As competition over peer status becomes intense during adolescence, some adolescents develop insecure feelings regarding their social standing among their peers. These adolescents sometimes use aggression to defend or promote their status. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among social status insecurity, callous-unemotional traits, and popularity-motivated aggression and prosocial behaviors among adolescents, while controlling for gender. Another purpose was to examine the potential moderating role of CU traits in these relationships. Participants were 1,047 in the 7th (...) or 8th grades from a large Midwestern city. They completed questionnaires on social status insecurity, CU traits, and popularity-motivated relational aggression, physical aggression, cyberaggression, and prosocial behaviors. A structural regression model was conducted, with gender as a covariate. The model had adequate fit. Social status insecurity was associated positively with callousness, unemotional, and popularity-motivated aggression and related negatively to popularity-motivated prosocial behaviors. High social status insecurity was related to greater popularity-motivated aggression when adolescents had high callousness traits. The findings have implications for understanding the individual characteristics associated with social status insecurity. (shrink)

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another (...) element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore the limits of a conception of metaphysical explanation based on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). For this purpose, I will focus on one of the alleged counter-intuitive consequences of an unrestricted application of the PSR, namely: Radical Monism. First, I will articulate such a conception of metaphysical explanation. Then, I will explain how is it that from a famous argument that rests on the PSR (i.e., Bradley’s regress) Radical Monism indeed seems (...) to follow. Right away, I will argue against the natural reaction that such argument triggers, namely: that we shall accept pluralism and relations as brute facts. Finally, I will sketch a qualified version of the PSR that allows us to avoid Radical Monism without compromising the essential content of the PSR. (shrink)

Some recent interpretations of his philosophy of mind argue that Hegel endorses one or both of a pair of Aristotelian ideas about human reason: first, that our responsiveness to reasons is a capacity we acquire through the development of our second nature; second, that our rationality is not merely one more capacity alongside those capacities we appear to share with nonrational animals but rather transforms the latter qualitatively. In this paper I argue, through an interpretation of Hegel’s discussion of gestation (...) and childbirth, that he endorses these ideas only in a negatively united form in which both the naturalism of the first and the rationalism of the second are sublated. The result is a uniquely Hegelian understanding of our rational animality. (shrink)

Despite his commitment to universal explicability, a case can be made that Hegel is better labelled an idealist than a naturalist. As an analysis of his three syllogisms of philosophy reveals, he strictly differentiates between the domains of nature and Geist, suggesting in sequence that Geist replaces nature, Geist comprehends nature and that Geist and nature are comprehended as forms of the metaphysical idea and determine and mediate each other. Since Hegel grounds his accounts of the metaphysical idea and its (...) forms nature and Geist in concept-metaphysics and these include a supernatural notion of undetermined, self-positing universality, Hegel’s entire ontological edifice is ultimately supernatural. This stands in stark contrast to the metaphysics of naturalism, which are based on categories Hegel associates with the logics of being and essence or which fail to sufficiently emancipate universality from its immediate connection to particularity. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence research allow us to build fairly sophisticated agents: robots and computer programs capable of acting and deciding on their own. These systems raise questions about who is responsible when something goes wrong—when such systems harm or kill humans. In a recent paper, Sven Nyholm has suggested that, because current AI will likely possess what we might call “supervised agency”, the theory of responsibility for individual agency is the wrong place to look for an answer to the (...) question of responsibility. Instead, or so argues Nyholm, because supervised agency is a form of collaborative agency—of acting together—the right place to look is the theory of collaborative responsibility—responsibility in cases of acting together. This paper concedes that current AI will possess supervised agency, but argues that it is nevertheless wrong to think of the relevant human-AI interactions as a form of collaborative agency and, hence, that responsibility in cases of collaborative agency is not the right place to look for the responsibility-grounding relation in human-AI interactions. It also suggests that the right place to look for this responsibility-grounding relation in human-AI interactions is the use of certain sorts of agents as instruments. (shrink)

Syntactic approaches in the philosophy of science, which are based on formalizations in predicate logic, are often considered in principle inferior to semantic approaches, which are based on formalizations with the help of structures. To compare the two kinds of approach, I identify some ambiguities in common semantic accounts and explicate the concept of a structure in a way that avoids hidden references to a specific vocabulary. From there, I argue that contrary to common opinion (i) unintended models do not (...) pose a significant problem for syntactic approaches to scientific theories, (ii) syntactic approaches can be at least as language-independent as semantic ones, and (iii) in syntactic approaches, scientific theories can be as well connected to the world as in semantic ones. Based on these results, I argue that syntactic and semantic approaches fare equally well when it comes to (iv) ease of application, (v) accommodating the use of models in the sciences, and (vi) capturing the theory-observation relation. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss whether it is ever morally permissible to diminish the cognitive abilities or capacities of some cognitively gifted offenders whose ability to commit their crimes successfully relies on them possessing these abilities or capacities. I suggest that, given such cognitive diminishments may prevent such offenders from re-offending and causing others considerable harm, this provides us with at least one good moral reason in favour of employing them. After setting out more clearly what cognitive diminishment may consist (...) of, I then critically discuss variations of four plausible arguments against a proposal of using them on cognitive gifted offenders related to autonomy, harm, narrative identity, and a right to mental self-determination. I argue that none of these concerns should have us reject the use of cognitive diminishments. (shrink)

Functions play an important role in neo-pragmatism. This paper advances neo-pragmatism’s prospects by investigating how functions are to be understood on this account. It argues that prominent ways of understanding functions do not suit neo-pragmatists’ meta-semantic commitments or their preferred methodology. It then presents an account that fits both, based on Laura and François Schroeter’s theory of rationalizing self-interpretation. On this account, a term’s function is what it allows us to do that makes our tradition with the term rational.

In the present paper we address the problem of optical isomerism embodied in the socalled “Hund’s paradox”, which points to the difficulty to account for chirality by means of quantum mechanics. In particular, we explain the answer to the problem proposed by the theory of decoherence. The purpose of this article is to challenge this answer on the basis of a conceptual analysis of the phenomenon of decoherence, that reveals the limitations of the theory of decoherence to solve the difficulties (...) posed by optical isomerism and, in general, by quantum measurement. (shrink)

Quasi-realism prominently figures in the expressivist research program. However, many complain that it has become increasingly unclear what exactly quasi-realism involves. This paper offers clarification. It argues that we need to distinguish two distinctive views that might be and have been pursued under the label “quasi-realism”: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called. Of these, only conciliatory expressivism is a genuinely meta-ethical project, while quasi-realism is a first-order normative view. This paper demonstrates the fruitfulness of these clarifications by using them to (...) address Terence Cuneo’s recent challenge that quasi-realist expressivists lack the resources to plausibly accommodate certain sorts of data points. (shrink)

Geoffrey Hellman has argued that non-truth-functionality entails a change of meaning between classical and quantum logical connectives. This paper criticizes and significantly improves the argument.

In his Logic, Hegel argues that evaluative judgments are comparisons between the reality of an individual object and the standard for that reality found in the object's own concept. Understood in this way, an object is bad insofar as it fails to be what it is according to its concept. In his recent Life and Action, Michael Thompson has suggested that we can understand various kinds of natural defect in a similar way, and that if we do, we can helpfully (...) see intellectual and moral badness—irrationality and vice—as themselves varieties of natural defect. In this paper, I argue that Hegel's position on animal individuality denies the claim that irrationality and vice are forms of natural defect. Hegel's account of the individuality proper to the animal organism in the Philosophy of Nature clearly disallows evaluative judgments about animals and thereby establishes a well-defined conceptual distinction between natural defect and intellectual or ethical—i.e., broadly spiritual or geistliche—defect. Hegel thus provides a way of maintaining the difference between nature and spirit within his broader commitment to a post-Kantian conception of substantial form. (shrink)

The modal-Hamiltonian interpretation belongs to the modal family of interpretations of quantum mechanics. By endowing the Hamiltonian with the role of selecting the subset of the definite-valued observables of the system, it accounts for ideal and non-ideal measurements, and also supplies a criterion to distinguish between reliable and non-reliable measurements in the non-ideal case. It can be reformulated in an explicitly invariant form, in terms of the Casimir operators of the Galilean group, and the compatibility of the MHI with the (...) theory of decoherence has been proved. Nevertheless, perhaps its main advantage in the eyes of a scientist is given by its several applications to well-known physical situations, leading to results compatible with experimental evidence. The purpose of this paper is to add a new application to the list: the case of optical isomerism, which is a central issue for the philosophy of physics and of chemistry since it points to the core of the problem of the relationship between physics and chemistry. Here it will be shown that the MHI supplies a direct and physically natural solution to the problem, a solution that does not require putting classical assumptions in “by hand.”. (shrink)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's 'Philosophy of Nature' has often been accused of promoting a view of nature fundamentally at odds with the modern scientific understanding of nature. I show this accusation to be false by pointing to two aspects of Hegel's treatment of nature: its rejection of the 'a priori/a posteriori' distinction, and its connection to Hegel's conception of autonomy as freedom from givenness. I give a reading of Hegel's treatment of the laws of motion along these lines, and I (...) close with some points connecting this reading of Hegel to contemporary philosophy (specifically John McDowell and Catherine Malabou). (shrink)

Abstract Artificial language philosophy (also called ‘ideal language philosophy’) is the position that philosophical problems are best solved or dissolved through a reform of language. Its underlying methodology—the development of languages for specific purposes—leads to a conventionalist view of language in general and of concepts in particular. I argue that many philosophical practices can be reinterpreted as applications of artificial language philosophy. In addition, many factually occurring interrelations between the sciences and philosophy of science are justified and clarified by the (...) assumption of an artificial language methodology. (shrink)

Proponents of linguistic philosophy hold that all non-empirical philosophical problems can be solved by either analyzing ordinary language or developing an ideal one. I review the debates on linguistic philosophy and between ordinary and ideal language philosophy. Using arguments from these debates, I argue that the results of experimental philosophy on intuitions support linguistic philosophy. Within linguistic philosophy, these experimental results support and complement ideal language philosophy. I argue further that some of the critiques of experimental philosophy are in fact (...) defenses of ideal language philosophy. Finally, I show how much of the current debate about experimental philosophy is anticipated in the debates about and within linguistic philosophy. Specifically, arguments by ideal language philosophers support experimental philosophy. (shrink)

K-axiom-based epistemic closure for explicit knowledge is rejected for even the most trivial cases of deductive inferential reasoning on account of the fact that the closure axiom does not extend beyond a raw consequence relation. The recognition that deductive inference concerns interaction as much as it concerns consequence allows for perspectives from logics of multi-agent information flow to be refocused onto mono-agent deductive reasoning. Instead of modeling the information flow between different agents in a communicative or announcement setting, we model (...) the information flow between different states of a single agent as that agent reasons deductively. The resource management of the database of agent states for the deductive reasoning fragment in question is covered by the residuated structure that encodes the nonassociative Lambek Calculus with permutation, bottom, and identity: NLP01. (shrink)

The sheer multitude of criteria of empirical significance has been taken as evidence that the pre-analytic notion being explicated is too vague to be useful. I show instead that a significant number of these criteria—by Ayer, Popper, Przełęcki, Suppes, and David Lewis, among others—not only form a coherent whole, but also connect directly to the theory of definition, the notion of empirical content as explicated by Ramsey sentences, and the theory of measurement; two criteria by Carnap and Sober are trivial, (...) but can be saved and connected to the other criteria by slight modifications. A corollary is that the ordinary language defense of Lewis, the conceptual arguments by Ayer and Popper, the theoretical considerations by Przełęcki, and the practical considerations by Suppes all apply to the same criterion or closely related criteria. Furthermore, the equivalence of some criteria allows for their individual justifications to be taken cumulatively and, together with the entailment relations between nonequivalent criteria, suggest criteria for general auxiliary assumptions, comparative criteria, and more liberal conceptions of observation. (shrink)

This paper critically discusses the argument from objectification – as recently presented by Elizabeth Shaw – against mandatory direct brain interventions targeting criminal offenders’ values as part of rehabilitative or reformative schemes. Shaw contends that such DBIs would objectify offenders because a DBI “excludes offenders by portraying them as a group to whom we need not listen” and “implies that offenders are radically defective with regard to one of the most fundamental aspects of their agency”. To ensure that offenders are (...) not objectified, Shaw first maintains that we should restrict rehabilitative/reformative schemes to attempts at rational dialogue because such an approach respects the offender’s personhood. Second, Shaw claims that we should not portray offenders as radically defective because such treatment would only negatively impact offenders’ already tenuous relationship with society. Third, Shaw contends that we should not confer the state the power to change an offender’s values because the state lacks insight into what constitutes the right values. I contend that none of these arguments should prevent the use of value-targeting DBIs. First, I show that the dialogue requirement for rehabilitative schemes is insufficient ground from which to oppose the use of these DBIs. Second, I show that it is doubtful that the use of DBIs as proposed would damage the relationship between offenders and society. Finally, although the state may often lack insight into what constitutes the correct values, this lack of insight should not by itself prevent value-targeting DBIs from being employed on certain groups of offenders. (shrink)

Many later thinkers in the Islamic world pick up on, and further expand, the idea of intuition (ḥads) as they react to Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā). Focusing on figures from the twelfth–thirteenth century, in this paper we will focus especially on the following points of debate: (1) Avicenna’s idea that intuition is distingiushed from normal (discursive) thought by lacking ‘motion’, (2) The question of how and why different individuals differ in the extent of their intuition, (3) The role of intuitive thought (...) in grounding knowledge: is intuition needed every time a certain item of knowledge is grasped for the first time, and hence without a teacher; and further, is intuition needed as an ultimate justification for all non-intuitive knowledge? (shrink)

En este artículo se presentan las reflexiones epistemológicas del filósofo Francisco Fernández Buey (1943-2012), las cuales, han estado continuamente presentes en la obra del autor al menos desde la publicación en 1991 de La ilusión del método, y culminan en su obra póstuma Para la tercera cultura (2013) en una apuesta por la complementariedad entre ciencias positivas y reflexión humanística. Partiendo de un marxismo heterodoxo tanto en el plano ético-político como en el epistemológico, Fernández Buey apuesta por una idea de (...) ciencia alejada del positivismo, a la vez que critica las filosofías contrarias a aquella en la medida en que la consideran como un conocimiento meramente reductor de una realidad que no puede ser aprehendida por la ciencia. Desde el concepto de dialéctica de Manuel Sacristán; el reconocimiento a la figura de Einstein como ejemplo de científico que no renuncia a otros modos de conocimiento; y la reflexión sobre la filosofía de la ciencia en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, el autor nos muestra la necesidad de un diálogo entre cultivadores de la ciencia y las humanidades para afrontar los desafíos del siglo XXI. (shrink)

The 'late' Foucault and his purported 'return to the subject' is a much discussed issue. Over the past twenty years, various suggestions have been made as to how to integrate Foucault's ethics into his oeuvre as a whole. This paper holds that there is a 'conceptual continuity', rather than a break, between Foucault's earlier works on normalizing power, and his later works on ethical self-constitution. On the basis of a conceptual framework, which is developed in Section II, a reading of (...) two themes concerning certain practices of the self is offered in the following sections (namely, dietetics and spiritual guidance). The material, drawn from the recently published lecture series L'herméneutique du sujet as well as from other published works, is related back to Foucault's ideas on the process of 'subjectivation', in order to support the claim that 'fabrication' and 'self-constitution' are but two aspects of subjectivation. Keywords: late Foucault, ethics, practices of the self, self-constitution, discipline, power, surveillance, spiritual guidance, meditation, parrhesia, dietetics, art of living, aesthetics of existence, return of the subject, subjectivation, relation to self. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a community and to be in a community? Can this social phenomenon be analogized to an individual person with her interwoven opinions, wants, and desires? Or is a community a phenomenon sui generis that requires its own methods and tools for research? Concretely: What does it mean that a community may achieve certain acts? And what about the intentional object of such an act, which has also been referred to as “social act”? These questions (...) raise the methodological ones: how is it even possible to characterize a community, such that it can be said to issue social acts? And how can such an inquiry be carried out, does it require an outside perspective or one from within a community, or can it be done by both? (shrink)

In "A Danger of Definition: Polar Predicates in Metaethics," Mark Alfano (2009) concludes that the response-dependence theory of Prinz and others and the fitting-attitudes theory first articulated by Brentano are false because they imply empirically false statements. He further concludes that these statements cannot be avoided by revising the definitions of the terms 'good' and 'bad' used in the two theories. I strengthen Alfano's first conclusion by arguing that the two theories are false even if they imply empirically true but (...) conceptually contingent statements, and show how, contrary to his second conclusion, the theories can avoid both empirically false and conceptually contingent implications. (shrink)

This article explores Nietzsche’s philosophical aestheticism—the conception of art and the aesthetic as playing a necessary, internal, privileged role in the task of philosophy. It begins with an overview of the discussions of art and the aesthetic in Nietzsche’s writings, focusing on his early theory of tragedy. It then shows how Nietzsche’s position allows itself to be reconstructed as a distinctive and coherent form of philosophical aestheticism. The great importance Nietzsche gives to the aesthetic state is not matched by extensive (...) treatment of art. Instead, he associates the aesthetic state with his own philosophical ideas of will to power and eternal recurrence. (shrink)

Evidence is currently mixed regarding the way in which cognitive conflict modulates the effect of emotion on task performance. The present study aimed to address methodological differences across previous studies and investigate the conditions under which interference from emotional stimuli can either be elicited or eliminated under high cognitive conflict. Four behavioural experiments were conducted with a university sample using a gender-discrimination stimulus-response compatibility task. In line with our previous findings, Experiment 1 found that when emotion and cognitive conflict conditions (...) were blocked, emotional faces increased reaction time interference during response compatible trials (low conflict) but not response incompatible trials (high conflict). However, when conflict and emotion conditions were randomised in different configurations across Experiments 2 (all trials randomised), 3 (emotion blocked, compatibility randomised) and 4 (compatibility blocked, emotion randomised), emotion interfered with task performance across both high and low conflict trials. These results suggest that predictability of both compatibility and emotion is required in order to obtain reduced emotional interference under high cognitive conflict. Consistent with prior reports, a top–down anticipatory control mechanism seems to be engaged in the presence of negative emotion when there are incompatible stimulus-response mappings. (shrink)

This text aims to offer a epistemic-normative reading of madness in Kant's work and its different developments throughout his work. This to maintain that madness arises from rationality itself when understood it as a force that exceeds the limits that reason imposes on itself. By outlining normality or mental sanity as the restriction of reason to sensibility, Kant intends -I maintain- to outline the minimum subjective and epistemic conditions for a republican political conformation, which is based on the agreement between (...) subjects about the rules that will regulate their actions and interactions. This reading will allow us to outline an understanding of the anti-vaccine protest that took place during the pandemic. Showing that those who promote and follow them break with this minimum agreement on the restrictions of reason, thus reaching selfish excesses that harm democratic dynamics. I concluded that these people can be understood as madness people who represent a danger to the republican and democratic political organization. (shrink)

En el marco del debate sobre los lineamientos fundamentales de la ética de Deleuze, diversos autores han reparado en nociones destacadas de su obra: el deseo, el devenir, la afirmación, el nomadismo. Mi propuesta en este artículo es desarrollar una vía poco estudiada, que gira alrededor de la idea de prudencia práctica experimental. Según mi hipótesis, este concepto reúne perspectivas relevantes de la producción deleuzeana posterior a L'Anti-Œdipe, en particular su orientación vitalista, su opción por la desubjetivación y su apelación (...) a una dimensión ascética vinculada con el deseo como impulsor de la experimentación. Within the realm of debate on fundamental layouts of Deleuze's ethics, several authors have concentrated on significant notions in his work: desire, becoming, affirmation, nomadism. In this article my proposal is to develop a road, scarcely studied yet, in connection with the idea of experimental practical prudence. Respect to my hypothesis, this concept assembles relevant perspectives of Deleuze's post L'Anti-Œdipe production, especially his orientation towards vitalism, his choice for desubjectivation and his appeal to an ascetic dimension linked to desire as motor to experimentation. (shrink)

The aim of the present article is to analyze the poetry of Xenophanes of Colophon concerning his epistemological considerations with the notion of god proposed by him. Traditionally, Xenophanes is well known as a philosopher engaged in the debate on the meaningfulness of mythological ideas. At the same time, he advocates the concept of god, which is different from pictures transmitted through The Greek epic. It shall be shown how the theological approach of the Colophonian finds its justification in his (...) remarks on cognitive abilities, especially in creatively used opposition between human and divine knowledge. Recently indicated, the connection between Xenophanes’ theology and his epistemological theses is not exhausted in the critique of religious anthropomorphism but is more profound, and based on the awareness of the impossibility of clear knowledge (saphes) for a human being. The latter is, however attributed to god alone, who gains the knowledge in the manner of synesthesia. (shrink)

This thesis is about the viability of meta-normative expressivism. On what I take to be the dominant conception of the view, it subscribes to two theses. First, that the meaning of sentences is to be explained in terms of the mental states these sentences conventionally express. Second, that there is a fundamental difference in the roles of the states expressed by normative sentences and the states expressed by descriptive sentences: descriptive sentences, according to expressivists, express mental states which are representational (...) and non-motivational, while normative sentences express non-representational and motivational states. Expressivism has attracted many naturalistically inclined philosophers for its ability to explain many of the distinctive features of normative discourse and thought, without adding entities to our ontology that are metaphysically and epistemologically problematic. In this way, expressivism promises to preserve the legitimacy of our ordinary normative practice within a naturalistic world-view, without giving up on any of its distinctive features. Despite it’s benefits, expressivism also faces significant problems. While one of these problems, the Frege-Geach Problem, has attracted a lot of attention, there are several other problems that have not been sufficiently addressed by. But, given that the reasonable assumption that the plausibility of philosophical theories needs to be assessed holistically, it seems that one should pay attention to these problems to be able to assess expressivism’s overall plausibility. In this thesis I explain how expressivists can solve two of these problems. The first problem the dissertation is concerned with is the normative attitude problem. This is a dilemma based on the challenge that expressivists need to give an account of the nature of the attitude that normative thinking consists in. The dilemma is then that expressivists could either do this by holding that normative thinking consists in sui generis attitudes, which is uninformative and potentially in conflict with naturalism, or by holding that normative thinking reduces to attitudes fully describable in non-normative terms, which is in conflict with our intuitions about normative thinking. I argue that this dilemma is structurally identical to a dilemma which meta-normative representationalism faces and that expressivists can use the same theoretical resources to address the normative attitude problem meta-normative representationalists have used to address their version of the dilemma. I also argue that these resources will not only help more traditional versions of expressivism, according to which normative thinking reduces to familiar kinds of attitudes fully describable in non-normative terms, but opens up the possibility of an expressivist view according to which normative thinking consists in sui generis attitudes. The second problem I consider is a challenge to a particular expressivist project: quasi-realism. Part of this project is to show that expressivism is compatible with a web of closely connected assumptions, namely, that normative thought and discourse are truth-apt and normative judgements are beliefs. While quasi-realists have made some progress in this direction, there is one relevant phenomenon that has so far been neglected, namely, those uses of that-clauses that are associated with propositional content. This is a problematic neglect, because that-clauses figure prominently in platitudes characterizing our ordinary notions of “truth-aptitude” and “belief ”, and so expressivists need to provide a plausible account of these uses of that-clauses which fits with their allowing that normative thought and discourse are truth-apt and normative judgements are beliefs. I address this challenge as follows: I first remove any worries that one might have that a plausible account of that-clauses that helps the quasi-realist could be given, by introducing the distinction between semantics and meta-semantics and locating expressivism at the level of metasemantics. I then develop a deflationist view of that-clauses which suits the quasi-realist’s purposes. I start by giving such a view for the use of that-clauses in meaning-attributions by expanding on the work of Wilfried Sellars. I then go on to explain how the account can be generalized to the use of that-clauses in belief-attributions and propositional attitude ascriptions more generally, in a way that allows expressivists to say that normative judgements are beliefs. (shrink)

El artículo es el análisis de algunos estudios realizados sobre el gaucho en los que se emiten juicios de valor acerca de la pertinencia o impertinencia de utilizar fuentes literarias o pictóricas para ayudarnos a comprender la historia argentina. Más aún, para indagar si pueden resultar útiles al estudiar los pasados subalternos que han quedado desplazados del relato nacional. Además de la discusión de posiciones teóricas, se presentan dos ejemplos a través de los cuales se intenta justificar la utilidad de (...) usar dichas fuentes para enriquecer los estudios históricos. Finalmente, se inicia un debate historiográfico acerca de la posibilidad o imposibilidad de hallar espacios de enunciación o huellas de las voces silenciadas de los sectores subalternos. (shrink)

I present and discuss recent work in analytic philosophy of religion on apophaticism and divine ineffability. I focus on three questions: how can we call God ineffable without contradicting ourselves? How can we refer to an ineffable God? What is the point of talking about an ineffable God?

An important concern sometimes voiced in the neuroethical literature is that swift and radical changes to the parts of a person’s mental life essential for sustaining his/her numerical identity can result in the person ceasing to exist—in other words, that these changes may disrupt psychological continuity. Taking neurointerventions used for rehabilitative purposes as a point of departure, this short paper argues that the same radical alterations of criminal offenders’ psychological features which under certain conditions would result in a disruption of (...) numerical identity can be achieved without these having any effect on numerical identity. Thus, someone interested in making radical alterations to offenders’ psychology can avoid the charge that this would kill the offenders, while still achieving a radical transformation of them. The paper suggests that this possibility makes the question of what kinds of qualitive alterations to offenders’ identity are morally permissible pressing, but then briefly highlights some challenges for arguments against making radical qualitative identity alterations to offenders. No data are available. (shrink)