A busca pela felicidade está naturalmente presente como um ideal a ser alcançado por cada indivíduo da espécie humana. Kant, em sua obra Fundamentação da Metafísica dos Costumes, pretende buscar e estabelecer o princípio supremo da moralidade e esclarece que para esse fim o ideal da felicidade não apresenta condições de fundamentar as leis da moralidade. Na obra Crítica da Razão Prática, Kant sustenta essa mesma posição, mas introduz o objeto do soberano bem, referente ao qual, a felicidade é o (...) seu segundo elemento, mas condicionada às leis da moralidade e entendida como elemento necessário do soberano bem. O objetivo deste trabalho é realizar uma breve reflexão sobre a importância da felicidade na teoria moral kantiana, enfatizando a relação estabelecida entre a moralidade e a felicidade no conceito do soberano bem. Pretendemos defender que embora o princípio da moralidade e o princípio da felicidade própria fundamentam-se em princípios diferentes, há possibilidades de conciliar a busca da felicidade própria com a realização das ações morais. Palavras-chave: Felicidade. Moralidade. Soberano bem. Imperativo categórico. Imperativo hipotético. (shrink)

With the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), global researchers were confronted with major challenges. The German National Pandemic Cohort Network (NAPKON) was launched in fall 2020 to effectively leverage resources and bundle research activities in the fight against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We analyzed the setup phase of NAPKON as an example for multicenter studies in Germany, highlighting challenges and optimization potential in connecting 59 university and nonuniversity study sites. We examined the ethics application (...) process of 121 ethics submissions considering durations, annotations, and outcomes. Study site activation and recruitment processes were investigated and related to the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections. For all initial ethics applications, the median time to a positive ethics vote was less than two weeks and 30 of these study sites (65%) joined NAPKON within less than three weeks each. Electronic instead of postal ethics submission (9.5 days (Q1: 5.75, Q3: 17) vs. 14 days (Q1: 11, Q3: 26), p value = 0.01) and adoption of the primary ethics vote significantly accelerated the ethics application process. Each study center enrolled a median of 37 patients during the 14-month observation period, with large differences depending on the health sector. We found a positive correlation between recruitment performance and COVID-19 incidence as well as hospitalization incidence. Our analysis highlighted the challenges and opportunities of the federated system in Germany. Digital ethics application tools, adoption of a primary ethics vote and standardized formal requirements lead to harmonized and thus faster study initiation processes during a pandemic. (shrink)

People in extraordinary situations are vulnerable. As research participants, they are additionally threatened by abuse or exploitation and the possibility of harm through research. To protect people against these threats, informed consent as an instrument of self-determination has been introduced. Self-determination requires autonomous persons, who voluntarily make decisions based on their values and morals. However, in nursing research, this requirement cannot always be met. Advanced age, chronic illness, co-morbidity and frailty are reasons for dependencies. These in turn lead to limited (...) abilities or opportunities for decision-making and self-determination. Exclusion of vulnerable people from research projects would disadvantage them by not covering their needs, which would violate the ethical principles of justice and beneficence. Commonly, vulnerability is attributed to social groups. The consequence for individuals, attributed as belonging to such a vulnerable group, is that the principles of respect for autonomy, justice and beneficence are subordinated to the principle of non-maleficence, understood as avoiding the risk to cause more harm than good. In addition, group-specific attribution could lead to stigmatizing because labelling a person as deviation from a norm violates integrity. For clinical nursing research, the question arises how the protection of vulnerable people could be granted without compromising ethical principles. The concept of relational ethics provides a possible approach. It defines vulnerability as the relation between a person’s health status and the extent to which this person is dependent on the researcher and the research context. Vulnerability is not attributed solely to a person but to a situation, meaning the person is viewed in context. By combining vulnerability as a context-related and situational concept with existing approaches of informed consent, the different ethical principles can be balanced and preserved at every step of the research process. (shrink)

Appraisal theory has become one of the most active aproaches in the domain of emotion psychology. The appraisal process consists of the subjective evaluation that occurs during the individual's encounter with significant events in the environment, determining the nature of the emotional reaction and experience. The organism's interpretation of events and situations elicits and differentiates its emotional responses, although the exact processes involved and the limits of the theory are still a matter of debate and are currently the object of (...) active research. This volume is intended to become the primary source of information on appraisal for all those interested in emotion, from beginning graduate students to accomplished researchers in emotion psychology. (shrink)

Plural Logic is an extension of First-Order Logic which has, as well as singular terms and quantifiers, their plural counterparts. Analogously, Higher-Level Plural Logic is an extension of Plural Logic which has, as well as plural terms and quantifiers, higher-level plural ones. Roughly speaking, higher-level plurals stand to plurals like plurals stand to singulars; they are pluralised plurals. Allegedly, Higher-Level Plural Logic enjoys the expressive power of a simple type theory while committing us to nothing more than the austere ontology (...) of First-Order Logic. Were this true, Higher-Level Plural Logic would be a useful tool, with various applications in philosophy and linguistics. However, while the notions of plural reference and quantification enjoy widespread acceptance today, their higher-level counterparts have been received with a lot of scepticism. In this paper, I argue for the legitimacy of Higher-Level Plural Logic by providing evidence to the effect that natural languages contain higher-level plural expressions and showing that it is likely that they do so in an indispensable manner. Since the arguments I put forward are of the same sort advocates of Plural Logic have employed to defend their position, I conclude that the commonly held view that Plural Logic is legitimate, but not so its higher-level plural extensions is untenable. (shrink)

Research on facial emotion expression has mostly focused on emotion recognition, assuming that a small number of discrete emotions is elicited and expressed via prototypical facial muscle configurations as captured in still photographs. These are expected to be recognized by observers, presumably via template matching. In contrast, appraisal theories of emotion propose a more dynamic approach, suggesting that specific elements of facial expressions are directly produced by the result of certain appraisals and predicting the facial patterns to be expected for (...) certain appraisal configurations. This approach has recently been extended to emotion perception, claiming that observers first infer individual appraisals and only then make categorical emotion judgments based on the estimated appraisal patterns, using semantic inference rules. Here we report two related studies to empirically investigate the facial action unit configurations that are used by actors to convey specific emotions in short affect bursts and to examine to what extent observers can infer a person’s emotions from the predicted facial expression configurations. The results show that 1) professional actors use many of the predicted facial action unit patterns to enact systematically specified appraisal outcomes in a realistic scenario setting, and 2) naïve observers infer the respective emotions based on highly similar facial movement configurations with a degree of accuracy comparable to earlier research findings. Based on estimates of underlying appraisal criteria for the different emotions we conclude that the patterns of facial action units identified in this research correspond largely to prior predictions and encourage further research on appraisal-driven expression and inference. (shrink)

Abstract:We discuss the role that transnational corporations (TNCs) should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the social (...) responsibility of the firm. We argue that instrumental stakeholder theory and business and society research can only partially solve the global governance issue, and that more recent concepts of corporate citizenship and republican business ethics deliver theoretically and practically helpful, fresh insights. However, even these need further development, especially with regard to the legitimacy of corporate political activity. (shrink)

The essay presents an interpretation of Hegel’s speculative sentence that, emphasizing the “counter-thrust” that the modern subject undergoes here, allows us to connect the movement of the Hegelian subject to the negativity recognised by Kant at the bottom of the faculty of judgment with regard to its aesthetic dimension. This way, it aims, first, to put into question the interpretation that sees in Hegel’s philosophy a regression with regard to the consciousness, attained by Kant, of the finitude, or the constitutive (...) split, of the modern subject, and, finally, in line with recent interpretations of Hegel, like those of Žižek or Malabou, to contribute to the questioning of the traditional interpretation of Hegel’s dialectics as the overcoming of negativity into a final reconciling synthesis. (shrink)

This article assesses some of the implications of globalization for the scholarly debate on business ethics, CSR and related concepts. The argument is based, among other things, on the declining capacity of nation state institutions to regulate socially desirable corporate behavior as well as the growing corporate exposure to heterogeneous social, cultural and political values in societies globally. It is argued that these changes are shifting the corporate role towards a sphere of societal governance hitherto dominated by traditional political actors. (...) This leads to a discussion of the ambivalent results of such a process for a responsible corporate role in a globalized world. While assessing the current reception these changes have received in the management literature, the contributions of the four articles in this Special Issue are framed and evaluated. The argument closes by highlighting avenues of future research on this new challenge. (shrink)

Cuando hablamos de iconos nos referimos a representaciones que producen un cierto impacto en nosotros aunque no sean perfectas; del icono se esperan armonía, belleza, simplicidad. Cuando el icono no es una imagen sino una persona humana, se convierte en referente: observamos aspectos de su personalidad con los que nos identificamos aunque nos coincidan exactamente con los nuestros. A lo largo de la historia de la ciencia, las mujeres han sido iconos referenciales fundamentalmente por dos cosas, su calidad humana y (...) su excelencia científica. (shrink)

Cada vez más, la medida de los estándares educativos está arrojando luz a las Reformas emprendidas en los distintos países. En el caso español, y concretamente en lo relativo a la enseñanza de las Ciencias, el paso a dar está en la transferencia de los aprendizajes hacia situaciones de vida.

The introduction of and the commitment to evidence-based nursing in all care settings have led to a rapid increase of intervention and outcome-based research programs. Yet, the topics of nursing research are not only affected by interventions and outcomes but also affected by the concept of caring derived from humanistic philosophy. Considering this twofold orientation of nursing science, nuanced ethical regulations for nursing research programs are called for. In addition to the different research approaches, further arguments for ethical regulations are (...) as follows: first, the different degrees of contextualization and the variety of participation models regarding the target groups; second, the capacities and opportunities of participants; and third, the caring relationship between nurses and research subjects. To capture these special features of nursing science, four approaches to fill the gaps in existing ethical regulations for nursing research are proposed: (a) process orientation, (b) community orientation, (c) context orientation, and (d) relation orientation. (shrink)

Background:Clinical ethics committees have been broadly implemented in university hospitals, general hospitals and nursing homes. To ensure the quality of ethics consultations, evaluation should be...

A partir de la reivindicación de Adorno del poder crítico del arte, este trabajo confronta la posición de este pensador con las de Kant y Hegel a propósito de la cuestión de la autonomía del ámbito estético. Explica por qué Adorno considera que ni Kant, quien afirma esa autonomía, ni Hegel, quien, por el contrario, asume su heteronomía, logran reconocer (el poder de) la obra de arte y de la experiencia estética. Muestra luego que Adorno tomó conciencia de que ello (...) proviene del compromiso de ambos autores con la pretensión de plena autonomía del sujeto moderno, y explica finalmente que Adorno sí reconoce la función crítica del arte y del pensamiento que le corresponde gracias a que rechaza tal pretenciosa subjetividad. Taking Adorno's vindication of the critical power of art as a starting point and focussing on the question of the autonomy of the aesthetic field, this paper confronts Adorno's position with those of Kant and Hegel. I explain why Adorno considers that neither Kant-affirming its autonomy- nor Hegel -assuming its heteronomy- succeeded in recognising (the power of) the work of art and the aesthetic experience. I show that Adorno saw that this was due to their common commitment to the modern subject's claim to full autonomy, and finally argue that Adorno, on the contrary, can do that because he abandons such a pretentious subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper proposes to call «countermodern aesthetics» a philosophical line that, reaching from the last Kant to Heidegger, would oppose to the modern dominance of theory while acknowledging the inner connection of the aesthetic to truth, to the tragic truth. It presents then cinema as a mass medium that modern aesthetics interprets according to its own conception of art in order to fit it into the advanced capitalist system and its ideology. And, finally, ir argues that S.Zizek´s alternative understanding of (...) cinema, because of the tragic condition of its very underlying metaphysics, continues the tradition that has been presented as «counter-modern aesthetics». (shrink)

Este trabajo parte de la constatación del carácter central que en la reconocimiento adorniano de lo estético tiene la rehabilitación de su vínculo al conocimiento y a la verdad. Se reconstruye así la crítica de Adorno a la teoría estética kantiana desde su rechazo de la separación que Kant estableció entre el ámbito estético y el epistemológico. Esta crítica, que acusa a la estética kantiana de subjetivista, se retrotrae finalmente a la insatisfacción de Adorno respecto al enfoque trascendental, en tanto (...) que no dialéctico. En este punto deviene patente la necesidad de determinar la especificidad de su propia comprensión de lo estético y de la dialéctica. Sorprendentemente se descubre entonces una inesperada cercanía entre su posición y la de la misma estética kantiana que permite reconocer en ésta última ciertos rasgos que desbordan el propio sistema crítico hacia el planteamiento adorniano. Pero esta cercanía prueba también la inmanencia y legitimidad de la (ambigua) crítica de Adorno a Kant y, de resultas, el carácter insatisfactorio de la determinación kantiana del conocimiento y la verdad. (shrink)

I strongly endorse many of the suggestions made by the authors of the extremely useful reviews in this issue. In particular, the need to identify the complex causal mechanisms underlying the major health risk factors requires urgent attention of the research community. I suggest considering the important role of emotional disturbances as contributors to health risks given the empirically established comorbidity between mental and somatic illness. Better knowledge of these mechanisms is an essential prerequisite to develop tailored personalized prevention and (...) intervention programs, including reliable and valid assessment of deficits. (shrink)

Diagnosing emotion disturbances should be informed by current knowledge about normal emotion processes. I identify four major functions of emotion as well as sources for potential dysfunctions and suggest that emotions should only be diagnosed as pathological when they are clearly dysfunctional, which requires considering eliciting events, realistic person-specific appraisal patterns, and adaptive responses or action tendencies. Evidence from actuarial research on the reported length of naturally occurring emotion episodes (including potential determinants) illustrates appropriateness criteria for the clinical evaluation of (...) emotion duration—an essential element in the DSM-5 symptom catalogue for major depression episodes, especially in bereavement. The need for more actuarial evidence on normal emotion responses and its consideration by the clinical community is highlighted. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive roadmap to the burgeoning area of affective sciences, which now spans several disciplines. The Handbook brings together, for the first time, the various strands of inquiry and latest research in the scientific study of the relationship between the mechanisms of the brain and the psychology of mind. In recent years, scientists have made considerable advances in understanding how brain processes shape emotions and are changed by human emotion. Drawing on a wide range of neuroimaging techniques, (...) neuropsychological assessment, and clinical research, scientists are beginning to understand the biological mechanisms for emotions. As a result, researchers are gaining insight into such compelling questions as: How do people experience life emotionally? Why do people respond so differently to the same experiences? What can the face tell us about internal states? How does emotion in significant social relationships influence health? Are there basic emotions common to all humans? This volume brings together the most eminent scholars in the field to present, in sixty original chapters, the latest research and theories in the field. The book is divided into ten sections: Neuroscience; Autonomic Psychophysiology; Genetics and Development; Expression; Components of Emotion; Personality; Emotion and Social Processes; Adaptation, Culture, and Evolution; Emotion and Psychopathology; and Emotion and Health. This major new volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers that will define affective sciences for the next decade. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAppraisal theories of emotion, and particularly the Component Process Model, claim that the different components of the emotion process are essentially driven by the results of cognitive appraisals and that the feeling component constitutes a central integration and representation of these processes. Given the complexity of the proposed architecture, comprehensive experimental tests of these predictions are difficult to perform and to date are lacking. Encouraged by the “lexical sedimentation” hypothesis, here we propose an indirect examination of the compatibility of the (...) theoretical assumptions with the semantic structure of a set of major emotion words as measured in a cross-language and cross-cultural study. Specifically, we performed a secondary analysis of the large-scale data set with ratings of affective features covering all components of the emotion process for 24 emotion words in 27 countries, constituting... (shrink)

Over the last century, emotion research has been beset by the problem of major disagreements with respect to the definition of the phenomenon and an abundance of different theories. Arguably, these divergences have had adverse effects on theory development, on the theoretical foundations of empirical research, and on knowledge accumulation in the study of emotion. Similar problems have been encountered in other areas of behavioural science. Increasingly, there have been calls to work towards some form of theory integration. In contrast, (...) here an effort is made to show that a reasonable degree of theory convergence in the area of emotion science can be attained by adopting a design feature-based working definition of emotion and highlighting the basic agreement on the components of the dynamic emotion process. The aim is to invite constructive discussion on communalities and divergences between different theories and foster the development of more complementary theoretical frameworks to guide future empirical research. (shrink)

This paper offers an alternative perspective to the traditional interpretation of Hegel's philosophical reflection on history, departing from a reinterpretation of Hegel's reading of the tragic action of Antigone in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The customary interpretation of this text affirms that Hegel shows how the conflict of tragic action finds its truth and its end in the identity of spirit. Tragic conflict is left behind to the same extent that spirit sublates the Greek ethical substance. This (...) way, spirit can guarantee that our historical time is released from the past of the substance, or the spiritual movement of mediation from the immediacy of an ‘in-itself’. My reading, by contrast, finds under the tragic conflict of this text of Hegel's nothing but the ‘no’ of death that negates itself, or a principle that has the form of an original and irreducible conflict. Under this interpretation of Hegelian spirit, it becomes clear that it can neither fail to posit some form of ‘in-itself’ nor sublate its own tragic nature. This way it is shown that Hegel's reflection on the past does not reassure the superiority of the identity of the present, but rather illuminates its ‘broken’ nature. I thus offer an alternative view on Hegel's comprehension of the relation between present and past and between philosophy and time. (shrink)

Este escrito pretende examinar el papel de la estética en el pensamiento de Schiller y Schelling en 1795 para rastrear el modo en que el pensamiento estético comienza a constituirse como un camino desde el que afrontar la problemática de la libertad planteada por la modernidad y, en especial, por la filosofía práctica de Kant. En el primer apartado se tratará de aclarar el sentido en el que la reflexión estética de ambos autores en 1795 no se puede disociar de (...) la problemática servida por la filosofía kantiana. En primer lugar intentaré mostrar las razones por las que las premisas mismas del sistema crítico hacen necesaria la Crítica del Juicio, cuya primera parte, como es sabido, constituye precisamente una ¿crítica del juicio estético¿ y, desde aquí, defenderé que la obra se hace cargo de cierta ambivalencia inherente al kantismo y que, precisamente por ello, expresa del modo más perspicuo el problema que plantea el concepto kantiano, formal, de libertad. Con ello se insiste evidentemente en la relevancia de esta obra para la primera recepción de Kant en general, esto es, para el primer Idealismo postkantiano en tanto que preocupado por elevarse a la verdad del espíritu kantiano, pero, sobre todo, se comenzarán a iluminar las razones por las que la orientación estética del pensamiento, orientación que en 1795 exploran tanto Schiller como Schelling, podrá considerarse un camino privilegiado de cara tanto a la ¿recuperación¿ de la consistencia del kantismo como a la elaboración de un concepto satisfactorio de libertad. Es decir, se intentará fundamentar así, aun cuando sólo sea indirectamente, que la conexión de la ética, de la filosofía práctica, con la estética resulta prometedora aun desde una óptica estrictamente kantiana. Pero el núcleo de este trabajo se desarrollará en los apartados segundo y tercero donde, partiendo de este suelo común compartido por Schiller y Schelling, se examinarán las diferencias entre los modos en que la reflexión estética de cada uno responde a la problemática planteada por el kantismo. En relación a esto último será fundamental determinar si sus respuestas, en tanto que soluciones, realmente se mantienen fieles a la complejidad que nace de la ambivalencia del espíritu kantiano o si, antes bien, pagan el precio de optar por uno sólo de los hilos que tejen el sistema crítico. (shrink)

Taking the Critique of Judgement for an answer to the problem raised by the kantian dualisms, I offer a reading of this work according to which in the part devoted to the teleological judgement Kant practices a Hegelian way of resolution, whereas, in the “critique of the aesthetic judgement”, he thinks the relation between the opposites of such dualisms in a new way that opens up the possibility of a dialectical thought rid of the absolutness of the Hegelian reason.

El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer, al hilo de un análisis del texto de la Fenomenologíadel Espíritu que comenta la Antígona de Sófocles, una interpretación del concepto hegeliano de acciónque pone en cuestión la tesis, defendida habitualmente, según la cual Hegel habría pretendido que elconflicto trágico resulta superado por la acción moderna.Ese texto revela que la acción, que comparece ahí como principio absoluto, posee sin embargo unaestructura quebrada y paradójica: necesariamente presupone y niega una instancia en sí, inmediata ysustantiva (...) que, finalmente, oculta la negatividad de la muerte. En la medida en que esa vinculación ala sustancia se demuestra así consustancial a la acción, el trabajo concluye, frente a otras lecturas, que,aun cuando la historia del espíritu haya dejado atrás la “sustancia ética” antigua, la acción nopuede liberarse para Hegel del carácter trágico. Por último, defiende el sentido en el que precisamenteesta condición trágica la determina a la vez como destructiva y productiva, capaz de abrir la historia. (shrink)

Emotion regulation, and in particular cognitive reappraisal. Gross has been booming in theory development and empirical research for the last two decades. A large number of publications have demonstrated the importance of these mechanisms for understanding and promoting well-being and mental health. It is thus timely for Cognition and Emotion to examine the current state of theory in this domain. The resultant invited article, authored by Uusberg, A., Ford, Uusberg, H., and Gross, aims to expand the scope of reappraisal theory (...) by extending their recent reAppraisal model by suggesting different forms of goal commitment and situation construals. Their suggestions are commented on by Kashdan and Goodman from a purpose in life perspective, Ehring, and Woud from a clinical psychopathology perspective. In this editorial, I briefly discuss the lack of specification of the goal construct, which is central to the reappraisal model. Moreover, I point to recent evidence showing that problems may arise because of appraisal biases, in the case of individuals prone to inappropriate evaluations of situations. I suggest that future work in this domain could benefit from increased interaction between theorists and researchers working on appraisal and reappraisal processes. (shrink)

Mimicry of appearance or of facial, vocal, or gestural expressions emerges frequently among members of different species. When such mimicry directly relates to affective aspects of an interaction, researchers talk about “emotional mimicry”. Emotional mimicry has been amply documented but its functionality is still debated. Why and when do people mimic the expressions of others, who benefits, the mimicker or the mimicked, and how do they benefit? Which processes underlie emotional mimicry? Is it completely automatic and unconscious or can it (...) be deliberate and conscious? The current Theory Section addresses these questions from different theoretical perspectives. The invited article by Hess and Fischer focused on the role of mimicry in social regulation and social bonding. The invited comment by Krets and Akyüz highlights information gathering and prediction in social interaction. The invited comment by Bernhold and Giles emphasizes vocal communication and its role in interpersonal accommodation. In this editorial, I propose the different theoretical perspectives may be integrated by assuming a multilevel appraisal and response generation mechanism. I also suggest that emotional mimicry research may be broadened by including social learning, vocal imitation, interspecies comparisons, and affective computing approaches. (shrink)

My hypothesis is that the cognitive challenge posed by death might have had a co-evolutionary role in the development of linguistic faculties. First, I claim that mirror neurons, which enable us to understand others’ actions and emotions, not only activate when we directly observe someone, but can also be triggered by language: words make us feel bodily sensations. Second, I argue that the death of another individual cannot be understood by virtue of the mirror neuron mechanism, since the dead provide (...) no neural pattern for mirroring: this cognitive task requires symbolic thought, which in turn involves emotions. Third, I describe the symbolic leap of the human species as a cognitive detachment from the here and now, allowing displaced reference: through symbols the human mind can refer to what is absent, possible, or even impossible (like the presence of a dead person). Such a detachment has had a huge adaptive impact: adopting a coevolutionary standpoint can help explain why language is as effective as environmental inputs in order to stimulate our bodily experience. In the end I suggest a further coevolutionary reversal : if language is necessary to understand the death of the other, it might also be true that the peculiar cognitive problem posed by the death of the other (the corpse is present, but the other is absent) has contributed to the crucial transition from an indexical sign system to the symbolic level, i.e., the cognitive detachment . Death and language, as Heidegger claimed, have an essential relation for humans, both from an evolutionary and a phenomenological perspective: they have shaped the symbolic consciousness that make us conceive of them. (shrink)

What is the difference between the discriminations made by a home appliance able to distinguish salt from sugar, and my sensations of salty and sweet? It is never taken into consideration that, in contrast to the appliance, I can have offline sensations, i.e., phenomenal experiences in the absence of direct environmental stimuli, mainly evoked by words occurring into thought, conversation, reading, etc. If we put this detachment stimuli/sensations in relation with the correlative detachment signs/referents inaugurated by the cognitive revolution of (...) symbolic language , we might rethink the role played by language in our phenomenal experience as a whole. Qualia can be defined as forms of relationship between organisms and environment, given that human environment is extended to the linguistic dimension, and that the latter has ignited a coevolutionary process with human cognition. The very same properties we attribute to qualia, even when conceiving of them as pre-linguistic phenomenal traits, rely on the cognitive resources that language has made available. The substantialist notion of qualia, I argue, is formed by an online sensation on which the focus shifts from the perceived object to the sensory quality by virtue of linguistic modes of thinking, which are systematically neglected. (shrink)

During the last decades the special literature has paid relatively much attention to the problematic of speech acts. However, in Slovakia it still remains underdeve-loped. Therefore the author decided to examine it from the points of view of its establishment, gradual development and interactional communication. The paper offers a survey of all philosophical-linguistic views on this problematic. Further, it gives a more detailed analysis of the theory of the founders of the speech acts theory , comparing their main ideas with (...) those of other philosophers and linguists. (shrink)