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)

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)

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)

Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...) and affective) dispositions. Frames thereby guide how we interpret, respond to, and navigate the world. I show that these perspectives are epistemically powerful and indispensable. I argue that flawed perspectives, and the distorting frames that produce them, are deeply pernicious and I examine their relationship to oppression. (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)

Sophists and rhetoricians like Gorgias are often accused of disregarding truth and rationality: their speeches seem to aim only at effective persuasion, and be constrained by nothing but persuasiveness itself. In his extant texts Gorgias claims that language does not represent external objects or communicate internal states, but merely generates behavioural responses in people. It has been argued that this perspective erodes the possibility of rationally assessing speeches by making persuasiveness the only norm, and persuasive power the only virtue, of (...) speech. Against this view, I show how Gorgias’ texts support a robust normativity of language that goes well beyond persuasion while remaining non-representational. Gorgias’ claims that a speech can be persuasive and false, or true and unpersuasive, reveal pragmatic, epistemic, and agonistic constraints on the validity of speech that are neither representational nor reducible to sheer persuasiveness. (shrink)

El texto se propone exponer críticamente algunos contenidos fundamentales del concepto de totalidad y su importancia para el pensamiento dialéctico. Partiendo de una crítica de la concepción hegeliana de totalidad, busca sin embargo defender este concepto, aunque reconstruido desde un giro materialista a partir de la filosofía desarrollada por Theodor W. Adorno. El concepto de totalidad cambiaría su significado y función a partir de la crítica materialista, pasando de la idea de un todo determinado y definitivo, a un criterio epistemológico (...) y normativo para oponerse con efectividad a la imposición de una totalidad social. (shrink)

El estudio reflexiona sobre la relación entre la mística y la política a través del discurso de una serie de pensadoras contemporáneas que comprometieron su vida con la causa de los oprimidos y de las víctimas. Dorothy Day, Etty Hillesum, María Skobtsov, Edith Stein, Simone Weil y María Zambrano, con su escritura humanizadora y de resistente, nos proporcionan un mensaje con el que construir un pensamiento compasivo y poético para iluminar un mundo desencantado.

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

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)

The aim of this article is to explore how metaphor is mobilized to frame and describe the lived experience of dementia in a corpus of illness narratives compiled from 10 blogs initiated and maintained by individuals diagnosed with early-onset dementia. The article is set against the background of contemporary healthcare practices and discourse around chronic illness and focuses on the metaphors that patients use to communicate about their dementia experience in relation to three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness, (...) which are essential for human well-being and are heavily challenged in complex medical situations. Results are discussed in terms of the framing metaphors provide of the emotional, psychological impact of dementia and their implications for patient-centered care. This study expands prior work by researching metaphors used for a condition that has been scarcely explored from this point of view and by focusing on the patient’s perspective exclusively. (shrink)

Is medicalization always harmful? When does medicine overstep its proper boundaries? The aim of this article is to outline the pragmatic criteria for distinguishing between medicalization and over-medicalization. The consequences of considering a phenomenon to be a medical problem may take radically different forms depending on whether the problem in question is correctly or incorrectly perceived as a medical issue. Neither indiscriminate acceptance of medicalization of subsequent areas of human existence, nor criticizing new medicalization cases just because they are medicalization (...) can be justified. The article: (i) identifies various consequences of both well-founded medicalization and over-medicalization; (ii) demonstrates that the issue of defining appropriate limits of medicine cannot be solved by creating an optimum model of health; (iii) proposes four guiding questions to help distinguish medicalization from over-medicalization. The article should foster a normative analysis of the phenomenon of medicalization and contribute to the bioethical reflection on the boundaries of medicine. (shrink)

Essays on the role of the body in self-consciousness, showing that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness. These essays explore how the rich and sophisticated forms of self-consciousness with which we are most familiar—as philosophers, psychologists, and as ordinary, reflective individuals—depend on a complex underpinning that has been largely invisible to students of the self and self-consciousness. José Luis Bermúdez, extending the insights of his groundbreaking 1998 book, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness, argues (...) that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness, and that these more primitive forms of self-consciousness persist in ways that frame self-conscious thought. They extend throughout the animal kingdom, and some are present in newborn human infants. Bermúdez makes the case that these primitive forms of self-awareness can indeed be described as forms of self-consciousness, arguing that they share certain structural and epistemological features with full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness. He offers accounts of certain important classes of states of nonconceptual content, including the self-specifying dimension of visual perception and the content of bodily awareness, considering how they represent the self. And he explores the general role of nonconceptual self-consciousness in our cognitive and affective lives, examining in several essays the relation between nonconceptual awareness of our bodies and what has been called our “sense of ownership” for our own bodies. (shrink)

In the present paper we would like to investigate the concept of mythothought as defined by two philosophers, Ernst Cassirer and Lucian Blaga, and the way in which the term may be applied to a chosen corpus of poetry from Romania, Wales and Ireland.

“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.

Today, scientific research is seen as being largely dominated by the short-term, and by the constant need to gain legitimacy in the eyes of society. This text analyzes the existing literature on the concept of future and seeks to explore some of the main meanings it has for scientists. Based on interviews with researchers working on different projects in Portuguese research centers, the authors scrutinize some of the implications of the recurrent reference to the future in their research agendas. Starting (...) with a review of the literature on the relations between science, time, and future, they show that nowadays, scientists experience some difficulty when dealing with the long-term in science, mostly due to the pressure of the market on innovation. In view of their profiles and discourses, what must be stressed are the risks and challenges playing out in the conflict between the short and the long term in scientific research. (shrink)

Today, scientific research is seen as being largely dominated by the short-term, and by the constant need to gain legitimacy in the eyes of society. This text analyzes the existing literature on the concept of future and seeks to explore some of the main meanings it has for scientists. Based on interviews with researchers working on different projects in Portuguese research centers, the authors scrutinize some of the implications of the recurrent reference to the future in their research agendas. Starting (...) with a review of the literature on the relations between science, time, and future, they show that nowadays, scientists experience some difficulty when dealing with the long-term in science, mostly due to the pressure of the market on innovation. In view of their profiles and discourses, what must be stressed are the risks and challenges playing out in the conflict between the short and the long term in scientific research. (shrink)

An eye-tracking while listening study based on the blank screen paradigm was conducted to investigate the processing of literal and metaphorical verbs of motion. The study was based on two assumpti...