In having an experience one is aware of having it. Having an experience requires some form of access to one's own state, which distinguishes phenomenally conscious mental states from other kinds of mental states. Until very recently, Higher-Order (HO) theories were the only game in town aiming at offering a full-fledged account of this form of awareness within the analytical tradition. Independently of any objections that HO theories face, First/Same-Order (F/SO) theorists need to offer an account of such access to (...) become a plausible alternative. My aim in this paper is twofold. In the first place, I wish to widen the logical space of the discussion among theories of consciousness by offering a distinction, orthogonal to that between F/SO and HO theories, between what I will call 'Self-Involving' (SI) and 'Mental-State-Involving' (MSI) theories and argue in favor of the former one. In the second place, I will present the basics of a characterization of such a Self-Involving theory in Same-Order terms. (shrink)

It is often claimed that a minimal form of self-awareness is constitutive of our conscious experience. Some have considered that such a claim is plausible for our ordinary experiences but false when considered unrestrictedly on the basis of the empirical evidence from altered states. In this paper I want to reject such a reasoning. This requires, first, a proper understanding of a minimal form of self-awareness – one that makes it plausible that minimal self-awareness is part of our ordinary experiences. (...) I will argue that it should be understood as Perspectival First-Person Awareness : a non-conceptual identification-free self-attribution that defines the first-person perspective for our conscious experience. I will offer a detailed characterization of PFP-Awareness in semantic and epistemological terms. With this tool in hand, I will review the empirical literature on altered states. I will focus on psychedelics, meditation and dreams, as they have been claimed to present the clearest cases in favor of a radical disruption of self-awareness. I will show that the rejection of the idea that minimal self-awareness is constitutive of our experience on the basis of this evidence is unfounded, for two main reasons. First, although there are good grounds to think that some forms of self-awareness that typically accompany our ordinary experiences are compromised, they do not support the claim that PFP-Awareness is absent. Secondly, the reports that could make us think of a radical disruption of self-awareness are most probably due to a confirmation bias – and hence we should mistrust them – derived from the expectations and metaphysical views of their subjects. (shrink)

Representations are not only used in our folk-psychological explanations of behaviour, but are also fruitfully postulated, for example, in cognitive science. The mainstream view in cognitive science maintains that our mind is a representational system. This popular view requires an understanding of the nature of the entities they are postulating. Teleosemantic theories face this challenge, unpacking the normativity in the relation of representation by appealing to the teleological function of the representing state. It has been argued that, if intentionality is (...) to be explained in teleological terms, then the function of a state cannot depend on its phylogenetical history, given the metaphysical possibility of a duplicate of an intentional being that lacks an evolutionary history. In this paper, I present a method to produce, according to our current knowledge in genetic engineering, human-like individuals who are not the product of natural selection in the required sense. This variation will be used to shed light on the main replies that have been offered in the literature to the Swampman thought experiment. I argue that these replies are not satisfactory: representations should better not depend on natural selection. I conclude that a non-etiological notion of function is to be preferred for characterizing the relation of representation. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate which of the main conditions proposed in the moral responsibility literature are the ones that spell trouble for the idea that Artificial Intelligence Systems could ever be full-fledged responsible agents. After arguing that the standard construals of the control and epistemic conditions don’t impose any in-principle barrier to AISs being responsible agents, I identify the requirement that responsible agents must be aware of their own actions as the main locus of resistance to attribute that kind (...) of agency to AISs. This is because this type of awareness is thought to involve first-person or de se representations, which, in turn, are usually assumed to involve some form of consciousness. I clarify what this widespread assumption involves and conclude that the possibility of AISs’ moral responsibility hinges on what the correct theory of de se representations ultimately turns out to be. (shrink)

Cognitive theories claim, whereas non-cognitive theories deny, that cognitive access is constitutive of phenomenology. Evidence in favor of non-cognitive theories has recently been collected by Block and is based on the high capacity of participants in partial-report experiments compared to the capacity of the working memory. In reply, defenders of cognitive theories have searched for alternative interpretations of such results that make visual awareness compatible with the capacity of the working memory; and so the conclusions of such experiments remain controversial. (...) Instead of entering the debate between alternative interpretations of partial-report experiments, this paper offers an alternative line of research that could settle the discussion between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness. Here I relate the neural correlates of cognitive access to empirical research into the neurophysiology of dreams; cognitive access seems to depend on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, that area is strongly deactivated during sleep; a period when we entertain conscious experiences: dreams. This approach also avoids the classic objection that consciousness should be inextricably tied to reportability or it would fall outside the realm of science. (shrink)

The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive processes. (...) From a representationalist frameworkregarding our conscious experience, in this article, I will offer a novel argument in favor of EC and show that cognitionconstitutively—and no merely causally—depends upon body activity beyond that in the brain. In particular, I will arguethat in order to solve the problem derived from the empirical evidence in favor of the possibility of shifted spectrum,representationalist should endorse the view that experiences concern its subject: the content of experience isde se.Ishow that this claim perfectly matches the phenomenological observation and helps explaining the subjective characterof the experience. Furthermore, I argue that entertaining this kind of representation constitutively depends on bodilyactivity. Consequently, insofar as cognition depends on consciousness, it is embodied. (shrink)

El libro de María González Navarro se presenta a sí mismo como una “nueva hermenéutica” (23). La novedad involucra dos aspectos: uno que llamaremos metateórico y otro hermenéutico en propiedad. Hablando metateóricamente, el libro presenta una hermenéutica gadameriana vigorizada y robustecida por las teorías pragma-dialécticas de la argumentación. Desde el punto de vista hermenéutico propiamente dicho, la novedad reposa en que se considera que la interpretación correcta está indesligablemente vinculada a la argumentación abductiva.

The well-known distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness has moved away from the conceptual domain into the empirical one, and the debate now is focused on whether the neural mechanisms of cognitive access are constitutive of the neural correlate of phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I want to analyze the consequences that a negative reply to this question has for the cognitive phenomenology thesis – roughly the claim that there is a “proprietary” phenomenology of thoughts. If the mechanisms responsible (...) for cognitive access can be disentangled from the mechanisms that give rise to phenomenology in the case of perception and emotion, then the same disentanglement is to be expected in the case of thoughts. This, in turn, presents, as I argue, a challenge to the cognitive phenomenology thesis: either there are thoughts with cognitive phenomenology we lack cognitive access to or there are good reasons to doubt that there is such a thing as cognitive phenomenology. I discuss a... (shrink)

Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theories of consciousness maintain that the kind of awareness necessary for phenomenal consciousness depends on the cognitive accessibility that underlies reporting. -/- There is empirical evidence strongly suggesting that the cognitive accessibility that underlies the ability to report visual experiences depends on the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). This area, however, is highly deactivated during the conscious experiences we have during sleep: dreams. HOT theories are jeopardized, as I will argue. I will briefly present HOT (...) theories in the first section. Section 2 offers empirical evidence to the effect that the cognitive accessibility that underlies the ability to report depends on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: dlPFC is the neural correlate of HOTs. Section 3 shows the evidence we have of the deactivation of this brain area during dreams and, in section 4, I present my argument. Finally, I consider and rejoin two possible replies that my opponent can offer: the possibility of an alternative neural correlate of HOTs during dreams and the denial that we have phenomenally conscious experiences during sleep. (shrink)

Higher-order thought theories of consciousness attempt to explain what it takes for a mental state to be conscious, rather than unconscious, by means of a HOT that represents oneself as being in the state in question. Rosenthal Consciousness and the self: new essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) stresses that the way we are aware of our own conscious states requires essentially indexical self-reference. The challenge for defenders of HOT theories is to show that there is a way to explain (...) the required reference-fixing mechanisms that is compatible with the theory. According to Rosenthal, the reference to oneself as such is grounded in the disposition to identify the individual the HOT refers to as the individual who has that HOT. I argue that this leads to a vicious infinite regress on the more than plausible assumption that our cognitive capacities are limited. This leaves such theories without a foundation, since self-reference is thought essential to consciousness. (shrink)

All around the world, but especially in the Third World, we are confronted by beggars who appeal to our sympathy. Most of us have no principled way to deal with the situation. Should we give to them? How much? To what purpose? We are inclined to let our momentary feelings dictate our response. Although applied ethicists have been tackling the general question of poverty in the world and what we ought to do, if anything, to alleviate it, nobody seems to (...) have taken an interest in the specific part of the general question which involves mendicity. This paper argues, firstly, that the question of our duties, if any, towards beggars demands a reasoned answer, and secondly, that careful reasoning indicates that we should channel the resources we are ready to give to beggars not tothem directly but rather to charities, for they have more and better information on who can and should be helped. (shrink)

Un a d e la s proclama s má s escuchada s e n la s concentracione s de l 15- M e s qu e los ca r go s político s n o no s r ep r esentan . P ar a v eri f ca r s i es e reproch e est á justi f icado , e n este estudi o analizamo s primer o qu é deb e se r l a representació n (...) polític a e n u n Estad o democrático ; a continuación , y par a sabe r s i lo s representante s “no s representan” , no s f ijamos e n l a fo r m a e n qu e ha n sid o el e gidos , e n e l mod o e n e l qu e ejerce n s u funció n y e n las pre r r o gat iv a s que , e n teoría , garantiza n e l ejercici o d e es a función. (shrink)

For a standard Finsler F on a manifold M, the domain is the whole tangent bundle T M and the fundamental tensor g is positive-definite. However, in many cases, these two conditions hold in a relaxed form only, namely one has either a psuedo-Finsler metric or a conic Finsler metric. Our aim is twofold. First, we want to give an account of quite a few subtleties that appear under such generalizations, say, for conic pseudo-finsler metrics. Second, we aim to provide (...) some criteria that determine when a pseudo-Finsler metric F obtained as a general homogeneous combination of Finsler metrics and one-forms is again a Finsler-metric -- or, more precisely, that the conic domain on which g remains positive-definite. Such a combination generalizes the known -metrics in different directions. Remarkably, classical examples of Finsler metrics are reobtained and extended, with explicit computations of their fundamental tensors. (shrink)

Resumen: El Preámbulo del Código francés de 1804 anuncia un nuevo orden basado en la recta razón y en los valores político-jurídicos de la Revolución francesa, en un intento de sustituir el papel tradicional que las iglesias habían jugado en la moralidad de la sociedad. Es más, la nueva ley civil se presenta como un sustituto de la ley moral y de la religión con intención de ocupar su lugar en la nueva sociedad que alumbra. Aparece la norma unidimensional con (...) pretensión de regular todos los ámbitos de la vida y que, en de nitiva, acabará con la dicotomía pecado/delito Palabras clave: Derecho, religión, pecado, delito. (shrink)

El Preámbulo del Código francés de 1804 anuncia un nuevo orden basado en la recta razón y en los valores político-jurídicos de la Revolución francesa, en un intento de sustituir el papel tradicional que las iglesias habían jugado en la moralidad de la sociedad. Es más, la nueva ley civil se presenta como un sustituto de la ley moral y de la religión con intención de ocupar su lugar en la nueva sociedad que alumbra. Aparece la norma unidimensional con pretensión (...) de regular todos los ámbitos de la vida y que, en definitiva, acabará con la dicotomía pecado/delito. (shrink)

Resumen: El Preámbulo del Código francés de 1804 anuncia un nuevo orden basado en la recta razón y en los valores político-jurídicos de la Revolución francesa, en un intento de sustituir el papel tradicional que las iglesias habían jugado en la moralidad de la sociedad. Es más, la nueva ley civil se presenta como un sustituto de la ley moral y de la religión con intención de ocupar su lugar en la nueva sociedad que alumbra. Aparece la norma unidimensional con (...) pretensión de regular todos los ámbitos de la vida y que, en definitiva, acabará con la dicotomía pecado/delito Palabras clave: Derecho, religión, pecado, delito. (shrink)

El cuño técnico de la cultura actual ha desordenado el marco tradicional en el cual la imagen podía persistir. El ojo ordenador y la representación contemplativa tradicional fracasan ante la velocidad vertiginosa con que nos inundan hoy las imágenes: el ojo ya no ve, sólo vibra. El autor propone una Estética del vértigo, cuyo propósito es volver a lograr un encuentro entre la concepción tradicional de las imágenes, lo cual significa hoy una defensa de la pintura, y la presencia evanescente (...) propia del vértigo técnico de las imágenes actuales. Esa Estética del vértigo aboga de nuevo por una facultad de juzgar rejlexionante, capaz de afrontar la finitud con sobriedad y pragmatismo. (shrink)

This book brings together previously unpublished work which looks at issues concerning the foundations and applications of a prominent branch of virtue epistemology: “performance-based epistemology”. The chapters in Part I examine some foundational issues in the conceptual framework of PBE: the relations between apt success and luck; the connection between aptness and a safety condition for knowledge; the fallibility of competences; the kind of reliability needed for knowledge and justification; the nature of epistemic agency; and some ways of enriching the (...) basic conceptual framework of PBE. The chapters in Part II discuss the application of PBE to outstanding problems in contemporary epistemology, such as the nature of a priori intuition; internalist objections to epistemic externalism; the roles that epistemic agency is meant to play in the acquisition of knowledge; the value of second-order reflection; the nature of some epistemic incompetences; and the problem of epistemic circularity. (shrink)

This critical appraisal of Juan Comesaña’s Being Rational and Being Right is divided into three sections: Section I describes the fundamental features of “Experientialism,” the theory of basic rationality developed and defended in the book; Section II briefly indicates how the chapters of the book unfold; and Section III describes and examines one problematic issue concerning how Experientialism interacts with the liberalism/conservatism debate in the theory of justification.

Con anterioridad a la paz de Westfalia el espacio filosófico alemán había estado dominado en gran medida por la teosofía, especialmente en el ámbito protestante y en regiones como Sajonia, Silesia y Württemberg. Con la Medicina mentis de E. W. von Tschirnhaus, noble sajón de estudios universitarios en Leiden, donde entra en contacto con Spinoza y su círculo, entramos en un nuevo mundo conceptual. Bajo la apariencia de una propuesta metodológica, de corte cartesiano, de conducir la razón al descubrimiento de (...) cuanto es posible conocer por la ‘luz natural’, Tschirnhaus propone una reforma moral del sujeto humano capaz de procurarle la perfección, la felicidad y la unión con Dios, donde la impronta de Spinoza es fuerte, aunque en ningún momento son nombrados estos dos filósofos. Tras estudiar la acusación de spinozismo por Christian Thomasius y el rechazo de la imputación por Tschirnhaus, el artículo se pronuncia sobre el sentido y función de ese rechazo. (shrink)

When reasoning about dependence relations, philosophers often rely on gradualist assumptions, according to which abrupt changes in a phenomenon of interest can result only from abrupt changes in the low-level phenomena on which it depends. These assumptions, while strictly correct if the dependence relation in question can be expressed by continuous dynamical equations, should be handled with care: very often the descriptively relevant property of a dynamical system connecting high- and low-level phenomena is not its instantaneous behaviour but its stable (...) fixed points (those in the vicinity of which it spends most of the time, after comparatively short transitory periods), and stable fixed points can change abruptly as a result of infinitesimal changes of the low-level phenomenon. We illustrate this potential gradualist trap by showing that Chalmers’ fading qualia argument falls into it. (shrink)

Alleged self-evidence aside, conceivability arguments are one of the main reasons in favor of the claim that there is a Hard Problem. These arguments depend on the appealing Kripkean intuition that there is no difference between appearances and reality in the case of consciousness. I will argue that this intuition rests on overlooking a distinction between cognitive access and consciousness, which has received recently important empirical support. I will show that there are good reasons to believe that the intuition is (...) misguided—at least on the reading that the conceivability arguments require—and hence that the arguments are unsupported. This, in turn, alleviates the Hard Problem but leaves us with what I think is a not easy problem. (shrink)

This article interprets the accounts and testimonies of native Chilean Pentecostalism, from a philosophical approach. In these accounts Pentecostal dilemmas are expressed and that oppressed beings prove by the economical and social conditions that the Chilean society lived in the 20th century. These dilemmas manifest anguish produced by absurd, emptiness and loneliness; that rise due to illness, alcoholism and poverty, which leads the individual to critical situations that push him to choose being Pentecostal, stigmatized beings and socially excluded, or to (...) suffer and death. Once they have chosen being Pentecostal the symbolic exodus starts, interpreting the past, the society and individuality in a tragic way. (shrink)

Aus Platons Dialogen geht ein Bild der Philosophie hervor, in dem die persönliche Haltung des Gesprächspartners von grosser Bedeutung ist. Dieses Buch versucht zu zeigen, dass der Gesprächspartner immer wieder dazu ermutigt wird, eine wohlwollende Stellungnahme sowohl gegenüber den am Gespräch beteiligten Personen als auch gegenüber dem Thema der Diskussion einzunehmen, damit ein erfolgreiches Gespräch von Anfang bis Ende durchgeführt werden kann. Diese als Bedingung festgelegte Anforderung wirkt im dialektischen Gespräch selbst und wird bei den Gesprächspartnern aktualisiert. Ihre Wirkung aber (...) geht über ihre eigenen Grenzen hinaus, so dass auch der Leser dazu aufgefordert ist, eine wohlwollende Haltung einzunehmen und sich positiv zum Text zu verhalten. (shrink)

In developing a theory of consciousness, one of the main problems has to do with determining what distinguishes conscious states from non-conscious ones—the delimitation problem. This paper explores the possibility of solving this problem in terms of self-awareness. That self-awareness is essential to understanding the nature of our conscious experience is perhaps the most widely discussed hypothesis in the study of consciousness throughout the history of philosophy. Its plausibility hinges on how the notion of self-awareness is unpacked. The idea that (...) consciousness involves self-awareness has been understood in two different ways: either as awareness of oneself—the subject of experience—or as awareness of the conscious episode itself. In this paper I argue (i) that every experience concerns the subject in a very specific way, involving what I will call ‘perspectival de se representation’, and (ii) that there is no need to appeal to the experience itself in order to characterize the awareness within that experience. The view I articulate explains the subjective nature of experience without over-intellectualizing it, accommodates the phenomenology of experience, and dispels any doubt about the need to find the self in introspection. (shrink)

Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, have either shown their sympathy for, or explicitly endorsed, the following two principles: Panpsychism—roughly the thesis that the mind is ubiquitous throughout the universe—and Organizational Invariantism—the principle that holds that two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. The purpose of this paper is to show the tension between the arguments that back up both principles. This tension should lead, or so I will argue, defenders of one of the principles (...) to give up on the other. (shrink)

En el estudio de los partidos y movimientos contemporáneos de extrema derecha hay una laguna reiteradamente enunciada por los estudiosos de la materia: el análisis de su sustrato ideológico. La razón principal de esta situación radica en la heterogeneidad, la fragmentación, el oportunismo y la ocultación planificada característicos de estos movimientos extremistas. En este artículo se pretende realizar un análisis de elementos fundamentales de la ideología del Front National recurriendo al modelo de Totalismo Ideológico formulado por ROBERT JAY LIFTON como (...) herramienta heurística de reducción de la complejidad. Ello nos permitirá comprobar que el discurso del Front National agrupa, en diferente grado pero de un modo claro, todos los componentes que posibilitan calificarlo de discurso y movimiento totalista. (shrink)

La gamificación o ludificación, entendida como la aplicación de la filosofía del juego en contextos no lúdicos, está experimentando en los últimos años un desarrollo espectacular en áreas de diversa naturaleza. Si bien está más que comúnmente aceptado que las funciones principales de los museos consisten en preservar y dar a conocer sus colecciones, resulta fundamental que logren conectar de manera satisfactoria con los usuarios empleando para ello medios y estrategias innovadoras y accesibles. En las siguientes páginas ponemos de manifiesto (...) cómo la gamificación no es sino un recurso idóneo para motivar, fidelizar e influir en el comportamiento de los usuarios. (shrink)

In this essay we discuss recent attempts to analyse the notion of representation, as it is employed in cognitive science, in purely informational terms. In particular, we argue that recent informational theories cannot accommodate the existence of metarepresentations. Since metarepresentations play a central role in the explanation of many cognitive abilities, this is a serious shortcoming of these proposals.

Most people think indexical thought has special content (_de se_ content). However, it has been acknowledged that classical examples, such as those offered by Perry and Lewis, are insufficient to establish this conclusion. Ongoing discussions typically focus on first-person beliefs and their relationship to the explanation of successful behavior and linguistic practices. Instead, I want to direct attention to the phenomenal content of our conscious experiences and the largely neglected contribution that its comprehension can make to the way in which (...) first-person representation is understood. This paper offers a novel argument for both the existence and a specific interpretation of the essential indexicality thesis based on widely accepted assumptions regarding the relation between phenomenology and representation. Specifically, I will argue that if (i) two different individuals can have token experiences with the same phenomenology and ii) two token experiences of ordinary subjects with the same phenomenology have the same phenomenal content, then phenomenal content is_ de se _content of a particular kind: _perspectival de se_ content. (shrink)

Este artículo examina la concepción del espacio infinito y del tiempo en Hasdai Crescas, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola y Giordano Bruno. Si la presencia de Crescas es explícita en el _Examen vanitatis_ (1520) de Pico, su recepción por Bruno, que nunca lo menciona, fue postulada por Harry A. Wolfson en 1929. Más recientemente, David Harari y Mauro Zonta han afirmado el papel intermediario de un autor judío desconocido. Sin embargo, una comparación de la crítica de Aristóteles efectuada por Crescas y (...) Bruno pone de manifiesto que, excepto dos puntos, Bruno pudo alcanzar sus posiciones con independencia de Crescas, a partir de su propia lectura crítica de Aristóteles y de su conocimiento de los desarrollos de la escolástica medieval y del concepto neoplatónico del tiempo. La significativa calificación por Crescas del espacio y del tiempo como atributos de Dios en un sentido puramente metafórico, una cuestión que Pico deja a un lado, deja paso en Bruno a la calificación del espacio infinito, de la duración y también de la materia como atributos reales de Dios, que es a la vez mente e intelecto, espacio y materia, en tanto que unidad indiferente de los opuestos. (shrink)

Castillos de Teruel. Historia y Patrimonio. Actas de las I Jornadas Castillos de Teruel:de la puesta en valor a la didáctica. Mora de Rubielos, 2018 Teruel: Asociación para la Recuperación de los Castillos Turolenses, Qualcina. Arqueología, Cultura yPatrimonio, y Acrótera Gestión del Patrimonio 201895 págs. 21 x 15 cm.ISBN: 978-84-948836-1-3.

In this paper, I develop a problem I call the “Conditional Position Problem” that arises for Ernest Sosa’s externalist epistemology. The problem is that, due to a phenomenon of epistemic circularity, one is unable to attain the reflective knowledge that one is justified in believing that perception is reliable, and is confined to the merely conditional position that one is so justified if perception is reliable. The problem is similar but different from a problem that Barry Stroud has tried to (...) formulate. However, because of space limitations I cannot explain in detail what makes the two problems different. The structure of the paper is as follows: first, I explain the structural features of Sosa’s epistemology that allow the problem to arise; I also describe the normative task that is thwarted by the Conditional Position Problem; then I expound the problem itself. I proceed to examine one response that Sosa can give based on a simple inferential manoeuvre and explain why that response fails; then I examine another response he can give based on a complex form of self-support, and explain why this response also fails. I conclude explaining why the problem I present is specifically a problem for externalism. In an appendix, I very briefly describe what I take to be the main reason that justifies my claim that Stroud's problem is not the same as the problem I develop. (shrink)

Many philosophers and scientists have argued that the difference between phenomenally conscious states and other kind of states lies in the implicit self-awareness that conscious states have. Higher-Order Representationalist theories, attempt to explain such a self-awareness by means of a higher-order representation. Consciousness relies on our capacity to represent our own mental states, consciousness depends on our Theory of Mind. Such an ability can, at least conceptually, be decomposed into another two: mindreading and metacognition. In this paper I will argue (...) that consciousness cannot depend on mindreading. The tenability of HOR theories depends, therefore, on the relation between mindreading and metacognition. I analyze several views on such a relation and argue that none of them seem to be a plausible option for HOR theories. (shrink)