In this comprehensive interview with Charles Taylor, the focus is put on the conceptual level. Taylor reflects on the relationship between history, narrativity and social critique, between social imaginaries and social change, and between his own thought and that of Cambridge School history of ideas, Nietzschean genealogy, Frankfurt School critical theory, and agonistic approaches to the political. This interview not only captures the tremendous breadth and range of Taylor’s theoretical interests, it also vindicates his contention that the common thread of (...) his oeuvre is the attempt to work out a non-reductive, non-mechanistic, non-atomistic philosophical anthropology. Still, it offers new insights into Taylor's most recent thinking and his intellectual engagement with the challenges of our time. (shrink)

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero (...) develops a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

The conservation of energy law, a law of physics that states that the total energy of any closed system is always conserved, is a bedrock principle that has achieved both broad theoretical and experimental support. Yet if interactive dualism is correct, it is thought that the mind can affect physical objects in violation of the conservation of energy. Thus, some claim, the conservation of energy grounds an argument for physicalism. Although critics of the argument focus on the implausibility of causation (...) requiring the transference of energy, I argue that even if causation requires the transference of energy, once we accept the other required premises of the argument that lie behind any supposed argument from the conservation of energy the law of the conservation of energy is revealed as irrelevant to the question of whether the mental is physical. (shrink)

Isidore of Seville did not leave behind any specifically trinitarian, Christological or pneumatological treatises. We find his theological doctrine evident in sections throughout his works although, as a result of the effort of a good compiler and synthesizer, it is not difficult to trace the passages in which the bishop of Seville deals with each one of these subjects. With regard to the doctrine on the Holy Spirit, the chapter dedicated to the third person of the Trinity in the first (...) book of the Sententiae offers a fairly complete summary of the matter. The following pages are intended to present the content of that chapter and to place it within the context of the rest of Isidore’s theological output. Therefore, in addition to paying close attention to the text of the Sententiae, we will seek its dependence or influence, as the case may be, on other treatises of Isidore, mainly in these three: Etymologiae, De fide catholica and Liber differentiarum [II]. Augustine, Gregory the Great and the theological contribution of the Spanish councils are presented as Isidore’s main sources. (shrink)

This article intends to show how the philosophy of Kant supposes a rupture with the doctrines based on a system of absolute rationality, where the most important element is the unity of reason. In this way, it will try to underline the main critiques of the Prussian philosopher to theories based on the unity of reason and direct access to reality, as well as exposing the Kantian proposal of a unitary formal rational structure, but with several irreconcilable uses.

La teoría del conocimiento en Tomás de Aquino es uno de los temas más controversiales de los últimos años entre los medievalistas debido a la interpretación de las teorías escolásticas en base a los modelos cognitivos contemporáneos. En estos debates, la noción de semejanza ocupa un lugar central, a pesar de que su estatus como una relación no es lo suficientemente tratado. En el presente trabajo abordo el problema del conocimiento en Tomás de Aquino como un término del orden de (...) los relativos. Primero presento el modo en el cual el autor incluye el conocimiento dentro de esta categoría como una relación «asimétrica» exponiendo los criterios que distinguen a este tipo de relativos y argumentando de qué modo el conocimiento cumple con ellos. Luego destaco la importancia del término «semejanza» en la gnoseología de Tomás y lo analizo desde el punto de vista de la relación, señalando diversos problemas y ambigüedades que se desprenden de la presentación de Tomás de Aquino. (shrink)

Ross & Spurrett (R&S) fail to take metaphysics seriously because they do not make a clear enough distinction between how we understand the world and what the world is really like. Although they show that the behavioral and cognitive sciences are genuinely explanatory, it is not clear that they have shown that these special sciences identify properties that are genuinely causal.

This chapter is concerned with materialistic views of the mind and the natural world in general. It examines the scientific evidence for the claim that everything within the spatiotemporal realm is physically constituted, and considers whether this evidence leaves room for any alternatives to this physicalist thesis.

In Mossio & Taraborelli (2008) we challenged the assumption according to which the ecological and sensorimotor approaches are mere conceptual variations on the same enactive theme. We showed, on the contrary, that they endorse substantially different notions of an 'action-dependent perceptual invariant' and we submitted that this distinction has interesting theoretical and empirical implications. This dissimilarity between ecological and sensorimotor theories stems, in our view, from a more fundamental divergence on the nature of perceptual information. Since Gibson's work, the ecological (...) approach has adopted a fundamentally realist stance, according to which this information is 'picked up', 'revealed', 'encountered' and 'exploited' by the organism (as a range of affordances) but not 'constituted' by the activity of the organism. In contrast, sensorimotor approaches take an explicit interactivist position, which sees the perceiver's motor activity as a determinant of perceptual information itself. Pascal & O'Regan (2008) suggest that our analysis of the relationship between ecological, sensorimotor and enactive theories would benefit from a further distinction. The original enactive approach (Varela et al. 1991; Maturana, 2002; Thompson, 2007), they argue, should not be lumped together with contemporary sensorimotor approaches to perception: whereas sensorimotor theories endorse an externalist view of perception, according to which 'perception can only be understood as a form of interaction of the organism with the environment', the original enactive approach by Varela and collaborators would have strong 'idealist underpinnings'. (shrink)

Is the neurophysiology of pain all there is to pain? How do words and mental pictures come to represent things in the world? Do computers think, and if so, are their thought processes significantly similar to our thought processes? Or is there something distinctive about human thought thatprecludes replication in a computer? These are some of the puzzles that motivate the philosophical discipline called "philosophy of mind," a central area of philosophy.This Very Short Introduction introduces the philosophy of mind, and (...) looks at some of the most interesting and important topics in this fascinating field, including the mind-body problem and dualism. Barbara Montero also discusses minds other than our own, and the problems associated with definingconsciousness in animals, aliens and machines. Considering these and other such thorny issues such as physicalism and intentionality, she demonstrates how questions of the philosophy of mind also infiltrate disciplines outside of philosophy, including psychology, neuroscience, economics,evolutionary biology, and linguistics. As she observes, most everyone, at some time or another, has ruminated over the relation between mind and matter.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, andenthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. (shrink)

La tesis central de este artículo es que la concepción de la razón pública propuesta por John Rawls, incluso en su versión “inclusiva”, es demasiado restrictiva y viola el principio liberal de legitimidad y la tesis de la neutralidad del estado, que constituyen elementos centrales de la teoría política de Rawls y del liberalismo político en general. Finalmente, se propone una concepción alternativa de la razón pública liberal, centrada únicamente en un deber básico de civilidad, el deber de reciprocidad, a (...) la que denominaré la concepción “abierta” de la razón pública. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

In this paper I offer a critical reading of some aspects of Heidegger’s late philosophy and evaluate how these relate to his nationalist claim that we need to stay rooted in the soil of our homeland. In response to this claim, Žižek suggests thet being-rootless is the primordial state of being-human and that what we represent as our roots are secondary attempts to obfuscate this dimension. First, I will present Heidegger’s philosophy of technology to elucidate his thesis that the essence (...) of modern technology determinates the way we come to experience the totality of beings in our times as “standing reserve”. In the second section, I expound his aesthetics where art is seen as a mode of approaching entities that follows a different logic to that of the Gestell. However, this analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art will reveal a political dimension to the concept of earth which I take to be a reactionary attempt to neutralize the eventual dimension of the Gestell. In the third section, I offer a critical re-interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy following Žižek’s clue. I argue that modern art is characterized by its self-reflexive character which can be deemed transcendental once we accept the ontological dimension of art following Heidegger. These works offer a rooting in our own rootless condition analogous to the grounding in the Abgrund of Hegel’s absolute knowledge. Finally, I offer an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorius Basterds from the perspective of the conceptual framework developed in the previous pages. (shrink)

Durante décadas, los filósofos han concebido los derechos humanos como una clase de derechos naturales de los que gozamos por el mero hecho de ser seres humanos. Sin embargo, esta interpretación ha sido severamente cuestionada en los últimos años. Toda una familia de autores, identificados con una concepción “práctico-dependiente”, asevera que los derechos humanos constituyen una práctica sui generis completamente ajena a la tradición del derecho natural. En contra de esta postura, este artículo argumenta que el discurso de los derechos (...) naturales es parte constitutiva de la doctrina actual de los derechos humanos y que puede hacer un aporte crucial a la adecuada justificación y comprensión de sus funciones, su contenido y su alcance normativo. Más concretamente, mi tesis será que si bien los derechos humanos no pueden reducirse a derechos naturales, bien podrían derivar de derechos naturales previos. (shrink)

A hard difficulty in Astrobiology is the precise definition of what life is. All living beings have a cellular structure, so it is not possible to have a broader concept of life hence the search for extraterrestrial life is restricted to extraterrestrial cells. Earth is an astronomical rarity because it is difficult for a planet to present liquid water on the surface. Two antagonistic bioethical principles arise: planetary protection and terraforming. Planetary protection is based on the fear of interplanetary cross-infection (...) and possible ecological damages caused by alien living beings. Terraforming is the intention of modifying the environmental conditions of the neighbouring planets in such a way that human colonisation would be possible. The synthesis of this antagonism is ecopoiesis, a concept related to the creation of new ecosystems in other planets. Since all the multicellular biodiversity requires oxygen to survive, only extremophile microorganisms could survive in other planets. So, it could be carried out a simulation of a meteorite by taking to other planets portions of the terrestrial permafrost, or ocean or soil, so that if a single species could grow, a new ecosystem would start, as well as a new Natural History. As a conclusion, ecopoiesis should be the bioethical principle to guide practices and research in Astrobiology. (shrink)