (...) complete three-sided sequent calculus for this expressively rich theory. (shrink)

A obra Eletric Waves foi o ponto de partida para a análise filosófico-metodológica das teorias científicas por parte de H. Hertz e a culminância dessa prática deu-se com a sua obra póstuma The Principles of Mechanics. Nas introduções a essas duas obras um tema metacientífico se apresenta como núcleo central. Nelas Hertz trata das diferentes representações, imagens ou modelos dos fenômenos físicos: no caso da primeira obra, dos fenômenos eletromagnéticos; no caso da segunda, dos fenômenos mecânicos. E a questão que (...) tenta resolver é a seguinte: qual é a origem da pluralidade de imagens nas teorias científicas? Seria ela inevitável? É sobre esse tipo de questões que se fixa o presente trabalho na intenção de apresentar o papel da noção de representação na concepção de ciência de Heinrich Hertz. (shrink)

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

I present a novel position vis-à-vis the views in the Latin American philosophy literature regarding whether subjects more aptly use "Hispanic" or "Latinx" to refer to Hispanic- or-Latinx people. To this end, I will argue (C) the term "Afro-Latinx" is more apt than "Hispanic" or "Latinx" in a significant number of cases. This conclusion is based on three premises. The first premise (P1) is that use of "Afro-Latinx" provides subjects with understanding of how certain events depend on anti-Black racism, US (...) society's racially unjust structure and US colonial policy. The second premise (P2) is that that neither the term "Hispanic" nor the term "Latinx" provide subjects with this understanding of how certain events depend on anti-Black racism, US society's racially unjust structure and US colonial policy. The third premise (P3) is that the term "Afro-Latinx" provides subjects with more understanding of these events than the terms, "Hispanic" and "Latinx.” I present three cases which feature the experiences of Afro-Dominican people. The 1992 murder of Dominican man Kiko García by New York Police officer O’Keefe is first case. The second case is the Washington Heights Uprising that ensued Kiko García’ murder. An instance where a nightclub bouncer in the Dominican Republic denies a Dominican women entry because of her hair texture composes the third case. (shrink)

In this note we shall argue that Milne’s new effort does not refute Truthmaker Maximalism. According to Truthmaker Maximalism, every truth has a truthmaker. Milne has attempted to refute it using the following self-referential sentence M: This sentence has no truthmaker. Essential to his refutation is that M is like the Gödel sentence and unlike the Liar, and one way in which Milne supports this assimilation is through the claim that his proof is essentially object-level and not semantic. In Section (...) 2, we shall argue that Milne is still begging the question against Truthmaker Maximalism. In Section 3, we shall argue that even assimilating M to the Liar does not force the truthmaker maximalist to maintain the ‘dull option’ that M does not express a proposition. There are other options open and, though they imply revising the logic in Milne’s reasoning, this is not one of the possible revisions he considers. In Section 4, we shall suggest that Milne’s proof requires an implicit appeal to semantic principles and notions. In Section 5, we shall point out that there are two important dissimilarities between M and the Gödel sentence. Section 6 is a brief summary and conclusion. (shrink)

The truth of a statement depends on the world in two ways: what the statement says is true if the world is as the statement says it is; on the other hand, what the expressions in the statement mean depends on what the world is like (for instance, on what conventions are in place). Each of these two kinds of dependence of truth on the world corresponds to one of the dimensions on the two-dimensional semantic framework, developed in the 1970’ (...) in the work of Evans, Kaplan, Kripke and Stalnaker. The introduction provides a systematic overview of the framework, the ideas of its earlier originators, recent developments and criticism. Finally, it gives a brief overview over the contributions to the volume. (shrink)

Since the publication of Hartry Field’s influential paper “Tarski’s Theory of Truth” there has been an ongoing discussion about the philosophical import of Tarski’s definition. Most of the arguments have aimed to play down that import, starting with that of Field himself. He interpreted Tarski as trying to provide a physicalistic reduction of semantic concepts like truth, and concluded that Tarski had partially failed. Robert Stalnaker and Scott Soames claimed then that Field should have obtained a stronger conclusion, namely that (...) Tarski’s failure in his allegedly intended physicalistic reduction was total. From another front, Hilary Putnam argued for an even more sweeping thesis: “[a]s a philosophical account of truth, Tarski’s theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.” Scott Soames followed suit also on this count, endorsing Putnam’s argument in section iii of the aforementioned paper; and John Etchemendy used a very similar argument to contend that “a Tarskian definition of truth [...] cannot possibly illuminate the semantic properties of the object language.” The paper argues that these contentions are based on several misunderstandings about the nature of a definition like Tarski’s. Regarding the Putnam-Soames-Etchemendy argument, we must apply a distinction Frege found natural to draw—and is natural to draw anyway—between what he called “constructive” definitions, definitions properly so called, which are mere stipulations, and what he described as “analytic” definitions, definitions which aim to make explicit the meaning of a term already in use. Regarding the Field-Soames-Stalnaker criticism, the paper contends that the true aims of a Tarskian truth definition are perfectly well fulfilled without Field’s amendments. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to contribute to the larger project of assessing the relative merits of different theories of substance. An important preliminary step in this project is assessing the explanatory resources of one main theory of substance, the so-called bundle theory. This article works towards such an assessment. I identify and explain three distinct explanatory challenges an adequate bundle theory must meet. Each points to a putative explanatory gap, so I call them the Gap Challenges. I consider (...) three bundle-theoretic strategies for meeting these challenges. I argue that none of them goes very far. The upshot is that, absent other strategies for meeting the challenges, bundle theory involves a significant amount of stipulation. This black box makes bundle theory relatively weak with respect to its explanatory power—unless, of course, rival theories of substance are unable to do better. (shrink)

State of the art paper on the topic realism/anti-realism. The first part of the paper elucidates the notions of existence and independence of the metaphysical characterization of the realism/anti-realism dispute. The second part of the paper presents a critical taxonomy of the most important positions and doctrines in the contemporary literature on the domains of science and mathematics: scientific realism, scientific anti-realism, constructive empiricism, structural realism, mathematical Platonism, mathematical indispensability, mathematical empiricism, intuitionism, mathematical fictionalism and second philosophy.

Trope theory is an increasingly prominent contender in contemporary debates about the existence and nature of properties. But it suffers from ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation reveals two fundamentally different concepts of a trope: modifier tropes and module tropes. These types of tropes are unequally suited for metaphysical work. Modifier tropes have advantages concerning powers, relations, and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes have advantages concerning perception, causation, character-grounding, and the ontology of substance. Thus, the choice between modifier (...) tropes and module tropes is significant and divides the advantages of trope theory simpliciter. In addition, each resulting trope theory is unstable: modifier trope theory threatens to collapse into realism and module trope theory threatens to collapse into austere nominalism. This invites reflection on the stability of trope theory in general. (shrink)

State of art paper on the topic causation, around the problem of the nature of causation. Central theories of contemporary philosophical literature are discussed and analysed, namely, regularity theories of Hume and Mackie, counterfactual theories of Lewis, probabilistic theories of Reichenbach, Lewis and Menzies and causal processes theories of Salmon and Dowe.

In a recent paper, Peacocke (2001) continues an ongoing debate with McDowell and others, providing renewed arguments for the view that perceptual experiences and some other mental states have a particular kind of content, nonconceptual content. In this article I want to object to one of the arguments he provides. This is not because I side with McDowell in the ongoing debate about nonconceptual content; on the contrary, given the way I understand it, my views are closer to Peacocke’s, and (...) have been strongly influenced by him. It is just that I am not persuaded by the particular argument I will be questioning here. (shrink)

A theory of truth is usually demanded to be consistent, but -consistency is less frequently requested. Recently, Yatabe has argued in favour of -inconsistent first-order theories of truth, minimising their odd consequences. In view of this fact, in this paper, we present five arguments against -inconsistent theories of truth. In order to bring out this point, we will focus on two very well-known -inconsistent theories of truth: the classical theory of symmetric truth FS and the non-classical theory of naïve truth (...) based on ᴌukasiewicz infinitely valued logic: PAᴌT. (shrink)

Transhumanism proposes human enhancement while regarding the human body as unfit for the future. This fulfills age-old aspirations for a perfect and durable body. We use “alienation” as a concept to analyze this mismatch between human aspirations and our current condition. For Hannah Arendt alienation may be accounted for in terms of earth- and world-alienation, as well as alienation from human nature, and especially from the given (“resentment of the given”). In transhumanism, the biological body is an impediment to human (...) accomplishment. At most, this movement accepts “clean” bodies, not bodies with excretions. We argue that real human bodies are valued in the event of giving birth, so a modified concept that Arendt proposed, natality, seems a suitable way to explore the dialectic alienation-reconciliation involving the body (Arendt’s “A child has been born unto us”), when re-read by some feminist scholars. (shrink)

Empiricist philosophers like Carnap invoked analyticity in order to explain a priori knowledge and necessary truth. Analyticity was “truth purely in virtue of meaning”. The view had a deflationary motivation: in Carnap’s proposal, linguistic conventions alone determine the truth of analytic sentences, and thus there is no mystery in our knowing their truth a priori, or in their necessary truth; for they are, as it were, truths of our own making. Let us call this “Carnapian conventionalism”, conventionalismC and cognates for (...) short. This conventionalistC explication of the a priori has been the target of sound criticisms. Arguments like Quine’s in “Truth by Convention” are in our view decisive: the truth of conventionalismC requires that the class of logical truths and logical validities be reductively accounted for as conventionally established; however, no such reduction is forthcoming, because logic is needed to generate the entire class from any given set of conventions properly so-called. Granted that conventionalismC is untenable, we want to take issue with a different, usually made criticism. Although the argument uncovers some difficulties for the way conventionalist claims are defended by some of its advocates, we will try to show that it fails. The criticism thus stands in the way of a proper appreciation of why the Carnapian account of the a priori is not correct. We will try to illustrate this by showing that the criticism we will dispute would dispose of conventionalist claims not only regarding philosophically problematic cases – logical and mathematical truths –, but also regarding cases for which they have some prima facie plausibility. One such case is that of truths that follow from mere abbreviations, “nominal” definitions; ‘someone is a bachelor if and only if he is an unmarried adult male’ can serve at this point for illustration. We will try to articulate a clear sense in which the contents of assertion such as this can be truths by convention. We do not need to prove that a conventionalist claim is true in those cases; it is enough for us to show that it is intelligible, for the arguments we will confront question even this. (shrink)

There is a largely unrecognized ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation throws into relief two fundamentally different conceptions of a trope and provides two ways to understand and develop each metaphysical theory that put tropes to use. In this paper I consider the relative merits that result from differences concerning a trope’s ability to ground the character of ordinary objects. I argue that on each conception of a trope, there are unique implications and challenges concerning character-grounding.

The origins and development of the problem of mental causation are outlined. The underlying presuppositions which give rise to the problem are identified. Possible strategies for solving, or dissolving the problem are examined.

There are propositions constituting the content of fictions—sometimes of the utmost importance to understand them—which are not explicitly presented, but must somehow be inferred. This essay deals with what these inferences tell us about the nature of fiction. I will criticize three well-known proposals in the literature: those by David Lewis, Gregory Currie, and Kendall Walton. I advocate a proposal of my own, which I will claim improves on theirs. Most important for my purposes, I will argue on this basis, (...) against Walton’s objections, for an illocutionary-act account of fiction, inspired in part by some of Lewis’s and Currie’s suggestions, but (perhaps paradoxically) above all by Walton’s deservedly influential views. (shrink)

Defends a version of the Davidsonian Demonstrative Theory of quotation against proponents of the Fregean Identity Theory.

In this article, we will analyze the redefinition that Hobbes applies to the essential elements of Protestant biblical hermeneutics in the Leviathan. Establishing who is the authorized interpreter, defining the rules for conducting a proper exegesis, and determining the content that results from both tasks, is of utmost importance. The answers to these three questions lay the foundation for a new relationship between civil and ecclesiastical power and fully immerse Hobbes in the theological-political discussion of the 17th century.

Kant’s metaphilosophy has three main parts: (1) an essentialist project (“What is philosophy?”); (2) a methodological project (“How do we do philosophy?”); and (3) a taxonomic project (“What are the different parts of philosophy, and how are they related?”). This paper focuses on the third project. In particular, it explores one of the most intriguing yet puzzling aspects of Kant’s philosophy, viz. the relationship between what Kant calls ‘pure’ philosophy vs. ‘applied’, ‘empirical’ or what we can broadly refer to as (...) ‘impure’ philosophy. (As we shall see, in order to be able to address this third project, we shall also need to examine the other two projects in detail.) My plan is as follows. First, I discuss four main areas of pure vs. impure philosophy: (i) ‘pure logic’ vs. ‘applied logic’; (ii) ‘rational psychology’ vs. ‘empirical psychology’; (iii) ‘pure metaphysics of nature’ vs. ‘physics’ and (iv) ‘pure morality’ or a ‘metaphysics of morals’ vs. ‘moral anthropology’, ‘practical anthropology’ or ‘applied moral philosophy’. Based on this, I identify four key differences between pure and impure philosophy. Second, I critically examine four different readings of Kant’s views about the status of ‘impure’ philosophy: (a) that it is not genuine philosophy; (b) that it is bad or inferior philosophy; (c) that it is instrumentally valuable; and (d) that it constitutes an indispensable part of Kant’s philosophy, both in a theoretical and practical sense. I argue that Kant is best interpreted as endorsing readings (c) and (d). Third, I offer some concluding remarks. (shrink)

In recent decades, several theories have claimed to explain the teleological causality of organisms as a function of self-organising and self-producing processes. The most widely cited theories of this sort are variations of autopoiesis, originally introduced by Maturana and Varela. More recent modifications of autopoietic theory have focused on system organisation, closure of constraints and autonomy to account for organism teleology. This article argues that the treatment of teleology in autopoiesis and other organisation theories is inconclusive for three reasons: First, (...) non-living self-organising processes like autocatalysis meet the defining features of autopoiesis without being teleological; second, organisational approaches, whether defined in terms of the closure of constraints, self-determination or autonomy, are unable to specify teleological normativity, that is, the individuation of an ultimate beneficiary; third, all self-organised systems produce local order by maximising the throughput of energy and/or material (obeying the maximum entropy production (MEP) principle) and thereby are specifically organised to undermine their own critical boundary conditions. Despite these inadequacies, an alternative approach called teleodynamics accounts for teleology. This theory shows how multiple self-organising processes can be collectively linked so that they counter each other’s MEP principle tendencies to become codependent. Teleodynamics embraces – not ignoring – the difficulties of self-organisation, but reinstates teleology as a radical phase transition distinguishing systems embodying an orientation towards their own beneficial ends from those that lack normative character. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Michael Loux’s important distinction between “tropes” and “tropers”. First, I argue that the distinction throws into relief an ambiguity and discrepancy in the literature, revealing two fundamentally different versions of trope theory. Second, I argue that the distinction brings into focus unique challenges facing each of the resulting trope theories, thus calling into question an alleged advantage of trope theory—that by uniquely occupying the middle ground between its rivals, trope theory is able to recover and (...) preserve the insights of these views. Ultimately, the distinction suggests that trope theory is a divided house. (shrink)

Recently, it has been proposed to understand a logic as containing not only a validity canon for inferences but also a validity canon for metainferences of any finite level. Then, it has been shown that it is possible to construct infinite hierarchies of "increasingly classical" logics—that is, logics that are classical at the level of inferences and of increasingly higher metainferences—all of which admit a transparent truth predicate. In this paper, we extend this line of investigation by taking a somehow (...) different route. We explore logics that are different from classical logic at the level of inferences, but recover some important aspects of classical logic at every metainferential level. We dub such systems meta-classical non-classical logics. We argue that the systems presented deserve to be regarded as logics in their own right and, moreover, are potentially useful for the non-classical logician. (shrink)

I describe a phenomenon that has not yet been described in the epistemology literature. I label this phenomenon expression-style exclusion. Expression-style exclusion is an example of how s...

Este documento ofrece una propuesta desde la perspectiva de la bioética para la elaboración de un protocolo de triaje en el contexto de la pandemia de COVID-19. Dicha propuesta incluye recomendaciones sobre las normas procedimentales y normas sustantivas que deben regir la asignación y reasignación de recursos terapéuticos en condiciones de escasez extrema.

Opinionated state of the art paper on scientific explanation. Analysis and discussion of the most relevant models and theories in the contemporary literature, namely, the deductive-nomological model, the models of inductive-statistical and statistical relevance, the pragmatic theory of why questions, the unifying theory of standard arguments, and the causal/non-causal counterfactual theory.

Schiffer has given an argument against supervaluationist accounts of vagueness, based on reports of vague contents. Suppose that Al tells Bob ‘Ben was there’, pointing to a certain place, and later Bob says, ‘Al said that Ben was there’, pointing in the same direction. According to supervaluationist semantics, Schiffer contends, both Al’s and Bob’s utterances of ‘there’ indeterminately refer to myriad precise regions of space; Al’s utterance is true just in case Ben was in any of those precisely bounded regions (...) of space, and Bob’s is true just in case Al said of each of them that it is where Ben was. However, while the supervaluationist truth-conditions for Al’s utterance might be satisfied, those for Bob’s cannot; for Al didn’t say, of any of those precisely delimited regions of space, that it is where Ben was. In an earlier version of the material presented here (García-Carpintero 2000) I replied to Schiffer’s argument that supervaluationism has an independently well-motivated defense. The response is essentially based on the point that the occurrence of ‘there’ in Bob’s utterance (and of ‘tall’ in Wright’s argument) occurs in indirect discourse, and supervaluationists may allow that it shifts its referent there. Schiffer’s reply to this response shows that it was not made sufficiently clearly. In this paper I will try to improve on that score. In his more recent reply, Schiffer (2000b, 325) dismisses a proposal like the one I will make, mainly because it “undermines … a leading virtue of supervaluationism … its implication that vagueness is … not a feature of the world.” I will argue that my reply does not undermine the fundamental contentions of the supervaluationist account. (shrink)

One of the hottest philosophical debates in recent years concerns the nature of the semantics/pragmatics divide. Some writers have expressed the reserve that this might be merely terminological, but in my view it ultimately concerns a substantive issue with empirical implications: the scope and limits of a serious scientific undertaking, formal semantics. In this critical note I discuss two arguments by Recanati: his main methodological argument --viz. that the contents posited by what he calls 'literalists' play no relevant role in (...) communication--, and some phenomenological considerations regarding the "Availability Principle" that he appeals to in order to buttress that main argument. /// Uno de los más encarnizados debates filosóficos recientes atañe a la naturaleza de la distinción entre semántica y pragmática. Aunque algunos autores han expresado reservas en el sentido de que èste pudiera ser sólo terminológico, en mi opinión tiene que ver con una cuestión sustantiva con implicaciones empíricas: el alcance y los límites de una empresa científica seria, la semántica formal. En este texto discuto dos argumentos de Recanati: su principal argumento metodológico, que los contenidos postulados por los autores que él denomina "literalistas" no desempeñan ningùn papel relevante en la comunicación, y, en segundo lugar, ciertas consideraciones fenomenológicas en torno a su "Principio de Accesibilidad", a las cuales apela para apoyar el argumento metodológico. (shrink)

In this paper I elaborate on previous criticisms of the influential Stalnakerian account of presuppositions, pointing out that the well-known practice of informative presupposition puts heavy strain on Stalnaker’s pragmatic characterization of the phenomenon of presupposition, in particular of the triggering of presuppositions. Stalnaker has replied to previous criticisms by relying on the well-taken point that we should take into account the time at which presupposition-requirements are to be computed. In defense of a different, ‘semantic’ account of the phenomenon of (...) presupposition, I argue that that point does not suffice to rescue the Stalnakerian proposal, and I portray Lewisian ‘accommodation’ as one way in which speakers adjust themselves to one another in the course of conversation. (shrink)

Opinionated state of the art paper on mathematical explanation. After a general introduction to the subject, the paper is divided into two parts. The first part is dedicated to intra-mathematical explanation and the second is dedicated to extra-mathematical explanation. Each of these parts begins to present a set of diverse problems regarding each type of explanation and, afterwards, it analyses relevant models of the literature. Regarding the intra-mathematical explanation, the models of deformable proofs, mathematical saliences and the demonstrative structure of (...) mathematical induction are addressed. Regarding the extra-mathematical explanation, modal, abstract and deductive models are addressed. (shrink)

"This book presents a theoretical discussion of problems and issues encountered in the Native American community from a perspective that accepts Native knowledge as legitimate. Native American cosmology and metaphor are used extensively in order to deal with specific problems such as alcoholism, suicide, family, and community problems. The authors discuss what it means to present material from the perspective of a people who have legitimate ways of knowing and conceptualizing reality and show that it is imperative to understand intergenerational (...) trauma and internalized oppression in order to understand the issues facing Native Americans today."--pub. website. (shrink)

Me propongo aquí una reflexión sobre la crisis del humanismo que afecta profundamente a la sociedad y la cultura contemporáneas en todas sus dimensiones. De un modo falsamente optimista, se ha opuesto a esta crisis la figura de un post humanismo triunfante, resultado de los desarrollos de la tecnología contemporánea y sus posibilidades de intervención en el cuerpo y el alma del hombre. Haré aquí una evaluación crítica de ese optimismo, sin por ello reivindicar el viejo humanismo y su razón (...) colonizadora. Trataré de plantear a través de Heidegger y Agamben la condición post humanista y post histórica –en el sentido moderno– en la que nos encontramos. Pero luego intentaré pensar junto a Nietzsche y Bataille una figura del hombre que no es nueva, sino una figura más antigua y creo más profunda, que quedó sepultada bajo la irrupción tectónica del humanismo y su empresa civilizatoria. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to throw some light on modal realism. Since it is David Lewis who has put forward the best arguments for thar position, I focus on his work. In the first, I point out that his approach does not provide an adequate account for the intuitive lack of symmetry between the actual and the possible. To begin with, I try to show that the strategy of appealing to both the spatio-temporal network and causality is not at (...) all satisfactory. Secondly, I criticize the argument for modal realism that is based on theoretical benefits. Then, I defend the view that Lewis' indexical analysis of the concept of actuality does not satisfy his own criterion of acceptability: an analysis of actuality should account for the intuitions about our actual word. I claim thet Lewis' objections to other positions can be raised against his own position. Finally, I conclude that, even though Lewis is right in claiming that actualist conceptions do not explain why the possible is not part of the actual, the realist conception fail to account for the special ontological status that we intuitively grant to our own world. (shrink)

Las «metáforas», «analogías» o «alegorías» tienen un lugar bien ganado en la tradición filosófica. Han sido atacadas por dar lugar a una interpretación poco rigurosa de las nociones que describen, pues permite asociarles propiedades que originalmente no se había pensado (ni resulta deseable) que formen parte de su concepto. Sin embargo, a pesar del reclamo en favor de procedimientos estrictos de definición, el uso de una imagen apropiada suele ser el mejor modo de explicar esas cuestiones que cada siglo escapan (...) a la disección que el filo de las mejores definiciones pretendía darle. Tal es el caso de las ilustraciones usadas por Charles S. Peirce en sus artículos "Algunas consecuencias de cuatro incapacidades" y "Cómo esclarecer nuestras ideas" para dar cuenta del pensamiento. Primero veremos el papel que juegan estas imágenes en la argumentación conque Peirce establece dos principios importantes de su filosofía: el de que toda cognición se encuentra determinada por otras cogniciones previas, y el de que no tenemos ningún poder de introspección. Luego hallaremos que dos de las imágenes presentan cierta incompatibilidad en un aspecto especialmente relevante desde el punto de vista de lo que tratan de ilustrar. Para finalizar, consideraremos una explicación que sea consistente con los textos y que permita resolver la discrepancia, brindando una mejor comprensión conjunta de ambas ilustraciones . (shrink)