This chapter subsumes David Marr’s levels of analysis account of explanation in cognitive science under the framework of mechanistic explanation: Answering the questions that define each one of Marr’s three levels is tantamount to describing the component parts and operations of mechanisms, as well as their organization, behavior, and environmental context. By explicating these questions and showing how they are answered in several different cognitive science research programs, this chapter resolves some of the ambiguities that remain in Marr’s account, and (...) shows that many different areas and traditions of cognitive scientific research can be unified under the mechanistic framework. (shrink)

The received view of dynamical explanation is that dynamical cognitive science seeks to provide covering law explanations of cognitive phenomena. By analyzing three prominent examples of dynamicist research, I show that the received view is misleading: some dynamical explanations are mechanistic explanations, and in this way resemble computational and connectionist explanations. Interestingly, these dynamical explanations invoke the mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory to describe mechanisms far more complex and distributed than the ones typically considered by philosophers. Therefore, contemporary dynamicist (...) research reveals the need for a more sophisticated account of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time offers an innovative philosophical account of the most fundamental kinds of time representation.

: "We are invisible": this melancholic assertion alludes to the "non-place" that we occupy as Latin American philosophers or, in general, as philosophers in the Spanish or Portuguese languages. We tend to survive as mere ghosts teaching courses and writing texts, perhaps some memorable ones, which, however, seldom spark anybody's interest, among other reasons, because almost no one takes the time to read them. In saying this, I do not mean to call upon a useless pathos, nor do I mean (...) to complain, or thrust forth a challenge. I am simply confirming a fact, and a widely acknowledged one at that. I wish to inquire a little into this invisibility. Later I will look into how the experience of our much acclaimed essay may help in fighting it. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

The purpose of the paper is to present a logical framework that allow to formalize a kind of prima facie duties, defeasible conditional duties, indefeasible conditional duties and actual (indefeasible) duties, as well as to show their logical interconnections.

Very often, phenomenology has been presented as opposed to structuralism. We aim to contest that opposition. We will argue that Husserl has influenced on structuralism in the early 20th century, and that phenomenolgy shows itself as a neither a global (trivial) nor a methodic struc-turalism. Indeed,..

Readers of the Republic have usually seen the passages about the stereotypical characteristics of communities as grounding the city-soul analogy. Plato indeed takes those attributions to be a powerful reason to expect the same types (εἴδη) and manners (ἤθη) in both the city and the individual soul and, hence, to affirm the structural isomorphism of polis and psyche (Resp. 435e). This natural reading is considerably challenged by Bernard Williams’ “The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato’s ‘Republic’” (2001), where it (...) is shown to entail paradoxes that make the analogy flawed. The point lies in the derivation principles that communal stereotypes imply. For while a community is expected to be, say, spirited precisely because all or many or its most prominent members are spirited, it seems that Plato’s perfect and imperfect constitutions fail to meet this simple requirement. In this paper, I will briefly examine Williams’ puzzles and lay out their core challenges. Then, I will discuss two of the most prominent attempts to meet them: Lear’s psychological interpretation and Ferrari’s metaphorical interpretation of the city-soul analogy. As I hope to show, they both entail consequences that run against some of the Republic’s most important aims or make them plainly unattainable. Finally, by distinguishing psycho-political forces (ἤθη) from psycho-political constitutions (εἴδη), I propose a solution that holds the derivation rules without falling prey to Williams’ paradoxes. This solution, we will see, calls for a prima facie compelling model of the unity of virtues, that is, a model showing how everyone in Callipolis may possess, in some way, all the virtues. (shrink)

O texto parte da parábola do bom samaritano para discorrer sobre a contribuição que uma pessoa pode dar para atenuar o sofrimento de uma outra e, em contrapartida, a violência que significa a indiferença ante a dor alheia. Essa parábola ensina que se deve dar especial atenção às pessoas mais frágeis e menos favorecidas da sociedade e que o próximo é a pessoa que está a seu alcance e que esteja padecendo com sua própria miséria, não importando se é um (...) desconhecido ou mesmo um inimigo. Acrescenta que a mobilização para ajudar envolve sacrifício pessoal, mas quando é motivada por amor, não depende nem gera um desejo de retribuição para si. (shrink)

Multisensory Experiences: Where the senses meet technology takes you on a journey that goes from the fundamentals of multisensory experiences, through the relationship between the senses and technology, to what the future of those experiences may look like, and our responsibility in it.

In this paper I address the question whether self-knowledge is compatible with an externalist individuation of mental content. Against some approaches, I consider self-knowledge as a genuine cognitive achievement. Though it is neither incorrigible nor infallible, self-knowledge is direct, a priori (no based on empirical investigation), presumptively true and authoritative. The problem is whether self-knowledge, so understood, is compatible with externalism. My answer will be affirmative. I will defend this species of compatibilism against several objections, in particular those based on (...) the possibility of an individual’s being unwittingly switched between worlds. (shrink)

As much in the processes of education of sciences like in the methodological and epistemological analyses, usually are not examples of social theories that they allow to show how they are resisted with the experience. This work tries to show not only the methodological skeleton used by E. Durkheim i..

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the role played by logic in the legal domain. In the traditional conception which underlies the movement of codification, judges are able to find in the legal system (the Master System) a unique answer for every legal problem. This entails its completeness, consistency and the possibility of deriving from it the contents of all judicial decisions. Although the ideal model of this conception is supported by important theoretical and political ideals, it (...) has significant shortcomings. The elements of normative systems (Master Systems) are “norms” and not mere “norm-formulations.” A “norm” is the meaning attributed to normative linguistic expressions. The set of all normative expressions, such as statutes, codes, etc. forms what is called the Master Book. One of the main problems for the ideal model is the identification of a normative system behind the Master Book. Interpretative arguments are the tools designed to solve these problems. Although the requirements of the model are not totally fulfilled in actual practice, it remains as an effective ideal rational goal behind legal activities linked to adjudication and most theoretical approaches to law. (shrink)