This presentation discusses a notion encountered across disciplines, and in different facets of human activity: autonomous activity. We engage it in an interdisciplinary way. We start by considering the reactions and behaviors of biological entities to biotechnological intervention. An attempt is made to characterize the degree of freedom of embryos & clones, which show openness to different outcomes when the epigenetic developmental landscape is factored in. We then consider the claim made in programming and artificial intelligence that automata could show (...) self-directed behavior as to the determination of their step-wise decisions on courses of action. This question remains largely open and calls for some important qualifications. We try to make sense of the presence of claims of freedom in agency, first in common sense, then by ascribing developmental plasticity in biology and biotechnology, and in the mapping of programmed systems in the presence of environmental cues and self-referenced circuits as well as environmental coupling. This is the occasion to recall attempts at working out a logical and methodological approach to the openness of concepts that are still to be found, and assess whether they can operate the structuring intelligibility of a yet undeveloped or underdeveloped field of study, where a “bisociation" and a unification of knowledge might be possible. (shrink)

In the last decades there has been a great controversy about the scientific status of emotion categories. This controversy stems from the idea that emotions are heterogeneous phenomena, which precludes classifying them under a common kind. In this article, I analyze this claim—which I call the Variability Thesis—and argue that as it stands, it is problematically underdefined. To show this, I examine a recent formulation of the thesis as offered by Scarantino (2015). On one hand, I raise some issues regarding (...) the logical structure of the claim. On the other hand, and most importantly, I show that the Variability Thesis requires a consensus about what counts as a relevant pattern of response in different domains, a consensus that is lacking in the current literature. This makes it difficult to assess what counts as evidence for or against this thesis. As a result, arguments based on the Variability Thesis are unwarranted. This raises serious concerns about some current empirical theories of emotions, but also sheds light on the issue of the scientific status of emotion categories. (shrink)

I propose a reading of Berkeley's Essay towards a New Theory of Vision in which Molyneux-type questions are interpreted as thought experiments instead of arguments. First, I present the general argumentative strategy in the NTV, and provide grounds for the traditional reading. Second, I consider some roles of thought experiments, and classify Molyneux-type questions in the NTV as constructive conjectural thought experiments. Third, I argue that (i) there is no distinction between Weak and Strong Heterogeneity theses in the NTV; (ii) (...) that Strong Heterogeneity is the basis of Berkeley's theory; and (iii) that Molyneux-type questions act as illustrations of Strong Heterogeneity. (shrink)

Las organizaciones públicas se comunican con los ciudadanos de diversas formas, y no están ajenas a la utilización de las redes sociales. La investigación tiene como finalidad analizar la comunicación de la Responsabilidad Social de las empresas públicas uruguayas, a través de la red Twitter. Para el análisis de los tweets se emplea la herramienta Burrrd, Twelets y se utiliza, como referencia, la metodología propuesta por Aldeanueva y Arrabal (2018), identificando un diccionario de términos relacionados con responsabilidad social en las (...) publicaciones realizadas, agrupándolos por temáticas comunes, a fin de analizar qué comunican las organizaciones públicas sobre su responsabilidad social. (shrink)

Public organizations communicate with citizens by several ways, and also use social media The purpose of the research is to analyze the Social Responsibility communication of Uruguayan public companies on Twitter. For the analysis of tweets, the Burrrd Twelets tool is used and, as a reference, the methodology proposed by Aldeanueva and Arrabal (2018) identifying a dictionary of terms related to social responsibility.

Se plantea el problema de la existencia de una campo científico -el geográfico - para el cual existen candidaturas e disciplinas determinadas como la Geografía Física, La Humana, la R egional y la Universal, etc. Se plantea la diferencia entre ciencias naturales y humanas, así como entre ciencias texonómicas y ciencias mereológicas, como marcos de análisis para las ciencias geográficas.

The status of art in Plato's philosophy has always been a difficult problem. As a matter of fact, he even threw the poets out from his ideal state, a passage that has led some interpreters to assess that Plato did not develop a proper philosophy of art. Nevertheless, R. G. Collingwood, wrote an article titled “Plato's Philosophy of Art”. How can it be? What could lead one of the most important aesthetic scholars of the first half of the twentieth century (...) to make this thesis about Plato? To understand Collingwood's position at that time, I will review it in a new light: his own philosophy of art at that moment as it was propounded in Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, a work he published that same year. I will also examine how Collingwood's position changed when he returned to the same subject in 1938, on the publication of The Principles of Art. Finally, I will end this article defending the correctness of Collingwood's earlier interpretation of Plato's position on art. (shrink)

Розкрито сутність поняття «рейтинг». Доведено значущість рейтингової оцінки для суб’єктів фінансового ринку, зокрема для страхових компаній, потенційних страхувальників, інвесторів та кредиторів.

From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism and (...) argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance. (shrink)

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict exemplify (...) self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which accounts for skillful agency by tackling the guidance problem: how can agents transform their abstract and coarse-grained intentions into the highly context-sensitive, fine-grained control processes required to select, revise and (...) correct strategies during self-control exertion? The skill model borrows conceptual tools from ‘hierarchical models’ recently developed in the context of motor skills, and asserts that self-control crucially involves the ability to manage the implementation and monitoring of regulatory strategies as the self-control exercise unfolds. Skilled agents are able do this by means of flexible practical reasoning: a fast, context-sensitive type of deliberation that incorporates non-propositional representations into the formation and revision of the mixed-format intentions that structure self-control exertion. The literatures on implementation intentions and motivation framing offer corroborating evidence for the theory. As a surprising result, the skill of self-control that allows agents to overcome the contrary motivations they experience is self-effacing: instead of continuously honing this skill, expert agents replace it with a different one, which minimizes or prevents contrary motivations from arising in the first place. Thus, the more expert you are at self-control, the less likely you are to use it. (shrink)

Gibson defined affordances as action possibilities directly offered to an animal by the environment. Ambitiously, affordances are meant to show the inadequacy of the subjective-objective dichotomy in the study of cognition. Armed with similar concerns, some neo-Gibsonians recently thought of affordances as latent dispositions existing independently of individual organisms or whole species. It is no coincidence that critics had, on several occasions, objected that this theoretical stance dramatically neglects the role of the perceiver in the emergence of affordances. In this (...) paper, we provide a phenomenological characterization of the perceiver’s role in affordance perception. Specifically, we borrow from Husserlian phenomenology to characterize two features of affordance perception that can enrich our understanding of the individual’s engagement with the environment, namely, its affective and temporal aspects. Taking an everyday activity such as rock climbing as a case example, we show that phenomenological investigations, if not misinterpreted as mere introspection, can represent an ally for ecological psychologists. (shrink)

Self-control is deemed crucial for reasons-responsive agency and a key contributor to long-term wellbeing. But recent studies suggest that effortfully resisting one’s temptations does not contribute to long-term goal attainment, and can even be harmful. So how does self-control improve our lives? Finding an answer requires revising the role that overcoming temptation plays in self-control. This paper distinguishes two forms of self-control problems: temptation (the presence of a strong wayward motivation) and apathy (the lack of commitment-advancing motivation). This distinction makes (...) it possible to separate negative self-control (aimed at overcoming temptation) from positive self-control (aimed at overcoming lack of motivation). The paper argues that temptation should not play a central role in our conception of self-control, since overcoming temptation is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful self-control. (shrink)

In this paper I will critically assess a very popular interpretation of Heidegger’s early thought, according to which meaning (Bedeutung) is conceived as ontologically dependent on human existence (Dasein). In order to criticize this subjectivist understanding of meaning, I will offer an interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of signs in Being and Time (§17). This will reveal two main things: first, that the ubiquity of sign-phenomena is founded on the universality of the structure known as reference (Verweisung); second, that Heidegger’s idea (...) of reference offers a non-substantialist understanding of meaning and its relation to the world. (shrink)

Intuitively, there is a difference between knowledge and mere belief. Contemporary philosophical work on the nature of this difference has focused on scenarios known as “Gettier cases.” Designed as counterexamples to the classical theory that knowledge is justified true belief, these cases feature agents who arrive at true beliefs in ways which seem reasonable or justified, while nevertheless seeming to lack knowledge. Prior empirical investigation of these cases has raised questions about whether lay people generally share philosophers’ intuitions about these (...) cases, or whether lay intuitions vary depending on individual factors (e.g. ethnicity) or factors related to specific types of Gettier cases (e.g. cases that include apparent evidence). We report an experiment on lay attributions of knowledge and justification for a wide range of Gettier Cases and for a related class of controversial cases known as Skeptical Pressure cases, which are also thought by philosophers to elicit intuitive denials of knowledge. Although participants rated true beliefs in Gettier and Skeptical Pressure cases as being justified, they were significantly less likely to attribute knowledge for these cases than for matched true belief cases. This pattern of response was consistent across different variations of Gettier cases and did not vary by ethnicity or gender, although attributions of justification were found to be positively related to measures of empathy. These findings therefore suggest that across demographic groups, laypeople share similar epistemic concepts with philosophers, recognizing a difference between knowledge and justified true belief. (shrink)

For Plato mimesis is the appearance of the external image of things. In his view, the reality was not to be found in the world of objects but in the realm of ideas. Therefore, Plato sees the arts as an occupation that is inferior to science and philosophy, but that is also a potential source of corruption. His concept of imitation, although it evolved over time, led him to take an increasingly dogmatic and intolerant position regarding artistic creation. His notion (...) that poetry is morally dangerous establishes the foundations for a didactic critique, which tends to flourish in societies undergoing political crises. Plato wrote his works during an age of instability and decline; an age when the role of Athens as the leading power in the Mediterranean was beginning to be questioned. Through an analysis of Ion and Books II, III, and X of The Republic, this essay explores the epistemological and moral —rather than aesthetic— nature of Plato’s judgment on the value of Poetry and the Arts. (shrink)

Sophists and rhetoricians like Gorgias are often accused of disregarding truth and rationality: their speeches seem to aim only at effective persuasion, and be constrained by nothing but persuasiveness itself. In his extant texts Gorgias claims that language does not represent external objects or communicate internal states, but merely generates behavioural responses in people. It has been argued that this perspective erodes the possibility of rationally assessing speeches by making persuasiveness the only norm, and persuasive power the only virtue, of (...) speech. Against this view, I show how Gorgias’ texts support a robust normativity of language that goes well beyond persuasion while remaining non-representational. Gorgias’ claims that a speech can be persuasive and false, or true and unpersuasive, reveal pragmatic, epistemic, and agonistic constraints on the validity of speech that are neither representational nor reducible to sheer persuasiveness. (shrink)

In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably less prevalent (...) in mathematics papers than in physics papers or in general English. Furthermore, we find that the proportion with which mathematicians use expressions related to ‘explaining why’ and ‘explaining how’ is significantly different to the equivalent proportion in physics and in general English. We discuss possible accounts for these differences. (shrink)

Effort and the feeling of effort play important roles in many theoretical discussions, from perception to self-control and free will, from the nature of ownership to the nature of desert and achievement. A crucial, overlooked distinction within the philosophical and scientific literatures is the distinction between theories that seek to explain effort and theories that seek to explain the feeling of effort. Lacking a clear distinction between these two phenomena makes the literature hard to navigate. To advance in the unification (...) and development of this area, this article provides an overview of the main theories of the nature of effort and the nature of the feeling of effort, and then discusses how efforts and their feelings are related. Two key takeaways emerge. First, there is widespread agreement that efforts are goal-directed actions. Second, one of the main philosophical issues to be decided is whether feelings of effort should be defined by reference to efforts (effort-first approach), or whether efforts are defined by reference to the feeling of effort (feeling-first approach). (shrink)

In “Willpower with and without effort”, G. Ainslie advances our understanding of selfcontrol by theoretically unifying multiple forms of willpower. But one crucial question remains unanswered: How do agents pick the right forms of willpower in each situation? I argue that willpower requires tactical skill, which detects willpower-demanding contexts, selects context-appropriate tactics, and monitors their implementation. Research on tactical skill will significantly advance our understanding of willpower.

Habitual action would still be a tremendously pervasive feature of our agency. And yet, references to habitual action have been marginal at best in contemporary philosophy of action. This neglect is due, at least, to the combination of two ideas. The first is a widespread view of habit as entirely automatic, inflexible, and irresponsive to reasons. The second is philosophy of action’s tendency (dominant at least since Anscombe and Davidson) to focus on explaining action by reference to reasons. Arguably, if (...) habitual behavior is reasons-irresponsive, and if action is explained by reference to reasons, the study of habit would have very little to teach about action. Recently, however, there has been a surge in philosophical interest on habit and habitual action. Novel approaches are challenging the two ideas mentioned above, arguing that (1) habitual behavior is not entirely automatic or inflexible, but instead has a particular kind of flexibility and intentionality; and that (2) acting out of habit can count as a form of acting for reasons, even in the absence of the traditional rationalizing mental states: belief, desire, and intention. -/- The essays contained in this issue move discussions forward in exciting new directions. In what follows we present each paper and situate it within its broader theoretical context, so that this introduction may serve also as an introduction to the topic of habitual action. A crucial lesson that emerges from these essays is a need to move past disputes between philosophical schools or traditions. Rather than combatting between different philosophical factions, an ecumenical approach capable of skillfully bringing together elements from different traditions seems better able to tackle problems that remain unsolved. These problems include (but are not limited to): developing an account of responsibility for habitual action; explaining our ability to perform joint habitual actions; and clarifying the link between habit and self-control. (shrink)

Scientifically speaking, quantum mechanics (QM) is the most successful theory ever made. Philosophically speaking, however, it is the most controversial theory. Its basic principles seem to contravene our deepest intuitions about reality, which are reflected in the metaphysical commitments of classical mechanics (CM). The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I argue that QM implies an ontological challenge, and not merely an “ontic” one, as it has been traditionally interpreted in the analytic tradition. Second, I suggest that positions known (...) as “ontological pluralism” exhibit an internal weakness due to its unwarranted compromise to a representational view of scientific theories. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

This book addresses key conceptual issues relating to the modern scientific and engineering use of computer simulations. It analyses a broad set of questions, from the nature of computer simulations to their epistemological power, including the many scientific, social and ethics implications of using computer simulations. The book is written in an easily accessible narrative, one that weaves together philosophical questions and scientific technicalities. It will thus appeal equally to all academic scientists, engineers, and researchers in industry interested in questions (...) related to the general practice of computer simulations. (shrink)

The two main theories of perceptual reasons in contemporary epistemology can be called Phenomenalism and Factualism. According to Phenomenalism, perceptual reasons are facts about experiences conceived of as phenomenal states, i.e., states individuated by phenomenal character, by what it’s like to be in them. According to Factualism, perceptual reasons are instead facts about the external objects perceived. The main problem with Factualism is that it struggles with bad cases: cases where perceived objects are not what they appear or where there (...) is no perceived object at all. The main problem with Phenomenalism is that it struggles with good cases: cases where everything is perfectly normal and the external object is correctly perceived, so that one’s perceptual beliefs are knowledge. In this paper we show that there is a theory of perceptual reasons that avoids the problems for Factualism and Phenomenalism. We call this view Propositionalism. We use ‘proposition’ broadly to mean the entities that are contents of beliefs and other doxastic attitudes. The key to finding a middle ground between Phenomenalism and Factualism, we claim, is to allow our reasons to be false in bad cases. Despite being false, they are about the external world, not our phenomenal states. (shrink)

Political liberals ask citizens not to appeal to certain considerations, including religious and philosophical convictions, in political deliberation. We argue that political liberals must include a demanding requirement of intellectual modesty in their ideal of citizenship in order to motivate this deliberative restraint. The requirement calls on each citizen to believe that the best reasoners disagree about the considerations that she is barred from appealing to. Along the way, we clarify how requirements of intellectual modesty relate to moral reasons for (...) deliberative restraint. And we argue against attempts to weaken our requirement of intellectual modesty by emphasizing those moral reasons. (shrink)

¿Qué es la mente humana? ¿Es un aspecto de la naturaleza? ¿O acaso la trasciende? ¿Se puede explicar enteramente al hombre en un lenguaje científico-natural? Desde que Aristóteles definió al hombre como un "animal racional", el pensamiento occidental ha erigido una distinción ontológica entre hombre y naturaleza. Sin embargo, el darwinismo nos ha legado una verdad ineludible: que somos organismos animales, cuyas capacidades conceptuales no escapan a los procesos propios de la naturaleza. ¿Se puede, entonces, pensar al hombre como un (...) ser mental, y al mismo tiempo como un organismo natural? Para ello, sin duda, será necesario reformular los conceptos tradicionales de "mente" y de "naturaleza" en busca de una reconciliación conceptual. El siguiente volumen recorre campos como la fenomenología trascendental, la lógica, la biología, la semiótica, la lingüística y la psicología con el fin de superar este dualismo tan antiguo como la filosofía. (shrink)

Richard Feldman has proposed and defended different versions of a principle about evidence. In slogan form, the principle holds that ‘evidence of evidence is evidence’. Recently, Branden Fitelson has argued that Feldman’s preferred rendition of the principle falls pray to a counterexample related to the non-transitivity of the evidence-for relation. Feldman replies arguing that Fitelson’s case does not really represent a counterexample to the principle. In this note, we argue that Feldman’s principle is trivially true.

Evidentialism and Reliabilism are two of the main contemporary theories of epistemic justification. Some authors have thought that the theories are not incompatible with each other, and that a hybrid theory which incorporates elements of both should be taken into account. More recently, other authors have argued that the resulting theory is well- placed to deal with fine-grained doxastic attitudes (credences). In this paper I review the reasons for adopting this kind of hybrid theory, paying attention to the case of (...) credences and the notion of probability involved in their treatment. I argue that the notion of probability in question can only be an epistemic (or evidential) kind of probability. I conclude that the resulting theory will be incompatible with Reliabilism in one important respect: it cannot deliver on the reductivist promise of Reliabilism. I also argue that attention to the justification of basic beliefs reveals limitations in the Evidentialist framework as well. The theory that results from the right combination of Evidentialism and Reliabilism, therefore, is neither Evidentialist nor Reliabilist. (shrink)

I argue that normative requirements should be interpreted as the conditional obligations of dyadic deontic logic. Semantically, normative requirements are conditionals understood as restrictors, the prevailing view of conditionals in linguistics. This means that Modus Ponens is invalid, even when the premises are known.

By “epistemic pragmatism” in general I will understand the claim that whether propositions instantiate certain key epistemic properties (such as being known or being justifiably believed) depends not just on factors traditionally recognized as epistemic, but also on pragmatic factors, such as how costly it would be to the subject if the proposition were false. In what follows I consider two varieties of epistemic pragmatism. According to what I shall call moderate epistemic pragmatism, how much evidence we need in favor (...) of a proposition in order to know that the proposition is true depends on our preferences. According to what I shall call extreme epistemic pragmatism, on the other hand, our preferences influence our epistemic position at a more basic level, because they help determine how much justification we actually have in favor of the proposition in question. Simplifying brutally, moderate epistemic pragmatism has it that the more worried we are about a proposition’s being false, the more justification we need in order to know it, whereas extreme epistemic pragmatism has it that the more worried we are about a proposition’s being false, the less justification we have for it. Recently, Fantl and McGrath have presented an interesting argument for moderate epistemic pragmatism, an argument which relies on the principle that (roughly) knowledge is sufficient for action (KA). In this paper I argue that KA, together with a plausible principle about second-order evidence, entails extreme epistemic pragmatism. (shrink)

This article aims to develop a new account of scientific explanation for computer simulations. To this end, two questions are answered: what is the explanatory relation for computer simulations? And what kind of epistemic gain should be expected? For several reasons tailored to the benefits and needs of computer simulations, these questions are better answered within the unificationist model of scientific explanation. Unlike previous efforts in the literature, I submit that the explanatory relation is between the simulation model and the (...) results of the simulation. I also argue that our epistemic gain goes beyond the unificationist account, encompassing a practical dimension as well. (shrink)

Self-control, the capacity to resist temptations and pursue longer-term goals over immediate gratifications, is crucial in determining the overall shape of our lives, and thereby in our ability to shape our identities. As it turns out, this capacity is intimately linked with our ability to control the direction of our attention. This raises the worry that perhaps social media are making us more easily distracted people, and therefore less able to exercise self-control. Is this so? And is it necessarily a (...) bad thing? This paper analyzes the nature of attention, its vices and virtues, and what currently available evidence has to say about the effects of social media on attention and self-control. The pattern that seems to be emerging is that, although there is an association between higher use of social media and lower attentional control, we do not yet know whether it is social media use that makes people more distracted, or whether those who use social media the most do so because they are more easily distracted. Either way, the rise of the ‘Web 2.0’ does raise questions about whether the virtues of attention will change in the future, and whether this will bring with it a transformation in the way we shape our selves. (shrink)

Concerns about threats to human autonomy feature prominently in the field of AI ethics. One aspect of this concern relates to the use of AI systems for problematically manipulative influence. In response to this, the European Union’s draft AI Act (AIA) includes a prohibition on AI systems deploying subliminal techniques that alter people’s behavior in ways that are reasonably likely to cause harm (Article 5(1)(a)). Critics have argued that the term ‘subliminal techniques’ is too narrow to capture the target cases (...) of AI-based manipulation. We propose a definition of ‘subliminal techniques’ that (a) is grounded on a plausible interpretation of the legal text; (b) addresses all or most of the underlying ethical concerns motivating the prohibition; (c) is defensible from a scientific and philosophical perspective; and (d) does not over-reach in ways that impose excessive administrative and regulatory burdens. The definition is meant to provide guidance for design teams seeking to pursue responsible and ethically aligned AI innovation. (shrink)

I discuss Turri's puzzle about withholding. I argue that attention to the way in which evidence can justify withholding dissolves the puzzle.

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that many scholars involved in the contemporary free will debates have underappreciated the philosophical appeal of agent causation because the resources of contemporary emergentism have not been adequately introduced into the discussion. Whereas I agree that agent causation’s main problem has to do with its intelligibility, particularly with respect to the issue of how substances can be causally relevant, I argue that the notion of substance causation can be clearly articulated from an emergentist framework. According (...) to my proposal, a free agent is _a causally powerful substance that emerges in an anomic way from her constitutive mental events_, downwardly constraining, selecting and, in this way, having control on them. As we shall see, this particular concept of agent causation not only makes sense of the deep insight behind agent libertarianism, but it also provides us with the resources to solve some of the main objections that have been raised against it. It is true that here I cannot develop a complete defense of the evidential credentials of emergentism. Still, even if the considerations that follow do not serve to convince detractors of agent causal libertarian accounts of free will, they do suggest that libertarian agent causation is more promising than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

Much of our know-how is acquired through practice: we learn how to cook by cooking, how to write by writing, and how to dance by dancing. As Aristotle argues, however, this kind of learning is puzzling, since engaging in it seems to require possession of the very knowledge one seeks to obtain. After showing how a version of the puzzle arises from a set of attractive principles, I argue that the best solution is to hold that knowledge-how comes in degrees, (...) and through practice a person gradually learns how to do something. However, the two standard accounts of know-how in the literature, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, cannot properly account for the distinctive way in which know-how is gradually acquired by practice, a process in which conceptual representations and practical abilities are intimately interwoven. Drawing on Gareth Evans's work, I outline an account that may do so, and use this account to distinguish between two forms of learning to explain why skill generally cannot be learnt through testimony, and requires practice. (shrink)

For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the general feeling of effort. To advance in this direction, I defend the single-feeling view, which states that (...) the feeling of effort is one and the same for both mental and bodily actions. This feeling represents the subjective costs, both mental and physical, of performing a given action. Cost-based approaches have recently become influential for the feeling of mental effort. Here I focus on arguing that our sense of bodily effort does not simply represent physiological processes, but rather represents the subjective costs of a bodily action. Through this paper I discuss the role of the feeling of effort (and affective states more broadly) in action guidance and the sense of agency. I also define efforts themselves in terms of the feeling of effort. (shrink)

There are important similarities between moral thought and talk and thought and talk about gender: disagreements about gender, like disagreements about morality, seem to be intractable and to outstrip descriptive agreement; and it seems coherent to reject any definition of what it is to be a woman in terms of particular social, biological, or other descriptive features, just as it seems coherent to reject any definition of what it is to be good or right in terms of any set of (...) descriptive properties. These similarities give us reason to investigate the idea that, like moral thought and talk, gender thought and talk is inherently normative. This paper proposes a normative account of gender thought and talk in terms of fitting treatment. On this fitting treatment account, to judge that A is gender G is just to judge that it is fitting to treat A as a G. This account is a descriptive or hermeneutical account of our gender thought and talk rather than an ameliorative account of our gender concepts or a metaphysical account of gender properties in social metaphysics. This paper argues that other descriptive accounts of gender thought and talk face problems that the fitting treatment account overcomes. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux es un joven filósofo al que ya algunos consideran una estrella en el firmamento del pensamiento contemporáneo. Es el cabeza de fila de una nueva concepción filosófica, el “Realismo Especulativo”, que se pretende una revolución respecto de toda o prácticamente toda la filosofía habida desde Kant. Su obra principal, hasta ahora, es el libro Après la finitude, lo que podríamos traducir por “Después de la finitud”, y que lleva por subtítulo “Ensayo acerca de la necesidad de la contingencia”. (...) Ha escrito, también, varios artículos, un libro sobre Mallarmé, en el que sostiene haber hallado la codificación numérica de un poema del críptico poeta francés, y un libro aún no publicado, pero que circula por ahí, titulado L’inexistence divine. Se le augura una obra futura de gran relevancia. Meillassoux tiene un estilo bastante sobrio, contundente, “cartesiano”, pero con pasajes, también, de gran belleza concentrada. Se respira en sus escritos una calurosa frialdad, un apasionado antidramatismo, una muy racionalizada prédica de la falta de razón de todas las cosas, una profunda intuición de la superficie. (shrink)