Con la finalidad de contribuir a los estudios de recepción de la obra de Søren Kierkegaard en México, este artículo presenta un análisis de su presencia en la obra escrita de Alfonso Reyes y Juan José Arreola. Para ello se abordan de manera sucinta los parámetros de recepción mundial y nacional del danés, para proseguir con el análisis puntual de las menciones explícitas de Reyes y Arreola, con esto se brindan herramientas de comprensión de Kierkegaard en la obra de (...) los mexicanos y se atiende a subsanar un faltante en los estudios de recepción kierkegaardiana allende el ámbito filosófico académico. (shrink)

"Aranguren: filosofía en la vida y vida en la filosofía" llevó por nombre la exposición sobre la figura y el legado de José Luis L. Aranguren (Ávila 1909- Madrid 1996) que pudo verse desde el 4 de junio al 26 de julio de 2009 en el Pabellón Transatlántico de la Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid con ocasión del centenario del nacimiento del filósofo abulense.

In this paper I address the question of whether bodily awareness is a form of perceptual awareness or not. I discuss José Luis Bermúdez’s and Shaun Gallagher’s proposals about this issue and find them unsatisfactory. Then I suggest an alternative view and offer some reasons for it.

ven a cursory look at the extensive literature on mindreading in nonhuman animals reveals considerable variation both in what mindreading abilities are taken to be, and in what is taken as evidence for them. Claims that seem to contradict each other are often not inconsistent with each other when examined more closely. And sometimes theorists who seem to be on the same side are actually talking at cross-purposes. The first aim of this paper is to tackle some important framework questions (...) about how exactly the mindreading hypothesis is to be stated. It emerges in sections 1 and 2 that there are three importantly different versions of the mindreading hypothesis that need to be distinguished. The first (which I call minimal mindreading) occurs when a creature’s behavior covaries with the psychological states of other participants in social exchanges. The presence of minimal mindreading is not in itself evidence for the presence of what I term substantive mindreading. Substantive mindreading involves attributions of mental states. There are different levels of substantive mindreading, varying according to the category of mental state attributions that they involve. Section 2 explores different types of substantive mindreading, according to the extent to which they involve explicitly representing the agent’s backgtround psychological profile. This gives us a principled way of distinguishing propositional attitude mindreading from perceptual mindreading. -/- It is clear that much of the reasoning behind attributions of mindreading abilities to nonlinguistic creatures is analogical in nature. We see in section 3 that much of the discussion in this area proceeds on the basis of a double analogy between animal cognition and human cognition. Researchers assume both that animals solve many problems of social coordination that are analogous to problem solved by humans and that since humans solve those problems using mindreading strategies, so too do non-human animals. How we apply the second analogy, of course, depends upon our interpretation of the particular mindreading strategies that humans employ – in particular, it depends upon the centrality of propositional attitude psychology (or folk psychology) in human social understanding and social coordination. There are good reasons for thinking that the role of propositional attitude psychology in human social life is very much over-stated. This has repercussions for how we think about substantive mindreading in nonhuman animals. It very much weakens the analogical case for identifying propositional attitude mindreading in nonlinguistic creatures. -/- Suspicion of claims of propositional attitude mindreading in non-human animals turns out to be well-founded. In section 4 I present a revised version of an argument I have given elsewhere (Bermúdez 2003) to show that the most sophisticated form of substantive mindreading (the type of mindreading that exploits the concepts of propositional attitude psychology) is only available to language-using creatures. (shrink)

One of the most urgent debates of our time is about the exact role that new technologies can and should play in our societies and particularly in our public decision-making processes. This paper is a first attempt to introduce the idea of CrowdLaw, defined as online public participation leveraging new technologies to tap into diverse sources of information, judgments and expertise at each stage of the law and policymaking cycle to improve the quality as well as the legitimacy of the (...) resulting laws and policies. First, we explain why CrowdLaw differs from many previous forms of political participation. Second,we reproduce and explain the CrowdLaw Manifesto that the rising CrowdLaw community has elaborated to foster such approaches around the world. Lastly, we introduce some preliminary considerations on the notions of justice, legitimacy and quality of lawmaking and public decision-making, which are central to the idea of CrowdLaw. (shrink)

Elite athletes are characterized by their high level of performance in sport. Since the very beginnings of sport, it has been understood that physical and physiological abilities influence the performance of athletes. Advances in scientific knowledge, especially sport psychology and neuroscience, seem to confirm this intuition and consequently it is possible to characterize elite athletes as having an extraordinary combination of physical and mental abilities. Techniques and substances that contribute to enhancing physical characteristics of athletes have also been well known (...) for ages. But it is now possible to make use of other techniques and substances that not only enhance physical abilities but also cognitive capabilities, which seem to require greater consideration given their direct impact on the athlete’s brain. In this article, we examine two such techniques, cognitive enhancers and transcranial stimulators, and highlight the potential advantages and drawbacks that applying each one may have on sport. Given the relative novelty of these enhancement techniques and substances and the absence of conclusive evidence regarding their short- and long-term effects, we deem that their use ought to be strictly governed by cautionary principles. But due to that same lack of evidence, we believe that the possibility of examining the feasibility of applying these techniques to sport should not be denied. (shrink)

Este trabajo utiliza el rastro analítico y hermenéutico producido por la resolución del “sofisma de los tres prisioneros”, que Lacan incluyó en su artículo de 1945 “El tiempo lógico y el aserto de certidumbre anticipada. Un nuevo sofisma” . Lo que con ello nos propusimos, fue mostrar la importancia de la alteridad como un elemento crucial para reflexionar sobre el deseo. La relevancia del “otro” aparece, así, no sólo como un complemento esencial para la constitución del sujeto, sino también como (...) el fundamento ontológico que hace de este sujeto un ser deseante, con el poder del lenguaje y volcado a la acción, es decir, un ser humano atado a la red social. (shrink)

Resumen: Diversos académicos han analizado la influencia de Toynbee y Spengler en la conocida saga Foundation, escrita por Isaac Asimov y considerada una de las más importantes de la ciencia ficción. Sin embargo, nuestra hipótesis es que, si bien existe un cierto diálogo transtextual con los trabajos de ambos autores, es en la obra del historiador griego Polibio, Historias, donde se halla la principal relación de tipo hipertextual. Comparando la anaciclosis descrita por Polibio con la evolución política que Asimov narra (...) en sus novelas, comprobamos que las semejanzas no solo alcanzan a los diferentes sistemas de gobierno, sino incluso a la misma secuencia en que estos se suceden. El resultado es una obra que permite una interesante lectura palimpséstica, enriqueciendo sensiblemente la experiencia del lector con formación humanística.: Several scholars have analyzed the influence of Toynbee and Spengler, in the well-known saga of the Foundation, written by Isaac Asimov and considered one of the most important of science fiction. However, although there exists a transtextual dialogue with Spengler's and Toynbee’s works, our hypothesis is that the main hypertextual relationship must be searched in the work of the Greek historian Polybius, Histories. Comparing the anacyclosis described by Polybius with the political evolution that Asimov narrates in his novels, we can see that similarities not only reach different systems of government, but even the very same sequence in which they happen. The result is a work that allows an interesting palimpsestic reading, significantly enriching the experience of those readers possessing humanistic knowledge. (shrink)

A chapter surveying Jerry Fodor's contributions to philosophy and cognitive science. In 12 Modern Philosophers, edited by Christopher Belshaw and Gary Kemp.

Este artículo examina los argumentos de Jacques Derrida contra la fenomenología de Husserl y a favor de la tesis principal del giro lingüístico: la tesis de que no hay pensamiento sin lenguaje. A continuación se defiende que la disolución derridiana de la subjetividad en el lenguaje no es la consecuencia de afirmar el giro lingüístico como tal, sino del modelo de lenguaje que adopta y radicaliza Derrida: el modelo estructuralista de Ferdinand de Saussure. Finalmente, partiendo de las objeciones de Ricoeur (...) se argumenta que la omisión de la dimensión pragmática del lenguaje es la raíz de las principales paradojas de la filosofía postestructuralista de Derrida en la teoría del significado, la referencia y la subjetividad. (shrink)

Decision Theory and Rationality offers a challenging new interpretation of a key theoretical tool in the human and social sciences. This accessible book argues, contrary to orthodoxy in politics, economics, and management science, that decision theory cannot provide a theory of rationality.

How precisely to understand and evaluate counterfactuals can be an intricate issue. The aim of this article is to examine a new set of difficulties for evaluating counterfactuals that arise in the context of the dynamical spacetimes described by the theory of general relativity (GR). The initial value formulation provides us with a methodology to pin down the specific combination of features of the theory at the origin of the difficulties, namely, non-linearity and certain non-local aspects (typically captured by ellipticity (...) at the analytical level), in particular when combined with the global and/or quasi-local character of physical quantities in GR. Finally, we connect the philosophical question about counterfactuals with concrete applied physical issues in GR about extracting meaningful predictions by constructing appropriate initial data sets, leading us to question the very suitability of the Cauchy approach to fully account for the explanatory power of the theory. (shrink)

My topic in this paper is social understanding. By this I mean the cognitive skills underlying social behaviour and social coordination. Normal, encultured, non-autistic and non-brain-damaged human beings are capable of an impressive degree of social coordination. We navigate the social world with a level of skill and dexterity fully comparable to that which we manifest in navigating the physical world. In neither sphere, one might think, would it be a trivial matter to identify the various competences which underly this (...) impressive level of performance. Nonetheless, at least as far as interpersonal interactions are concerned, philosophers show a rare degree of unanimity. What grounds our success in these interactions is supposed to be our common mastery of folk psychology. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente trabajo analiza las aportaciones de Ortega a la sociología de la filosofía. Se comienza explicando las circunstancias históricas en las que escribió nuestro autor. Posteriormente se presentan sus innovaciones, poniéndolas en relación con problemas tratados por Althusser, Skinner, Collins o Bourdieu. Así se propone que Ortega produce innovaciones en la concepción de las carreras en filosofía, en cómo las ideas de articulan en contextos locales, en la visión de la temporalidad de la filosofía y en la visión (...) crítica de la escolástica.: This paper analyzes Ortega's contributions to the sociology of philosophy. It begins by explaining the historical circumstances in which our author wrote. Subsequently, his innovations are presented in relation to problems dealt with by Althusser, Skinner, Collins, or Bourdieu. Thus, it is proposed that Ortega produces innovations in the conception of careers in philosophy, in how ideas are articulated in local contexts, in the vision of the temporality of philosophy and in the critical vision of scholasticism. (shrink)

Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...) satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)

Forms of thinking that involve thinking about thought are only available to creatures participating in a public language. Thoughts can only be the objects of further thoughts if they have suitable vehicle and the only suitable vehicle is public language sentences. These language-dependent cognitive abilities range from second-order reflection on one's own beliefs and desires and the capacity to attribute thoughts to others to the ability to entertain tensed thoughts and to deploy logical concepts. Many of these language-dependent cognitive abilities, (...) however, have primitive analogues that do not involve intentional ascent and hence are available at the nonlinguistic level. This chapter considers the practical implications this has for the scope and limits of nonlinguistic thought. The chapter explores the question: what types of thinking are in principle unavailable to nonlinguistic creatures? There are two types of intentional ascent, which might be termed explicit and implicit intentional ascent respectively. (shrink)

Este texto se inscribe en una copiosa tradición bibliográfica que ha buscado los puntos de encuentro y desencuentro entre las figuras fenomenológicas más importantes del siglo XX: Husserl y Heidegger. De esta forma, y partiendo de las bases crítica que supone la irrupción pública del proyecto de la ciencia originaria heideggeriana en 1919, me propongo, en primer lugar, repasar la crítica de Heidegger a la historia de la filosofía, la cual, a su juicio, ha cometido el pecado original de ser (...) teórica; y, en esa línea, cómo dicha teorización se ha visto, principalmente, en la absolutización de la percepción al momento de describir la relación originaria entre el ser humano y el mundo. Este hilo crítico, aunque no sea explícito, llega hasta las canteras de Husserl. Frente a esto, en segundo lugar, ensayo una posible respuesta a dicha crítica a la luz del descubrimiento husserliano del flujo absoluto, el cual podemos extraer de las Lecciones sobre la conciencia interna del tiempo. (shrink)

The author challenges the view that birth cannot be a morally relevant fact in the process of development from zygote to child. He reviews specific arguments against giving any moral significance to the fact of birth. Drawing on recent work in developmental psychology, he contends that the lives of neonates can have a level of self-consciousness that confers moral significance but can only be possessed after birth. He shows that the position he has argued for provides a framework within which (...) the move from the moral validity of aborting sentient fetuses to the moral validity of infanticide might be resisted. He concludes that arguments suggesting that birth can be morally significant support the view that the acquisition of moral significance is a gradual and multilayered phenomenon. (shrink)

"The book presents in accessible fashion recent important work on the self and self-consciousness and also moves the issues forward with interesting new ideas. It provides a notably crisp and clear treatment of some extremely intriguing topics." -- Jane Heal, Department of Philosophy, University of Cambridge In this book, José Luis Bermú dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in (...) terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Bermú dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox ofself-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer. (shrink)

What is the relation between philosophical theorizing and experimental data? A modest set of naturalistic assumptions leads to what I term the force-field puzzle. The assumption that philosophy is continuous with natural science, as captured in Quine’s force-field metaphor, seems to push us simultaneously towards thinking that there have to be conceptual constraints upon how we interpret experimental data and towards thinking that there cannot be such conceptual constraints, because all theorizing must be accountable to data and observation. The key (...) to resolving the force-field puzzle is to take a more nuanced view of how conceptual constraints can be accountable to data and observation. This can be done by developing conceptual arguments in conjunction with interpretative frameworks for making sense of experimental evidence. This paper shows how attending to important differences between different types of mindreading yields tools for interpreting experimental and observational data in a manner consistent with a (conceptually derived) constraint that I have developed elsewhere. This is the first-order constraint that second-order thinking, or thinking about thinking, is only available to language-using creatures. (shrink)

Thinking Without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Jose Luis Bermudez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. The book is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

Reseña de la obra de Orden Jiménez, Rafael V., Humanismo Republicano Iberoamericano. Un debate. Ambrosio Velasco Gómez; José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2019, pp. 127.

How precisely to understand and evaluate counterfactuals can be an intricate issue. The aim of this article is to examine a new set of difficulties for evaluating counterfactuals that arise in the context of the dynamical spacetimes described by the theory of general relativity. The initial value formulation provides us with a methodology to pin down the specific combination of features of the theory at the origin of the difficulties, namely, non-linearity and certain non-local aspects, in particular when combined with (...) the global and/or quasi-local character of physical quantities in general relativity. Finally, we connect the philosophical question about counterfactuals with concrete applied physical issues in general relativity about extracting meaningful predictions by constructing appropriate initial data sets, leading us to question the very suitability of the Cauchy approach to fully account for the explanatory power of the theory. (shrink)

Marko Jurjako’s article “Self-deception and the selectivity problem” (Jurjako 2013) offers a very interesting discussion of intentionalist approaches to self-deception and in particular the selectivity objection to anti-intentionalism raised in Bermúdez 1997 and 2000. This note responds to Jurjako’s claim that intentionalist models of self-deception face their own version of the selectivity problem, offering an account of how intentions are formed that can explain the selectivity of self-deception, even in the “common or garden” cases that Jurjako emphasizes.

The analysis of so-called ?strategic intentional fouls? (SIF) as well as the discussion of their validity in the normative systems of sports have a long track record. These fouls can be characterised as rule violations committed in order to be detected and which accept the corresponding sanction. However, there is an additional goal of obtaining an advantage or subsequent benefit in the competition. In fact, this practice is not infrequent and it is even occasionally accepted by the players themselves, referees, (...) judges, sports authorities and spectators. In this work I have analysed the internal structure of SIFs (the features of an axiological gap and a ?special intention?) with a view to providing a deeper understanding and stressing the differences with closely related concepts: cheating, and especially fraus legis or what in Anglo-Saxon culture is called ?spoiling the game?. Finally, I try to show some difficulties in distinguishing SIF from gamesmanship. (shrink)

El artículo afronta un tema novedoso que ha tenido recientemente tratamientos muy diversos. Algunosde sus objetivos podrían ser los siguientes: pretende señalar algunos caminos realizados en el diálogo entreciencia y técnica a lo largo de las últimas décadas y describir sucintamente los hitos que han conducido desde la ciencia clásica (newtoniana) a la tecnociencia actual. En el fondo, ofrecer también unas pinceladas sobre la nueva filosofía de la técnica, que se construye apartando viejos prejuicios humanistas, que cuenta con el desarrollo (...) teórico de la consiliencia y que no quiere estar dirigida ni principalmente ni exclusivamente hacia la ingeniería. En definitiva, una filosofía de la técnica con nueva ‘agenda’. El trabajo tiene cuatro grandes bloques: en el primero se describe el proyecto de la tecnociencia en su perspectiva histórica. En un segundo momento se pretende situar la técnica en la historia de las ciencias y de las técnicas. La tercera parte aborda la posibilidad (también necesidad) de una nueva visión de estos temas, que se ha dado en llamar visión sapiencial y transdisciplinar. Finalmente, en la cuarta parte, se señalan algunos pasos que se están dando en el campo de la filosofía de la técnica bajo esta nueva mirada, lo que podrían ser consideradas como las conclusiones, la nueva agenda: irrupción de enfoques éticos (entre otros, el de la responsabilidad) y nuevas visiones de ciencia-tecnología-sociedad. (shrink)

The main purpose of this essay is to explore the relationship between the incommensurability of paradigms or general theories, a thesis due to Kuhn and Feyerabend, and the idealizations and abstractions that permeate concepts and fundamental laws of physical theories. One can find some unrealistic or idealizational suppositions underlying the semantic level of the differences between the conceptual vocabularies of incommensurable theories, on which these theories rest. This kind of suppositions relates to the idealizations and abstractions involved in forming concepts (...) and formulating laws. Generally, the fundamental laws of physical theories have an abstract and idealized character. Physical theories contain conceptual networks of kind concepts and quantitative concepts, which are interconnected by several sorts of relationships. The discrepancies between such conceptual network, and their underlying assumptions, of alternative paradigms or theories make their comparison at a theoretical level, that is, their commensurability implausible. That at once strengthens the incommensurability thesis and further supports it. In addition, it follows that Kuhn’s philosophy of science indeed involves a version of conceptual or epistemological relativism about science. (shrink)

Table of Contents Acknowledgments 1 Self-Consciousness and the Body: An Interdisciplinary Introduction by Naomi Eiland, Anthony Marcel and José Luis Bermúdez 2 The Body Image and Self-Consciousness by John Campbell 3 Infants’ Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology by Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore 4 Persons, Animals, and Bodies by Paul F. Snowdon 5 An Ecological Perspective on the Origins of Self by George Butterworth 6 Objectivity, Causality, and Agency by Thomas (...) Baldwin 7 At Two with Nature: Agency and the Development of Self-World Dualism by James Russell 8 Ecological Perception and the Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View by José Luis Bermúdez 9 Proprioception and the Body Image by Brian O’Shaughnessy 10 Awareness of One’s Own Body: An Attentional Theory of Its Nature, Development, and Brain Basis by Marcel Kinsbourne 11 Body Schema and Intentionality by Shaun Gallagher 12 Living without Touch and Peripheral Information about Body Position and Movement: Studies with Deafferented Subjects by Jonathan Cole and Jacques Paillard 13 Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership by M. G. F. Martin 14 Bodily Awareness and the Self by Bill Brewer 15 Introspection and Bodily Self-Ascription by Quassim Cassam 16 Consciousness and the Self by Naomi Eilan Contributors Index. (shrink)

En este artículo realizamos una meditación acerca de la subjetividad. La subjetividad a la manera pensada por Descartes fue criticada por Martin Heidegger durante sus primeros años de actividad filosófica, y se encuentra madurada en el tratado de Ser y tiempo. Si nuestra filosofía se presenta como una crítica a la Modernidad, nuestra crítica a la subjetividad moderna tiene que enfrentarse a la filosofía cartesiana. En primer lugar realizaremos una aproximación al problema desde La hermenéutica del sujeto de Foucault. Revisaremos (...) tras ello cómo se fraguó la subjetividad cartesiana y cómo se autolimitó a sí misma. Estudiaremos las aportaciones de Heidegger para criticar a Descartes en sus primeros años. Con su ayuda trataremos de demostrar cómo la subjetividad moderna es un producto artificial que viene motivado por la inquietud del mundo que, precisamente, Descartes pretendía superar con su filosofía. A modo de conclusión y de propuesta introduciremos los planteamientos de Jean Paul Sartre en El ser y la nada en los que la subjetividad es comprendida desde una óptica no moderna, al estar en realidad fundada en el otro. (shrink)

First person judgments that are immune to error through misidentifi cation (IEM) are fundamental to self-conscious thought. The IEM status of many such judgments can be understood in terms of the possession conditions of the concepts they involve. However, this approach cannot be extended to first person judgments based on autobiographical memory. Th e paper develops an account of why such judgments have the IEM property and how thinkers are able to exploit this fact in inference.

In Bermúdez 2013 I argued against David Lewis’s well-known and widely accepted claim that Newcomb’s problem and the prisoner’s dilemma are really notational variants of a single problem. Mark Walker’s paper in this journal takes issue with my argument. In this note I show how Walker’s criticisms are misplaced. The problems with Walker’s argument point to more general and independently interesting conclusions about, first, the relation between deliberation and decision and, second, the differences between the prisoner’s dilemma, which is a (...) strategic choice problem, and Newcomb’s problem, which is a parametric choice problem. (shrink)