Se intenta poner de manifiesto, en este artículo, a través de un somero análisis de la biografía y de la obra de Santiago Ramón y Cajal, como su contribución a la historia de la histología no fue un fruto del azar, sino de una profunda investigación propiciada por su deseo de saber.

Distensión de la finitud y belleza son paralelas en Agustín, su deducción y su calificación estética. Ontología de lo finito es, por ello, a la vez, discurso estético en tres grandes dimensiones: a) fundación y estructura de lo finito; b) sucesión temporal ; c) devenir histórico . Podríamos, sin reduccionismo alguno, interpretar su doctrina estética como >?.Distension of the finiteness and beauty are parallel in St. Augustine, its deduction and its aesthetic qualification. Ontology of finiteness is therefore, at the (...) same time, aesthetic thought in three dimensions: a) foundation and structure of the finetenesss; b) temporal succession ; c) historic becoming . Could we, with no reduction, interpret his aesthetic doctrine as >? (shrink)

Este artículo investiga dos problemas principales en los conocidos argumentos de San Agustín en pro de la certeza, contra los escépticos. En realidad, son más bien dos niveles de una misma cuestión "metodológica": la interioridad del conocimiento y la reflexión, como vía de certeza. Conclusión principal de este estudio es que ambas dimensiones son correlativas: la reflexión supone interioridad, N la interioridad exige reflexión, como ría de certeza. La última parte del artículo examina la doctrina agustiniana de la reflexión, (...) en el contexto de su "filosofía del espíritu". La presente investigación intenta mostrar en este punto que, de hecho, San Agustín tematiza o supone, a lo largo de su obra tres grandes modos de reflexión, correspondientes a otros tantos modos de autoconocimiento del alma: el noticial, el cogitativo y el fenomenológico. (shrink)

Las Confesiones de San Agustín son una obra muy peculiar. Lectores e investigadores convienen en ello. No es fácil ‘definir’ ni comprender ese escrito. El presente estudio intenta una aproximación a su contenido mediante un examen de ciertos rasgos característicos de la obra que derivan de su propia singularidad. Y denunciamos también algunos impedimentos de comprensión y lectura. Confiemos en que esta mirada pueda ofrecer una guía inicial, pero orientadora, a la misma. Además, el estudio formal y temático revela (...) una dinámica interna, de su estructura misma, que va del relato autobiográfico a la reflexión , de lo narrativo al pensamiento. Este avance tendencial culmina al concluir el libro IX, donde la dimensión narrativa de la obra termina. Razón por la cual los libros X-XI alcanzan el vértice teorético de las Confesiones, con su investigación de la memoria y del tiempo. El presente estudio concluye con una breve exposición del problema agustiniano de la subjetividad o el yo, en la base de esos dos libros.t. Augustine’s Confessions is a very particular work. Readers and Scholarsagree upon it. Therefore, it’s ‘definition’ and understanding are not so easy. These paper tries to provide an approach to the contents of this difficult writing, by means of an examination of some main special traits, arising from the particular work’s kind. And we betray also some new difficulties for it’s reading and understanding. It is hoped that these brief look to the famous Augustinian writing could offer an initial but adviser guide to it. Moreover, the formal and thematic inquiry reveal an internal dynamics of it’s structure, which moves from the autobiographycal account to the reflection , from the story to the thinking. This aimed advance culminates at the end of the book IX, where the work’s narrative side concludes. That’s why the books X and XI reach the theoretical summit of the Confessions through their search for memory and time. Our paper ends with an exposition of the Augustinian inquiry on the human subiectivity, underlying both these books. (shrink)

The renewed interest in concepts and their role in psychological theorizing is partially motivated by Machery’s claim that concepts are so heterogeneous that they have no explanatory role. Against this, pluralism argues that there is multiplicity of different concepts for any given category, while hybridism argues that a concept is constituted by a rich common representation. This article aims to advance the understanding of the hybrid view of concepts. First, we examine the main arguments against hybrid concepts and conclude that, (...) even if not successful, they challenge hybridism to find a robust criterion for concept individuation and to show an explanatory advantage for hybrid concepts. Then we propose such a criterion of individuation, which we will call ‘functional stable coactivation’. Finally, we examine the prospects of hybridism to understand what is involved in recent approaches to categorization and meaning extraction. 1 The Heterogeneity of Conceptual Representations2 Two Challenges for Hybrid Concepts: Individuation and Explanation2.1 The coordination criterion2.2 Concepts as constituents of thoughts3 Individuating Hybrids: Functional Stable Coactivation4 The Explanatory Power of Hybrid Concepts4.1 Categorization4.2 Meaning extraction4.2.1 Linguistic comprehension and rich lexical entries4.2.2 Polysemy and hybrid concepts5 Conclusion. (shrink)

This paper presents philosophical perspectives related to the concept of boredom from the point of view of its forms and structural modes as developed by Martin Heidegger in his lectures at the University of Freiburg during the winter semesters of 1929 and 1930. We highlight a philosophical stance often overlooked in comparison to more traditional positions in Western philosophical thought—through the proposed hermeneutic-phenomenological processes, this will allow us to interweave their philosophical images with cinematographic narratives that enrich the factual understanding (...) of modernity. For this reason, we assume boredom and its essence, “tediousness”, as the fundamental mood of our era, thus permitting other mobilities of thought that warrant a study of phenomena relating to cultural entertainment as a symptom of the modern disease that distances Dasein from meeting, questioning, and self-care. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo presentar un análisis bioético claro de las consecuencias que tiene la legalización de la eutanasia sobre tres sectores: la sociedad, los enfermos y el personal médico. Para plasmarlo se desarrolla un análisis crítico a partir de un caso reciente de público conocimiento, además de una amplia revisión bibliográfica en torno a la temática. Así, se presenta de manera práctica y cercana el impacto de la legalización de la eutanasia. Se argumenta y concluye que el camino (...) hacia una muerte digna no es la eutanasia, sino un acompañamiento activo e integral del paciente. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between language and thought, focusing on the question of whether language can be a vehicle of thought, as, for example, Peter Carruthers has claimed. We develop and examine a powerful argument—the "argument from explicitness"—against this cognitive role of language. The premises of the argument are just two: (1) the vehicle of thought has to be explicit, and (2) natural languages are not explicit. We explain what these simple premises mean and why we should believe (...) they are true. Finally, we argue that even though the argument from explicitness shows that natural language cannot be a vehicle of thought, there is a cognitive function for language. (shrink)

According to an increasing number of authors, the best, if not the only, argument in favour of physicalism is the so-called 'overdetermination argument'. This argument, if sound, establishes that all the entities that enter into causal interactions with the physical world are physical. One key premise in the overdetermination argument is the principle of the causal closure of the physical world, said to be supported by contemporary physics. In this paper, I examine various ways in which physics may support the (...) principle, either as a methodological guide or as depending on some other laws and principles of physics. (shrink)

According to the thesis of semantic underdetermination, most sentences of a natural language lack a definite semantic interpretation. This thesis supports an argument against the use of natural language as an instrument of thought, based on the premise that cognition requires a semantically precise and compositional instrument. In this paper we examine several ways to construe this argument, as well as possible ways out for the cognitive view of natural language in the introspectivist version defended by Carruthers. Finally, we sketch (...) a view of the role of language in thought as a specialized tool, showing how it avoids the consequences of semantic underdetermination. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that genders are enacted, by providing an account of how an individual can be said to enact a gender and explaining how, consequently, genders can be fluid. On the enactive-ecological view we defend, individuals first and foremost perceive the world as fields of affordances, that is, structured sets of action possibilities. Fields of natural affordances offer action possibilities because of the natural properties of organisms and environments. Handles offer graspability to humans because of physical-structural properties (...) of handles and the anatomical-physiological properties of humans. Although humans live in fields of bodily, action, and cultural affordances, our work focuses on cultural affordances, where action possibilities are offered to individuals because of the normative responses of individuals in that culture. Knocking on a door affords entrance because knocking provides cultured individuals on the other side of the door an affordance to which they themselves behave normatively. Usually, behaving normatively in response to cultural affordances brings about sequences of perception-action loops, which we will call “scripts”: for instance, closed doors afford knocking, which affords the individual inside opening the door, which affords an interpersonal meeting, which afford entrance. Although the notion of script has a strong cognitivist flavor, one of the aims of the paper to provide an ecological account of scripts, to show that what cognitivists viewed as representations are in fact environmentally structured perception-action loops. On our account of gender, gendered cultures build and maintain gendered cultural affordance landscapes, that is, landscapes in which the action possibilities individuals face are normed according to a specific body type or situation; most often biological sex. Individuals enact a given gender when they come to perceive the affordances reserved for one gender by their culture and respond in the culturally normative way, thus enacting gendered sequences of perception-action loops. With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by several recent social, technological, and epistemic developments in some cultures, the gendered landscapes of affordances offered to individuals in these cultures have become more varied and less rigid, thus increasing the variety and flexibility of scripts individuals can enact. This entails that individuals in such cultures have an increased possibility for gender fluidity, which may in part explain the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary. (shrink)

A bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight. Agustín Fuentes argues that your child's finger painting comes essentially from the same place as creativity in hunting and gathering millions of years ago, and throughout history in making (...) war and peace, in intimate relationships, in shaping the planet, in our communities, and in all of art, religion, and even science. It requires imagination and collaboration. Every poet has her muse; every engineer, an architect; every politician, a constituency. The manner of the collaborations varies widely, but successful collaboration is inseparable from imagination, and it brought us everything from knives and hot meals to iPhones and interstellar spacecraft. Weaving fascinating stories of our ancient ancestors' creativity, Fuentes finds the patterns that match modern behavior in humans and animals. This key quality has propelled the evolutionary development of our bodies, minds, and cultures, both for good and for bad. It's not the drive to reproduce; nor competition for mates, or resources, or power; nor our propensity for caring for one another that have separated us out from all other creatures. As Fuentes concludes, to make something lasting and useful today you need to understand the nature of your collaboration with others, what imagination can and can't accomplish, and, finally, just how completely our creativity is responsible for the world we live in. Agustín Fuentes's resounding multimillion-year perspective will inspire readers—and spark all kinds of creativity. (shrink)

Whether or not we achieve absolute generality in philosophical inquiry, most philosophers would agree that ordinary inquiry is rarely, if ever, absolutely general. Even if the quantifiers involved in an ordinary assertion are not explicitly restricted, we generally take the assertion’s domain of discourse to be implicitly restricted by context.1 Suppose someone asserts (2) while waiting for a plane to take off.

Plotinus’ thought is generally viewed as a “system”, the One’s system, wich embraces and considers the Totality as such, as a whole, ruled by the metaphysical law of the unity. Scholars as É. Bréhier, J. Moreau, G. Reale, J. Igal, A. H. Armstrong... agree to it. The present study tries to make explicit and interpret it, examining some basic features, or general traits, wich reveal the Plotinian doctrine from this same point of view. Therefore, the systematic side of Plotinus’ thought (...) is here viewed as the really suitable mode, way or “mothodology” to think the Totality as a supreme unity, and to express the One’s ontology as a perfect whole. According to this interpretation, the system reflects the “synoptical” view of its same content, and shows it as the One’s “presence” in the whole reality and in the Plotinus’ intuitive mind, developed through an ordered series of concepts, in view of the mystical experience, to the union with the One, as the final goal. (shrink)

The problem of absolute generality has attracted much attention in recent philosophy. Agustin Rayo and Gabriel Uzquiano have assembled a distinguished team of contributors to write new essays on the topic. They investigate the question of whether it is possible to attain absolute generality in thought and language and the ramifications of this question in the philosophy of logic and mathematics.

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at (...) deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning. (shrink)

In this paper I try to fix the price that a non-epiphenomenal dualism demands. To begin with, the defender of non-epiphenomenal dualism cannot hold that mental events cause physical events, since the physical world is causally closed. Hence, she must say that mental events cause events that are not physical, or at least, events that are not affected by the principle of the causal closure of the physical world. However, this is not all: the events mental causes bring about must (...) fulfill certain further conditions, which I spell out. When properly analyzed, it will be seen that these conditions make the dual explanandum strategy highly demanding. /// En este artículo trato de fijar el precio que un dualismo no epifenomènico tiene que pagar. Para empezar, el defensor del dualismo no epifenomenico no puede mantener que los eventos mentales causan cambios en el mundo fisico, ya que èste está causalmente cerrado. Por lo tanto, ha de decir que los eventos mentales causan eventos que no son fisicos, o, al menos, que no están sometidos al principio del cierre causal del mundo fisico. Sin embargo, esto no es todo: los eventos que son efectos de las causas mentales tienen que cumplir ciertas condiciones ulteriores, condiciones que detallo. Cuando èstas se analizan propiamente, se ve que vuelven muy exigente la estrategia del doble explanandum. (shrink)

Here is an account of logical consequence inspired by Bolzano and Tarski. Logical validity is a property of arguments. An argument is a pair of a set of interpreted sentences (the premises) and an interpreted sentence (the conclusion). Whether an argument is logically valid depends only on its logical form. The logical form of an argument is fixed by the syntax of its constituent sentences, the meanings of their logical constituents and the syntactic differences between their non-logical constituents, treated as (...) variables. A constituent of a sentence is logical just if it is formal in meaning, in the sense roughly that its application is invariant under permutations of individuals.1 Thus ‘=’ is a logical constant because no permutation maps two individuals to one or one to two; ‘∈’ is not a logical constant because some permutations interchange the null set and its singleton. Truth functions, the usual quantifiers and bound variables also count as logical constants. An argument is logically valid if and only if the conclusion is true under every assignment of semantic values to variables (including all non-logical expressions) under which all its premises are true. A sentence is logically true if and only if the argument with no premises of which it is the conclusion is logically valid, that is, if and only if the sentence is true under every assignment of semantic values to variables. An interpretation assigns values to all variables. (shrink)

Polo es un nombre que describe la Universidad de Navarra en su comienzo. Es un ejemplo señero de pensamiento, ejemplo de universitario, inconformista; un filósofo teórico y práctico que busca la verdad que encamina a la Verdad; un maestro de vida coherente con esa búsqueda, siempre con buen humor.

This paper extracts some of the main theses in the philosophy of mathematics from my book, The Construction of Logical Space. I show that there are important limits to the availability of nominalistic paraphrase functions for mathematical languages, and suggest a way around the problem by developing a method for specifying nominalistic contents without corresponding nominalistic paraphrases. Although much of the material in this paper is drawn from the book — and from an earlier paper — I hope the present (...) discussion will earn its keep by motivating the ideas in a new way, and by suggesting further applications. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a famous argument for physicalism – which some authors indeed regard as the only argument for it – the overdetermination argument. In fact it is an argument that does not establish that all the entities in the world are physical, but that all those events that enter into causal transactions with the physical world are physical. As mental events seem to cause changes in the physical world, the mind is one of those things that fall (...) within the scope of the argument. Here I analyze one response to the overdetermination argument that has acquired some popularity lately, and which consists in saying that what mental events cause are not physical effects. I try to show that recent attempts to develop this response are not successful, but that there may be a coherent way of doing so. I also try to show that there seems to be a philosophical niche in which this way might fit. (shrink)

Las novelas del fin de los tiempos son frecuentes en las literaturas de muchos países, que se han preocupado de darlas a conocer, no así en España. Son narraciones en las que el autor se compromete a enjuiciar a la Humanidad que va a hacer desaparecer. Es lo más común que, partiendo en principio de un progreso sin límites de la civilización, esta idea termine por dar paso a la contraria y surja la gran pregunta: ¿La Humanidad perece por azar (...) o como consecuencia de sus actos? En las dos novelas que reseñamos está llamada a perecer por infortunio, aunque en una se dé el caso excepcional de que el esfuerzo colectivo de la Humanidad entera va a evitar la catástrofe. (shrink)

I propose a way of thinking aboout content, and a related way of thinking about ontological commitment. (This is part of a series of four closely related papers. The other three are ‘On Specifying Truth-Conditions’, ‘An Actualist’s Guide to Quantifying In’ and ‘An Account of Possibility’.).

In this paper we address the question of what determines the content of our conscious episodes of thinking, considering recent claims that phenomenal character individuates thought contents. We present one prominent way for defenders of phenomenal intentionality to develop that view and then examine ‘sensory inner speech views’, which provide an alternative way of accounting for thought-content determinacy. We argue that such views fare well with inner speech thinking but have problems accounting for unsymbolized thinking. Within this dialectic, we present (...) an account of the nature of unsymbolized thinking that accords with and can be seen as a continuation of the activity of inner speech, while offering a way of explaining thought-content determinacy in terms of linguistic structures and representations. (shrink)

Here is an account of logical consequence inspired by Bolzano and Tarski. Logical validity is a property of arguments. An argument is a pair of a set of interpreted sentences (the premises) and an interpreted sentence (the conclusion). Whether an argument is logically valid depends only on its logical form. The logical form of an argument is fixed by the syntax of its constituent sentences, the meanings of their logical constituents and the syntactic differences between their non-logical constituents, treated as (...) variables. A constituent of a sentence is logical just if it is formal in meaning, in the sense roughly that its application is invariant under permutations of individuals.1 Thus ‘=’ is a logical constant because no permutation maps two individuals to one or one to two; ‘∈’ is not a logical constant because some permutations interchange the null set and its singleton. Truth functions, the usual quantifiers and bound variables also count as logical constants. An argument is logically valid if and only if the conclusion is true under every assignment of semantic values to variables (including all non-logical expressions) under which all its premises are true. A sentence is logically true if and only if the argument with no premises of which it is the conclusion is logically valid, that is, if and only if the sentence is true under every assignment of semantic values to variables. An interpretation assigns values to all variables. (shrink)

Basado en Las Confesiones de la carne, cuarto y último volumen de la Historia de sexualidad de Michel Foucault, este artículo interroga el alcance de la noción de “hombre de deseo” que Foucault pone el centro de las modificaciones introducidas por El uso de los placeres al proyecto general de la Historia de la sexualidad. El artículo discute la hipótesis de Foucault según la cual el cristianismo habría forjado una “hermenéutica del deseo” cuyo objetivo es descubrir, a través del análisis (...) del deseo, la verdad oculta del individuo. A partir de las investigaciones que Las Confesiones de la carne proponen sobre la teoría de la libido de San Agustín y la ascesis de la castidad desarrollada por Casiano, el artículo pone en evidencia los problemas que tal hipótesis supone y analiza su impacto para el proyecto general de la Historia de la sexualidad. (shrink)

Forthcoming in Philosophical Compass. I explain why plural quantifiers and predicates have been thought to be philosophically significant.

The purpose of this paper is to defend a conception of language that does not rely on linguistic meanings, and use it to address the Sorites and Liar paradoxes.

This article investigates Foucault’s account of desiring man by drawing upon History of Sexuality vol. 4, Confessions of the Flesh. In order to do so, the article focuses on Foucault’s diagnosis of the Christian elaboration of “the analytic of the subject of concupiscence” that closes Confessions of the Flesh. As the article shows, “the analytic of the subject of concupiscence” inspires Foucault’s account of desiring man. However, Foucault’s diagnosis of the Christian elaboration of “the analytic of concupiscence” proves to be (...) debatable as it relies on a problematic interplay between Cassian’s and Saint Augustine’s account of concupiscence. The article exposes the problems that such interplay supposes by addressing the contrast between Cassian’s and Augustine’s perspective on both concupiscence and the human condition. Despite this problematic aspect of Foucault’s investigation of Christianity, the article argues that the publication of Confessions of the Flesh is central to understanding Foucault’s History of Sexuality. By providing new elements of analysis, the book reopens Foucault’s genealogical diagnosis of the formation of the medical account of sexuality and allows us to problematise new avenues for developing Foucault’s investigation in depth. (shrink)

Recently, many philosophers and psychologists have claimed that the explanation that grounds both passivity phenomena in the cognitive domain and passivity phenomena that occur with respect to overt actions is, along broad lines, the same. Furthermore, they claim that the best account we have of such phenomena in both scenarios is the “comparator” account. However, there are reasons to doubt whether the comparator model can be exported from the realm of overt actions to the cognitive domain in general. There is (...) a lingering worry concerning such explanations of thought insertion: the "What is compared to what?" problem. Here I examine two ways to tackle this problem. First: thought insertion consists of the misattribution of strings of inner speech which are not attenuated (thought insertion is thus another name for auditory verbal hallucinations). Second: thought insertion is misattributed inner speech which exhibits the same phenomenological characteristics as normal inner speech. After explaining the types of problem that each of these potential solutions faces, I conclude with a set of open questions that the comparator theorist has to tackle. (shrink)

Charles Travis has been forcefully arguing that meaning does not determine truth-conditions for more than two decades now. To this end, he has devised ingenious examples whereby different utterances of the same prima facie non-ambiguous and non-indexical expression type have different truth-conditions depending on the occasion on which they are delivered. However, Travis does not argue that meaning varies with circumstances; only that truth-conditions do. He assumes that meaning is a stable feature of both words and sentences. After surveying some (...) of the explanations that semanticists and pragmaticians have produced in order to account for Travis cases, I propose a view which differs substantially from all of them. I argue that the variability in the truth-conditions that an utterance type can have is due to meaning facts alone. To support my argument, I suggest that we think about the meanings of words (in particular, the meanings of nouns) as rich conceptual structures; so rich that the way in which a property concept applies to an object concept is not determined. (shrink)

Part of the task in studying human evolution is developing a deep understanding of what we share, and do not share, with other life, as a mammal, a primate, a hominin, and as members of the genus Homo. A key aspect of this last facet is gained via the examination of the genus Homo across the Pleistocene. By at least the later Pleistocene members of the genus Homo began to habitually insert shared meaning into and onto their world forming one (...) of the bases of contemporary human abilities to develop a distinctive human niche and human culture. Meaning-laden cultural dynamics constitute the core of a ubiquitous semiotic ecosystem, which in turn structures the architecture of the complex niches and niche construction processes that characterize humanity today. Here, I offer a summary of Pleistocene evolution of the genus Homo and an argument for when and how that extensive and distinctive capacities for shared meaning-making and a particularly dynamic niche construction emerged. (shrink)

Este artículo examina la compleja relación entre democracia y derechos fundamentales, argumentando que una perspectiva histórica de los derechos, que es indispensable, no necesariamente justifica su existencia en términos historicistas. Señala que la expansión y generalización de los derechos han planteado desafíospara definir un concepto unificado de derechos fundamentales. Además, critica la percepción romántica de que la democracia es suficiente para garantizar estos derechos, especialmente en un contexto de crisis de representación, corrupción y otros desafíos contemporáneos. El artículo también aborda (...) la disyuntiva entre democracia y capitalismo, especialmente en su forma neoliberal, argumentando que esta alianza ha sido problemática y ha contribuido a la erosión de los derechos sociales. Se destaca que, aunque las democracias pueden violar los derechos humanos, estas violaciones no son sistemáticas y hay mecanismos para denunciarlas y corregirlas. El autor sugiere que para entender los desafíos actuales en el discurso de los derechos, es crucial considerar su historia desde la Modernidad hasta el presente. (shrink)