Can we fruitfully apply creative ecology practices in the world of industrial production? Enter the crealectic method for innovation and self-innovation, aiming at fostering creative long-term thinking and acting. The crealectic method proposes five steps: Step 1—Resetting (doing tabula rasa); Step 2—Crealing (reconnecting with the “Creal”); Step 3—Profusing (letting ideas pour out without censorship); Step 4—Compossibilizing (connecting compatible ideas); Step 5—Realizing (understanding and making real). I describe a pilot test of the method within the Research and Development unit of Vattenfall, (...) a Swedish power company dedicated to fossil-free energy production. (shrink)

The present article introduces eight empirically-tested concepts that guide the crealectic practice of philosophical counseling: philosophical health, deep listening, the Creal, the possible, imparadisation, deep orientation, eudynamia , and mental heroism. The crealectic framework is grounded on a process-philosophy axiom of absolute possibility and continuous cosmological and cosmopolitical creation, termed "Creal". The approach also posits that there are three complementary modes of intelligence, namely analytic, dialectic, and crealectic, the balance of which is necessary to live a healthy human life. Beyond (...) what is physically possible and psychologically possible, an underestimated force of social and personal deployment is the philosophical possible . In a context of personal counseling and philosophical care, the crealectic approach endeavors to slowly connect the patient to a field of harmonious and generative potentiality termed eudynamia. (shrink)

The emerging crealectic frame posits that there are three complementary and effectual domains of intelligence, namely analytic, dialectic, and crealectic, being alternatively or complementarily used in human interactions with the world. The focus of crealectic intelligence is the relative possibilization and local realization of absolute possibility, the becoming real, biological, and social of creation. This multimodal externalization and asymptotic unification of a cosmological flux expresses itself via three realms of possibilization: physical, psychological, and philosophical. But the philosophical possible is not (...) merely abstract; it originates a generative process of exteriorizations, interiorizations, dissolutions, and unifications transforming the possible into realities. The term “crealectics,” coined by philosopher and author Luis de Miranda, is a compound of “Creal” and of two possible suffixes: “logos” or “ektos”. The ontological core of crealectics, the Creal, is the immanent process of creation understood as a ubiquitous stream of absolute possibility exteriorizing itself. For a crealectician, philosophy is not the mere logical analysis of truth conditions, but the self-questioning enterprise of thought regarding its own possibilizing and world-making power. (shrink)

Background We investigated the personal philosophies of eight persons with a tetraplegic condition (four male, four female), all living in Sweden with a chronic spinal cord injury (SCI) and all reporting a good life. Our purpose was to discover if there is a philosophical mindset that may play a role in living a good life with a traumatic SCI. Methods Two rounds of in-depth qualitative interviews were performed by the same interviewer, a philosophical practitioner by training (de Miranda). The (...) second round systematically covered the following elements: bodily sense, sense of self, sense of belonging, sense of the possible, sense of purpose and philosophical sense. This six-step method developed by de Miranda is called SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Results All the interviewees, as a consequence of their trauma, reported having gone through a reinvention of themselves which implied questioning the meaning and purpose of their life in particular and life in general. A philosophical rather than realistic sense of the possible was abstracted toward teleological growth. All interviewees developed a sense of purpose based on self-interested altruism and solidarity with disabled peers. Conclusions To reinvent a good life with SCI, in addition to physical training and willpower, one needs to consider philosophical questions about the self and life, what Kant called the cosmic interests of reason: What may I hope? What must I do? What can I know? Our results indicate that we should, in the future, explore what the philosophical health approach may bring to rehabilitation processes in the months or years that follow the trauma. (shrink)

The present article is a primary introduction to the semi-structured interviewing method SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Beyond grounding this new methodology theoretically (a work that is started here but will in the future necessitate several developments), the main motivation here is pragmatic: to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared, tested and used systematically with (...) a population that has received no training in philosophy. The SMILE_PH approach was conceived by the author during an ethically approved pilot study focused on the philosophy of life of persons living with spinal cord injury (SCI), with the intention of rectifying the epistemic obstacles generated by rationalist, Socratic or unstructured ways of in-depth interviewing. The six-step structure of the method is also inspired by hundreds of individual dialogue sessions with philosophical counselees, led by the author between 2018 and 2022: the SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological data about 1 – our bodily sense, 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging, 4 – our sense of the possible, 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense. (shrink)

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and (...) ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle. (shrink)

« Ce petit livre est un bijou d’intelligence, de finesse, de culture, qui prend un objet technique sans rechigner et le tourne et le retourne comme Heidegger nous avait appris à le faire avec les chaussures de Van Gogh. Ce qui frappe, c’est l’ambition d’une méditation sur les cartes de la modernité contemporaine, sur le fameux Grand Paris, sur le sujet, sur le pluriel, sans les faux-fuyants du postmoderne, de la citation absurde. Luis de Miranda se promène, il (...) vous conte qu’il se promène, mais il vous mène avec une grande maîtrise et sait où il veut aller. Rien de gratuit dans cette rencontre de l’enseigne de kebabs sur la table de dissection de la Ville Néon. C’est plutôt une nouvelle méditation cartésienne après Descartes et Husserl : où le poêle et sa chaleur ont fait place au bruit vrillant du gaz dans un tube. Je suis, je crée, donc j’entends. » Yann Moulier-Boutang, ancien élève de l’ENS, professeur agrégé d’économie à l’université de technologie de Compiègne, directeur de la revue Multitudes. Né d’une rencontre inopinée avec un néon sur le quai du Louvre, ce livre a été composé à partir d’un séminaire donné par l’auteur à l’hiver 2012. Un voyage inspiré à travers la nuit, qui déchiffre les halos du passé et les reflets du présent pour donner à entendre une certaine magie du futur. Luis de Miranda, philosophe, romancier, révélateur du créalisme, est notamment l’auteur d’un essai remarqué, L’art d’être libres au temps des automates (Max Milo, 2010). (shrink)

In his dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze asserts that: ‘Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made of lines’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 124). In A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari), Deleuze calls these kinds of ‘lifelines’ or ‘lines of flesh’: break line (or segmental line, or molar line), crack line (or molecular line) and rupture line (also called line of flight) (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 22). We will explain the difference between these three lines and how they are related (...) to the ‘soul’. We will also explain how a singular individual or group can arise from the play of the lines. Eventually, we will introduce the concept of ‘Creal’ to develop the Deleuzian figure of the ‘Anomal’, the so(u)rcerer. (shrink)

Book review : The philosophy of person‐centred healthcareBy Derek Mitchell, Michael Loughlin, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2023.201 pp. £64.99. ISBN (10): 1‐5275‐9058‐5, ISBN (13): 978‐1‐5275‐9058‐8.

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in (...) time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

The tendency to idealise artificial intelligence as independent from human manipulators, combined with the growing ontological entanglement of humans and digital machines, has created an “anthrobotic” horizon, in which data analytics, statistics and probabilities throw our agential power into question. How can we avoid the consequences of a reified definition of intelligence as universal operation becoming imposed upon our destinies? It is here argued that the fantasised autonomy of automated intelligence presents a contradistinctive opportunity for philosophical consciousness to understand itself (...) anew as holistic and co-creative, beyond the recent “analytic” moment of the history of philosophy. Here we introduce the concept of “crealectic intelligence”, a meta-analytic and meta-dialectic aspect of consciousness. Intelligent behaviour may consist in distinguishing discrete familiar parts or reproducible functions in the midst of noise via an analytic process of segmentation; intelligence may also manifest itself in the constitution of larger wholes and dynamic unities through a dialectic process of association or assemblage. But, by contrast, crealectic intelligence co-creates realities in the image of an ideal or truth, taking into account the desiring agent imbued with a sense of possibility, in a relationship not only with the Real but also with the creative sublime or “Creal”. (shrink)

The letter and the neon -- Augustus Rex -- Sublimism -- The incalculable -- The halo -- The new grail -- The mint and the muses -- Neon in space.

Vous éprouvez souvent l'embarras du choix? Que sera la liberté au XXIe siècle? Depuis l'invention des machines et des computeurs, notre quotidien semble avoir gagné du temps. Mais en contrepartie, il paraît de plus en plus codé, soumis aux automatismes. Depuis Leibniz jusqu'à la puce biométrique, l'auteur raconte une histoire alternative de l'ère informatique. Il démontre que le " numérisme ", le principe ordinateur, est une vertu humaine ancestrale et nécessaire. Mais insuffisante. Après le sauve-qui-peut du postmodernisme, un nouveau paradigme (...) est en train de naître, le " créalisme " : le monde est notre création commune incessante. L'horizon de notre liberté politique et existentielle, c'est la Terre comme oeuvre d'art. Construit comme une odyssée philosophique curieuse et empreinte d'humour, voici un traité de cocréativité pour une époque aux forces actives éclatées. Où l'on découvre que l'ordre et l'aventure ne sont pas incompatibles. (shrink)

« Voici un livre vif, intelligent, nullement béni-oui-oui. Avec Lacan, il démontre que le capitalisme est une machine à faire jouir massivement. Ce qui s'obtient n'est pas pour autant une jouissance toute, mais seulement des lichettes. La jouissance demeurera toujours tonneau des Danaïdes. » Hervé Castanet, professeur des universités, psychanalyste, membre de l'école de la Cause freudienne. -/- Partout la qualité de vie prend la forme d'une quantité d'envies. Le nouveau monde oscille entre deux versants d'une même pièce de théâtre (...) : côté cour, des passages à l'acte obscènes ; côté coulisses, un puritanisme coupable. Pouvons-nous nous comporter autrement que comme des machines à jouir détraquées, dont le courant alternatif oscillerait entre avidité et rétention, gaspillage et dette ? Beaucoup se demandent pourquoi, une fois réunies les conditions imaginaires ou symboliques de la jouissance, c'est un réel vide ou perverti qui s'installe. C'est que la mécanique même de l'économie libidinale capitaliste repose sur l'angoisse sans cesse repoussée d'un désir dévoyé. Dans un monde globalement structuré par la plus-value, la jouissance prend la forme internationale du « plus-de-jouir ». -/- Faut-il pour autant renoncer à la joie de vivre et se réfugier dans le moralisme et l'austérité ? Lacan, Heidegger et Marx, articulés ensemble, permettent de dire comment une forme d'existence créative est encore possible. Une telle liberté est l'horizon de ce livre. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustices, according to Miranda Fricker, are injustices that occur “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (Fricker 2007, 1). For Fricker, the relevant injustice in these cases is the very lack of knowledge and understanding experienced by the subject. In this way, hermeneutical injustices are instances of epistemic injustices, the kind of injustice that “wrongs someone in their capacity as a subject of (...) knowledge” (Fricker 2007, 5). In this paper, however, I identify different means by which our hermeneutic activities lead to social injustices, of both a practical and epistemic kind, and I identify different ways in which those injustices manifest themselves. Since Fricker’s use of the notion of “hermeneutical injustices” to denote a well-defined kind of injustice is rightfully well-established, I here refer to the more general kinds of injustices I have in mind as “hermeneutic injustices” instead. (shrink)

En los últimos tiempos el derecho ambiental ha ganado un puesto importante en el ámbito jurídico, hecho que refleja la preocupación que hoy se tiene por la relación del hombre con su entorno. Desde hace quince años, la Universidad Colegio Mayor de Nuestra señora del Rosario, por intermedio de su Facultad de Jurisprudencia y concretamente de la Especialización y la línea de investigación en Derecho Ambiental, ha propuesto a través de diversos proyectos avanzar en el conocimiento y análisis del ordenamiento (...) jurídico ambiental, aportando así al desarrollo, estructura y consolidación de esta rama jurídica. Bajo estos parámetros, el objetivo de esta publicación es hacer algunas reflexiones en torno a distintos temas que dentro del derecho público impactan o influyen al derecho ambiental y responder a los enormes desafíos que se presentan en la materia. Por tanto, el programa quiere contribuir desde la academia al diálogo crítico y propositivo que permita dar solución a los problemas encontrados en la aplicación del derecho ambiental. En el primer capítulo, Gloria Amparo Rodriguez describe los ordenamientos jurídicos constitucionales de Colombia, Ecuador y Bolivia a fin de analizar la forma en que cada uno de ellos consagra el derecho a un ambiente sano. A continuación, Martha Ovalle y Zelba Nidia Castro de Perez realizan un estudio de los principios de precaución y prevención, exponiendo su alcance, su fundamento desde el derecho internacional y cómo vienen siendo entendidos por nuestro ordenamiento jurídico, tanto jurisprudencial como legal. Luis Adolfo Diazgranados se ocupa de la responsabilidad de los funcionarios públicos en materia ambiental, para lo cual realiza un análisis de los deberes consagrados en la normatividad vigente. Continuando con esta temática, el profesor Jorge Agudo Gonzalez, de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, explora la incidencia del ambiente y los recursos naturales en los procesos contractuales, a fin de mostrar cómo estas materias se han constituido en variable fundamental en el devenir de la formación, celebración y ejecución de los contratos, desde un punto de vista crítico, los aspectos importantes del proceso sancionatorio ambiental, evidenciando las falencias y vacios del a Ley 1333 de 2009. Jairo Cabrera plantea algunas reflexiones sobre la responsabilidad, valiéndose de la doctrina internacional, sobre la problemática de la reparación por daño ambiental. Por su parte, Leonardo Güiza Suárez explica el régimen general de la responsabilidad ambiental en el ordenamiento jurídico a partir del daño de los bosques naturales y su incidencia sobre los derechos humanos. Andres Gomez Rey, desde la teoría del acto administrativo, desarrolla el análisis crítico del régimen jurídico de las aguas superficiales en el derecho ambiental. Giovani J. Herrera Carrascal realiza una disertación sobre los recursos naturales y el ambiente como elementos del espacio público que a su vez constituye en un componente del medio ambiente urbano a partir de la jurisprudencia y de las competencias respectivas. Por último, Marybell Ochoa Miranda trate el tema de los residuos hospitalarios en Colombia, exponiendo su régimen jurídico, las competencias de las autoridades ambientales, los deberes que en estos asuntos tienen los ciudadanos, proponiendo lineamientos para avanzar en la consolidación de la gestión integral de residuos hospitalarios y similares. (shrink)

Dr Miranda Anderson is an Honorary Fellow in History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She has held several prestigious fellowships and was principal investigator of an AHRC-funded project, titled ‘The Art of Distributed Cognition’, which involved collaboration with the Talbot Rice Gallery. Her work has investigated the relations between cognition and culture, particularly literary works, challenging the boundaries between disciplines and engaging with numerous contemporary science, technology and society (...) (STS) questions. In this perspective article, she evokes the ‘fission-fusion’ concept on which she has been working for some years now – a concept that contributes to debates surrounding the issue of identity by drawing on the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. (shrink)

The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within distributed cognition and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities.

In 2008 the authors held Involving Interface, a lively interdisciplinary event focusing on issues of biological, sociocultural, and technological interfacing (see Acknowledgments). Inspired by discussions at this event, in this article, we further discuss the value of input from neuroscience for developing robots and machine interfaces, and the value of philosophy, the humanities, and the arts for identifying persistent links between human interfacing and broader ethical concerns. The importance of ongoing interdisciplinary debate and public communication on scientific and technical advances (...) is also highlighted. Throughout, the authors explore the implications of the extended mind hypothesis for notions of moral accountability and robotics. (shrink)

Examining imagination, 4E cognition and the arts together expands our understanding of them all. 4E cognition is a framework that comprises the theories separately known as embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended cognition. This paper draws on research in cognitive science (including 4E and recent predictive processing approaches), ideas in phenomenology, and artworks from The Extended Mind exhibition (2019–20). The artworks offer diverse reflections on 4E cognition, as well as revealing personal, political and ethical benefits and issues predicated on a 4E (...) cognition perspective. This approach further provides a way of defending the epistemic value of the imagination and of unpacking the four key puzzles associated with its relationship with the arts regarding its production of emotional response, imaginative resistance, and moral persuasion, and the paradox of our attraction towards horror and tragedy. The arts are a valuable mode of inquiry into the nature of cognition and neglect of their relevance negatively impacts understandings of the mind. (shrink)

Given plausible assumptions about the nature of evidence and undercutting defeat, many believe that the force of the evidential problem of evil depends on sceptical theism’s being false: if evil is...

Pierre Duhem’s philosophy of science has influenced many philosophers in the twentieth century, and even today. Many of the subjects he addressed are still highly discussed today, especially the distinction between science and metaphysics. My aim in this paper will be to motivate a naturalistic approach where the difference between physics and metaphysics is only a matter of degree. I focus on whether it would be possible to articulate this gradual distinction from a duhemian point of view. Although Duhem thought (...) that metaphysics is an entirely different and more excellent activity than physics, I believe that Duhem’s philosophy of science also supports a naturalistic distinction in terms of degrees. I offer three reasons to justify this conclusion: Duhem’s notion of common sense; Duhem’s holism and his views on the generality of our theories, and Duhem’s notion of natural classification. At the end of the paper I will argue that a naturalistic approach accomplishes must of what Duhem wanted to achieve with his distinction. (shrink)

3rd ed, 2021. A circumscription of the classical theory of computation building up from the Chomsky hierarchy. With the usual topics in formal language and automata theory.

In this paper I present reasons for us to accept the hypothesis that suspended judgment has correctness conditions, just like beliefs do. Roughly put, the idea is that suspended judgment about p is correct when both p and ¬p might be true in view of certain facts that characterize the subject’s situation. The reasons to accept that hypothesis are broadly theoretical ones: it adds unifying power to our epistemological theories, it delivers good and conservative consequences, and it allows us to (...) assess processes of reasoning involving attitudes of suspended judgment. (shrink)

Foundational ontologies, central constructs in ontological investigations and engineering alike, are based on ontological categories. Firstly proposed by Aristotle as the very ur- elements from which the whole of reality can be derived, they are not easy to identify, let alone partition and/or hierarchize; in particular, the question of their number poses serious challenges. The late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg wrote around 1286 a tutorial that can help us today with this exceedingly difficult task. In this paper, I discuss (...) ontological categories and their importance for foundational ontologies from both the contemporary perspective and the original Aristotelian viewpoint, I provide the translation from the Latin into English of Dietrich's De origine II with an introductory elaboration, and I extract a foundational ontology–that is in fact a single-category one–from this text rooted in Dietrich's specification of types of subjecthood and his conception of intentionality as causal operation. (shrink)

To most of us – believers and non-believers alike – the possibility of a perfect God co-existing with the kinds of evil that we see calls out for explanation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the belief that God must have justifying reasons for allowing all the evil that we see has been a perennial feature of theistic thought. Recently, however, a growing number of authors have argued that the existence of a perfect God is compatible with the existence of gratuitous (...) evil. Given powerful, millenia-long sensibilities about power and love and justice, it isn’t hard to find that suggestion simply incredible. Nonetheless, in this paper I will argue that the most prominent theistic alternatives to what has seemed incredible to most of us throughout most of history are themselves patently unacceptable for the theist as well. On any of the most widely accepted accounts of how God could have justifying reasons for permitting some evils, God’s existence means that we have justifying reasons for perpetrating and allowing every evil that we see. That's hard to swallow too. If I’m right about all of this, then two competing outcomes seem to present themselves as a possible result. On the one hand, for the theist, the apparently outrageous suggestion that the existence of a perfect God is compatible with gratuitous evil no longer looks like it faces a formidable, hard-to-resist alternative. On the other hand, some like me might think that my arguments go no distance at all towards dispelling the incredibility of the gratuitous evil nouvelle vague. On this line, theism may seem now to be between the rock and the hard place: it seems hard to make sense of the existence of a perfect God whether or not He has justifying reasons for allowing all the evil that we see. (shrink)

Ontologies are some of the most central constructs in today's large plethora of knowledge technologies, namely in the context of the semantic web. As their coinage indicates, they are direct heirs to the ontological investigations in the long Western philosophical tradition, but it is not easy to make bridges between them. Contemporary ontological commitments often take causality as a central aspect for the ur-segregation of entities, especially in scientific upper ontologies; theories of causality and philosophical ontological investigations often go hand-in-hand, (...) and were essentially inseparable in medieval thought. This constitutes the foundation for a bridge, and this article analyzes the causality-based ontology of the late medieval philosopher Dietrich of Freiberg from the viewpoint of today's upper-ontology engineering. In this bridging attempt, it offers a translation into English of the first part of Dietrich's De origine (abbreviated title) that is a compromise between traditional scholarly translations of medieval Latin philosophical texts and contemporary ontology. (shrink)

Conceptual analysis has been a traditional methodology within analytic philosophy, but it also has been the target of numerous attacks. On the other hand, explication has been undergoing a revival as a methodological alternative due to the revisionary element associated with it. This allows for a scientific reconstruction of our ordinary notions, which would share virtues associated with scientific concepts. However, there is now a popular variant of conceptual analysis which resembles closely the explicative methodology: the two-step methodology advanced by (...) the advocates of the Canberra Plan. Although explication is a wider and more ambitious program, I will argue that both methodologies can be regarded as attempts to bring philosophical methodology and its products closer to scientific ones. However, I will also point out that, although the goal is advantageous, there still remain some theoretical problems. (shrink)

Not focusing on the history of classical logic, this book provides discussions and quotes central passages on its origins and development, namely from a philosophical perspective. Not being a book in mathematical logic, it takes formal logic from an essentially mathematical perspective. Biased towards a computational approach, with SAT and VAL as its backbone, this is an introduction to logic that covers essential aspects of the three branches of logic, to wit, philosophical, mathematical, and computational.

The van Wijngaarden grammars are two-level grammars that present many interesting properties. In the present article I elaborate on six of these properties, to wit, (i) their being constituted by two grammars, (ii) their ability to generate (possibly infinitely many) strict languages and their own metalanguage, (iii) their context-sensitivity, (iv) their high descriptive power, (v) their productivity, or the ability to generate an infinite number of production rules, and (vi) their equivalence with the unrestricted, or Type-0, Chomsky grammars.

Are philosophy and literature allies or enemies in Jorge Luis Borges's fictions? In this paper, I argue that Borges can satisfy membership in the allies camp because his fictions provide the imaginative scenarios the allies believe are so necessary to this coalition; however, because his stories question philosophy's hold on reality, they can also seem to fall into the enemies camp by countervailing any claim philosophy has on reality and truth; although, ultimately, the manner in which Borges forges an (...) alliance between philosophy and literature will be for reasons not traditionally accepted by those in either the allies or enemies camps. (shrink)

The possibility that non-biological resources can act as part of the cognitive system is claimed by Andy Clark’s and David Chalmers’s seminal paper, ‘The Extended Mind’ (1998). This hypothesis holds parallels with the history of the book, an area of research that has long been considering the effect on culture and cognition of the technological changes from orality to literacy and from manuscripts to printing. M. T. Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record describes literacy as a technology that structures the (...) intellect and Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy argues that the increasing use of texts results in the development of new forms of cognition. More recently a number of scholars have charted how the common Renaissance practices of the annotation and alteration of the books enabled readers to deal with increasing cognitive loads, through reorganising and adding to the textual structures. Furthermore, in the Renaissance the textual was understood as playing a supplementary role to biological memory and historical narratives were understood as supplementing individual experience, with another’s memories or knowledge equivalent to one’s own. In addition, Renaissance accounts of rhetoric explore the notion of language as constitutive of our humanity. These strands form a prevalent notion of language and literacy as a means of extending oneself that is equivalent to the production of biological offspring, and as a means to overcome death and forgetting. This notion infiltrated diverse spheres’ ways of understanding these activities, from literary prefaces, autobiographies, plays and poems, to jest books and medical and scientific texts. These diverse works shape this reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which focuses on the exploration in ‘Sonnet 77’ of the benefits and constraints of a biological versus a textual copy of the subject. ‘Sonnet 77’ evidences the co-existence of an uneasy and yet also a celebratory understanding of the human capacity to reproduce and extend itself through biological and linguistic couplings, the latter of which the reader may experience through their own encounter with the sonnets. This chapter thereby demonstrates that the fertile parallels between the extended mind hypothesis, the history of the book, and Renaissance texts invites a re-evaluation of historical, as well as modern, concepts of what constitutes cognition and subjectivity. (shrink)

Examining imagination, 4E cognition and the arts together expands our understanding of them all. 4E cognition is a framework that comprises the theories separately known as embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended cognition. This paper draws on research in cognitive science (including 4E and recent predictive processing approaches), ideas in phenomenology, and artworks from The Extended Mind exhibition (2019–20). The artworks offer diverse reflections on 4E cognition, as well as revealing personal, political and ethical benefits and issues predicated on a 4E (...) cognition perspective. This approach further provides a way of defending the epistemic value of the imagination and of unpacking the four key puzzles associated with its relationship with the arts regarding its production of emotional response, imaginative resistance, and moral persuasion, and the paradox of our attraction towards horror and tragedy. The arts are a valuable mode of inquiry into the nature of cognition and neglect of their relevance negatively impacts understandings of the mind. (shrink)

Logic arguably plays a role in the normativity of reasoning. In particular, there are plausible norms of belief/disbelief whose antecedents are constituted by claims about what follows from what. But is logic also relevant to the normativity of agnostic attitudes? The question here is whether logical entailment also puts constraints on what kinds of things one can suspend judgment about. In this paper I address that question and I give a positive answer to it. In particular, I advance two logical (...) norms of agnosticism, where the first one allows us to assess situations in which the subject is agnostic about the conclusion of a valid argument and the second one allows us to assess situations in which the subject is agnostic about one of the premises of a valid argument. (shrink)

What happens to our minds when we listen to a story or read a book? How about when we watch a play or film? Any story, like a piece of music, plays out across our minds and in the process changes the nature of our notes and expands their range. Stories enable a metamorphosis of our minds through biological and sociocultural processes operating in concert.

What happens to our minds when we listen to a story or read a book? How about when we watch a play or film? Any story, like a piece of music, plays out across our minds and in the process changes the nature of our notes and expands their range. Stories – whether told orally, read in a book, scrolled through or watched upon screen or stage – enable a metamorphosis of our minds through biological and sociocultural processes operating in (...) concert. (shrink)

Paul Silva has recently argued that doxastic justification does not have a basing requirement. An important part of his argument depends on the assumption that doxastic and moral permissibility have a parallel structure. I here reply to Silva's argument by challenging this assumption. I claim that moral permissibility is an agential notion, while doxastic permissibility is not. I then briefly explore the nature of these notions and briefly consider their implications for praise and blame.

La tesis principal de este trabajo es que los modelos estadísticos facilitan explicaciones acerca de los errores que pueden cometer nuestros procedimientos de inferencia de datos a fenómenos, en el contexto de la estadística clásica o frecuentista. La explicación del error es una operación que, a su vez, ayuda a evitarlo en donde es evitable e intolerable; tolerarlo donde es inevitable y tolerable; y suspender el juicio donde es inevitable e intolerable. Todas estas operaciones son elementos de una práctica generadora (...) de evidencia confiable. Se ilustra esta tesis con el modelo lineal en econometría, el estimador de mínimos cuadrados ordinarios, el estimador y modelo de variables instrumentales y con los conceptos relacionados con las pruebas de hipótesis. Se pone especial énfasis en las propiedades de insesgadez, consistencia y precisión como caracterizaciones del tipo de error que se puede cometer usándo un estimador. Se sostiene que los modelos explican identificando patrones de dependencia contrafáctica entre características del mecanismo estocástico representadas por el modelo y características de los procedimientos inferenciales. (shrink)

For millennia, knowledge has eluded a precise definition. The industrialization of knowledge (IoK) and the associated proliferation of the so-called knowledge communities in the last few decades caused this state of affairs to deteriorate, namely by creating a trio composed of data, knowledge, and information (DIK) that is not unlike the aporia of the trinity in philosophy. This calls for a general theory of knowledge (ToK) that can work as a foundation for a science of knowledge (SoK) and additionally distinguishes (...) knowledge from both data and information. In this paper, I attempt to sketch this generality via the establishing of both knowledge structures and knowledge systems that can then be adopted/adapted by the diverse communities for the respective knowledge technologies and practices. This is achieved by means of a formal–indeed, mathematical–approach to epistemological matters a.k.a. formal epistemology. The corresponding application focus is on knowledge systems implementable as computer programs. (shrink)

Why should we avoid incoherence? An influential view tells us that incoherent combinations of attitudes are such that it is impossible for all of those attitudes to be simultaneously vindicated by the evidence. But it is not clear whether this view successfully explains what is wrong with certain akratic doxastic states. In this paper I flesh out an alternative response to that question, one according to which the problem with incoherent combinations of attitudes is that it is impossible for all (...) of those attitudes to be simultaneously knowledgeable. This alternative response explains what is wrong with akratic combinations of attitudes using commonly accepted epistemological theses. The paper still shows how this proposal is able to explain the badness of incoherent combinations involving the absence of attitudes, suspended judgment and credence. These explanations deploy the notions of knowledge and being in a position to know, instead of the notion of responding properly to the evidence. Finally, I suggest that this picture can be generalized to the realm of practical rationality as well. (shrink)

For ancient philosophers, philosophy was not only a theory about the big questions but also a way of life, yet it was not only a way of life but also a theory. Pierre Hadot showed the importance of philosophy as a way of life in antiquity. Moreover, he defended, as this paper demonstrates, the view that ancient philosophy was primarily a way of life and that philosophical discourse or theory played a secondary role. The paper argues against Hadot, taking the (...) paradigmatic Socratic way of life as an illustration, that theory is as crucial for philosophy as practice is. Doing spiritual exercises and living in a particular way was very important for the ancients, but so were truth and understanding reality. (shrink)

We study whether it is possible to generalise Seidenfeld et al.’s representation result for coherent choice functions in terms of sets of probability/utility pairs when we let go of Archimedeanity. We show that the convexity property is necessary but not sufficient for a choice function to be an infimum of a class of lexicographic ones. For the special case of two-dimensional option spaces, we determine the necessary and sufficient conditions by weakening the Archimedean axiom.

Aesthetic subjectivism takes the truth of aesthetic judgments to be relative to the individual making that judgment. Despite widespread suspicion, however, this does not mean that one cannot be wrong about such judgments. Accordingly, this does not mean that one cannot gain higher-order evidence of error and fallibility that bears on the rationality of the aesthetic judgment in question. In this paper, we explain and explore these issues in some detail.

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that we ought to form and maintain our beliefs in accordance with our evidence. In this paper, I criticize two arguments in its defense. I begin by discussing Berit Broogard’s use of the distinction between narrow-scope and wide-scope requirements against W.K. Clifford’s moral defense of. I then use this very distinction against a defense of inspired by Stephen Grimm’s more recent claims about the moral source of epistemic normativity. I use this distinction once again to (...) argue that Hilary Kornblith’s criticism of Richard Feldman’s defense of is incomplete. Finally, I argue that Feldman’s defense is insensitive to the relation between normative requirements and privileged values: values that have normative authority over us. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer two counterexamples to the so-called ‘Uniqueness Thesis.’ As one of these examples rely on the thesis that it is possible for a justified belief to be based on an inconsistent body of evidence, I also offer reasons for this further thesis. On the assumption that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, the counterexamples seem to work.

James Sterba has recently argued that the free will defense fails to explain the compossibility of a perfect God and the amount and degree of moral evil that we see. I think he is mistaken about this. I thus find myself in the awkward and unexpected position, as a non-theist myself, of defending the free will defense. In this paper, I will try to show that once we take care to focus on what the free will defense is trying to (...) accomplish, and by what means it tries to do so, we will see that Sterba’s criticism of it misses the mark. (shrink)

This is not a guide for your writing process. You should write in whatever way expressing and making sense of your ideas feels most natural and most productive to you. This is a guide for organizing your ideas, after you have captured some of them in fits and starts of prose, into a particular kind of final product: the basic philosophy paper.