Existe una conexión interna de teoría y praxis que se pone de manifiesto en la acción. Ésta no es el resultado de un traspaso dialéctico de un determinado saber a un actuar cualquiera, sino un movimiento que implica un saber que, en sí mismo, es práctico, por cuanto contiene de suyo el momento de la ejecución del fin que se propone. Vida teorética y vida práctica no constituyen una alternativa, sino una gradación: en ello consiste el Ethos de la acción (...) humana. La ética aristotélica remonta a esta mediación recíproca de teoría y praxis, no sólo la posibilidad de la vida individual, sino, ante todo, de la vida de la comunidad. Sobre esta mediación se cumple el tránsito directo de la ética a la política en el pensamiento aristotélico. (shrink)

Based on Fichte's conception of international law from the Grundlage des Naturrechts the article examines to what extent a League of nations is compatible with the sovereignty of a nation state. Fichte's concept of sovereignty refers to a republican notion of a state which guaranties the congruence of power and right. This principle leads to an internal tension, for the League presupposes the existence of sovereign states and in the same time curtails their competences. It manifests an instance of power (...) without the legitimation of the singular nations. Fichte avoids the paradoxes of the Kantian vision of a perpetual peace, because he develops a more complex concept of political power, but it remains to be a contradictory construction. In the Rechtslehre of 1812 however, Fichte follows consistently the principle of popular sovereignty and therefore waives an explicit contract among states. He thus meets the ideal of congruence of power and right and also outlines the requirements for a realistic conception of the legalization of relations between states.Ausgehend von Fichtes Grundriss des Völkerrechts, dem Abschluss der Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre wird untersucht, inwiefern ein Völkerbund mit der Idee staatlicher Souveränität vereinbar ist. Fichtes Konzeption der Souveränität basiert auf einem republikanischen Staatsverständnis, das im Idealfall die Koinzidenz von Macht und Recht garantiert. Dieses Prinzip führt zu internen Spannungen, denn ein Bund setzt einerseits die Existenz souveräner Staaten voraus, greift aber andererseits in die Kompetenzen der Einzelstaaten ein, bildet also selbst eine Machtinstanz, ohne wie die Einzelstaaten über eine entsprechende Legitimation zu verfügen. Zwar vermeidet Fichte die Aporien der Kantischen Vision eines ewigen Friedens, weil er über einen komplexeren Machtbegriff verfügt, doch bleibt seine Konstruktion widersprüchlich. In der Rechtslehre von 1812 hält Fichte dann jedoch konsequent am Prinzip der Volkssouveränität fest und verzichtet deshalb auf einen expliziten Vertrag der Staaten untereinander. Damit trägt er dem Ideal der Kongruenz von Macht und Recht Rechnung und skizziert zugleich die Voraussetzungen für eine realistische Konzeption der Verrechtlichung der Verhältnisse zwischen den Staaten. (shrink)

El presente ensayo investiga la filosofia política de Rousseau bajo la perspectiva de la problemática del poder. El contrato social no se orienta por el primado moderno del "Gobierno", sino que concibe la constitución de la comunidad como un modo autónomo de poder que en condiciones democráticas alcanza su realización en la soberanía popular. La figura enigmática del legislador pone de manifiesto, aunque en forma restringida, una tercera forma de poder: la autoridad o el poder de acción en cuanto competencia (...) de iniciativas políticas. El balance entre estos tres tipos de poder constituye el marco en que se inscribe la concepción moderna de la política. (shrink)

La fundameníación filosófica del poder que, desde Platón, ha intentado vincular poder y razón, choca con una serie de aporías que ponen en cuestión la racionalidad recabada en el establecimiento del poder. Una identificación apriorística de poder y razón, no menos que la exclusión reciproca de ambos, no dan cuenta de la paradoja subyacente al fenómeno del poder: el que éste, aunque surge históricamente como un intento por conjurar la violencia dominante en el “Estado de naturaleza ” encuentra, él mismo, (...) en la fuerza bruta un momento fundamental de su legitimación. La filosofía política de Hegel, que invoca la necesidad de una mediación constante del poder institucionalizado y racionalidad colectiva, ofrece la vía para superar aquella paradoja. (shrink)

What makes our brain a brain? This is the central question posited in Unlocking the Brain. By providing a fascinating venture into different territories of neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy, the author takes a novel exploration of the brain's resting state in the context of the neural code, and its ability to yield consciousness.

This book uncovers Kant s hidden theory of cosmopolitan education within the framework of his overall practical philosophy. The Kant brought out here turns out to be very different from current mainstream appropriations, which erroneously consider him one of the founding fathers of the new cosmopolitanism. Kant s Embedded Cosmopolitanism is a valuable source for students of political philosophy, cosmopolitanism, and Kant s ethics.".

For Descartes, minds were essentially non-extended things. Contemporary cognitive science prides itself on having exorcised the Cartesian ghost from the biological machine. However, it remains committed to the Cartesian vision of the mental as something purely inner. Against the idea that the mind resides solely in the brain, advocates of the situated and embodied nature of cognition have long stressed the importance of dynamic brain-body-environment couplings, the opportunistic exploitation of bodily morphology, the strategic performance of epistemically potent actions, the generation (...) and use of external representations, and the cognitive scaffolding provided by artifacts and social-cultural practices. According to the “extended mind” thesis, a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the brain into the body and its environment. My goal in this book is to clarify the nature and scope of this thesis, and to defend its central insight that cognition is not confined to the boundaries of the biological individual. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophical developments of the notion of distributed and/or scaffolded cognition have given rise to the “extended mind” thesis. Against the popular belief that the mind resides solely in the brain, advocates of the extended mind thesis defend the claim that a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the brain into the body and a heterogeneous array of physical props, tools, and cultural techniques that are reliably present in the environment in which people grow, think, and (...) act (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 1997, 2003, 2008; Wilson 2004; Rowlands 1999, 2012; Menary 2007; Theiner 2011). However, as commentators who are friendly to the idea of distributed cognition have pointed out, the philosophical debate over extended cognition has predominantly focused on the impact of tools on our thinking while somewhat neglecting the distinctively social and cultural dimensions of cognitive scaffolding (Sterelny 2004, 2010; Caporael 1997a, 1997b; Smith and Semin 2004; Wilson 2005; Barnier et al. 2008; Sutton et al. 2010; Theiner, Allen, and Goldstone 2010). -/- To reorient the reigning paradigm, Hutchins (2010, 445) has recently proposed the “hypothesis of enculturated cognition” (HEnC) as an alternative to Clark’s (2003, 2008) largely individualistic vision of the extended mind. According to the HEnC, the “ecological assemblies of human cognition make pervasive use of cultural products” and are typically “assembled … in ongoing cultural practices” (ibid.). Cultural practices, for Hutchins, are essentially “the things people do in interaction with one another” (ibid., 440). My goal in this chapter is to follow up on Hutchins’s call to “spur the program forward” (ibid., 445), by generalizing Kirsh and Maglio’s (1994) distinction between pragmatic and epistemic actions from the level of individuals to the level of groups. The concept of a collective epistemic action refers to the ways in which groups of people actively change the structure of their social organization, with the epistemic goal of reshaping and augmenting their cognitive performance as integrated collectivities. By placing a renewed emphasis on the interactions between people, rather than between people and their tools, I hope to reconnect the cognitive-scientifically-driven “extended mind” thesis with complementary areas of social-scientific research in which groups are analyzed as the seats of action and cognition in their own right. In particular, the literature to which I aim to build a bridge in this paper is, on the one hand, certain segments of social and organizational psychology (Larson and Christensen 1993; Hinsz et al. 1997; Mohammed and Dumville 2001), and, on the other hand, theories of collective and institutional action (Ostrom 1990; List and Pettit 2011). (shrink)

This novel approach plunges the reader into the depths of our own brain.

This paper concerns Carnap’s early contributions to formal semantics in his work on general axiomatics between 1928 and 1936. Its main focus is on whether he held a variable domain conception of models. I argue that interpreting Carnap’s account in terms of a fixed domain approach fails to describe his premodern understanding of formal models. By drawing attention to the second part of Carnap’s unpublished manuscript Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik, an alternative interpretation of the notions ‘model’, ‘model extension’ and ‘submodel’ (...) in his theory of axiomatics is presented. Specifically, it is shown that Carnap’s early model theory is based on a convention to simulate domain variation that is not identical but logically comparable to the modern account. (shrink)

In this paper my primary aim is to present a logical system of practical reasoning that can be used to assess the validity of practical arguments, that is, arguments with a practical judgment as conclusion. I begin with a critical evaluation of other approaches to this issue and argue that they are inadequate. On the basis of these considerations, I explain in Sect. 2 the informal conception of practical validity and introduce in Sect. 3 the logical system P , which (...) is an extension of propositional logic and can be used to assess the validity of a wide range of practical arguments. In the last section, I apply this system to some examples of practical reasoning in order to demonstrate how it can be used in practice. (shrink)

Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel (1985) defined the notion of a transactive memory system (TMS) as a group level memory system that “involves the operation of the memory systems of the individuals and the processes of communication that occur within the group (p. 191). Those processes are the collaborative procedures (“transactions”) by which groups encode, store, and retrieve information that is distributed among their members. Over the past 25+ years, the conception of a TMS has progressively garnered an increased interest among (...) social and organizational psychologists, communication scholars, and management theorists (Ren & Argote 2011). But there remains considerable disagreement about how exactly Wegner’s appeal to group memory should be understood. My goal in this paper is contribute to this debate, by articulating more clearly the value of conceptualizing groups as TMSs. This value, I argue, consists in providing us with a blueprint for how to explain group memory in terms of collective information-processing mechanisms. Collective information-processing mechanisms are dependent on, and interact with, the brain-bound information-processing of individuals, but cannot be reduced to the latter. In my analysis, I lean on extant accounts of mechanistic explanation in the philosophy of science (Bechtel & Richardson 1993; Machamer, Darden, & Craver 2000; Wimsatt 2007) that have been used to analyze the explanatory practices of psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Bechtel 2008, 2009). Based on my reconstruction of Wegner’s conceptualization of a TMS, I argue that the reality of emergent group cognition is compatible with its mechanistic explanation. More generally, my analysis shows that group cognition cannot be reduced to individual cognition, while avoiding the false dilemma between “wholism” and “nothing but-ism” which has hampered traditional construals of the “group mind” thesis (Allport 1968). (shrink)

In my dissertation, I explore the remarkable talent of human beings to modify and co-opt resources of their material and socio-cultural environment, and integrate them with their biological capacities in order to enhance their cognitive prowess. In the first part, I clarify and defend the claim – known as the extended mind thesis – that a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the head into the world, actively incorporating our bodies and an intricate web of material resources (Clark, (...) 2003, 2008; Wilson, 2004). Yet since much of distinctively human cognition occurs when we think in groups, I argue that the bias of this thesis to view cognition as an essentially solitary (albeit bodily or technologically extended) activity is misplaced. In the second part, I re-deploy the idea of cognitive extensions to establish a scientifically respectable version of the group mind thesis – i.e., the claim that groups can have emergent cognitive properties and capacities in their own right. (shrink)

Carnap and Goodman developed methods of conceptual re-engineering known respectively as explication and reflective equilibrium. These methods aim at advancing theories by developing concepts that are simultaneously guided by pre-existing concepts and intended to replace these concepts. This paper shows that Carnap’s and Goodman’s methods are historically closely related, analyses their structural interconnections, and argues that there is great systematic potential in interpreting them as aspects of one method, which ultimately must be conceived as a component of theory development. The (...) main results are: an adequate method of conceptual re-engineering must focus not on individual concepts but on systems of concepts and theories; the linear structure of Carnapian explication must be replaced by a process of mutual adjustments as described by Goodman; Carnap’s condition of similarity can be analysed into two components, one securing a relation to the specific extensions of the pre-existing concepts, one regulating the transition to the new system of concepts; these two criteria of adequacy can be built into Goodman’s account of reflective equilibrium to ensure that the resulting concepts promote theoretical virtues while being sufficiently similar to the concepts we started out with. (shrink)

The Hegel Lectures Series Series Editor: Peter C. Hodgson Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures series is based on a selection of extant and recently discovered transcripts and (...) manuscripts. Lectures from specific years are reconstructed so that the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources. Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God Hegel lectured on the proofs of the existence of God as a separate topic in 1829. He also discussed the proofs in the context of his lectures on the philosophy of religion (1821-31), where the different types of proofs were considered mostly in relation to specific religions. The text that he prepared for his lectures in 1829 was a fully formulated manuscript and appears to have been the first draft of a work that he intended to publish and for which he signed a contract shortly before his death in 1831. The 16 lectures include an introduction to the problem of the proofs and a detailed discussion of the cosmological proof. Philipp Marheineke published these lectures in 1832 as an appendix to the lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with an earlier manuscript fragment on the cosmological proof and the treatment of the teleological and ontological proofs as found in the 1831 philosophy of religion lectures. Hegel's 1829 lectures on the proofs are of particular importance because they represent what he actually wrote as distinct from auditors' transcriptions of oral lectures. Moreover, they come late in his career and offer his final and most seasoned thinking on a topic of obvious significance to him, that of the reality status of God and ways of knowing God. These materials show how Hegel conceived the connection between the cosmological, teleological, and ontological proofs. All of this material has been newly translated by Peter C. Hodgson from the German critical editions by Walter Jaeschke. This edition includes an editorial introduction, annotations on the text, and a glossary and bibliography. (shrink)

The author recalls a distinction between philosophy conceived as “analytics of truth” and philosophy as “ontology of the actual.” The latter might be seen as a diagnostics of our times. For this second type of philosophy questions of legitimation are prominent. According to the author, one can distinguish three main sources of legitimacy of beliefs and practices: religion, reason, and nature. Reason has been considered the most important legitimating ground as far as modernity is concerned. Nevertheless, it has never been (...) very clear what reason as a source of legitimation amounts to. The author, finally, points to the fact that, in times of increasing menace to the biosphere, “nature”– metaphorically speaking – may set a standard for human laws. (shrink)

Modern medicine provides unprecedented opportunities in diagnostics and treatment. However, in some situations at the end of a patient’s life, many physicians refrain from using all possible measures to prolong life. We studied the incidence of different types of treatment withheld or withdrawn in 6 European countries and analyzed the main background characteristics.

In this article I am concerned with analogical reasoning in ethics. There is no doubt that the use of analogy can be a powerful tool in our ethical reasoning. The importance of this mode of reasoning is therefore commonly accepted, but there is considerable debate concerning how its structure should be understood and how it should be assessed, both logically and epistemically. In this paper, I first explain the basic structure of arguments from analogy in ethics. I then discuss the (...) diversity of analogical arguments that can be found in ethics. I analyse their structure, assess them from a logical viewpoint, and show how they can be epistemically challenged and defended. The result of this investigation is that, contrary to a commonly held view, analogical reasoning can be a logically valid type of ethical reasoning that can provide reasons for action that are not worse than the reasons provided by any other kind of practical reasoning. (shrink)

Die Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion bilden die letzte, die abschließende Disziplin des Hegelschen Systems. Die Konzeption der Vorlesungen in den Jahren 1821, 1824, 1827 und 1831 hat Hegel in großen Teilen immer wieder neu formuliert – Ausdruck seiner Reflexion der philosophisch-theologischen Auseinandersetzung in jenen Jahren. Die dreibändige Studienausgabe folgt dem Text der kritischen Ausgabe »G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte«. Sie ermöglicht mit der getrennten Wiedergabe der vier selbständigen Kollegien eine entwicklungsgeschichtliche Analyse.