La discussione generale sulla filosofia della scienza contemporanea è complicata dal numero e dall’eterogeneità delle scienze, mentre lo studio di temi specifici porta inevitabilmente a dissertazioni specialistiche che mancano nel dare ragione della trama di senso sottostante. Questo Piccolo trattato di epistemologia intende occupare uno spazio vuoto, proponendo alcuni temi chiave per la comprensione dei meccanismi alla base della conoscenza scientifica: i rapporti tra filosofia e scienze, siano esse naturali o umane; la complessa relazione tra fatti e valori; la distinzione (...) tra scoperta e giustificazione; la necessità di un discorso etico sulla ricerca, che chiami in causa categorie come fiducia, empatia, altruismo ed egoismo. Con un approccio chiaro e rigoroso, il volume intende rivolgersi a quell’ampia fascia di pubblico interessata alle tematiche centrali dell’epistemologia, della filosofia e delle scienze. (shrink)

Existen insospechados parecidos de familia. En sus clases de Ciencia y Filosofía Política en la Universidad de Yale, Seyla Benhabib suele insistir en que las personas se terminan pareciendo mucho más a sus propias instituciones que a los Estados o a las naciones en las que viven. Esta aseveración resulta inquietante. De todos es sabido que podemos identificarnos más o menos con nuestra propia nación, pero la idea de que, en verdad, todos vayamos a terminar pareciéndonos mucho más a ciertas (...) instituciones solo es comparable a una de esas experiencias culinarias que proporciona Dabiz Muñoz, calificadas por él mismo como “de romperte la cabeza”. Laureado con el Nobel en 1993, el economista e historiador Douglass C. North sostuvo que los seres humanos idean las instituciones para crear orden, reducir la incertidumbre y estructurar la interacción socio-política. (shrink)

This book addresses current threats to citizenship and democratic values posed by the spread of post-truth communication. The contributors apply research on moral, civic, and epistemic virtues to issues involving post-truth culture. The spread of post-truth communication affects ordinary citizens' commitment to truth and attitudes toward information sources, thereby threatening the promotion of democratic ideals in public debate. The chapters in this volume investigate the importance of helping citizens improve the quality of their online agency and raise awareness of the (...) risks social media poses to democratic values. The book moves from two initial chapters that provide historical background and overview of the present post-truth malaise, through a series of chapters that feature mainly diagnostic accounts of the epistemic and ethical issues we face, to the complexities of virtue-theoretic analyses of specific virtues and vices. Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in virtue ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and media studies. (shrink)

No two individuals with the autism diagnosis are ever the same—yet many practitioners and parents can recognize signs of ASD very rapidly with the naked eye. What, then, is this phenotype of autism that shows itself across such distinct clinical presentations and heterogeneous developments? The “signs” seem notoriously slippery and resistant to the behavioral threshold categories that make up current assessment tools. Part of the problem is that cognitive and behavioral “abilities” typically are theorized as high-level disembodied and modular functions—that (...) are assessed discretely (impaired, normal, enhanced) to define a spectral syndrome. Even as biology reminds us that organic developing bodies are not made up of independent switches, we remain often seduced by the simplicity of mechanistic and cognitive models. Developmental disorders such as autism have accordingly been theorized as due to different modular dysfunctions—typically of cortical origin, i.e., failures of “theory of mind” (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), of the “mirror neuron system” (Ramachandran and Oberman, 2006), of “weak central coherence” (Happe and Frith, 2006) or of the balance of “empathizing” and “systemizing” (Baron-Cohen, 2009), just to list a few. -/- The broad array of autonomic (Ming et al., 2005; Cheshire, 2012) and sensorimotor (Damasio and Maurer, 1978; Maurer and Damasio, 1982; Donnellan and Leary, 1995; Leary and Hill, 1996; Donnellan and Leary, 2012; Donnellan et al., 2012) differences experienced and reported by people with autism have by such theories typically been sidelined as “co-morbidities,” possibly sharing genetic causes, but rendered as incidental and decisively behaviorally irrelevant symptoms—surely disconnected from cognition. But what if the development of cortically based mental processes and autonomous control relies on the complexities and proper function of the peripheral nervous systems? Through such an “embodied” lens the heterogeneous symptoms of autism invites new interpretations. We propose here that many behavioral-level findings can be re-defined as downstream effects of how developing nervous systems attempt to cope and adapt to the challenges of having various noisy, unpredictable, and unreliable peripheral inputs. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, in Leibniz’s mature metaphysics, primary matter is not a positive constituent which must be added to the form in order to have a substance. Primary matter is merely a way to express the negation of some further perfection. It does not have a positive ontological status and merely indicates the limitation or imperfection of a substance. To be sure, Leibniz is less than explicit on this point, and in many texts he writes as if (...) primary matter were a positive constituent of a substance. It seems to me, however, that the view most in keeping with the thrust of his mature philosophical system is that captured by a striking remark of 1695: “Materia rerum est nihilum: id est limitatio [The matter of things is nothing: that is, limitation].” This becomes especially apparent in texts showing that Leibniz’s conception of primary matter corresponds to his conception of creaturely limitation. I start by discussing the notion of primary matter in the scholastic tradition. I then show that although Leibniz places the scholastic terminology of primary matter at a crucial juncture of his metaphysics, he thinks of primary matter in a way which significantly deviates from earlier scholastic views. I conclude that despite his adoption of distinctive terminology of Aristotelian scholasticism, instead of holding a broadly Aristotelian concept of primary matter as the ultimate subject of inherence, Leibniz thinks of primary matter according to a Neoplatonic blue-print in which matter is non-being, privation, mere absence of perfection. (shrink)

Most scholars of emotions concede that although cognitive evaluations are essential for emotion, they are not sufficient for it, and that other elements, such as bodily feelings, physiological sensations and behavioral expressions are also required. However, only a few discuss how these diverse aspects of emotion are related in order to form the unity of emotion. In this essay I examine the co-presence and the causal views, and I argue that neither view can account for the unity of emotions. In (...) particular, both views face the problem of fortuitous connection, and, as a result, they fail to identify and distinguish an emotion from other mental states. Consequently, they fail to account for our first person authority over our emotions. I finally argue that only an internal, conceptual relation between the cognitive/evaluative and affective/physiological aspects of emotion can avoid such problems, and suggest that the Aristotelian distinction of form and matter can provide such internal relation. (shrink)

The 2007 edition of the Amsterdam Colloquium is the Sixteenth in a series which started in 1976. Originally, the Amsterdam Colloquium was an initiative of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1984 the Colloquium is organized by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam.

The discovery of so-called ‘mirror neurons’ - found to respond both to own actions and the observation of similar actions performed by others - has been enormously influential in the cognitive sciences and beyond. Given the self-other symmetry these neurons have been hypothesized as underlying a ‘mirror mechanism’ that lets us share representations and thereby ground core social cognitive functions from intention understanding to linguistic abilities and empathy. I argue that mirror neurons are important for very different reasons. Rather than (...) a symmetric ubiquitous or context- independent mechanism, I propose that these neurons are part of broader sensorimotor circuits, which help us navigate and predict the social affordance space that we meet others in. To develop both the critical and positive project I analyze the interpretive choices and the debate surrounding the mirror neuron research and show how the field is marred by highly questionable assumptions about respectively motor and social cognition. The discovery of mirror neurons - and the sensorimotor circuits of which these neurons are a part – actually empirically challenge many of these tacit assumptions. Findings of sensorimotor goal representations at levels of abstraction well beyond actual sensory information and kinetic movements challenge the idea of motor cognition as primarily output production. Additionally, the focus on 3rd person mindreading of hidden mental states is misguiding the field of social cognition. Much ‘mind-reading’ seems rooted in sensorimotor representations and a developmentally primary 2nd person understanding of actions and the mental lives of others, which precisely breaks the assumed dichotomy between mind and behavior. I propose a Social Affordance model where parallel fronto-parietal sensorimotor circuits support representations not just of other people’s actions but of the overall social affordance space. It is a process that monitors concrete goals and teleological possibilities that the environment affords respectively oneself and other present agents. With this model I hypothesize that the complex spectrum of sensorimotor integrations are indeed essential not only to normal action choice calibration but also to social cognitive abilities, as the sensorimotor teleological representations let us relate to others and understand their action choices in a shared pragmatic and intentional context. (shrink)

The passage of time seems to be a fundamental aspect of experience. However, most descriptions of the passage of time itself are incompatible with the four-dimensional block universe model of space and time, in which time is extended like space, and all states of affairs exist equally and eternally in this varied tapestry of space and time. The tension between temporal passage and the block universe seems to leave one with the option of either abandoning the block universe in favor (...) of a metaphysics that can accommodate our experience, or holding that this experience of passage is illusory. I argue for a third option: that we have certain dynamic experiences, which lend themselves to the view that time passes, those dynamic experiences can be accounted for within the block universe model without any additional mechanism, and those dynamic experiences are not illusory, but veridical. (shrink)

'Ethics' was not developed as a separate branch of philosophy in Buddhist traditions until the modern period, though Buddhist philosophers have always been concerned with the moral significance of thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, virtues, and precepts. Their most penetrating forms of moral reflection have been developed within disciplines of practice aimed at achieving freedom and peace. This Element first offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two (...) of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition – Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva – in a comparative fashion. (shrink)

Largely aided by the neurological discovery of so-called “ mirror neurons,” the attention to motor activity during action observation has exploded over the last two decades. The idea that we internally “ mirror ” the actions of others has led to a new strand of implicit simulation theories of action understanding[1][2]. The basic idea of this sort of simulation theory is that we, via an automatic covert activation of our own action representations, can understand the action and possibly the goal (...) and/or intentions of the observed agent. In this way motor “simulation” is seen as the basis for low-level “mind-reading”; i.e. for the ascription of goals and intentional mental states to others. The thought is that one, through mirroring simulations, can get beyond the observable behaviour to the hidden minds of others. I am questioning the idea of an exclusively “mirroring” role of the motor system in social perception, which is tacitly assumed in this sort of simulation theories. Is motor activity during action observation really primarily a simulation, a detailed “echo” of the others action? My point is not that we never simulate what we observe, but rather to question whether such processes are representative of the overall motor contribution to social cognition. More and more studies on the functional properties of mirror neurons and motor facilitation during perception points to a more complex role of the motor system in action perception. Recently, several proposals have been made attempting to reinterpret and critique the function of motor activity in social situations. I shall here briefly touch on a few of these and sketch parts of my own alternative “social affordance” hypothesis of the sensorimotor contribution to social perception. By way of these analyses I highlight how traditional discussions are marred by problematic theoretical assumptions. It seems to me that we need a thorough reinterpretation not just of mirror neurons and mirroring, but also of what we take motor and social cognition to be. In my view the details of the sensorimotor findings underline the need to move beyond the simplistic idea of the motor system as a unitary output system. In terms of social cognition I question the traditional focus on hidden mental states. I suggest that the motor contribution might have more to do with understanding the process of how others choose their actions, navigate the world and relate to others than with simulating specific actual actions or mental states. I conclude that low-level simulation theories, which see the motor role in social perception as passive “mirroring,” are faced with serious empirical challenges, and that the motor system serve a much more proactive and complex cognitive role in social perception and interaction than previously thought. But my claim is also that many empirical tensions have slipped out of focus due to entrenched theoretical assumptions. Narrow theoretical expectations have marked not only the interpretations but the research itself and I propose that we are in dire need of more studies of actual contextual and interactive social perception. (shrink)

The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a"dying party" in the Netherlands; examinations of (...) the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives. (shrink)

IN THE LAST PART of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith puts his theory in a class with those of his contemporaries Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, namely, the systems that make sentiments the principle of approbation. Despite recognizing important differences with both of them, he thinks that since he has placed the origin of moral sentiments in sympathy, and in particular the fact that we are able to enter into the motives of the agent and get pleasure from (...) finding them appropriate to their cause, sentiments are the foundation of his theory of morals. Many of Smith’s commentators, in fact almost all of the most important studies over the last few years, reaffirm the author’s self-description. However, my aim in this paper is to challenge this view by showing that Smith’s system can also be plausibly seen as a theory of practical reasoning, and in some important aspects very similar to Aristotelian ethics. Surprisingly few scholars have seen this parallel. Laurence Berns, Samuel Fleischacker, Charles Griswold, and Gloria Vivenza are the latest exceptions, identifying several points of coincidence between Adam Smith and Aristotle’s ethics. None of them, however, has tied all these similarities under a unified interpretation, such as the one I propose here: The basic analogy between these theories, and the source of those particular coincidences, is the operation of practical reason. Moreover, and besides the common elements with Aristotle’s ethics, Smith’s reconstruction of practical reason simultaneously announces some of the main features of modern accounts of ethics, such as impartiality and universality as preconditions of moral judgment. The integration of these ancient and modern elements in a single coherent theory allows Smith’s TMS to overcome the insufficiencies and paradoxes of both these traditions, and it constitutes one of the most interesting and challenging proposals of modern ethics. (shrink)

Con el fin de mostrar la importancia de la consideración de la "verdad práctica" como un concepto clave a la hora de dar cuenta de la teoría aristotélica de la acción, se procederá a dilucidar el sentido y alcance de este concepto mediante un análisis de la conexión estructural existente entre la parte racional e irracional del alma (razón y deseo) en la psicología moral de Aristóteles. Luego se pasará a examinar el breve pasaje de Ética Nicomaquea VI 2, en (...) el que Aristóteles señala los requerimientos para que se dé la "verdad práctica", lo cual quedará mucho más claro si se lo revisa a la luz del análisis de la estructura formal de la acción que Aristóteles elabora en el llamado "silogismo práctico". En este artículo se abordará principalmente el problema del sentido de la sintética declaración de Aristóteles de que, para que haya "verdad práctica", "el lógos debe ser verdadero". Esto se encuentra vinculado al problema del papel de la prudencia para determinar los medios conducentes al fin de la acción, pero también para establecer su fin mismo. (shrink)

Este trabajo se propone estudiar las características de los paralogismos de composición y división (Retórica II 24.II, 1401a), de la consecuencia (Retórica II 24.VI, 1401b20-30) y de la causa aparente (Retórica II 24.VII, 1401b30-34), de modo de analizar si Eurípides los utiliza en el agón de Andrómaca de los versos 577 a 746 This paper intends to study the characteristics of paralogisms due to composition and division (Rhetoric II 24.II, 1401a), due to consequent (Rhetoric II 24.VI, 1401b20-30), and due to (...) false cause (Rhetoric II 24.VII, 1401b30-34), in order to analyze if Euripides uses them in the agon in Andromache (577-746). (shrink)

En el presente artículo se realiza un análisis de los Estudios Subalternos, acerca de su posibilidad, avances y fracasos. Se parte de la pregunta por el sujeto subalterno y sobre la posibilidad de éste de crear su propia historia. En el fondo se interroga por el derecho a erigirse como sujeto de lenguaje. Se reflexiona a partir de los aportes de Fanon, Chakrabarty y Mignolo sosteniendo que pueden arrojar luz y así producir verdaderos corrimientos en las epistemologías académicamente consolidadas. Se (...) apuesta a epistemologías fronterizas que tomen en cuenta desde dónde pensamos y que al pensar desde el límite puedan llevar a cabo la propuesta del pensamiento decolonial. (shrink)

RESUMEN El texto explora, en mujeres mayores de 80 años, la experiencia vivida durante el pe ríodo conocido como La Violencia en Colombia. Se examina el "trauma" que, según la autora, se manifiesta como "rayones", lo que hace difícil traducirlo o interpretarlo, porque solo se percibe a través de la escucha. Se estudia lo que M. Heidegger exploró como "ser-ahí" y "ser-en-el-mundo", esto es, el estar lanzados al mundo en un de terminado contexto donde construimos nuestra subjetividad y aprendemos a (...) vivir, para entenderlo mediante estas experiencias femeninas singulares. ABSTRACT The text explores the experience lived during the period known as The Violence in Colombia by women now over 80. It examines the "trauma" that, according to the author, manifests itself in the form of "scratches", thus making it difficult to translate and interpret given that it is only perceptible through listening. The article discusses M. Heidegger's notions of Dasein and being-in-the-world, that is, our thrownness into the world in a specific context in which we construct our subjectivity and learn how to live, in order to understand them through these singular feminine experiences. (shrink)

The objects of the Internal Audit Management in corporations are offered and based in the article. Analyzing, systematizing and summarizing scientific labors of many scientists, the types of providing (legal, organizational, informative, methodical, personnel and technical) are defined, the scheme of the internal audit subjects (services) and the internal audit process organization is developed, and a conceptual framework is presented. The results of this investigation phase make a basis of the subsequent justification and the solution of the internal audit subjects (...) management questions and the internal audit process organization in corporations. (shrink)

Os mitos antigos não estão mortos. A partir desta afirmação fundamentada nas obras de autores como Warburg, Jean Seznec, Erwin Panofsky e Fritz Saxl, este trabalho pretende apontar os caminhos históricos que legitimaram a sobrevivência do mito das sibilas no mundo cristão, em sua estreita relação com a astrologia. O paganismo não renasceu após o medievo, mas esteve sempre presente no cristianismo, não só como símbolos, mas como efetiva influência essencial sobre os homens e as suas vidas. Alguns momentos históricos (...) em particular são privilegiados neste caminho, desde os padres apologistas do cristianismo primitivo até o nascimento da ciência moderna. Sibilas e astrologia, como testemunhos “de fora” são presença constante seja na teologia cristã, seja na literatura e na música, ou nas representações plásticas do mundo cristão, que aqui privilegiamos. A sua sobrevivência ou pós-vida é ora afirmada também pela legitimação de grandes nomes da patrística e da escolástica, e ainda por meio da influência de Albumasar, teólogo muçulmano nascido no século VIII e que faz o elo entre sibilas, astrologia e a Virgem Maria. O que fazem as sibilas nos tetos das igrejas católicas? É esta a pergunta que o presente trabalho pretende, em grande medida, responder. (shrink)