Olivera Cadahia, Luciana; Carrasco-Conde, Ana. Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse. Herder. 399 páginas.

El propósito de este artículo, reside en mostrar y analizar, las metáforas más notables con las cuales el maestro dominico de vida espiritual Eckhart, transmite la reunión del alma humana creada y separada (existente) del Dios Creador, con lo Uno, o unidad esencial originaria, definida en su totalidad como Deidad. La atención se centra en alguno de sus sermones, donde se explican las alegorías del alma humana, la divinidad y la fusión o encuentro de ambas en la Deidad. Se trata (...) de un recorrido interpretativo por elementos centrales y alegóricos de su mística nihilista y de su teología negativa, donde la única y última conclusión sostenible es que “Todo se hace Nada”. (shrink)

Las islas Yaeyama, localizadas al suroeste del archipiélago de Ryukyu, Japón, presentan una gran variedad de rituales y festividades dedicados a las deidades (kami) de los sitios sagrados comunales (utaki/On). Estos eventos anuales, vinculados con el ciclo agrícola, son realizados con base en organizaciones sociales específicas, y tienen la finalidad de agradecer por los cultivos, pedir por la salud, y asegurar la fertilidad para el año venidero. A través de estos actos, se desdoblan una serie de consideraciones y principios vinculados (...) a una visión del mundo y un sistema de creencias, los cuales son percibidos a través de concepciones del espacio y el tiempo, así como formas simbólicas expresadas en la composición del sitio sagrado. (shrink)

This book defends two main ideas: there is a need and a market for better specialised dictionaries for learners; we need a sound theoretical framework for coping with known and unknown challenges in the realm of pedagogical specialised lexicography. Both themes were Enrique Alcaraz's driving force during his life. Hence, his memory deserves this book that has been written by leading scholars in the field? they have compiled more than 70 dictionaries and published hundreds of books and articles on the (...) topics here discussed? although only two of them knew him in person. (shrink)

Este texto investiga las condiciones del lugar propio de la libertad según la propuesta kantiana. Esa libertad está vinculada al ámbito práctico, en el que las máximas de la acción parecen dirigirse a la consecución de la felicidad. Simultáneamente la razón se reconoce subordinada a ciertas leyes morales. ¿Dónde situar la libertad? ¿En las elecciones del mundo sensible o en el sometimiento a la legalidad moral? La posible solución, si admitimos la segunda propuesta, pasa por reconocer el origen de la (...) legalidad en la razón que se reconoce a ella sometida, por lo que esa razón adquiere un papel eminentemente activo. Based on the conditions of Kantian Theory of Knowledge, this paper investigates the proper place of freedom, considered from the practical point of view in which maxims try to achieve happiness. In the same way, reason recognize the necessary respect for the moral law. Where must freedom be placed? In the elections in the world of sense or in the submit to that law? Assumption of the second propos- al implies to set up the origin of morality in the reason that recognize itself subordinate to moral legislation and it that way becomes an active role in the establishment of morality. (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)

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)

Drawing upon a distinction between epistemically and metaphysically motivated notions of a concept, I consider the insurmountable problems of theories that appeal to our epistemic capacities to address the problem of the nature of concepts satisfactorily. Prominent theories of concepts hold that primitive concepts must have internal structure if they are to account for the explanatory functions that cognitive scientists have attributed to such constructs as prototypes, exemplars, and theories. Vindicating the role of non-experimental philosophy in the critical examination of (...) empirical theories, I argue that the explanatory effectiveness of those constructs is orthogonal to an argument concerning the structure of primitive concepts. Conceptual atomism provides an alternative approach to individuating primitive concepts the precise formulation of which has yet to be worked out. Despite its unpopularity, the atomist alternative is still in a better position to face the question of what concepts are than its competitors. (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)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

Based on the conditions of Kantian Theory of Knowledge, this paper investigates the proper place of freedom, considered from the practical point of view in which maxims try to achieve happiness. In the same way, reason recognize the necessary respect for the moral law. Where must freedom be placed? In the elections in the world of sense or in the submit to that law? Assumption of the second propos- al implies to set up the origin of morality in the reason (...) that recognize itself subordinate to moral legislation and it that way becomes an active role in the establishment of morality. (shrink)

En este trabajo se reflexiona en torno al concepto de _usucapio_ del §33 de la _Metafísica de las costumbres_. Para ello se piensan las condiciones y relación entre la posesión sensible y de la posesión inteligible o jurídica sin caer en una mera implicación causal. La posibilidad de uso de los objetos como garantía de la libertad legitimaría el principio de la usucapio, de la que, además, dice Kant que las dificultades que entraña la convierten en un concepto contradictorio.

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la recepción de la obra de Tucídides a principios del siglo XXI en el contexto de la intervención militar estadounidense en Irak y la discusión sobre el carácter imperial de Estados Unidos. Se observa un empleo de la historia de la Atenas clásica y de su imperio, en pos de incidir en los debates políticos, en donde se le asigna al pasado las funciones de “legitimación” y “advertencia”. Se concluye que el imperio ateniense (...) configuró un modelo alternativo de imperio, enunciado como hegemonía, para aquellos académicos y analistas reacios a comparar a los Estados Unidos con el modelo romano. (shrink)

This paper analyses the role of remorse and apology in international criminal trials by juxtaposing two prominent cases of convicted war criminals Biljana Plavšić and Esad Landžo. Plavšić was the first and only Bosnian Serb political leader to plead guilty before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Her acknowledgement of guilt and purported remorse expressed during her ICTY proceedings was celebrated as a milestone for both the ICTY and the Balkans. However, she later retracted her remorse while serving (...) her prison sentence. Landžo was a guard at the notorious Čelebići detention camp and did not acknowledge his guilt publicly during his ICTY trial. Seven years after his release from prison, Landžo personally confronted survivors and apologised to them. Through comparison of these two widely different cases, we illustrate varying roles criminal trials can play in offender’s reflection on his/her crimes and how relevance and resonance of war criminal’s remorse in and outside of the courtroom depend on how remorse is expressed and to whom. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

In the last decades, Hegel’s mature political philosophy has come to be associated with some form of social or welfare liberalism. Challenging this line of interpretation, this study aims to show that his work harbours a more ambitious philosophical programme, grounded in a different vision of the modern state. However, this programme is only partly spelled out in the Philosophy of Right. While the conceptual logic that guides Hegel’s dialectical progression points beyond the modern liberal standpoint, some of his concrete (...) political choices are more conservative, and some are even opposed to the change of perspective I claim to be at stake in his work. In response to this tension, I undertake a systematic reconstruction of his social and political views, divided into two main parts. First, I highlight the critical dimension I take to be explicitly present in the Philosophy of Right but neglected or misrepresented in the secondary literature. I argue that the different stages of Hegel’s progression are not merely added to one another, but qualitatively transformed, and hence that his account of the state should not be read as a mere complement to the stage of civil society, but as a direct challenge to its underlying logic. Second, I draw the political and economic conclusions implicit in this line of approach. Shifting the focus from Hegel’s interpreters to Hegel himself, I show that the conscious pursuit of the common good he regards as essential to a rational state is not compatible with a capitalist production system nor with the constitutional monarchy he proposes. A true dialectical synthesis of the particular interests of individuals and the general interests of society entails nothing less than a comprehensive democratization of the economic and the political spheres. And the need for this transformation holds the key to Hegel’s enduring political relevance. (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)

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)

This paper presents two projects concerned with the application of natural language processing technology for improving communication between Public Administration and citizens. The first project, GIST,is concerned with automatic multilingual generation of instructional texts for form-filling. The second project, TAMIC, aims at providing an interface for interactive access to information, centered on natural language processing and supposed to be used by the clerk but with the active participation of the citizen.

Este trabajo indaga sobre el desarrollo de los estudios helénicos en la ciudad de Paraná durante las décadas de 1960 y 1970. Una etapa caracterizada por la presencia en la capital entrerriana de varios individuos que de una u otra manera contribuyeron a fomentar el estudio y la enseñanza de la cultura griega clásica. En esa línea, se exploran aquí las trayectorias intelectuales y redes académicas de los mencionados personajes. Con énfasis en las figuras de Osvaldo Melella y Vicente Visñovezky, (...) para el campo de la Literatura, Juan Carlos Wirth para el de Historia, y Celia Ortiz de Montoya para Filosofía. Por último, la investigación procura dar respuesta a los motivos que llevaron a una pérdida de interés por los estudios clásicos en los sectores académicos en las décadas de 1980 y 1990. (shrink)

En este artículo recorro algunas de las páginas de la obra kantiana que introducen la problemática de los otros seres racionales, me centro para ello en Historia universal de la naturaleza y Teoría del cielo, la Fundamentación de la metafísica de las costumbres y la Antropología en sentido pragmático. Mi propuesta es que la hipótesis de la existencia de otras formas de racionalidad, que en algunos textos Kant sitúa en otros planetas, nos proporciona una perspectiva necesaria para poder dar alguna (...) respuesta a la cuestión ¿qué es el ser humano? Si bien Kant aborda en textos muy relevantes la forma de tener por verdad la existencia de tales seres, lo realmente importante es el ser capaces de asumir esa perspectiva para reflexionar en torno a nuestra racionalidad. (shrink)

En el presente artículo analizaremos las patenas de vidrio y vidriadas decoradas con la imagen de Cristo, san Pedro y san Pablo, así como el programa iconográfico de la Traditio Legis. A pesar de que no son muy numerosas en España, sí contamos con el importante testimonio de Cástulo o de la Almoina. El análisis de sus formas intrínsecas nos aporta una valiosa información iconográfica, que sería el ante sala del Pantocrator representado en el arte Románico en siglos posteriores.

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)

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his iconic imitation game, calling it a ‘test’, an ‘experiment’, and the ‘the only really satisfactory support’ for his view that machines can think. Following Turing’s rhetoric, the ‘Turing test’ has been widely received as a kind of crucial experiment to determine machine intelligence. In later sources, however, Turing showed a milder attitude towards what he called his ‘imitation tests’. In 1948, Turing referred to the persuasive power of ‘the actual production of machines’ rather than (...) that of a controlled experiment. Observing this, I propose to distinguish the logical structure from the rhetoric of Turing’s argument. I argue that Turing’s proposal of a crucial experiment may have been a concession to meet the standards of his interlocutors more than his own, while his construction of machine intelligence rather reveals a method of successive idealizations and exploratory experiments. I will draw a parallel with Galileo’s construction of idealized fall in a void and the historiographical controversies over the role of experiment in Galilean science. I suggest that Turing, like Galileo, relied on certain kinds of experiment, but also on rhetoric and propaganda to inspire further research that could lead to convincing scientific and technological progress. (shrink)

We conducted a scoping review to map and critically examine the knowledge, perceptions and utilization of generics and biosimilars, among physicians, pharmacists, patients, the general population, and other stakeholders from LAC.

Vítima, quer do contexto, quer da sua recepção, a obra de Eric Weil (1904-1977), editada entre os anos 50 e 70 do século passado, não tem obtido o devido acolhimento pela comunidade filosófica. Se as interpretações magistrais de Kant (Problèmes kantiens. Paris: Vrin, 1970) e de Hegel (Hegel et l’état. Paris; Vrin, 1950) constituem referências cada vez mais frequentes nos trabalhos da especialidade (os quais persistem, contudo, em ignorar os importantes artigos sobre a filosofia dos dois autor...

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)

This article describes a research project in which a qualitative research was carried out consisting of 24 semi-structured interviews and a subsequent data analysis using the MAXQDA software in order to investigate a particular dimorphic emotional expression: tears of joy (TOJ). The working hypothesis is that TOJ are not only an atypical expression due to a “super joy,” or that they are only an attempt by the organism to self-regulate the excess of joyful emotion through the expression of the opposite (...) emotion (sadness), but that it is an emotional experience in its own right—not entirely overlapping with joy—with a specific adaptive function. Through the interviews, conducted in a cross-cultural context (mainly in India and Japan), we explored the following possibility: what if the adaptive function of crying for joy were to signal, to those experiencing it, the meaning of their life; the most important direction given to their existence? The material collected provided positive support for this interpretation. (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)

Este volume oferece o primeiro conjunto de artigos exclusivamente dedicados à noção de «retomada», tal como a entendeu Eric Weil (1904-1977), escritos por investigadores oriundos de Portugal, França, Brasil, Itália, Roménia, Burkina Faso e Chile. Nascido na Alemanha, Eric Weil foi discípulo de Ernst Cassirer que o orien­tou no estudo dos filósofos do Renascimento, como Pietro Pomponazzi e Marsílio Ficino. Naturalizado francês, após ter sido obrigado a abandonar o país de origem, contra o qual...

Com este conjunto de treze artigos introdutórios, pretende-se apontar e, parcialmente, preencher uma lacuna significativa nos estudos sobre a Filosofia em Portugal e no Brasil. Com efeito, uma investigação bibliográfica tornará facilmente manifesto que a Filosofia do Conhecimento, enquanto tal, com os seus problemas específicos e as suas categorias próprias, não tem figurado, com uma assiduidade à medida da sua representatividade, na agenda daqueles que se dedicam à interpretação das proposta...

> 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)

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)