The goal of this piece is to put some pressure on Brian O’Shaughnessy’s claim that perceptual experiences are necessarily mental processes. The author targets two motivations behind the development of that view. First, O’Shaughnessy resorts to pure conceptual analysis to argue that perceptual experiences are processes. The author argues that this line of reasoning is inconclusive. Secondly, he repeatedly invokes a thought experiment concerning the total freeze of a subject’s experiential life. Even if this case is coherent, however, it does (...) not show that perceptual experiences are processes. (shrink)

How should we think of perceptual experiences qua dynamic phenomena? Against an increasingly popular Heraclitean approach that frames them as irreducibly dynamic, the present book argues that perceptual experiences may be described in terms of non-dynamic categories, such as properties, relations, and states.

This piece contrasts two ontological views of perceptual experience: on the one hand, Experiential Heracliteanism, a view according to which the intuitively dynamic character of experience should be described – and probably accounted for – in irreducibly dynamic terms; and, on the other, Experiential non‐Heracliteanism, a stance according to which perceptual experience may at least be described – if not explained – in terms of nondynamic constituents. I specially strive (1) to frame both proposals against the backdrop of a venerable (...) Heraclitean metaphor and (2) to highlight the virtues of Experiential non‐Heracliteanism against its currently sexier Heraclitean counterpart. (shrink)

A number of contemporary philosophers of mind have brought considerations from the study of aspect to bear on the ontological question how perceptual experiences persist over time. But, apart from rare exceptions, relatively little attention has been devoted to assess whether the way we talk about perceptual occurrences is of any relevance for discussions of ontological matters in general, let alone discussions about the ontological nature of perception. This piece examines whether considerations derived from the study of lexical aspect have (...) a significant bearing on what ontological views of perception we should endorse: I shall argue that such aspectual considerations are in fact of very little use for settling the relevant ontological issue. (shrink)

Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes physical properties and psychological states to herself. The body-ownership view argues that a necessary and sufficient condition on such self-ascriptions is the existence of causal links between a spatio-temporal body and the self-ascribed properties or states. However, since P.F. Strawson’s influential attack, this view has been dismissed as a bad philosophical idea. The goal of this brief piece is to outline the body-ownership view and neutralise two classic (...) lines of objection against it: on the one hand, that the stance is incoherent; and, on the other, that it has counterintuitive implications. (shrink)

Bodily and mental self-ascriptions are forms of first-person thought where a subject attributes physical properties and psychological states to herself. The body-ownership view argues that a necessary and sufficient condition on such self-ascriptions is the existence of causal links between a spatio-temporal body and the self-ascribed properties or states. However, since P.F. Strawson’s influential attack, this view has been dismissed as a bad philosophical idea. The goal of this brief piece is to outline the body-ownership view and neutralise two classic (...) lines of objection against it: on the one hand, that the stance is incoherent; and, on the other, that it has counterintuitive implications. (shrink)

It is widely thought that, in his later work An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell argued that our natural languages could in principle do away with indexicals. This brief piece, by contrast, aims to show that, instead of suggesting the potential eliminability of such expressions, Russell outlined a semantic account of indexicals according to which such expressions fundamentally depend on the perspectival way in which they refer to worldly items. If correct, this proposal would not only show that, (...) in Russell’s later work, the meaning of expressions like indexicals is not exhaustively determined by the items they refer to: it would also show that Russell did not mean to eliminate indexicals from our natural languages at all. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se hace una descripción de las variables fenomenológicas del movimiento, la ipseidad y la sensibilidad que propone la filosofía de Michel Henry. A partir de esta lectura se profundiza en el papel epistémico que ejerce la corporeidad, como horizonte de sentido para una ‘fenomenología de la vida material’.

De considerar los fundamentos metafísicos de disciplinas humanistas que andan en boga hoy día como la bioética o la ecofilosofía, se tendría que considerar las discusiones de fondo generadas en la modernidad por la filosofía de la naturaleza y la fenomenología material. Efectivamente, la genealogía de los dioses, la teogonía, la antropología y los dilemas éticos implicados en una especulación en torno al concepto de naturaleza, fueron tópicos adelantados por el Schelling en su libro Investigaciones filosóficas sobre la esencia de (...) la libertad humana y los objetos con ella relacionados. (shrink)

One of the minor works that has been immortalized and remains amongst the most cited essays in the history of philosophy courses is the 1874 publication entitled: An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment”? by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. We propose an hermeneutics of the main topics and problems that Kant addresses in this fundamental text; in addition, we will connect its arguments with the thesis that will be supported in this work: namely, that modern philosophy is an (...) exercise of critical thinking that has implications on the educational views, as well as on the ethical and political bets that aim at finding solutions for a society that has been historically traversed by an armed conflict, in a complex scenario where economic crises and asymmetric and fratricidal confrontations have been used, in conventional and unconventional ways, to obtain political power. (shrink)

Esta investigación determinó áreas críticas de interés en programas de ingeniería industrial para la incorporación de la gamificación en tres universidades de Colombia desde la percepción de estudiantes y docentes. Se evaluó la actualidad de los programas participantes y sus planes de estudio, lo que permitió identificar temas comunes entre las instituciones de educación mencionadas. Se aplicaron 125 encuestas, 109 a estudiantes (87,2%) y 16 a docentes (12,8%). Los docentes consideran de mayor complejidad temas del área de Investigación de Operaciones, (...) mientras que para los estudiantes corresponde principalmente a Producción. No se encontraron correlaciones significativas entre las tres universidades. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, scientists, engineers, and healthcare professionals have developed brain–computer interface (BCI) technologies, connecting the user’s brain activity to communication or motor devices. This new technology has also captured the imagination of publics, industry, and ethicists. Academic ethics has highlighted the ethical challenges of BCIs, although these conclusions often rely on speculative or conceptual methods rather than empirical evidence or public engagement. From a social science or empirical ethics perspective, this tendency could be considered problematic and even technocratic because (...) of its disconnect from publics. In response, our trinational survey (Germany, Canada, and Spain) reports public attitudes toward BCIs (N = 1,403) on ethical issues that were carefully derived from academic ethics literature. The results show moderately high levels of concern toward agent-related issues (e.g., changing the user’s self) and consequence-related issues (e.g., new forms of hacking). Both facets of concern were higher among respondents who reported as female or as religious, while education, age, own and peer disability, and country of residence were associated with either agent-related or consequence-related concerns. These findings provide a first look at BCI attitudes across three national contexts, suggesting that the language and content of academic BCI ethics may resonate with some publics and their values. (shrink)

Being located in the horizon of the philosophical outrage, our article purpose is to show the phenomenological basis of Max Scheler’s anthropological proposal, whose immediate antecedents were Husserl’s researches regarding to the correlation man-world, the debate held between phenomenology and the incursion of psychology within the field of the objectives sciences, the develop of a growing up discipline such as physiology, and in general the gradual consolidation of evolutionary theories, which were taking from the philosophical anthropology his conceit of prevailing (...) discipline in the explanation of human phenomena. In the midst this theoretical chaos Scheler in The man’s place in the cosmos radicalize the thesis of I – world correlation of life, guiding the study of man closer to the eidetic transcendental pretention, and beyond the purely empirical description. According to this we understand that Scheler develops an anthropological proposal with a phenomenological nature. (shrink)

La historia de las ideas en Latinoamérica sigue siendo un campo fértil de indagaciones. Entre otras cosas porque en sus narraciones se ponen de manifiesto diversos proyectos de verdad. Uno de los propósitos que persigue este trabajo consiste en distinguir los principales tenores que han caracterizado a una interlocución plural y abierta de propuestas que gravitan alrededor de la pregunta de ¿cómo significar y construir una praxis sobre el pensamiento filosófico en Latinoamérica? En la marcha y al hilo de una (...) reconstrucción histórica de la problemática enunciada, se plantea que una de las propiedades que entrañan a este proyecto de filosofía es la pluralidad; se trata de una polifonía de voces que dialoga, diverge y polemiza con las corrientes filosóficas provenientes de las tradiciones europeas. (shrink)

Una de las novedades de la teoría mimética consiste en su mirada particular sobre el deseo humano y de sus despliegues en el campo de la literatura, asunto que ha sido materia de estudio por la filosofía, la antropología y la fenomenología. Buscamos a continuación explorar desde los insumos teóricos que se mencionan esbozar algunas ideas sobre la filosofía literaria y cómo estos mismo pueden ser brújula para orientar el lector en el estudio e interpretación de una obra literaria del (...) canon nacional: La Vorágine de José Eustasio Rivera. ¿En qué radica la novedad del planteamiento filosófico que se ha formulado en el presente ensayo? Básicamente en mostrar que la teoría mimética deriva en una filosofía literaria, que conecta con un análisis fenomenológico a propósito de cómo surge la violencia social a la luz de la expresión literaria. Para llevar a cabo dicho cometido, la propuesto se desglosa de la siguiente manera: en primer lugar, se propone una idea de lo que se entiende por filosofía literaria en relación con la apuesta del pensamiento de René Girard. Hecho esto, se procede a tematizar las relaciones entre fenomenología y teoría mimética en donde se profundiza en el análisis filosófico de los conceptos de la experiencia, el otro, la rivalidad, la vida y el deseo y la relación que guardan con la literatura. En un tercer momento, se propone el análisis filosófico que en clave mimética se aplica a la novela La Voràgine del escritor huilense José Eustasio Rivera. Finalmente, se propone en las conclusiones otros acercamientos a la teoría del deseo mimético y sus vínculos con el estudio filosófico de la literatura, de cara a la dialéctica del reconocimiento y sus intérpretes contemporáneos según la postura girardiana. (shrink)

En la historia como también en la tradición filosófica sobresale un ideal antropológico: no existe una única forma de definir la vida humana y su finalidad. Este ensayo busca demostrar la tesis que la humanidad es un concepto en disputa en la historia de la filosofía moderna y contemporánea. Esta historia pone de presente que pensar la idea de humanidad es un intento prometeico por reconocer la pluralidad de los proyectos de humanización, que desde los ámbitos sociales, religiosos, metafísicos, culturales, (...) sistémicos y éticos ponen de presente un diversidad compleja y siempre enriquecida de procesos de subjetivación y desubjetivación, que se enfrentan a los desafíos planteados por la caótica historia del siglo XX y la que nos asiste en este siglo XXI. (shrink)

El presente escrito pretende explicar la relevancia y actualidad ética del pensamiento personalista comunitario de Emmanuel Mounier contextualizándolo en medio de los desafíos del post-humanismo. De este modo, la exposición se centrará en un primer momento en el mundo actual y la “muerte del ser humano”, para luego detallar en qué consiste el post-humanismo y el personalismo comunitario. Finalmente, se confrontarán las ideas provenientes del post-humanismo con la propuesta de Mounier.

Psychological flexibility is a key concept of acceptation and commitment therapy. This factor has been linked with psychological wellbeing and associated factors, such as quality of life, in cancer patients. These and other positive results of acceptation and commitment therapy in cancer patients found in previous research could be enhanced by using mhealth tools. A three-arm randomized superiority clinical trial, with a pre-post-follow-up repeated measures intergroup design with a 1:1:1 allocation ratio is proposed. A hundred and twenty cancer patients will (...) be randomly assigned to one of the following interventions: face-to-face ACT + mobile application, face-to-face ACT, and Waitlist control group. The primary expected outcome is to observe significant improvements in psychological flexibility acceptance and action questionnaire- II in the face-to-face ACT + app group, after comparing baseline and post-treatment scores, and the scores will remain stable in the two assessment points, 3 and 6 months after the intervention. Secondary expected outcomes are significant increasing scores in quality of life and post-traumatic-growth, and significant decreasing scores in anxiety and depression, insomnia and fatigue at the same assessment points. Also, it is expected that the scores of this group will be higher than the scores of the face-to-face ACT group and the waitlist control group. This study aims to assess the efficacy of a combined intervention for psychological flexibility and associated symptoms in cancer patients. The results of this protocol may help to consider the use of acceptation and commitment therapy and mhealth applications in cancer settings as a valid therapeutic choice.Clinical Trial Registration[www.ClinicalTrials.gov], identifier [NCT05126823]. (shrink)

The article analyzes the four novels that Ángel García Ronda, politician and writer, has dedicated to ETA and to the situation experienced in the Basque Country as a result of terrorism. He is an important author for the knowledge of terrorism in literature, for the following reasons: his condition as born in San Sebastián in 1939, where he has lived all his life, the performance of positions in the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and in the Socialist Party from Euskadi, (...) having carried an escort for two decades, having suffered the murder of friends and acquaintances and, consequently, having extensive experience, public and private, of what happened in the Basque Country. We attend to the genesis, contents, intentionality and historicity of the tetralogy that the author has baptized as Áspera memoria. (shrink)

Al sur de la iglesia San Sebastián se perciben restos en los cuales se pueden ver dos baños islámicos. El baño de Suso apareció en el curso de excavaciones arqueológicas tras haber documentado unas tenerías de época posterior. En el baño de Yuso se han conservado tres salas abovedadas de medio cañón. Además, en la sala del poniente, identificada como sala caliente, está un arco de herradura, un ábside, y la traza de un arco geminado. El contacto entre la (...) caldera y la sala caliente se ha conservado bajo la forma de un arco de medio punto. En el baño de Suso se han conservado el hipocausto y las toberas. Estos dos baños tienen muchas similitudes. Nos revelan, por primera vez en Toledo, el modo de calefacción de la sala caliente. Hasta el momento, no son conocidos en los documentos medievales. (shrink)

KRK ediciones publica la traducción al español del ya clásico texto de Andy Clark y David Chalmers 'La Mente Extendida' en su versión aparecida en la antología de textos Philosophy of Mind: classical and contemporary readings, editada por D. Chalmers en 2002 para Oxford University Press. La traducción va precedida de una interesante introducción al debate que surge a partir de la publicación original del texto en Analysis en 1998, a cargo de Ángel García Rodríguez y Francisco Calvo Garzón, quienes (...) son responsables también de la traducción del texto. -/- En La Mente Extendida Clark y Chalmers defienden la tesis de que los procesos cognitivos y mentales van más allá de los límites del cráneo y de la piel: hay elementos constitutivos de los procesos mentales y cognitivos más allá de los límites de nuestro propio cuerpo. Una tesis semejante había sido ya defendida por Putnam (1975) y Burge (1979); sin embargo, Clark y Chalmers distinguen ese tipo de externismo pasivo del externismo activo que ellos propugnan de acuerdo con el cual “las características externas relevantes son activas, desempeñado un papel crucial aquí y ahora. Como se hayan acopladas con el organismo humano, tienen un impacto directo sobre el organismo y su conducta” (La Mente Extendida p.67). -/- Carecería de sentido hablar en esta reseña de la relevancia de la tesis de la mente extendida y del debate que tanto en filosofía como en ciencia cognitiva ha suscitado―baste mencionar la multitud de artículos que se han escrito sobre La Mente Extendida, al punto que, de acuerdo con Google Scholars, es uno de los cien artículos filosóficos más citados.Por esta razón me centraré en la introducción al texto de García Rodríguez y Calvo Garzón. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the enterprise of evaluating and improving our representational devices. But how should we conduct this enterprise? One increasingly popular answer to this question proposes that conceptual engineering should proceed in terms of the functions of our representational devices. In this paper, we argue that the best way of understanding this suggestion is in terms of normative functions, where normative functions of concepts are, roughly, things that they allow us to do that matter normatively (for example, things in (...) virtue of which we have normative reasons to have these concepts). Not only does this introduce a novel view about functions to the literature. This proposal also fits more naturally than the alternatives with conceptual engineering as a normative enterprise, and it allows functions to play all of the explanatory roles assigned to them in the conceptual engineering literature. Our discussion of the explanatory advantages of normative functions also advances the understanding of the ways in which concepts can be authoritative, what this means for conceptual engineering, and highlights the importance of political philosophy for thinking about conceptual engineering in practice. Furthermore, the paper explicates what kind of role considerations about function can and should actually play in conceptual engineering. (shrink)

What should we believe when epistemic and practical reasons pull in opposite directions? The traditional view states that there is something that we ought epistemically to believe and something that we ought practically to (cause ourselves to) believe, period. More recent accounts challenge this view, either by arguing that there is something that we ought simpliciter to believe, all epistemic and practical reasons considered (the weighing view), or by denying the normativity of epistemic reasons altogether (epistemic anti-normativism). I argue against (...) both accounts and defend the traditional view. An agent can be blameworthy in doxastic dilemmas for complying with their practical but not their epistemic reasons. This reveals how epistemic reasons are normative: the concept of epistemic blame helps us track epistemic normativity. (shrink)

'Everyone knows what attention is’ according to William James. Much work on attention in psychology and neuroscience cites this famous phrase only to quickly dismiss it. But James is right about this: ‘attention’ was not introduced into psychology and neuroscience as a theoretical concept. I argue that we should therefore study attention with broadly the same methodology that David Marr has applied to the study of perception. By focusing more on Marr's Computational Level of analysis, we arrive at a unified (...) answer to the question of what attention is, what role it plays in the mind, and why organisms like us have that capacity. I propose a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level that optimizes in a three-dimensional space: it should capture core aspects of our first-person experience of attention, be explanatorily powerful in psychology and neuroscience, and fertile in an interdisciplinary context. I show how this methodology leads to what I call the priority structure account of attention. Attention is what organizes current information to make it more useful for the organism. We can identify it by four features. Attention, in this way, helps a cognitive system to integrate its informational state with its current motivational state. I describe how this account improves on alternatives and shows why attention is a useful concept in many disciplines and for connecting them. -/- This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science. (shrink)

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra presents an original study of the place and role of the Identity of Indiscernibles in Leibniz's philosophy. The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles rules out numerically distinct but perfectly similar things; Leibniz derived it from more basic principles and used it to establish important philosophical theses. Rodriguez-Pereyra aims to establish what Leibniz meant by the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles, what his arguments for and from it were, and to assess those arguments and Leibniz's claims (...) about the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles. He argues that Leibniz had a very strong version of the principle, according to which no possibilia are intrinsically perfectly similar, where this excludes things that differ in magnitude alone. The book discusses Leibniz's arguments for the Identity of Indiscernibles in the Meditation on the Principle of the Individual, the Discourse on Metaphysics, Notationes Generales, Primary Truths, the letter to Casati of 1689, the correspondence with Clarke, as well as the use of the Identity of Indiscernibles in Leibniz's arguments against the Cartesian conception of the material world, atoms, absolute space and time, the Lockean conception of the mind as a tabula rasa, and freedom of indifference. Rodriguez-Pereyra argues that the Identity of Indiscernibles was a central but inessential principle of Leibniz's philosophy. (shrink)

According to ordinary language philosophy (OLP), philosophical problems can be solved by investigating ordinary language, often because the problems stem from its misuse. According to ideal language philosophy (ILP), on the other hand, philosophical problems exist because ordinary language is flawed and has to be improved or replaced by constructed languages that do not exhibit these flaws. OLP and ILP together make up linguistic philosophy, the view that philosophical problems are problems of language. Linguistic philosophy is opposed to what may (...) be called, for lack of a better word, ‘traditional philosophy’ (TP), the view that philosophical problems can be solved by discovering non-linguistic facts. In the following, OLP, ILP, and TP are taken to be methodologies, that is, frameworks in which to interpret and evaluate different philosophical methods (i.e., argumentative strategies). The two linguistic methodologies are discussed separately with TP as a foil, and then used to interpret the status of different philosophical methods. While each of the methods discussed here finds a plausible interpretation in each methodology, there are other arguments for and against linguistic philosophy in general, and for and against ILP and OLP in particular. As none of these arguments is decisive, I conclude with a superficial moral about peaceful co-existence. (shrink)

What happens in the agent that enables her to comply with the legal command or directive? When we perform an action because we are complying with the legal command or directive, are we still active, self-governed autonomous agents? In what sense are we still autonomous agents? The task of this study is to explain what legal authority is and the premise of the study is that this question can only be answered through understanding of how legal authority operates upon the (...) agent: if we recognize that legal commands or directives intervene upon, affect and change the agent’s practical reasoning, then we need to understand and explain how this happens. (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)

One objection that has been raised for meta-ethical expressivism is that expressivists must give an account of the nature of the attitude which constitutes moral thinking, but that any expressivist account that attempts to do seems to fail. Call this objection the “moral attitude problem.” In this article I suggest a strategy for expressivists to escape this problem: I argue that the moral attitude problem is a problem that arises not only for expressivists but also for meta-ethical cognitivists, and that (...) expressivists can use the same resources used by cognitivists to escape this problem. (shrink)

Kathleen Higgins (2012) claims that emotional responses to music are mostly social constructs, derived from the cultural transmission of musical knowledge. I agree with this general idea, but question Higgins’ ethnocentric and narrow view, which reduces music mainly to the art of combining sounds to produce beauty of form and expression of emotion. Instead, I propose that the distinctive and unique behavior of active music-making evolved culturally to serve a range of adaptive functions in the social environments humans used to (...) live in before the age of playback. Consequently, emotions perceived and induced via music should be studied in such “original” contexts. (shrink)

This book presents a clear, deep and accessible overview of the philosophical, developmental and educational foundations of Rudolf Steiner/Waldorf education--as a dynamic, adaptable, creative process for which a profound sense of the uniqueness of each child is foundational. It demystifies Steiner as a philosopher of "freehood" and discusses the threefold human being in psychology. Child development: topics covered include the 12 senses and sensory motor development, language, and inner life. Education principles covered include imitation, purposeful activity and free play; nature; (...) music and the arts; rhythm, structure, trust and security; observing and understanding children; self-development and reflection; comparison with other preschool approaches. (shrink)

In most domains of human life, we are willing to accept that there are experts with greater knowledge and competencies that distinguish them from non-experts or laypeople. Despite this fact, the very recognition of expertise curiously becomes more controversial in the case of “moral experts”. Do moral experts exist? And, if they indeed do, are there ethical reasons for us to follow their advice? Likewise, can emerging technological developments broaden our very concept of moral expertise? In this article, we begin (...) by arguing that the objections that have tried to deny the existence (and convenience) of moral expertise are unsatisfactory. After that, we show that people have ethical reasons to ask for a piece of moral advice in daily life situations. Then, we argue that some Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can play an increasing role in human morality by becoming moral experts. Some AI-based moral assistants can qualify as artificial moral experts and we would have good ethical reasons to use them. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

El daño ambiental ha despertado el interés de la doctrina en Colombia, aunque aún no se aborda con rigor y profundidad. La razón, entre otras, es la omisión de los avances que ha dado el derecho comparado, donde la concepción del rol de las instituciones jurídicas va hasta una comprensión integral del daño a partir de la alteración funcional de los sistemas. Existe hoy cierto consenso respecto al deber ser del régimen de responsabilidad aplicable a esta noción integral del daño (...) ambiental, capaz de hacer frente a los componentes del medio natural y a todos los que lo conforman. El libro busca aportar al estudio del daño ambiental desde los avances antes descritos en la materia. (shrink)