This paper aims to portray the human being as spirit, in dialogue with Levinas’ first philosophy. The relation between time and eternity is addressed in the work of both Kierkegaard and Levinas. However, in Kierkegaard’s notion of spirit there lies a discernible further development of the relation between the subject and that which transcends it. In Kierkegaard’s authorship, the absolute exteriority of the eternal does not break or suspend the finite structure of the subject. Contrary to Levinas’ critique of the (...) Danish philosopher, the possibility of a life is opened in which neither the external world nor the relation with the others is disdained. (shrink)

Este reciente libro de la filósofa Sharon Krishek aborda de forma profunda y exhaustiva el tema del amor (en especial, el amor romántico) en el contexto de los planteamientos que Kierkegaard elaboró en sus obras acerca de esta importantísima dimensión de la existencia humana. El proyecto del libro es definido por Krishek, valientemente, como “neo-kierkegaardiano”; este apelativo responde con cuidado a su propósito: si bien los planteamien- tos y nociones del filósofo danés son la base y el motor de la (...) reflexión, los desarrollos y conclusiones a los que llega la autora exceden por mucho la filosofía de Kierkegaard e, incluso, en ocasiones, llegan a señalar sus deficiencias o ambigüedades. (shrink)

El pensamiento de Kierkegaard impide de suyo el acercamiento a la realidad del ser humano desde una actitud meramente especulativa; puesto que el hombre es espíritu, la libertad está siempre presente, haciendo inadecuado cualquier acercamiento que ignore dicha condición. El ser humano no es una realidad estática, y por ello, para comprender su dinamismo propio, es necesario adentrarse en la aparente contradicción de ser misterio y tarea para sí mismo. El presente artículo seguirá esa misma dirección, a partir de las (...) descripciones recogidas en El concepto de angustia y La enfermedad mortal. (shrink)

The paper provides an opinionated survey of recent contributions – roughly, in the last decade – to our understanding of how names and other referring expressions work in fictional discourse and addresses well-known philosophical worries that they raise. Views about the semantics of referring expressions in fictional discourse are usually accompanied by metaphysical views on the ontology of fictional characters, so this will also come under our focus.

Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of ‘I’, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of _immunity to error through misidentification_ (‘IEM’); in their use “as subject”, first-personal claims are IEM, but not in their use “as object”. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, _episodic_ memory are only de facto IEM, not strictly speaking IEM, while Gareth Evans disputed it. In the past two decades research on memory has (...) produced very significant results, which have changed the philosophical landscape. As part of it, several new arguments have been made for and against the IEM of personal memories. The paper aims to defend the Shoemaker line by critically engaging with some compelling recent contributions. (shrink)

Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’—first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se—have a distinctive character that traditional views of contents cannot characterize. Drawing on Anscombe, Annalisa Coliva has argued that a feature she calls Real Guarantee marks apart de se thoughts—as opposed to others including Immunity to Error through Misidentification that have been proposed for that role. I'll argue that, while her work points to a truly distinguishing feature of (...) the de se, we need an account of the notion other than hers and Echeverri's recent development of it. I'll offer an alternative, drawing on Léa Salje's work. Finally, I'll briefly outline how, thus understood, the Real Guarantee feature could be adequately explained by theories of de se thoughts like the one I favour, even if it is an open option to just explain it away. (shrink)

We intuitively make a distinction between _lying_ and _misleading_. On the explanation of this phenomenon favored here—the _adverbial_ account—the distinction tracks whether the content and its truth-committing force are literally conveyed. On an alternative _commitment_ account, the difference between lying and misleading is predicated instead on the strength of assertoric commitment. One lies when one presents with full assertoric commitment what one believes to be false; one merely misleads when one presents it without full assertoric commitment, by merely hinting or (...) otherwise implying it. Now, as predicted by the well-supported assumption that we can also assert with pictures, the lying/misleading distinction appears to intuitively show up there too. Here I’ll explain how the debate confronting the two accounts plays out both in general and in that case, aiming to provide support for the adverbial account. (shrink)

Two-dimensional semantics is a framework that helps us better understand some of the most fundamental issues in philosophy: those having to do with the relationship between the meaning of words, the way the world is, and our knowledge of the meaning of words. This selection of new essays by some of the world's leading authorities in this field sheds fresh light both on foundational issues regarding two-dimensional semantics and on its specific applications. Contributors: Richard Breheny, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Martin (...) Davies, Gareth Evans, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Josep Maci`, Martine Nida-Rumelin, Christopher Peacocke, James Pryor, Francois Recanati, Scott Soames, Cara Spencer, Robert Stalnaker, Kai-Yee Wong, Stephen Yablo. (shrink)

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has quickly swept the globe leaving a devastating trail of lost human lives and leading to a public health and economic crisis. With this in mind, prosociality has been heralded as a potential important factor to overcome the negative effects of the pandemic. As such, in this study, we examined the effectiveness of a brief reflexive writing exercise about recent experiences of gratitude on individuals’ intentions to engage in prosocial behaviors using a sample (...) of 253 participants living in Portugal and 280 participants living in Brazil. Participants were randomly assigned to either a condition in which they were asked to write about recent experiences of gratitude or a control group in which they were asked to write about daily tasks. We predicted that the gratitude intervention would increase state gratitude and, consequently, increase positive affect and empathic concern, and decrease negative affect, leading to increased intentions to engage in prosocial behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. A moderated serial–parallel mediation analysis, in which we controlled for gender, age, and level of religiosity, indicated that our manipulation led to increases in state gratitude, which in turn increased positive emotions and empathic concern, leading to increased prosocial intentions in both countries. A content analysis of participants’ responses in the gratitude group revealed that relationships with others and health and well-being were the central themes of their gratitude experiences during the COVID-19 global pandemic. (shrink)

John Searle argues that fictions are constituted by mere pretense—by the simulation of representational activities like assertions, without any further representational aim. They are not the result of sui generis, dedicated speech acts of a specific kind, on a par with assertion. The view had earlier many defenders, and still has some. Stefano Predelli enlists considerations derived from Searle in support of his radical fictionalism. This is the view that a sentence of fictional discourse including a prima facie empty fictional (...) name like “Emma Woodhouse” in fact “is not a sentence, and it encodes no proposition whatsoever.” His argument is broadly abductive; he claims that this view affords compelling explanations of features of fictions he finds well-established, among them that fictions without explicit narrators nonetheless have covert ones. Here I take up his arguments, in defense of the dedicated speech act view. I thus address pressing issues about the status of fictional names and the nature and ubiquity of narrators in fictions. (shrink)

With contributions from some of the key figures in the contemporary debate on relativism this book is about a topic that is the focus of much traditional and ...

This paper argues for a conditional claim concerning a famous argument—developed by Church in elucidation of some remarks by Frege to the effect that the bedeutung of a sentence is the sentence’s truth-value—the Frege–Gödel–Church argument, or FGC for short. The point we make is this :if, and just to the extent that, Arthur Smullyan’s argument against Quine's use of FGC is sound, then essentially the same rejoinder disposes also of Davidson's use of FGC against ‘correspondence’ theories of truth. We thus (...) dispute a contention by Professor Davidson that it is coherent to accept that Smullyan’s rejoinder takes away the force of Quine’s version of FGC, while still consistently using FGC to establish that if true sentences (or utterances) correspond to anything, they all correspond to the same thing. We show that the differences between the cases discussed by Smullyan and Davidson’s version of FGC on which Davidson relies for his contention are irrelevant to the point under dispute. (shrink)

The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter in the first place as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between real games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies (...) on Rawls’s distinction between types of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence are truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines that a plurality of norms apply to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this Rawlsian line to block the examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case. (shrink)

Manuel García Carpintero defends a form of antirealism for the explicit talk and thought both about fictional entities and scientific models: a version of StephenYablo’s figuralist brand of factionalism. He argues that, in contrast with pretense-theoretic fictionalist proposals, on his view, utterances in those discourses are straightforward assertions with straightforward truth-conditions, involving a particular kind of metaphors or figurative manner. But given that the relevant metaphors are all but “dead”, this might suggest that the view is after all realist, (...) committed to referents of some sort for singular terms in the relevant discourses. He revisits these issues from the perspective of the more recent work on them and applies his view to recent debates in semantics on the role and adequacy of supervaluationist models of indeterminacy. (shrink)

Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in fictional discourse don’t work there as (...) they do in simple-sentence assertions, but rather as fictional names do. (shrink)

lniciado como un movimiento crítico de la modernidad, el Sturm und Drang alemán propuso una concepción distinta del humano, que exigía una renovación de la razón en armonía con la totalidad de las facultades humanas en favor del desarrollo de la individualidad. De esta manera se centralizaba la cualidad creadora del ser humano, sin subordinar el desarrollo de las demás facultades humanas. En este trabajo se analiza la reinterpretación del mito de Prometeo en el trabajo de tres personalidades: el filósofo (...) Johann G. Herder, el literato Johann W. von Goethe y el compositor Ludwig van Beethoven. Del primero, se examina su teoría del genio, explicada por medio de la figura de Shakespeare; del segundo se aborda el lugar de Prometeo en la obra del poeta; mientras que del tercero se analiza su tercera sinfonía, Heroica. Al final, se concluye que, en lostres pensadores, la figura del titán Prometeo representa ese espíritu rebelde que, rechazando a los dioses, encamina todos sus actos hacia el engrandecimiento del ser humano y de la humanidad. (shrink)

From a gender perspective, female immigrant domestic caregivers have been particularly impacted during the COVID-19 pandemic: first, as female immigrants, and second, due to their work within the domestic care sector, which has been so badly affected in this pandemic. This study investigates the emotions and experiences of 15 female Latin American immigrant domestic workers, caregivers in five Andalusian cities who were cohabiting with their employees/patients during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, using qualitative research through in-depth interviews and life stories. The (...) results show the moral debt accrued by the caregivers with the family who employ them, while worsening the physical and psychological health of many of the caregivers, due to both work overload and fear of the global pandemic. (shrink)

This article aims to discuss some theoretical problems regarding to human rights. It begins with a theoretician and conceptual discussion about modern State, empire of law, politics and law, sovereignty etc. and their relation with the idea of human rights, which have been more than ever supported and guaranteed by the Rule of law and its institutional arrangements. It has been necessary to briefly discuss the notion of citizenship to understand how human rights have arrived to such ordinance, for citizenship (...) would discharge, in XXth century, in the concept of human rights, whose redefinition would culminate in the Declaration of Vienna in 1993. After that, human rights had been studied through innumerable paradigms from different authors, whose statements and general lines are reconstituted and agglutinated in four typical-ideal models of interpretation. Finally, some statements regarding this subject had been made, from recent facts and events that have rearranged the worldwide politics in the beginning of the century, trying to confront the theories with the reality that is presented to us. Key words: human rights, theory of the State, international relations, theory politics, international law. (shrink)

Este trabalho toma como disparador duas situações de sala de aula em que se questiona se a imaginação como gênero do conhecimento constitui uma ameaça ou uma possibilidade potencial do desenvolvimento humano. Para tanto, estudamos o prefácio e os dois primeiros capítulos do Tratado Teológico Político, o Tratado da Reforma da Inteligência, e a Ética de Espinosa. Nesse sentido buscamos compreender as possíveis repercussões do estudo do conceito espinosano de imaginação no âmbito educacional contemporâneo.

Pierre Bourdieu, inspirado pelos estudos de Panofsky, delineou o conceito de habitus para tratar da relação entre indivíduo e sociedade. Para ele, habitus tem um papel mediador: é criado a partir da internalização das estruturas sociais em que um sujeito se encontra e prepara a ação futura desse indivíduo na sociedade. O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar habitus como um signo, sob a ótica da filosofia de Charles Sanders Peirce, e a relação entre indivíduo e sociedade como um processo semiótico (...) e pragmático de fixação de crenças. Para isso, será apresentada a base escolástica comum aos conceitos de habitus em Bourdieu e de hábito em Peirce, para então serem apresentados os conceitos peircianos. Assim, se tornará mais evidente como o habitus participa de um processo de evolução contínuo que pode manter os modelos de uma sociedade ou transformá-los por meio das ações inventivas dos agentes. (shrink)

Argumentation mining aims to automatically detect, classify and structure argumentation in text. Therefore, argumentation mining is an important part of a complete argumentation analyisis, i.e. understanding the content of serial arguments, their linguistic structure, the relationship between the preceding and following arguments, recognizing the underlying conceptual beliefs, and understanding within the comprehensive coherence of the specific topic. We present different methods to aid argumentation mining, starting with plain argumentation detection and moving forward to a more structural analysis of the detected (...) argumentation. Different state-of-the-art techniques on machine learning and context free grammars are applied to solve the challenges of argumentation mining. We also highlight fundamental questions found during our research and analyse different issues for future research on argumentation mining. (shrink)

The truth of a statement depends on the world in two ways: what the statement says is true if the world is as the statement says it is; on the other hand, what the expressions in the statement mean depends on what the world is like (for instance, on what conventions are in place). Each of these two kinds of dependence of truth on the world corresponds to one of the dimensions on the two-dimensional semantic framework, developed in the 1970’ (...) in the work of Evans, Kaplan, Kripke and Stalnaker. The introduction provides a systematic overview of the framework, the ideas of its earlier originators, recent developments and criticism. Finally, it gives a brief overview over the contributions to the volume. (shrink)

Several philosophers advance substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they raise in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views appear to create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in (...) this light some critical points against Hanks’ (2015, 2019) act-theoretic view, and Recanati’s (2019) recent elaboration of Hanks’ notion of cancellation. Both Hanks and Recanati, I’ll argue, rely on problematic conceptions of fiction and pretense. (shrink)

Imagination and Convention by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone is a sustained attack on a standard piece of contemporary philosophical lore, Grice’s (1975) theory of conversational implicatures, and on indirect meanings in general. Although I agree with quite a lot of what they say, and with some important aspects of their theoretical stance, here I will respond to some of their criticism. I’ll assume a characterization of implicatures as theory-neutral as possible, on which implicatures are a sort of indirectly conveyed (...) meanings, illustrated by some traditional examples. Then I will discuss the claim that one can make an assertion indirectly, through a mechanism essentially like the one envisaged by Grice in his account of implicatures. This is something that not just L&S have argued against, but other writers as well, for more or less related reasons. Since it will be clear that assertions, the way I will characterize them, “convey information inthe usual sense” and provide “information in the semantic sense of publicly accessible content that supports inquiry”, I will be thereby arguing for a claim clearly at odds with some of those made by L&S. (shrink)

In recent work, Walton has abandoned his very influential account of the fictionality of p in a fictional work in terms of prescriptions to imagine emanating from it. He offers examples allegedly showing that a prescription to imagine p in a given work of fiction is not sufficient for the fictionality of p in that work. In this paper, both in support and further elaboration of a constitutive-norms speech-act variation on Walton’s account that I have defended previously, I critically discuss (...) his objections. In addition to answering his concerns and developing the account further, I provide additional abductive support for its explanatory virtues vis-à- institutional accounts like Walton’s, and Gricean speech-act proposals. (shrink)

Some speech acts are made indirectly. It is thus natural to think that assertions could also be made indirectly. Grice’s conversational implicatures appear to be just a case of this, in which one indirectly makes an assertion or a related constative act by means of a declarative sentence. Several arguments, however, have been given against indirect assertions, by Davis (1999), Fricker (2012), Green (2007, 2015), Lepore & Stone (2010, 2015) and others. This paper confronts and rejects three considerations that have (...) been made: arguments based on the distinction between lying and misleading; arguments based on the ordinary concept of assertion; and arguments based on the testimonial knowledge that assertions provide. (shrink)

Aphantasia is a condition that is often characterized as the impaired ability to create voluntary mental images. Aphantasia is assumed to selectively affect voluntary imagery mainly because even though aphantasics report being unable to visualize something at will, many report having visual dreams. We argue that this common characterization of aphantasia is incorrect. Studies on aphantasia are often not clear about whether they are assessing voluntary or involuntary imagery, but some studies show that several forms of involuntary imagery are also (...) affected in aphantasia (including imagery in dreams). We also raise problems for two attempts to show that involuntary images are preserved in aphantasia. In addition, we report the results of a study about afterimages in aphantasia, which suggest that these tend to be less intense in aphantasics than in controls. Involuntary imagery is often treated as a unitary kind that is either present or absent in aphantasia. We suggest that this approach is mistaken and that we should look at different types of involuntary imagery case by case. Doing so reveals no evidence of preserved involuntary imagery in aphantasia. We suggest that a broader characterization of aphantasia, as a deficit in forming mental imagery, whether voluntary or not, is more appropriate. Characterizing aphantasia as a volitional deficit is likely to lead researchers to give incorrect explanations for aphantasia, and to look for the wrong mechanisms underlying it. (shrink)

In recent work, Williamson has defended a suggestive account of assertion. Williamson claims that the following norm or rule (the knowledge rule) is constitutive of assertion, and individuates it: (KR) One must ((assert p) only if one knows p) Williamson is not directly concerned with the semantics of assertion-markers, although he assumes that his view has implications for such an undertaking; he says: “in natural languages, the default use of declarative sentences is to make assertions” (op. cit., 258). In this (...) paper I will explore Williamson’s view from this perspective, i.e., in the light of issues regarding the semantics of assertion-markers. I will end up propounding a slightly different account, on which, rather than KR, what is constitutive and individuating of assertion is an audience-involving transmission of knowledge rule: (TKR) One must ((assert p) only if one’s audience comes thereby to be in a position to know p) I will argue that TKR, of which KR is an illocutionary consequence (but not the other way around), has all the virtues that Williamson claims for his account and no new defect. (shrink)

Only Imagine is a wonderful book. Clear and tersely written, it provides a compelling defence of a rather unpopular view : namely, extreme intentionalism about the determination of fictional content and the nature of fictionality. It thus unquestionably advances the philosophical debate. It is also a pleasure to read for those of us who like fictions and not just the philosophy thereof: Stock discusses for her arguments many examples from real fictions, systematically making perceptive remarks. Here I will respond to (...) an objection that she makes to the normative account that I have defended in previous work, arguing that it has explanatory advantages grounded on the subordination on that account of author-intentions to fictional contents independently determined by social practices. (shrink)

BackgroundThis pilot study aims to test the usability of the iACTwithPain platform, an online ACT-based intervention for people with chronic pain, to obtain information on which intervention and usability aspects need improvement and on expected retention rates.MethodsSeventy-three Portuguese women with chronic pain were invited to complete the first three sessions of the iACTwithPain intervention assess their quality, usefulness and the platform’s usability. Twenty-one accepted the invitation. Additionally, eight healthcare professionals working with chronic medical conditions assessed the platform and the intervention (...) from a practitioner’s point of view.ResultsThis study presented a considerable attrition rate (71.43%) among chronic pain participants, with six completers. There were no significant differences in demographic or clinical variables between dropouts and completers except for completed education (participants who dropped out presented less education than completers). Reasons for dropout were related to difficult personal events occurring during the time of the intervention, lack of time, or having forgotten. There seemed to be an overall satisfaction with both the intervention, its contents and form of presentation of information, and the platform, concerning its design, appearance, and usability. Real image videos were preferred over animations or audio by chronic pain participants. Healthcare professionals emphasized the appealing and dynamic aspects of the animation format.ConclusionThis study informs the ongoing improvement of the iACTwithPain platform and provides valuable information on aspects researchers should consider while developing online psychological interventions for chronic pain. Further implications are discussed. (shrink)

Este libro está dirigido a quien desee familiarizarse con los problemas clásicos y contemporáneos de la ética. Pero también está escrito desde un punto de vista y refleja una posición personal de l autora en torno a esta disciplina. En este libro se encontrarán nociones sobre un saber sistematizado que constituye el corazón de los conocimientos filosóficos. Pero en cuanto que la ética nos muestra esa pequeña pero poderosa arma que constituye la voluntad de transformación, liberación y cambio del ser (...) humano cabe esperar que la lectura de este tratado iniciador en la disciplina contribuya a la mejora de la vida y la sociedad humanas. (shrink)

I provide a variation on ideas presented by Walton and Currie, elaborating the view that fictive utterances are characterized by a specific form of illocutionary force in the family of directives – a proposal or invitation to imagine. I make some points on the relation between the proposal and the current debates on intentionalist and conventionalist views, and I discuss interesting recent objections made by Stacie Friend to the related, but crucially different, Gricean view of such force advanced by Currie (...) and others. (shrink)

In this paper I elaborate on previous criticisms of the influential Stalnakerian account of presuppositions, pointing out that the well-known practice of informative presupposition puts heavy strain on Stalnaker’s pragmatic characterization of the phenomenon of presupposition, in particular of the triggering of presuppositions. Stalnaker has replied to previous criticisms by relying on the well-taken point that we should take into account the time at which presupposition-requirements are to be computed. In defense of a different, ‘semantic’ account of the phenomenon of (...) presupposition, I argue that that point does not suffice to rescue the Stalnakerian proposal, and I portray Lewisian ‘accommodation’ as one way in which speakers adjust themselves to one another in the course of conversation. (shrink)

Francisco Suárez se inserta en la línea de los escolásticos españoles del siglo XVI, especialmente de los dos jesuitas que, junto con él, culminan esta escuela: Gabriel Vázquez de Belmonte y Luis de Molina. Se diferencia de ellos en que él es nominalista. Se adelantó a los autores de la Edad Moderna en la carrera por las libertades típicamente modernas, tales como la afirmación de los derechos subjetivos naturales, la democracia como la forma más natural o más próxima a la (...) libertad del hombre, la libertad de conciencia (no de cultos). Estuvo omnipresente en los escolásticos de las Edades Modernas y Contemporánea que, de hecho, entendieron que él culminó la escolástica, de forma tal que también Tomás de Aquino debe ser interpretado a la luz de sus escritos. (shrink)