This paper analyses the available eyewitness accounts and documents relating to the young Francisco Sanchez’s sojourn in Italy with the aim of highlighting the influence of this experience on his education and on his particular form of scepticism. The issue of the certainty of geometry, addressed in his letter to Clavio, is an example of a theme that the Portuguese philosopher must have picked up from a typical debate in Italian academic circles at that time. Even more enlightening for (...) an exact understanding of his Quod nihil scitur, however, are the contemporary discussions on the epistemological status of medicine and on the reliability of traditional Galenic pathology. They show that, instead of being the expression of a radical lack of confidence in every form of knowledge, nihil sciri denotes simply a rejection of the perfect cognition of things and a receptiveness towards a model of ‘weaker’ knowledge, inspired precisely by the exercise of medical practice. (shrink)

What is the self? Does it exist? If it does exist, what is it like? It's not clear that we even know what we're asking about when we ask these large, metaphysical questions. The idea of the self comes very naturally to us, and it seems rather important, but it's also extremely puzzling. As for the word "self"--it's been taken in so many different ways that it seems that you can mean more or less what you like by it and (...) come up with almost any answer. Galen Strawson proposes to approach the (seeming) problem of the self by starting from the thing that makes it seem there is a problem in the first place: our experience of the self, our experience of having or being a self, a hidden, inner mental presence or locus of consciousness. He argues that we should consider the phenomenology (experience) of the self before we attempt its metaphysics (its existence and nature). And when we have considered what it's like for human beings (assuming we can generalize about ourselves), we need to consider what it might be like for other possible creatures: what's the very least that might count as experience of oneself as a self? This, he proposes, will give us a good idea of what we ought to be looking for when we go on to ask whether there is such a thing-an idea worth following wherever it leads. It leads Strawson to conclude that selves, inner subjects of experience, do indeed exist. But they bear little resemblance to traditional conceptions of the self. (shrink)

This lucid book is the first to be wholly dedicated to Hume's theory of personal identity, and presents a bold new interpretation which bears directly on ...

The sense of the self -- A fallacy of our age -- I have no future -- Luck swallows everything -- You cannot make yourself the way you are -- The silliest claim -- Real naturalism -- The unstoried life -- Two years' time.

The Greek word mētis (μῆτις) traditionally refers to a particular form of wily intelligence associated with the arts of deception (dolos) and the knowledge of tricks (kerdē), subterfuges, and traps. Mētis evokes innovative and ground-breaking solutions, based on the capability to understand, anticipate, and possibly violate the others’ expectations. Most importantly, mētis presupposes practical wisdom, or prudence (phrόnesis), a dispositional quality that underpins all the virtues that deserve to be cultivated by sportspersons and that is pivotal to perfect sportspersons’ moral (...) character. Not only is prudence required to apply mētis profitably for winning a game, but it is also indispensable to perform consistently with the game’s norms—cognizant of sport values. This analysis of mētis is key to illuminate the embodied dimension of tactical and moral reasoning in contemporary sport practice. In this paper, we first argue that the strategic effectiveness of mētis proves that not only sensorimotor control but also higher forms of intelligence, like strategic reasoning, are embodied and inform skilful performance; second, we argue that relying on mētis is necessary not only to interpret the rules of the game in one’s own favor but also to respect the shared values that these rules uphold in the sport practice. (shrink)

In seiner Auseinandersetzung mit Eberhard behauptet Kant, Kritizismus sei die eigentliche Apologie von Leibniz. Diese Äußerung darf nicht einfach als sarkastisch abgetan werden. Kant kann dies insofern ernsthaft denken und behaupten, da für ihn die Transzendentalphilosophie die wesentliche philosophische Bedeutung des leibnizschen Gedankens aufhebt, liegt doch schon in Leibniz ein kritizistischer Kern, welcher wiedergewonnen werden kann. Man sieht hier nur einen Aspekt dieser historischen Transformation von Leibniz im kantischen Gedanken, und zwar: die explizite Behauptung Kants, das Konzept der prästabilierten Harmonie (...) werde in der Theorie der reflektierenden Urteilskraft und im Begriff der Zweckmäßigkeit kritisch aufgehoben. Dazu muss man jedoch vorher den Grundzug des kritischen Unterschieds zwischen Kant und der leibniz-wolffschen Philosophie durch eine Diskussion über die Bedeutung des Begriffs des Transzendentalen erläutern. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the applications of the interbehavioral model to the system of educational psychology. Some of its foundations are exposed, its application as a logic of theoretical construction, culminating with some characteristics of its technological application, in continuity with the theory of behavior, in the science of psychology. The technological model of didactic discourse is rescued, and its current and potential contributions in the educational field are valued. It is concluded that there (...) is significant potential for the development of interbehavioral thinking in the field of psychology, but researchers need more interest in it. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: the moralistic fallacy. The moralistic fallacy occurs when one concludes that something is a particular way because it should or ought to be that way. Alternatively, this fallacy occurs when one concludes that something cannot be a particular way because it should not or ought not be that way. The moralistic fallacy is often described as the reverse of the is/ought fallacy, wherein one reasons fallaciously that because things (...) are a particular way, they ought to be that way. Variations of the moralistic fallacy occur whenever any normative claim is used to justify a factual claim about the world, and so the pattern of fallacious reason central to the moralistic fallacy can also be found in legal reasoning, prudential reasoning, or reasoning regarding proper etiquette, aesthetics, humor, or appropriate emotional responses. (shrink)

This book introduces readers to central concepts and ideas in Mexican philosophy. Couched in stories and anecdotes from the author's life, the book offers these concepts and ideas as orientations, recommendations, or exhortation for navigating today's world. The structure and the style of the book aims at making these accessible to both specialists and non-specialist or anyone who may have had some experience with contemporary forms of marginalization, alienation, objectification, or any of the various forms of dread and accidentality familiar (...) to modern life. This, the author thinks, is most of us. Narrowing down the scope of the tradition, the author draws from the history of Mexican philosophy in the 20th century, as it is at this time that Mexican philosophy comes into its own. The book begins with two short introductions, one is an introduction philosophy in Mexico, the other to Mexican philosophy. Here, readers are introduced to Alfonso de la Veracruz, who offered the first philosophy course in the Americas in 1540 in the monastery of a small town in Michoacán, Mexico. From there, it presents four main themes from Mexican philosophy that recur in the philosophical literature. The remainder of the book serves as a "guide" for living a better, more fulfilling life. The main characters in what the author considers an uncontroversial retelling of Mexican philosophy are Antonio Caso, Samuel Ramos, Emilio Uranga, Leopoldo Zea, Jorge Portilla, Rosario Castellanos, Elsa Cecilia Frost, and, of course, persons in the author's own life. (shrink)

En el vórtice del tiempo -- La digestión del conocimiento -- De la noble virtud -- Retrodicción del futuro -- Taki Onqoy -- Guernica -- Máximas e interludios -- De retorno al crepúsculo -- Bitácora.

Contents: Introduction, Bibliography On the Sects for Beginners An Outline of Empiricism On Medical Experience Index of the Persons Mentioned in the Texts Index of the Subjects Mentioned in the Texts.

Galen dominated medicaltheory and practice until the scientific revolution and beyond, through the medieval Schools, and through his influence on Muslim medicine.This is the first major selection of Galen's work in English.

This chapter focuses on four areas Aristotle considered when determining what something really was, namely, essence, predicates, judgments, and potentials. Understanding and employing these concepts in our own concept of monster will help us avoid our currently tainted love of Supernatural. According to Aristotle, there are essential and accidental aspects of being. In the simplest terms, the essential aspects are the things that could not change about something, while the accidental aspects are things that could change. Aristotle's third taxonomy of (...) being is found in judgments of truth and falsity about a thing. These judgments can apply to questions of essence, accident, or any of the categories. Any question about the essential nature of monsters requires an answer that applies to all monsters. (shrink)

According to Christian theology, after being properly judged, bad souls are damned to Hell for eternity after being judged. Supernatural differs in that some of the souls in Hell weren't even judged, they just made very bad deals. But regardless of whether you think the mythos of Supernatural is even correct on this point, the fact that we recognize these are very bad deals should tell us something about the choices that land us in Hell. Our attitudes toward the experience (...) of punishment highlight an interesting feature about Hell in Supernatural—a person in Hell might not be there because they lived a bad life, but because they made a really bad deal with a demon. There is a problem with justifying Hell's existence this way, which our “deals with demons” examples from Supernatural make clear. Without a doubt, Hell is fundamental to Supernatural, but is definitely not a justifiable punishment. (shrink)

Una pandemia ha golpeado a millones de familias en el mundo. Este problema global parecía que cuestionaba todas nuestras formas de vida. No obstante, los malos hábitos y las viejas estructuras corruptas comenzaron a aprovecharse de esta situación. Y la corrupción volvió a la escena, en la sobrevaloración de medicamentos o equipos médicos, en la mala repartición de víveres o de dinero, en el cobro de dinero por ingreso a una unidad de cuidado intensivo, aprovecharse de su posición política para (...) vacunarse antes, etc. ¿Se ha normalizado la corrupción en la vida nacional? (shrink)

Introduction -- A default position -- Experience -- The character of experience -- Understanding-experience -- A note about dispositional mental states -- Purely experiential content -- An account of four seconds of thought -- Questions -- The mental and the nonmental -- The mental and the publicly observable -- The mental and the behavioral -- Neobehaviorism and reductionism -- Naturalism in the philosophy of mind -- Conclusion: The three questions -- Agnostic materialism, part 1 -- Monism -- The linguistic argument (...) -- Materialism and monism -- A comment on reduction -- The impossibility of an objective phenomenology -- Asymmetry and reduction -- Equal-status monism -- Panpsychism -- The inescapability of metaphysics -- Agnostic materialism, part 2 -- Ignorance -- Sensory spaces -- Experience, explanation, and theoretical integration -- The hard part of the mind-body problem -- Neutral monism and agnostic monism -- A comment on eliminativism, instrumentalism, and so on -- Mentalism, idealism, and immaterialism -- Mentalism -- Strict or pure process idealism -- Active-principle idealism -- Stuff idealism -- Immaterialism -- The positions restated -- The dualist options -- Frege's thesis -- Objections to pure process idealism -- The problem of mental dispositions -- Mental -- Shared abilities -- The sorting ability -- The definition of mental being -- Mental phenomena -- The view that all mental phenomena are experiential phenomena -- Natural intentionality -- E/c intentionality -- The experienceless -- Intentionality and abstract and nonexistent objects -- Experience, purely experiential content, and n/c intentionality -- Concepts in nature -- Intentionality and experience -- Summary with problem -- Pain and pain -- The neo-behaviorist view -- A linguistic argument for the necessary connection between pain and behavior -- A challenge -- The Sirians -- N.N. Novel -- An objection to the Sirians -- The Betelgeuzians -- The point of the Sirians -- Functionalism, naturalism, and realism about pain -- Unpleasantness and qualitative character -- The weather watchers -- The rooting story -- What is it like to be a weather watcher? -- The aptitudes of mental states -- The argument from the conditions for possessing the concept of space -- The argument from the conditions for language ability -- The argument from the nature of desire -- Desire and affect -- The argument from the phenomenology of desire -- Behavior -- A hopeless definition -- Difficulties -- Other-observability -- Neo-behaviorism -- The concept of mind. (shrink)

I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists. . . . We try to make all of our material (...) cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional char- acter . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman). (shrink)

Este artículo está motivado por el problema de la responsabilidad colectiva frente a las acciones cometidas por nuestros antepasados y por la pregunta acerca de la legitimidad de las demandas de perdón. Acudiendo al universo conceptual heredado de Hannah Arendt, en este texto se aboga por el ejercicio de la capacidad de juicio como detonante tanto de la demanda de perdón como de la responsabilidad colectiva. El perdón se presenta así no solo como una categoría moral sino fundamentalmente política, imprescindible (...) para reconciliarse con lo acontecido y mirar al futuro con esperanza. (shrink)

Where we begin: from Mennonite to Manhattan -- How we know: the quest for certainty -- What there is: the nature of existence -- What's divine: the experience of God -- Who we are: the human challenge -- Keeping the faith: the necessity of religion -- What we receive: the discipline of gratitude -- How we should live: the source of ethics -- What we owe: an ethic of gratitude -- When we're satisfied: ultimate meaning.

On the whole, we continue to believe firmly both that we have free will and that we are morally responsible for what we do. Here, the author argues that there is a fundamental sense in which there is no such thing as free will or true moral responsibility (as ordinarily understood). Devoting the main body of his book to an attempt to explain why we continue to believe as we do, Strawson examines various aspects of the "cognitive phenomenology" of freedom--the (...) nature, causes, and consequences of our deep commitment to belief in freedom. (shrink)

Method of Medicine, a systematic and comprehensive account of the principles of treating injury and disease and one of Galen's greatest and most influential works.

Previous studies on body ownership illusions have shown that under certain multimodal conditions, healthy people can experience artificial body-parts as if they were part of their own body, with direct physiological consequences for the real limb that gets ‘substituted’. In this study we wanted to assess (a) whether healthy people can experience ‘missing’ a body-part through illusory ownership of an amputated virtual body, and (b) whether this would cause corticospinal excitability changes in muscles associated with the ‘missing’ body-part. Forty right-handed (...) participants saw a virtual body from a first person perspective but for half of them the virtual body was missing a part of its right arm. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied before and after the experiment to left and right motor cortices. Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and the extensor digitorum communis (EDC) of each hand. We found that the stronger the illusion of amputation and arm ownership, the more the reduction of MEP amplitudes of the EDC muscle for the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. In contrast, no association was found for the EDC amplitudes in the ipsilateral cortex and for the FDI amplitudes in both contralateral and ipsilateral cortices. Our study provides evidence that a short-term illusory perception of missing a body-part can trigger inhibitory effects on corticospinal pathways and importantly in the absence of any limb deafferentation or disuse. (shrink)

Neoliberal Techniques of Social Suffering: Political Resistance and Critical Theory from Latin America and Spain is the result of the critical and political commitment of various Latin American and Spanish philosophers who share a critical approach to the global “stealth revolution” in recent decades, where neoliberalism has forced the well-being and reproduction of life to adapt to a system devastating for both humans and non-humans. The authors voice the shared concern of contemporary Spanish and Latin American societies to build new (...) conceptions of the public and the common through mobilizing affects usually disavowed in political theory. If, in Ancient Greece, the idea of strengthening the most vulnerable and weakest was deplored as the art of sophists, this collection edited by Laura Quintana and Nuria Sánchez Madrid explores the other side of our social world to revive grassroots strategies of resistance and emancipation, which are able to bring about new distributions of power, welfare, and discursive legitimation and to extend our goal of creating a radically democratic world. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that David Hume invented and espoused the "regularity" theory of causation, holding that causal relations are nothing but a matter of one type of thing being regularly followed by another. It is also widely supposed that he was not only right about this, but that it was one of his greatest contributions to philosophy. Strawson here argues that the regularity theory of causation is indefensible, and that Hume never adopted it in any case. Strawson maintains that (...) Hume did not claim that causation in the natural world is just a matter of regular succession, that such a dogmatic metaphysical claim about the nature of reality would have been utterly contrary to his fundamental philosophical principles, and that he rightly took it for granted that there was more to causation than regularity of succession, claiming only that regularity of succession was all that we could ever know of causation. (shrink)

Rapid advances in high throughput genomic technologies and next generation sequencing are making medical genomic research more readily accessible and affordable, including the sequencing of patient and control whole genomes and exomes in order to elucidate genetic factors underlying disease. Over the next five years, the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Initiative, funded by the Wellcome Trust (United Kingdom) and the National Institutes of Health (United States of America), will contribute greatly towards sequencing of numerous African samples for (...) biomedical research. (shrink)

What does it mean to listen to someone respectfully, that is, insofar as they are due recognition respect? This paper addresses that question and gives the following answer: it is to listen in such a way that you are open to being surprised. A specific interpretation of this openness to surprise is then defended.