"The book presents in accessible fashion recent important work on the self and self-consciousness and also moves the issues forward with interesting new ideas. It provides a notably crisp and clear treatment of some extremely intriguing topics." -- Jane Heal, Department of Philosophy, University of Cambridge In this book, José Luis Bermú dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in (...) terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Bermú dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox ofself-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer. (shrink)

Thinking Without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Jose Luis Bermudez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. The book is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

Frames and framing make one dimension of a decision problem particularly salient. In the simplest case, framesprimeresponses (as in, e.g., the Asian disease paradigm, where the gain frame primes risk-aversion and the loss frame primes risk-seeking). But in more complicated situations frames can function reflectively, by making salient particular reason-giving aspects of a thing, outcome, or action. For Shakespeare's Macbeth, for example, his feudal commitments are salient in one frame, while downplayed in another in favor of his personal ambition. The (...) role of frames in reasoning can give rise torational framing effects. Macbeth can prefer fulfilling his feudal duty to murdering the king, while also preferring bravely taking the throne to fulfilling his feudal duty, knowing full well that bravely taking the throne just is murdering the king. Such patterns ofquasi-cyclicalpreferences can be correct and appropriate from the normative perspective of how one ought to reason. The paper explores three less dramatic types of rational framing effects: (1) Consciously framing and reframing long-term goals and short-term temptations can be important tools for self-control. (2) In the prototypical social interactions modeled by game theory, allowing for rational framing effects solves longstanding problems, such as the equilibrium selection problem and explaining the appeal of non-equilibrium solutions (e.g., the cooperative solution in the Prisoner's Dilemma). (3) Processes for resolving interpersonal conflicts and breaking discursive deadlock, because they involve internalizing multiple and incompatible ways of framing actions and outcomes, in effect create rational framing effects. (shrink)

Table of Contents Acknowledgments 1 Self-Consciousness and the Body: An Interdisciplinary Introduction by Naomi Eiland, Anthony Marcel and José Luis Bermúdez 2 The Body Image and Self-Consciousness by John Campbell 3 Infants’ Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology by Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore 4 Persons, Animals, and Bodies by Paul F. Snowdon 5 An Ecological Perspective on the Origins of Self by George Butterworth 6 Objectivity, Causality, and Agency by Thomas (...) Baldwin 7 At Two with Nature: Agency and the Development of Self-World Dualism by James Russell 8 Ecological Perception and the Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View by José Luis Bermúdez 9 Proprioception and the Body Image by Brian O’Shaughnessy 10 Awareness of One’s Own Body: An Attentional Theory of Its Nature, Development, and Brain Basis by Marcel Kinsbourne 11 Body Schema and Intentionality by Shaun Gallagher 12 Living without Touch and Peripheral Information about Body Position and Movement: Studies with Deafferented Subjects by Jonathan Cole and Jacques Paillard 13 Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership by M. G. F. Martin 14 Bodily Awareness and the Self by Bill Brewer 15 Introspection and Bodily Self-Ascription by Quassim Cassam 16 Consciousness and the Self by Naomi Eilan Contributors Index. (shrink)

A central discussion in the theory of deliberative democracy in recent decades has focused on whether democratic deliberation, and consequently those participating in it, should aim, at least ideally, for political consensus. Thus, pluralist deliberative democrats have criticized the consensualist approach to deliberative democracy for neglecting the moral importance of political disagreement because of their fixation with reaching consensus. The debate between these two positions, initiated in the 1990s, has evolved in recent years toward more precision and sophistication. However, some (...) vagueness and ambiguities remain in many of the contributions and prevent us from getting an exact idea of the object of discussion. This article starts making further distinctions about several types of agreement and disagreement in order to clarify much more precisely the exact niche of dispute between these two views. They do not need to disagree on the value of many forms of disagreement and consensus. Their dispute consists only in a controversy about the relative value of post-deliberative, operative, substantive, legislative, regulatory, or adjudicative reason-based consensus as opposed to the corresponding reason-based disagreement. Finally, the article argues that this relatively small niche is made smaller by certain considerations. The most important of them is that this controversy remains at a high theoretical level and lacks practical importance: it only affects the kind of personal ideal commitment or aspiration that virtuous deliberators should have when entering into a deliberative process, and has no concrete consequent institutional implications. (shrink)

Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...) satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)

This paper examines and defends the view that the immediate objects of visual perception, or what are often called sense data, are parts of the facing surfaces of physical objects-the naturalized sense data (NSD) theory. Occasionally defended in the literature on the philosophy of perception, most famously by G. E. Moore (1918-1919), it has not proved popular and indeed was abandoned by Moore himself. The contemporary situation in the philosophy of perception seems ripe for a revaluation of the NSD theory. (...) however. The NSD theory allows us to accommodate the very real shortcomings in uncritical direct realism without postulating the existence of non-physical sense data in a way that has seemed to many incompatible with any robust form of philosophical naturalism.The argument to establish the NSD theory proceeds in two stages. In §II I argue against the direct realist that we perceive three-dimensional material objects in virtue of perceiving parts of their surfaces. The argument for this conclusion involves clearly distinguishing (in § I) between two notions that have tended to be run together in discussions of perception---namely, immediate perception and direct perception. In §III I argue against the sense-datum theorist that those parts of the surfaces of those objects are not themselves perceived in virtue of the perception of anything else. (shrink)

Beyond different starting points, stakeholder theory and Catholic Social Thought share many compatible perspectives when analyzing the role of the firm in economic activity, especially regarding the attention of the firm to different social and economic actors. Additionally, ST bears limitations regarding its ethical and anthropological foundation, and also about the legitimation of the different stakeholders’ interests. Therefore, ST lacks clear criteria to solve possible conflicts of interest between stakeholders. This paper analyzes the potentiality of ST, widely accepted in corporate (...) management, to integrate CST principles in order to solve those conflicts. At the same time, the paper studies the possibility of finding in the principles of CST an anthropological and ethical foundation for ST. This foundation could be the source of criteria to discuss the levels of legitimation and prioritization between stakeholders´ interests, especially when those interests collide. (shrink)

This chapter considers a deflationary or minimalist construal of the nature of nonlinguistic thought that might be deployed to finesse the apparent need to attribute thoughts to creatures that are not language-users. The aim of the minimalist proposal is to show that thinking behavior in nonlinguistic creatures can be understood in nonpropositional and perceptual terms, rather than through the attribution of propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires. In opposition to this the book suggest that there are important types of (...) nonlinguistic thought that cannot be accommodated in the manner proposed by the minimalists. The requirements of psychological explanation often demand that we attribute to nonlinguistic creatures thoughts that are structured, represent the world in a highly determinate way, and reflect the particular mode of presentation under which the creature apprehends its environment. (shrink)

A theory of nonlinguistic thought is incomplete without an account of nonlinguistic reasoning and the norms of rationality by which such reasoning is governed. This chapter tries to show how an account of nonlinguistic rationality emerges when we pose the question: What could count as evidence that a nonlinguistic creature is behaving rationally? There are several different forms of evidence that can come into play here. At the most sophisticated level, a creature is behaving rationally when it is sensitive to (...) the consequences of different courses of action, but there are types of rationality that do not involve such consequence-sensitivity. Different forms of rationality are appropriate to different types of explanation, and this chapter draws a distinction between level 1 rationality and level 2 rationality that maps onto the distinction between explanations of the type proposed by the minimalist and explanations that make use of belief-desire psychology. (shrink)

En torno al Concilio de Basilea (1431-49), y frente a la renovación nominalista, en la Universidad de Salamanca se promueve todo un movimiento de renovación humanista desde el campo de la filosofía y teología, teniendo en Pedro Martínez de Osma (1424-80) a uno de sus representantes más significativos. En este trabajo se muestra el significado de su obra, con influencias de L. Bruni y L. Valía, y se rescatan dos de sus textos más significativos desde esa lucha que enfrentaba al (...) humanismo con el nominalismo. (shrink)

The idea that thoughts are structured is essential to Frege's understanding of thoughts. A basic tenet of his thinking was that the structure of a sentence can serve as a model for the structure of a thought. Recent commentators have, however, identified tensions between that principle and certain other doctrines Frege held about thoughts. This paper suggests that the tensions identified by Dummett and Bell are not really tensions at all. In establishing the case against Dummett and Bell the paper (...) argues (a) that Frege was committed, in virtue of his doctrine of decomposition, to the thesis that a single sentence can express a range of thoughts, and (b) that Frege was committed, in virtue of his views about truth, to the thesis that a single thought can be expressed by structurally different sentences. But neither of these theses comes into conflict with the basic principle. (shrink)

Los descubrimientos vinculados al Proyecto Genoma Humano, ni mermannuestro sentido de la libertad ni confirman que nuestra condición de sereslibres sea una ficción. Lo que realmente demandan es una noción de libertadmoral ubicada en un mundo natural. El contenido de la exposición tiene dospartes. En la primera, se examina qué hay de verdadero y de falso en eldeterminismo genético respecto a las relaciones entre fenotipo y genotipo.En la segunda parte, siguiendo la tradición moderna inaugurada por D.Hume y con el apoyo (...) de las aportaciones de E. Tugendhat, se sostiene quelas acciones libres protagonizadas por los seres humanos pueden identificarsecon criterios empíricos distintos a los que caracterizan la conducta de otrosanimales ajenos a la posibilidad de imputarles responsabilidad alguna. (shrink)

O presente texto tem por pressuposto teórico a determinação das práticas e teorias pedagógicas, bem como das controvérsias epistemológicas, pela estrutura e superestrutura indissociáveis vigentes. O cenário é o da globalização econômica e cultural. Nesse cenário, destaca-se a pedagogia da hegemonia visando decifrar suas implicações na construção de um novo homem e de um novo consenso ideológico, político e social. Conclui-se que a pedagogia da hegemonia, desde o Estado educador, passando pelas igrejas, mídias e ONG's, tenta sedimentar a "ordem" mundial (...) capitalista-burguesa como algo inevitável.This paper has the theoretical assumptions in determining the practical and pedagogical theories, the controversies in the current epistemological and inseparable relationship between structure and superstructure. The scenario is the economic and cultural globalization. In this scenario, we highlight the teaching of hegemony that seeks to decipher their implications in the construction of a new man and a new ideological consensus, political and social. We conclude that the pedagogy of hegemony from the Educator State, through churches, media and ONGs are trying to consolidate the "order" of the bourgeois-capitalist world as inevitable. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show you the broad concept of “real-freedom”, following both the analyses and comments of a remarkable author, Amartya Sen. This concept inspires most of the works and articles of our author. It is mainly reflected on his most important book of the past years: Development as freedom . We analyse the two points of view of the concept of “freedom” in this book. They are the constitutive role and the instrumental one. In the (...) first role we include three concepts: Freedom as a universal value, Processes and Opportunities, and Freedom as a social commitment. In the second role we compare Sen`s instrumental-freedoms with Rawls’s “primary goods” theory. (shrink)

How precisely to understand and evaluate counterfactuals can be an intricate issue. The aim of this article is to examine a new set of difficulties for evaluating counterfactuals that arise in the context of the dynamical spacetimes described by the theory of general relativity (GR). The initial value formulation provides us with a methodology to pin down the specific combination of features of the theory at the origin of the difficulties, namely, non-linearity and certain non-local aspects (typically captured by ellipticity (...) at the analytical level), in particular when combined with the global and/or quasi-local character of physical quantities in GR. Finally, we connect the philosophical question about counterfactuals with concrete applied physical issues in GR about extracting meaningful predictions by constructing appropriate initial data sets, leading us to question the very suitability of the Cauchy approach to fully account for the explanatory power of the theory. (shrink)

El autor parte del difícil tratamiento del tema del divorcio en España, como consecuencia de su tradicional constitución como un Estado católico confesional. En este marco considera que la publicación del libro de Carmen de Burgos, El divorcio en España (1904), fue un verdadero revulsivo; se detiene el autor en algunos miembros de la generación del 98 –Azorín, Baroja, Unamuno– que contestaron a la encuesta del Diario Universa, y aprovecha la ocasión para poner de relieve la difícil coyuntura de la (...) sociedad española –“crisis de fin de siglo”– en los primeros años del siglo XX. (shrink)