The Affective grounding hypothesis suggests that affective experiences play a crucial role in abstract concepts’ processing (Kousta et al. 2011). Vigliocco and colleagues test the role of affective experiences as well as the role of language in learning words denoting abstract concepts, comparing children with typical and atypical development. They conclude that besides the affective experiences also language plays a critical role in the processing of words referring to abstract concepts.

The penetration process of structures traditionally assigned to civil law into administrative law, especially administrative law aiming environmental protection, has been more noticeable through recent years. This process resulted in deepening the absence of a clear separation of private law norms from public law norms. It led to the existence of so-called quasi civil solutions, which can be found for example in the Act on prevention from damages in environment and its repair. Their specificity consists in the fact that they (...) cannot be regarded as civil law structures due to the differences between them and the civil law structures. This legal status sets new challenges for legal theorists as well as practition- ers. They concentrate on interpretation of administrative law provisions which were penetrated by civil law structures, taking into account differences between interpretation of administrative and civil law provisions. We should not reject specific character of the civil law provisions’ interpretation and interpret these provisions only by taking into account specificity of administrative law inter- pretation. Civil law institutions are characterized by a larger field for action, which is left for parties or performers, in comparison to the institutions of ad- ministrative law. This specificity of civil law structures should be considered as its advantage that should not be removed in the activities of public authorities. (shrink)

Why would we ever take a picture of a dead person? This practice began as a way to perpetuate the image of the deceased, rendering their memory eternal – Victorians thought that it could be useful to have portraits of their dead loved ones. Certainly, subjects in post-mortem photos will be remembered forever. However, we must ask two more questions. Are they people portrayed as if they were still alive? Or on the other hand, are they bodies that represent death? (...) Our paper takes an in-depth look at different iconographical styles as well as photographic techniques and religious and ethical reasons behind memento mori photos during the Victorian Age. (shrink)

Neuroimaging and psychophysiological techniques have proved to be useful in comprehending the extent to which the visual modality is pervasive in mental imagery, and in comprehending the specificity of images generated through other sensory modalities. Although further research is needed to understand the nature of mental images, data attained by means of these techniques suggest that mental imagery requires at least two distinct processing components.

In dynamical systems models feedforward is needed to guide planning and to process unknown and unpredictable events. Feedforward could help Theory of Event Coding (TEC) integrate control processes and could model human performance in action planning in a more flexible and powerful way.

The relationship between philosophy and science has always been complementary. Today, while science moves increasingly fast and philosophy shows some problems in catching up with it, it is not always possible to ignore such relationships, especially in some disciplines such as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and neuroscience. However, the methodological procedures used to analyze these data are based on principles and assumptions that require a profound dialogue between philosophy and science. Following these ideas, this work aims to raise the (...) problems that a classical connectionist theory can cause and problematize them in a cognitive framework, considering both philosophy and cognitive sciences but also the disciplines that are near to them, such as AI, computer sciences, and linguistics. For this reason, we embarked on an analysis of both the computational and theoretical problems that connectionism currently has. The second aim of this work is to advocate for collaboration between neuroscience and philosophy of mind because the promotion of deeper multidisciplinarity seems necessary in order to solve connectionism’s problems. In fact, we believe that the problems that we detected can be solved by a thorough investigation at both a theoretical and an empirical level, and they do not represent an impasse but rather a starting point from which connectionism should learn and be updated while keeping its original and profoundly convincing core. (shrink)

In this essay, I aim to examine Hölderlin’s theory of composition according to the thesis on the compatibility of poetic and philosophical practices. I interpret Hölderlin’s poetological fragments as a response to the epistolary exchange he had held with his master Schiller a few years earlier, concerning the dialectic between philosophy and poetry, enthusiasm and sobriety. I argue that Hölderlin’s fragments prompt us to consider poetry and philosophy as poiesis-based practices. Identifying creativity as their common destination allows one to postulate (...) the interaction between the two disciplines. I finally argue that aesthetics could be the place for this interaction. Hölderlin outlines a productive, namely aesthetic, theory of creation, in which boundaries between philosophy and poetry seem to interact rather than exclude. (shrink)

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

Aristotle ’s claim that we become virtuous by doing virtuous actions raises a familiar problem: How can we perform virtuous actions unless we are already virtuous? I reject deflationary accounts of the answer given in _Nicomachean Ethics_ 2.4 and argue instead that proper habituation involves doing virtuous actions with the right motive, i.e. for the sake of the noble, even though learners do not yet have virtuous dispositions. My interpretation confers continuity to habituation and explains in a non-mysterious way how (...) we become virtuous by doing virtuous actions in the right way. (shrink)

¿Qué tenemos en común y qué nos separa de los animales? ¿Somos un animal más? Las humanidades clásicas, basadas en el excepcionalismo humano, han dado paso a las posthumanidades, que incluyen los estudios animales, así como otras perspectivas que desafían la noción tradicional del sujeto humano, como los estudios de género, poscoloniales y decoloniales, la ecocrítica o la teoría queer. Pensarnos en nuestra relación con los animales tiene consecuencias filosóficas en ámbitos como la ciencia, los afectos, el trabajo y el (...) desarrollo de políticas concretas de salud y de alimentación; todas ellas, zonas de contacto entre humanos y animales. Sobre estos encuentros, aunque nunca reparemos en ello, edificamos nuestro mundo. Este ensayo imprescindible aglutina parte de los conocimientos desarrollados hasta ahora por quienes se han acercado a la relación humano-animal, y los vincula con la historia, los movimientos políticos y sociales, las nuevas concepciones del género, de la ciencia y del conocimiento. Los argumentos, contradicciones, contextos e incluso tabúes que acoge este debate interdisciplinar ayudan a imaginar y a matizar unos presupuestos éticos posibles sobre los que replantear nuestra relación con los animales y, en último término, con nosotros mismos. [Resumen del editor]. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege rozlišuje mezi smyslem a významem výrazů, přičemž smyslem rozumí to, co je výrazem vyjadřováno, významem pak to, co je jím označováno. Toto rozlišení se týká jak singulárních, tak obecných výrazů, ovšem Fregovy rozbory týkající se významu obecných výrazů jsou všeobecně méně známy. Chci zdůraznit skutečnost, že Frege považuje za význam obecných výrazů pojem, který chápe jako tzv. nenasycenou funkci, nikoli jako množinu nebo zobrazení. To mu umožňuje zachovat některé podstatné intuice týkající se obecnin – můžeme např. mít obecný (...) pojem (znát nějakou vlastnost či relaci), aniž bychom věděli, jaké předměty pod něj spadají. Zároveň se snažím ukázat, že není jasné, nakolik Frege skutečně zastával tezi, která mu bývá obvykle přičítána, totiž že identita pojmů je dána jejich koextenzivitou. Gottlob Frege distinguished between sense and reference of expressions. 'Sense' according to him is that what the expression means, 'reference' is that what is designated by it. This distinction concerns both singular and general terms but Frege’s analyses focused on general terms are much less known. It is crucial, I argue, to appreciate the importance of the fact that the reference of a general term is, according to Frege, a concept – identified with an unsaturated function in the Fregean sense, i.e. not a set, and not a mapping. In this way Frege can keep some important intuitions about universals – for instance that we can have a general concept (know a property or a relation) even if we don’t know which objects fall under it. I also try to show that it is not clear whether Frege really defended the thesis usually attributed to him that the identity of concepts is guaranteed solely by their coextensivity. (shrink)

The specific role of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethics has received much less attention than its role in his epistemology, despite the fact that Aristotle explicitly stresses the importance of empeiria as a requirement for the receptivity to ethical arguments and as a source for the formation of phronêsis.1 Thus, while empeiria is an integral part of all explanations that scholars give of the Aristotelian account of the acquisition of technê and epistêmê, it is usually not prominent in explanations of the (...) acquisition of phronêsis.2 The abundant mentions of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethical treatises are often eclipsed in the secondary literature... (shrink)

According to Husserl’s phenomenology, the intentional horizon is a general structure of experience. However, its characterisation beyond perceptual experience has not been explored yet. This paper aims, first, to fill this gap by arguing that there is a viable notion of cognitive horizon that presents features that are analogous to features of the perceptual horizon. Secondly, it proposes to characterise a specific structure of the cognitive horizon—that which presents possibilities for action—as a cognitive affordance. Cognitive affordances present cognitive elements as (...) opportunities for mental action (i.e., a problem affording trying to solve it, a thought affording calculating, an idea affording reflection). Thirdly, it argues that postulating cognitive affordances helps to unfold a rational dimension of thinking by conceiving of them as motivating reasons for action, something that in turn provides an argument for the experienced character of cognitive affordances. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly, I propose to analyze controversies using a “dialectical” model, in the sense described in Aristotle'sTopics. This approach presupposes that we temporarily disregard, for the sake of clarity, the concreteness of real life controversies in order to focus on their argumentative structure. From this point of view, the main advantage of controversies is that they allow the interlocutorsto testeach other's claims and therefore to arrive at relatively corroborated conclusions. This testing function in (...) a dialectical context is implemented through theassentto commonly accepted premises, and thenecessitywhich characterizes each step of the reasoning.Secondly, I shall apply this dialectical framework to the study of the controversy concerning the motion of the Earth, or rather a small episode of it. I shall examine an exchange of letters, written in 1616 and in 1624 respectively, between Galileo Galilei and Francesco Ingoli, one of his Aristotelian opponents. I shall then compare this exchange with the first day of Galileo'sDialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, a fictional debate, where Galileo discusses some of the same arguments. While the first exemplifies what I call “negative” testing, and yields a refutation of the opponent's theses, the second exemplifies “positive” testing and yields a dialectical demonstration of the motion of the Earth. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce two issues relevantly related to the cognitive phenomenology debate, which, to our minds, have not been yet properly addressed: the relation between access and phenomenal consciousness in cognition and the relation between conscious thought and inner speech. In the first case, we ask for an explanation of how we have access to thought contents, and in the second case, an explanation of why is inner speech so pervasive in our conscious thinking. We discuss the prospects (...) of explanation for both sides of the debate and argue that cognitive phenomenology defenders are in an overall advantageous position. We also propose an account of inner speech that differs from other influential explanations in some interesting respects. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFinance may suffer from institutional deformations that subordinate its distinctive goods to the pursuit of external goods, but this should encourage attempts to reform the institutionalization of finance rather than to reject its potential for virtuous business activity. This article argues that finance should be regarded as a domain-relative practice. Alongside management, its moral status thereby varies with the purposes it serves. Hence, when practitioners working in finance facilitate projects that create common goods, it allows them to develop virtues. This (...) argument applies MacIntyre’s widely acknowledged account of the relationship between practices and the development of virtues while questioning some of his claims about finance. It also takes issue with extant accounts of particular financial functions that have failed to identify the distinctive goods of financial practice. (shrink)

This paper considers a host of definitions and labels attached to the concept of smart cities to identify four dimensions that ground a review of ethical concerns emerging from the current debate. These are: (1) network infrastructure, with the corresponding concerns of control, surveillance, and data privacy and ownership; (2) post-political governance, embodied in the tensions between public and private decision-making and cities as post-political entities; (3) social inclusion, expressed in the aspects of citizen participation and inclusion, and inequality and (...) discrimination; and (4) sustainability, with a specific focus on the environment as an element to protect but also as a strategic element for the future. Given the persisting disagreements around the definition of a smart city, the article identifies in these four dimensions a more stable reference framework within which ethical concerns can be clustered and discussed. Identifying these dimensions makes possible a review of the ethical implications of smart cities that is transversal to their different types and resilient towards the unsettled debate over their definition. (shrink)

There is currently a consensus among comparative psychologists that nonhuman animals are capable of some forms of mindreading. Several philosophers and psychologists have criticized this consensus, however, arguing that there is a “logical problem” with the experimental approach used to test for mindreading in nonhuman animals. I argue that the logical problem is no more than a version of the general skeptical problem known as the theoretician’s dilemma. As such, it is not a problem that comparative psychologists must solve before (...) providing evidence for mindreading. (shrink)