Words change meaning, usually in unpredictable ways. But some words’ meanings are revised intentionally. Revisionary projects are normally put forward in the service of some purpose – some serve specific goals of inquiry, and others serve ethical, political or social aims. Revisionist projects can ameliorate meanings, but they can also pervert. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the dangers of meaning perversions, and argue that the self-declared goodness of a revisionist project doesn’t suffice to avoid meaning perversions. (...) The road to Hell, or to horrors on Earth, is paved with good intentions. Finally and more importantly, I want to demarcate what meaning perversions are. This, I hope, can help us assess the moral and political legitimacy of revisionary projects. (shrink)

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology, yet only recently have the two disciplines developed greater interaction. Recent experiments in psychology that test the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning have found a great deal of variation, across individuals and (...) cultures, in categorization behaviour. Meanwhile, philosophers of language and mind have investigated the semantic properties of concepts, and how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. A key motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared across individuals and cultures. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. -/- This volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers to advance the interdisciplinary debate on the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, the relationship between concepts and linguistic meaning and communication, the challenges conceptual variation poses to communication, and the social and political effects of conceptual change. (shrink)

Neste artigo, pretendemos defender a tese segundo a qual julgamentos sociais se iniciam com a percepção emocional e com o processamento de informações emocionais no reconhecimento de expressões faciais. Para tanto, revisaremos modelos que discutem (i) os mecanismos pelos quais as expressões faciais são codificadas para transmitir informações e ser percebidas pelos outros, (ii) os mecanismos perceptivos de decodificação e categorização de expressões faciais e, por fim, (iii) os mecanismos pelos quais o reconhecimento de expressões faciais geram respostas emocionais e (...) ajustes comportamentais e, por fim, (iv) a eficiência de nosso sistema perceptual na decodificação desses processos. Com essa discussão, nossa intenção é a de (i) explicitar em que sentido nossa percepção emocional de expressões faciais é u m dos principais mecanismos evolutivos de regulação da vida e que (ii) o processamento de informações emocionais é um poderoso instrumento para assegurar a sobrevivência e sustentar razoáveis interações sociais. (shrink)

O presente texto é de natureza hermenêutica, e sua finalidade é a de sistematizar o estudo que empreendemos em relação às linhas gerais do projeto de Varela, Thompson e Rosch. Nosso objetivo é o de analisar as bases e o caminho a partir dos quais nossos autores buscaram redirecionar os rumos e mesmo os princípios mais centrais das ciências empíricas e fenomenológicas da mente. Buscaremos demonstrar que o projeto de Varela, Thompson e Rosch foi exitoso em seu propósito de constituir (...) um novo programa de pesquisa no interior das ciências cognitivas e das ciências da mente em geral. Buscaremos, por fim, discutir a concepção de cognição sobre a qual se sustentaram e o papel da fenomenologia nesse empreendimento. (shrink)

Kaplan (1999) argued that a different dimension of expressive meaning (“use-conditional”, as opposed to truth-conditional) is required to characterize the meaning of pejoratives, including slurs and racial epithets. Elaborating on this, writers have argued that the expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is either a conventional implicature (Potts 2007) or a presupposition (Macià 2002 and 2014, Schlenker 2007, Cepollaro and Stojanovic 2016). We argue that an expressive presuppositional theory accounts well for the data, but that expressive presuppositions are not just (...) propositions to be added to a common ground. We hold that expressives, including pejoratives and slurs, make requirements on a contextual record governed by sui generis norms specific to affective attitudes and their expressions. (shrink)

An implicit ambiguity in the field of prediction-based decision-making concerns the relation between the concepts of prediction and decision. Much of the literature in the field tends to blur the boundaries between the two concepts and often simply refers to ‘fair prediction’. In this paper, we point out that a differentiation of these concepts is helpful when trying to implement algorithmic fairness. Even if fairness properties are related to the features of the used prediction model, what is more properly called (...) ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ is a decision system, not a prediction model. This is because fairness is about the consequences on human lives, created by a decision, not by a prediction. In this paper, we clarify the distinction between the concepts of prediction and decision and show the different ways in which these two elements influence the final fairness properties of a prediction-based decision system. As well as discussing this relationship both from a conceptual and a practical point of view, we propose a framework that enables a better understanding and reasoning of the conceptual logic of creating fairness in prediction-based decision-making. In our framework, we specify different roles, namely the ‘prediction-modeler’ and the ‘decision-maker,’ and the information required from each of them for being able to implement fairness of the system. Our framework allows for deriving distinct responsibilities for both roles and discussing some insights related to ethical and legal requirements. Our contribution is twofold. First, we offer a new perspective shifting the focus from an abstract concept of algorithmic fairness to the concrete context-dependent nature of algorithmic decision-making, where different actors exist, can have different goals, and may act independently. In addition, we provide a conceptual framework that can help structure prediction-based decision problems with respect to fairness issues, identify responsibilities, and implement fairness governance mechanisms in real-world scenarios. (shrink)

Abstract David Sobel (2001) objects to Bernard Williams's internalism, the view that an agent has a reason to perform an action only if she has some motive that will be served by performing that action. Sobel is an unusual challenger in that he endorses neo-Humean subjectivism, ?the view that it is the agent's subjective motivational set that makes it the case that an agent does or does not have a reason to φ? (219). Sobel's objection in fact arises from this (...) very commitment. Internalism, he says, is incompatible with the best subjectivist accounts of reasons for action?accounts that suggest that there are what he calls fragile reasons and perhaps also superfragile ones, both of which allegedly provide for counterexamples to internalism. I argue that such reasons do not in fact threaten internalism. I then briefly explore whether internalism is vulnerable to a related charge?that it commits the conditional fallacy. (shrink)

Resumo : O presente texto é de natureza hermenêutica, e sua finalidade é a de sistematizar o estudo que empreendemos em relação às linhas gerais do projeto de Varela, Thompson e Rosch. Nosso objetivo é o de analisar as bases e o caminho a partir dos quais nossos autores buscaram redirecionar os rumos e mesmo os princípios mais centrais das ciências empíricas e fenomenológicas da mente. Buscaremos demonstrar que o projeto de Varela, Thompson e Rosch foi exitoso em seu propósito (...) de constituir um novo programa de pesquisa no interior das ciências cognitivas e das ciências da mente em geral. Buscaremos, por fim, discutir a concepção de cognição sobre a qual se sustentaram e o papel da fenomenologia nesse empreendimento. (shrink)

Children’s future-oriented cognition has become a well-established area of research over the last decade. Future-oriented cognition encompasses a range of processes, including those involved in conceiving the future, imagining and preparing for future events, and making decisions that will affect how the future unfolds. We consider recent empirical advances in the study of such processes by outlining key findings that have yielded a clearer picture of how future thinking emerges and changes over childhood. Our interest in future thinking stems from (...) a broader interest in temporal cognition, and we argue that a consideration of developmental changes in how children understand and represent time itself provides a valuable framework in which to study future-oriented cognition. (shrink)

Collective Action, Philosophy and Law brings together two important strands of philosophical analysis. It combines general philosophical inquiry into collective agency with analyses of specific questions about plural entities and activities in the legal domain. These are issues of growing interest in areas of philosophy like action theory and social ontology, as well as in philosophy of law. The book contains thirteen original chapters written by an international team of leading philosophers and legal theorists, and is divided into four clear (...) parts: The nature of law and of legislative intention Practical reasoning and duties Causality, blameworthiness, and responsibility Citizens, states, and institutions. These sections cut across, and build on, different accounts to advance the debate on classical and new issues in collective agency. Each part also features legal-philosophical analyses that draw on general accounts of collective agency to cast new light on the law, descriptive as well as normatively. Collective Action, Philosophy and Law is the first major interdisciplinary and multi-authored work bridging legal and philosophical approaches to collective agency. As such, it is essential reading for students and researchers of philosophy of law, ethics, political philosophy, jurisprudence, and legal theory. (shrink)

Our understanding of what it means to be a parent is shaped by our biological, social, legal, and moral concepts of parenthood. This book combines traditional philosophical methods with research in the broader social sciences and humanities to explore the dilemmas which challenge our understanding of parenthood today.

Civility is often treated as an essential virtue in liberal democracies that promise to protect diversity as well as active disagreement in the public sphere. Yet the fear that our tolerant society faces a crisis of incivility is gaining ground. Politicians and public intellectuals call for "more civility" as the solution--but is civility really a virtue? Or is it something more sinister--a covert demand for conformity that silences dissent? Mere Civility sheds light on this tension in contemporary political theory and (...) practice by examining similar appeals to civility in early modern debates about religious toleration. In seventeenth-century England, figures as different as Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke could agree that some restraint on the wars of words and "persecution of the tongue" between sectarians would be required; and yet, they recognized that the prosecution of incivility was often difficult to distinguish from persecution.--. (shrink)

An account of the development of temporal understanding is proposed which links such understanding with the development of episodic memory. We distinguish between different ways of representing time in terms of the kinds of temporal frameworks they involve. Distinctions are made between frameworks that are perspectival or nonperspectival and those that represent recurrent sequences or particular times. Even primitive temporal understanding integrates both perspectival and nonperspectival components. However, since early frameworks are event-based and localized, they are not yet sufficient for (...) episodic memory in that they do not enable the child to think of events as having occurred at particular points in time. We describe the emergence of new kinds of frameworks in terms of the development of temporal decentering. Two levels of temporal decentering are distinguished, with the higher level involving an appreciation of how event representations depend on one's temporal perspective. (shrink)

In the book "Conceptual Spaces: the Geometry of Thought" [2000] Peter Gärdenfors proposes a new framework for cognitive science. Complementary to symbolic and subsymbolic [connectionist] descriptions, conceptual spaces are semantic structures — constructed from empirical data — representing the universe of mental states. We argue that Gärdenfors' modeling can be used in consciousness research to describe the phenomenal conscious world, its elements and their intrinsic relations. The conceptual space approach affords the construction of a universal state space of human consciousness, (...) where all possible kinds of human conscious states could be mapped. Starting from this approach, we discuss the inclusion of feelings and emotions in conceptual spaces, and their relation to perceptual and cognitive states. Current debate on integration of affect/emotion and perception/cognition allows three possible descriptive alternatives: emotion resulting from basic cognition; cognition resulting from basic emotion, and both as relatively independent functions integrated by brain mechanisms. Finding a solution for this issue is an important step in any attempt of successful modeling of natural or artificial consciousness. After making a brief review of proposals in this area, we summarize the essentials of a new model of consciousness based on neuro-astroglial interactions. (shrink)

The field of affective neuroscience has emerged from the efforts of Jaak Panksepp in the 1990s and reinforced by the work of, among others, Joseph LeDoux in the 2000s. It is based on the ideas that affective processes are supported by brain structures that appeared earlier in the phylogenetic scale (as the periaqueductal gray area), they run in parallel with cognitive processes, and can influence behaviour independently of cognitive judgements. This kind of approach contrasts with the hegemonic concept of conscious (...) processing in cognitive neurosciences, which is based on the identification of brain circuits responsible for the processing of (cognitive) representations. Within cognitive neurosciences, the frontal lobes are assigned the role of coordinators in maintaining affective states and their emotional expressions under cognitive control. An intermediary view is the Damasio-Bechara Somatic Marker model, which puts cognition under partial somatic-affective control. We present here our efforts to make a synthesis of these views, by proposing the existence of two interacting brain circuits; the first one in charge of cognitive processes and the second mediating feelings about cognitive contents. The coupling of the two circuits promotes an endogenous feedback that supports conscious processes. Within this framework, we present the defence that detailed study of both affective and cognitive processes, their interactions, as well of their respective brain networks, is necessary for a science of consciousness. (shrink)

This is the second of two volumes which together provide a comprehensive look at the rich and colorful history of higher education exchange between the United States and the countries of the Middle East. Twenty-first century developments, and the current scope and character of higher education exchange between America and the Middle East are explored in this new book.

Higher education exchange between America and the Middle East is a comparatively recent development, but the colorful history of circumstances and events that preceded the relationship is ancient and deep. Here, Brawner explores the multifarious and intriguing story from antiquity to the end of the twentieth century.

Post-secularism is the fundamental evidence of the end of modernity. Modernity, as sleeping reason in Francisco Goya's painting, realizes that, although it thought that it was awake, it was producing monsters. We try to analyze post-secular philosophy from the point of view of Russian religious thought. We believe that such philosophers as Vladimir Soloviev, Pavel Florensky, Sergey Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Georges Florovsky, and Semen Frank may be helpful for understanding and overcoming post-secular order. Their unique views on the relations between (...) religion and philosophy, science, and social life are apparently missing in the current Western debates. It seems to us that Russian religious philosophy becomes surprisingly up-to-date and attractive in the contemporary world. We hope that the present volume will be a significant step forward in the inclusion of the heritage of Russian religious philosophy in contemporary debates. (shrink)

A new model of the development of temporal concepts is described that assumes that there are substantial changes in how children think about time in the early years. It is argued that there is a shift from understanding time in an event-dependent way to an event-independent understanding of time. Early in development, very young children are unable to think about locations in time independently of the events that occur at those locations. It is only with development that children begin to (...) have a proper grasp of the distinction between past, present, and future, and represent time as linear and unidirectional. The model assumes that although children aged 2 to 3 years may categorize events differently depending on whether they lie in the past or the future, they may not be able to understand that whether an event is in the past or future is something that changes as time passes and varies with temporal perspective. Around 4 to 5 years, children understand how causality operates in time, and can grasp the systematic relations that obtain between different locations in time, which provides the basis for acquiring the conventional clock and calendar system. (shrink)

The idea that one can 'soak up' someone else's mood or sense the tension in a room is familiar - as in 'negative energy'. This ability to borrow or share states of mind is now pathologized, as the author shows in relation to affective transfer in psychiatric clinics.

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one right logic. A particular version of the view, what is sometimes called domain-specific logical pluralism, has it that the right logic and connectives depend somehow on the domain of use, or context of use, or the linguistic framework. This type of view has a problem with cross-framework communication, though: it seems that all such communication turns into merely verbal disputes. If two people approach the same domain with different logics (...) as their guide, then they may be using different connectives, and hence talking past each other. In this situation, if we think we are having a conversation about “¬A\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot A$$\end{document}”, but are using different “¬\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot $$\end{document}”s, then we are not really talking about the same thing. The communication problem prevents legitimate disagreements about logic, which is a bad result. In this paper I articulate a possible solution to this problem, without giving up pluralism, which requires adopting a notion of metalinguistic negotiation, and allows people to communicate and disagree across domains/contexts/frameworks. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that Thomas Hobbes' analysis of insult or ‘contumely’ prefigures recent developments in moral and political philosophy in striking ways. Specifically, Hobbes's concerns about the dignitary harms in hate speech went well beyond ‘fighting words’ to the essential role played by expressions of hatred and contempt in making and unmaking social hierarchies. Hobbes’s sensitivity to contumely’s subtle power to constitute social in/equalities recalls recent work in feminist and critical race theory. Yet his expansive solutions – both negative (...) and positive, legal and ethical – also shed light on the difficulties faced by aspirationally egalitarian societies in their efforts to eradicate contempt today. (shrink)

What cognitive abilities underpin the use of tools, and how are tools and their properties represented or understood by tool-users? Does the study of tool use provide us with a unique or distinctive source of information about the causal cognition of tool-users? -/- Tool use is a topic of major interest to all those interested in animal cognition, because it implies that the animal has knowledge of the relationship between objects and their effects. There are countless examples of animals developing (...) tools to achieve some goal-chimps sharpening sticks to use as spears, bonobos using sticks to fish for termites, and New Caledonian crows developing complex tools to extracts insects from logs. Studies of tool use have been used to examine an exceptionally wide range of aspects of cognition, such as planning, problem-solving and insight, naive physics, social relationship between action and perception. A key debate in recent research on animal cognition concerns the level of cognitive sophistication that is implied by animal tool use, and developmental psychologists have been addressing related questions regarding the processes through which children acquire the ability to use tools. In neuropsychology, patterns of impairments in tool use due to brain damage, and studies of neural changes associated with tool use, have also led to debates about the different types of cognitive abilities that might underpin tool use, and about how tool use may change the way space or the body is represented. -/- Tool Use and Causal Cognition provides a new interdisciplinary perspective on these issues with contributions from leading psychologists studying tool use and philosophers providing new analyses of the nature of causal understanding A ground-breaking volume which covers several disciplines, this volume will be of interest to psychologists, including animal researchers and developmental psychologists as well as philosophers, and neuroscientists. (shrink)

Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, one of Russia’s great philosophers, exemplified what was best in the Russian religious-philosophical tradition. His lifelong pursuit was “integral knowledge.” This ideal affirmed that faith was integral to reason and that inner experience, and not just external sensory experience, offered truthful testimony to the nature of reality—precisely contrary to the reductive positivism and scientism of Trubetskoi’s day and ours. Following Vladimir Soloviev he developed the concept of Bogochelovechestvo —the free human realization of the divine principle in ourselves (...) and in the world —and found in it the very meaning of life. Trubetskoi strikingly combined religious philosophy with an unwavering commitment to the main principles of liberalism: human dignity, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, and human perfectibility. He worked tirelessly for a liberal, constitutional Russia. This is the first book in English devoted to Evgenii Trubetskoi’s life and thought. It includes a comprehensive introduction, six chapters on his religious-philosophical worldview, and six chapters on an area of religious studies that he inspired—the philosophy of the icon. (shrink)

Although the concept of food sovereignty is rooted in International Peasant Movements across the global south, activists have recently called for the adoption of this framework among low-income communities of color in the urban United States. This paper investigates on-the-ground processes through which food sovereignty articulates with the work of food justice and community food security activists in Oakland, California, and Seattle, Washington. In Oakland, we analyze a farmers market that seeks to connect black farmers to low-income consumers. In Seattle, (...) we attend to the experiences of displaced immigrant farmers from Latin America and their efforts to address their food needs following migration. In both cases, we find that US based projects were constrained by broader forces of neoliberalism that remained unrecognized by local activists. In Oakland, despite a desire to create a local food system led by marginalized African Americans, emphasis on providing green jobs in agriculture led activists to take a market-based approach that kept local food out of the economic grasp of food-insecure neighborhood residents. In Seattle, the marginalization of the immense agroecological knowledge of Latino/an immigrant farmers rendered local food projects less inclusive and capable of transformative change. Taken together, these very different cases suggest that a shift towards food sovereignty necessitates a broad acknowledgement of and resistance to neoliberalism. (shrink)

The field of affective neuroscience has emerged from the efforts of Jaak Panksepp in the 1990s and reinforced by the work of, among others, Joseph LeDoux in the 2000s. It is based on the ideas that affective processes are supported by brain structures that appeared earlier in the phylogenetic scale (as the periaqueductal gray area), they run in parallel with cognitive processes, and can influence behaviour independently of cognitive judgements. This kind of approach contrasts with the hegemonic concept of conscious (...) processing in cognitive neurosciences, which is based on the identification of brain circuits responsible for the processing of (cognitive) representations. Within cognitive neurosciences, the frontal lobes are assigned the role of coordinators in maintaining affective states and their emotional expressions under cognitive control. An intermediary view is the Damasio-Bechara Somatic Marker model, which puts cognition under partial somatic-affective control. We present here our efforts to make a synthesis of these views, by proposing the existence of two interacting brain circuits; the first one in charge of cognitive processes and the second mediating feelings about cognitive contents. The coupling of the two circuits promotes an endogenous feedback that supports conscious processes. Within this framework, we present the defence that detailed study of both affective and cognitive processes, their interactions, as well of their respective brain networks, is necessary for a science of consciousness. (shrink)

We are logical pluralists who hold that the right logic is dependent on the domain of investigation; different logics for different mathematical theories. The purpose of this article is to explore the ramifications for our pluralism concerning normativity. Is there any normative role for logic, once we give up its universality? We discuss Florian Steingerger’s “Frege and Carnap on the Normativity of Logic” as a source for possible types of normativity, and then turn to our own proposal, which postulates that (...) various logics are constitutive for thought within particular practices, but none are constitutive for thought as such. (shrink)

Four experiments examined children's ability to reason about the causal significance of the order in which 2 events occurred (the pressing of buttons on a mechanically operated box). In Study 1, 4-year-olds were unable to make the relevant inferences, whereas 5-year-olds were successful on one version of the task. In Study 2, 3-year-olds were successful on a simplified version of the task in which they were able to observe the events although not their consequences. Study 3 found that older children (...) had difficulties with the original task even when provided with cues to attend to order information. However, 5-year-olds performed successfully in Study 4, in which the causally relevant event was made more salient. (shrink)

This paper presents a new view of logical pluralism. This pluralism takes into account how the logical connectives shift, depending on the context in which they occur. Using the Question-Under-Discussion Framework as formulated by Craige Roberts, I identify the contextual factor that is responsible for this shift. I then provide an account of the meanings of the logical connectives which can accommodate this factor. Finally, I suggest that this new pluralism has a certain Carnapian flavour. Questions about the meanings of (...) the connectives or the best logic outside of a specified context are not legitimate questions. (shrink)

"Hay quien va por la vida viéndola, dejándose sorprender por la existencia". Esta obra es una aproximación laica a los fundamentos de la experiencia mística. Ayudándose de pensadores contemporáneos como Eugenio Trías, Marià Corbí o María Zambrano, la autora fundamenta el silencio de sí como peculiar vía de conocimiento y explora las formas en las que éste pueda favorecerse. Es una invitación a adentrarse en la lucidez asombrada como núcleo de una experiencia de vida plenamente humana. Mediante la relectura (y (...) el redescubrimiento) de los maestros del camino interior -exploradores del conocimiento silencioso-, se pondrá en evidencia la práctica de un peculiar esfuerzo de desegocentración como medio de sutilización de las capacidades humanas. La exploración de La nube del no-saber, del Bhagavad Gîta, o de las obras de Maestro Eckhart, Rûmî, Al-Yîlî, Lanfranchi, Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Jesús, Nisargadatta Maharaj o Yoka Daishi entre otros, nos acerca a unas lecciones de vida que, nacidas de la experiencia mística, dejarán al descubierto la aportación propia e insustituible de ese rico legado. (shrink)

Spiritualität und spirituelle Übungen haben eine Bedeutung für religiöse und theologische Verstehensprozesse und prägen daher auch die im Zuge dieser Prozesse gewonnenen Erkenntnisse. Kurz gesagt: Spiritualität kommt eine epistemologische Relevanz zu. Das hat Auswirkungen auf das Verständnis von christlicher Offenbarung. Teresa Peter zeigt in ihrer Studie, wie die Verbindung von Inhalt und Prozess, von Verstehen und Lebensvollzug neu zu denken ist. Dabei greift sie zurück auf die klassische Lehre von den geistlichen Sinnen ebenso wie auf Zeugnisse der christlich-ignatianischen und (...) der buddhistischen vipassanā Tradition. So entsteht ein epistemologischer Entwurf mit weitreichenden Konsequenzen für Theologie und Pastoral, um den christlichen Glauben vor dem Horizont spätmodernen Denkens neu zu verstehen zu suchen. (shrink)

From an investigation of the theoretical, structural, methodological, and conceptual rudiments of the neurophenomenology, such as developed by Francisco Javier Varela, I seek, at first, to investigate the possibility of a theoretical model whose purpose consists in the integration between the subjective experience and the cerebral dynamic. To the study of the fundamental diagnosis of neurophenomenology — namely, the interpretation which Varela offers to the theoretical and methodological position of Chalmers’ ‘hard problem’ of consciousness —, I will associate the conception (...) of downward determination I borrow from the emergentism. My intention is to demonstrate that the notion of downward determination — as exemplified in meditative practice — can greatly contribute to the consolidation of a theoretical perspective for the problem of mind-body-life relations which is beyond the theoretical, structural, methodological and conceptual implications of the highly acclaimed ‘explanatory gap’. From my belief that meditation brings with it the possibility of filling the mind-body gap on a phenomenological level, I proceed to investigate the elements through which Buddhism and phenomenology can mutually benefit the sciences cognitive; in this sense, I am not presupposing the limitations, but rather the possibilities and the scope of the introspective method, as Varela has previously done in his neurophenomenology. (shrink)

Nosso objetivo é destacar o sentido filosófico no Brasil dos primeiros debates suscitados pela ideia de uma psicologia científica. Para tanto, trabalharemos com os textos de dois autores em especial, Gonçalves de Magalhães e Tobias Barreto. Nosso interesse é o de demonstrar em que sentido estes filósofos foram capazes de oferecer oposição a uma tendência positiva vigente na Psicologia e, ao mesmo tempo, superar o caráter contemplativo da consciência de si inerente à Psicologia sob a égide dos Jesuítas, e em (...) vista da necessidade de modernização filosófica no Brasil. Ao mesmo tempo, pretendemos mostrar que, a despeito da crítica de Tobias a Magalhães, ambos souberam reconhecer a significação do naturalismo em Psicologia, especialmente no que diz respeito à tarefa de inserir o pensamento brasileiro nos rumos da filosofia ocidental. (shrink)