I argue for a novel interpretation of Leibniz’s conception of the kind of contingency that matters for freedom, which I label ‘agential contingency.’ In brief, an agent is free to the extent that she determines herself to do what she judges to be the best of several considered options that she could have brought about had she concluded that these options were best. I use this novel interpretation to make sense of Leibniz’s doctrine that the reasons that explain free actions (...) are merely inclining and not necessitating. (shrink)

Jorge Portilla argues that authentic philosophical inquiry plays a liberating function. This function is that of bringing more fully to consciousness aspects of identities or ways of being‐in‐the world that have been, up until then, tacit or opaque to the agent herself to facilitate her endorsement, rejection, or modification of these identities. For Portilla, this function facilitates greater self‐mastery by increasing the range of free variations of subjectivity available to the agent, and this increase in self‐mastery itself constitutes a kind (...) of liberation. The main goal of this article is to provide a substantive interpretation of the nature of liberation Portilla thinks is embedded in this central function of authentic philosophical inquiry. I argue that this type of liberation should be understood ultimately in terms of increases in human agency, so I label it “agential liberation.” For Portilla, agential liberation involves two central elements: (i) a type of agential flourishing central to human flourishing, and (ii) an increase in the reach of intentional action that I describe as an expansion in the arena of human agency. (shrink)

According to intellectualists, the will is a rational inclination towards apprehended goodness. This conception of the will makes its acts intelligible: they are explained by (i) the nature of the will as a rational inclination, and (ii) the judgement of the intellect that moves the will. From this it follows that it is impossible for an agent to will evil as such or for its own sake. In explaining wrongdoing intellectualists cite cognitive error or the disruptive influences of the passions; (...) these considerations, however, seem involuntary and at least partly exculpatory. The intellectualist needs an account that renders wrongful actions intelligible without undermining their status as responsible. I argue that Leibniz has the theoretical tools to provide at least part of an answer to this problem. In sum, an agent is directly responsible for her wrongdoing if the cognitive error or the disruptive influence of the passions that help explain this wrongdoing do not completely undermine her acting freely; an agent is indirectly responsible for her wrongdoing if she is directly responsible for previous actions which partly resulted in her wrongdoing, even if the presence of cognitive error or disruptive influence of the passions completely undermines her acting freely. (shrink)

Carlos Vaz Ferreira argues that the problem of freedom is conceptually distinct from the problem of causal determinism. The problem of freedom is ultimately a problem regarding the ontologically independent agency of a being, and the problem of determinism is a problem regarding explanations of events or acts in terms of the totality of their antecedent causal conditions. As Vaz Ferreira sees it, failing to keep these problems apart gives rise to merely apparent but unreal puzzles pertaining to the nature (...) of freedom and its relation to determinism. In this article, I present my interpretation of Vaz Ferreira’s distinctive ideas regarding the nature of freedom and its relation to casual determinism. (shrink)

Resumen: Este trabajo se propone revisar la tesis de la proliferación de alternativas, expuesta por Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a la luz de algunas críticas a la tesis de la proliferación de teorías, expuesta por Paul Feyerabend. Se defiende que, aunque no de modo explícito, hay una afinidad entre ambas tesis y, en consecuencia, las debilidades de la segunda afectan a la primera. No obstante, el objetivo básico consiste en mostrar cómo propuestas emergentes, como la ecología de los saberes, antes (...) que insistir en su carácter contraepistemológico, podrían beneficiarse de una discusión epistemológica amplia.: In this paper I review the thesis about the proliferation of alternatives by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, from some criticisms to the thesis of the proliferation of theories by Paul Feyerabend. I claim that, though not in explicit way, there is an affinity between them, therefore the weakness from the second one affects the first one. However, the point is to show how some emergent proposals, as the ecology of knowledges, could benefit from a full epistemological discussion, instead of insisting on its counter-epistemological nature. (shrink)

(Relato breve de ideas). [...] Algo atormenta a María, mi más admirada científica. El tesoro que custodia es tan grande, que la mínima irregularidad hace saltar todas las alarmas. Las nuevas arrugas de su frente se expanden en ondas concéntricas y hacen subir la tensión. [...].

Leibniz endorses several tenets regarding explanation: (1) causes provide contrastive explanations of their effects, (2) the past and the future can be read from the present, and (3) primitive force and derivative forces drive and explain changes in monadic states. I argue that, contrary to initial appearances, these tenets do not preclude an intelligible conception of contingency in Leibniz’s system. In brief, an agent is free to the extent that she determines herself to do that which she deliberately judges to (...) be the best from several considered options that she could have brought about, had she come to the deliberative conclusion that these options were best. I develop a model which illustrates how Leibnizian agents could have come to different deliberative conclusions, and which thus illustrates how Leibnizian agents could have acted differently. (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)

Leibniz claims that for every possible substance S there is an individual concept that includes predicates describing everything that will ever happen to S, if S existed. Many commentators have thought that this leads Leibniz to think that all properties are had essentially, and thus that it is not metaphysically possible for substances to be otherwise than the way their individual concept has them as being. I argue against this common way of reading Leibniz’s views on the metaphysics of modality. (...) I develop a model in which individual concepts are innocent; that is, individual concepts are divine ideas that permit God to know everything that will ever happen to all possible substances, if created, but these individual concepts neither require that all properties are had essentially nor require that it is metaphysically necessary for substances to be the way their individual concepts have them as being. (shrink)

ES: La economía tradicional explica la evolución de los individuos y del conocimiento de forma muy parcial. Los nuevos medios exigen una reconsideración del papel del individuo y del valor comunal del conocimiento que permita una reorientación del sentido económico y las acciones individuales. Frente a la teoría de juegos tradicional de suma 0, es posible encontrar formulaciones cooperativas que muestran su robustez y pertinencia. EN: Classical economics explains the evolution of individuals and knowledge in a very partial way. New (...) technological means require a reconsideration of the role of individuals and communal value of knowledge. This rethinking allows a reorientation of both the economic sense and individual actions to become a reality. Against a classical theory of zero-sum games, it is possible to reshape cooperative ways that show their robustness and pertinence. (shrink)

Can a person from Latin America be a Catholic, or a feminist, or a democratic socialist in an authentic way? These identities come from Europe, and given the colonial history of Latin America, it seems reasonable to think that decolonizing the Latin American mind is a condition for its authenticity. Further, it seems reasonable to think that decolonization itself requires extirpating ideas and identities originating from the colonizers, especially those used to establish the colonial order. Thus, it seems that Latin (...) Americans cannot adopt such identities; authentic decolonization demands otherwise. In this paper I argue that the thought of twentieth century Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla provides a persuasive account of the nature of authentic self-creation that allows for a kind of decolonization that makes it conceptually possible for Latin Americans to be Catholics, feminists, or democratic socialists in an authentic fashion. That is, authentic decolonization of the mind, I argue, need not involve a blanket rejection of identities originating from the colonizers; instead, it can be understood as a particular kind of authentic self-creation: one that is appropriately sensitive to the colonial history of the identities freely chosen by the agent. (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)

The thesis that technology is applied science is called by Niiniluoto (1997) the standard view. That is surprising because the identification between technology and applied science has been widely rejected by both historians and philosophers of technology, including Rapp (1974), Bugliarello and Doner (1976), Derry and Williams (1977), Feibleman (1983), Skolimowski (1966), Vermaas et al., (2011), Don Idhe (2013). The reasons of such rejection mainly stem from the fact that technology has historically progressed without the benefit of science, i.e., it (...) has been possible to design technological devices without the explicit and systematic development of the scientific theories and laws that would explain their functioning. Polish philosopher Henryk Skolimowski has attacked this identification based on historical evidence. He argues that in the development of technology, there are many cases wherein technological designs have supported pure scientific research, rather than the other way round if technology were applied science. According to Skolimowski, some cases that dispute the identification of technology as applied science are the design of the transistor, supersonic aircraft, and the Manhattan Project. However, this historical evidence should not persuade us for two reasons: 1) Rejecting the previous scientific research that served as the basis for the said technological designs commits Skolimowski to anachronism. 2) From a realistic perspective of science, technological devices are not only subject to the principles and laws of science, regardless of the extent of our knowledge of them, but incorporate insights on more articulated explanations that while not available at the time of designing, do inspire our practical and theoretical efforts and guide further work. In this paper, we posit that the cases offered by Skolimowski to motivate his rejection of the standard view are far from being conclusive. To this end, we not only critically assess each case but also identify other historical examples that might be even more promising to support Skolimowski's thesis. Finally, we critically deal with those more promising cases and argue for a deflationary interpretation of the standard view. -/- . (shrink)

Leibniz is commonly labeled a foe of Molinism. His rejection of robust libertarian freedom coupled with some explicit passages in which he distances himself from the doctrine of middle knowledge seem to justify this classification. In this paper, I argue that this standard view is not quite correct. I identify the two substantive tenets of Molinism. First, the connection between the conditions for free actions and these free actions is a contingent one: free actions follow contingently from their sufficient conditions. (...) Second, God knows what creatures would freely do in different possible circumstances prevolitionally—that is, prior to God willing anything. I argue that Leibniz himself endorses a version of both tenets and utilizes them for theoretical purposes similar to those of Molinists. I conclude that Leibniz is much closer to Molinism than is typically acknowledged. Leibniz is best characterized as a friend—rather than a foe—of Molinism. (shrink)

In the following paper, I wish to examine a problem for the theist libertarian. On the one hand, libertarians insist that freedom requires possible alternatives open to the agent. On the other hand, God’s perfectly formed moral character implies that He always does the morally best. Give His moral character, then, it appears that there are no possible alternatives open to God. We thus get a dilemma for the theist libertarian: either a) God is not libertarian free – because His (...) moral character rules out possible alternatives; or b) God’s character is not perfectly formed – because libertarian freedom requires that it is possible for God to act out of character. In the present paper, I argue that Thomas Reid, a paradigmatic libertarian, has the theoretical tools to retain a robust account of libertarian freedom without compromising a robust account of perfectly formed characters. In sum, it is necessary that agents with fully formed characters always act in character (read de dicto), but it is possible that agents with fully formed characters act out of character (read de re). The former claim captures the robustness of perfectly formed moral characters and the latter claim captures the robustness of libertarian freedom. (shrink)

El presente escrito tiene por objeto tematizar la colonialidad del ser en el sur-global. Para ello, se identifican, por una parte, las diferencias entre el colonialismo y la colonialidad y, por otro lado, se analiza la emergencia del sintagma colonialidad del ser en el marco de las teorías de la colonialidad, las cuales se sitúan, como punto de partida, en la obra de Aníbal Quijano. La colonialidad del ser consiste en la infravaloración o inferiorización cultural de la vida humana colonizada. (...) La colonialidad del ser enuncia el despojo de la condición humana (des-humanización o sub-humanización) que padecieron los pueblos amerindios colonizados (siglo XVI-XVIII) y que, actualmente, continúan padecido los habitantes que constituyen el sur-global. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo trata del método y su relación con la investigación educativa. El objetivo es analizar la relevancia del método en ciencias humanas y sociales, en especial, en educación. Para ello, dividimos este artículo en tres secciones: 1. ¿Hay método? 2. ¿Hay uno o varios métodos? 3. La discusión sobre el método en la investigación educativa. A la primera pregunta, respondemos que hay método. Respondemos a la segunda señalando la necesidad de adoptar un pluralismo metodológico. La tercera sección defiende (...) que las discusiones sobre el método de investigación educativa implican dimensiones ontológicas, epistemológicas y éticas que se han tornado críticas, y se hace una revisión de cada una de ellas. En el apartado conclusivo, sugerimos algunas vías para desanudar esos asuntos críticos en la investigación educativa.: This article deals with method and its relation to educational research. The objective is to analyze the relevance of method in human and social sciences, especially in education. To this end, we divide this article into three sections: 1. Is there a method? 2. Is there one or more methods? 3. The discussion on method in educational research. To the first question, we answer that there is a method. We answer the second question by pointing out the need to adopt methodological pluralism. The third section argues that discussions on the method of educational research involve ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions that have become critical, and a review is made of each of them. In the concluding section, we suggest some ways to disentangle these critical issues in educational research. (shrink)

I argue that Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda differed in their conclusions regarding the status of Indigenous persons at least partly because las Casas had significant, yet incomplete, understanding of Indigenous persons, culture and societies and Sepúlveda had mere knowledge of them. To this end, I show that the epistemic state of understanding explains why Las Casas properly concluded that Indigenous persons deserve the same moral status afforded to Europeans. And I show how las Casas’ (...) understanding of Indigenous persons, culture and societies related to what he got wrong about Indigenous persons. (shrink)

En este artículo analizamos la contribución de la teología protestante a la idea de autonomía moral a partir de un análisis de la obra de Juan Calvino. Mostramos cómo se afirma en ella la incapacidad del sujeto para conocer y querer el bien, manifiesto en la ley natural. Esta incapacidad es compensada con los mandatos bíblicos, para los que Calvino justificará una positivación jurídica en los Estados cristianos. Concluimos, por todo ello, que Calvino está lejos de la idea kantiana (...) de autonomía que consideramos distintiva de la Modernidad. (shrink)

Una reseña mía sobre el clásico libro de Kojeve.

Este documento registra la entrevista al comunicador social Juan Manuel Rojas, gerente general de Creative Forward Films SAC (en el Perú), que ha realizado estudios orientados al tema audiovisual en la Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, la Universidad Católica Argentina y la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. El propósito de esta conversación fue que se conociera de manera panorámica en qué consiste la formación de un comunicador y cómo esta es de utilidad para emprender un trabajo dirigido (...) a la práctica de lo audiovisual. Con las experiencias del entrevistado, se consigue construir una idea del universo cinematográfico en cuanto al desarrollo de los guiones y sus estructuras, el dominio especializado del lenguaje como herramienta fundamental y persuasiva para la publicidad, la crítica a las producciones de cine, los concursos que se promueven para respaldar la labor de los directores, etc. (shrink)

This is the original English version of the introduction to Ciencia, Realidad y Racionalidad (University of Cauca Press, 2015), which is a collection of my essays translated into Spanish by Juan Carlos Aguirre Garcia.

Los estudiantes de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración de la Universidad de la República deben realizar, como trabajo final de carrera, una investigación o ensayo monográfico en un área de su interés, tutorados por un docente universitario o un investigador de reconocida trayectoria. Un gran número de estos trabajos monográficos han hecho un aporte valioso al conocimiento pero, lamentablemente, la poca difusión de éstos hace que ese conocimiento termine olvidado en los fondos de la biblioteca de la (...) Facultad, entre cientos de producciones monográficas. Se pretende en este libro, mostrar los aportes que se han generado en el área tanto de Economía de la Cultura como de Gestión de Organizaciones Culturales. Varias de las monografías fueron realizadas en la línea de investigación Costos y Gestión de Organizaciones Culturales, la cual coordino. Otros fueron realizados con antelación, como los trabajos tutorados por el referente de la Economía de la Cultura en Uruguay, el hoy fallecido Luis Stolovich. También se incluyen dos trabajos monográficos tutorados por el Dr Gustavo Buquet, quien siempre está presente a la hora de crear investigación de calidad en Economía de la Cultura. Como cada trabajo supera el centenar de páginas, no es posible publicarlos completamente, por lo que para este libro se hicieron resúmenes de esos trabajos, intentando adecuar la terminología y quitándoles el formato estrictamente científico –poco amigable para un no especialista-, de forma tal que su lectura sea accesible al público en general. Se resumieron ocho, clasificados en tres capítulos: Patrimonio, Artes Escénicas e Industria Cultural. El capítulo de Patrimonio comienza con un trabajo realizado por las Economistas Fernanda Arezo y Verónica Pereyra, titulado “Museos y Ciudadanos, el comportamiento del consumidor”, tutorado por Raúl Ramírez y por mí. Este estudio tuvo como centro explicar la modalidad de conducta de consumo del visitante montevideano hacia tres importantes instituciones museísticas como lo son el Museo del Cabildo, el Museo del Carnaval y el Museo de Historia del Arte. El objetivo del trabajo es estimar la demanda y obtener un indicador de la propensión a pagar por el consumo de dichos museos. El segundo trabajo, titulado “Disposición a pagar por la restauración de la Puerta de la Ciudadela”, fue realizado por las Contadoras Beatriz Torres, María Elena Olarán y María Carolina Duarte, y tutorado en forma conjunta por el Phd. Juan José Goyeneche y quien les escribe. En este trabajo se realiza una valoración contingente para medir la disposición a pagar por la restauración de la “Puerta de la Ciudadela”, un monumento fundamental de identidad montevideana. El capítulo de Patrimonio finaliza con un trabajo realizado por las Economistas Malena Rodríguez y María de la Paz Besada y tutorado por el Ec. Luis Stolovich. El mismo se denomina “El arte uruguayo: un estudio sobre el mercado y la pintura como alternativa de inversión” y explora el mercado de arte uruguayo, analizando la rentabilidad de la inversión en pintura uruguaya. Tratan la rentabilidad de la inversión para tres casos específicos: las obras vendidas por el Banco Comercial en su proceso de recuperación de activos, un portafolio de obras de Pedro Figari y otro de Joaquín Torres García. En cuanto al segundo capítulo, Artes Escénicas, comienza con un trabajo realizado para la obtención del título de Contador Público realizado por Pamela Cambeiro, Martín Cami e Ignacio Mouradián. Se denomina “La gestión de teatros. Caso de estudio: Aplicación del Cuadro de Mando Integral al Teatro Solís” y trata sobre la identificación de indicadores que faciliten las tareas de gestión para la dirección del Teatro. Luego se presenta un trabajo realizado por las Economistas Tania Cruz y Natalia Nollenberger titulado “Análisis económico del teatro independiente en Montevideo: una aproximación al problema de la fatalidad de los costos”. Este trabajo, también tutorado por el Ec. Luis Stolovich, muestra un exhaustivo análisis del teatro independiente montevideano identificando los problemas económicos que afectan al sector. El capítulo de Industria Cultural incluye tres trabajos. El primero, fue realizado por el Economista Diego Traverso y tutorado por el Dr. Gustavo Buquet, y su título es “Análisis de competitividad del sector exportador de Productoras Audiovisuales Publicitarias en Uruguay”. El sector audiovisual publicitario es un sector dinámico que se ha internacionalizado tempranamente y que generó divisas para el país del orden de los US$ 24 millones durante el año 2005 por concepto de exportaciones. En este trabajo se caracteriza al sector audiovisual publicitario en Uruguay y se analiza las ventajas competitivas que posee frente a sus principales competidores extranjeros. El segundo trabajo fue realizado por las Contadoras Natalia Rivera, Antonella Triay y María Eugenia Triay y se denomina “Gestión aplicada a las empresas radiales”. En este se identifican el sector radial, su proceso productivo y la complejidad al definir al “cliente”. Se proponen una serie de indicadores con el doble objetivo de medir el desempeño de la empresa y proveer incentivos a su organización. Finalmente, el último trabajo monográfico, fue una investigación interdisciplinaria, que sirvió simultáneamente para obtener el título de Licenciado en Economía a Ernesto Pienika y el de Licenciado en Administración a Nicolás Cohnheim y a Damián Geinsinger. Este trabajo, tutorado por el Dr. Gustavo Buquet y el Cr. Cecilio García de título “Impactos de las nuevas tecnologías en la .industria musical”, muestra cuáles son los principales impactos en esa industria que las nuevas tecnologías han provocado y cuáles son las posibles estrategias para adaptarse a estos cambios, así como los nuevos modelos de negocio. Espero que este libro sea el primero de una larga lista. Las áreas de Economía de la Cultura y Gestión de Organizaciones Culturales son disciplinas jóvenes que necesitan seguir creciendo. La investigación realizada por trabajos monográficos de fin de carrera en estas áreas, será siempre bienvenida. (shrink)

Empresarios Zombis. La mayor elusión tributaria de la elite chilena es un libro escrito por los periodistas Juan Andrés Guzmán y Jorge Rojas, publicado originalmente en 2017, reimpreso en 2018 y con plena vigencia en este 2019. El pago de impuestos no es un tema baladı́ en la actualidad chilena. En efecto, ha sido uno de los temas más subrayados en la revuelta de octubre de 2019 . De acuerdo con Francisco Saffie, “el sistema tributario deberı́a ser expresión (...) de la igualdad que requiere la calidad de ciudadano y el pago de los impuestos, una muestra de reciprocidad. Esa reciprocidad exige (. . . ) que el pago de los impuestos no sea evadido o eludido” . Como señalan los autores de este texto, Guzmán y Rojas, gracias a la discusión en torno a los impuestos es posible pensar los niveles de concentración de riqueza, es decir, la desigualdad 3 , ası́ como la pérdida de confianza en la democracia que hace que las personas vean al Estado como impotente o indiferente a la hora de controlar a la elite empresarial que actúa de manera “perfectamente legal” pero perjudicando al resto de las personas. (shrink)

This article asks the question, ``what is reliable machine learning?'' As I intend to answer it, this is a question about epistemic justification. Reliable machine learning gives justification for believing its output. Current approaches to reliability (e.g., transparency) involve showing the inner workings of an algorithm (functions, variables, etc.) and how they render outputs. We then have justification for believing the output because we know how it was computed. Thus, justification is contingent on what can be shown about the algorithm, (...) its properties, and its behavior. In this paper, I defend computational reliabilism (CR). CR is a computationally-inspired off-shoot of process reliabilism that does not require showing the inner workings of an algorithm. CR credits reliability to machine learning by identifying reliability indicators external to the algorithm (validation methods, knowledge-based integration, etc.). Thus, we have justification for believing the output of machine learning when we have identified the appropriate reliability indicators. CR is advanced as a more suitable epistemology for machine learning. The main goal of this article is to lay the groundwork for CR, how it works, and what we can expect as a justificatory framework for reliable machine learning. (shrink)

As substance dualism fell out of favor, philosophers became increasingly interested in making sense of mind in purely physicalist terms. Along the way, the physicalist project has hit a few snags. Perhaps the most popular challenge was presented by Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room thought experiment, wherein Mary, a brilliant color scientist, comes to know all of the physical facts about color whilst confined to a black-and-white room. Once released, Mary is presented with a ripe tomato. The intuition is that Mary, (...) upon seeing a colored object for the first time, has learned something new, but what she has learned apparently cannot be accounted for by physicalism, thereby leaving an explanatory gap between mind and matter. There are those, like Joseph Levine, who believe the explanatory gap to be a necessary consequence of any physicalist theory of mind. I disagree, and in this dissertation, I aim to show that at least one physicalist theory of mind can close the gap. However, it requires embracing a theory that physicalists are hesitant to embrace: panpsychism. (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)

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 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)

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)

As touch remains commonly defined by the closeness it physically implies and it rhetorically evokes, the mere notion of distant touch and of distal haptic perception seems peculiar. But Aristotle’s perspective, which I wish to take as a point of departure, is firm: we perceive the objects of touch, the hot and the cold, the hard and the soft, the curved and the sharp, through other things: δι' ἑτέρων. In this article, I would like to explore this ἕτερος by showing (...) how the otherness of perception always implies an intermediary, a middle point (μέσος), i.e. an other not so other, an other that is able to translate the much more distant otherness of the perceived object. To explore these forgotten layers of alterity that fall into what we commonly conceive of as the impalpable emptiness of distance, I propose to study the idea of distant touch from the perspective of phenomenological aesthetics. In order to do so, I will first examine some aspects of the Husserlian account of perception and will then focus on the phenomenology of distant touch in Alejandra Costamagna’s novel El Sistema del Tacto [The System of Touch] (2018). (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)

Several philosophers advance substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they raise in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views appear to create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in (...) this light some critical points against Hanks’ (2015, 2019) act-theoretic view, and Recanati’s (2019) recent elaboration of Hanks’ notion of cancellation. Both Hanks and Recanati, I’ll argue, rely on problematic conceptions of fiction and pretense. (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)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

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)

Cultural evolution is normally framed in informational terms. However, it is not clear whether this is an adequate way to model cultural evolutionary phenomena and what, precisely, “information” is supposed to mean in this context. Would cultural evolutionary theory benefit from a well-developed theory of cultural information? The prevailing sentiment is that, in contradistinction to biology, informational language should be used nontechnically in this context for descriptive, but not explanatory, purposes. Against this view, this article makes the case for the (...) need to take a proper biology-based “informational turn” in the cultural evolutionary sciences. I argue that the current vague use of informational language misses out on the potential benefits for advancing understanding of phenomena that information-theoretic reasoning has provided in other sciences, especially genetics. In particular, by emphasizing the informational aspects of cultural evolutionary processes, this approach can clarify some conceptual and methodological problems that have plagued cultural evolutionary theory since its inception, including (1) how to determine the channel conditions of cultural information flow, (2) the nature and scope of cultural information, and (3) how to quantify trends of cultural cumulation. More generally, theories of cultural evolution will be incomplete until the mechanisms underlying cultural processes are better understood and integrated into the explanations. This article explores the adequacy of an information-theoretic framework to accomplish these purposes. (shrink)

Following Tuomela, I argue that institutions consist in institutional activities conducive to the realisation (or “satisfaction”) of institutional activity types. Since this realisation is carried out by institutional groups, our having an answer to 'what are institutional groups?' is a necessary step towards a better understanding of what institutions are and how we create them. In this chapter, I offer an answer to this question.

Education is essential to life, and the epidemic affected everything. Parents want to get their kids the most important teaching. However, since COVID-19 has affected schools and other institutions, providing education has become the most significant issue. Online learning pedagogy uses technology to provide high-quality learning environments for student-centered learning. Further, this study explores the experiences and challenges faced by Filipino tertiary students regarding the lack of gadgets amidst online learning. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study (...) were: Some college students still have difficulty with online learning. Attending online classes is difficult, especially for students with limited resources. Smartphones, other gadgets, and internet connections play a significant role in online classrooms because they are the ones that students utilize while learning online, which is essential for successful participation in online higher education as well as for solving a variety of other difficulties in the new normal. Further, College students face similar health challenges. Having an online learning setup is not just about students' struggles with learning resources but also about their health issues. When our respondents used their smartphones for an extended period, they reported eye aches and blurred vision. They also said that some of their body parts, such as their legs and back, are aching, and feel pressured because they tend to overthink things in their surroundings, which causes them incredible difficulty in performing their best in attending online classes. Even though college students continue to suffer from a lack of learning resources during online sessions, they do their best to manage their needs and the scarcity of learning resources. Students have unique coping methods for dealing with difficulties in online classes. (shrink)

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)

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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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)

La migración internacional nos enfrenta con problemas irresolubles desde la figura moderna del Estado nacional, su concepto de ciudadanía y su noción de justicia. Juan Carlos Velasco critica las limitaciones y la orientación de las políticas contemporáneas que nos hacen percibir a la migración como una “invasión”, y propone un modo radicalmente diferente de entender e intervenir el fenómeno desde lo trasnacional. Nacer de uno u otro lado de una línea divisoria es un evento azaroso, no obstante delimitar la (...) frontera es una construcción histórico-política: la desigualdad en las oportunidades que ofrecen las naciones es una situación estructural de injusticia que se perpetúa con las políticas de exclusión de los migrantes y la deslegitimación de su derecho a buscar una vida mejor. Esa circunstancia genera fracturas sociales, injustificables pero normalizadas, que imposibilitan alcanzar la justicia global. Velasco presenta un análisis completo que abarca las dimensiones política, jurídica y moral del tema, en el que lleva a la filosofía política a un terreno práctico del que se desprenden las claves para entender y actuar en esta nueva era en la que, debido a los conflictos sociales y políticos, la migración vuelve a ser argumento de discusión relevante. (Texto de la CONTRAPORTADA del libro). (shrink)

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)