Este artigo é resultado do projeto de pesquisa ‘Educação e ações afirmativas: um estudo sobre a presença e o lugar de professores negros e negras no IFMT’, desenvolvido no Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Mato Grosso. Tem por objetivo analisar, a partir de uma pesquisa quantitativa, a presença e o lugar de docentes negros e negras na estrutura educacional e administrativa do IFMT. Problematizamos especificamente esta instituição, de modo a compreender o locus dela no cenário de implementação (...) de políticas de ações afirmativas no Brasil pós Durban (2001), tendo em vista que, no contexto geral das universidades públicas e privadas brasileiras, é visível a diminuta presença de professores negros e negras na estrutura didática e administrativa dessas academias. Para tanto, a pesquisa parte do pressuposto de que o cerne deste problema é o racismo acadêmico, justificado ‘brasileiristicamente’ pelo mito da democracia racial, presente na obra de Gilberto Freyre (2003). Por outro lado, descontruímos a ideia de democracia racial, principal impeditivo para a discussão de políticas de ações afirmativas no Brasil até 2001, ano da Terceira Conferência de Durban, tendo como aporte teórico Florestan Fernandes (1972), Kabengele Munanga (1999, 2014), José Jorge de Carvalho (2003, 2006) e Nilma Lino Gomes (2005). Resulta da investigação que o combate à desigualdade racial na docência superior e nas instâncias administrativas universitárias requer novas medidas de ações afirmativas que promovam a igualdade racial e, por conseguinte, ampliem a presença e o protagonismo de docentes negros e negras no ambiente acadêmico. (shrink)

Early twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naïve realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naïve realism about perceptual experience to be incompatible with Kant’s claims about the way the understanding is necessarily involved in perceptual consciousness. This essay seeks to situate a naïve realist account of visual experience within a recognisably Kantian framework by arguing that a naïve realist account of visual experience is compatible with the claim that the understanding is necessarily involved in the (...) perceptual experience of those rational beings with discursive intellects. The resultant view is middle way between recent conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant, holding that the understanding is necessarily involved in the kind of perceptual consciousness that we, as rational beings, enjoy whilst allowing that the relations of apprehension which constitute perceptual consciousness are independent of acts of the understanding. (shrink)

According to non-conceptualist interpretations, Kant held that the application of concepts is not necessary for perceptual experience. Some have motivated non-conceptualism by noting the affinities between Kant's account of perception and contemporary relational theories of perception. In this paper I argue (i) that non-conceptualism cannot provide an account of the Transcendental Deduction and thus ought to be rejected; and (ii) that this has no bearing on the issue of whether Kant endorsed a relational account of perceptual experience.

Phenomenal particularism is the view that particular external objects are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. It is a central part of naïve realist or relational views of perception. We consider a series of recent objections to phenomenal particularism and argue that naïve realism has the resources to block them. In particular, we show that these objections rest on assumptions about the nature of phenomenal character that the naïve realist will reject, and that they ignore the full (...) resources that naïve realism has to offer in explaining phenomenal character. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people perceive patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mentality than the dead. Following on from Gomes and Parrott, we provide evidence to show that participants' responses in the initial experiments are an artifact of the questions posed. Results from two experiments show that, once the questions have been clarified, people do not ascribe more mental capacity to the dead than (...) to PVS patients. There is no reason to think that people perceive PVS patients as more dead than dead. (shrink)

James Van Cleve has argued that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the categories shows, at most, that we must apply the categories to experience. And this falls short of Kant’s aim, which is to show that they must so apply. In this discussion I argue that once we have noted the differences between the first and second editions of the Deduction, this objection is less telling. But Van Cleve’s objection can help illuminate the structure of the B Deduction, and it suggests (...) an interesting reason why the rewriting might have been thought necessary. (shrink)

For Kant, the human cognitive faculty has two sub-faculties: sensibility and the understanding. Each has pure forms which are necessary to us as humans: space and time for sensibility; the categories for the understanding. But Kant is careful to leave open the possibility of there being creatures like us, with both sensibility and understanding, who nevertheless have different pure forms of sensibility. They would be finite rational beings and discursive cognizers. But they would not be human. And this raises a (...) question about the pure forms of the understanding. Does Kant leave open the possibility of discursive cognizers who have different categories? Even if other discursive cognizers might not sense like us, must they at least think like us? We argue that textual and systematic considerations do not determine the answers to these questions and examine whether Kant thinks that the issue cannot be decided. Consideration of his wider views on the nature and limits of our knowledge of mind shows that Kant could indeed remain neutral on the issue but that the exact form his neutrality can take is subject to unexpected constraints. The result would be an important difference between what Kant says about discursive cognizers with other forms of sensibility and what he is in a position to say about discursive cognizers with other forms of understanding. Kantian humility here takes on a distinctive character. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish two ways of raising a sceptical problem of others' minds: via a problem concerning the possibility of error or via a problem concerning sources of knowledge. I give some reason to think that the second problem raises a more interesting problem in accounting for our knowledge of others’ minds and consider proposed solutions to the problem.

In this paper I defend the claim that testimony can serve as a basic source of knowledge of other people’s mental lives against the objection that testimonial knowledge presupposes knowledge of other people’s mental lives and therefore can’t be used to explain it.

In the essays which make up The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch gives us a picture of moral life in which ‘the metaphor of vision [is] almost irresistibly suggested’. This chapter aims to clarify the role played by the metaphor of vision in Murdoch’s philosophical thinking. I’ll examine two different things which might be meant by the term ‘moral vision’: vision of moral things or vision which is itself moral. The suggestion will be that whilst both capture something important about (...) Murdoch’s work, each may mislead about what is distinctive in her views. For Murdoch, I shall suggest, there is no distinctively moral vision. There is only vision: a loving gaze directed upon the reality of others. (shrink)

An extended examination of Libet's works led to a comprehensive reinterpretation of his results. According to this reinterpretation, the Minimum Train Duration of electrical brain stimulation should be considered as the time needed to create a brain stimulus efficient for producing conscious sensation and not as a basis for inferring the latency for conscious sensation of peripheral origin. Latency for conscious sensation with brain stimulation may occurafterthe Minimum Train Duration. Backward masking with cortical stimuli suggests a 125-300 ms minimum value (...) for the latency for conscious sensation of threshold skin stimuli. Backward enhancement is not suitable for inferring this latency. For determining temporal relations between stimuli that correspond to subjects' reports, theendof cerebral Minimum Train Duration should be used as reference, rather than its onset. Results of coupling peripheral and cortical stimuli are explained by a latency after the cortical Minimum Train Duration, having roughly the same duration as the latency for supraliminal skin stimuli. Results of coupling peripheral stimuli and stimuli to medial lemniscus (LM) are explained by a shorter LM latency and/or a longer peripheral latency. This interpretation suggests a 230 ms minimum value for the latency for conscious sensation of somatosensory near-threshold stimuli. The backward referral hypothesis, as formulated by Libet, should not be retained. Long readiness potentials preceding spontaneous conscious or nonconscious movements suggest that both kinds of movement are nonconsciously initiated. The validity of Libet's measures of W and M moments (Libet et al., 1983a) is questionable due to problems involving latencies, training, and introspective distinction of W and M. Veto of intended actions may be initially nonconscious but dependent on conscious awareness. (shrink)

Libet's (2000) arguments in defense of his interpretation of his experimental results are insufficient. The claims of my critical review (Gomes, 2008) do not suffer with his new statements.

Claims that necessary and sufficient conditions are not converse relations are discussed, as well as the related claim that If A, then B is not equivalent to A only if B . The analysis of alleged counterexamples has shown, among other things, how necessary and sufficient conditions should be understood, especially in the case of causal conditions, and the importance of distinguishing sufficient-cause conditionals from necessary-cause conditionals. It is concluded that necessary and sufficient conditions, adequately interpreted, are converse relations in (...) all cases. (shrink)

Scepticism is sometimes expressed about whether there is any interesting problem of other minds. In this paper I set out a version of the conceptual problem of other minds which turns on the way in which mental occurrences are presented to the subject and situate it in relation to debates about our knowledge of other people's mental lives. The result is a distinctive problem in the philosophy of mind concerning our relation to other people.

In the first part of this chapter, I summarise some of the issues in the philosophy of mind which are addressed in Kant’s Critical writings. In the second part, I chart some of the ways in which that discussion influenced twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind and identify some of the themes which characterise Kantian approaches in the philosophy of mind.

Can the experience of great art play a role in our coming to understand the ethical framework of another person? In this article I draw out three themes from Iris Murdoch’s ‘The Sovereignty of Good’ in order to show the role that communal attention to works of art can play in our ethical lives. I situate this role in the context of Murdoch’s wider philosophical views.

What is the status of the claims which make up Kant’s arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason? This question seemed to Kant’s contemporaries to require a metacritique. Strawson’s criticisms of Kant should be understood in this context: as raising a metacritical challenge about Kant’s grounds for the claims which make up his arguments. What about the claims which make up Strawson’s own arguments in The Bounds of Sense? I argue in this chapter, against what I take to be the (...) general consensus, that Strawson did not and should not have understood these claims to be analytic. Rather he is somewhat puzzlingly committed to our possessing non-analytic but still a priori knowledge of his claims. What could such knowledge consist in? I’ll extract from G.E. Moore’s early writings on Kant a model for understanding such knowledge, one which enables us to better appreciate the way in which Strawson’s methodology dovetails with Kant’s own. (shrink)

In the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’ of The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson argues for the thesis that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. My aim in this essay is to evaluate this claim. In the first and second parts of the essay, I explicate Strawson's thesis, reconstruct his argument, and identify the point at which the argument fails. Strawson's discussion nevertheless raises an important question: are there ways in which we must think of our experiences (...) if we are to self-ascribe them? In the third part of the essay, I use Kant's remarks concerning the passivity of experience to suggest one answer to this question: in self-ascribing experiences, we must be capable of thinking of them as passive to their objects. This can be used to provide an alternative route from unity to objectivity. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether 'even if A, B' is pragmatically polysemic, so that a nonconcessive conditional may have 'even if', and whether concessive conditionals, pragmatically defined, can fail to have 'even if' or a non-temporal 'still'. Different paraphrases are used to help elucidate pragmatic meanings. A theory of the pragmatic meanings of concessive and implicative conditionals is presented. The semantic meaning of 'even if' and the question of whether concessive conditionals imply the truth of their consequents are also discussed.

We are able to think of empirical objects as capable of existing unperceived. What explains our grasp of this conception of objects? In this paper I examine the claim that experience explains our understanding of objects as capable of existing unperceived with reference to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I argue that standard accounts of experience’s explanatory role are unsatisfactory, but that an alternative account can be extracted from the first Critique – one which relies on Kant’s transcendental idealism.

What method should we use to determine the nature of perceptual experience? My focus here is the Kantian thought that transcendental arguments can be used to determine the nature of perceptual experience. I set out a dilemma for the use of transcendental arguments in the philosophy of perception, one which turns on a comparison ofthe transcendental method with the first-personal method of early analytic philosophy, and with the empirical methods of much contemporary philosophy of mind. The transcendental method can avoid (...) this dilemma only if it commits to our possessing a capacity for imaginative reflection, one which is capable of identifying certain formal properties of experience.This result indicates some of the commitments which must be made if transcendental arguments are to be used in the philosophy of perception, and it has implications for those views that take the philosophy of perception to be autonomous of the empirical science of perception. (shrink)

Lucy Allais seeks to provide a reading of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories which is compatible with a nonconceptualist account of Kant’s theory of intuition. According to her interpretation, the aim of the Deduction is to show that a priori concept application is required for empirical concept application. I argue that once we distinguish the application of the categories from the instantiation of the categories, we see that Allais’s reconstruction of the Deduction cannot provide an answer to Hume’s problem (...) about our entitlement to use a priori concepts when thinking about the objects of empirical intuition. If the Deduction is to provide a response to Hume, Allais’s interpretation must be rejected. (shrink)

It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered, making a change in verb tense necessary. A suitable contrapositive for implicative counterfactual conditionals can also usually be found. In some cases, the addition of certain words is necessary to preserve meaning that is present in the original sentence and would be lost or changed (...) in the contrapositive without them. A distinction is made between adding new meaning and adding new words to preserve existing meaning. For concessive conditionals and relevance conditionals, however, no valid contrapositive can be found. They do not belong to the class of contraposable conditionals, which can be independently defined. Difficult cases are also discussed in which the contradictory of the consequent semantically entails the truth of the antecedent. In such cases the content of the antecedent is implicit in the meaning of the consequent. Contraposition becomes possible if what is implicit in the original consequent is made explicit in the contrapositive antecedent. (shrink)

1. Introduction The readiness potential was found to precede voluntary acts by about half a second or more (Kornhuber & Deecke, 1965). Kornhuber (1984) discussed the readiness potential in terms of volition, arguing that it is not the manifestation of an attentional processes. Libet discussed it in relation to consciousness and to free will (Libet et al. 1983a; 1983b; Libet, 1985, 1992, 1993). Libet asked the following questions. Are voluntary acts initiated by a conscious decision to act? Are the physiological (...) facts compatible with the belief that free will determines our voluntary acts? What is the role of consciousness in voluntary action? In this paper I will discuss these questions and the answers that Libet gave to them. (shrink)

‘How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?’ So asks Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. It is this question, rather than any concern about pretence or deception, which forms the basis for the philosophical problem of other minds. Responses to this problem have tended to cluster around two solutions: either we know others’ minds through perception; or we know others’ minds through a form of inference. In the (...) first part of this paper I argue that this debate is best understood as concerning the question of whether our knowledge of others’ minds is based on perception or based on evidence. In the second part of the paper I suggest that our ordinary ways of thinking take our knowledge of others’ minds to be both non- evidential and non-perceptual. A satisfactory resolution to the philosophical problem of other minds thus requires us to take seriously the idea that we have a way of knowing about others’ minds which is both non-evidential and non-perceptual. I suggest that our knowledge of others’ minds which is based on their expressions – our expressive knowledge - may fit this bill. (shrink)

An examination of conditionals in di¤erent languages leads to a distinction of three types of conditionals instead of the usual two (indicative and subjunctive). The three types can be explained by the degree of acceptance or as-if acceptance of the truth of the antecedent. The labels subjunctive and indicative are shown to be inadequate. So-called indicative conditionals comprise two classes, the very frequent uncertain-fact conditionals and the quite rare accepted-fact conditionals. Uncertain-fact conditionals may have a time shift in contemporary English (...) and the future subjunctive in Portuguese (though not all of them do). Moreover, paraphrases of if with in case or supposing are usually possible with approximately the same meaning. Accepted-fact conditionals never have these features. (shrink)

Quassim Cassam has recently defended a perceptual model of knowledge of other minds: one on which we can see and thereby know that another thinks and feels. In the course of defending this model, he addresses issues about our ability to think about other minds. I argue that his solution to this 'conceptual problem' does not work. A solution to the conceptual problem is necessary if we wish to explain knowledge of other minds.

Anil Gomes considers Murdoch's view that morality is real and that, with the right conceptual resources, we can perceive it.

Why is gauge symmetry so important in modern physics, given that one must eliminate it when interpreting what the theory represents? In this paper we discuss the sense in which gauge symmetry can be fruitfully applied to constrain the space of possible dynamical models in such a way that forces and charges are appropriately coupled. We review the most well-known application of this kind, known as the 'gauge argument' or 'gauge principle', discuss its difficulties, and then reconstruct the gauge argument (...) as a valid theorem in quantum theory. We then present what we take to be a better and more general gauge argument, based on Noether's second theorem in classical Lagrangian field theory, and argue that this provides a more appropriate framework for understanding how gauge symmetry helps to constrain the dynamics of physical theories. (shrink)

A commentary on articles by Klein, Pockett, and Trevena and Miller, in this issue, is given. Average shift in the point of subjective equality , calculated by Klein on Libet's data, and corresponding change in mean shift, calculated by Libet et al. , may be “corrected,” taking as a reference point the end of the minimum train duration. Values obtained, if significant, indicate a latency for conscious sensation of the skin stimulus of at least 230 ms. Pockett's main conclusions are (...) favored, but her explanation of peripheral–lemniscal couplings is found to be unconvincing. Trevena and Miller's article unsuccessfully tries to rescue a dualist interactionist view. Libet's method of timing intentions is thoroughly criticized. (shrink)

John McDowell’s original motivation of disjunctivism occurs in the context of a problem regarding other minds. Recent commentators have insisted that McDowell’s disjunctivism should be classed as an epistemological disjunctivism about epistemic warrant, and distinguished from the perceptual disjunctivism of Hinton, Snowdon and others. In this paper I investigate the relation between the problem of other minds and disjunctivism, and raise some questions for this interpretation of McDowell.

Varzi (2005) discussed 6 ways of symbolizing the sentence 'If Alf went to the movies then Beth went too, but only if she found a taxi-cab.' In the present reply, a seventh symbolization is offered, along with an analysis of the six alternatives discussed by Varzi.

Freedom is often defined by the possibility of doing otherwise. The conditional interpretation of this possibility, advanced by Moore, maintains that to say that someone could have done otherwise is to say that someone would have done otherwise if she had decided to do so. This conception is adequate for the thesis that freedom is compatible with natural causality. The present article presents a defense of this interpretation against the argument with which Lehrer purports to have refuted it. As used (...) in ordinary language, one of the conditionals of the argument has a different sense from that captured in Lehrer’s formalization. In a context that includes the premise that the subject would do otherwise if she decided to do so, the assertion that she could do otherwise only if she decided to do so acquires the meaning that she would do otherwise only if she decided to do so. Without this interpretation, the meaning of ‘can’ in the argument is different from its meaning in ordinary language, since the possibility of doing otherwise would imply really doing otherwise. Abstract in Portuguese: A liberdade é freqüentemente definida pela possibilidade de agir diferentemente. A interpretação condicional dessa possibilidade, proposta por Moore, sustenta que dizer que alguém poderia ter agido diferentemente é dizer que alguém teria agido diferentemente, se assim tivesse decidido. Esta concepção é adequada à tese da compatibilidade entre liberdade e causalidade natural. O presente artigo apresenta uma defesa dessa interpretação contra o argumento com que Lehrer pretendeu contestá-la. Tal como usado na linguagem corrente, um dos condicionais do argumento tem sentido diverso daquele capturado na formalização de Lehrer. No contexto que inclui a premissa de que o sujeito agiria diferentemente se assim decidisse, a afirmaçãode que ele só poderia agir diferentemente se assim decidisse tem o sentido de que ele só agiria diferentemente se assim decidisse. Sem essa reinterpretação, o sentido de ‘poder’, no argumento, distancia-se da linguagem corrente, pois, no caso, poder agir diferentemente implicaria em assim efetivamente agir. (shrink)

We are grateful to Ganson and Mehta (forthcoming) for their reply to our defence of phenomenal particularism against the objections raised by Mehta in his (2014). Their reply clarifies the nature of their objections to phenomenal particularism and helps identify the locus of our disagreements. In what follows we aim to defend phenomenal particularism against the objections raised in their reply.

In this article I compare Hume and Whitehead on the experience of causality. I examine Whitehead's examples of such an experience and I offer a defense of Whitehead against Hume on this topic.

In this work, we discuss the failure of the principle of truth functionality in the quantum formalism. By exploiting this failure, we import the formalism of N-matrix theory and non-deterministic semantics to the foundations of quantum mechanics. This is done by describing quantum states as particular valuations associated with infinite non-deterministic truth tables. This allows us to introduce a natural interpretation of quantum states in terms of a non-deterministic semantics. We also provide a similar construction for arbitrary probabilistic theories based (...) in orthomodular lattices, allowing to study post-quantum models using logical techniques. (shrink)

Chapter 4 of Dennis Schulting’s book Kant’s Radical Subjectivism targets those commentators who take there to be a gap in the transcendental deduction of the categories, arguing instead that there is no gap between the necessary application of the categories and their exemplification in the object of experience. In these comments on the chapter, I suggest a minimal sense in which the fact that there is a gap is non-negotiable. The interesting question is not whether there is a gap which (...) needs to be bridged, but how and why Kant makes the step from subjectivity to objectivity. (shrink)

Internalism and externalism disagree about whether agents who are internally the same can differ in their mental states. But what is it for two agents to be internally the same? Standard formulations take agents to be internally the same in virtue of some metaphysical fact, for example, that they share intrinsic physical properties. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that such formulations should be rejected. We provide the outlines of an alternative formulation on which agents are internally the (...) same in virtue of facts about their epistemic capacities. The resulting formulation is one on which internalism and externalism are views about the extent to which an agent’s mental states can vary independently of the capacity for introspective discrimination. We suggest that this epistemic formulation of internalism and externalism picks out a substantive disagreement in philosophical theorizing about the nature of the mind. (shrink)

By elaborating on the results presented in Lógica cuántica, Nmatrices y adecuación I, here we discuss the notions of adequacy and truth functionality in quantum logic from the point of view of a non-deterministic semantics based on Nmatrices. We present a proof of the impossibility of providing a functional semantics for the quantum lattice. An advantage of our proof is that it is independent of the number of truth values involved, generalizing previous works. Due to the impossibility of defining adequate (...) interpreting sets for the conjunction and disjunction (as was shown in our previous work), it follows that a homomorphism between the lattice of quantum projections and a Boolean algebra of n-elements cannot exist. (shrink)

A commentary is given on Trevena and Miller . The comparability of their experimental task and of the potential they recorded with those used and recorded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl is questioned. An interpretation is given for the similarity of event-related potentials recorded when subjects decided to move and when they decided not to move.

When a circular coin is rotated in depth, is there any sense in which it comes to resemble an ellipse? While this question is at the center of a rich and divided philosophical tradition (with some scholars answering affirmatively and some negatively), Morales et al. (2020, 2021) took an empirical approach, reporting 10 experiments whose results favor such perspectival similarity. Recently, Burge and Burge (2022) offered a vigorous critique of this work, objecting to its approach and conclusions on both philosophical (...) and empirical grounds. Here, we answer these objections on both fronts. We show that Burge and Burge’s critique rests on misunderstandings of Morales et al.’s claims; of the relation between the data and conclusions; and of the philosophical context in which the work appears. Specifically, Burge and Burge attribute to us a much stronger (and stranger) view than we hold, involving the introduction of “a new entity” located “in some intermediate position(s) between the distal shape and the retinal image.” We do not hold this view. Indeed, once properly understood, most of Burge and Burge’s objections favor Morales et al.’s claims rather than oppose them. Finally, we discuss several questions that remain unanswered, and reflect on a productive path forward on these issues of foundational scientific and philosophical interest. (shrink)

In Metaphysics A.4, Aristotle provides crucial information about fundamental aspects of the chemistry and microphysics of the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus of Abdera. Besides the plenum and the void, which he identifies as the elements of the atomic theory, he presents what he himself names as differences. These fundamental differences are named so because they ought to be responsible for the emergence of all other differences in the physical world, and especially the ones that hit our senses. Aristotle (...) provides a list of three differences both in what is recognized as autochthonous terminology from Leucippus and Democritus, and in a translation to terms apparently more intelligible to Aristotelian listeners. Among those differences there is one in particular that is harder to comprehend than the other ones: rhysmos. Aristotle’s translation of rhysmos into schēma has led most interpreters to acknowledge that it referred solely to atoms individually, while the other two differences would refer to relations between atoms. In this paper, I want to propose an interpretation in which rhysmos actually refers to several aspects of the chemistry and microphysics of the atomic theory. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people judge patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mental capacity than the dead. They explain this result by claiming that people have implicit dualist or afterlife beliefs. This essay critically evaluates their experimental findings and their proposed explanation. We argue first that the experiments do not support the conclusion that people intuitively think PVS patients have less mentality than the dead. (...) And second, we provide an alternative explanation of our ascriptions of mentality to the dead and PVS patients, one which turns on Epicurean considerations about the nature of death. (shrink)

Peter Goldie has argued for a virtue theory of art, analogous to a virtue theory of ethics, one in which the skills and dispositions involved in the production and appreciation of art are virtues and not simply mere skills. In this note I highlight a link between the appreciation of art and its production, and explore the implications of such a link for a virtue theory of art.

Hodgson’s (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12 (1), 2005) defense of the plain person’s view that free will exists in conscious voluntary action is discussed. His position against the view that human action is automatically determined is favored, but his view that free will is incompatible with natural causation is countered. Eccles’ hypothesis to account for the presence of a readiness potential prior to a conscious decision to act now is discussed. It is argued that it is possible to preserve what (...) is good in a plain person’s concept of free will in a way that is compatible with natural causation. (shrink)

Studying the neural correlates of conscious awareness depends on a reliable comparison between activations associated with awareness and unawareness. One particularly difficult confound to remove is task performance capacity, i.e. the difference in performance between the conditions of interest. While ideally task performance capacity should be matched across different conditions, this is difficult to achieve experimentally. However, differences in performance could theoretically be corrected for mathematically. One such proposal is found in a recent paper by Lamy, Salti and Bar-Haim [Lamy (...) D, Salti M, Bar-Haim Y. Neural correlates of subjective awareness and unconscious processing: an ERP study. J Cognitive Neurosci 2009,21:1435-46], who put forward a corrective method for an electroencephalography experiment. We argue that their analysis is essentially grounded in a version of High Threshold Theory, which has been shown to be inferior in general to Signal Detection Theory. We show through a series of computer simulations that their correction method only partially removes the influence of perfor- mance capacity, which can yield misleading results. We present a mathematical correction method based on Signal Detection Theory that is theoretically capable of removing performance capacity confounds. We discuss the limitations of mathemati- cally correcting for performance capacity confounds in imaging studies and its impact for theories about consciousness. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar como Kant aplicou uma estrutura cognitiva mais abstrata aos objetos da experiência. É possível observar, a partir de um exemplo _in concreto,_ a aplicação dos princípios do entendimento puro, desenvolvidos e estruturados na_ Crítica da Razão Pura_, aos objetos da experiência, neste caso, as proposições empíricas da mecânica newtoniana. Assim, apresentamos a configuração dos argumentos kantianos, sustentando que há uma relação explícita entre os princípios do entendimento puro, e os princípios metafísicos da ciência da (...) natureza, estes desenvolvidos na obra de mesmo nome – _Princípios Metafísicos de Ciência da Natureza_ – e mostramos que essa relação se dá por meio de uma estrutura argumentativa em que os princípios gerais e abstratos da primeira _Crítica_ são premissas para os princípios metafísicos aplicados dos PMCN. Buscamos, assim, provar que a estrutura da filosofia da ciência kantiana é dada, principalmente, por meio das duas obras supracitadas, e é uma teoria que tem como principal objetivo, fundamentar filosoficamente a mecânica newtoniana, a fim de explicar como um conhecimento objetivamente válido dos fenômenos do mundo é possível. (shrink)