The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...) and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our under- standing of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world. (shrink)

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for (...) other phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Based on anthropological fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research as well as on the epistemic culture of neurophilosophy, this Common Knowledge guest column examines two very different philosophical engagements with psychedelic drugs. In Thomas Metzinger's evidence-based philosophy of mind, hallucinogens help to operationalize questions about the nature of consciousness. While this project contributes to the great divide between empirically enlightened moderns and tradition-oriented premoderns, Metzinger's neurophilosophical reanimation of the ancient conception of philosophy as cultura animi can build a bridge (...) to Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, which has informed the psychedelic intelligentsia like no other body of thought. In the sixteenth century, the philosophia perennis grew out of a decidedly nonmodern philosophy of religion that sought to suture the historical and cultural cracks that would come to define modernity. This essay argues that neurophilosophy and ethnographic studies of consciousness cultures could function as critical correctives in a contemporary rearticulation of perennial philosophy. (shrink)

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but non-singular logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets, we arrive at a Russellian paradox when characterizing the semantics of mass nouns. Likewise, a semantics of mass nouns based upon predicate logic (...) and mereological sums is too weak, since it cannot characterize the “intermediary” construals that sentences containing mass nouns may receive. We then develop an account where mass nouns are treated as non-singular terms, which may refer to several things at once. This semantics is faithful to the intuition that, if there are eight pieces of silverware on a table, the speaker refers to eight things at once when he says: “The silverware that is on the table comes from Italy”. We show that this account provides a satisfactory semantics for a wide range of sentences, including cases often seen as difficult, like “The gold on the table weighs seven ounces” (Bunt 1985) and “All phosphorus is either red or black” (Roeper 1983). (shrink)

To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and (...) society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships isTaktwhich is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence and robots may progressively take a more and more prominent place in our daily environment. Interestingly, in the study of how humans perceive these artificial entities, science has mainly taken an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., how distant from humans are these agents). Considering people’s fears and expectations from robots and artificial intelligence, they tend to be simultaneously afraid and allured to them, much as they would be to the conceptualisations related to the divine entities (e.g., gods). In two experiments, (...) we investigated the proximity of representation between artificial entities (i.e., artificial intelligence and robots), divine entities and natural entities (i.e., humans and other animals) at both an explicit (Study 1) and an implicit level (Study 2). In the first study, participants evaluated these entities explicitly on positive and negative attitudes. Hierarchical clustering analysis showed that participants’ representation of artificial intelligence, robots and divine entities were similar, while the representation of humans tended to be associated with that of animals. In the second study, participants carried out a word/non-word decision task including religious semantic-related words and neutral words after the presentation of a masked prime referring to divine entities, artificial entities and natural entities (or a control prime). Results showed that after divine and artificial entity primes, participants were faster to identify religious words as words compared to neutral words arguing for a semantic activation. We conclude that people make sense of the new entities by relying on already familiar entities and in the case of artificial intelligence and robots, people appear to draw parallels to divine entities. (shrink)

Our discussion of the commentaries begins, at the evolutionary level, with issues raised by our account of the evolution of morality in terms of partner-choice mutualism. We then turn to the cognitive level and the characterization and workings of fairness. In a final section, we discuss the degree to which our fairness-based approach to morality extends to norms that are commonly considered moral even though they are distinct from fairness.

High and low alexithymia scorers were confronted with a modified visual oddball task that allowed the study of categorical perception of emotional expressions on faces. Participants had to quickly detect a deviant (rare) morphed face that shared or did not share the same emotional expression as the frequent one. Expected categorical perception effects, which were also neurophysiologically indexed, showed that rare stimuli were detected faster if they depicted a different emotional expression compared to rare stimuli depicting the same emotional expression (...) than the frequent one. Even if no differences were observed at a behavioural level, high alexithymia scorers evidenced overall delayed neurophysiological responses in components related to the attentional processing of rare emotional faces. Moreover, the categorical perception effects for event-related components associated with the attentional processing were smaller in high alexithymia scorers and were even absent for anger. These results show that high alexithymia scorers present discrimination delays that are already observed at the attentional level. (shrink)

In the past decade, experiments on altruistic punishment have played a central role in the study of the evolution of cooperation. By showing that people are ready to incur a cost to punish cheaters and that punishment help to stabilise cooperation, these experiments have greatly contributed to the rise of group selection theory. However, despite its experimental robustness, it is not clear whether altruistic punishment really exists. Here, I review the anthropological literature and show that hunter-gatherers rarely punish cheaters. Instead, (...) they avoid dealing with them and switch to other partners. I suggest that these data are better explained by individual selection, and in particular by partner choice models, in which individuals are in competition to be recruited by cooperative partners. I discuss two apparent problems for partner choice theories: large-scale cooperation and punishments in economic games. I suggest that rather than favouring group selection theory, these two phenomena provide evidence in favour of individual selection: (1) people produce large-scale cooperation through institutions in which punishment is not altruistic but rewarded on an individual basis; (2) punishment in experimental games can be explained without altruism and is indeed often better explained by individual interests. (shrink)

In Time Deposits, Dimension, and Fraud (2009), William Barnett and Walter Block argue that by borrowing short and lending long there is an over issuance of property rights. Their article, however, does not fully extend the consequences of their contribution. Once this is done, it becomes clearer that their argument suits a great impediment to banking, becoming a possible reason to support rather than to oppose fractional reserve banking. Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399–406, 2009) comment on Barnett and (...) Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009), the authors claim that while maintaining the illegitimacy of fractional reserve deposits, borrowing short and lending long it is actually not illegitimate. An extension on Bagus and Howden (2009) will show that their line of argumentation can be applied as a defense of fractional reserve banking as well. (shrink)

This paper intends to bring Austinian themes into methodological discussion about models. Using Austinian conceptual vocabulary, I argue that models perform actions in and outside of the academic field. This multiplicity of fields induces a variety of felicity conditions and types of performed actions. If for example, an inference from a model is judged according to some epistemological criteria in the scientific field, the representation of the world which the model carries will not be judged by the same criteria outside (...) the scientific field. A model can be considered as a standard in a strict scientific framework, while not being used as part of public policies, or vice versa. However, we focus on the dynamics between different fields. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est consacre a l'etude de la distinction linguistique entre noms massifs (lait, mobilier, desordre, amour...) et noms comptables (chat, equipe, combat, chose...). Les premiers sont normalement invariables, tandis que les seconds s'emploient librement au singulier et au pluriel. Apres avoir etabli qu'il s'agit bien d'une distinction morpho-syntaxique, l'ouvrage discute la possibilite de caracteriser semantiquement cette distinction. Les recherches existantes ne tiennent compte, essentiellement, que des noms s'appliquant au domaine materiel. Ce travail, au contraire, examine en detail aussi bien (...) les noms concrets qu'abstraits. Il propose de redefinir les proprietes souvent attribuees aux noms massifs (references distributive et cumulative), grace, notamment, a une nouvelle notion de partie. Concernant les noms comptables, il montre qu'aucune propriete purement semantique n'est necessaire pour qu'un nom soit de ce type. L'ouvrage se termine par l'analyse des conversions (emplois massifs des noms comptables, et vice versa), et du role qu'y jouent les facteurs pragmatiques. (shrink)

How do humans manage to keep track of a gradually changing object or person as the same persisting individual despite the fact that the extraction of information about this individual must often rely on heterogeneous information sources and heterogeneous tracking methods? The article introduces the Empirical Tracking of Individuals theory to address this problem. This theory proposes an analysis of the concept of integrated tracking, which refers to the capacity to acquire, store, and update information about the identity and location (...) of individuals in our environment. It hypothesizes that certain functions of attention are a key to explaining how the cognitive flexibility of the human mind overcomes the heterogeneity of sources and methods in integrated tracking. At least two premises lend support to this hypothesis. First, heterogeneity of tracking sources is overcome by the combination of information from multiple perceptual modalities and a phenomenon of multisensory 'transparency'. Second, heterogeneity of tracking sources and methods may also be overcome by inferences that combine information across domains to acquire reasons to believe propositions about the target's location and identity. (shrink)

Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further specify our claim that basic exposure and the design stance are necessary conditions of artistic understanding; and we explain (...) why many experimental studies do not belong to a psycho-historical science of art. (shrink)

“The apocalypse of hope” and other comparable flourishes in the writings of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre on political violence strike an alarming tone. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocates the way of revolutionary violence as the inevitable consequence of colonialism and its systematic exploitation of colonized natives. In his role of agent provocateur, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s influential and controversial work characteristically dramatizes this redemptive promise of violence: “to gun down a European is to kill two birds (...) with one stone…there remains a dead man and a free man.” This notorious pronouncement constitutes itself as an act of violence—we must feel threatened—meant to incite the latent counter-violence behind, in Sartre’s diagnosis, the false consciousness of bourgeois toleration and understanding. Could Sartre’s bold statement be spoken today without violent condemnation? This statement claims that, against the dehumanization of colonial oppression, only revolutionary violence allows for the colonized natives to constitute a “people” and recreate themselves in the image of a new humanity forged from the experience of liberation. For Fanon in particular, the recreation of humanity is impossible without the birth of a national consciousness and a revolutionary culture. As Fanon writes, “[w]e believe that the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists.” This reach toward a new humanism through the praxis of revolutionary violence points directly to the problem of beginnings. As Arendt observes in On Revolution, “[r]evolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.” Anti-colonial violence, for Fanon, inaugurates the beginning of political life; the colonized native reconstitutes himself as a βίοσ πολιτικόσ capable of both speech and praxis. For Sartre, anti-colonial violence reveals the dialectical necessity of world history in its struggle towards genuine universality and the utopia of a “classless” society. (shrink)

In this article, I show that the semantics one adopts for mass terms constrains the metaphysical claims one can make about mixtures. I first expose why mixtures challenge a singularist approach based on mereological sums. After discussing an alternative, non-singularist approach, I take chemistry into account and explain how it changes our perspective on these issues.

Since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have experienced high and sustained rates of economic growth. Recent explanations of this sudden and massive change in economic history have held that modern growth results from an acceleration of innovation. But it is unclear why the rate of innovation drastically accelerated in England in the eighteenth century. An important factor might be the alteration of individual preferences with regard to innovation resulting from the unprecedented living standards of the English during that period, for (...) two reasons. First, recent developments in economic history challenge the standard Malthusian view according to which living standards were stagnant until the Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial England enjoyed a level of affluence that was unprecedented in history. Second, behavioral sciences have demonstrated that the human brain is designed to respond adaptively to variations in resources in the local environment. In particular, Life History Theory, a branch of evolutionary biology, suggests that a more favorable environment should trigger the expression of future-oriented preferences. In this paper, I argue that some of these psychological traits – a lower level of time discounting, a higher level of optimism, decreased materialistic orientation, and a higher level of trust in others – are likely to increase the rate of innovation. I review the evidence regarding the impact of affluence on preferences in contemporary as well as past populations, and conclude that the impact of affluence on neurocognitive systems may partly explain the modern acceleration of technological innovations and the associated economic growth. (shrink)

Henrich et al.’s article fleshes out in a very useful and timely manner comments often heard but rarely published about the extraordinary cultural imbalance in the recruitment of participants in psychology experiments and the doubt this casts on generalization of findings from these “weird” samples to humans in general. The authors mention that one of the concerns they have met in defending their views has been of a methodological nature: “the observed variation across populations may be due to various methodological (...) artifacts that arise from translating experiments across contexts” (sect. 7.2, para. 1). Here we want to express a less sweeping methodological concern. While accepting the general conclusions and recommendations of the article, we believe they should be complemented with a.. (shrink)

This article offers a justification for accommodating claims of conscience. The standard justification points to the pain that acting against one’s conscience entails. But that defense cannot make sense of the state’s refusal to accommodate individuals where the law interferes with their deeply meaningful but nonmoral projects. An alternative justification, we argue, arises once one recognizes the connection between conscience and moral address: One’s lived moral convictions determine when and with what force one can hold others to account. Acting against (...) one’s convictions can undermine one’s standing to blame others who act in similar ways. When the state compels someone to act against conscience, it renders her complicit in conduct she takes to be wrong and thereby impairs her ability to condemn similar conduct in the future, in a manner akin to the hypocrite. The reason the state should not compel people to act against conscience, then, is that doing so would undercut their moral standing. (shrink)

The phenomenon of performativity has recently sparked debates about the status of the economic discourse. This paper aims to discuss the subjectivist idea that if economics ‘performs’ social reality, rather than merely reflects it, then every theory can be considered ‘true.’ My main goal is to point out three limits of performativity. First, not all theories can be performative since some do not produce empirical landmarks for agents. Second, social institutions restrict performativity. Third, I emphasize the necessity that a theory (...) to be self-fulfilling. This article is a prelude to a new kind of performative studies based on an original definition: a theory performs the world if it implies a behavioral regularity which leads to a general coordination between agents. That is to say, if it becomes a convention à la David Lewis. (shrink)

Se aborda la polémica entre Leibniz y Malebranche en torno a la relación entre las sustancias. Se plantean cuatro hipótesis para explicar esta interacción: la influencia física, la asistencia divina inmediata, la identidad y la armonía previa. Se explica la posición crítica de Leibniz respecto a las otras tres. En relación con la primera hipótesis Leibniz y Malebranche están de acuerdo en que no es viable. Se explican la crítica de Leibniz al ocasionalismo de Malebranche y al monismo sustancialista de (...) Spinoza. Y finalmente se analiza, desde la hipótesis de la armonía previa, el modo en que Leibniz aprovecha la disputa con el ocasionalismo, tanto en la versión de Malebranche como en la de Pierre Bayle, para reivindicar la autonomía de la razón en el ámbito de las causas segundas. En ello juegan un papel fundamental la noción de naturaleza de las cosas, el principio de diversidad y el principio de razón suficiente. (shrink)

Synaesthesia is a heterogeneous phenomenon, even when considering one particular sub-type. The purpose of this study was to design a reliable and valid questionnaire for grapheme-colour synaesthesia that captures this heterogeneity. By the means of a large sample of 628 synaesthetes and a factor analysis, we created the Coloured Letters and Numbers questionnaire with 16 items loading on 4 different factors . These factors were externally validated with tests which are widely used in the field of synaesthesia research. The questionnaire (...) showed good test–retest reliability and construct validity . Our findings are discussed in the light of current theories and new ideas in synaesthesia research. More generally, the questionnaire is a useful tool which can be widely used in synaesthesia research to reveal the influence of individual differences on various performance measures and will be useful in generating new hypotheses. (shrink)

The article is the text of a lecture given at the Faculty of the Humanities, March 2001. It argues that one implication of recent advances in the sciences of life may be that the binary opposition of the normal and the pathological is put into question. Canguilheim’s distinction between vital and social norms is challenged and superseded by a Foucauldian genealogical approach to programs for the government of individuals, and the norms of life that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth (...) centuries are argued to be fundamentally social. Viewing genetics, biopsychiatry, and the commercialisation of drug development and biomedicine, the author argues that the logic of normalisation is loosing its hold, and being replaced by strategies for the continuous molecular management of variation, the modulation of susceptibilities, and the capitalisation of life itself. (shrink)

This article addresses the data protection and product safety regulatory models currently applied to consumer-facing health technologies. It explains how the design and structures of existing data protection and safety regulation in the U.S. have resulted in exceptionally thin protection for the users of consumer-facing devices and products that rely on or that facilitate consumer collection or aggregation of health and wellness data. It also examines some appealing legislative alternatives to the current thin model used in the U.S. and suggests (...) a framework for prioritizing ameliorative regulation. To better understand existing regulatory models, their deficiencies, and how they should be reformed, the article employs an analytical model describing these regulatory systems across two axes. The vertical axis describes the quantity or depth of regulation, such as, for example, the strictness of the rules imposed by the regulatory model. The horizontal axis describes the reach of the regulation, the behaviors, products, or industries to which the regulation applies. (shrink)

In his famous text the Bodhicaryāvatāra, the 8th century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva argues that anger towards people who harm us is never justified. The usual reading of this argument rests on drawing similarities between harms caused by persons and those caused by non-persons. After laying out my own interpretation of Śāntideva's reasoning, I offer some objections to Śāntideva's claim about the similarity between animate and inanimate causes of harm inspired by contemporary philosophical literature in the West. Following this, I argue (...) that by reading Śāntideva's argument as practical advice rather than as a philosophical claim about rational coherence, his argument can still have important insights even for those who reject his philosophical reasoning. (shrink)

To introduce the issue of the tracking and identification of human agents, I examine the ability of an agent to track a human person and distinguish this target from other individuals: The ability to perform person identification. First, I discuss influential mechanistic models of the perceptual recognition of human faces and people. Such models propose detailed hypotheses about the parts and activities of the mental mechanisms that control the perceptual recognition of persons. However, models based on perceptual recognition are incomplete (...) theories of person identification because they do not explain several identification behaviors that are fundamental to human social interactions. Furthermore, recognition-based models tend to appeal to the controversial concept of the “identity” of a person without explaining what determines personal identity and persistence. To overcome these limitations, I propose to integrate the face-recognition program into a broader causal-historical theory of identification. The causal-historical theory of identification complements models focused on perceptual recognition because it can account for the types of non-perceptual identification overlooked by the face-recognition program. Moreover, it can decompose the identification behaviors into tracking processes that succeed or fail to be sensitive to causal characteristics of a target. I illustrate these advantages with a discussion of the difference between the tracking of a person understood as either a causally continuous biological organism or a psychologically continuous mind. Finally, I argue that the causal-historical theory provides a theoretical framework for investigating the tracking of relations between a target and its contextual and historical attributes, such as a target's possessions. (shrink)

Some things have positive value and some things have negative value. The things with positive value are good and the things with negative value are bad. There are also things in-between that are neither good nor bad, which are neutral. All in all, then, there are three monadic value predicates: “good,” “bad,” and “neutral.”.

The growing popularization of stakeholder theory among management scholars has offered a useful framework for understanding the multiple and interdependent roles of government and business in an increasingly challenging political and regulatory environment. Despite this trend, attention to the role and responsibility of government to protect citizen rights has been limited. To the two traditional stakeholder theory views of government where the focal organization remains the firm, we propose to add two views by pivoting the government’s place and making it (...) the focal organization. We thus describe governments as serving four roles in the business–government–society nexus. For each role, we analyze typical governmental activities/behaviors, relationships with firms’ stakeholders, as well as the challenges and limits to these roles. We also focus on the central notion of salience amplification, as a means of checks and balances across stakeholders in order to safeguard citizen rights and reveal the greater good. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate how certain types of predicates should be connected with certain types of degree scales, and how this can affect the events they describe. The distribution and interpretation of various degree adverbials will serve us as a guideline in this perspective. They suggest that two main types of degree scales should be distinguished: (i) quantity scales, which are characterized by the semantic equivalence of Yannig ate the cake partially and Yannig ate part of the cake; quantity (...) scales only appear with verbs possessing an incremental theme (cf. Dowty 1991); (ii) intensity scales, which are characterized by degree modifiers (e.g., extremely, perfectly) receiving an intensive interpretation; intensity scales typically occur with verbs morphologically related to an adjective (to dry). More generally, we capitalize on a typology of degree structures to explain how degrees play a central role with respect to event structure. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es indagar en la fundamentación schmittiana del individuo y de la reserva de conciencia. En la actualidad, buena parte de la recepción contemporánea considera al jurista renano como un antiliberal y, por lo tanto, como un antiindividualista. Sin embargo, nuestra hipótesis es que es posible encontrar en su obra no solo una crítica a la noción liberal de individuo, sino también una concepción propositiva a través de sus reflexiones sobre la crítica frente a la autoridad (...) y al poder público. Para demostrarla, se propone un abordaje hermenéutico-exegético de sus obras —principalmente, de las conferencias sobre El Leviatán en la teoría del Estado de Thomas Hobbes y del artículo "La visibilidad de la Iglesia. Una reflexión escolástica”— para indagar la acción humana como fundadora del orden político y las posibilidades del individuo de criticar a la autoridad. El artículo sostiene que Carl Schmitt formula una noción de individualidad de signo distinto a la liberal y que se vincula íntimamente con la idea de Derecho, el entramado institucional-estatal y el sustrato comunitario. (shrink)

What semantics should we attribute to nouns like "wisdom" and "generosity", which are derived from gradable adjectives? We show that, from a morphosyntactic standpoint, these nouns are mass nouns. This leads us to consider and answer the following questions. How are these nouns interpreted in their various uses? What formal representations may one associate with their interpretations? How do these depend on the semantics of the adjective? And where lies the semantic unity of nouns like wisdom and generosity with the (...) more familiar concrete mass nouns, like wine and furniture? (shrink)

This commentary suggests that understanding the “Folk Psychology of Souls” requires studying a problem articulating ontology with psychology: How do human beings, both as perceivers and thinkers, track and refer to (1) living and dead intentional agents and (2) supernatural agents? The problem is discussed in the light of the principle of the ontological commitment in agent tracking.

This article was inspired by participant observation of a contemporary collaboration between empirically oriented philosophers of mind and neuroscientists. An encounter between this anthropologist of science and neurophilosophers in a Finnish sleep laboratory led to the following philosophical exploration of the intellectual space shared by neurophilosophy and science studies. Since these fields emerged in the 1970s, scholars from both sides have been visiting brain research facilities, but engaged with neuroscientists very differently and passionately fought with each other over the reduction (...) of mind to brain. As a case in point, this article looks at the philosophical controversy over the dreaming brain. It serves as a window on the problem space opened up by the demise of positivist conceptions of science, now inhabited by both neurophilosophy and science studies. Both fields face the problem of how to bridge the gap between empirical research and conceptual work. At a time when ontological speculation has made a comeback in these areas of research, studies on how epistemic objects manifest themselves in the material culture of neuroscience could help neurophilosophers to become better materialists. In the sleep laboratory, however, the materiality of dreams continues to be elusive. In dreaming science studies and neurophilosophy encounter a phenomenon that – at least in 2015 – still invites a positivist rather than a materialist attitude. (shrink)

L’étude de l’antonomase, qui est en fait un trope double puisqu’il existe des antonomases de nom propre et de nom commun, invite à plaider pour l’existence d’un système du nom propre fondé sur des positions et organisé à partir d’un prototype, les formes se situant à plus ou moins grande distance de celui-ci. Après avoir montré comment la catégorie du nom propre peut être structurée à partir d’un double mouvement de déconceptualisation et de conceptualisation, double mouvement dont les emplois du (...) nom propre portent la trace en discours, on montre que l’antonomase de nom commun, qui fige un lien référentiel, se situe à l’entrée du système du nom propre, quand l’antonomase de nom propre, qui construit une catégorie conceptuelle à partir d’une dénomination individuelle, renvoie à une position au-delà de laquelle disparaît la perception de la proprialité. Ces formes périphériques, qui illustrent un emploi figuré de la description définie et du nom propre, représentent des tropes complémentaires. On souligne in fine l’existence d’antonomases imbriquées, c’est-à-dire d’antonomases (de nom propre ou de nom commun) formées à partir d’une autre antonomase (de nom commun ou de nom propre). (shrink)

Este dossier contiene cuatro artículos que son el resultado de una labor colectiva y continuada de un equipo de investigadores y filósofos argentinos en torno a la obra de Hans Kellner. Desde sus primeros artículos sobre White, el narrativismo y su aplicación a la historiografía, los aportes de Kellner destacaron por una sutileza y un horizonte teórico al proponer una lectura oblicua, tensiva de los problemas, los autores y los textos objeto de su interpretación. Entendemos que el conjunto de sus (...) contribuciones, que recorremos en el presente dossier, constituye un aporte fundamental a un esbozo de una teoría retórica -en sentido estricto- de la historia. ARK: ark:/s18537960/oakjkrt2r. (shrink)

Se abordan tres cuestiones estrechamente relacionadas con los desarrollos actuales en filosofía y epistemología de la historia. En primer lugar, se pretende dar cuenta del despliegue narrativo del discurso historiográfico siguiendo los lineamientos originales de la filosofía narrativista de la histo..