Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its ‘pick up’ in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be “RECtified” so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In (...) this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified. (shrink)

El objetivo central de este trabajo fue identificar los patrones funcionales-valorativos presentes en un corpus de informes de arbitraje, género clave en la producción de conocimiento científico. Para el análisis, se utilizó un procedimiento que implicó, primero, la identificación de los elementos funcionales o propósitos comunicativos más frecuentes y, luego, su descripción con algunas categorías del modelo de la valoración. El corpus, de carácter intencionado, estuvo compuesto por 42 informes de arbitraje de la revista de lingüística y traducción de la (...) Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Onomázein. Algunos de los resultados muestran que los propósitos comunicativos más frecuentes son “Describir un problema”, “Destacar un aspecto positivo”, “Solicitar una acción” y “Sugerir una acción”. La alta frecuencia de los propósitos “Describir un problema” y “Destacar un aspecto positivo” eran esperables en un género evaluativo. Ambos propósitos se focalizan más en elementos de contenido y presentan un fuerte posicionamiento monoglósico intensificado con significados de Gradación. El patrón monoglósico puede explicarse por la situación de poder en que se encuentra el árbitro al ser el evaluador del artículo. La alta frecuencia de los propósitos comunicativos “Solicitar acción” y “Sugerir acción” da cuenta de la función negociadora del género. Por último, tanto en la solicitud como en la sugerencia de acciones, los significados de actitud tienen como foco los elementos de forma y no de contenido. (shrink)

Este manuscrito es una fiel transcripción de la entrevista que se realizó al doctor Gilberto Sánchez Cabezas, miembro de la Academia Chilena de la Lengua. La información que brindó el académico en este intercambio de preguntas fue esencial para tener un panorama de cómo fluctúa una investigación medular de las lenguas originarias o aborígenes de su país. Asimismo, hizo algunas precisiones en función de las traducciones de escritores canónicos que existen en lenguas proteiformes y cómo estas son plasmadas con modificaciones (...) que podrían alterar en demasía el contenido. Para ello, el académico usa con frecuencia algunos ejemplos de palabras quechuas, aimaras o castellanas con sus respectivos significados, además de citar fragmentos de autores como Paul Verlaine, Attila József, García Lorca, Goethe y Homero, con la volición de que se corrobore la traslación semántica y fonológica. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a criticism, inspired by Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, of the enactivist account of perception and action. We start by setting up a non-descriptivist naturalism regarding the mind and continue by defining enactivism and exploring its more attractive theoretical features. We then proceed to analyse its proposal to understand normativity non-socially. We argue that such a thesis is ultimately committed to the problematic idea that normative practices can be understood as private and factual. Finally, we offer a (...) characterization of normativity as an essentially social phenomenon and apply our criticisms to other approaches that share commitments with enactivism. (shrink)

This paper argues that the normative character of our unreflective situated behaviour is not factual. We highlight a problematic assumption shared by the two most influential trends in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science, reductionism and enactivism. Our intentional, normative explanations are referential, descriptive or factual. Underneath this assumption lies the idea that only facts can make true or false our attributions of cognitive, mental and agential abilities. We will argue against this view by describing the main features and problems of (...) reductionism and enactivism and then we will offer two arguments against this shared factualist assumption: (1) normative vocabulary is ineliminable if we want a complete explanation of our situated practices; and (2) the factualist assumption is a species of the is-ought fallacy. Finally, we will claim that a folk psychological explanation of our normative practices is fully compatible with ontological naturalism when such descriptivist or factualist assumption is rejected. (shrink)

I address the objection that the concept of racism has become overly inflated. Critics of the conceptual inflation of “racism” argue that theories of institutional racism engage in untoward conceptual inflation insofar as they undermine our moral understanding of racial phenomena, hinder our ability to explain the causes of racial inequality, and even undercut struggles for racial justice. I develop an original account of institutional racism and show that it is immune to all three versions of the conceptual inflation challenge.

This paper argues that racism should not only be conceived as a moral concept whose main aim is to condemn severe wrongs in the domain of race. The paper advances a complementary interpretation of racism as an explanatory concept--one that plays a key role in explaining race-based social problems afflicting members of subordinate racialized groups. As an explanatory concept, the term 'racism' is used to diagnose and highlight the causes of race-related social problems. The project of diagnosing race-based social problems (...) contributes to the pragmatic anti-racist end of developing better political and policy strategies for solving these social problems. The paper defends this interpretation of racism as an explanatory concept through a critical engagement with Urquidez's moral-philosophical account of racism. (shrink)

I defend impact-based accounts of institutional racism against the criticism that they are over-inclusive. If having a negative impact on non-whites suffices to make an institution racist, too many institutions (including institutions whose affirmative action policies inadvertently harm its intended beneficiaries) would count as racist. To address this challenge, I consider a further necessary condition for these institutions to count as racist—they must stand in a particular relation to racist ideology. I argue that, on the impact-based model, institutions are racist (...) if they have a negative racial impact AND this impact is legitimized by racist ideology. Racist ideologies limit social criticism of and collective action against institutions that have a negative racial impact, and in so doing, lend stability to systems of racial domination. (shrink)

In this paper we challenge the notion of ‘normativity’ used by some enactive approaches to cognition. We define some varieties of enactivism and their assumptions and make explicit the reasoning behind the co-emergence of individuality and normativity. Then we argue that appealing to dispositions for explaining some living processes can be more illuminating than claiming that all such processes are normative. For this purpose, we will present some considerations, inspired by Wittgenstein, regarding norm-establishing and norm-following and show that attributions of (...) normativity to non-social agents are deeply paradoxical. The main conclusions of our discussion are: (1) circular and internal explanations centred on the stability of living systems are insufficient to account for processes where the environment plays an important role, such as adaptation. Enactivism is not an explanatory alternative to evolutionary biology but needs it as a complement to accounts focused on the internal self-assembly of organisms; (2) though we share enactivism’s anti-representational spirit, we argue that ecological psychology can offer a better account of perception. (shrink)

Our concern is with the ethical issues related to girlhood and bodily integrity—the right to be free from physical harm and harassment and to experience freedom and security in relation to the body. We defend agency, positive self-relations, and health as basic elements of bodily integrity and we advocate that this normative concept be used as a conceptual tool for the protection of the rights of girls. We assume the capability approach developed by Martha Nussbaum as an ethical framework that (...) enables us to evaluate girls’ well-being and well-becoming in relation to the potential, and often subtle, threats they face. The capability approach can be understood as a theory of justice, and, therefore, as an ethical and political approach. An enriched concept of bodily integrity can help in the design of better policies to address gender biases against girls because it could contribute to seeing them as active agents and valid participants. (shrink)

Considering the war context and the emergence of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century, I base on this work the reasons why the presence of the concept of nivola, attributed by Miguel de Unamuno to refer to the literary technique used in his novel Mist (1914), provokes a possible confrontation between universes composed of elements of reality and the virtual. In that sense, it will be appropriate to explain the procedure that originates that collision of established plans. For (...) this, I will resort to literary categories that support the theories of fiction, according to the perception of Thomas Pavel and Marie-Laure Ryan. (shrink)

Justice for children and during childhood and the particular political, social and moral status of children has long been a neglected issue in ethics, and in social and political philosophy. The application of general, adult-oriented theories of justice to children can be regarded as particularly problematic. Philosophers have only recently begun to explore what it means to consider children as equals, what goods are especially valuable to them, and what are the obligations of justice different agents have toward children. In (...) addition, while philosophers have extensively written about global poverty and inequality, the issue of disadvantages during childhood, especially child poverty, has only been superficially addressed. This also applies to the Capability Approach (CA) as a normative theory. Although the socio-scientific and economic literature on how to conceptualize capabilities and functionings of children and how to measure them in the context of poverty and wellbeing is steadily growing, the normative aspects of these issues are still under-theorized. The CA offers a unique framework to engage with both the topic of justice for children and questions concerning what justice implies and demands with regard to children living and growing up in disadvantaged circumstances. Furthermore, justice and disadvantage during childhood is a compellingly interdisciplinary topic that invites the combination of ethical and philosophical reasoning together with socio-scientific theories and empirical knowledge. In this special issue of Ethical Perspectives we bring together theoretical and empirically informed discussions that explore the CA in relation to children and the many disadvantages they can face in their lives. (shrink)

In having an experience one is aware of having it. Having an experience requires some form of access to one's own state, which distinguishes phenomenally conscious mental states from other kinds of mental states. Until very recently, Higher-Order (HO) theories were the only game in town aiming at offering a full-fledged account of this form of awareness within the analytical tradition. Independently of any objections that HO theories face, First/Same-Order (F/SO) theorists need to offer an account of such access to (...) become a plausible alternative. My aim in this paper is twofold. In the first place, I wish to widen the logical space of the discussion among theories of consciousness by offering a distinction, orthogonal to that between F/SO and HO theories, between what I will call 'Self-Involving' (SI) and 'Mental-State-Involving' (MSI) theories and argue in favor of the former one. In the second place, I will present the basics of a characterization of such a Self-Involving theory in Same-Order terms. (shrink)

Considerando el contexto bélico y el surgimiento de las vanguardias a inicios del siglo XX, fundamento en este trabajo las razones por las cuales la presencia del concepto de nivola, atribuida por Miguel de Unamuno para hacer referencia a la técnica literaria que emplea en su novela Niebla (1914), suscita una confrontación posible entre universos compuestos por elementos de la realidad y lo virtual. En ese sentido, será propicio explicar el procedimiento que origina esa colisión de planos establecidos. Para (...) ello, recurriré a categorías literarias que sustentan las teorías de la ficción, según la percepción de Thomas Pavel y Marie-Laure Ryan. (shrink)

The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. (...) From a representationalist frameworkregarding our conscious experience, in this article, I will offer a novel argument in favor of EC and show that cognitionconstitutively—and no merely causally—depends upon body activity beyond that in the brain. In particular, I will arguethat in order to solve the problem derived from the empirical evidence in favor of the possibility of shifted spectrum,representationalist should endorse the view that experiences concern its subject: the content of experience isde se.Ishow that this claim perfectly matches the phenomenological observation and helps explaining the subjective characterof the experience. Furthermore, I argue that entertaining this kind of representation constitutively depends on bodilyactivity. Consequently, insofar as cognition depends on consciousness, it is embodied. (shrink)

Cognitive theories claim, whereas non-cognitive theories deny, that cognitive access is constitutive of phenomenology. Evidence in favor of non-cognitive theories has recently been collected by Block and is based on the high capacity of participants in partial-report experiments compared to the capacity of the working memory. In reply, defenders of cognitive theories have searched for alternative interpretations of such results that make visual awareness compatible with the capacity of the working memory; and so the conclusions of such experiments remain controversial. (...) Instead of entering the debate between alternative interpretations of partial-report experiments, this paper offers an alternative line of research that could settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness. Here I relate the neural correlates of cognitive access to empirical research into the neurophysiology of dreams; cognitive access seems to depend on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, that area is strongly deactivated during sleep; a period when we entertain conscious experiences: dreams. This approach also avoids the classic objection that consciousness should be inextricably tied to reportability or it would fall outside the realm of science. (shrink)

Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the (...) notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. On this basis, we offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal investigations of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence. (shrink)

Higher-order thought theories of consciousness attempt to explain what it takes for a mental state to be conscious, rather than unconscious, by means of a HOT that represents oneself as being in the state in question. Rosenthal Consciousness and the self: new essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) stresses that the way we are aware of our own conscious states requires essentially indexical self-reference. The challenge for defenders of HOT theories is to show that there is a way to explain (...) the required reference-fixing mechanisms that is compatible with the theory. According to Rosenthal, the reference to oneself as such is grounded in the disposition to identify the individual the HOT refers to as the individual who has that HOT. I argue that this leads to a vicious infinite regress on the more than plausible assumption that our cognitive capacities are limited. This leaves such theories without a foundation, since self-reference is thought essential to consciousness. (shrink)

Representations are not only used in our folk-psychological explanations of behaviour, but are also fruitfully postulated, for example, in cognitive science. The mainstream view in cognitive science maintains that our mind is a representational system. This popular view requires an understanding of the nature of the entities they are postulating. Teleosemantic theories face this challenge, unpacking the normativity in the relation of representation by appealing to the teleological function of the representing state. It has been argued that, if intentionality is (...) to be explained in teleological terms, then the function of a state cannot depend on its phylogenetical history, given the metaphysical possibility of a duplicate of an intentional being that lacks an evolutionary history. In this paper, I present a method to produce, according to our current knowledge in genetic engineering, human-like individuals who are not the product of natural selection in the required sense. This variation will be used to shed light on the main replies that have been offered in the literature to the Swampman thought experiment. I argue that these replies are not satisfactory: representations should better not depend on natural selection. I conclude that a non-etiological notion of function is to be preferred for characterizing the relation of representation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers the first step in an ongoing project of revisiting the foundations of latinidad and lo latinoamericano by focusing on the exclusions enacted by the history of these concepts and the cultural and political identity that comes with them. In conversation with Susana Nuccetelli and Omar Rivera, the author focuses on two emblematic authors in the history of Latin American philosophy (Simón Bolívar and José de Vasconcelos) that are usually read as offering a novel, liberatory conception of (...) the Latin American reality/identity, categorically different from European and Anglo-American conceptions. This common reading of some of the foundational texts on Latin American identity, however, conceals not only the active, textual removal of Blackness in the construction of this identity, but also the literal subtraction of Black bodies, lives, and histories from the Latin American nations and communities. Both of these elements are an explicit part of the philosophical programs of Bolívar and Vasconcelos. The article shows how the thought and political practice of these two authors, celebrated in different ways as foundational of what we understand as Latin America today, exemplify the exclusionary historical demarcation of latinidad. (shrink)

When reasoning about dependence relations, philosophers often rely on gradualist assumptions, according to which abrupt changes in a phenomenon of interest can result only from abrupt changes in the low-level phenomena on which it depends. These assumptions, while strictly correct if the dependence relation in question can be expressed by continuous dynamical equations, should be handled with care: very often the descriptively relevant property of a dynamical system connecting high- and low-level phenomena is not its instantaneous behaviour but its stable (...) fixed points (those in the vicinity of which it spends most of the time, after comparatively short transitory periods), and stable fixed points can change abruptly as a result of infinitesimal changes of the low-level phenomenon. We illustrate this potential gradualist trap by showing that Chalmers’ fading qualia argument falls into it. (shrink)

The well-known distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness has moved away from the conceptual domain into the empirical one, and the debate now is focused on whether the neural mechanisms of cognitive access are constitutive of the neural correlate of phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I want to analyze the consequences that a negative reply to this question has for the cognitive phenomenology thesis – roughly the claim that there is a “proprietary” phenomenology of thoughts. If the mechanisms responsible (...) for cognitive access can be disentangled from the mechanisms that give rise to phenomenology in the case of perception and emotion, then the same disentanglement is to be expected in the case of thoughts. This, in turn, presents, as I argue, a challenge to the cognitive phenomenology thesis: either there are thoughts with cognitive phenomenology we lack cognitive access to or there are good reasons to doubt that there is such a thing as cognitive phenomenology. I discuss a... (shrink)

Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is unclear what psychological and neural mechanisms underlie the influence of religious belief on pain. By analogy to other top-down processes of pain modulation we hypothesized that religious belief helps believers reinterpret the emotional significance of pain, leading to emotional detachment from it. Recent findings on emotion regulation support a role for the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region also important for driving top-down pain inhibitory circuits. (...) Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in practicing Catholics and avowed atheists and agnostics during painful stimulation, here we show the existence of a context-dependent form of analgesia that was triggered by the presentation of an image with a religious content but not by the presentation of a non-religious image. As confirmed by behavioral data, contemplation of the religious image eneabled the religious group to detach themselves from the experience of pain. Critically, this context-dependent modulation of pain specifically engaged the right VLPFC, whereas group-specific preferential liking of one of the pictures was associated with activation in the ventral midbrain. We suggest that religious belief might provide a framework that allows individuals to engage known pain-regulatory brain processes. (shrink)

Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories of consciousness maintain that the kind of awareness necessary for phenomenal consciousness depends on the cognitive accessibility that underlies reporting. -/- There is empirical evidence strongly suggesting that the cognitive accessibility that underlies the ability to report visual experiences depends on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). This area, however, is highly deactivated during the conscious experiences we have during sleep: dreams. HOT theories are jeopardized, as I will argue. I will briefly present HOT (...) theories in the first section. Section 2 offers empirical evidence to the effect that the cognitive accessibility that underlies the ability to report depends on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: dlPFC is the neural correlate of HOTs. Section 3 shows the evidence we have of the deactivation of this brain area during dreams and, in section 4, I present my argument. Finally, I consider and rejoin two possible replies that my opponent can offer: the possibility of an alternative neural correlate of HOTs during dreams and the denial that we have phenomenally conscious experiences during sleep. (shrink)

In this essay we discuss recent attempts to analyse the notion of representation, as it is employed in cognitive science, in purely informational terms. In particular, we argue that recent informational theories cannot accommodate the existence of metarepresentations. Since metarepresentations play a central role in the explanation of many cognitive abilities, this is a serious shortcoming of these proposals.

Uno de los temas fundamentales de la filosofía realista es la intentio. Este concepto surgió en la filosofía árabe a partir de la idea aristotélica que explica la posibilidad del alma de apropiarse de las formas de las cosas. La intentio es el vínculo referencial entre la realidad y el intelecto en el acto de conocer. En la primera parte del artículo se hace una revisión conceptual del término con especial énfasis en Avicena y Averroes; y en la segunda parte (...) se explica la idea de la intentio en dos filósofos tomistas contemporáneos. El objetivo principal de este estudio es volver a subrayar la conexión real que se establece entre el sujeto cognoscente y las cosas de la realidad. Se trata de una de las genuinas características del conocimiento realista en oposición al conocimiento inmanentista. (shrink)

Las últimas décadas del siglo XX hasta nuestros días parecen estar mostrando un continuo abandono de la filosofía para explicar los temas del mundo y del hombre, más específicamente, el abandono de la metafísica. ¿Se está olvidando la metafísica?, ¿se trata de un saber perimido, reservado sólo para especialistas de estudios clásicos? En esta comunicación pretendo señalar, en primer lugar la actualidad e importancia de la reflexión en torno a la antropología filosófica, y en segundo, la insoslayable necesidad de contar (...) con una metafísica como saber de supuestos. Toda antropología se basa en una idea de hombre, en una filosofía que intenta explicar quién es el ser humano. La ciencia no puede dar una respuesta cabal a dichos supuestos, porque su estatuto epistemológico asume como hechos de experiencia la constitución psico-física humana y su comportamiento. La filosofía, en cambio, indaga acerca del por qué del ser humano, no solo de sus aspectos fenomenológicos, sino el sustrato que lo constituye. Mucho se ha oído hablar de la crisis de la metafísica, sin embargo, a pesar de “tantos sepultureros” que desean enterrarla, ella se sigue presentando para reclamar respuestas fundamentales, radicales. ¿Por qué tanto rechazo? Este es un tema que nos puede dar para pensar y debatir en el Congreso que celebramos. Hay propuestas de una “renovación de la metafísica” que viene de corrientes personalistas, pero también hay sugerencias estimulantes desde la Filosofía Analítica, ¿merece la pena el intento? Quisiera recordar que las preguntas que se oyen en nuestras aulas de Filosofía remiten a explicaciones de hondo calado acerca del hombre, si deseamos plantear una antropología filosófica que no se quede en medianías, tal vez haya que analizar la vuelta a esa reflexión de ultimidades. (shrink)

The Challenge from Cognitive Diversity (CCD) states that demography-specific intuitions are unsuited to play evidential roles in philosophy. The CCD attracted much attention in recent years, in great part due to the launch of an international research effort to test for demographic variation in philosophical intuitions. In the wake of these international studies the CCD may prove revolutionary. For, if these studies uncover demographic differences in intuitions, then in line with the CCD there would be a good reason to challenge (...) philosophical views that rely on those intuitions for evidential support. I argue that philosophical views that rely on demography-specific intuitions for evidential support need not be threatened by such findings. I first provide a detailed analysis of the epistemological principles driving the CCD and distinguish three formulations of this challenge. I then show that there are good reasons to reject all such formulations of the CCD. (shrink)

Digital COVID certificates are a novel public health policy to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. These immunity certificates aim to incentivize vaccination and to deny international travel or access to essential spaces to those who are unable to prove that they are not infectious. In this article, we start by describing immunity certificates and highlighting their differences from vaccination certificates. Then, we focus on the ethical, legal, and social issues involved in their use, namely autonomy and consent, data protection, equity, and (...) international mobility from a global fairness perspective. The main conclusion of our analysis is that digital COVID certificates are only acceptable if they meet certain conditions: that they should not process personal data beyond what is strictly necessary for the aimed goals, that equal access to them should be guaranteed, and that they should not restrict people’s autonomy to access places where contagion is unlikely. We conclude that, if such conditions are guaranteed, digital COVID certificates could contribute to mitigating some of the most severe socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic. (shrink)

Many Christian thinkers have embraced the notion “art for art’s sake.” Chesterton did not. To the contrary, he saw such an idea as deeply problematic for a Christian aesthetic. In the following article, I will explore some philosophical aspects of the “art for art’s sake” movement and then explain why Chesterton parted company with it.

This article states that research in skill acquisitionand executionhas underestimated the relevance of some features of attention. We present and theoretically discuss two essential features of attention that have been systematically overlooked in the research of skill acquisitionandexecution. First, attention alters the appearance of the perceived stimuli in an essential way; and second, attention plays a fundamental role in action, being crucial for solving the so called ’many-many problem’, that is to say, the problem of generating a coherent behavior byselecting (...) between many inputs and many potential outputs. We discuss the importance of these features for skill acquisition in sport. We also suggest empirical ways to assess the precise impact of taking them into consideration and at the same time we propose important implications for training derived from the ideas discussed in the paper. (shrink)

The non-transitivity of the relation looks the same as has been used to argue that the relation has the same phenomenal character as is non-transitive—a result that jeopardizes certain theories of consciousness. In this paper, I argue against this conclusion while granting the premise by dissociating lookings and phenomenology; an idea that some might find counter-intuitive. However, such an intuition is left unsupported once phenomenology and cognitive access are distinguished from each other; a distinction that is conceptually and empirically grounded.

La teoría de la intentio hoy conocida como “intencionalidad” había pasado desapercibida en la filosofía moderna y fue recuperada por Brentano, pero sobre todo fue puesta de relieve por Husserl, quien se apoyó en ella como uno de los elementos básicos de su fenomenología. Sin embargo, en esta corriente la intencionalidad perdió su sentido clásico. Así lo pone de manifiesto Jacques Maritain en su gnoseología. ¿Por qué Husserl cambia el sentido del concepto?, ¿cuál es la crítica principal de Maritain a (...) este hecho? Parece pertinente esclarecer ambas visiones a fin de comprender el sentido que ha prevalecido en la Filosofía de la Mente contemporánea y las Neurociencias. Lo que se halla en juego es nuevamente la antigua confrontación entre inmanentismo y realismo gnoseológico: admitir en qué consiste la intencionalidad es el punto de inflexión entre estas posiciones. En este trabajo pongo de manifiesto que la forma de asumir un legítimo realismo es mediante una metafísica del ser que reclama una intencionalidad radicada no solamente en el sujeto cognoscente sino además en su relación con la cosa conocida y no sólo con los meros objetos mentales. -/- El propósito de esta publicación es mostrar el punto de quiebre que se lleva a cabo en la teoría del conocimiento y en la psicología racional con respecto al concepto “intencionalidad” del realismo metafísico. La teoría de la intentio en F. Brentano recoge la idea original de los medievales pero sin ser muy explícito en los términos gnoseológicos ya que su objetivo primario consistió sobre todo en superar el psicologismo de su época. En cambio, esa teoría heredada por Husserl se ve alterada completamente con respecto a su sentido primigenio cuando aplica su método trascendental. Esto se puede apreciar en varias partes de su obra "Ideas relativas a una fenomenología pura y una filosofía fenomenológica" (1913). (shrink)

Alleged self-evidence aside, conceivability arguments are one of the main reasons in favor of the claim that there is a Hard Problem. These arguments depend on the appealing Kripkean intuition that there is no difference between appearances and reality in the case of consciousness. I will argue that this intuition rests on overlooking a distinction between cognitive access and consciousness, which has received recently important empirical support. I will show that there are good reasons to believe that the intuition is (...) misguided—at least on the reading that the conceivability arguments require—and hence that the arguments are unsupported. This, in turn, alleviates the Hard Problem but leaves us with what I think is a not easy problem. (shrink)

The notion of the human embryo is not immutable. Various scientific and technological breakthroughs in reproductive biology have compelled us to revisit the definition of the human embryo during the past 2 decades. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, oocyte haploidisation and, more recently, human stem cell-derived embryo models have challenged this scientific term, which has both ethical and legal repercussions. Here, we offer a legal perspective to identify a universally accepted definition of ‘embryo’ which could help to ease and unify the (...) regulation of such entities in different countries. (shrink)

Como requisito para finalizar mi Diplomado en Antropología Filosófica Contemporánea en el CISAV, desarollé un ensayo con el título “La dignidad como punto diferenciador del ser humano” buscando responder a la pregunta: ¿es el hombre animal o persona? -/- As a requirement to complete my Diploma in Contemporary Philosophical Anthropology at CISAV, I developed an essay entitled "Dignity as a differentiating point of the human being" seeking to answer the question: is man an animal or a person?

Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, have either shown their sympathy for, or explicitly endorsed, the following two principles: Panpsychism—roughly the thesis that the mind is ubiquitous throughout the universe—and Organizational Invariantism—the principle that holds that two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. The purpose of this paper is to show the tension between the arguments that back up both principles. This tension should lead, or so I will argue, defenders of one of the principles (...) to give up on the other. (shrink)

It has been widely acknowledged that indexical thought poses a problem for traditional theories of mental content. However, recent work in philosophy has defied this received view and challenged its defenders not to rely on intuitions but rather to clearly articulate what the problem is supposed to be. For example, in “The Inessential Indexical”, Cappelen and Dever claim that there are no philosophically interesting or important roles played by essential indexical representations. This paper assesses the role of essential indexicality in (...) understanding the content of perception and argues that, if the perceptual experiences of different subjects can have the same phenomenology, and thus share a representational content (phenomenal content)—assumptions shared by a well-established research project, including a wide variety of theories—, then phenomenal content exhibit a particular kind of essential indexicality (perspectival). I also discuss how the argument is immune to Cappelen and Dever’s objections to the idea that the content of perceptual experiences is essentially indexical. (shrink)