“De l’information du poème” qui clôt la partie “Éléments” dans Poétique de la Relation, représente pour le lectorat habitué à l'écriture glissantienne un chapitre assez surprenant voire confondant tant au niveau de l’approche du sujet traité que de sa mise en forme rhétorique, car c’est autour de l’opposition entre poésie et informatique que démarre son propos. Tout d’abord, on a l’impression que Glissant s'écarte des riches lieux-communs qui rythment et structurent sa pensée puisque, après quelques pages consacrées au baroque, son (...) attention se tourne ici de manière apparemment aléatoire vers l'antagonisme entre les nouvelles technologies et le parangon de la création littéraire. L'intérêt de Glissant pour la science et les nouvelles technologies n’est certes pas une anomalie lorsque l’on considère l’ensemble de son œuvre puisque cette dernière est en effet bâtie sur un éclectisme quasi programmatique qui se manifeste à travers la pensée du rhizome et le droit à l'opacité. Cependant, la dichotomie entre “ces deux ordres de la connaissance, le poétique et le scientifique” sur laquelle repose l'hypothèse de ce court chapitre semble trancher avec la rhétorique relationnelle qui caractérise son approche. Le penseur semble même souscrire aux poncifs d’un discours d'époque réduisant la complexité des nouvelles technologies et la magnitude de leurs effets sur la société contemporaine à une simple série d’oppositions entre, d’une part, une culture humaniste qui rassemblerait une communauté en présence autour de la parole poétique menacée, et, d’autre part, le pouvoir aliénant de l’information transmise à travers des circuits non-relationnels, impersonnels, sans voix et sans visage. (shrink)

BackgroundWith the emergence of Brain Computer Interfaces, clinicians have been facing a new group of patients with severe acquired brain injury who are unable to show any behavioral sign of consciousness but respond to active neuroimaging or electrophysiological paradigms. However, even though well documented, there is still no consensus regarding the nomenclature for this clinical entity.ObjectivesThis systematic review aims to 1) identify the terms used to indicate the presence of this entity through the years, and 2) promote an informed discussion (...) regarding the rationale for these names and the best candidates to name this fascinating disorder.MethodsThe Disorders of Consciousness Special Interest Group of the International Brain Injury Association launched a search on Pubmed and Google scholar following PRISMA guidelines to collect peer-reviewed articles and reviews on human adults published in English between 2006 and 2021.ResultsThe search launched in January 2021 identified 4,089 potentially relevant titles. After screening, 1,126 abstracts were found relevant. Finally, 161 manuscripts were included in our analyses. Only 58% of the manuscripts used a specific name to discuss this clinical entity, among which 32% used several names interchangeably throughout the text. We found 25 different names given to this entity. The five following names were the ones the most frequently used: covert awareness, cognitive motor dissociation, functional locked-in, non-behavioral MCS and higher-order cortex motor dissociation.ConclusionSince 2006, there has been no agreement regarding the taxonomy to use for unresponsive patients who are able to respond to active neuroimaging or electrophysiological paradigms. Developing a standard taxonomy is an important goal for future research studies and clinical translation. We recommend a Delphi study in order to build such a consensus. (shrink)

In the historical context of a crisis in biological psychiatry, psychedelic drugs paired with psychotherapy are globally re-emerging in research clinics as a potential transdiagnostic therapy for treating mood disorders, addictions, and other forms of psychological distress. The treatments are poised to soon shift from clinical trials to widespread service delivery in places like Australia, North America, and Europe, which has prompted ethical questions by social scientists and bioethicists. Taking a broader view, we argue that the ethics of psychedelic therapy (...) concerns not simply how psychotherapies are different when paired with psychedelic drugs, but how psychedelic therapies shape and are shaped by different values, norms, and metaphysical commitments. Drawing from the published literature and interviews with seven psychedelic therapists working in clinical trials in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia, this article opens the black box of the treatments to consider the values and informal debates currently animating the therapies. Considering questions of patient autonomy, mechanisms of therapeutic action, and which therapies are best suited to pair with psychedelic substances, we examine the ethics of psychedelic therapy as an emergent form of life. To bring this form of life out in fuller relief, we conclude by comparing and contrasting it with ayahuasca use in Amazonian shamanism. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence and robots may progressively take a more and more prominent place in our daily environment. Interestingly, in the study of how humans perceive these artificial entities, science has mainly taken an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., how distant from humans are these agents). Considering people’s fears and expectations from robots and artificial intelligence, they tend to be simultaneously afraid and allured to them, much as they would be to the conceptualisations related to the divine entities (e.g., gods). In two experiments, (...) we investigated the proximity of representation between artificial entities (i.e., artificial intelligence and robots), divine entities and natural entities (i.e., humans and other animals) at both an explicit (Study 1) and an implicit level (Study 2). In the first study, participants evaluated these entities explicitly on positive and negative attitudes. Hierarchical clustering analysis showed that participants’ representation of artificial intelligence, robots and divine entities were similar, while the representation of humans tended to be associated with that of animals. In the second study, participants carried out a word/non-word decision task including religious semantic-related words and neutral words after the presentation of a masked prime referring to divine entities, artificial entities and natural entities (or a control prime). Results showed that after divine and artificial entity primes, participants were faster to identify religious words as words compared to neutral words arguing for a semantic activation. We conclude that people make sense of the new entities by relying on already familiar entities and in the case of artificial intelligence and robots, people appear to draw parallels to divine entities. (shrink)

This paper compares two explanations of the process by which human communication systems evolve: iterated learning and social collaboration. It then reports an experiment testing the social collaboration account. Participants engaged in a graphical communication task either as a member of a community, where they interacted with seven different partners drawn from the same pool, or as a member of an isolated pair, where they interacted with the same partner across the same number of games. Participants’ horizontal, pair‐wise interactions led (...) “bottom up” to the creation of an effective and efficient shared sign system in the community condition. Furthermore, the community‐evolved sign systems were as effective and efficient as the local sign systems developed by isolated pairs. Finally, and as predicted by a social collaboration account, and not by an iterated learning account, interaction was critical to the creation of shared sign systems, with different isolated pairs establishing different local sign systems and different communities establishing different global sign systems. (shrink)

If panpsychism is true, it suggests that consciousness pervades not only our brains and bodies but also the entire universe, prompting a reevaluation of our existential attitudes. Hence, panpsychism potentially fulfills psychological needs typically addressed by religious beliefs, such as a sense of belonging and purpose but also transcendence. The discussion is organized into two main areas: the implications of panpsychism for basic human existential needs, such as feelings of kinship, ommunication, and loneliness; and for greater existential questions relating to (...) mystical experiences including transcendent unity and alleviation of the fear of death. In conclusion panpsychism may provide a deeper meaning in life for some people but its broader impact depends on individual dispositions and the cultural context in which it is embedded. (shrink)

(in press, under contract with MIT Press, accepted on June 30th, 2006). Attention, Information and Epistemic Perception. In Terzis, G. & Arp, R. (Eds) Information and the Living Systems: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology. The MIT Press. (14,000 words).

This monograph proposes a new way of implementing interaction in logic. It also provides an elementary introduction to Constructive Type Theory. The authors equally emphasize basic ideas and finer technical details. In addition, many worked out exercises and examples will help readers to better understand the concepts under discussion. One of the chief ideas animating this study is that the dialogical understanding of definitional equality and its execution provide both a simple and a direct way of implementing the CTT approach (...) within a game-theoretical conception of meaning. In addition, the importance of the play level over the strategy level is stressed, binding together the matter of execution with that of equality and the finitary perspective on games constituting meaning. According to this perspective the emergence of concepts are not only games of giving and asking for reasons, they are also games that include moves establishing how it is that the reasons brought forward accomplish their explicative task. Thus, immanent reasoning games are dialogical games of Why and How. (shrink)

This study investigates the social–psychological mechanisms leading individuals in organizations to engage in environmental citizenship behaviors, which entail keeping abreast of, and participating in, the environmental affairs of a company. Informed by the corporate greening and organizational behavior literature, we suggested that an employee’s level of involvement in the management of a company’s environmental impact was the overt manifestation of his or her discretionary sense of commitment to environmental concerns in the work context, and that such commitment developed through the (...) interplay of individual, organizational, and supervisory factors. Our general findings support the idea that when environmental protection is valued and encouraged by the company and line managers, organization members are more likely to experience a volitional sense of attachment and responsibility to corporate environmental goals and values, which is enacted through citizenship behaviors. We also expected that individual ecological beliefs would strengthen the environmental commitment of employees via identification with, and adherence to, the socially responsible cause embodied by the organization and its managerial staff. But it did not. On the contrary, the data indicated that corporate environmental policy is more likely to influence an employee’s level of environmental commitment when he or she holds weak versus strong personal ecological beliefs. Theoretical and managerial implications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

[R]eflection is a system of thought no less closed than insanity, with this difference that it understands itself and the madman too, whereas the madman does not understand it.– Merleau-Ponty, Phen...

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for (...) other phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This longitudinal study investigated the capability of various positive psychological resources to directly or indirectly protect specific well-being outcomes and moderate the effects on well-being of health and economic threats in a lockdown situation during the 2020 health crisis in France. At the beginning of lockdown, participants completed self-assessment questionnaires to document their initial level of well-being and state of nine different well-established psychological resources, measured as traits: optimism, hope, self-efficacy, gratitude toward the world, self-transcendence, wisdom, gratitude of being, peaceful (...) disengagement, and acceptance. Three weeks later, a weekly follow-up was started to record changes in well-being and reported threats for a duration of 5 weeks. Results show that psychological resources efficiently protected well-being in a variety of ways: they buffered the adverse effects of reported threats to health and wealth, increased the well-being averages, and reduced the decline in well-being over time. More specifically, emotional well-being was positively predicted by hope, gratitude of being, and, to a lesser level, by acceptance; psychological well-being by self-efficacy, personal wisdom, and gratitude of being; social well-being only by gratitude toward the world; and inner well-being by optimism, gratitude of being, and acceptance. The study emphasizes the importance of cultivating psychological resources in ordinary times to protect individuals' well-being when difficult and extraordinary circumstances occur. It also offers clues to the kind of resources one may want to develop. (shrink)

Quantum physics, which offers an explanation of the world on the smallest scale, has fundamental implications that pose a serious challenge to ordinary logic. Particularly counterintuitive is the notion of entanglement, which has been explored for the past 30 years and posits an ubiquitous randomness capable of manifesting itself simultaneously in more than one place. This amazing 'non-locality' is more than just an abstract curiosity or paradox: it has entirely down-to-earth applications in cryptography, serving for example to protect financial information; (...) it also has enabled the demonstration of 'quantum teleportation', whose infinite possibilities even science-fiction writers can scarcely imagine. This delightful and concise exposition does not avoid the deep logical difficulties of quantum physics, but gives the reader the insights needed to appreciate them. From 'Bell's Theorem' to experiments in quantum entanglement, the reader will gain a solid understanding of one of the most fascinating areas of contemporary physics. (shrink)

What has become generally known as the Berlin School of Logical Empiricism constitutes a philosophical movement that was erected on foundations laid by Albert Einstein. His revolutionary work in physics had a profound impact on philosophers interested in scientific issues, prominent among them Paul Oppenheim and Hans Reichenbach, the founding fathers of the school, who joined in viewing him as their hero among philosopher-scientists. Overall the membership of this school falls into three groups. The founding generation was linked by the (...) circumstance that both Grelling and Reichenbach were collaborators of Oppenheim; the middle generation by the fact that both Hempel and Helmer were students of Reichenbach's in Berlin; and the younger generation by the fact that all of its members were students and disciples either of Reichenbach's or of Hempel's in the USA. Three stages are at issue: an initial phase in Berlin, a transatlantic migration, and a continuation in the U.S.A.--principally in Pittsburgh. (shrink)

Sometimes physicians lie to third-party payers in order to grant their patients treatment they would otherwise not receive. This strategy, commonly known as gaming the system, is generally condemned for three reasons. First, it may hurt the patient for the sake of whom gaming was intended. Second, it may hurt other patients. Third, it offends contractual and distributive justice. Hence, gaming is considered to be immoral behavior. This article is an attempt to show that, on the contrary, gaming may sometimes (...) be a physician's duty. Under specific circumstances, gaming may be necessary from the viewpoint of the internal morality of medicine. Moreover, the objections against gaming are examples of what we call the idealistic fallacy, that is, the fallacy of passing judgments in a nonideal world according to ideal standards. Hence, the objections are inconclusive. Gaming is sometimes justified, and may even be required in the name of beneficence. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that moral deliberation requires that the alternatives available in a choice situation are evaluatively comparable. This comparability assumption is threatened by claims of incomparability, which is often established by means of the small improvement argument (SIA). In this paper I argue that SIA does not establish incomparability in a stricter sense. The reason is that it fails to distinguish incomparability from a kind of evaluative indeterminacy which may arise due to the vagueness of the evaluative comparatives (...) ‘better than,’ ‘worse than,’ and ‘equally as good as.’. (shrink)

We argue that two powerful error-theoretic concepts provide a general framework that satisfactorily accounts for key aspects of the explanation of physical patterns. This method gives an objective criterion to determine which mathematical models in a class of neighboring models are just as good as the exact one. The method also emphasizes that abstraction is essential for explanation and provides a precise conceptual framework that determines whether a given abstraction is explanatorily relevant and justified. Hence, it increases our epistemological understanding (...) of how one should go about reconstructing scientific practices by making clear that, at a fundamental level, a key aspect of mathematical modeling consists in exactly solving nearby problems. (shrink)

Modern mathematical sciences are hard to imagine without appeal to efficient computational algorithms. We address several conceptual problems arising from this interaction by outlining rival but complementary perspectives on mathematical tractability. More specifically, we articulate three alternative characterizations of the complexity hierarchy of mathematical problems that are themselves based on different understandings of computational constraints. These distinctions resolve the tension between epistemic contexts in which exact solutions can be found and the ones in which they cannot; however, contrary to a (...) persistent myth, we conclude that having an exact solution is not generally more epistemologically beneficial than lacking one. (shrink)

Based on anthropological fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research as well as on the epistemic culture of neurophilosophy, this Common Knowledge guest column examines two very different philosophical engagements with psychedelic drugs. In Thomas Metzinger's evidence-based philosophy of mind, hallucinogens help to operationalize questions about the nature of consciousness. While this project contributes to the great divide between empirically enlightened moderns and tradition-oriented premoderns, Metzinger's neurophilosophical reanimation of the ancient conception of philosophy as cultura animi can build a bridge (...) to Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, which has informed the psychedelic intelligentsia like no other body of thought. In the sixteenth century, the philosophia perennis grew out of a decidedly nonmodern philosophy of religion that sought to suture the historical and cultural cracks that would come to define modernity. This essay argues that neurophilosophy and ethnographic studies of consciousness cultures could function as critical correctives in a contemporary rearticulation of perennial philosophy. (shrink)

An innovative literary analysis of Freud's "Wolf Man.".

In a 1993 paper, I argued that empirical treatments of the epistemologyused by scientists in experimental work are too abstract in practice tocounter relativist efforts to explain the outcome of scientificcontroversies by reference to sociological forces. This was because, atthe rarefied level at which the methodology of scientists is treated byphilosophers, multiple mutually inconsistent instantiations of theprinciples described by philosophers are employed by contestingscientists. These multiple construals change within a scientificcommunity over short time frames, and these different versions ofscientific methodology (...) can determine the outcome of a controversy. Iillustrated with a comparatively detailed analysis of the methodologyused by biologists debating the existence of an entity called thebacterial mesosome between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. This 1993piece has drawn several critiques in the philosophical literature. Inthis present piece I respond to these critiques and argue that they failto address the core argument of the original paper, and I reflectfurther on the methodologies of philosophers of science pursuingempirical or `naturalistic' epistemology. (shrink)

The relatively recent increase in prominence of computer simulations in scientific inquiry gives us more reasons than ever before for asserting that mathematics is a wonderful tool. In fact, a practical knowledge of scientific computation has become essential for scientists working in all disciplines involving mathematics. Despite their incontestable success, it must be emphasized that the numerical methods subtending simulations provide at best approximate solutions and that they can also return very misleading results. Accordingly, epistemological sobriety demands that we clarify (...) the circumstances under which simulations can be relied upon. With this in mind, this paper articulates a general perspective to better understand and compare the strengths and weaknesses of various error-analysis methods. (shrink)

Recent research has challenged our view of the Abrahamic religious traditions as unilaterally intolerant and incapable of recognizing otherness in all its diversity and richness; but a diachronic and comparative study of how these traditions deal with otherness is yet to appear. This volume aims to contribute to such a study by presenting different treatments of otherness in medieval and early modern thought. Part I: Altruism deals with attitudes and behaviors that benefit others, regardless of its motives. We deal with (...) the social rights and emotions as well as the moral obligations that the very existence of other human beings, whatever their characteristics, creates for a community. Part II: Religious recognition and toleration considers identity, toleration and mutual recognition created by the existence of religious or ethnic otherness in a given social, religious or political community. Part III: Evil deals with religious otherness that is considered evil and rejected such as heretics and malevolent, demonic entities. The volume will ultimately inform the reader on the nature of religious toleration (including beliefs and doctrines, even emotions) as well as of the self-definition of religious communities when encountering and defining otherness in different ways. (shrink)

Drawing from the example of Asian elephant conservation in Laos, this article primarily intends to reveal the elephantocentric vision adopted by mainstream conservation project in direction to the species. In the second part, I will present some ethnographic notes collected among local population who daily live and work with pachyderms. These notes will help in opening up a broader and more ecocentric approach of elephant conservation by highlighting links between biological and cultural diversity. By revealing the cosmo-ecological view of elephants (...) as thought locally, I will then propose an enlarged vision of elephant conservation. (shrink)

In Study 1, we examined the moderating impact of alexithymia (i.e., a difficulty identifying and describing feelings to other people and an externally oriented cognitive style) on the automatic processing of affective information. The affective priming paradigm was used, and lower priming effects for high alexithymia scorers were observed when congruent (incongruent) pairs involving nonverbal primes (angry face) and verbal target were presented. The results held after controlling for participants' negative affectivity. The same effects were replicated in Studies 2 and (...) 3, with trait anxiety and depression entered as additional covariates. In Study 3, no moderating impact of alexithymia was found for verbal-facial pairs suggesting that the results cannot be merely explained in terms of transcoding limitations for high alexithymia scorers. Overall, the present results suggest that alexithymia could be related to a difficulty in processing and automatically using high arousal emotional information to respond to concomittant behavioural demands. (shrink)

We introduce a logic specifically designed to support reasoning about social choice functions. The logic includes operators to capture strategic ability, and operators to capture agent preferences. We establish a correspondence between formulae in the logic and properties of social choice functions, and show that the logic is expressively complete with respect to social choice functions, i.e., that every social choice function can be characterised as a formula of the logic. We prove that the logic is decidable, and give a (...) complete axiomatization. To demonstrate the value of the logic, we show in particular how it can be applied to the problem of determining whether a social choice function is strategy-proof. (shrink)

High and low alexithymia scorers were confronted with a modified visual oddball task that allowed the study of categorical perception of emotional expressions on faces. Participants had to quickly detect a deviant (rare) morphed face that shared or did not share the same emotional expression as the frequent one. Expected categorical perception effects, which were also neurophysiologically indexed, showed that rare stimuli were detected faster if they depicted a different emotional expression compared to rare stimuli depicting the same emotional expression (...) than the frequent one. Even if no differences were observed at a behavioural level, high alexithymia scorers evidenced overall delayed neurophysiological responses in components related to the attentional processing of rare emotional faces. Moreover, the categorical perception effects for event-related components associated with the attentional processing were smaller in high alexithymia scorers and were even absent for anger. These results show that high alexithymia scorers present discrimination delays that are already observed at the attentional level. (shrink)

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...) relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties. (shrink)

How do affective feelings arise? Most theories consider that affective feelings result from the appraisals of an event, these appraisals being the consequences of automatic evaluations processes th...

The elimination of subjectivity through brain research and the replacement of so-called ‘folk psychology’ by a neuroscientifically enlightened worldview and self-conception has been both hoped for and feared. But this cultural revolution is still pending. Based on nine months of fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research since the ‘Decade of the Brain,’ this paper examines how subjective experience appears as epistemic object and practical problem in a psychopharmacological laboratory. In the quest for neural correlates of (drug-induced altered states of) (...) consciousness, introspective accounts of test subjects play a crucial role in neuroimaging studies. Firsthand knowledge of the drugs’ flamboyant effects provides researchers with a personal knowledge not communicated in scientific publications, but key to the conduct of their experiments. In many cases, the ‘psychedelic experience’ draws scientists into the field and continues to inspire their self-image and way of life. By exploring these domains the paper points to a persistence of the subjective in contemporary neuropsychopharmacology. (shrink)

¿Es posible que el arte progrese al mismo ritmo que la filosofía racional? ¿No existe algún tipo de incompatibilidad constitutiva entre ambos modos de interpretar la realidad, de manera tal que, siempre, la mayor precisión de la última implica una menor intensidad del primero? Tales preguntas constituyeron un vital eje de preocupación para los pensadores de la Ilustración francesa. En este artículo, nos concentramos en la respuesta que Denis Diderot intenta dar al dilema. Mostramos, en primer lugar, cómo el editor (...) de la Encyclopédie diferencia ambas áreas de la producción humana a la hora de trazar su historia: si bien es necesario destacar el progreso de la razón, lo es también el reconocer la decadencia de las artes como una de sus consecuencias. En segundo lugar, mostramos cómo, elaborado este diagnóstico, Diderot procura, a través de propuestas pictóricas, poetológicas y dramatúrgicas, salvar la potencia estética del arte para un siglo ilustrado. (shrink)

This paper develops a new argument against free will, understood as the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). This principle has been central in debates around free will and moral responsibility; however, it is almost always stated in terms of bodily rather than mental action, and it is therefore mainly understood as the possibility to physically act differently, rather than to think differently. The argument presented here is aimed at the latter, which is termed the possibility of alternative thought (PAT). It (...) argues on psychological grounds that it is impossible for a subject to think differently than it does in a given situation. First, I make the possibility of alternative thought explicit, explain what it means for a self to entertain a thought (or conscious content), and I define a notion of conscious control that is required for the argument. I then offer a taxonomy of content types, based on how they are being controlled. In the third section, I analyse the scenarios of content generation for each type of content, to determine whether they can satisfy the PAT. It will be shown that this cannot be the case. (shrink)

This paper articulates an account of imperatives that sensibly supports the idea of a logic of imperative inferences. We rebuke common objections to the very possibility of such a logic, from a perspective based on recent linguistic work on the morphosyntax of imperatives. Specifically, we develop the notion that the content of an imperative sentence includes both a force operator alongside an imperational content to which the force applies. We further argue that this account of the content of imperatives constitutes (...) a plausible and flexible framework to develop a logic of imperative by examining a number of reconstructions of this idea using semantical analogs of widespread modal semantics. After studying the performance of those approaches, we conclude that progress in imperative logic has been hindered by the failure to adopt conflict-tolerant and resource-sensitive semantics, but suggest that such considerations can be incorporated in this flexible framework. Finally, we also propose a simple account of the difference between operators applying to the content of imperatives and imperative operators, in a way that sheds light on some of the issues underlying the usual antinomies. (shrink)

This commentary suggests that understanding the “Folk Psychology of Souls” requires studying a problem articulating ontology with psychology: How do human beings, both as perceivers and thinkers, track and refer to (1) living and dead intentional agents and (2) supernatural agents? The problem is discussed in the light of the principle of the ontological commitment in agent tracking.

In this paper I analyze the non-conceptualist continuity argument to show that it implies an implausible conception of perceptual experience in animals that are supposed to lack concepts. In order to do this, I show the limitations and implicit premises in the traditional formulations of the argument, and the additional premises needed to use it as an objection against conceptualism. Then, I review studies in cognitive neuroscience, ethology, comparative psychology, developmental psychology, and philosophical considerations to show that the argument implies (...) a conception of animal experience that is at odds with our scientific theories and even with the motivations for adopting non-conceptualism. I conclude that, if we wish to defend the continuity between adult human’s and other animal’s experiences, we should do it by attributing concepts to the latter. (shrink)

El presente texto busca desarrollar una reflexión filosófica respecto de las posibles relaciones entre la noción de identidad y las formas de gobierno contemporáneas. A partir de un breve análisis sobre los principales desarrollos de la noción, se busca tensionar el campo de comprensión habitual y plantear un determinado modo en que esta puede pensarse como un engranaje epistemológico-ético respecto de los modos en que los individuos son llamados a nombrarse y reconocerse dentro de los límites impuestos por una cartografía (...) política. La tesis que sostiene este escrito dice relación con que la categoría de individuo moderno no es sostenible sin una adscripción a un orden de los nombres que tiende al autogobierno en base a la apelación de un ideal ético de correspondencia consigo mismo. (shrink)

Clark & Thornton present the well-established principle that recoding inputs can make learning easier. A useful goal would be to make such recoding automatic. We discuss some ways in which incrementality and transfer in connectionist networks could attain this goal.

Now characterised by high-throughput sequencing methods that enable the study of microbes without lab culture, the human “microbiome” (the microbial flora of the body) is said to have revolutionary implications for biology and medicine. According to many experts, we must now understand ourselves as “holobionts” like lichen or coral, multispecies superorganisms that consist of animal and symbiotic microbes in combination, because normal physiological function depends on them. Here I explore the 1960s research of biologist René Dubos, a forerunner figure mentioned (...) in some historical accounts of the microbiome, and argue that he arrived at the superorganism concept 40 years before the Human Microbiome Project. This raises the question of why his contribution was not hailed as revolutionary at the time and why Dubos is not remembered for it. (shrink)