In this paper we argue that the formalisms for decoherence originally devised to deal just with closed or open systems can be subsumed under a general conceptual framework, in such a way that they cooperate in the understanding of the same physical phenomenon. This new perspective dissolves certain conceptual difficulties of the einselection program but, at the same time, shows that the openness of the quantum system is not the essential ingredient for decoherence. †To contact the authors, please write to: (...) Mario Castagnino, CONICET-IAFE, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Casilla de Correos 67, Sucursal 28, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina; Roberto Laura, IFIR-Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Av. Pellegrini 250, 2000 Rosario, Argentina; Olimpia Lombardi, CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, C. Larralde 3440, 6°D, 1430, Buenos Aires; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify and examine an overlooked strategy to counter bigoted speech on the spot. Such a strategy we call ‘bending’. To ‘bend’, in our sense, is to deliberately give a distorted response to a speaker’s harmful move – precisely, an ameliorative response, which may turn that move into a different, less harmful, contribution. To substantiate our proposal, we distinguish two ideas of uptake – interpretation and response – and argue for the general claim that a distorted response (...) on the hearer’s part may end up transforming a speaker’s contribution. Patterns of distortion have been analyzed in the literature as unjustly undermining speakers’ agency and exacerbating oppression. Our analysis shows that, under certain circumstances, distortion can be employed to derail bigoted speech and thus serve the purposes of social justice. We close by discussing the virtues and limits of bending vis-à-vis a different, much-discussed, counterspeech strategy, i.e. ‘blocking’ (Langton 2018). (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this paper, I discuss the intrinsic value of truth from the perspective of the emotion studies in virtue epistemology. The strategy is the one that looks at epistemic emotions as driving forces towards truth as the most valuable epistemic good. But in doing so, a puzzle arises: how can the value of truth be intrinsic and instrumental? My answer lies in the difference established by Duncan Pritchard between epistemic value and the value of the epistemic applied to the case (...) of subjective motivations to knowing. I argue that the value of truth is intrinsic as epistemic value and that this is not only compatible with the idea that truth can have different kinds of instrumental values but also that the subjective value of truth, disclosed by epistemic emotions, can make the value of truth stronger if regulated within patterns of virtuous enquiry. (shrink)

Although recent work has been done on the Barnes Foundation and its philosophical and pedagogical background, almost all the research effort has been focused on the friendship and intellectual link between John Dewey and Albert C. Barnes. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the impact of George Santayana’s philosophy on the Foundation has not been systematically examined. The hypothesis that we present and develop in this article is that Santayana’s thought is essential for the aesthetic theories elaborated within the (...) framework of the Barnes Foundation: Barnes’ theory of art criticism; Dewey’s aesthetic theory, and even Lawerence Buermeyer’s aesthetic theory. This article is a first approximation with the purpose of clarifying these philosophical, theoretical and historical relationship so as to start to fill the existing gap in contemporary literature on the topic. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

In the Algerian War of Independence, women famously used both traditional and modern clothing as part of their revolutionary efforts against French colonialism. This paper uncovers some of the principal lessons of this historical episode through a phenomenological exploration of agency, religion, and political transformation. Part I draws primarily on the philosophical insights of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty alongside the memoirs of Zohra Drif, a young woman member of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, in order to explore the (...) worldly and habitual nature of human agency in contrast to the Enlightenment stress on individual rationality and autonomy. Part II turns to John Russon’s phenomenological interpretation of religion in order to argue for the ineluctable significance of religion on human existence, in contrast to the modern tendency to oppose religious tradition and secular modernity. Part III analyzes the dynamics of intercultural communication, and argues for the political power of phenomenology as a critical enterprise that enables more just and emancipatory visions of collective human life and political transformation to come to the fore. (shrink)

This article provides a much‐needed review of the neural bases of implicit statistical learning. Batterink, Paller and Reber focus on the neural processes that underpin performance in experimental paradigms employed in implicit learning and statistical learning research. An important insight is that learning across all paradigms is supported by interactions between the declarative and nondeclarative memory systems of the brain. They conclude with a helpful discussion of future directions of research.

Music students at the University of Chichester Conservatoire completed questionnaires about their experience of the forced use of remote teaching and learning due to Lockdown, as imposed in the United Kingdom from March to June 2020, and how this impacted their self-beliefs, decision making processes, and methods of preparation for their performance assessments. Students had the choice to either have musical performance assessed in line with originally published deadlines via self-recorded video or defer the assessment until the following academic year. (...) Student’s choice to defer or submit the assessment during Lockdown was influenced by a range of forced factors, such as adaptions required by online teaching, limitations of rehearsal in their home environment, and the challenges in facilitating and recording their own assessments. Students completed online questionnaires about their self-efficacy, resilience, wellbeing, and provided free text responses explaining the reasoning for their decision to record their performance or to defer the assessment were coded to reveal patterns impacting their decision and preparation processes. Those choosing to submit their assessments demonstrated more strategies in their preparation and reported higher perceived self-efficacy scores. The specific conditions for this assessment, as a result of Lockdown, revealed correlations between resilience and both self-efficacy and wellbeing. The impact on teaching and the student experience is discussed and suggestions to support students in future settings of blended delivery are presented. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Modern ideas of embodiment have been influential in cognitive science for the past several decades, yet there is minimal evidence of embodied cognition approaches in creativity research or pedagogical practices for teaching creativity skills. With creativity research in crisis due to conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues, radical embodied cognitive science (RECS) may offer a framework to move the field forward. This conceptual analysis examines the current state of creativity research from the 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) cognition and RECS (...) perspectives. Two streams are critiqued for their potential to further knowledge about the development of creative expertise and inform educational practices. Promising directions for future research is discussed, including ways dynamical systems approaches, such as those used in improvisational and musical creativity, might yield new insights about how people develop creative expertise and help address the “higher order thinking” criticisms of RECS. (shrink)

This paper draws on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Hannah Arendt in order to explore the nature of free action. Part one outlines three familiar ways in which we often understand the nature of freedom. Part two argues that these common understandings of freedom are rooted in impoverished conceptions of time and subjectivity. Part three engages with Arendt’s conception of natality alongside Merleau‐Ponty’s conception of expression in order to argue that the freely acting self draws in improvisational manners on (...) the resources of a shared past in order to open unprecedented spaces of meaning for the future, and in so doing at once discovers and institutes herself as the self that she is. Part four draws on an example of anti‐oppressive political action in order to argue that free action not only has the power to inaugurate new spaces of shared meaning for the future, but also to change the sens of the shared past. By the same token, free action is vulnerable in its ontological status and ethical meanings to the events and judgments of the future. Part five argues with both Merleau‐Ponty and Arendt that ethical‐political actors can do no better than to cultivate a political virtù while facing up to the inherently transgressive dimensions of free action in a shared historical world. (shrink)

Conventional metaphors such as early bird are interpreted rather fast and efficiently. This is so because they might be stored as lexicalized, non-compositional expressions. In a previous study, employing a maze task, we showed that, after reading metaphors (John is an early bird so he can …), participants took longer and were less accurate in selecting the appropriate word (attend) when it was paired with a literally-related distractor (fly) rather than an unrelated one (cry). This suggests that the literal meaning (...) of conventional metaphors is awakened or made available immediately after their metaphorical interpretation. But does the literal meaning remain available further downstream during sentence comprehension? In two experiments also employing a maze task, we examined whether the awakening effect can be obtained when there is a medium (6 to 8 words) and a large (11 to 13 words) distance between the metaphor and lexical choice. Results indicated that the metaphor awakening effect persists but decreases as word distance increases. An analysis of our data based on a GPT model showed that our maze effects could not be attributed to target predictability. Overall, our results suggest that the literal meaning of a metaphor is accessed and remains available for about three seconds, fading as the sentence unfolds over time. The results support a model of metaphor comprehension that postulates the availability of both literal and metaphoric content in the course of sentence processing. (shrink)

Philosophers have understood propositional contents in many different ways, some of them imposing stricter demands on cognition than others. In this paper, I want to characterize a specific sub-type of propositional content that shares many core features with full-blown propositional contents while lacking others. I will call them modest propositional contents, and I will be especially interested in examining which behavioral patterns would justify their attribution to non-human animals. To accomplish these tasks, I will begin by contrasting modest propositional contents (...) with primitive feature-placing contents: a kind of content that, according to some philosophers, can explain the behavior of non-human animals. I will examine which cognitive abilities are involved in having mental states with each of these contents and which sorts of behavioral patterns would provide evidence that an animal has one of them or another. Finally, I will present some empirical evidence which strongly suggests that some non-human animals have mental states with modest propositional contents. (shrink)

In this chapter, I focus on the faculties by which we gain knowledge, namely, sensibility and the understanding, as well as on the methodological framework within which Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz examines them. I stress the importance that the author gives to sensibility and the physiological apparatus that grounds and explains sensation.With respect to her conception of understanding, I will show that it is both the sign of man’s filiation with God and a faculty that displays deficiencies and (...) limitations with respect to the difficult task of attaining knowledge.Finally, I examine Sor Juana’s criticism both of the Neoplatonic method, which looks for a vision of the universe as a whole, as well as of the deductive method of the Aristotelian- Scholastic tradition, which attempts to reduce the unmanageable diversity of beings to some specific characteristics and laws.My conclusion is that Sor Juana shares with modern philosophers the critical attitude against tradition; she holds that traditional methods do not enable us to reach knowledge about either the remotest causes or the closest effects. On my view, Sor Juana takes an epistemological approach to philosophy, as do Bacon and Descartes, but she does not propose a new method; this is not because of some radical skepticism on her part, but because of the enormity of the task of the human mind achieving complete knowledge. (shrink)

The concept offreedom in Heidegger’s sense of truth or unconcealedness of beings may be applied to future generations without thereby reducing the status of other elements within the environment to mere means, since Da-sein’s approach as one who is a caring and concernful, anxious and aware of its own death in an authentic manner, does not place man in any sense “above” other things. This care (Sorge), concern, favor can be captured in Heidegger’s remark that man is not the lord (...) of beings, but rather is “the Shepherd of Being.” Accordingly. we may be able to learn to moderate our ordering andcommanding attitude and learn to “listen” and free beings. letting them be what they truly are. If so, we might then require no special justification in order to extend toward earth, sky, and future persons the same understanding and freeing concern we normally give to, and wish for ourselves. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse a literary response to antiquity’s most alluring work of art, the Cnidian Aphrodite. It argues that the ecphrasis of the statue in the Amores develops textual and verbal strategies to provoke in the recipients the desire to see the Cnidia, but eventually frustrates this desire. The ecphrasis thereby creates a discrepancy between the characters’ aesthetic experience of the statue and the visualisation and aesthetic experience of the recipients of the text. The erotic (...) mechanisms of the ecphrasis, simultaneously arousing and frustrating the recipients’ desire, mirror the effect of the statue on its viewers and disclose the erotic programmatics of the whole dialogue. The analysis shows that the Amores surpass the ongoing discourse on love from Plato’s Phaedrus to the ancient novel – and Achilles Tatius and Longus in particular. The Amores, like the nude statue of the Cnidia, threaten to cross all bounds of decency in sexuality. (shrink)

This article puts forth Modern Socratic Dialogue as a pedagogical tool for cultivating an American Bildung. Beginning with Michael Hogue’s work on “resilient democracy,” an associational ethos that is vulnerable and based on our lived uncertainty. To further establish this American Bildung, I investigate what it means to be American. Drawing from the works of Michael Walzer and Gloria Anzaldúa, I establish that “American” means unfinished, pluralistic, and embraces ambiguity. The question of how to cultivate this pluralistic, ambiguous, and vulnerable (...) Bildung is framed by the freedom and social bonds of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of Bildung. For an American Bildung to flourish, freedom and social bonds can be presented and practiced in the form of Modern Socratic Dialogue – “truths” are created by the community of interlocutors, and problems and solutions are based on the experiences of the participants. (shrink)

In his best-seller The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han maintained that the immunological dispositive is not compatible with global capitalism. In this article, I argue, against Han, that the capitalism we inhabit produces countless immunological devices, and not just in times of pandemic. In particular, I emphasize the affective dimension of these mechanisms, the configuration of desire they generate. When carrying out this reflection, I highlight the complexity of immunity: since it can be considered a defense system that activates forms of (...) rejection towards the strange, identified as a risk for a body assumed in an identitarian way. However, immunity can also be understood in symbiotically terms, as a system of protection and care strategies, not tied to preserving the border between self and not-self, the proper and the improper, but dependent on a relational understanding of life. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the rapidly evolving concept of “harmful products” and its connection with marketing practices. It examines (a) products generally recognized as harmful, and (b) innocuous products that are sometimes (unintentionally) transformed into harmful ones by marketing activities. We indicate how the effects of these activities depend on individual perceptions as well as the norms of social and business ethics. We advocate the creation of marketing codes of ethics for particular product categories, as well as the dissemination of (...) product information that can link the ethical codes with individual values. We illustrate these concepts with a case study of the fragrance industry and olfactory marketing. (shrink)

How can citizens construct the political authority under which they will live? I argue that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) answers this question concerning the constitutive power of political and normative agency by employing four dimensions of mimesis from the Greek and Roman traditions. And I argue that mimesis accounts for the know-how, or power/knowledge, the general ‘man’ draws upon in constructing the commonwealth. Hobbes revalues poetic mimesis through his stylistic decisions, including the invitation to the reader to read ‘himself’ in (...) the portrait of the general man depicted in the text. Hobbes aims for Leviathan to change the ethical dispositions of its readers, turning them from bad to good men as they witness the general man undergoing this ethical transformation in the transition from the state of nature to the civil state. He emphasizes the anthropological dimension of mimesis to explain political disorder since he argues that men assess the honor others attribute them by observing signs and gestures in others’ behavior. Hobbes employs the linguistic dimension of mimesis to describe how men acting as agents can build a normative consensus out of the state of nature. This article positions mimesis as a key term for understanding the intersection between aesthetics and politics before the term ‘aesthetics’ came into parlance. (shrink)

_Neonatal Bioethics: A Complicated Decisión_ _Bioética neonatal: uma decisão complicada_ _Carta al editor / Letter to the editor / Carta ao editor_ _Para citar esta carta / To reference this letter / Para citar esta carta _ Dussán-Rojas LV, Chacón-Pedraza SA. Bioética neonatal: una decisión complicada. Pers Bioet. 2019; 23: 140-141. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2019.23.1.10.

This article aims at summing up the reflections of a small group of psychologists who work in the domain of palliative treatment. The theory and methodology supporting it are borrowed by a group analysis approach; the group's purpose is a research based on the workers' experience elaboration, which aims at finding out both the specificities of the work apparatus with the people accompanied to the conclusion of their lives, and the main thematic areas of the relationship between healthcare team, patients, (...) and families. The work we present aims at introducing the most meaningful themes that emerged during group meetings: first of all, some service criticalities examined in the area of terminal healthcare and the workers' possible saturation and psycho-social discomfort quotas, generating in some cases a common sense of professional precariousness. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical and religious dimensions of mathematical practice in the early modern era by offering an interpretation of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s Nouveaux éléments de géométrie. According to these important figures of seventeenth-century French philosophy and theology, mathematics could achieve extra-mathematical or non-mathematical goals; that is, mathematics could foster practices of moral self-improvement, deepen the mathematician’s piety and cultivate epistemic virtues. The Nouveaux éléments de géométrie, which I contend offers the most robust account of the virtues (...) cultivated by mathematics in the period, was envisaged by its authors to cultivate moral, Christian and epistemic virtues that could serve in the fulfilment of moral and Christian obligations. In this paper, I set out the goals of mathematical inquiry for the Port-Royalists and describe the specific virtues they believed a revised edition of the Elements of Euclid could foster. I show that Arnauld and Nicole believed that an acquaintance with mathematics could render a student of Euclid more just, truth-loving, attentive and humble, and better able to discern truth from falsity. (shrink)

The informed consent process for genetic testing does not commonly address preferences regarding disclosure of results in the event of the patient's death. Adults being tested for familial colorectal cancer were asked whether they want their exome sequencing results disclosed to another person in the event of their death prior to receiving the results. Of 78 participants, 92% designated an individual and 8% declined to. Further research will help refine practices for informed consent.

Human research is accepted in our society because it is seen as generating valuable new knowledge that may alleviate suffering and bring benefit to ill persons now and in the future (Brody 1998; Fa...