La perspectiva renacentista ha sido un ejemplo insistentemente trabajado en la literatura epistemologica, dado que permite establecer relaciones con la constitucion de la ciencia moderna y, a la vez, ofrece una fecunda metafora respecto de la actividad cognoscente propia de este modelo de racionalidad. En este trabajo, pretendemos examinar el uso critico de esta metafora y, para ello, seleccionamos tres lecturas procedentes de diferentes origenes y orientaciones teoricas que, a nuestro juicio, coinciden en: (1) la preocupacion por mostrar que la (...) asociacion de estos modos de representacion con el realismo esta lejos de ser obvia y directa; y (2) una cierta conciencia de haber pagado un costo muy alto por la sistematizacion y racionalizacion a las que han conducido estos modos de representacion. (shrink)

A standing presumption in the literature is that devil’s advocacy is an inherently beneficial argumentative move; and that those who take on this role in conversation are paradigms of argumentative virtue. Outside academic circles, however, devil’s advocacy has acquired something of a notorious reputation: real-world conversations are rife with self-proclaimed devil’s advocates who are anything but virtuous. Motivated by this observation, in this paper we offer the first in-depth exploration of non-ideal devil’s advocacy. We draw on recent analyses of two (...) better known discursive practices—mansplaining and trolling—to illuminate some of the signature traits of vicious devil’s advocacy. Building on this comparative examination, we show that all three practices trade on a manipulation of illocutionary force; and we evaluate their respective options for securing plausible deniability. (shrink)

Our aim is to provide a sequent calculus whose external consequence relation coincides with the three-valued paracomplete logic `of nonsense' introduced by Dmitry Bochvar and, independently, presented as the weak Kleene logic K3W by Stephen C. Kleene. The main features of this calculus are (i) that it is non-reflexive, i.e., Identity is not included as an explicit rule (although a restricted form of it with premises is derivable); (ii) that it includes rules where no variable-inclusion conditions are attached; and (iii) (...) that it is hybrid, insofar as it includes both left and right operational introduction as well as elimination rules. (shrink)

In this study, we consider that enabling young people to experience direct contact with nearby natural environments can positively influence their knowledge and feelings about the biodiversity that occurs there, contributing to its protection and conservation for current and future generations. In this study, we explore how teenagers (n = 17) aged between 13 and 17 years old describe and perceive the nearby natural environment before and after an interpretive trail in Una, Bahia, Brazil. Participants were asked to draw the (...) Atlantic Forest with colored pencils on white paper and, based on the drawing, they answered the following questions: “What is in your drawing? and “What is happening in your drawing?,” in addition to other information such as the title of the drawing, difficulty of the activity, and sociodemographic aspects. Content analysis was used to analyze the information collected. From the drawings and responses of the participants, categories related to knowledge, experiences, and types of relationships with the visited place emerged. (shrink)

RESUMO A alimentação é o fator que mais onera um sistema de produção animal. Assim, a utilização de diferentes estratégias de alimentação dos animais ainda é o grande desafio da nutrição animal, principalmente, levando em consideração as exigências nutricionais de diferentes categorias de ruminantes, em especial bovinos em regiões tropicais, haja vista que a sazonalidade na produção de forragens afeta diretamente a produção bovina, promovendo inadequação no atendimento das exigências nutricionais dos animais principalmente em minerais e vitaminas. Uma alimentação que (...) não atenda as exigências nutricionais dos ruminantes gera prejuízos no sistema de produção, além de, em casos mais graves, ocasionar a perda do animal. Estudos que abordam o efeito e a importância de vitaminas e minerais na nutrição bovina são escassos e necessários. Recentemente a National Research Council (NRC) apresentou novos registros das exigências nutricionais das vitaminas e minerais. Essas alterações proporcionam um impacto econômico significativo em relação à nutrição animal. Nesse sentido, objetivou-se com esta revisão trazer informações acerca de vitaminas e minerais na nutrição de bovinos em pastejo. -/- Palavras-chave: Alimentação animal; forragem; pastagem; requerimentos nutricionais; ruminantes; vitaminas lipossolúveis (Source: AGROVOC). -/- ABSTRACT Animal feed is the factor that most burdens a production system. Thus, the use of different animal feeding strategies is still the great challenge of animal nutrition, taking into account the nutritional requirements of different categories of ruminants, especially cattle in tropical regions, given that seasonality in forage production directly affects cattle production, promoting inadequacy in meeting the nutritional requirements of animals, mainly in minerals and vitamins. A diet that does not meet the nutritional requirements of ruminants generates losses in the production system, in addition to, in more serious cases, causing the loss of the animal. Studies that address the effect and importance of vitamins and minerals in bovine nutrition are scarce and necessary. Recently the National Research Council (NRC) presented new records of the nutritional requirements of vitamins and minerals. These changes provide a significant economic impact on animal nutrition. In this sense, the objective of this review was to bring information about vitamins and minerals in the nutrition of grazing cattle. -/- Keywords: Animal feeding; fat soluble vitamins; forage; nutritional requirements; pasture feeding; ruminants (Source: AGROVOC). -/- REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS -/- 1. Cavalcanti CPL, Silva e Macedo TJ, Gois GC, Menezes VG, Monte APO, Silva AD, Silva DJM, Silva EO, Araújo GGL, Rodrigues RTS, Wischral A, Matos MHT, Queiroz MAA. Licuri oil improves feedlot performance and modifies ruminal fauna of Santa Inês ewes. Liv Sci. 2022; 265:e105093. 2. Busato KC, Chizzotti ML, Rodrigues RTS, Silva TS, Silva IF, Queiroz MAA, Silva KT, Borges JC, Gois GC. Ingestive behavior and growth performance of boer crossbred and indigenous goat kids under different feeding levels in Semiarid Region in Brazil. Trop Agric Res. 2022; 33:299-309. 3. Patton J, Dineen M, Keady TWJ, McGee M, Waters S. Developments in nutrition for pasture-based cattle and sheep systems in Ireland. Irish J Agric Food Res. 2022; 61(1):12-37. 4. McAllister TA, Stanford K, Chaves AV, Evans PR, Figueiredo, EES, Ribeiro G. Nutrition, feeding and management of beef cattle in intensive and extensive production systems. Chapter 5. In: Bazer FW, Lamb GC, Wu G, editors. Animal Agriculture. Sustainability, Challenges and Innovations. 1st ed. Elsevier Inc.: Academic Press; 2020. 5. Byrne L, Murphy RA. 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Avaliação dos efeitos de fontes de fósforo na dieta sobre parâmetros do meio ruminal e eficiência de síntese microbiana, digestibilidade dos nutrientes e fósforo plasmático em bovinos. Rev Bras Zootec. 2009; 38:760-769. 34. Yamada S, Inaba M. Potassium metabolism and management in patients with CKD. Nutr. 2021; 13:1-19. 35. Martinsen TC, Fossmark R, Waldum HL. The phylogeny and biological function of gastric juice—Microbiological consequences of removing gastric acid. Int J Mol Sci. 2019; 20:1-22. 36. González FHD, Silva SC. Minerais e vitaminas no metabolismo animal. 1st ed. Porto Alegre: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; 2019. 37. Melo RR, Gonçalves SLS, Baccarin FJB, Vasconcelos WA, Miranda SC. Influência de altas dosagens de cloreto de potássio no desenvolvimento de espécies em cultivo hidropônico. Pubvet. 2020; 14:1-9. 38. Araújo WAG, Rostagno HS, Albino LFT, Carvalho TA, Ribeiro Neto AC. Potássio na nutrição animal. Rev Eletr Nutr. 2010; 7:1280-1291. 39. NRC. 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A review of vitamin D and its importance to the health of dairy cattle. J Dairy Res. 2020; 87:84–87. 50. Alves EM, Pedreira MS, Santana CA, Silva FF. Nutrição vitamínica de vacas leiteiras. Pubvet. 2008; 2:1-17. 51. Jiang Q, Lin L, Xie F, Jin W, Zhu W, Wang M, et al. Metagenomic insights into the microbe-mediated B and K2 vitamin biosynthesis in the gastrointestinal microbiome of ruminants. Microb. 2022; 10:1-16. 52. Magan JB, O’Callaghan TF, Zheng J, Zhang L, Mandal R, Hennessy D, et al. Effect of diet on the vitamin B profile of bovine milk-based protein ingredients. Foods. 2020; 9:1-17. 53. Pinedo LA, Berenchtein B, Selem ASMA. Estudo dos processos bioquímicos da fermentação, degradação e absorção de nutrientes dos alimentos em ruminantes. Pubvet. 2008; 2:1-10. 54. DA SILVA, Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro. Formulação e Avaliação de Suplemento Mineral Para Caprinos. Instrução Técnica Para o Produtor Rural de Pernambuco, v. 3, n. 1, p. 1-4, 2023. 55. DA SILVA, Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro. Nutrição Sobre a Reprodução e Fertilidade dos Bovinos. Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva, 2021. 56. DA SILVA, Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro. Suplementação e formulação de sal mineral e mistura múltipla para bovinos. Revista Universitária Brasileira, v. 2, n. 1, 2024. (shrink)

One of the criteria to a strong principle in natural sciences is simplicity. This paper claims that the Free Energy Principle (FEP), by virtue of unifying particles with mind, is the simplest. Motivated by Hilbert’s 24th problem of simplicity, the argument is made that the FEP takes a seemingly mathematical complex domain and reduces it to something simple. More specifically, it is attempted to show that every ‘thing’, from particles to mind, can be partitioned into systemic states by virtue of (...) self-organising symmetry break, i.e. self-entropy in terms of the balance between risk and ambiguity to achieve epistemic gain. By virtue of its explanatory reach, the FEP becomes the simplest principle under quantum, statistical and classical mechanics conditions. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a performative account of hinge epistemology to make the case for a feminist hinge epistemology. We characterize it as follows: 1) there are hinges that enable and govern our ordinary epistemic practices, functioning as rules; 2) these hinges are enacted and actualized in the specific actions of agents that participate in such practices; 3) this makes room for the transformation and emergence of hinges; 4) against this background, we argue in favor of the possibility of (...) feminist hinges. This novel account opens the way for hinge epistemology to be useful for feminist goals in epistemology, which we believe is the ultimate criterion for hinge epistemology to be legitimately feminist. (shrink)

John Rawls shows a deep influence of David Hume’s thought, mainly at his Theory of Justice, though also at the rest of his works. This influence is well-known in the field of political philosophy, much less in the field of moral philosophy. Rawls reads Hume’s thought with a sceptic and naturalistic key, attributing him what he calls a “nature fideism”. Besides this, attributes to Hume an ethical and political position linked with the classical utilitarianism. Nevertheless, his skeptical epistemology will move (...) away, paradoxically, to Hume from the utilitarian positions. Hume’s ethics and politics will finish, according to Rawls, showing a purely descriptive character and a lack of normative purposes. Hume does not have in the strict sense a theory of practical reason. This article examines and puts in question this interpretation of Hume proposed by John Rawls. The philosophy of Hume is not aporetically skeptical, articulates the moral roles of reason and the passions; and finally, is not only connected with utilitarianism; his defense of the role of utility frees to his theory of some of the main contradictions of classical utilitarianism. Besides this, the theory of the “judicious spectator” can be considered a form of a theory of practical rationality. (shrink)

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, we provide arguments in favour of the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition, such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors rather than there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. The paper reviews the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition and a revisionary, new order variant of cognitivism – a Predictive Processing account of Cognition, or PPC. It (...) argues that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. In abandoning that way of understanding PPC, it offers a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, the possibility that culture permeates cognition is promoted. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an account of metaphor identification on the basis of contextual coherence. In doing so, we build on previous work by Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides that appeals to rhetorical relations in order to explain discourse structure and the constraints on the interpretation of metaphor that follow from it. Applying this general idea to our problem, we will show that rhetorical relations are sometimes insufficient and sometimes inadequate for deciding whether a given utterance is a case (...) of metaphor. They are insufficient, since rhetorical relations fall short at times of providing a basis for disambiguating between literal and metaphorical interpretations. In such cases, contextual information other than previous discourse needs to enter the picture. To this effect, we bring the idea of external consistency into play. Beyond that, though, we will argue that rhetorical relations are sometimes inadequate to account for coherence, if conceived as relations among sentences only. The reason is that extra-linguistic elements of the situation in which the sentence is uttered may be crucial for getting at the preferred interpretation. To account for these cases, we allow rhetorical relations to connect both with previous discourse and with extra-linguistic situations. In our final refinement of the notion of contextual coherence, we forfeit any appeal to rhetorical relations in favour of Questions Under Discussion (QUD). We defend the view that this account does not only explain the same sort of cases. What is more, it solves the issue of metaphor identification in impoverished contexts. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is possible to embrace the predictive processing framework (PP) without reducing affordances to inferential perception. The cognitivist account of PP contends that it can capture relational perception, such as affordances. The rationale for this claim is that over time, sensory data becomes highly-weighted. This paper, however, will show the inconsistency of this claim in the face of the cognitivist premise that ‘encapsulated’ models can throw away ‘the body, the world, or other people’ [Hohwy 2016: 265]. (...) It is then showed how it is possible to embrace a non-cognitivist reading of PP—one that does not need to reduce affordances to representational content. (shrink)

There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is thecomputational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biologicalorganism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allowthe phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioraltests), or brain ‘pictures’ (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome meth-odological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in (...) thispaper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated withcognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of livingbeings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The interventionwith Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based uponsubjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards anintegrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have thefinal word. (shrink)

Kurt Gödel wrote (1964, p. 272), after he had read Husserl, that the notion of objectivity raises a question: “the question of the objective existence of the objects of mathematical intuition (which, incidentally, is an exact replica of the question of the objective existence of the outer world)”. This “exact replica” brings to mind the close analogy Husserl saw between our intuition of essences in Wesensschau and of physical objects in perception. What is it like to experience a mathematical proving (...) process? What is the ontological status of a mathematical proof? Can computer assisted provers output a proof? Taking a naturalized world account, I will assess the relationship between mathematics, the physical world and consciousness by introducing a significant conceptual distinction between proving and proof. I will propose that proving is a phenomenological conscious experience. This experience involves a combination of what Kurt Gödel called intuition, and what Husserl called intentionality. In contrast, proof is a function of that process — the mathematical phenomenon — that objectively self-presents a property in the world, and that results from a spatiotemporal unity being subject to the exact laws of nature. In this essay, I apply phenomenology to mathematical proving as a performance of consciousness, that is, a lived experience expressed and formalized in language, in which there is the possibility of formulating intersubjectively shareable meanings. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is usually described as a fragmentation of subjective experience and the impossibility to engage in meaningful cultural and intersubjective practices. Although the term schizophrenia is less than 100 years old, madness is generally believed to have accompanied mankind through its historical and cultural ontogeny. What does it mean to be “mad”? The failure to adopt social practices or to internalize cultural values of common sense? Despite the vast amount of literature and research, it seems that the study of schizophrenia (...) and of the psychoses is suffering from a generic disintegration. In this introduction, we offer an historical overview of the variety of theories and approaches to schizophrenia. We also provide an overview of how the authors in this volume attempt an integrative account where training, practice, theory and research are considered as parts of a larger whole. This is a varied and pluralistic volume, and it is up to the readers to make use of different chapters according to their own needs. (shrink)

Reports of patients with schizophrenia show a fragmented and anomalous subjective experience. This pathological subjective experience, we suggest, can be related to the fact that disembodiment inhibits the possibility of intersubjective experience, and more importantly of common sense. In this paper, we ask how to investigate the anomalous experience both from qualitative and quantitative viewpoints. To our knowledge, few studies have focused on a clinical combination of both first- phenomenological assessment and third-person biological methods, especially for Schizophrenia, or ASD therapeutics (...) and diagnosis. We will thus attempt to bring forward a second-person scientific design, accounting for both the first-person subjective experiential aspects, and respective third-person neurobiological correlates of embodied aesthetics in anomalous experience. From this proposal, we further explore the consequences to clinical and research practice. (shrink)

Loyalty is considered central to people’s moral life, yet little is known about how people think about what it means to be loyal. We used a prototype approach to understand how loyalty is represented in Colombia and the United States and how these representations mediate attributions of loyalty and moral judgments of loyalty violations. Across 7 studies (N = 1,984), we found cross-cultural similarities in the associative meaning of loyalty (Study 1) but found differences in the centrality of features associated (...) with loyalty (Study 2) and the latent structure of loyalty representations (Study 3). Colombians represent loyalty in terms of more general moral characteristics, while US participants represent loyalty in terms of interpersonal commitment, both in contrast with current approaches to loyalty. By comparing representations of loyalty and honesty, we establish that difference in loyalty conceptualizations reflect a different way of thinking about loyalty rather than morality more generally (Study 4). Further, Colombians attributed greater loyalty to individuals with general moral characteristics compared to participants from the United States sample (Study 5) and were more likely to classify non-loyal values as loyalty-related (Study 6). While the centrality of prototypical features predicts categorizing norm violations as loyalty-related, differences in prototypical structure account for differences in the severity of moral judgment for such violations (Study 7), which suggests that loyalty representations have similar functions even though these representations differ in structural characteristics. (shrink)

With neurons emergence, life alters itself in a remarkable way. This embodied neurons become carriers of signals, and processing devices: it begins an inexorable progression of functional complexity, from increasingly drawn behaviors to the mind and eventually to consciousness [Damasio, 2010]. In which moment has awareness arisen in the history of life? The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior and mind, which ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in natural history. (...) It is in this context of biological evolution of conscious brains that we raise the question: how conscious brains connect with each other? In order to answer it, I will explore how brain states and conscious states each participate in dynamic interactive processes involving the whole organism. I will argue that a possible way to overcome the hard problem of consciousness might be based on the notion of embodiment as a process of embedding the mental in the living organism relating dynamically with the environment through the sensorymotor experience. In order to do so, I will provide an assembly between an anthropologic perspective of consciousness with contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Interaction Theory [Gallagher 2001, 2008; Zahavi 2001, 2008; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009]. (shrink)

Uno de los mayores desafíos que enfrenta el realismo científico es la tesis de la inconmensurabilidad. Consideramos, empero, que la teoría descriptiva causal de la referencia puede determinar si hay alguna continuidad referencial en un cambio de teoría y, específicamente, en qué circunstancias se daría. Tras caracterizarla brevemente, la someteremos a prueba mediante un análisis de caso, a saber, las diferentes caracterizaciones de ‘órbita’ en la astronomía antigua. Ello supone dilucidar cuáles son las propiedades fundamentales por las cuales la órbita (...) ejerce su función. La continuidad referencial se podrá establecer si constatamos que las descripciones causales nucleares de las distintas nociones de órbita, son equivalentes. Este estudio de caso, además, constituye una oportunidad para ahondar en la reflexión: ¿sirve el descriptivismo causal como argumento a favor del realismo científico? ¿Es factible aplicarlo? ¿Cuál es su alcance? Estas y otras preguntas se suscitan a partir del análisis propuesto. (shrink)

Escribir hoy en día un libro sobre hermenéutica, que tal hermenéutica se refiera a la desarrollada por G. Gadamer en su conocido Verdad y método y que se pretenda añadir algo nuevo a lo mucho escrito sobre el tema parecería, a primera vista, empresa irrealizable. Que ambas pretensiones inspiren la sólida monografía de María G. Navarro —titulada Interpretar y argumentar— constituye empresa audaz y arriesgada, plena de coraje innovador, que provoca admiración, curiosidad e interés. Contra lo que pudiera parecer (...) a primera vista, el libro contiene un alto componente de originalidad y creatividad, debido a la estratagema metodoló-gica de que se sirve la autora. A saber, una hermenéutica in obliquo, estrategia consistente en interpretar a la hermenéutica gadameriana a través del prisma de la lógica de la argumentación. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What, if anything, should we do when someone says they don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change? Or that they worry that a COVID-19 vaccine might be dangerous? We argue that in general, we face an epistemic duty to object to such assertions, qua instances of science denial and science sceptical discourse, respectively. Our argument builds on recent discussions in social epistemology, specifically surrounding the idea that we ought to speak up against (epistemically) problematic assertions so as to fulfil an (...) important epistemic obligation – namely, preventing epistemic harms in others. We show that both science denial (SD) and vaccine hesitant (VH) discourses are harmful in a distinctively epistemic sense, and as such generate an especially strong duty to voice our disagreement. As we also argue, this obligation is nonetheless defeasible: depending on the situational features of those involved, voicing an objection to VH discourse may actually end up doing more harm than good. We conclude by tracing what seems like a promising path towards restoring well-placed public trust in scientific testifiers. Doing so is key in order to guarantee equitable access to warranted beliefs about important subject matters, such as the safety of vaccines, to all segments of society. (shrink)

In the face of causal complexity, scientists reconstitute phenomena in order to arrive at a more simplified and partial picture that ignores most of the 'bigger picture.' This paper will distinguish between two modes of reconstituting phenomena: one moving down to a level of greater decomposition (toward organizational parts of the original phenomenon), and one moving up to a level of greater abstraction (toward different differences regarding the phenomenon). The first aim of the paper is to illustrate that phenomena are (...) moving targets, i.e., they are not fixed once and for all, but are adapted, if necessary, on the basis of the preferred perspective adopted for pragmatic reasons. The second aim is to analyze in detail the second mode of reconstituting phenomena. This includes an exposition of the kind of pragmatic-pluralistic picture resulting from the fact that phenomena are reconstituted by a move up to a level of greater abstraction. (shrink)

There seems to be confusion and disagreement among scholars about the meaning of interpersonal forgiveness. In this essay we shall venture to clarify the meaning of forgiveness by examining various literary works. In particular, we shall discuss instances of forgiveness from Homer’s The Iliad, Euripides’ Hippolytus, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and we shall focus on the changes that the concept of forgiveness has gone through throughout the centuries, in the hope of being able to understand, and therefore, of being able (...) to use more accurately, contemporary notions of forgiveness. We shall also explore the relationship between forgiveness and concepts that are closely associated with it, such as anger/resentment, hurt, clemency, desert/merit, excuse, etc. (shrink)

The present paper presents experimental evidence confirming that contextually mismatching scalar implicatures can be generated even when quantifiers range over empty domains. In the literature, this possibility has been interpreted as providing further evidence for a grammatical approach to scalar implicatures. The main result presented here is that scalar sentences with empty domains are judged as more infelicitous when associated with a mismatching implicature than variants with the same empty domains but associated with a non-mismatching implicature. We interpret this result (...) as suggesting that the infelicity judgment associated with the first kind of sentence stems from the cumulative effect of the mismatching implicature and the contextual domain emptiness. Compared to previous literature on blind implicatures, our results indicate that the body of knowledge involved in relevance assignments is restricted to ignoring existential determination while still considering the properties attributed to nonexistent entities. They also show that, while not blocking implicature generation, contextual domain emptiness plays a role in speakers’ evaluation of scalar sentences, reflecting the unconscious nature of scalar implicature generation. (shrink)

Section III of part IV of Book I of Hume's Treatise entitled “Of the ancient philosophy” has been virtually ignored by most Hume scholars. Although philosophers seem to concentrate on sections II and VI of part IV and pay little or no attention to section III, the latter section is paramount in showing how serious Hume's skepticism is, and how Hume's philosophy, contrary to his intention, is far removed from "the sentiments of the vulgar". In this paper I shall first (...) explore Hume's view on ancient philosophy as it is presented in section III, and I shall particularly focus on his discussion of identity and simplicity of bodies. Second, I shall argue that Hume's account of identity and simplicity in terms of qualities is at best unsatisfactory. Finally, I shall try to show that Hume's advice to hold a "moderate" skepticism cannot be taken seriously. On the contrary, Hume seems to hold an "extravagant" skepticism, since he claims that there is a contradiction between our most fundamental natural beliefs, as well as between our natural beliefs and philosophical reasoning. (shrink)

While most scholars focus on the advantages of forgiveness, the negative effects of hasty forgiveness have been largely neglected in the literature. In this essay I shall argue that in certain contexts granting forgiveness to a wrongdoer could be morally questionable, and sometimes it could even be morally wrong. Following Aristotle’s view of emotion, and, in particular, his notion of virtuous anger, I shall claim that appropriate, righteous anger is instrumental for justice, and, as a result, inappropriate, or imprudent forgiveness (...) could be an impediment to justice, or even a license for the continuation of injustice. (shrink)

Models of discourse and narration elaborated within the classical compositional framework have been characterized as bottom-up models, according to which discourse analysis proceeds incrementally, from phrase and sentence local meaning to discourse global meaning. In this paper we will argue against these models. Assuming as a case study the issue of discourse coherence, we suggest that the assessment of coherence is a top-down process, in which the construction of a situational interpretation at the global meaning level guides local meaning analysis. (...) In support of our hypothesis, we explore the role of executive functions (brain functions involved in planning and organization of goal-oriented behaviors) in coherence’s establishment, discussing the results of several studies on narrative abilities of patients with brain injuries. We suggest that, compared to other models of discourse processing focused on comprehension, our model is a viable candidate for an integrated account of discourse comprehension and production. (shrink)

Although cognitivism has lost some ground recently in the philosophical circles, it is still the favorite view of many scholars of emotions. Even though I agree with cognitivism's insight that emotions typically involve some type of evaluative intentional state, I shall argue that in some cases, less epistemically committed, non-propositional evaluative states such as mental pictures can do a better job in identifying the emotion and providing its intentional object. Mental pictures have different logical features from propositions: they are representational, (...) and some may or may not portray actual objects aptly. Yet, unlike propositional attitudes, mental pictures do not allow for objective criteria by which one can judge that a certain picture is an apt portrait of someone or something. (shrink)

This paper is on the problem of causal selection and comments on Collingwood's classic paper "The so-called idea of causation". It discusses the relevance of Collingwood’s control principle in contemporary life sciences and defends that it is not the ability to control, but the willingness to control that often biases us towards some rather than other causes of a phenomenon. Willingness to control is certainly only one principle that influences causal selection, but it is an important one. It shows how (...) norms make causes. (shrink)

Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake exculpate. What about agents who have all the relevant facts in view but fail to meet their obligations because they do not have the right moral beliefs? If their ignorance of their obligations derives from mistaken moral beliefs or from ignorance of the moral significance of the facts they have in (...) view, should they be excused for failing to meet their moral obligations? It is not obvious that they should. In this paper we argue that the best non-skeptical accounts of moral responsibility acknowledge that factual ignorance and mistake will diminish moral responsibility in a way that moral ignorance and mistake will not. That is because factual ignorance is often non-culpable so long as it meets certain merely procedural epistemic standards but the same is not true of moral ignorance. Our argument is that the assumption that it is gets the standards of culpability for moral ignorance wrong, and that the mistake is encouraged by the thought that culpability in general requires an instance of known wrongdoing: that acting wrongly requires de dicto unresponsiveness to one’s obligations at some stage. We deny this and conclude that, therefore, ignorance and mistaken belief are indeed often perfectly good excuses – but far less often than some philosophers claim. (shrink)

Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social (...) misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development results from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether. (shrink)

No two individuals with the autism diagnosis are ever the same—yet many practitioners and parents can recognize signs of ASD very rapidly with the naked eye. What, then, is this phenotype of autism that shows itself across such distinct clinical presentations and heterogeneous developments? The “signs” seem notoriously slippery and resistant to the behavioral threshold categories that make up current assessment tools. Part of the problem is that cognitive and behavioral “abilities” typically are theorized as high-level disembodied and modular functions—that (...) are assessed discretely (impaired, normal, enhanced) to define a spectral syndrome. Even as biology reminds us that organic developing bodies are not made up of independent switches, we remain often seduced by the simplicity of mechanistic and cognitive models. Developmental disorders such as autism have accordingly been theorized as due to different modular dysfunctions—typically of cortical origin, i.e., failures of “theory of mind” (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), of the “mirror neuron system” (Ramachandran and Oberman, 2006), of “weak central coherence” (Happe and Frith, 2006) or of the balance of “empathizing” and “systemizing” (Baron-Cohen, 2009), just to list a few. -/- The broad array of autonomic (Ming et al., 2005; Cheshire, 2012) and sensorimotor (Damasio and Maurer, 1978; Maurer and Damasio, 1982; Donnellan and Leary, 1995; Leary and Hill, 1996; Donnellan and Leary, 2012; Donnellan et al., 2012) differences experienced and reported by people with autism have by such theories typically been sidelined as “co-morbidities,” possibly sharing genetic causes, but rendered as incidental and decisively behaviorally irrelevant symptoms—surely disconnected from cognition. But what if the development of cortically based mental processes and autonomous control relies on the complexities and proper function of the peripheral nervous systems? Through such an “embodied” lens the heterogeneous symptoms of autism invites new interpretations. We propose here that many behavioral-level findings can be re-defined as downstream effects of how developing nervous systems attempt to cope and adapt to the challenges of having various noisy, unpredictable, and unreliable peripheral inputs. (shrink)

How and when do we learn to understand other people’s perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we navigate FBs as (...) they relate to (1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to (2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of “sensorimotor priors,” i.e., statistical expectations of own kinesthetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance. (shrink)

To have a well-functioning principle of academic freedom, we need to distin-guish critique from an infringement of academic freedom. To achieve this goal, this paper presents three necessary conditions for something to be an infringe-ment of academic freedom. These conditions allow to delineate cases in which at least one of the three conditions is not fulfilled. These are contrast cases that might – at first glance – look like infringements of academic freedom but are, in fact, not so. I will (...) refer to five such kinds of contrast cases: (1) discrimination and thus a more general kind of unjust treatment of a person engaged in aca-demic affairs, (2) infringement of freedom of speech or other non-academic intel-lectual freedoms, (3) mere critique, (4) justified critique that leads to justified limitations of someone’s academic freedom, and (5) cases of deep disagreement. Special attention will be given to vulnerabilities concerning unjustified silencing of critique, which haunt fields that lack clear and agreed-on ethical or academic standards. (shrink)

This article sheds light on moral education from an exemplarist perspective. Following Linda Zagzebski's Exemplarist Virtue Theory, we relate several fundamental exemplarist intuitions to the classical virtue ethical debate over the unity-disunity of the virtues, to endorse a pluralistic exemplar-based approach to moral education ("Empe"). After a few preliminary remarks, we argue that Empe amounts to defending "a prima facie" disunitarist perspective in moral theory, which admits both exemplarity in all respects (moral sainthood) and single-domain exemplarity (moral heroism). Then, we (...) evaluate the effectiveness of heroes and saints for moral education, according to four criteria derived from Empe. This analysis allows us to conclude that moral education should value both kinds of exemplars and, therefore, adopt weaker standards of exemplarity than the unitarist's ones. (shrink)

Was Iris Murdoch a virtue ethicist? At first sight, it would appear that she was not. She does not offer an explicit definition of account of the term ‘virtue’, and there are significant differences between her views and those of standard Aristotelian virtue ethicists. There is no reason, however, to think that the standard Aristotelian view represents the only legitimate form of virtue ethics. In this chapter, I begin by recalling (in section 1) the main commonalities between Murdoch’s criticisms of (...) the prevailing moral theories of her time and those of other first-wave virtue-ethicists. I then highlight (in section 2) some cornerstones of Murdoch’s peculiar approach to morality, which represent the background against which her account of virtue is developed, and I propose to trace these cornerstones back to a more diverse range of influences than the standard version of Aristotelianism. In section 3, I sketch the basics of Murdoch’s account of virtue, and I argue that there are at least three routes to vindicate it as a genuine virtue-ethical approach: the Buddhist, the Kantian and the Socratic-Aristotelian. I explore each of these routes in turn in sections 4, 5, and 6. In conclusion, I argue that the virtue-ethical field would benefit a great deal from the kind of pluralistic account of virtue that Murdoch offers. (shrink)

Статья посвящена обоснованию смены парадиг- мы в философии для детей, а именно тому, что философия для детей сама может привнести в академическую философию, а не наоборот. Сме- на парадигмы связана с раскрытием категории «отношение» (М. Бубер, Д. Бом). Это априорное отношение к миру формирует основу для инту- итивного знания о нем, поскольку интуитивное мышление исходит из полного участия человека в «переживаемом отношении» с бытием. Вместо акцентирования внимания на том, как можно развить у детей навыки критического мышления посредством абстрактного мышления, необхо- (...) димо сосредоточиться на неявном, конкретном мыслительном процессе, поскольку именно он лежит в основе мышления. (shrink)

Philosophy with children often focuses on abstract reasoning skills, but as David Bohm points out the “entire process of mind” consists of our abstract thought as well as our “tacit, concrete process of thought.” Philosophy with children should address the “entire process of mind.” Our tacit, concrete process of thought refers to the process of thought that involves our actions such as the process of thought that goes into riding a bicycle. Bohm contends that we need to develop an awareness (...) or proprioception of thinking as well. When Socrates enters into dialogue with his interlocutors, he shows the limitations of purely abstract thought by leading them to admit that they really “don’t know.” But, of course, they know. We know what bravery is or what love is, even though we can never “explain” these concepts in abstract terms. Life has taught us through experience what these concepts mean and we have developed an understanding of them. We can recognize when a person acts bravely. This is where I see the link between our tacit, concrete process of thought and emotional intelligence. We need emotional intelligence to learn how to be brave, to learn how to love, and be just in the way we act in the world. Knowing what justice is abstractly does not make us act justly. We have to develop awareness of our actions in order to develop the skills necessary to act the part. This is also where emotional intelligence comes in. In the bulletin of the play Romeo and Juliet, director Barry Edelstein wrote the following: “To perform Romeo and Juliet, actors need a series of skills… they must have the emotional and psychological awareness and openness of uncommon depth; they must listen with acuteness, they must possess an imagination of real suppleness and subtlety…” An abstract portrayal would not bring these characters to life. We can surely agree – abstractly – that racism is destructive, but still act racist, without being even slightly aware of it. My contention is that while our abstract sense of racism has evolved, our tacit, concrete knowledge has not, which explains that racism is for the most part still rampant, even though we know abstractly that it is wrong. So how do we educate and develop the awareness of the tacit, concrete knowledge that informs our actions, and develop the emotional intelligence to give a depth of understanding to what we know and believe abstractly. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner connects (...) historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

In an interdisciplinary discussion with an international group of experts, we address the question of why faces matter so much. We approach the issue from different academic, technological and artistic perspectives and integrate these different perspectives in an open dialogue in order to raise awareness about the importance of faces at a time when we are hiding them more than ever, be it in “facing” other human beings or in “facing” digital technology.

Deliberative Transformative Moments (DTM) is a new concept that serves as an amendment to the DQI. With this new concept it is easier to get at the quick give-and-take of discussions of small groups of ordinary citizens. As an illustration, we apply the concept to discussions about the peace process among Colombian ex-combatants, ex-guerrillas and ex-paramilitaries. Specifically, we show how personal stories can transform a discussion from a low to a high level of deliberation and how they can have the (...) opposite effect. To increase the level of deliberation in the general population, we recommend that good illustrations of DTM’s should be part of the school programs from an early age on, so that children learn how to discuss with others who have different opinions and values. (shrink)

This contribution discusses Leibniz’s conception of the Christian church, his life-long ecumenical efforts, and his stance toward religious toleration. Leibniz’s regarded the main Christian denominations as particular churches constituting the only one truly catholic or universal church, whose authority went back to apostolic times, and whose theology was to be traced back to the entire ecclesiastical tradition. This is the ecclesiology which underpins his ecumenism. The main phases and features of his work toward reunification of Protestants and Roman Catholics, and (...) unification of Protestant churches are briefly explored, before turning to the issue of religious toleration. It is argued that a remarkably inclusive conception of toleration can be gleaned from a broad sample of Leibniz’s writings and correspondence. It is thanks to the philosophical and theological grounds of this conception that toleration can in principle be extended, for Leibniz, to all men and women of good will, including non-Christians, pagans, and atheists. (shrink)

Interview with the author of "why We are in Need of Tails." Iguana Books, Toronto, Canada.

The aim of this paper lies in characterizing the explanations and models used in the field of evolutionary developmental biology throughout its history. While manipulative experiments in controlled conditions have been useful to set the bases of the discipline and are still routinely performed, this approach supposes a tension between the reliability and the representativity of the conclusions. Given the recent changes in the understanding of evolutionary phenomena, different authors currently emphasize the need of avoiding excessive simplifications in experimental approaches, (...) incorporating the complexity of the analyzed systems as a relevant trait in the study of biological diversity. On the other hand, the fragile and contingent nature of evolutionary processes and the impossibility of intervening some of these phenomena underscore the importance of non-manipulative models that allow the elucidation of how-possibly mechanisms. We argue that a pluralism characterized by the integration of different kinds of explanations, models and metaphors used in evo-devo allows to exploit their respective advantages, favours interdisciplinarity and can contribute to form a representative description of evolutionary processes without relinquishing the local and detailed study of actual mechanisms. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on the concept of human nature disagrees on how to respond to the Darwinian challenge, according to which biological species do not have traditional essences. Three broad kinds of reactions can be distinguished: conservative intrinsic essentialism, which defends essences in the traditional sense, eliminativism, which suggests dropping the concept of human nature altogether, and constructive approaches, which argue that revisions can generate sensible concepts of human nature beyond traditional essences. The different constructive approaches pick out one or (...) two of the three epistemic roles that are fused in traditional essentialist conceptions of human nature: descriptive, explanatory, definitional, or explanatory and definitional. These turns towards diverging epistemic roles are best interpreted pluralistically: there is a plurality of concepts of human nature that have to be clearly distinguished, each with a legitimate role in respective scientific contexts. (shrink)

In this paper art history and visual studies, the disciplines that study visual culture, are presented as a field whose conjectural paradigm can be used to understand the epistemic problems associated with abduction. In order to do so, significant statements, concepts and arguments from the work of several specialists in this field have been highlighted. Their analysis shows the fruitfulness and potential for understanding the study of visual culture as a field that is interwoven with the assumptions of abductive cognition.

This book surveys the ways in which languages of different types refer to past, present, and future events and how these referents are related to the knowledge and attitudes of discourse participants. The book is the culmination of fifteen years of research by the author. Four major language types are examined in-depth: tense-based English, tense-aspect-based Polish, aspect-based Chinese, and mood-based Kalaallisut. Each contributes to a series of logical representation languages, which together define a common logical language that is argued to (...) underlie all language types. The four types differ in whether they choose to grammaticalize discourse reference to times (tense), events (aspect), and/or attitudes (mood), and how non-grammaticalized elements are inferred. The common logical language is a dynamic update logic, building on DRT and Centering Theory, but with a novel architecture—e.g. the distinction between focal vs. peripheral attention plays a key role, parallel to focal vs. peripheral vision. (shrink)

Kann die Entstehung neuer Ideen im Menschen und die daran anschließende Verbreitung dieser neuen Ideen durch die Anwendung eines Darwinistischen Evolutionsschemas erklärt werden? Der Prozess der Kreativität und der Veränderung wäre damit genauso wie die biologische Evolution im Sinne Darwins als ein sich ständig wiederholender, graduell kumulierender Prozess von Versuch und Irrtum zu verstehen. – Ist eine solche Erklärung möglich und könnte sie im Sinne einer allgemeinen Evolutionstheorie die Kluft zwischen Geistes-und Naturwissenschaften überbrücken helfen? Diese Fragen sollen Gegenstand einer systematischen, (...) philosophischen Analyse sein. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a way of characterizing human agency in terms of the concept of a two‐way power. I outline this conception of agency, defend it against some objections, and briefly indicate how it relates to free agency and to moral praise‐ and blameworthiness.

Largely aided by the neurological discovery of so-called “ mirror neurons,” the attention to motor activity during action observation has exploded over the last two decades. The idea that we internally “ mirror ” the actions of others has led to a new strand of implicit simulation theories of action understanding[1][2]. The basic idea of this sort of simulation theory is that we, via an automatic covert activation of our own action representations, can understand the action and possibly the goal (...) and/or intentions of the observed agent. In this way motor “simulation” is seen as the basis for low-level “mind-reading”; i.e. for the ascription of goals and intentional mental states to others. The thought is that one, through mirroring simulations, can get beyond the observable behaviour to the hidden minds of others. I am questioning the idea of an exclusively “mirroring” role of the motor system in social perception, which is tacitly assumed in this sort of simulation theories. Is motor activity during action observation really primarily a simulation, a detailed “echo” of the others action? My point is not that we never simulate what we observe, but rather to question whether such processes are representative of the overall motor contribution to social cognition. More and more studies on the functional properties of mirror neurons and motor facilitation during perception points to a more complex role of the motor system in action perception. Recently, several proposals have been made attempting to reinterpret and critique the function of motor activity in social situations. I shall here briefly touch on a few of these and sketch parts of my own alternative “social affordance” hypothesis of the sensorimotor contribution to social perception. By way of these analyses I highlight how traditional discussions are marred by problematic theoretical assumptions. It seems to me that we need a thorough reinterpretation not just of mirror neurons and mirroring, but also of what we take motor and social cognition to be. In my view the details of the sensorimotor findings underline the need to move beyond the simplistic idea of the motor system as a unitary output system. In terms of social cognition I question the traditional focus on hidden mental states. I suggest that the motor contribution might have more to do with understanding the process of how others choose their actions, navigate the world and relate to others than with simulating specific actual actions or mental states. I conclude that low-level simulation theories, which see the motor role in social perception as passive “mirroring,” are faced with serious empirical challenges, and that the motor system serve a much more proactive and complex cognitive role in social perception and interaction than previously thought. But my claim is also that many empirical tensions have slipped out of focus due to entrenched theoretical assumptions. Narrow theoretical expectations have marked not only the interpretations but the research itself and I propose that we are in dire need of more studies of actual contextual and interactive social perception. (shrink)

This paper advances the view that the history of philosophy is both a kind of history and a kind of philosophy. Through a discussion of some examples from epistemology, metaphysics, and the historiography of philosophy, it explores the benefit to philosophy of a deep and broad engagement with its history. It comes to the conclusion that doing history of philosophy is a way to think outside the box of the current philosophical orthodoxies. Somewhat paradoxically, far from imprisoning its students in (...) outdated and crystallized views, the history of philosophy trains the mind to think differently and alternatively about the fundamental problems of philosophy. It keeps us alert to the fact that latest is not always best, and that a genuinely new perspective often means embracing and developing an old insight. The upshot is that the study of the history of philosophy has an innovative and subversive potential, and that philosophy has a great deal to gain from a long, broad, and deep conversation with its history. (shrink)