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 his paper, Vardoulakis traces a genealogy of the concept of the ‘ineffectual’ that dominates many discussions in continental political philosophy back to Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the early 1920s. Although I sympathize with Vardoulakis’s suspicions concerning the ‘ineffectual’, I think his genealogy misses the main aspects of Heidegger’s analysis of praxis. In particular, Vardoulakis’s reading relies on two fundamentally ill-conceived assumptions: (a) that Heidegger’s thought can be read as a continuous endorsement of a series of fundamental claims, in (...) particular, the rejection of instrumentality, the critique of modern technical thinking, and a praise of a certain form of ineffectual meditative thought as an alternative; and (b) that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in general and of the Nichomachean Ethics in particular has, as its main aim, to ground in Greek thinking such form of ineffectual meditative thought. In this comment, I will challenge both these assumptions. I will claim that Heidegger’s project in the 1920s is oriented to provide an answer to the question that shaped the debate between Marburg Neo-Kantians, on the one hand, and Husserl, on the other: namely, how is it possible to account for lived experience and its categorial articulation. For Neo-Kantians such as Natorp (e.g. [1912: 28]), all conceptual understanding is an understanding of objects. Subjectivity as the pure form of activity—the Kantian I think—could not be understood but merely postulated. Hence, it is in principle impossible to account for subjectivity without objectifying it. This was a serious and potentially devastating objection to phenomenology’s fundamental project. It is in this context that Heidegger turns his attention to Aristotle’s ethics, precisely as a way of accounting for the kind of relationship between my understanding of experience and experience itself. Aristotelian praxis (and phronesis as the kind of ‘knowledge’ associated with praxis) provides a model for such understanding. Therefore, Heidegger has no interest in ethics or in developing a theory of action in the 1920s in general or when reading Aristotle in particular. Vardoulakis’s understanding of Heidegger’s mistranslation—even if there is one—can only make sense in hindsight, when reading those texts in the light of the later Heidegger’s interest in avoiding technical calculation and promoting a meditative thinking. If we abandon Vardoulakis’s assumptions, Heidegger’s analysis of praxis and, in particular, his reading of Aristotle’s hou heneka can be understood under a different light. Understanding the meaningful structure of the world as existing for the sake (hou heneka, umwillen) of Dasein is not so much a reflection on the role of ends in action—technical or otherwise—but an analysis of the way in which any understanding of the world and of our actions within it is an understanding of who we are and of the structures that constitute the very being of our subjectivity. This may suggest that there is in the early Heidegger a way out of the dilemma between ineffectuality and instrumentalism, a path that, perhaps, provides an alternative for contemporary ethics and political thinking. (shrink)

En este artículo introductorio, exploro el sentido de la influencia de Kant en la filosofía de Heidegger, y en particular examino el significado de su afirmación tardía según la cual "la ontología fundamental no es otra cosa que filosofía trascendental". Sostengo que, para dar sentido a esta afirmación, no tendremos que limitarnos a la lectura atenta de Heidegger sobre Kant a finales de la década de 1920, sino que nos centraremos en sus primeros trabajos sobre lógica y en su redescubrimiento (...) de Aristóteles. Creo que, al hacerlo, Heidegger, fuertemente influenciado por el neokantismo y, en particular, por Emil Lask, llega a la idea de que la pregunta kantiana acerca del campo trascendental como un campo de validez solo puede responderse si planteamos preguntas a priori sobre el modo de ser de ese campo y la forma en que las determinaciones ontológicas emergen como condiciones de posibilidad para nuestra experiencia de los objetos. (shrink)

El presente artículo se propone analizar una serie de llamativas coincidencias entre el pensamiento tardío de Husserl y el pensamiento temprano de Heidegger –en particular en torno a tópicos como la muerte, la finitud, la negatividad y la posibilidad– a partir de la puesta en primer plano de un problema metodológico crucial para la fenomenología: el de la legitimación de las propias descripciones del ámbito de la subjetividad originaria. Ello conduce a Husserl, pretendo mostrar, al abandono de una noción estrecha (...) de donación y legitimación asociada a la intuitividad y al desarrollo de una fenomenología constructiva centrada en la pregunta por lo inconstituible y por el modo en que la esfera propiamente constituyente puede darse, si bien siempre indirectamente, en la experiencia, en el sentido de lo que Montavont ha llamado un “trascendental a posteriori”. Es allí donde las coincidencias con Heidegger saldrán a la luz. (shrink)

El tratamiento heideggeriano del problema de la vida es uno de los másenigmáticos y controversiales puntos de su obra. Mucho se ha cuestionadoel hecho de que Heidegger disocie, en particular a partir de la analíticaexistenciaria del Dasein, a éste del ámbito de lo viviente. Contra dichaslecturas, me propongo aquí mostrar que el problema de la vida es centralen la obra temprana de Heidegger y que sólo a partir de una adecuadaelucidación de su abordaje se hace comprensible no sólo el recorrido (...) quelleva a Ser y Tiempo sino también una serie de tesis centrales de esta obra,en particular aquella referida precisamente a al consideración del Daseincomo un ente privilegiado. Sostendré que es precisamente porque el Daseinmuestra de un modo eminente la movilidad propia de la vida - y no porque,como suele creerse, se distancia radicalmente de lo vital - que es posibledistinguirlo metodológicamente del resto de lo viviente. (shrink)

RESUMEN El artículo sostiene que la concepción fenomenològica de la justificación epistémica y su modo de elucidar la objetividad depende de la vigencia de un cierto ideal de racionalidad como ideal ético que orienta nuestras acciones. Se trata de lo que Husserl denomina el ideal de renovación, que cumple una doble función: a) da cuenta de la tendencia normativa a la corrección sobre la que se asienta la comprensión husserliana de la objetividad, y b) da cuenta de la motivación sobre (...) la que se asienta la adopción de una actitud peculiar, la actitud fenomenológica o trascendental, que caracteriza al quehacer filosófico. ABSTRACT The article argues that the phenomenological conception of epistemic justification and its account of objectivity depends on the validity of an ideal of rationality as the ethical ideal that guides our actions. This is what Husserl calls the ideal of renewal, that fulfills a double function: a) it accounts for the normative tendency to self-correction on which the Husserlian understanding of objectivity is based, and b) it accounts for the motivation for the adoption of the properly philosophical stance, namely, the phenomenological or transcendental attitude. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the metaphilosophical relevance of the phenomenon of sleep, suggesting that it has the potential to not only enrich the analysis of limit cases but also to test some of the ideas concerning the possibility of naturalizing phenomenology and its limits. Insofar as sleeping allows for both a first personal and a third personal description and challenges the usual primacy of the first-person point of view, exploring sleeping under the prism of its import for the phenomenological (...) method allows to illuminate the relationships between a first personal transcendental phenomenology and a third personal naturalized one. We do this by examining Husserl’s treatment of sleep as a limit-case, and the problem of accounting for deep sleep from a first-personal perspective. Drawing from a Heidegger-inspired account of sleep, we argue that sleep demands for a type of approach that can be fairly described as ontological, and which reveals a new understanding of subjectivity as a dynamic unity of different modes of being. Although this approach challenges a first-personal based approach, it does not, however support the naturalization of phenomenology or undermine the project of a transcendental philosophy of experience. (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.

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

This thesis articulates an analytic version of the ontology of idealism, according to which universal phenomenal consciousness is all there ultimately is, everything else in nature being reducible to patterns of excitation of this consciousness. The thesis’ key challenge is to explain how the seemingly distinct conscious inner lives of different subjects—such as you and me—can arise within this fundamentally unitary phenomenal field. Along the way, a variety of other challenges are addressed, such as: how we can reconcile idealism with (...) the fact that we all inhabit a common external world; why this world unfolds independently of our personal volition or imagination; why there are such tight correlations between measured patterns of brain activity and reports of experience; etc. The core idea of this thesis can be summarized thus: we, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of universal phenomenal consciousness, analogously to how a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) manifests multiple disjoint centers of subjectivity also called ‘alters.’ We, and all other living organisms, are surrounded by the transpersonal phenomenal activity of universal consciousness, which unfolds beyond the dissociative boundary of our respective alter. The inanimate world we perceive around us is the extrinsic appearance—i.e. the phenomenal image imprinted from across our dissociative boundary—of this activity. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other alters. (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)

> Context • The alleged dichotomy between mind and matter is pervasive. Therefore, the attempt to explain mat- ter in terms of mind (idealism) is often considered a mirror image of that of explaining mind in terms of mat- ter (mainstream physicalism), in the sense of being structurally equivalent despite being reversely arranged. > Problem • I argue that this is an error arising from language artifacts, for dichotomies must reside in the same level of abstraction. > Method • I (...) show that, because matter outside mind is not an empirical observation but rather an explanatory model, the epistemic symmetry between the two is broken. Consequently, matter and mind cannot reside in the same level of abstraction. > Results • It then becomes clear that attempting to explain mind in terms of matter is epistemically more costly than attempting to explain matter in terms of mind. > Implications • The qualities of experience are suggested to be not only epistemically, but also ontologically primary. > Constructivist content • I high- light the primacy of perceptual constructs over explanatory abstraction on both epistemic and ontic levels. > Key words • Idealism, physicalism, pancomputationalism, anti-realism, hard problem of consciousness, epistemic symmetry, explanatory abstraction, levels of abstraction. (shrink)

Recent neuroimaging studies of the psychedelic state, which have commanded great media attention, are reviewed. They show that psychedelic trances are consistently accompanied by broad reductions in brain activity, despite their experiential richness. This result is at least counterintuitive from the perspective of mainstream physicalism, according to which subjective experience is entirely constituted by brain activity. In this brief analysis, the generic implications of physicalism regarding the relationship between the richness of experience and brain activity levels are rigorously examined from (...) an informational perspective, and then made explicit and unambiguous. These implications are then found to be non-trivial to reconcile with the results of said neuroimaging studies, which highlights the significance of such studies for the mind-body problem and philosophy of mind in general. (shrink)

This paper defends the relevance of philosophy in the contemporary study of concepts. With the advent of cognitive science, naturalistic and interdisciplinary theorizing about concepts has gained momentum. In this context, it has been recently argued that philosophers’ theories of concepts are not aimed at answering the issues that psychologists are interested in, thus dismissing the mentioned philosophical contribution as scientifically otiose. We present and discuss two cases in point suggesting otherwise, as an attempt to vindicate the crucial role of (...) philosophy in the development of empirical theories of concepts. (shrink)