The strict limits imposed on this paper make it necessary to confine it to a schematic resume of problems the importance of which demands an extended and exhaustive treatment. For this reason the author feels constrained to treat only a few of the many problems which, when duly considered, are capable of producing a radical modification in the field of epistemology. Likewise, the author cannot arrive at any settled conclusion, since he is hindered by the extent and close reasoning of (...) Heidegger's work, his subtlety, and the fact that his work is not yet completed. The intellectual revolt in which Heidegger's existentialism consists is based in part on a critical restatement of the problem of being and, further, in a series of concepts, namely, the world, utility and presence, the duality of subject and object, ontology and knowledge, all subordinated to the most important and ultimately superior concept of existence. These concepts and their revision, as a point of departure for Heidegger's existentialism, owe their origin to phenomenology and philosophy of life (above all, Dilthey's). From the revision of the above-mentioned concepts, by distinguishing in each one of them what, by reason of its inaccuracy, is a source of confusion, there are derived possible changes which, in the view of the author of this paper, may be described as: (1) the subject-object correlation, (2) knowledge, (3) the intellectual function as ground of the possibility of knowledge, and (4) the categories. With regard to the first problem--that of the subject-object correlation--it must be said that if it does not really disappear in Heidegger, he has profoundly modified it, since he does not accept the view held by his predecessors in all the history of philosophy that in the subject-object correlation there are given: (a) the subject, (b) the object, (c) the act of knowledge, and (d) the categories as entities equipped with absolute independence and unique peculiarities. The old view cannot be true, because, says Heidegger, at the start human existence appears so interested in its own being that there is no extra-subjective being prior to the being of human existence. The extra-human, that which is not purely existential (as human existence alone is), is given as useful, whatever it be. Human existence is comprehension of its own being. This comprehension, at the same time that it establishes the being of human existence, also renders possible whatever else is given, in the manifestation of a what rather than in that of a how. Or it may be that the theoretical yields to a prior qualification and by the same basic principle in the constitution of the world, and this qualification is the pragmatic character of the total reality. In harmony with this, it follows, according to Heidegger, that it is impossible to locate subject and object on the same plane; this is already equivalent to locating existence (who) and reality (what) on the same plane. It means nothing to speak of a determination of the subject by the object or vice versa, since there is no way of proving that a predetermination of the subjective and the objective precedes the determination so as to render possible the determination and with it the correlation. And if this is impossible, the intellectual function which makes knowledge possible is annulled, and every pre-essence of forms or manifestations of theoretic nature, such as the nous, the Platonic ideas, the Aristotelian active intellect or the Kantian a priori--all are dissolved in the presence of Heidegger's thesis of the uniqueness of (human) existence and the world, inasmuch as it affirms that knowledge is merely a modality of being-in-the-world. Finally, with regard to the categories, the chief negation of Heidegger proceeds from the fact that, up to this time, the categories are considered sometimes as situated in the object, sometimes in the subject, and zppear to be valid for all being. Heidegger is opposed to this; he postulates categories for the existentials different from those which prevail for other entities. He does not accept a categorial structure which is closed within itself and incapable of alteration. Finally, for him, the categries are interpretative in contrast to the traditional view that they are entitative and to Kant's view that they are constitutive. (shrink)

A modified visual search task demonstrates that humans are very good at resuming a search after it has been momentarily interrupted. This is shown by exceptionally rapid response time to a display that reappears after a brief interruption, even when an entirely different visual display is seen during the interruption and two different visual searches are performed simultaneously. This rapid resumption depends on the stability of the visual scene and is not due to display or response anticipations. These results are (...) consistent with the existence of an iterative hypothesis-testing mechanism that compares information stored in short-term memory (the perceptual hypothesis) with information about the display (the sensory pattern). In this view, rapid resumption occurs because a hypothesis based on a previous glance of the scene can be tested very rapidly in a subsequent glance, given that the initial hypothesis-generation step has already been performed. (shrink)

"Knowing how we know" is the subject of this book. Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword (...) by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se propone un estudio comparativo de las producciones de algunos referentes de la Investigación Participativa. Se revisan algunos de los textos de Orlando Fals Borda, Paulo Freire, João Bosco Guedes Pinto, Michel Thiollent, María Teresa Sirvent y Joel Martí. Este trabajo se inscribe en el proceso reciente de transformación universitaria en Uruguay, en particular, en una de sus iniciativas: la de la integración curricular de la extensión a través de lo que se ha denominado “prácticas universitarias (...) integrales”. En este marco, la reflexión teórico-metodológica sobre la extensión crítica y las prácticas de investigación-acción conectadas con ella resultan fundamentales para dotar las iniciativas en curso de mayor pertinencia académica y potencial transformador. (shrink)

The phenomenon of size constancy is defined as the apparent perceptual invariance of the linear dimensions of a seen object as this approaches the eye or recedes from it. It has been interpreted as resulting from the application by the brain of a size correction, made possible by the subject's apprehension of distance cues present in the image. We present several observations which, by dissociating accommodation from distance of the seen object and by suppressing the optic effects of accommodation on (...) the visual image itself, show that this interpretation is incorrect, and that in fact the size correction of the visual image is a function of the central effort of accommodation, not of the distance of the seen object. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Donald Davidson have explained that we cannot derive predictions from judgments such as "he boasted from vanity." Such judgments are also the source of countless painful mistakes. However, are they necessarily unreliable? Often enough, even if only gradually and partially, we get people right. Assuming that we do is already assuming that there must be a connection, if not causal then at least casual, between what a person is, what she does, and how she (...) acts; and that we may describe it correctly. If no ironclad generalizations can be made that connect the way a person is, her reasons, and her actions, how might we describe correctness in judgments such as this?Anscombe... (shrink)

This article discusses conditions in Colombia and the need for emancipation from colonial stereotypes. It describes communities of learning that have been created as spaces in which people can practice making sense of their world. It describes a project in Bogot and reflects on what has been done and what was learned in trying to create communities of learning.

This research is part of a more extensive programme that deals with intercultural ethics from different perspectives. All of them share a common inspiration sprung from UNESCO’s Intercultural Ethics Project. The main goal of this paper consists in offering pragmatic/theoretical tools in order to analyse a cultural and political issue which is currently very important in Spain: the confrontation between those promoting Spanish national culture and those promoting the Basque one. I approach this confrontation in terms of discursive praxis, reaching (...) the conclusion that only if both groups are capable of self-understanding will they be capable of reciprocal-understanding, and only then will it be possible to maintain peace in our country. (shrink)

editorial changes not yet reviewed by author Purpose My intent in this essay is to reflect on the history of some biological notions such as autopoiesis, structural coupling, and cognition, that I have developed since the early 1960’s as a result of my work on visual perception and the organization of the living. No doubt I shall repeat things that I have said in other publications (Maturana and Varela 1980 and 1988), and I shall present notions that once they are (...) said appear as obvious truisms. But the reader it is not invited to attend to the truisms, rather he or she is invited to attend to the consequences that they entail for the understanding of biological processes. After all, explanations or demonstrations always become self evident once they are understood and accepted. KEYWORDS Autopoiesis, structural coupling, cognition, explanations, self consciousness, 1. Autopoiesis 1.1 Origins of the notion In November 1960, a first year medical student asked me the question “What began three thousand eight hundred million years ago so that you can say now that living systems began then?” I realized that I could not properly answer that question, so I said “I cannot answer this question now, but if you come back next year I shall propose an answer then.” Thus I accepted the question of the student to be answered later, and as I did so, I accepted also the question for myself. I realized that to answer this question I had to create a living system, either conceptually or practically, because I had to be able to say what kind of systems were living system to be able to say how they began. While in the attempting to answer the dual questions of what kind of systems are living systems, and of how did they begin so that I could now speak of their origin, it became obvious to me that living systems exist as autonomous entities in the form of self contained closed molecular dynamics of self production, open to the flow of molecules through them. Indeed, one can say that living systems arose in the history of the earth in the moment in which some spontaneous networks of molecular autocatalytic processes became closed upon themselves.. (shrink)

We present a description of the Stern–Gerlach type experiments using only the concepts of classical electrodynamics and the Newton’s equations of motion. The quantization of the projections of the spin (or the projections of the magnetic dipole) is not introduced in our calculations. The main characteristic of our approach is a quantitative analysis of the motion of the magnetic atoms at the entrance of the magnetic field region. This study reveals a mechanism which modifies continuously the orientation of the magnetic (...) dipole of the atom in a very short time interval, at the entrance of the magnetic field region. The mechanism is based on the conservation of the total energy associated with a magnetic dipole which moves in a non uniform magnetic field generated by an electromagnet. A detailed quantitative comparison with the (1922) Stern–Gerlach experiment and the didactical (1967) experiment by J.R. Zacharias is presented. We conclude, contrary to the original Stern–Gerlach statement, that the classical explanations are not ruled out by the experimental data. (shrink)

Threatened aboriginal cultures provide valuable criteria for fruitful criticism of the dominant Western cultural paradigm and perceptual model, which many take for granted as the inevitable path for humankind to follow. However, this Western model has proven itself to be imprecise and limiting. It obscures fundamental aspects of human nature, such as the mythical, religious dimension, and communication with the Cosmos. Modern technology, high-speed communication and mass media affect our ability to perceive reality and respond to it. Non-Western worldviews could (...) help us to regain meaningful communication with Nature and to learn new ways of perceiving our world. (shrink)

The causal theory of action is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency -- the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources (...) while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action ; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action -oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues. Contributors: Fred Adams, Jesús H. Aguilar, John Bishop, Andrei A. Buckareff, Randolph Clarke, Jennifer Hornsby, Alicia Juarrero, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Moore, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Josef Perner, Johannes Roessler, David-Hillel Ruben, Carolina Sartorio, Michael Smith, Rowland Stout The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

Our purpose in this essay is to introduce new concepts in a wide and recursive view of the systemic consequences of the following biological facts that I and we have presented that can be resumed as: that as living systems we human beings are molecular autopoietic system; that living systems live only as long as they find themselves in a medium that provides them with all the conditions that make the realization of their living possible, that is, in the continuous (...) conservation of their relation of adaptation to the circumstances in which they find themselves; that as a living system exists only in a relation of adaptation with the medium that operates as its ecological niche, its reproduction necessarily occurs as a process of systemic duplication or multiplication of the ecological organism-niche unity that it integrates; that the worlds of doings that we generate as languaging beings in our conversations, explanations, reflections and theories are part of our ecological niche; and that we human beings as living beings that exist in languaging, are biological–cultural beings in which our cultural and our biological manners of existences can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Of the systemic consequences of these biological facts that we consider in this essay, we wish to mention two as the principal: that the diversification of manners of living produced in biological evolution is the result of differential survival in a changing medium through the conservation of adaptation, and not through competitive survival of the best; and that we in our living as languaging human beings are the epistemological fundament of all that we do and know as such. (shrink)

En la formación inicial docente, el estudio de la epistemología constituye una pieza fundamental para que los futuros profesores puedan filosofar sobre la realidad de los diversos contextos educativos y se pregunten cómo mejorarla desde los principios que rigen la investigación científica. De este modo, gracias al sustento epistemológico, los estudiantes de pedagogía pueden formarse como docentes investigadores capaces de analizar los cambios sociales propuestos por las múltiples realidades y conocer cómo se construye el conocimiento científico de una especialidad dada. (...) La finalidad de este trabajo, es presentar una reflexión filosófica-epistemológica sobre la imperiosa necesidad de desarrollar el conocimiento epistemológico en la formación inicial del profesorado de matemática e historia, considerando los fundamentos disciplinares, pedagógicos y cognitivos de dichas áreas. (shrink)

En el marco de estas conferencias conmemorativas del cuatricentenario del nacimiento de René Descartes, quisiera aproximarme al pensamiento de este gran filósofo francés, preguntando qué relación guarda con el escepticismo.No se trata de una pregunta del todo novedosa, pero su significación es indiscutible tanto para comprender el sentido como para discutir el alcance y las limitaciones del proyecto cartesiano de fundamentación del conocimiento.