Despite the lack of evidence for their effectiveness, the use of physical restraints for patients is widespread. The best ethical justification for restraining patients is that it prevents them from harming themselves. We argue that even if the empirical evidence supported their effectiveness in achieving this aim, their use would nevertheless be unethical, so long as well known exceptions to informed consent fail to apply. Specifically, we argue that ethically justifiable restraint use demands certain necessary and sufficient conditions. These conditions (...) are that the physician obtain informed consent for their application, that their application be medically appropriate, and that restraints be the least liberty-restricting way of achieving the intended benefit. It is a further question whether their application is ever medically appropriate, given the dearth of evidence for their effectiveness. (shrink)

It is always risky to make sweeping statements about the development of philosophy, but if one were nevertheless asked to describe 20th century philosophy in broad strokes, one noteworthy feature might be the following: Whereas important figures at the beginning of the century, figures such as Frege and Husserl, were very explicit in their rejection of naturalism (both are known for their rejection of the attempt to naturalize the laws of logic, i.e., for their criticism of psychologism), the situation has (...) changed considerably. Today many philosophers – not the least within analytical philosophy – would subscribe to some form of naturalism. In fact, naturalism is seen by many as the default metaphysical position. If you don’t subscribe to naturalism you must be subscribing to some form of Cartesian substance dualism. Thus, whereas 20 or 30 years ago one might have been inclined to characterize the development of 20th century philosophy in terms of a linguistic turn, a turn from a philosophy of subjectivity to a philosophy of language, it might today be more apt to describe the development in terms of a turn from anti-naturalism to naturalism. (shrink)

If one comes to Phénoménologie de la perception after having read Sein und Zeit (or Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs) one will be in for a surprise. Both works contain a number of both implicit and explicit references to Husserl, but the presentation they give is so utterly different, that one might occasionally wonder whether they are referring to the same author. Thus nobody can overlook that Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl differs significantly from Heidegger’s. It is far more charitable. In (...) fact, when evaluating the merits of respectively Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty often goes very much against the standard view. This is not only the case in his notorious remark on the very first page of Phénoménologie de la Perception where he declares that the whole of Sein und Zeit is nothing but an explication of Husserl’s notion of Lifeworld, but also - to give just one further example - in one of his Sorbonne-lectures, where Merleau-Ponty writes that Husserl took the issue of historicity far more seriously than Heidegger. (shrink)

My discussion will focus on what is arguable the main claim of Being No One: That no such things as selves exist in the world and that nobody ever was or had a self. In discussing to what extent Metzinger can be said to argue convincingly for this claim, I will also comment on his methodological use of pathology and briefly make some remarks vis-à-vis his understanding and criticism of phenomenology.

Many legal theorists have argued that analogical reasoning is merely rule-following in which the general rule is not stated. Lloyd Weinreb's tries to defend the practice of analogical reasoning on its own terms. He does so by giving examples of the way people use analogical reasoning, both in legal and non-legal contexts, as a means for deciding how to act in particular circumstances. By itself such evidence does not support Weinreb's case, because to justify analogy he must show that analogical (...) reasoning can somehow lead us to correct answers. Moreover, his evidence does nothing to challenge the claim that analogical reasoning is simply following suppressed rules.I try to give Weinreb a helping hand. I use the data he mentions that people actually reason by analogy as a starting point for a novel justificatory account of analogical reasoning based on the notion of reliable results: a process of reasoning is reliable, and therefore reliance on it justified, if it tends to generate correct results. This requires explaining what counts as correct results in law, which is a question of political philosophy. I show that the most fundamental condition for the acceptability of analogical reasoning is that the standard of legal correctness is not determined by principles derived by Reason (as is the approach in the civil law tradition) but rather by a standard of acceptance (more prevalent in the common law tradition). Nonetheless, I argue that there two other conditions - shared social values and skepticism about the possibility of discovering the right normative foundations to legal questions - that together have to obtain in order to justify reliance on analogical reasoning. Since that in a modern society it is unlikely that these two conditions are not likely to obtain, I conclude that even this sympathetic reconstruction of Weinreb's argument ultimately fails. (shrink)

There is an obvious, perhaps even trite, argument against getting married which deserves our attention. Reduced to a crude sketch, the argument is simply that, most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with something like horror or at least great antipathy; the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence when we marry we are putting ourselves in the (...) position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake. (shrink)

One of the striking features of Logical Investigations is its metaphysical neutrality. What are the implications of this neutrality? Should it be counted among the many virtues of the work, or rather mourned as a fateful shortcoming? In an article published in the beginning of the nineties, I answered this question rather unequivocally. At that time I considered the neutrality in question to be highly problematic. In the meantime, however, I have had the pleasure of reading Jocelyn Benoist’s recent work (...) Phénoménologie, sémantique, ontologie, where he argues for the opposite conclusion, criticizing my own interpretation in the process. In the light of this criticism, I would like to use this occasion to reconsider the question anew. (shrink)

One of Michel Henry’s persistent claims has been that phenomenology is quite unlike positive sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, history, and law. Rather than studying particular objects and phenomena phenomenology is a transcendental enterprise whose task is to disclose and analyse the structure of manifestation or appearance and its very condition of possibility.

We first want to express our thanks to the commentators for their close and critical readings of The Phenomenological Mind. We would like to treat their comments and challenging questions as a productive opportunity to clarify and to make our positions more precise. Before we address the specific points raised by our colleagues, we do want to say that the intersection between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences is a rich one, and growing richer as collaboration and research continues. Our book (...) was meant to be an introduction to this area rather than a complete map of ongoing research. For that reason we were not able to cover every interesting issue, many of which are raised in the set of commentaries. (shrink)

The Bachelor's Argument against marriage, as I described it in this journal,1 says that marriage involves taking an imprudent risk of finding oneself committed to a relationship with someone one does not love. The evidence indicates that many people who marry eventually find themselves without the feelings for the other person which made a marital relationship seem worthwhile in the first place; and were that to happen to us, it would seem highly undesirable nonetheless to be locked into a relationship (...) with our spouse as a result of the commitment we made when we married. I went on to argue that several obvious responses to this argument fail. In particular, if we enter into marriage without genuinely intending to keep our promise of maintaining a relationship with our spouse, we will be making an insincere promise. Alternatively, if our promise is sincere, but the morality of promise-keeping is such that when our feelings for the other person fade away the moral force of our commitment is canceled, then the commitment itself seems otiose. However, I did not consider all of the possible responses to the argument, and Iddo Landau has recently made an interesting suggestion about how to interpret the marriage commitment in a way that does not render it immoral or pointless.2 His proposal is that what we are committing ourselves to when we marry is ‘to invest work in performing certain acts that are likely to sustain the. (shrink)

In this paper I claim that Quinean naturalist accounts of science, that deny that there are any a priori statements in scientific frameworks, cannot account for the foundational role of certain classes of statements in scientific practice. In this I follow Michael Friedman who claims that certain a priori statements must be presupposed in order to formulate empirical hypotheses. I also show that Friedman's account, in spite of his claims to the contrary, is compatible with a type of non-Quinean naturalism (...) that I sketch. Finally I also show that Friedman's account needs amending because it cannot provide a rational account of theory change. I accomplish this by arguing for a structural realist view of theory change. I show how this view fits well with an account like Friedman's and helps it deal with the problem of theory change and in retaining its superiority over Quinean naturalism. (shrink)

The theories of information ethics articulated by Luciano Floridi and his collaborators have clear implications for law. Information law, including the law of privacy and of intellectual property, is especially likely to benefit from a coherent and comprehensive theory of information ethics. This article illustrates how information ethics might apply to legal doctrine, by examining legal questions related to the ownership and control of the personal data representations, including photographs, game avatars, and consumer profiles, that have become ubiquitous with the (...) proliferation of information and communication technologies. Recent controversy over the control of player performance statistics in “fantasy” sports leagues provides a limiting case for the analysis. Such data representations will in many instances constitute the kind of personal data that information ethics asserts constitutes an information entity. Legal doctrine in some instances proves sympathetic to such an assertion, but remains largely inchoate as to which data might constitute a given information entity in a given instance. Neither is information ethics, in its current state of development, entirely helpful in answering this critical question. While information ethics holds some promise to bring coherence to this area of the law, further work articulating a richer theory of information ethics will be necessary before it can do so. (shrink)

To sum up the main results of this study: I have disentangled two distinct patterns of argument that Taylor runs together in his attempt to show that there is a reason or explanation for the world as a whole. The first is based on the causal dependency of things in the world, the second is based on their logical contingency. It seems to make the most sense of Taylor's discussion if we interpret him not as invoking the principle of sufficient (...) reason at the crucial juncture, but as using these arguments to give backing to that principle by showing that it applies to the world in its totality. However, these arguments do not succeed in doing that. The first fails because it depends on a remote analogy between the world as a whole and the physical objects in the world. Concerning the second, an analysis of the logic of why-questions about the existence of things has revealed that the logical contingency of something is not a ground for thinking it has an explanation. The only promising interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason that we have found is as a causal principle pertaining to things in nature. (shrink)

This paper critically contrasts Laudan’s normative naturalism with Friedman’s arguments about the importance of a priori concepts in scientific methodology. I do not take issue with Laudan’s claim that taking philosophy and science to be continuous does not preclude a normative role for the philosophy of science. The main focus of criticism instead is Laudan’s assertion that if normative philosophy employs the methods found in the sciences themselves, then this precludes any a priori or philosophical justification of methodological rules. I (...) make the case that not only are such justifications possible, they are central to any proper philosophical understanding of scientific methodology, and must figure prominently in any plausible version of normative naturalism. To make this case I sketch Laudan’s position and his reasons for the ban on a priori justification. I then contrast Laudan’s position with Friedman’s recent studies on the prominence ofrelativised constitutive a priori principles within science and show that this view can serve as the basis of a contrasting variation of naturalised philosophy of science. I elucidate Friedman’s position in order to identify some prima facie difficulties with Laudan’s ban on the a priori in our understanding of science but also to provide an example of a competing variation of philosophical naturalism. Finally, I further highlight the difficulties that attend Laudan’s position through a case study, the central methodological role of renormalisation in quantum field theory. (shrink)

The view that organisms are agents—and that organismal agency is fundamental to explaining biological phenomena—has become a central topic in the philosophy of biology. Unlike standard causal-mechanical approaches, however, the concept of agency carries distinct teleological and normative implications that must be naturalized to be scientifically legitimate. But what exactly does naturalism require? And what counts as an adequate naturalization? I propose two desiderata: causal-location and explanatory indispensability, and compare two naturalistic accounts of agency—the organizational or constitutive account (OA) (Moreno (...) & Mossio, 2015) and the ecological or dynamical account (EA) (Walsh, 2015). I argue that while OA satisfies causal-location at the cost of explanatory adequacy, EA achieves explanatory adequacy while remaining silent on causal-location. This leads to a dilemma between causal reductionism (OA) and teleological primitivism (EA), rooted in differing criteria for what naturalism requires. I distinguish two increasingly demanding grades of scientific naturalism: scientific emergentism and scientific essentialism, and argue that the dilemma arises from OA’s commitment to the latter and EA’s to the former. I conclude by showing how the emergentist criterion can resolve the dilemma by integrating OA and EA into a two-stage strategy that satisfies both desiderata. (shrink)

“...a theory of meaning for a particular language should be conceived by a philosopher as describing the practice of linguistic interchange by speakers of the language without taking it as already understood what it is to have a language at all: that is what, by imagining such a theory, we are trying to make explict." – Michael Dummer (2004: 31).

What is natural selection? I address this question by exploring the relation between two debates: Is natural selection a mechanism? Is natural selection a causal or a statistical theory? I argue that the first can be assessed only relative to a model and that, following the second, there are two fundamentally different and independent kinds of models, Modern-Synthesis and Darwinian models. MS-models, I argue, are not mechanistic even if they are causal. D-models, in contrast, are mechanistic. A causal-mechanistic interpretation of (...) D-models is thus compatible with a statistical interpretation of MS-models. Natural selection, I conclude, lacks a single, unifying nature. (shrink)

Understanding the changes in our language abilities along the lifespan is a crucial step for understanding the aging process both in normal and in abnormal circumstances. Besides controlled experimental tasks, it is equally crucial to investigate language in unconstrained conversation. I present an information-theoretical analysis of a corpus of dyadic conversations investigating how the richness of the vocabulary, the word-internal structure, and the syntax of the utterances evolves as a function of the speaker's age and sex. Although vocabulary diversity increases (...) throughout the lifetime, grammatical diversities follow a different pattern, which also differs between women and men. Women use increasingly diverse syntactic structures at least up to their late fifties, and they do not deteriorate in terms of fluency through their lifespan. However, from age 45 onward, men exhibit a decrease in the diversity of the syntactic structures they use, coupled with an increased number of speech disfluencies. (shrink)

The finding of fractal scaling (FS) in behavioral sequences has raised a debate on whether FS is a pervasive property of the cognitive system or is the result of specific processes. Inferences about the origins of properties in time sequences are causal. That is, as opposed to correlational inferences reflecting instantaneous symmetrical relations, causal inferences concern asymmetric relations lagged in time. Here, I integrate Granger-causality with inferences about FS. Four simulations illustrate that causal analyses can isolate distinct FS sources, whereas (...) correlational techniques cannot. I then analyze three simultaneous sequences of responses from a database of word-naming trials. I find that two, or perhaps three, distinct sources account for the presence of FS in these sequences, but FS is not a general property of the system. This suggests that FS arises due to the properties of a limited number of identifiable psychological and/or neural processes. Finally, I reanalyze a previously published dataset of acoustic frequency spectra using the new tools. The causality/criticality combination introduced here offers a new important perspective in the study of cognition. (shrink)

Fodor argue that Darwinism cannot be true on the grounds that there are no laws of selection to support counterfactuals about why traits are selected-for. Darwinian explanations, according to this objection, amount to mere ‘plausible historical narratives’. I argue that the objection is predicated on two problematic assumptions: A nomic-subsumption account of causation and causal explanation, and a fine-grained view of the individuation of selected-for effects. Against the former, I argue that Darwinian explanations are a historical species of mechanistic explanation (...) and that mechanisms are causally productive and counterfactual supporting in the absence of appropriate laws. Once this mechanistic framework is in place, the demand for laws of selection vanishes and the historical cum causal coherence of Darwinism is restored. As for the second assumption, I argue that it is an artefact of the teleosemantic program with no basis in evolutionary biology and that properly understood, Darwinian evolutionary biology shows just why teleosemantics cannot succeed. (shrink)

Edith Stein (1891-1942) is a clear example of a philosopher, since she dedicated her entire life and effort to the conquest of Truth, of Being. The path she follows begins with her personal experience and her desire to find an answer to the existence of man. In phenomenology, she will find a means of confronting reality, free of prejudices. During her intellectual and existential journey, she meets a God that becomes living experience and quenches her thirst for Truth. She completes (...) her contemplation of the philosophical being by means of a mystic contemplation of Being. Her philosophical activity is a road that leads “from finite being to eternal being”. (shrink)

El artículo analiza algunos aspectos de la comunicación política tomando como referencia las elecciones generales españolas de 1996, a fin de reflexionar sobre la eficacia de la Comunicación Política aplicada y sus riesgos en una sociedad democrática. Retórica y democracia van juntas por cuanto la retórica es el arte de la palabra y la palabra es consustancial a la democracia. El problema es que la palabra ha de entenderse hoy como el resultado de un uso científicamente programado de la comunicación (...) que afecta profundamente el discurso clásico de la política. (shrink)

This work studies an artistic way of narrating an exile without having to resort to direct words such as violence or crime. Max Aub, a Spanish exile in Mexico, published his personal magazine Sala de Espera in Aztec lands. In the section called “Zarzuela,” he compiled a series of short stories entitled Crímenes, which later, for its edition in book format, he called Crímenes ejemplares. The short stories are a series of humorous confessions about various types of murders narrated by (...) the "murderers," so that they seem real testimonies. Throughout the three editions of this book, during Aub's lifetime, the author incorporated a series of "clues" in the paratexts with the aim of referring to the social phenomena of the time, especially those related to the situation with the Franco regime, the Cold War —historical context of the time of Aub's exile in Mexico— and the events that would take place in Mexico and Paris in 1968. For example, this last nod to the violent events of that summer of 68 is represented with a painting that evokes the French gang Bonnot, dedicated to bank robberies to destabilize the economy of the richest. This is an example of how the writer related the fiction of the crimes to real events, in such a way that a kind of dilution between the real and the imaginary arises. (shrink)

Este artículo propone una lectura analítica de la novela Jinete a pie, de Israel Centeno, que forma parte del grupo de obras, publicadas en los últimos años, que vislumbran un futuro distópico para Venezuela. Inicialmente se repasa el origen de la distopía como género literario y sus antecedentes utópicos, así como el auge de la novela distópica venezolana en el siglo xxi; luego se estudian las características de Jinete a pie, para analizar la construcción de una distopía que remite a (...) una Caracas arrasada por la violencia y su relación con el contexto venezolano actual. (shrink)

La filosofía necesita escenarios para dibujar el sentido de su actividad; frente al destino, la dialéctica entre la facultad creativa y la certitud epistémica representa una clave interpretativa en la relación entre el pensamiento mítico y el filosófico en sus orígenes. En esa búsqueda de sentido, el concepto de ápeiron actualiza a partir de lo indefinido o ilimitado la realidad, descubriendo su ontología como un cierto criticismo sobre las posibilidades del ser mismo. De otra parte, el concepto de abstracción nos (...) permite narrar como conceptual la distancia entre los cuerpos físicos y su origen metafísico. Finalmente, la filosofía poética de Bachelard despliega esa distancia desde la poética de lo ignoto con la abstracción como principio intelectual hacia el espacio de la inmensidad. (shrink)

La reflexividad paradójica del fenómeno al objetivar el en sí, sin presupuestos pre-dados, proviene de querer responder a la cuestión de cómo pensar la trascendencia si sólo puede experimentarse. Pelayo Pérez nos allana la comprensión de la refundición fenomenológica de Richir y su arquitectónica, sentido interpretativo del fenómeno, donde su significación, prosa y poética del mundo, permite estar más acá del solipsismo y más allá de la naturalización positivista. La empresa fenomenológica no puede de antemano renunciar a reconocer y reconstruir (...) de manera sistemática el sentido de los fenómenos de la conciencia vivida según el esclarecimiento de las potencialidades simbólicas que los sucesos poseen y promueven en ella. Con la fenomenología de la percepción encontramos la aceptable «naturalización» de la fenomenología, en la medida en que todo hecho psíquico es la concretización de todo conocimiento del mundo. (shrink)

This article explores the intersection between critical pedagogies and social justice in the context of environmental education, with a focus on transforming educational projects to promote meaningful social change. Through theoretical analysis and qualitative methodology, it highlights how critical pedagogies offer a valuable framework for addressing social and environmental inequalities. This approach fosters students' awareness of their role as agents of change in environmental protection and in creating more equitable and resilient communities. The results show that the application of these (...) principles facilitates the development of critical thinking and empowerment competencies in students, promoting active participation in environmental management. (shrink)