ResumenEn el marco intelectual del Renacimiento hubo una serie de pensadores que se mostraron disconformes con el aristotelismo dominante. La variedad de sus posturas así como lo distinto de sus posicionamientos filosóficos ha podido actuar como obstáculo para poder ver las similitudes que, en torno a la crítica aristotélica, presentan. El caso de Juan Luis Vives y de Gianfrancesco Pico puede resultar paradigmático, a estos se suma con fuerza Francisco Sánchez, quien dedicó una parte importante de su obra Quod nihil (...) scitur a criticar a Aristóteles, aunque más aún a sus comentaristas.Palabras claveFilosofía del Renacimiento, Francisco Sánchez, Juan Luis Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico, aristotelismo, historia de la filosofía.AbstractIn the intellectual frame of the Renaissance, there were some thinkers who did not agree with the Aristotelism prevailing at the time. The variety of their philosophical positions and opinions may have been an obstacle for an approach to their similarities regarding the Aristotelian critic. The case of Juan Luis Vives and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola can be paradigmatic. Also Francisco Sánchez, who strongly joined their position, devoted an important part of his play Quod nihil scitur to criticize Aristotle –although he focused on his commentators above all.KeywordsPhilosophy in the Renaissance, Francisco Sanchez, Juan Luis Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico, Aristotelism, History of Philosophy. (shrink)

Recensión de Marco del Cano, Ana María y De la Torre, Javier (coords.). Y de nuevo la eutanasia. Una mirada nacional e internacional. Dykinson, Madrid, 2019, 217 páginas.

RESUMENEn la obra del pensador gallego Francisco Sánchez (1551-1623), titulada Que nada se sabe, existen una serie de características que nos obligan a relacionarla directamente con el pensamiento judío. Entre estas cuestiones se hallan: las citas bíblicas recogidas por su autor, siendo la gran mayoría de ellas procedentes del Antiguo Testamento; la falta de la dedicatoria a la virgen María o la relación entre el alma y el cuerpo que recoge Sánchez y que es de claro origen judío.PALABRAS CLAVEESCEPTICISMO, PENSAMIENTO (...) JUDÍO, FRANCISCO SÁNCHEZABSTRACTIn the work of the thinker Francisco Sanchez (1551-1623), entitled That nothing is known, there are some characteristics that force us to directly relate it to the Jewish thought. Some of these questions are: the Biblical quotations gathered by its author, coming the great majority of them from the Old Testament; the lack of the dedication to Virgin Mary or the relation between the soul and the body that Sanchez shares with the Jewish tradition. All these topics point at the importance of this tradition in the work That nothing is known.KEYWORDSSCEPTICISM, JEWISH THOUGHT, FRANCISCO SANCHEZ, RENAISSANCE. (shrink)

ResumenEn el marco intelectual del Renacimiento hubo una serie de pensadores que se mostraron disconformes con el aristotelismo dominante. La variedad de sus posturas así como lo distinto de sus posicionamientos filosóficos ha podido actuar como obstáculo para poder ver las similitudes que, en torno a la crítica aristotélica, presentan. El caso de Juan Luis Vives y de Gianfrancesco Pico puede resultar paradigmático, a estos se suma con fuerza Francisco Sánchez, quien dedicó una parte importante de su obra Quod nihil (...) scitur a criticar a Aristóteles, aunque más aún a sus comentaristas.Palabras claveFilosofía del Renacimiento, Francisco Sánchez, Juan Luis Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico, aristotelismo, historia de la filosofía.AbstractIn the intellectual frame of the Renaissance, there were some thinkers who did not agree with the Aristotelism prevailing at the time. The variety of their philosophical positions and opinions may have been an obstacle for an approach to their similarities regarding the Aristotelian critic. The case of Juan Luis Vives and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola can be paradigmatic. Also Francisco Sánchez, who strongly joined their position, devoted an important part of his play Quod nihil scitur to criticize Aristotle –although he focused on his commentators above all.KeywordsPhilosophy in the Renaissance, Francisco Sanchez, Juan Luis Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico, Aristotelism, History of Philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines and defends the view that the immediate objects of visual perception, or what are often called sense data, are parts of the facing surfaces of physical objects-the naturalized sense data (NSD) theory. Occasionally defended in the literature on the philosophy of perception, most famously by G. E. Moore (1918-1919), it has not proved popular and indeed was abandoned by Moore himself. The contemporary situation in the philosophy of perception seems ripe for a revaluation of the NSD theory. (...) however. The NSD theory allows us to accommodate the very real shortcomings in uncritical direct realism without postulating the existence of non-physical sense data in a way that has seemed to many incompatible with any robust form of philosophical naturalism.The argument to establish the NSD theory proceeds in two stages. In §II I argue against the direct realist that we perceive three-dimensional material objects in virtue of perceiving parts of their surfaces. The argument for this conclusion involves clearly distinguishing (in § I) between two notions that have tended to be run together in discussions of perception---namely, immediate perception and direct perception. In §III I argue against the sense-datum theorist that those parts of the surfaces of those objects are not themselves perceived in virtue of the perception of anything else. (shrink)

1 Domains of application 2 Formulating the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction 3 Is there such a thing as nonconceptual content? 4 Developing the account of nonconceptual content .

The most frequently discussed skeptical arguments in the history of philosophy are to be found in the tightly argued twelve paragraphs of Descartes’ Meditation One. There is considerable controversy about how to interpret the skeptical arguments that Descartes offers; the extent to which those arguments rest upon implicit epistemological and/or metaphysical presuppositions; their originality within the history of skepticism; and the role they play within Cartesian philosophy and natural science. This chapter begins by tracing the complex argumentation of Meditation One. (...) The second section explores the differences between Cartesian skeptical arguments and the skeptical arguments discussed in the ancient world, while the third section considers whether there might be medieval antecedents for the radical doubts that end Meditation One. The final section suggests that the radical nature of the doubts raised in Meditation One has its sources in two fundamental characteristics of Cartesian science: the radical error that Cartesian science posits in our everyday experience of the world, and the hypothetical and (only) morally certain nature of the scientific edifice that is proposed to replace the commonsense view of the world enshrined in Aristotelian science. (shrink)

A ubiquitous feature of active sleep in mammals and birds is its relative abundance in early development. In rat pups across the first two postnatal weeks, active sleep promotes the expression of synchronized oscillatory activity within and between cortical and subcortical sensorimotor structures. Sensory feedback from self-generated myoclonic twitches – which are produced exclusively during active sleep – also triggers neural oscillations in those structures. We have proposed that one of the functions of active sleep in early infancy is to (...) provide a context for synchronizing developing structures. Specifically, neural oscillations contribute to a variety of neurodevelopmental processes, including synapse formation, neuronal differentiation and migration, apoptosis, and the refinement of topographic maps. In addition, synchronized oscillations promote functional connectivity between distant brain areas. Consequently, any condition or manipulation that restricts active sleep can, in turn, deprive the infant animal of substantial sensory experience, resulting in atypical developmental trajectories. The synchronization of rhythmic neural activity across brain structures provides evidence of communication. In developing sensorimotor networks, such oscillations are triggered most clearly and prominently during REM sleep. We propose that REM sleep provides a context for the emergence and expression of functional connectivity in the developing sensorimotor system. (shrink)

Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...) satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)

From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism and (...) argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance. (shrink)

Thinking without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Many scientific disciplines treat non-linguistic creatures as thinkers, explaining their behavior in terms of their thoughts about themselves and about the environment. But this theorizing has proceeded without any clear account of the types of thinking available to non-linguistic creatures. One consequence of this is that ascriptions of thoughts to non-linguistic creatures have frequently been held to be metaphorical and not to be taken at face value. (...) Bermúdez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. Whereas existing discussions of thought at the non-linguistic level have concentrated on how such thoughts might be physically realized, Bermúdez approaches the problem by considering what is required in explaining behavior in psychological terms. In developing a positive account of non-linguistic thought he shows how the experimental tools used by developmental psychologists and students of animal behavior can be used to give a precise account of the way in which a human infant or non-human animal is representing the world. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the differences between thinking without words and language-based thinking. Bermúdez argues that there are clear limits to the expressive power of non-linguistic thought. Nonetheless, he identifies primitive analogues at the non-linguistic level that can be used to explain sophisticated non-linguistic behaviors. Thinking Without Words is the first full-length philosophical study of this important topic. It is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior. (shrink)

This paper considers how best an eliminativist might argue for the radical falsity of commonsense psychology. I will be arguing that Paul Churchland’s “official” arguments for eliminative materialism (in, e.g., Churchland 1981) are unsatisfactory, although much of the paper will be developing themes that are clearly present in Churchland’s writings. The eliminativist needs to argue that the representations that feed into action are fundamentally different from those invoked by propositional attitude psychology. The “springs of action” are representations of features that (...) are much more finely grained than those encoded within the vocabulary that we employ to specify the content of propositional attitudes. The eliminativist’s most promising strategy is to argue that, whatever we might think about why we behave the way we do, careful experimental work will show that we are in fact acting in virtue of representations of properties and microfeatures that fall completely outside the ambit of propositional attitude psychology. The paper considers a number of examples of how this eliminativist strategy might be developed, ranging from the implications of the two visual systems hypothesis to research in social psychology into the role that situational factors play in controlling action. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Fredérique de Vignemont has argued that there is a positive quale of bodily ownership . She thinks that tactile and other forms of somatosensory phenomenology incorporate a distinctive feeling of myness and takes issue with my defense in Bermúdez of a deflationary approach to bodily ownership. That paper proposed an argument deriving from Elizabeth Anscombe’s various discussions of what she terms knowledge without observation . De Vignemont is not convinced and appeals to the Rubber Hand (...) Illusion to undercut my appeal to Anscombe. Section 1 of this article restates the case against the putative quale of ownership. Section 2 explains why de Vignemonts’ objections miss the mark. Section 3 discusses in more detail how to draw a principled distinction between bodily awareness and ordinary perceptual awareness. (shrink)

The author challenges the view that birth cannot be a morally relevant fact in the process of development from zygote to child. He reviews specific arguments against giving any moral significance to the fact of birth. Drawing on recent work in developmental psychology, he contends that the lives of neonates can have a level of self-consciousness that confers moral significance but can only be possessed after birth. He shows that the position he has argued for provides a framework within which (...) the move from the moral validity of aborting sentient fetuses to the moral validity of infanticide might be resisted. He concludes that arguments suggesting that birth can be morally significant support the view that the acquisition of moral significance is a gradual and multilayered phenomenon. (shrink)

Interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of action in the last few decades has tended toward an intellectualist position, according to which reason is in charge of setting the goals of action. This position has recently been criticized by the revival of anti-intellectualism (particularly from J. Moss’ work), according to which character, and not reason, sets the goals of action. In this essay I argue that neither view can sufficiently account for the complexities of Aristotle’s theory, and propose an intermediate account, which (...) I call indirect intellectualism, that preserves the merits of both traditional interpretations and is able to dispel the problems that trouble each. There is very strong textual evidence for the claim that goal-setting is the task not of reason but of character (and in this anti-intellectualists are right); but reason is able to set goals indirectly by carefully shaping the processes of habituation that constitute a person’s character (and in this intellectualists are right). I argue for this position through a study of the division of labour between character and reason, and through a reconstruction of Aristotle’s conception of habituation. (shrink)

DICTIONARY OF SPANISH VERBS WITH THEIR ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS AND MODELS OF CONJUGATION/DICCIONARIO CON LOS VERBOS EN ESPAÑOL, SU TRADUCCIÓN AL INGLÉS Y CONJUGACIONES.

Self-control is deemed crucial for reasons-responsive agency and a key contributor to long-term wellbeing. But recent studies suggest that effortfully resisting one’s temptations does not contribute to long-term goal attainment, and can even be harmful. So how does self-control improve our lives? Finding an answer requires revising the role that overcoming temptation plays in self-control. This paper distinguishes two forms of self-control problems: temptation (the presence of a strong wayward motivation) and apathy (the lack of commitment-advancing motivation). This distinction makes (...) it possible to separate negative self-control (aimed at overcoming temptation) from positive self-control (aimed at overcoming lack of motivation). The paper argues that temptation should not play a central role in our conception of self-control, since overcoming temptation is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful self-control. (shrink)

In this paper we prove that the free algebras in a subvariety equation image of the variety equation image of semi-Heyting algebras are directly decomposable if and only if equation image satisfies the Stone identity.

“There’s no need for DNA tests to prove that One Hundred Years of Solitude is Don Quixote’s heir.” G. Rabassa This paper is a personal attempt to relate the concept of language games as portrayed by the Austrian Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein with the literary magic of Gabriel García Márquez. The topic came up to me after reading an essay of the Colombian writer Carlos Patiño Roselli. His exposition on the language games in Wittgenstein triggered a series ofassociations in me that (...) made me see spoken language as the actor that plays the leading role in both authors. In order to address this topic I will first summarize Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games, on one hand, and then I will remind us of what we commonly understand under “magical realism” in GGM; then, I will propose a free interpretation of §103 in PhU relating it to Melquiades’ return from death to live in a story he tells in some papyrus. And now, “Back to the rough ground!”. (shrink)

This paper explores some of the areas where neuroscientific and philosophical issues intersect in the study of self-consciousness. Taking as point of departure a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) that appears to block philosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, the paper illustrates how the highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention is paid in particular to the primitive forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness manifested in visual perception, somatic proprioception, spatial reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions. (...) The study of these primitive forms of self-consciousness is an interdisciplinary enterprise and the paper considers a range of points of contact where philosophical work can illuminate work in the cognitive sciences, and vice versa. (shrink)

Mind-wandering seems to be paradigmatically unintentional. However, experimental findings have yielded the paradoxical result that mind-wandering can also be intentional. In this paper, we first present the paradox of intentional mind-wandering and then explain intentional mind-wandering as the intentional omission to control one’s own thoughts. Finally, we present the surrealist method for artistic production to illustrate how intentional omission of control over thoughts can be deployed towards creative endeavors.

The central aim of the present investigation is to shed light on Nietzsche’s understanding of happiness and a good life, starting from Nietzsche’s appropriation of Plato’s and Aristotle’s doctrine of a hierarchy of human beings and forms of life.

The rise of foundational dualism and the eclipse of the body -- "Body am I entirely, and nothing else": non-reductive materialism and the struggle against dualism -- Toward a materialist phenomenology of religion -- The phenomenology of embodiment and the study of religion -- Religious bodies as social artifacts -- Holding social constructionism in check: the recovery of the active, lived body -- A cultural neurophenomenology of religion: enter the embodied mind -- The eclipse of practice: textualism at large -- (...) "Ceci n'est pas un texte": from textualism to practice -- Expanding the conversation on emplaced religion -- Mobility, networks, and ecology. (shrink)

Effort and the feeling of effort play important roles in many theoretical discussions, from perception to self-control and free will, from the nature of ownership to the nature of desert and achievement. A crucial, overlooked distinction within the philosophical and scientific literatures is the distinction between theories that seek to explain effort and theories that seek to explain the feeling of effort. Lacking a clear distinction between these two phenomena makes the literature hard to navigate. To advance in the unification (...) and development of this area, this article provides an overview of the main theories of the nature of effort and the nature of the feeling of effort, and then discusses how efforts and their feelings are related. Two key takeaways emerge. First, there is widespread agreement that efforts are goal-directed actions. Second, one of the main philosophical issues to be decided is whether feelings of effort should be defined by reference to efforts (effort-first approach), or whether efforts are defined by reference to the feeling of effort (feeling-first approach). (shrink)

Many philosophers consider that memory is just a passive information retention and retrieval capacity. Some information and experiences are encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved in a passive way, without any control or intervention on the subject’s part. In this paper, we will defend an active account of memory according to which remembering is a mental action and not merely a passive mental event. According to the reconstructive account, memory is an imaginative reconstruction of past experience. A key feature of the (...) reconstructive account is that given the imperfect character of memory outputs, some kind of control is needed. Metacognition is the control of mental processes and dispositions. Drawing from recent work on the normativity of automaticity and automatic control, we distinguish two kinds of metacognitive control: top-down, reflective control, on the one hand, and automatic, intuitive, feeling-based control on the other. Thus, we propose that whenever the mental process of remembering is controlled by means of intuitive or feeling-based metacognitive processes, it is an action. (shrink)

Thought, Reference, and Experience is a collection of important new essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. The starting-point for the papers is the brilliant work of the British philosopher Gareth Evans before his untimely death in 1980 at the age of 34. Evans's work on reference and singular thought transformed the Fregean approach to the philosophy of thought and language, showing how seemingly technical issues in philosophical semantics are inextricably linked (...) to fundamental questions about the structure of our thinking about ourselves and about the world. The papers, all newly written for this volume, explore different aspects of Evans's philosophical legacy, showing its importance to central areas in contemporary analytic philosophy. The volume includes a substantial introduction that introduces the principal themes in Evans's thought and places the papers in context. (shrink)

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict exemplify (...) self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

Chris Frith’s target chapters contain a wealth of interesting experiments and striking theoretical claims. In these comments I begin by drawing out some of the key themes in his discussion of action and the sense of agency. Frith’s central claim about conscious action is that what we are primarily conscious of in acting is our own agency. I will review some of the experimental evidence that he interprets in support of this claim and then explore the following three questions about (...) the awareness of agency: Should we locate the phenomena that Frith describes as awareness of agency at the personal level or at the subpersonal level? If we are indeed operating at the personal level, then should we think about awareness of agency as something we experience, or as something that we believe? If awareness of agency is to be understood experientially, is there what some authors have called “a sense of agency”, where this is understood to be a distinctive type of experience that accompanies agentive behaviors but is absent in behaviors that are not under the control of the agent? In what follows I argue that awareness of agency should be located at the personal level, and that we should think of it as something we experience. But I will reject the claim that there is a distinctive sense of agency. (shrink)

La pena natural es una situación paradójica que se puede presentar cuando el autor de un delito, al cometerlo o a causa de éste, ha sufrido un daño igual o mayor al que padecería si el juez de la causa le aplicara la pena estatal prevista para tal conducta. Se da con frecuencia al juzgar ciertos accidentes viales, cuando el acusado ya carga el peso de ser quien, por imprudencia, mató a su pareja o familiar cercano, por ejemplo. Pero ¿en (...) qué situaciones y cómo cabe recurrir a la pena natural? En esta investigación, Manuel Serrano explora las diversas aristas y posturas en pugna que atraviesan este tema, donde se cruzan cuestiones como la idea de la “culpa compensada”, la prohibición de aplicar castigo doble por un mismo hecho (non bis in idem) y la clemencia judicial. El autor desmonta la estructura conceptual de la pena natural, estudia jurisprudencia argentina y recorre producciones teóricas de juristas que se han preocupado por este asunto complejo, profundo y poco abordado del derecho penal. (shrink)

The paper focuses on Reinhardt Grossmann's analysis of the Argument from Physics, as well as the analysis by the Spanish philosopher Antonio Millán-Puelles, in an attempt to assess the validity of the Argument on the basis of their respective critical views. Both authors agree in perceptual realism and in the need to distinguish between the scope and object of Physics and the ordinary objects of natural perception. Their criticisms mainly concern the innappropiate use of the principle of reduction in the (...) Argument and the distinction between secondary and primary qualities, which is, according to Grossmann, one of the sources of idealism and phenomenalism. (shrink)

Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which accounts for skillful agency by tackling the guidance problem: how can agents transform their abstract and coarse-grained intentions into the highly context-sensitive, fine-grained control processes required to select, revise and (...) correct strategies during self-control exertion? The skill model borrows conceptual tools from ‘hierarchical models’ recently developed in the context of motor skills, and asserts that self-control crucially involves the ability to manage the implementation and monitoring of regulatory strategies as the self-control exercise unfolds. Skilled agents are able do this by means of flexible practical reasoning: a fast, context-sensitive type of deliberation that incorporates non-propositional representations into the formation and revision of the mixed-format intentions that structure self-control exertion. The literatures on implementation intentions and motivation framing offer corroborating evidence for the theory. As a surprising result, the skill of self-control that allows agents to overcome the contrary motivations they experience is self-effacing: instead of continuously honing this skill, expert agents replace it with a different one, which minimizes or prevents contrary motivations from arising in the first place. Thus, the more expert you are at self-control, the less likely you are to use it. (shrink)