This paper addresses the meaning and importance of Alexandre Morujão’s work for the reception of husserlian phenomenology in the Portuguese university. It gives also an overall view of his philosophical activity and interests, either as a university professor and researcher, or as a translator of philosophical works. The paper tracks also some of philosophical influences, sometimes hidden in the author’s published works, such as the influence of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassett. Regarding phenomenology (and especially husserlian phenomenology), the paper (...) shows that Alexandre Morujão’s work tried to highlight the following three main themes: 1) the radical character of phenomenological attitude, as the science of origins and as a unitary theoretical connection of propositions grounded in ultimate evidences· 2) the ensuing radical awareness of the phenomenological Ego, not only as a pole of identity but above all as a set of habits, i.e. a series of synthesis passively persisting in his own personal life; 3) the relation of transcendental subjectivity to the life-world, as the world of intuition and immediate experience, and the ultimate ground of meaning. (shrink)

The present text surveys and reevaluates the meaning and scope of Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy. The chapters reveal the most important aspects of his history such as the Neokantian training he went thru in Germany as well as his discovery of Husserl’s phenomenology around 1912. The work also covers his original contributions to philosophy namely vital and historical reason - and the cultural and educational mission he proposed to achieve. The Spanish – and to a certain extent the European – (...) circumstance was the milieu from which his work emerged but this does not limit Ortega’s scope. Rather, he believed that universal truths can only emerge from the particulars in which they are embedded. The publication in 2010 of a critical edition of his Complete Works opened worldwide access for many unpublished manuscripts, and some of his lectures. There is renewed interest among students and researchers in Ortega and this book uniquely delivers scholarship on his content in English. (shrink)

In this paper I will focus on Adolf Reinach’s work A Priori Foundations of Civil Law. Reinach, a member of the so-called “Circle of Göttingen”, formed around Edmund Husserl, sought in this work to apply phenomenology, understood as a doctrine of essences, to the problem of the constitution of legal norms. Surprisingly, however, his starting point is an analysis of the promise – whose legal status is weak, appearing only in some civil codes (as the Portuguese), in expressions such as (...) “promise of sale” – and the Verbindlichkeit it establishes between the one who makes the promise and the person who is promised something. Between promise and its fulfilment Reinach establishes a logical relation of cause and consequence, although he claims a different status for his legal formalism from that of Kant’s. In this paper I will address not only Reinach’s starting point, but also his claim to ground the Science of Law on objective legal formations, which can be intuited in the same way numbers or physical objects are intuited. (shrink)

This paper is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the main tenets of Husserl ‘s conception of formal logic, its different levels and its relationship with formal mathematics and formal ontology. It will, therefore, undertake a delimitation of the logical domain, in its autonomy, taking as its point of departure the presentation Husserl makes of this subject in his works of maturity, particularly in Forma/e und. transzendentale Logik. The second ·part shows why, for phenomenology, the analysis of objective (...) logical configurations has to be completed by a subjective analysis of the intentional achievements in which these configurations have their genesis. ln other words, we will try to ground such an autonomy in. the very nature of logical reason. Finally, the third and last part, following the text of the first two sections of Erfahrung und Urteil, adresses the roots of the logical-categorical activity in the ante-predicative passive experience. (shrink)

The paper offers a survey of the debate between Husserl and Paul Natorp that followed the publication, by the former, of Logical Investigations, in 1900-1901. Beyond a general agreement on the nature of psychologism and the ways to struggle against it, Husserl and Natorp disagreed, at the time, on the nature and function of consciousness. As Natorp defended, since his Introduction to Psychology of 1888, that the objective contents of consciousness are distinct from the I as the subjective (and unobjectifiable) (...) point of reference of them all, Husserl remarks the inner contradiction of these argument; as long as philosophy pretends to speak of such an I it has to be treated as an object, albeit of a special kind. In the Logical Investigations, nevertheless, Husserl stresses that it is not even necessary to admit the existence of such an I to explain the acts of consciousness. However, and that is the central theme of the paper, the later evolution of Husserl’s thought and finally his «transcendental turn» can only be fully comprehensible from the admission of a strong influence of the previous criticized thesis of Natorp. (shrink)

Delfim Santos was not a phenomenologist, but his interest concerning phenomenological issues was more than an accident. Familiar with the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, but above all strongly influenced by Nicolai Hartmann, Delfim Santos sees in Husserl’s phenomenology (mainly in Ideas I) the recognition of several kinds or regions of objectivity, each with its peculiar regional essence. At the same time, he looks at the theory of intentionality as acknowledging the necessary relation between any realm of reality that requests (...) thinking activity, and reality itself recognize by thought regarding its ultimate layers of sense. But in this paper, we also show that while addressing existential issues, Delfim Santos came to the careful study Heidegger’s Being and Time; man appears to him as a being determined in his terrestrial life-course by transcendence and, consequently, as in the case of the German philosopher, as belonging to a zone of reality inaccessible to traditional ontological categories. At last, we trace the marks of Merleau-Ponty (as well as Gestalt-psychology) in Delfim Santos’ pedagogical works, particularly in the way he characterizes human action and its relations to physical-chemical stimuli that act not as a cause, but as a motive or occasion for meaningful behavior. (shrink)

O presente ensaio procura compreender a concepção husserliana da história a partir de conceitos tais como Urstiftung, Wiedererinnerung e Nachstiftung. Tentar-se-á, não só perceber as razões subjacentes à concepção teleológica da história, presente no livro da Crise (e nos textos que Ihe andam associados) e na Conferência de Viena de 1935, bem como o tipo de concepção do tempo histórico que é correlativa dela, mas também, sobretudo, detectar a possibilidade - a partir dos textos mesmos de Husserl - de uma (...) outra concepção, mais apta a exprimir a novidade e a contingência. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the guidelines of a phenomenology of the social world in the wake of Alfred Schutz and José Ortega y Gasset. While the latter was not, for a long time, acknowledge as a phenomenologist, the former is a well-known critique of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity and of the possibility of grounding a community of transcendental Egos. Both, however, remained faithful to some basic phenomenological tenets, namely, that individual subjectivity has a relational character, the circumstances in which (...) men live are a part of their life, and life is characterized by its openness to the world. On this basis, they both carried out a phenomenological description of social existence, stressing its two main assumptions: 1) there are things that must be taken for granted; 2) habitualities, typical constructions, and systems of relevance are the primary ways of dealing with social events and other fellow citizens. In different ways, they both showed that the traditional objections opposed to phenomenology regarding its capacity to address mundane human existence stemmed from a misunderstanding of its basic tenets and intentions. (shrink)

This paper adresses both the phenomenological theories of intentionality, reduction, and passive synthesis, and Freud’s theory of the inconscious. Its main purpose is to develop some ideas that will allow an answer to the two following questions. First: is there anything in Husserl’s phenomenology that authorizes the foundation, from a philosophical point of view, of the main psychoanalytical concepts, or at least opens the possibility of thinking them, regardless their specific therapeutically value? Secondly: is there anyting in psychoanalysis that excedes (...) everything that both a phenomenology of the acts of consciousness and the traditional philosophical discourse say about the psyche, inducing philosophy to review its most firmly established ideas about this matter? (shrink)

Shadows are intriguing phenomena. They do not have mass or energy. So, they are unable to have some basic characteristics of the objects of which they are shadows: they cannot move by themselves and they cannot experience the same kind of changes. At first sight, any theory of perception can skip this optical phenomenon or look at it only as a side-effect. Actually, in order to be seen objects must be illuminated and one of the consequences of this is that (...) they project a shadow over the surrounding space. Is that all? In this paper I will argue that, from a phenomenological point of view (or at least from a Husserlian oriented phenomenology), shadows, with their specific hyletic data, must be considered as an element of the process of constitution of spatial-temporal objectivities. In other words, shadows no less than other predicates, like extension or hardness, although in a different manner, belong to the a priori structure of those objectivities. This means that their ontological status is quite different from that of fictitious objects or hallucinations. To show this I will draw mainly in Husserl’s Lesson Thing and Space, from 1907, and other unpublished texts during Husserl’s lifetime, like the second volume of the Ideas and the Lesson of 1925 on Psychological Phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper, I address Husserl’s theory of intentionality focusing on the problems of attention. I claim that without phenomenological reduction the specific phenomenological content of modalizations – in intentional acts – would be hard to explain. It would be impossible to understand why constant external factors (for instance, variations in the intensity of a stimulus) are accompanied by fluctuations in attention. It would also be impossible to understand the reasons why only the lived experience of causality – which I (...) sharply distinguish from causality in the psychophysical sense of the term – transforms attention into a factor that allows the understanding of a situation by the subject who lives that experience. I claim at last that only the genetic analysis of Husserl’s late Freiburg period, with its distinction between primary and secondary attention, gives a full account of the relation between the thematic object, focused on an intentional attentive act, and the horizon that surrounds the object and gives it its ultimate meaning. (shrink)

This paper focus on the phenomenological theories of perception and intuitive acts in general, and aims to show the relevance of William James’ concept of fringe to understand them. Although Husserl claims that James’ analysis were carried on without the phenomenological reduction and were thus biased by psychological and physiological prejudices, the paper stresses the high value of those analysis: James’ intended to remain faithful to the meaning of lived experience and avoided any considerations where descriptions could be entangled with (...) uncriticized philosophical theories (e.g. about the nature of brain states). The paper also aims to show that James’ importance for Husserl could be extended beyond the explanation of acts intending singular individuals to the acts intending universal objectivities and essences. (shrink)

O presente ensaio aborda o pensamento de Karl Leonhard Reinhold entre 1789 e 1792. Após um curto período em que apareceu como discípulo e divulgador da filosofia de Kant, Reinhold procurou conduzir o kantismo na direcção que lhe parecia a mais adequada para a resolução de dois problemas que Kant deixara em aberto: a clarificação da natureza da coisaemsi e o acabamento dos intentos sistemáticos da sua filosofia. Este último desiderato, Reinhold procurou resolvêlo por meio de uma teoria da faculdade (...) representativa. Este ensaio procura também mostrar de que forma a filosofia de Reinhold estimulou o surgimento das interpretações especulativas do pensamento kantiano, nos grandes sistemas do idealismo alemão. (shrink)

This paper addresses the meaning of Husserl’s idealism between the Ideas of 1913 and the Cartesian Meditations of 1931. In the work of 1913, the idealism stems from a distinction between consciousness and world based in a difference in the corresponding modes of giveness: consciousness gives itself absolutely and without profiles, and the world is given as an identity pole of a multiplicity of profiles. The fact that Husserl offered a second definition of his idealism in the same work proves (...) that he thought the first one was not sufficient to ground the kind of idealism he was committed to. According to this second definition, consciousness is an absolute being that nulla res indigent ad existendum, while the world has a relative and contingent being. In 1931 the Cartesian Meditations give the final clue to the understanding of these earlier definitions. Husserls sharply distinguishes his phenomenological idealism from the Berkeleyan and Kantian ones and defines it as a thorough explicitation of the Ego as a constitutive agency, so that the «world that really is» is «the world constituted by consciousness». (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to determine if there is still a place for God, in Husserl’s phenomenology, after the achievement of the phenomenological reduction. There are several different ways to address this issue. One can begin by asserting that there is no place in phenomenology, after bracketing the natural world of our lived experience, for any transcendence that is not, either the transcendence of the noema regarding the stream of consciousness in which it was generated, or the worldly (...) or mundane transcendence. One can also stress that the absolute consciousness that constitutes all kinds of objectivities – real or ideal – cannot tolerate at his side another absolute like the Christian God. Against these views, one can oppose the following: 1) in the intersubjective experience, the process of constitution of its specific noemata – the alter egos – goes beyond what seemed admissible in the standard intentional analysis of the process of constitution of worldly objectivities; 2) intentional consciousness shows an overall teleological structure that points beyond the simply given. In this paper, I try to explore the possibilities this opens in the core of intentional analysis to a phenomenological approach to God. (shrink)

O presente ensaio aborda o pensamento de Karl Leonhard Reinhold entre 1789 e 1792. Após um curto período em que apareceu como discípulo e divulgador da filosofia de Kant, Reinhold procurou conduzir o kantismo na direcção que lhe parecia a rnais adequada para a resolução de dois problemas que Kant deixara em aberto: a clarificação da natureza da coisaem-si e o acabamento dos intentos sistemáticos da sua filosofia. Este último desiderato, Reinhold procurou resolvê-lo por meio de uma teoria da faculdade (...) representativa. Este ensaio procura também mostrar de que forma a filosofia de Reinhold estimulou o surgimento das interpretações especulativas do pensamento kantiano, nos grandes sistemas do idealismo alemão. /// The present paper offers a survey of Karl Leonhard Reinhold's thought between 1789 and 1792. After a short period of time in which he emerged as a disciple and follower of Kant s philosophy, Reinhold tried to drive Kantianism in the direction that seemed to him the more appropriate to solve two problems left open by Kant: the clarification of the nature of the thing-in-itself and the final achievement of the systematic intents of his philosophy. This he tried to accomplish through the means of a theory of the faculty of representation. This paper tries also to show how Reinhold's philosophy stimulated the appearance of the speculative interpretations of Kant's thought in the great systems of the German Idealism. (shrink)

In his explanation of human action Alfred Schutz resorts mainly to Max Weber’s notion of subjective meaning and Husserl’s notion of type. For him subjective meaning seems more important to understand human action than the fact that social actors internalize normative values. Accordingly, validity has mainly to do with projects of action, with fulfilled (or unfulfilled) expectations and to the stock of knowledge available, along with the actor’s system of relevances. This raises two characteristic Schutzian problems: 1) the relation between (...) the subjective meaning of an action and the objective criteria (namely, the juridical and the ethical ones) according to which any action can be evaluated; 2) the relation between an actor and his fellow human beings that arguably share the same system of relevances and act in the same normative framework. In this paper, I intend to offer an analysis of these issues, resorting mainly to Schutz’s 1934 book Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt, and in some unpublished manuscripts. (shrink)

Este ensaio tem como objectivo apresentar, num primeiro momento, os resultados da análise intencional do processo de constituição dos objectos físicos, do corpo somático e da psique, tal como ela foi levada a cabo por Edmund Husserl. Na base desses resultados, será possível elaborar uma teoria da afecção que permitirá, num segundo momento, algumas aproximações com a Psicanálise de Freud e a teoria freudiana das pulsões. A especificidade do corpo somático relativamente a qualquer objecto físico – apesar de algumas semelhanças (...) no seu modo de doação – revela-se, acima de tudo, na experiência do corpo próprio e nas modalidades de vivência das afecções. Em particular, o enfraquecimento ou obscurecimento destas últimas colocam a questão da existência de um «inconsciente fenomenológico», cujas relações com o inconsciente de Freud, num terceiro e último momento do ensaio, se tentarão pôr em evidência. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity theory: the topics of time dilation, the search for invariants, and (...) the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will help to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of his philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

Chaque fois que nous "donnons forme" à quelque chose, cette représentation nous figure, par signes, l'objet évoqué, mais nous confirme également qu'il ne s'agit que d'un simulacre. D'où le besoin, à chaque époque, de créer du vivant pour pallier cette déception : tel est le sens du mythe de Pygmalion. Ce livre s'organise donc autour de deux pôles : d'un côté la nécessité de figurer, et de figurer l'acte même de la perception (voir le chapitre "Un oeil immense artificiel") ; (...) de l'autre, l'impératif de dépasser le signe. Il s'agit d'un défi radical, qui concerne l'avenir même des arts. C'est la raison de ce titre, A vif, qui témoigne d'un "coup d'oeil" : un regard et une incision pratiquée à vif dans l'objet, un désir de définitif qui ne caresse plus la forme, mais qui pénètre, met à nu, éviscère dans les paroles et dans les actes. Dedans et derrière l'oeil, comme dans l'un des plus impassibles traités d'anatomie du Cinquecento. Aujourd'hui, est-il encore vif notre oeil qui cherche le vivant? N'est-il pas lui-même défiguré par l'informe qui s'est logé en nous? Où est la pupilla viva qui illumine le Paradis et qui, de Dante à Baudelaire, a animé, de longs siècles durant, tant de quête mentale? Il faut remonter à ces origines, parcourir les espaces séculaires et sidéraux dans lesquels le cosmos était ordre, beauté, compréhension ; où, justement, il était nécessaire de "captiver les yeux pour avoir l'âme". Cet essai se voudrait une parabole déployée au fil de l'ardente soif humaine d'"exorbiter", de brûler la distance du point de vue, pour accéder, maintenant et à jamais, au vivant. (shrink)

Many of the computing systems programmed using Machine Learning are opaque: it is difficult to know why they do what they do or how they work. Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to develop analytic techniques that render opaque computing systems transparent, but lacks a normative framework with which to evaluate these techniques’ explanatory successes. The aim of the present discussion is to develop such a framework, paying particular attention to different stakeholders’ distinct explanatory requirements. Building on an analysis of “opacity” from (...) philosophy of science, this framework is modeled after accounts of explanation in cognitive science. The framework distinguishes between the explanation-seeking questions that are likely to be asked by different stakeholders, and specifies the general ways in which these questions should be answered so as to allow these stakeholders to perform their roles in the Machine Learning ecosystem. By applying the normative framework to recently developed techniques such as input heatmapping, feature-detector visualization, and diagnostic classification, it is possible to determine whether and to what extent techniques from Explainable Artificial Intelligence can be used to render opaque computing systems transparent and, thus, whether they can be used to solve the Black Box Problem. (shrink)

The received view of dynamical explanation is that dynamical cognitive science seeks to provide covering law explanations of cognitive phenomena. By analyzing three prominent examples of dynamicist research, I show that the received view is misleading: some dynamical explanations are mechanistic explanations, and in this way resemble computational and connectionist explanations. Interestingly, these dynamical explanations invoke the mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory to describe mechanisms far more complex and distributed than the ones typically considered by philosophers. Therefore, contemporary dynamicist (...) research reveals the need for a more sophisticated account of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

Models developed using machine learning are increasingly prevalent in scientific research. At the same time, these models are notoriously opaque. Explainable AI aims to mitigate the impact of opacity by rendering opaque models transparent. More than being just the solution to a problem, however, Explainable AI can also play an invaluable role in scientific exploration. This paper describes how post-hoc analytic techniques from Explainable AI can be used to refine target phenomena in medical science, to identify starting points for future (...) investigations of causal relationships, and to generate possible explanations of target phenomena in cognitive science. In this way, this paper describes how Explainable AI—over and above machine learning itself—contributes to the efficiency and scope of data-driven scientific research. (shrink)

To date, no definition of life has been unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. In frustration, some authors advocate alternatives to standard definitions. These include using a list of characteristic features, focusing on life’s effects, or categorizing biospheres rather than life itself; treating life as a fuzzy category, a process or a cluster of contingent properties; or advocating a ‘wait-and-see’ approach until other examples of life are created or discovered. But these skeptical, operational, and pluralistic approaches have intensified the debate, (...) rather than settled it. Given the failure of even these approaches, we advocate a new strategy. In this paper, we reverse the usual line of reasoning and argue that the “life problem” arises from thinking incorrectly about the nature of life. Scientists most often conceptualize life as a class or kind, with earthly life as a single instance of it. Instead, we advocate thinking about Earth’s Life as an individual, in the way that species are now thought to be. In this view, Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last universal common ancestor, and includes all its descendants. We can continue to use the category ‘life’ pragmatically to refer to similarities between various phenomena and Life. But the relevant similarities are a matter of interest and preference, not a matter of fact. The search for other life in the Universe, then, is merely a search for entities that resemble parts of Life in whatever sense astrobiologists find most appealing. This does not mean that the search for evolved complexity elsewhere in the universe or its creation in the lab are futile endeavors, but that debates over whether they count as ‘life’ are. Ironically, finally abandoning the concept ‘life’ may make our searches for evolved complexity more fruitful. We explain why. (shrink)

"Epistola a Memeceo, Maximas capitales, Sentencias vaticanas, fragmentos y testimonios; texto griego y traduccion": p. [87]-161.

This paper discusses the varieties of capitalism in transitional societies in Latin America and Central / Eastern Europe. The intended purpose of these transitions from semi-closed import-substituting economies in the first case and state socialist ones in the second was to institutionalize open-market economies. Twenty or thirty years later, there is a variety of types of capitalism in these countries, which I classify into three: open-market, neo-mercantilist, and anemic. The question for sociology is whether these quite different variants represent temporary (...) stages or distortions in the same process of transition or whether, on the contrary, they may institutionalize as discrete forms of peripheral capitalism. Neither standard “legacy” argu­ments nor institutionalist theories offer satisfactory answers to this question. The multiple modernities approach, on the other hand, is more appropriate as a theoretical perspective, but it has not produced yet specific propositions applicable to this question. My paper makes two claims. First, the successful transfer of institutions depends on the congruence between these institutions and the broader institutional framework of the recipient economies, a point not developed by institutionalist theories. I offer a hypothesis in this regard: Two critical nodes of congruence are the regulatory and extractive capacity of the state and the strength of civil society. Second, market capitalism (as liberal democracy as well) is a complex institution, and some of its components “travel” more easily across societies and institutional frameworks, and therefore are easier to institutionalize. This is the source of the hybrid variants. (shrink)

Bayesian reverse-engineering is a research strategy for developing three-level explanations of behavior and cognition. Starting from a computational-level analysis of behavior and cognition as optimal probabilistic inference, Bayesian reverse-engineers apply numerous tweaks and heuristics to formulate testable hypotheses at the algorithmic and implementational levels. In so doing, they exploit recent technological advances in Bayesian artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, but also consider established principles from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Although these tweaks and heuristics are highly pragmatic in character and (...) are often deployed unsystematically, Bayesian reverse-engineering avoids several important worries that have been raised about the explanatory credentials of Bayesian cognitive science: the worry that the lower levels of analysis are being ignored altogether; the challenge that the mathematical models being developed are unfalsifiable; and the charge that the terms ‘optimal’ and ‘rational’ have lost their customary normative force. But while Bayesian reverse-engineering is therefore a viable and productive research strategy, it is also no fool-proof recipe for explanatory success. (shrink)

The philosophical conception of mechanistic explanation is grounded on a limited number of canonical examples. These examples provide an overly narrow view of contemporary scientific practice, because they do not reflect the extent to which the heuristic strategies and descriptive practices that contribute to mechanistic explanation have evolved beyond the well-known methods of decomposition, localization, and pictorial representation. Recent examples from evolutionary robotics and network approaches to biology and neuroscience demonstrate the increasingly important role played by computer simulations and mathematical (...) representations in the epistemic practices of mechanism discovery and mechanism description. These examples also indicate that the scope of mechanistic explanation must be re-examined: With new and increasingly powerful methods of discovery and description comes the possibility of describing mechanisms far more complex than traditionally assumed. (shrink)

In a context of pervasive digitalization of the social world, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the field of education has undergone major changes with the development of digital practices and settings. However, the physical presence of the subjects and the body remain something primordial and irreplaceable in traditional educational processes. Thus, it is often assumed that virtuality is opposed to the corporeal reality of the subjects involved in teaching, learning and studying. In this paper we aim to critically (...) challenge this assumption by addressing the phenomenon of virtuality in a more original sense: as a fundamental dimension of corporeality itself. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights, we argue that the experience of the virtual is inherently embodied and fully real. We understand corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena. At the same time, this leads us to rethink the digital as only one possible medium in which virtuality can appear as inherent to embodied experience. We develop our phenomenological approach in three instances. First, we question and bracket two common assumptions about corporeality. From our critical perspective, assumptions about a disembodied digitality and a devirtualized corporeality represent extremes within which educational discourses currently move. Second, we address the inherent virtuality of embodied experience. We outline the heuristic concept of the virtual body to describe corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena that encompass extension, intercorporeality and intermediality. Finally, we make some remarks on the relationships of corporeality and virtuality considering the challenges of digital education. (shrink)

This chapter subsumes David Marr’s levels of analysis account of explanation in cognitive science under the framework of mechanistic explanation: Answering the questions that define each one of Marr’s three levels is tantamount to describing the component parts and operations of mechanisms, as well as their organization, behavior, and environmental context. By explicating these questions and showing how they are answered in several different cognitive science research programs, this chapter resolves some of the ambiguities that remain in Marr’s account, and (...) shows that many different areas and traditions of cognitive scientific research can be unified under the mechanistic framework. (shrink)