En aquest article pretenem fer una crítica, des de postulats ètics de caràcter republicà, al mode actual d’entendre i, per tant, posar en pràctica el principi d'autonomia de la bioètica. Pretenem mostrar que, en l’estat actual d’aplicació d'aquest principi, emprant una definició liberal de llibertat i de la natura humana, aquest idea de llibertat i autonomia que es pretén protegir, no es compleix en deixar fora de l’equació tot un seguit de circumstàncies socials, polítiques o econòmiques que poden dificultar al (...) pacient prendre una veritable decisió sobirana sobre quin ha de ser el fet d'actuar dels professionals sanitaris sobre el seu cos en cada cas. (shrink)

Political theory is a field that finds nourishment in others. From economics, history, sociology, psychology, and political science, theorists have drawn a rich repertoire of schemas to parse the social world and make sense of it. With each of these encounters, new subjects are brought into focus as others recede into the background, ushering a change not only in how questions are tackled but also in what questions are thought worth asking.

I argue for an idealist ontology consistent with empirical observations, which seeks to explain the facts of nature more parsimoniously than physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This ontology also attempts to offer more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be nature’s sole ontological primitive. We, as well as (...) all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness. The universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality surrounding—but dissociated from—our alter. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis. (shrink)

Several alternatives vie today for recognition as the most plausible ontology, from physicalism to panpsychism. By and large, these ontologies entail that physical structures circumscribe consciousness by bearing phenomenal properties within their physical boundaries. The ontology of idealism, on the other hand, entails that all physical structures are circumscribed by consciousness in that they exist solely as phenomenality in the first place. Unlike the other alternatives, however, idealism is often considered implausible today, particularly by analytic philosophers. A reason for this (...) is the strong intuition that an objective world transcending phenomenality is a self-evident fact. Other arguments—such as the dependency of phenomenal experience on brain function, the evidence for the existence of the universe before the origin of conscious life, etc.—are also often cited. In this essay, I will argue that these objections against the plausibility of idealism are false. As such, this essay seeks to show that idealism is an entirely plausible ontology. (shrink)

Departing from Anderson’s (2016) suggestion that there are three communities in Peirce’s thought corresponding to his three normative sciences of logic, ethics, and esthetics, I argue that these communities partake in a relationship of dependence similar to that found among the normative sciences. In this way, just as logic relies on ethics which relies on esthetics, so too would a logical community of inquirers rely on an ethical community of love, which would rely on an esthetic community of artists. A (...) community could conduct inquiry together only if it pursued the same goal; and it could pursue the same goal only if it first imaginatively construed it. Any logical or ethical community requires a shared imaginative repertoire of ideal ends. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Plotinus does not limit the sphere of free human agency simply to intellectual contemplation, but rather extends it all the way to human praxis. Plotinus’s goal in the first six chapters of Ennead 6.8 is, accordingly, to demarcate the space of freedom within human practical actions. He ultimately concludes that our external actions are free whenever they actualize, in unhindered fashion, the moral principles derived from intellectual contemplation. This raises the question of how the (...) freedom of practical actions might relate to the freedom of intellectual contemplation. After considering two previously offered models—a model of double activity, and an Aristotelian model of practical syllogism—I offer a third alternative, namely a model of moral attunement, according to which our rational desires assume a kind of ‘care of the soul’ through active supervision. Practical life is thus imbued with freedom to the extent that the soul supervises its actions to conform to its will and choice of the good. (shrink)

Can animals think? In this paper I address the proposal that many animals, including insects such as honeybees, have genuine thoughts. I consider one prominent version of this view that claims that honeybees can represent and process information about their environments in a way that satisfies the main hallmarks of human conceptual thought. I shall argue, however, that this view fails to provide convincing grounds for accepting that animals possess concepts. More precisely, I suggest that two important aspects of conceptual (...) thought, viz., concept individuation and the generality constraint, are not satisfied. (shrink)

Turing’s much debated test has turned 70 and is still fairly controversial. His 1950 paper is seen as a complex and multilayered text, and key questions about it remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing select learning from experience as the best approach to achieve machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence only to trade it out for conversational question-answering in 1950? Why did Turing refer to (...) gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? In this article, I shall address these questions by unveiling social, historical and epistemological roots of the so-called Turing test. I will draw attention to a historical fact that has been only scarcely observed in the secondary literature thus far, namely that Turing’s 1950 test emerged out of a controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably out of debates with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen in its historical context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as essentially a reply to a series of challenges posed to him by these thinkers arguing against his view that machines can think. Turing did propose gender learning and imitation as one of his various imitation tests for machine intelligence, and I argue here that this was done in response to Jefferson's suggestion that gendered behavior is causally related to the physiology of sex hormones. (shrink)

I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters (...) of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. (shrink)

Se examina la idea de un vínculo directo entre modernización y pérdida de plausibilidad de la creencia religiosa, se explora la imagen contemporánea de la relación entre religión y racionalidad, y se muestra cómo no puede afirmarse que el avance de la ciencia conduzca a la secularización. Ante la pregunta, si la postsecularización conlleva una mutua exclusión de religión y racionalidad, se examinan las propuestas de J. Habermas y N. Wolterstorff, buscando criterios normativos para el diálogo entre racionalidades religiosas y (...) no religiosas. The article examines the idea of a direct link between modernization and the loss of plausibility of religious belief, explores the contemporary image of the relation between religion and rationality, and shows why it is not possible to say that the advance of science leads to secularization. In view of the question regarding whether post- secularization entails the mutual exclusion of religion and rationality, it examines the proposals of J. Habermas and N. Wolterstorff, in a search for normative criteria for the dialogue between religious and non-religious rationalities. (shrink)

Las Instituciones Nacionales de Derechos Humanos cumplen, fundamentalmente, con dos funciones: proteger a las personas a partir de recomendaciones, garantizándoles una reparación si se comente una violación a sus derechos, y prevenir futuras violaciones a los derechos humanos. Sobre esta base están llamadas a ser los organismos que guíen hacia una cultura ciudadana a favor de los derechos humanos. Para lograr la culturización en este campo, se requiere educar en derechos a través de la educación formal e informal. En el (...) caso de México, la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos es la institución encargada de realizar esta labor. Su posición flexible y dinámica, así como su autonomía dentro del Estado mexicano, le dan la posibilidad de propiciar esa cultura, ya que es una institución de configuración diferente al sistema tradicional de impartición de justicia, por lo que hace que mantenga una línea de investigación enfocada en los derechos humanos. La culturización empieza por el ámbito nacional o interno y se debe extender hacia el exterior, como un movimiento social internacional. (shrink)

Se explora la relación entre las dimensiones proposicional y no proposicional de la creencia religiosa para mostrar que la última dirige el proceso de justificación y representa su límite. Se defiende que la no proposicional también tiene valor cognitivo, porque constituye una suerte de elección epistémica preteórica que no es exclusiva de la fe religiosa. Se explora la noción de ambigüedad religiosa, tanto a nivel intelectual como experiencial, y se sostiene que la relación entre la dimensión proposicional y la no-proposicional (...) de la fe está mediada por la función directiva de las presuposiciones metafísicas instauradas por la experiencia religiosa. (shrink)

The Turing test has been studied and run as a controlled experiment and found to be underspecified and poorly designed. On the other hand, it has been defended and still attracts interest as a test for true artificial intelligence (AI). Scientists and philosophers regret the test’s current status, acknowledging that the situation is at odds with the intellectual standards of Turing’s works. This article refers to this as the Turing Test Dilemma, following the observation that the test has been under (...) discussion for over seventy years and still is widely seen as either too bad or too good to be a valuable experiment for AI. An argument that solves the dilemma is presented, which relies on reconstructing the Turing test as a thought experiment in the modern scientific tradition. It is argued that Turing’s exposition of the imitation game satisfies Mach’s characterization of the basic method of thought experiments and that Turing’s uses of his test satisfy Popper’s conception of the critical and heuristic uses of thought experiments and Kuhn’s association of thought experiments to conceptual change. It is emphasized how Turing methodically varied the imitation game design to address specific challenges posed to him by other thinkers and how his test illustrates a property of the phenomenon of intelligence and suggests a hypothesis on machine learning. This reconstruction of the Turing test provides a rapprochement to the conflicting views on its value in the literature. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a thread in the philosophy of E. Tugendhat binding together his moral and justice theories with his conceptual analysis. Oriented by the thesis that a conceptual analysis is necessary to explain what justice is, this paper reconstructs some aspects of Tugendhat’s philosophy. It is divided in four sections: First, I delve into the author’s definition and use of conceptual analysis. Second, I describe some features of Tugendhat’s moral theory of contractualism. Third, I examine his (...) theory of justice. Fourth, I conclude by framing my analysis within the debate between Rawls’s and Tugendhat’s theories of justice. (shrink)

This paper argues that the historical character of our knowledge is compatible with both ontological and epistemological realism. The first part critically analyses the thesis according to which the situated nature of our cognitive practices implies that they do not refer to an extra-linguistic reality. The second section explores the claim that realism is a necessary presupposition of our communicative practices and the final part outlines the principles of a pluralist realism.

The Idea of the World offers a grounded alternative to the frenzy of unrestrained abstractions and unexamined assumptions in philosophy and science today. This book examines what can be learned about the nature of reality based on conceptual parsimony, straightforward logic and empirical evidence from fields as diverse as physics and neuroscience. It compiles an overarching case for idealism - the notion that reality is essentially mental - from ten original articles the author has previously published in leading academic journals. (...) The case begins with an exposition of the logical fallacies and internal contradictions of the reigning physicalist ontology and its popular alternatives, such as bottom-up panpsychism. It then advances a compelling formulation of idealism that elegantly makes sense of - and reconciles - classical and quantum worlds. The main objections to idealism are systematically refuted and empirical evidence is reviewed that corroborates the formulation presented here. The book closes with an analysis of the hidden psychological motivations behind mainstream physicalism and the implications of idealism for the way we relate to the world. (shrink)

The past decade has seen an explosion of work on calculi of explicit substitutions. Numerous works have illustrated the usefulness of these calculi for practical notions like the implementation of typed functional programming languages and higher order proof assistants. It has also been shown that eta-reduction is useful for adapting substitution calculi for practical problems like higher order unification. This paper concentrates on rewrite rules for eta-reduction in three different styles of explicit substitution calculi: λσ, λse and the suspension calculus. (...) Both λσ and λse when extended with eta-reduction rules, have proved useful for solving higher order unification. We enlarge the suspension calculus with an adequate eta-reduction rule which we show to preserve termination and confluence of the associated substitution calculus and to correspond to the eta rules of the other two calculi. We prove that λσ and λse as well as λσ and the suspension calculus are non-comparable while λse is more adequate than the suspension calculus in simulating one-step beta-reduction. After defining the eta-reduction rule in the suspension calculus, and after comparing these three calculi of explicit substitutions , we then concentrate on the implementation of the rewrite rules of eta-reduction in these calculi. We note that it is usual practice when implementing the eta rule for substitution calculi, to mix isolated applications of eta-reduction with the application of other rules of the corresponding substitution calculi. The main disadvantage of this practice is that the eta rewrite rules so obtained are unclean because they have an operational semantics different from that of the eta-reduction of the λ-calculus. For the three calculi in question enlarged with adequate eta rules we show how to implement these eta rules. For the λse we build a clean implementation of the eta rule and we prove that it is not possible to follow the same approach for the λσ and λsusp. (shrink)

This paper makes the claim that the overall structure of Plato’s Laws follows the principle of indirect access to the knowledge of human soul, which consists in the understanding that a philosophical approach to the soul is only possible initially through an image of it. The structure of the Laws can be interpreted as a movement towards the soul’s interior, beginning with the famous image of the puppet. According to this image, the movement opens with the analysis of the non-rational (...) elements of the soul, which are capable of an harmonic relation with the rational element, and advances bit to bit to the rational or epistemic element. The political necessity of undertaking the dialectical investigation in order to attain a philosophical knowledge of the human soul and its specific excellence appears only at the end of the dialogue. In this way, the structure of the Laws dramatizes the progressive birth of philosophy, conceived as the dialectical investigation of the unity of virtue, starting from the initial understanding of the human soul contained in the myth of the puppet. (shrink)

In 2005, an essay was published in Nature asserting that the universe is mental and that we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things. Since then, experiments have confirmed that — as predicted by quantum mechanics — reality is contextual, which contradicts at least intuitive formulations of realism and corroborates the hypothesis of a mental universe. Yet, to give this hypothesis a coherent rendering, one must explain how a mental universe can — at least in principle — accommodate (...) (a) our experience of ourselves as distinct individual minds sharing a world beyond the control of our volition; and (b) the empirical fact that this world is contextual despite being seemingly shared. By combining a modern formulation of the ontology of idealism with the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, the present paper attempts to provide a viable explanatory framework for both points. In the process of doing so, the paper also addresses key philosophical qualms of the relational interpretation. (shrink)

Se examina la idea de un vínculo directo entre modernización y pérdida de plausibilidad de la creencia religiosa, se explora la imagen contemporánea de la relación entre religión y racionalidad, y se muestra cómo no puede afirmarse que el avance de la ciencia conduzca a la secularización. Ante la pregunta, si la postsecularización conlleva una mutua exclusión de religión y racionalidad, se examinan las propuestas de J. Habermas y N. Wolterstorff, buscando criterios normativos para el diálogo entre racionalidades religiosas y (...) no religiosas. (shrink)

I argue for an idealist ontology consistent with empirical observations, which seeks to explain the facts of nature more parsimoniously than physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This ontology also attempts to offer more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be nature’s sole ontological primitive. We, as well as (...) all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness. The universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality surrounding—but dissociated from—our alter. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis. (shrink)

Recently, Emil Lask’s work has been the object of renewed interest. As it has been noted, Lask’s work is much closer to phenomenology than that of his fellow Neo-Kantians. Many recent contributions to current discussions on this topic have compared his account of logic to Husserl’s. Less attention has been paid to Lask’s original metaphilosophical insights. In this paper, I explore Lask’s conception of transcendental philosophy to show how it led him to a phenomenological conversion. Lask found in Husserl’s Logical (...) Investigations the possibility of grounding transcendental philosophy in purely objective terms, thus avoiding any risk of psychologism. But he also concluded that the tools found in Logical Investigations needed to be complemented by a method which would inquire back fr om the constituted to the constituting and a way of grounding such a methodological move in experience itself. Lask then provided a model for reduction and motivation without bringing a transcendental ego into the picture. (shrink)

In order to perceive the world, we need more than just raw sensory input: a subliminal paradigm of thought is required to interpret raw sensory data and, thereby, create the objects and events we perceive around ourselves. As such, the world we see reflects our own unexamined, culture-bound assumptions and expectations, which explains why every generation in history has believed that it more or less understood the world. Today, we perceive a world of objects and events outside and independent of (...) mind, which merely reflects our current paradigm of thought. Anomalies that contradict this paradigm have been accumulated by physicists over the past couple of decades, which will eventually force our culture to move to a new paradigm. Under this new paradigm, a form of universal mind will be viewed as nature’s sole fundamental entity. In this paper, I offer a sketch of what the new paradigm may look like. (shrink)

The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities (...) of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects. (shrink)

A broad pattern of correlations between mechanisms of brain function impairment and self-transcendence is shown. The pattern includes such mechanisms as cerebral hypoxia, physiological stress, transcranial magnetic stimulation, trance-induced physiological effects, the action of psychoactive substances and even physical trauma to the brain. In all these cases, subjects report self-transcending experiences o en described as ‘mystical’ and ‘awareness-expanding,’ as well as self-transcending skills o en described as ‘savant.’ The idea that these correlations could be rather trivially accounted for on the (...) basis of disruptions to inhibitory neural processes is reviewed and shown to be implausible. Instead, this paper suggests that an as-of-yet unrecognized causal principle underlying the entire pattern might be at work, whose further elucidation through systematic research could hold great promise. (shrink)

Depth psychology finds empirical validation today in a variety of observations that suggest the presence of causally effective mental processes outside conscious experience. I submit that this is due to misinterpretation of the observations: the subset of consciousness called “meta-consciousness” in the literature is often mistaken for consciousness proper, thereby artificially creating space for an “unconscious.” The implied hypothesis is that all mental processes may in fact be conscious, the appearance of unconsciousness arising from our dependence on self-reflective introspection for (...) gauging awareness. After re-interpreting the empirical data according to a philosophically rigorous definition of consciousness, I show that two well-known phenomena corroborate this hypothesis: (a) experiences that, despite being conscious, aren’t re-represented during introspection; and (b) dissociated experiences inaccessible to the executive ego. If consciousness is inherent to all mentation, it may be fundamental in nature, as opposed to a product of particular types of brain function. (shrink)

Analizamos las relaciones no siempre presentes entre deportes, barrios y políticas públicas en Chile en el marco de las vinculaciones entre Estado y sociedad civil en la que el barrio y los clubes deportivos, pese a su gran presencia y aporte a la sociabilidad, han estado ausentes. Hasta antes del golpe de Estado de 1973, la sociedad civil tenía una gran fortaleza, y muchas de sus instituciones, como los clubes deportivos, gozaban de buena salud institucional y sobre todo de autonomía. (...) El colapso institucional del año 1973 quebró las confianzas y tras un proceso muy largo, las instituciones deportivas volvieron a reconfigurarse. Las políticas neoliberales también alcanzaron al mundo del deporte. El Estado subsidiario, a través de proyectos concursables, presta ayuda al desarrollo de estas instituciones de base. (shrink)

This book is a multi-faceted exploration and critique of the human condition as it is presently manifested. It addresses science and philosophy, explores the underlying nature of reality, the state of our society and culture, the influence of the mainstream media, the nature of free will and a number of other topics. Each of these examinations contributes an angle to an emerging idea gestalt that challenges present mainstream views and behaviors and offers a sane alternative. The book is organized as (...) a series of short and self-contained essays, most of which can be read in under one hour. (shrink)

The article aims to provide the main conceptual coordinates in order to fully understand the state of the art of the most recent research in the field of neurobiology of interpersonal experience. The main purpose of this work is to analyze, at an anthropological, phenomenological and epistemological level, how the fundamental characteristics of the recognition of otherness and intercorporeity among human beings contribute to changing the image of nature in the light of a possible new relationship between living bodies, neurophysiological (...) systems and empathy. From this point of view, the hypothesis to investigate is that neurophenomenology, understood as a new evolutionary, multidimensional and autopoietic approach, is capable of probing the preconditions of the possible delineation of a phenomenology of intersubjectivity shaped by the neuroscientific turning point, represented by the discovery of mirror neurons. At this level, the neuroscientific data are interpreted according to a specific interdisciplinary perspective, thus trying to offer a possible unitary and integrated theoretical framework. (shrink)

Although Hegel is increasingly recognized as an important figure in the history of political economy, his economic views are never strictly economic. In contrast to other modern thinkers, his primary concern is not the economic efficacy of different practices or institutions but the extent to which they enable and promote the development of human freedom. In this article, I argue that Hegel's pioneering critique of modern liberal economy plays out simultaneously at a more empirical level, corresponding to the properly economic (...) dimension of his analysis, and at a deeper, logical level, which grounds and guides his position. Moreover, I argue that the tendency to favour the first of these levels, found in most of the literature on Hegel's economic thought, reduces the Philosophy of Right's main argument to a more or less vigorous plea for economic interventionism. Against this kind of reading, I show that a renewed focus on the text's logical structure reveals a different and more radical philosophical proposition, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. In particular, I argue that Hegel's dialectical logic leads him beyond the liberalism-interventionism debate, towards a qualitatively different conception of social and economic relations. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a general taxonomy of different forms of eliminativism. In order to do so, I begin by exploring eliminativism from a broad perspective, providing a comparative picture of eliminativist projects in different domains. This exploration shows that eliminativism is a label used for a family of related types of eliminativist arguments and claims. The proposed taxonomy is an attempt to systematise those arguments and claims.

Seguindo de perto o traço deixado em aberto pelo pensamento de Jacques Derrida, a autora do presente artigo começa por sublinhar os limites da "hospitalidade universal" de Kant. Com efeito, o artigo pretende demonstrar até que ponto estes limites, apesar do espírito das Luzes que inspira Kant, lhe advêm dos seus próprios fundamentos onto-teológicos e jurídico-políticos, em virtude dos quais essa "hospitalidade universal" deixou de corresponder às urgências do nosso hoje cataclísmico. Num segundo momento, a autora tenta igualmente mostrar de (...) que modo a hospitalidade incondicional, tal como Derrida a pensa e a oferece à nossa reflexaão, se descobre justamente como o "passo em frente" que comuta a hospitalidade cosmopolita de Kant ao mesmo tempo que constitui oportunidade para pensar e pôr em obra uma nova ordem política e jurídica mundial, de que a "democracia-por-vir" ou a "nova Internacional" democrática constituem a promessa. Uma promessa igualmente traduzível pelo "conceito "mais recente de altermundialização. /// Following closely the traces of Jacques Derrida's thought, the author of the article starts underlining the limits of the "universal hospitality" de Kant. The article aims in the first place at a demonstration of how these limits, regardless of the enlightened spirit of Kant, derive of his onto-teological and juridicalpolitical foundations. According to the author, it is in virtue of these that such "universal hospitality" no longer corresponds to the urgencies of today's crisis. Secondly, the author also shows how the unconditional hospitality of Jacques Derrida can just represent the needed step in order for us to overcome the cosmopolitan hospitality of Kant as much as it constitutes a royal opportunity for thinking and enacting a new political and juridical order for the world, one of which we can find a promise in the "democracy-to-be" or the democracy's "new International". The article makes clear that such promise can be also translated through the more recent concept of altermondialization. (shrink)