Introduction: Traditionally, empathy has been studied from two main perspectives: the theory-theory approach and the simulation theory approach. These theories claim that social emotions are fundamentally constituted by mind states in the brain. In contrast, classical phenomenology and recent research based on enactive theories consider empathy as the basic process of contacting others’ emotional experiences through direct bodily perception and sensation. Objective: This study aims to enrich knowledge of the empathic experience of pain by using an experimental phenomenological method. Method: (...) Implementing an experimental paradigm used in affective neuroscience, we exposed 28 healthy adults to a video of sportspersons suffering physical accidents while practicing extreme sports. Immediately after watching the video, each participant underwent a phenomenological interview to gather data on embodied, multi-layered dimensions (bodily sensations, emotions, and motivations) and temporal aspects of empathic experience. We also performed quantitative analyses of the phenomenological categories. Results: Experiential access to the other person’s painful experience involves four main-themes. Bodily resonance: participants felt a multiplicity of bodily, affective, and kinesthetic sensations. Attentional focus: some participants centered their attention more on their own personal discomfort and sensations of rejection, while others on the pain and suffering experienced by the sportspersons. Kinesthetic motivation: some participants experienced the feeling in their bodies to avoid or escape from watching the video, while others experienced the need to help the sportspersons avoid suffering any injury while practicing extreme sports. Temporality of experience: participants witnessed temporal fluctuations in their experiences, bringing intensity changes in their bodily resonance, attentional focus, and kinesthetic motivation. Finally, two experiential structures were found: one structure is self-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the participant’s own experience of seeing the sportsperson suffering, and self-protective kinesthetic motivation; the other structure is other-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the sportsperson, and prosocial kinesthetic motivation to help them. Discussion: We show how phenomenological data may contribute to comprehending empathy for pain in social neuroscience. In addition, we address the phenomenological aspect of the enactive approach to the three dimensions of embodiment of human consciousness, especially the intersubjective dimension. Also, based on our results, we suggest an extension of the enactive theory for non-interactive social experience. (shrink)

Marta Suria writes *Ella soy yo* as part of her response to the irruption of the memories of the sexual aggressions she had suffered since childhood. She is convinced that the way she narrates her experience will transform and liberate her. How is it at all possible that a certain kind of narrative may transform and li- berate us? In this paper, we will first describe the conception of the relationship between language and experience that lies behind this perplexity (...) and, secondly, we will sketch an alternative conception that will hopefully allow us to account for the transformative power of certain kinds of narratives. This alternative conception will hinge on the idea of expression and on the concept of aspect perception. For this purpose, we will firstly argue that language can be used not only to describe or evaluate our experience, but also to express it; we will, then, defend the view that linguistic or gestural expressions of our experiences not only announce or manifest them, but contribute to shaping and modulating them; finally, we will highlight the transformative, humanizing power of certain expressive uses of language. (shrink)

The prestigious French publisher Presses Universitaires de France has recently brought out (November 1995) a new French edition of Elie Halévy's well known book "The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism", first published in France in three volumes as "La formation du radicalisme philosophique" (1901-1904) and translated into English in 1926. The prevailing opinion on this book is that it gives an excellent account of English utilitarianism. Thus, in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Talcott Parsons speaks of it as the ‘virtually (...) definitive analysis of utilitarianism’. More recently Donald Winch, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, describes Halévy's book as: ‘Still the best study of the ideas and activities of the school taken as a whole’. In this short essay I express a very different opinion. I show that Halévy, who qualifies utilitarianism (with obvious disgust) as ‘a plebeian or rather bourgeois morality’, as ‘much too simple’, completely misunderstood the writings of the English and Scottish utilitarian philosophers. (shrink)

This book describes the philosophical principles underlying the doctrine (the political project) often called “classical liberalism”. By this expression we mean, in this book, the project for society proposed, during the second half of the eighteenth century, by David Hume and Adam Smith in Great Britain, Turgot and Condorcet in France, Thomas Jefferson in the United States and Kant and Humboldt in Germany. The differences between the principles of “classical liberalism” and those of the extreme doctrines of Milton Friedman and (...) Friedrich Hayek (often confused with 'classical liberalism') are clearly explained. -/- This book has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Vietnamese, Rumanian and Turkish. -/- Several scholars have done me the honor of posting a .pdf version of this work (which is no longer available in paper form). Here are three excellent versions that are easily found : -/- "Les fondements philosophiques du libéralisme jugurtha noblogs" (224 pages), "Les fondements philosophiques du libéralisme" (224 pages), in ZLibrary. -/- "Les fondements philosophiques du libéralisme abdelmagidzarrouki" (224 pages), -/- . (shrink)

Philosophers of embodied and situated cognition have provided convincing explanations of what objects do in affective processes (e.g., in emotion regulation). They have often used the concept of 'affective affordance' to account for the affective role of objects but it is not clear how this concept relates to other concepts of affordance, in particular those used in empirical works in cognitive science. We start to fill this gap by providing a new definition of affective affordances and we suggest a possible (...) way to test this novel theoretical construct through a kinematic analysis of hand movements. (shrink)

Abstract: Introspection reveals that one is frequently conscious of some form of inner speech, which may appear either in a condensed or expanded form. It has been claimed that this speech reflects the way in which language is involved in conscious thought, fulfilling a number of cognitive functions. We criticize three theories that address this issue: Bermúdez’s view of language as a generator of second-order thoughts, Prinz’s development of Jackendoff’s intermediate-level theory of consciousness, and Carruthers’s theory of inner speech as (...) a rehearsal of action-schemata. We contend they have problems to account for those cases in which inner speech is fragmentary, and for the difference with those instances in which it appears as more sentence-like. In addition, we present verbal overshadowing as a phenomenon that neither of them can easily explain. Finally, we propose an account in which inner speech is fundamentally silent outer speech and argue that it is more explanatory than the alternatives. (shrink)

One of the most disputed questions among economists is that of "the role" and "size" that the public sector should have in a rich and developed country like France. -/- The importance of this question is understandable, because the history of nations is filled with examples of a sector (or a branch) of the economy becoming too large, or remaining too small, hampering growth or making the economy more vulnerable. A recent case is that of the "Financial Corporations Sector", which (...) doubled in size in several countries during the two decades leading up to the 2008 economic collapse [1]. -/- It is therefore legitimate to ask whether this is not also the case, in France, with "General Government" or "the Public Sector". -/- We explain why the argument most often used by those who hold this opinion (that the ratio "public expenditure/GDP" is a good measure of the size of the public sector and that in France it is too high) is not a serious one. -/- . (shrink)

Imperativism is the view that the phenomenal character of the affective component of pains, orgasms, and pleasant or unpleasant sensory experience depends on their imperative intentional content. In this paper I canvass an imperativist treatment of pains as reason-conferring states.

In this paper we introduce two issues relevantly related to the cognitive phenomenology debate, which, to our minds, have not been yet properly addressed: the relation between access and phenomenal consciousness in cognition and the relation between conscious thought and inner speech. In the first case, we ask for an explanation of how we have access to thought contents, and in the second case, an explanation of why is inner speech so pervasive in our conscious thinking. We discuss the prospects (...) of explanation for both sides of the debate and argue that cognitive phenomenology defenders are in an overall advantageous position. We also propose an account of inner speech that differs from other influential explanations in some interesting respects. (shrink)

In what ways and how far does virtue shield someone against suffering evils? In other words, how do non-moral evils affect the lives of virtuous people and to what extent can someone endure evils while staying happy? The central purpose of this chapter is to answer these questions by exploring what Aristotle has to say about the effects of evils in human well-being in general and his treatment of extreme misfortunes.

The story of the Ship of Theseus is one of the most venerable conundrums in philosophy. Some philosophers consider it a genuine puzzle. Others deny that it is so. It is, therefore, an open question whether there is or there is not a puzzle in the Ship of Theseus story. So, arguably, it makes sense to test empirically whether people perceive the case as a puzzle. Recently, David Rose, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich and forty-two other researchers from different countries have (...) undertaken that task. We argue that their tests do not provide any evidence that bears on the question as to whether the Ship of Theseus case is a genuine puzzle. In our discussion we address also what should be taken into account if one wishes to test the puzzling, or not puzzling, status of the Ship of Theseus story. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham are often said to have held opposed views concerning the way “the value” of different pleasures should be estimated. Mill is accused of being an inconsistent utilitarian because he thought that, when comparing the value of two pleasures, we should not forget to take their “quality” into account. Bentham, on the other hand, is said to have believed that we should take “only quantity” into consideration. By verifying what they actually wrote, and reflecting on (...) what they meant by words like “value”, “quantity”, and “quality”, we find that these allegations are largely imaginary and that the difference between Mill and Bentham on this question has (at least) been exaggerated. Bentham, for example, did not write that "quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry", as is so often reported. In his Principles of Morals and Legislation he clearly tells us why he rejects the inaccurate word “quantity”, when speaking of “the value of (a lot of) pain or pleasure”, and he explicitly introduces “quality” – both the word and the concept – in his analysis of rewards and punishments. These clarifications allow us to sort-out a few other confusions concerning utilitarianism. We explain, for example, why authors like Amartya Sen and Michael Sandel are mistaken in believing that rights and freedoms have “no intrinsic value” (only instrumental value) in utilitarian ethics. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalization of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as ?There is a fly here.? Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millikan's biosemantics, offers (...) an account of productivity in thought. This paper raises a basic worry about this account: that the use of mapping functions in the theory is unacceptable from a naturalistic point of view. (shrink)

The specific role of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethics has received much less attention than its role in his epistemology, despite the fact that Aristotle explicitly stresses the importance of empeiria as a requirement for the receptivity to ethical arguments and as a source for the formation of phronêsis.1 Thus, while empeiria is an integral part of all explanations that scholars give of the Aristotelian account of the acquisition of technê and epistêmê, it is usually not prominent in explanations of the (...) acquisition of phronêsis.2 The abundant mentions of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethical treatises are often eclipsed in the secondary literature... (shrink)

Everyone has heard of "the invisible hand," the famous metaphor used by Adam Smith (1723-1790) in The Wealth of Nations. Although he uses the expression only once in the book, it has given rise to controversy that has lasted for over two centuries. -/- The famous expression has been understood, in (at least) two very different ways. In one way by most of academia, and in a very different way by Keynes, Noah Chomsky and more lately by Mark Blaug (in (...) the second edition of The New Palgrave, 2008). -/- In the standard textbook interpretation, it is considered a poetical name for "the price mechanism" and presented as an argument in favor of laisser-faire and free trade. In this paper we recall the less well-known interpretation (of Keynes, Blaug and Chomsky), showing that Smith was more reserved towards laisser-faire than is commonly believed and that by "invisible hand" he did not mean the price mechanism. (shrink)

Una de las tesis que tradicionalmente han sido defendidas por la tradición del positivismo jurídico es la tesis coactiva, según la cual el derecho consiste en un conjunto de normas coactivas, en el sentido de impuestas por medio de la fuerza. Pero, sin abandonar esta corriente, ha habido históricamente diversas maneras de entender las relaciones entre derecho y fuerza. Si, pues, hasta comienzos del s. XX era opinión común la idea de que el derecho constituía un conjunto de mandatos o (...) normas de conducta cuya eficacia se garantizaba a través de la amenaza del uso de la fuerza coactiva a los transgresores de aquéllas; a lo largo del siglo pasado, empero, algunos autores muy destacados dieron en sostener la opinión de que la fuerza disponible por jueces y funcionarios venía a constituir sustancialmente el objeto mismo de toda regulación jurídica. Según esta última concepción, el derecho tendría primordialmente la función de articular las condiciones de legitimidad para el uso de la fuerza, designando a los sujetos a los que se encomienda tal uso y determinado los casos y modalidades en los que pueda utilizarse. Entre quienes sustentan la primera tesis, que afirma que la fuerza constituye la garantía del derecho, es lugar común citar a Austin y, a menudo, se cita también a Jhering. Entre los defensores de la segunda tesis común es habitual mencionar a Kelsen, Olivecrona y Ross, habiéndose sustanciado una polémica entre Bobbio y Olivecrona en punto a determinar si fuera menciona Olivecrona o fue Kelsen el primero en adoptarla. Sin embargo, es problemático incluir a Jhering dentro del primer grupo y no dentro del segundo, en cuyo caso habría que atribuirle la primera formulación histórica de la tesis. Este trabajo, de carácter histórico, parte de la citada polémica y trata de verificar la constancia de la segunda tesis en las obras no sólo de Kelsen y Olivecrona, sino sobre todo de Jhering. (shrink)

I respond to an objection recently formulated by Barlassina and Hayward against first-order imperativism about pain, according to which it cannot account for the self-directed motivational force of pain. I am going to agree with them: it cannot. This is because pain does not have self-directed motivational force. I will argue that the alternative view—that pain is about dealing with extramental, bodily threats, not about dealing with itself—makes better sense of introspection, and of empirical research on pain avoidance. Also, a (...) naturalistic theory of body-involving commands falls straightforwardly out of our most prominent naturalistic metasemantic accounts, while the token-reflexive contents that would underlie self-directed motivation are more problematic. (shrink)

There is a dimension of rationality, known as structural rationality, according to which a paradigmatic example of what it means to be rational is not to be akratic. Although some philosophers claim that aesthetics falls within the scope of rationality, a non-akrasia constraint prohibiting certain combinations of attitudes is yet to be developed in this domain. This essay is concerned with the question of whether such a requirement is plausible and, if so, whether it is an actual requirement of aesthetic (...) rationality. Ultimately, this paper defends the view that aesthetics is no different from other domains in that it requires coherence between a subject’s mental states (in the aesthetic case, between what is judged and what is aesthetically liked). (shrink)

Intentionalism is the view that perceptual phenomenology depends on perceptual content. The aim of this paper is to make explicit an ambiguity in usual formulations of intentionalism, and to argue in favor of one way to disambiguate it. It concerns whether perceptual phenomenology depends on the content of one and only one representation (often construed as being identical to a certain perceptual experience), or instead depends on a collection of many different representations throughout the perceptual system. We argue in favor (...) of the latter option. Intentionalism so conceived can make better sense of contemporary neuroscience of perception, and is better equipped to confront several influential objections to traditional intentionalism. (shrink)

In our everyday interaction with the environment, we often perceive objects and spaces as opportunities to feel, maintain, enhance, and change our affective states and processes. The concept of affective affordance was coined to accommodate this aspect of ordinary perception and the many ways in which we rely on the material environment to regulate our emo- tions. One natural way to think of affective affordances in emotion regulation is to interpret them as tools for regulating felt affective states. We argue (...) that this way of conceiving of affective affordances is too restrictive. By analyzing the role of expressive properties of objects and spaces in emotion regulation, we show that our environment does not need to elicit felt affective states to regulate our emotions. Thus, we revise the concept of affective affordance to accommodate these cases. This revised concept explains more with less. Hence, it should be preferred in wide-reaching philosophical projects that aim to explain human affectivity as a situated phenomenon. (shrink)

How should we characterize the nature of conscious occurrent thought? In the last few years, a rather unexplored topic has appeared in philosophy of mind: cognitive phenomenology or the phenomenal character of cognitive mental episodes. In this paper I firstly present the motivation for cognitive phenomenology views through phenomenal contrast cases, taken as a challenge for their opponents. Secondly, I explore the stance against cognitive phenomenology views proposed by Restrictivism, classifying it in two strategies, sensory restrictivism and accompanying states. On (...) the one hand, I problematize the role of attention adopted by sensory restrictivism and I present and discuss in detail an argument that defends the limitation of sensory phenomenology so as to explain the distinction between visual and cognitive mental episodes on the basis of immediate experience. On the other hand, I address accompanying states views by discussing the empirical studies of Hurlburt et al. (2006, 2008) that defend the existence of “unsymbolized thinking”. I present how they can be construed as evidence for cognitive phenomenology views and I dispel some problems that have been raised against its acceptance. I thus conclude that cognitive phenomenology views hold up well against the restrictivist positions considered. (shrink)

Recent work on signaling has mostly focused on communication between organisms. The Lewis–Skyrms framework should be equally applicable to intra-organismic signaling. We present a Lewis–Skyrms signaling-game model of painful signaling, and use it to argue that the content of pain is predominantly imperative. We address several objections to the account, concluding that our model gives a productive framework within which to consider internal signaling.

Cancer research is experiencing ‘paradigm instability’, since there are two rival theories of carcinogenesis which confront themselves, namely the somatic mutation theory and the tissue organization field theory. Despite this theoretical uncertainty, a huge quantity of data is available thanks to the improvement of genome sequencing techniques. Some authors think that the development of new statistical tools will be able to overcome the lack of a shared theoretical perspective on cancer by amalgamating as many data as possible. We think instead (...) that a deeper understanding of cancer can be achieved by means of more theoretical work, rather than by merely accumulating more data. To support our thesis, we introduce the analytic view of theory development, which rests on the concept of plausibility, and make clear in what sense plausibility and probability are distinct concepts. Then, the concept of plausibility is used to point out the ineliminable role played by the epistemic subject in the development of statistical tools and in the process of theory assessment. We then move to address a central issue in cancer research, namely the relevance of computational tools developed by bioinformaticists to detect driver mutations in the debate between the two main rival theories of carcinogenesis. Finally, we briefly extend our considerations on the role that plausibility plays in evidence amalgamation from cancer research to the more general issue of the divergences between frequentists and Bayesians in the philosophy of medicine and statistics. We argue that taking into account plausibility-based considerations can lead to clarify some epistemological shortcomings that afflict both these perspectives. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions on cognition (ranging from computational and representational approaches to the 4E fra-mework), on the one hand, and those on sound and auditory per-ception, on the other, have hitherto remained apart. In this paper, the author addresses the concept of “auditory cognition”. While committing to the conceptual analysis of the latter, the author in-troduces the discussion of modality-specif ic approaches. Since the contributions made so far in the domain of the philosophy of sound and auditory perception are prone to (...) favor computational-repre-sentational approaches —e.g., the perceptual coherence model (Méndez-Martínez, 2022)—, the exploration of 4E possibilities will lay down a series of questions aimed to encourage future developers from that viewpoint. In that sense, the author explores conceptual entailments and connections between the genealogy of theories within the philosophy of sound and auditory perception, and the hypothesis of the extended cognition (EX). (shrink)

It is widely held that it is unhelpful to model our epistemic access to modal facts on the basis of perception, and postulate the existence of a bodily mechanism attuned to modal features of the world. In this paper I defend modalizing mechanisms. I present and discuss a decision-theoretic model in which agents with severely limited cognitive abilities, at the end of an evolutionary process, have states which encode substantial information about the probabilities with which the outcomes of a certain (...) Bernoulli process occur. Thus, in the model, a process driven by very simple, thoroughly naturalistic mechanisms eventuates in modal sensitivity. (shrink)

Internal coherence is of great importance for how we think about appreciating objects of aesthetic worth. A disagreement between what we judge to be worthy and what we affectively favor can prevent us from properly grasping its value. However, it is also assumed in the aesthetic domain that our taste changes over time, jeopardising such coherence constraint. These changes can lead to a mismatch between new aesthetic judgments and old aesthetic preferences. This chapter explores a number of issues that emerge (...) from this tension. Using Taylor Swift’s re-recording as a case study, I will explore the relation between fan loyalty and personal authenticity, as well as the role of biographical taste in the reception of these newly recorded albums among Swift’s long-time fanbase. (shrink)

We explore the contribution made by oscillatory, synchronous neural activity to representation in the brain. We closely examine six prominent examples of brain function in which neural oscillations play a central role, and identify two levels of involvement that these oscillations take in the emergence of representations: enabling (when oscillations help to establish a communication channel between sender and receiver, or are causally involved in triggering a representation) and properly representational (when oscillations are a constitutive part of the representation). We (...) show that even an idealized informational sender–receiver account of representation makes the representational status of oscillations a non-trivial matter, which depends on rather minute empirical details. (shrink)

I sketch and defend an imperativist treatment of the phenomenology associated with disgusting smells. This treatment, I argue, allows us to make better sense than other intentionalist alter-natives both of the neuroanatomy of olfaction, and of a natural pre-theoretical stance regarding the sense of smell.

The concept of autonomy is central to many debates in aesthetics. However, exactly what it means to be autonomous in our aesthetic engagements is somewhat unclear in the philosophical literature. The normative significance of autonomy is also unclear and hotly debated. In this essay, I propose a method for clarifying this elusive concept by distinguishing three distinct senses or varieties of aesthetic autonomy: experiential autonomy, competence-based autonomy, and personal autonomy. On this taxonomy autonomy is a context-sensitive concept and autonomy applies (...) to several different moments or stages of aesthetic appreciation. Throughout this critical discussion, important issues concerning the nature of aesthetic appreciation are also explored. (shrink)

In this paper, I will investigate the notion of mind within the “Extended Mind” theory, as it is defended by Andy Clark. The aim is to provide an explanation of its key ideas and to highlight some of its consequences. In the first part I will briefly explain the main features of Clark's theory. In the second part, I will discuss his account of the nature of language and its relationship to cognition, and I will relate it with the arguments (...) for cognitive and mental extension. Then I will use my analysis of Clark's arguments in order to individuate some problems, which characterize his philosophical position. Although I am sympathetic with his theory, I will argue that it is nonetheless committed to a narrow account of cognition and mind. For this reason, I will propose a way to integrate Clark's theory within a semiotic and pragmatist framework inspired by C.S. Peirce. I suggest that, if we conceive the cognition as a semiotic sense-making process, we can provide a broad account of cognition and a fully externalist position about the mind. (shrink)

Are occurrent states of forgetting literal experiences of absences? I situate this question within the debate on mental time travel (MTT) to understand whether these states can be explained as literal experiences of absent episodic memories. To frame my argument, I combine Barkasi and Rosen’s literal approach to MTT with Farennikova’s literal approach to the perception of absences, showing that both are built on the idea that for an experience to be literal it must afford an unmediated contact with the (...) object that constitutes it. I test the idea that forgetting affords literal experiences of mnemonic absences by considering different views of absence perception and I evaluate whether the objections raised against Farennikova’s approach also apply to my exploratory idea. I show that, while the idea resists the objections that an advocate of a cognitive approach to mnemonic absences may raise, the same does not apply to those elaborated by advocates of a metacognitive approach. Even if conceiving of occurrent states of forgetting as literal experiences of mnemonic absences sounds appealing, this idea is misleading. Therefore, I suggest conceiving of occurrent states of forgetting as states with metacognitive features, which track the absence of episodic memories from awareness in an affectively mediated way. (shrink)

Categorization behavior can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the trade‐off between as high as possible faithfulness in the transmission of information about samples of the classes to be categorized, and as low as possible transmission costs for that same information. The kinds of categorization behaviors we associate with conceptual atoms, prototypes, and exemplars emerge naturally as a result of this trade‐off, in the presence of certain natural constraints on the probabilistic distribution of samples, and the ways in which we (...) measure faithfulness. Beyond the general structure of categorization in these circumstances, the same information‐centered perspective can shed light on other, more concrete properties of human categorization performance, such as the results of certain prominent experiments on supervised categorization. (shrink)

En este artículo nos proponemos reconstruir las bases de la teoría política calviniana. Intentaremos comprender cómo define el reformador al sujeto político de su teología, donde es definido como Pueblo de Dios. A través de una Teología de la Alianza Calvino establece los términos de un contrato político en el que las instituciones humanas son queridas y establecidas por Dios. A continuación, veremos que el Estado cristiano según Calvino es la plataforma desde la que se promueve el conocimiento de la (...) Voluntad divina, a través de la predicación y la positivación de leyes conformes a la misma. Finalmente, veremos que las ideas del reformador sobre la organización y la naturaleza de la política tuvieron en Ginebra una realización evidente. Ni sus textos ni sus acciones nos permiten calificar a Calvino de constitucionalista o republicano, sino más bien de hombre de orden y defensor de la tradición del derecho divino de los reyes. (shrink)

In this paper I examine some of the positive epistemic and moral dimensions of anger in Plato’s dialogues. My aim is to show that while Plato is clearly aware that retaliatory anger has negative effects on people’s behavior, the strategy we find in his dialogues is not to eliminate anger altogether; instead, Plato aims to transform or rechannel destructive retaliatory anger into a different, more productive, reformative anger. I argue that this new form of anger plays a crucial positive role (...) in our intellectual and moral development. In relation to our intellectual development, anger is often part of people’s reactions to the Socratic interrogations and it often helps or hinders attempts to acknowledge one’s ignorance and become motivated to learn. For anger to play a positive role in the context of philosophical conversations, Plato suggests its transformation from being an outward-looking and reactive emotion oriented towards retaliation (refutation), into a mostly inward-looking emotion aimed at ones’ own moral and intellectual reform or self-betterment. In relation to our moral progress, anger is strategically linked both to the control of our appetites and to the virtue of courage, so anger is crucial to the psychology of the good citizen. Concretely, anger is needed both for the development of the right opposition to injustice and greed, and for the formation of an adequate sensitivity to justice. (shrink)

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by (...) social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap. (shrink)

The human subject in as much as he knows transforms the sensitive and concrete (the thing perceived) into abstract (an image of the thing perceived), the abstract into an idea (imaginative representation of the thing abstracted), and ideas into contents of conscience (meanings). The last step in the creation of meanings, something being executed in the speech act, consists in fixing the construct mentally created thus making it objectified meanings in the conscience of speakers. The interchange amongst the different steps (...) in the creation of meaning manifests lógos, the state lived by speakers in their interior when speaking, created and developed in words and because of words. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan's biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy. In the second part, I develop a novel teleosemantic proposal (...) which makes progress in the treatment of this family of problems. I describe a procedure to derive a (unique) homeostatic property cluster [HPC] from facts having to do with the properties that a certain indicator relied on, in the events leading to its fixation in a certain population. This HPC is the one that should figure in the content attribution to the indicator in question. (shrink)

A widespread Western conception about the sanctity of the human body and its parts prevents from any morally acceptable disposition of these objects. However, this entails nothing but a dualistic conception of the human being as a composite of detachable parts — namely, body and mind. Understood as the antechamber of legal rights, moral rights perform an important — yet frequently overlooked — justifying function that permeates the political discourse. Although the connection among moral, political and legal discourses should be (...) properly acknowledged, certain boundaries are to mediate among each scope for the sake of certainty and accuracy. Intermediate realities, as the so-called human rights, serve to connect the moral and legal domains, still they also blur the lines along which the discourse is deployed. Moral entities are essentially inalienable, to the extent that they demarcate the moral status of the subject. By contrast, legal rights are essentially negotiable and, thus, alienable. The controversial instance of bodily rights will serve to test the assertions above. (shrink)

Meaning defines language because it is the internal function of language. At the same time, meaning does not exist unless in language and because of language. From the point of view of the speaking subject meaning is contents of conscience. From the point of view of a language, meaning is the objectification of knowledge in linguistic signs. And from the point of view of the individual speaking subject, meaning is the expressive intentional purpose to say something.

This paper addresses the relationship between logic and phenomenology at a historical moment that precedes the big divide between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. In analysing alternative derivations of phenomenological logic, the discussion focuses on the case of two notorious neo-Kantian Mexican philosophers from the first half of the XXth century: Adalberto García de Mendoza and Francisco Larroyo. It is argued that both García de Mendoza and Larroyo made an original contribution to the discussion on the relationship between phenomenology and logic. (...) Further, this paper attempts to present a charitable portrait of both García de Mendoza and Larroyo in contrast to underrating approaches to both Mexican philosophers. In so doing, this paper adopts a historical—though not strictly biographical— perspective. While it is true that neither García de Mendoza nor Larroyo could be considered “phenomenologists” or “Husserl scholars” according to contemporary standards it is worth noticing that they engage in the discussion of phenomenological logic. Both authors had the project of developing a grounding logic for science and, as the article argues, both attempts could be even linked. Their project, however, was unfinished. The plan of this paper is as follows. The first section addresses the problem of the relationship between logic and phenomenology. The second one focuses on García de Mendoza’s contributions. The third one elaborates on Larroyo’s Logic of Sciences. And, finally, the fourth section elaborates on these Mexican philosophers’ contributions to education, making as well further observations concerning the similarities and differences between both authors. (shrink)

The most comprehensive manifestation of language can be seen in the activity of speaking. In it the activity of speaking cannot be understood unless it is referred to the concepts of language and a language. Anything in language can be found in the activity of speaking. Because of this you can find what language is if you abstract from the innumerable manifestations of the activity of speaking.

Meaning as the original function of language is the arrangement of internal things on the part of the creative and historical individual subject who speaks a particular language. Meaning constitutes the series of contents making up the linguistic world human subjects can manage real things with. Real things are not described with meanings but merely represented and designated. Meanings represent the essence of things thus making them members of a category. In this sense, meaning is the base to create things (...) in as much as they constitute entities. Only through the operation of determination can meanings designate individual real things. Since meaningful categories are intended to particular purposes, meaning is intentional and inclusive. (shrink)

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) debate is gaining ground in contemporary evolutionary biology. In parallel, a number of philosophical standpoints have emerged in an attempt to clarify what exactly is represented by the EES. For Massimo Pigliucci, we are in the wake of the newest instantiation of a persisting Kuhnian paradigm; in contrast, Telmo Pievani has contended that the transition to an EES could be best represented as a progressive reformation of a prior Lakatosian scientific research program, with the extension (...) of its Neo-Darwinian core and the addition of a brand-new protective belt of assumptions and auxiliary hypotheses. Here, we argue that those philosophical vantage points are not the only ways to interpret what current proposals to ‘extend’ the Modern Synthesis-derived ‘standard evolutionary theory’ (SET) entail in terms of theoretical change in evolutionary biology. We specifically propose the image of the emergent EES as a vast network of models and interweaved representations that, instantiated in diverse practices, are connected and related in multiple ways. Under that assumption, the EES could be articulated around a paraconsistent network of evolutionary theories (including some elements of the SET), as well as models, practices and representation systems of contemporary evolutionary biology, with edges and nodes that change their position and centrality as a consequence of the co-construction and stabilization of facts and historical discussions revolving around the epistemic goals of this area of the life sciences. We then critically examine the purported structure of the EES—published by Laland and collaborators in 2015—in light of our own network-based proposal. Finally, we consider which epistemic units of Evo-Devo are present or still missing from the EES, in preparation for further analyses of the topic of explanatory integration in this conceptual framework. (shrink)

We aim to map out the points of confluence between phronesis and emotion, as well as the nature of this confluence. We do so based on philosophical and psychological explanations of emotions and phronesis. Making sound decisions, which requires phronesis, is an important matter, but its relationship with emotions has only just begun to be studied. We propose that the interplay between phronesis and emotion is possible (rather than inevitable) because both have a cognitive-behavioural structure and because emotions are hierarchical. (...) In the case of emotion, there are no gaps between the cognitive and behavioural dimensions, while phronetic acts can only manifest if cognitive and behavioural aspects are activated simultaneously. The confluence we identify is bidirectional and involves mutual enrichment in this dual dimension. On the one hand, phronesis enriches emotion because it involves extra subjective knowledge and allows emotion to be directed towards higher goals. On the other hand, emotions enrich phronesis because phronesis makes decisions based on sensitive preferences and because emotions confirm correctness in the context of moral decision making. Methodologically, this study is theoretical and interdisciplinary, as our approach is both philosophical and psychological. Philosophy helps us to improve the conceptual foundation of the construct, while psychology provides an analysis of the emotional process, allowing philosophy to understand how emotional evaluation-assessment and motivation lead to decision making. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene por objeto analizar la noción de ciencia jurídica de los profesores Carlos E. Alchourrón y Eugenio Bulygin. Ésta parte del presupuesto de que la ciencia jurídica no está autorizada a crear nuevo Derecho, sino que sólo puede aspirar legítimamente a representarlo de alguna manera. Eso no significa que la suya sea una actividad meramente especulativa, en el sentido etimológico del término. Esto es, la ciencia jurídica no se limita a reflejar, como en un espejo, el Derecho tal (...) y como se nos presenta empíricamente, sino que confiere a éste un importante valor añadido a través de su sistematización. La primera parte de este trabajo está dedicada a exponer el modelo científico propuesto por los mencionados autores. En la segunda parte se presta especial atención a la cuestión de la separación entre descripción y prescripción en la actividad de la ciencia jurídica. Por último, en la tercera parte se cuestiona la utilidad del modelo propuesto sobre la base de los postulados teóricos de que se le hace partir, a lo que se suman ciertas dificultades metodológicas. (shrink)