Typically developing 3-day-old newborns take significantly more forward steps on a moving treadmill belt than on a static belt. The current experiment examined whether projecting optic flows that specified forward motion onto the moving treadmill surface would further enhance forward stepping. Twenty newborns were supported on a moving treadmill without optic flow, with optic flow matching the treadmill’s direction and speed, with optic flow in the same direction but at a faster speed, and in a control condition with an incoherent (...) optic flow moving at the same speed as in the Congruent condition but in random directions. The results revealed no significant differences in the number or coordination of forward treadmill steps taken in each condition. However, the Faster condition generated significantly fewer leg pumping movements than the Random control condition. When highly aroused, newborns made significantly fewer single steps and significantly more parallel steps and pumping movements. We speculate the null findings may be a function of the high friction material that covered the treadmill surface. (shrink)

This paper examines the analysis of property regimes in the thought of the French philosopher, Francois Huet, as presented especially in his one major work on that subject, Le Regne Social du Christianisme . There, Huet developed his concern with social issues which began in the mid-1840s, when he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ghent. From 1846, he formed a study group of students now known as the ‘Huet Society’, which discussed social questions such (...) as property rights and inheritance, and considered various reform proposals in the works of Fourier, Proudhon, Saint-Simon and others. In the aftermath of the 1848 Revolutions, Huet resigned his Chair following an official campaign against his allegedly subversive views. From 1850 until his death in 1869, Huet lived in Paris where he concentrated on his studies, producing a large number of published works. Apart from Le Regne, those works were concerned principally with Catholic theology, at least until 1864 when Huet renounced his faith and sought to develop a version of pantheism. However, in La Science de l'esprit , which immediately preceded that renunciation, Huet restated at length and in virtually identical form the core argument of Le Regne. Even in one of his last works, La Revolution Religieuse , moreover, Huet expressed his continuing endorsement of its ‘fundamental idea’ of ‘a guarantee of property to all’, and argued that after fifteen years it was still in advance of current liberal critiques of property regimes. (shrink)

São examinadas as relações pessoais e filosóficas do cético francês da segunda metade do século XVII, Pierre-Daniel Huet, com os principais filósofos seus contemporâneos que apresentaram perspectivas céticas: François de La Mothe le Vayer, Blaise Pascal, Simon Foucher e Pierre Bayle. A longa trajetória intelectual de Huet, aqui resumida do ponto de vista de sua relação com estes filósofos, ilumina a origem da configuração do que é hoje conhecido como ceticismo moderno ou cartesiano. AbstractThe paper is about (...) the personal and philosophical connections between the French skeptic of the second half of the 17th century Pierre-Daniel Huet and the main philosophers who held skeptical views at his time: François de la Mothe Le Vayer, Blaise Pascal, Simon Foucher and Pierre Bayle. Huet’s long intellectual life, abridged in the paper from the point of view of his relationship with these philosophers, sheds light on the origin of the epistemological position known today as modern or Cartesian skepticism. (shrink)

A l'epoque hellenistique, la reflexion morale s'engage sur des voies nouvelles.

Il est assez rare qu’un concept philosophique s’échappe de l’arène académique. C’est pourtant le cas du concept de spécisme, qui a fait une entrée remarquée dans la sphère publique au cours de la dernière décennie. Il est désormais au cœur du débat de société sur nos devoirs envers les animaux non humains. Hélas, ce concept et les enjeux qu’il soulève sont souvent mal compris. Nombreux sont les auteurs qui contestent sa légitimité alors qu’ils le maitrisent mal. D’autres l’utilisent plus volontiers (...) sans toutefois mieux le comprendre. Les confusions qui entourent cette notion l’empêche de contribuer à la discussion autant qu’elle le pourrait. Le présent ouvrage entend remédier à cet état de faits en donnant de la notion de spécisme une présentation à la fois assez précise pour rendre justice aux discussions philosophiques dont elle fait l’objet et suffisamment claire pour être accessible à quiconque s’intéresse au statut moral des animaux. Il se divise en deux parties. La première aborde des questions ontologiques : Qu’est-ce exactement que le spécisme ? À quelles conditions existe-t-il ? Ces conditions sont-elles remplies dans les faits ? Quant à la seconde, elle porte sur des questions éthiques : Le spécisme peut-il être justifié ? Faut-il au contraire le condamner au même titre que le racisme et le sexisme ? (shrink)

Animal ethicists often distinguish between direct and indirect defenses of speciesism, where the former appeal to species membership and the latter invoke other features that are simply associated with it. The main extant charge against indirect defenses rests on the empirical claim that any feature other than membership in our species is either absent in some humans or present in some nonhumans. This paper challenges indirect defenses with a new argument, which presupposes no such empirical claim. Instead, the argument from (...) discordance resorts to the following principle: a certain feature can only justify discriminating on the basis of that feature. (shrink)

Renowned philosopher and prominent French critic François Noudelmann engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. Noudelmann both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music (...) they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. Noudelmann positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, he introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work. A careful reader of music, Noudelmann maintains an elegant command of the texts under his gaze and appreciates the discursive points of musical and philosophical scholarship they involve, especially with regard to recent research and cutting-edge critique. (shrink)

At the end of World War II, F. A. Hayek denounced the then-popular idea of central planning by arguing that, if pursued to its logical conclusion, it would entail totalitarianism. But there were at least two problems. First, judging by his example of Nazi Germany, state control over the economy appears to be a consequence, not a cause, of the monopolization of political power. Second, he conflated socialism and mere interference in the market with central planning. Therefore, history did not (...) so much falsify Hayek's prediction as bypass it: Once the vogue for central planning faded in the West, Hayek's book became irrelevant—except, ironically, in Germany. There, it was read as a manifesto for “good planning” through the rule of law. Alongside other “neoliberal” writers, Hayek had a profound (if little acknowledged) influence on the shape of the emerging Federal Republic and, through it, on the whole European institutional framework. (shrink)

A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.

Я интерпретирую философские взгляды Вернера Гайзенберга как прагматизм и неметафизический реализм виттгенштайновского типа. «Замкнутая теория» – виттгенштайновское правило/концепт. В отличие от Бокулич, предпочитающей позицию Дирака относительно природы связей между различными физическими теориями, я отдаю предпочтение позиции Гайзенберга. Моя позиция, интерпретирующая Гайзенберга, также прямо противоположна позиции Поппера: критерием устоявшейся научной (замкнутой) теории является её нефальсифицируемость. -/- I interpret philosophical views of Werner Heisenberg as a pragmatism and non-metaphysical realism of a Wittgensteinian kind. The “closed theory” is a Wittgensteinian rule/concept. Unlike Alisa (...) Bokulich, favouring Dirac’s position about inter-theoretical relations, I favour Heisenberg’s one. My position, interpreting Heisenberg’s notion of a closed theory, is also in direct opposition to Popper’s one: the criterion of an established scientific (closed) theory is its non-falsifiability. (shrink)

Response to Alex Byrne's paper 'Knowing what I see'.

ABSTRACTWhat does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.

Image has been considered an influential factor in tourists’ perceptions and evaluations of a destination. This paper analyzes the formation of the tourist destination image of Segóbriga Archaeological Park, a cultural destination of great heritage value, located in the province of Cuenca (Spain). The image is analyzed using a multidimensional approach, considering not only its cognitive and affective components, but also the unique-image component. The latter has received less attention in the literature and is a novelty in the context of (...) this type of cultural destination. The results show that this component is essential to the overall image of an archaeological destination and that it is not influenced by information sources. PLS-SEM was used. (shrink)

La religión ha sido la institución más afectada por la pluralización de la realidad social. Esto es debido a que el papel simbólico y global de la religión, en tanto que institución integradora y significativa, queda socavado desde la plausibilidad de sus definiciones sociales de la realidad. La causa de esta situación se encuentra en que las personas viven -conciencia subjetiva- nuevos roles institucionales, nuevos esquemas interpretativos, nuevos valores y creencias. Sin embargo, si algo permanece invariablemente constante en la vida (...) diaria de las personas es, afirma Berger, el temor a las situaciones marginales y a la anomia. Ni el proceso de secularización con sus universos simbólicos (filosofía diurna y teodiceas seculares), ni el resurgimiento religioso y global (desecularización público-política) han podido dar una explicación plausible y convincente de estos fenómenos que tanto afectan a la conciencia y a las identidades subjetivas de los individuos. En este sentido, y tras el fracaso de las anteriores cosmovisiones en su intento de dotar de sentido a la realidad y la vida ordinaria de las personas, Berger recurre a una nueva instauración del «nomos religioso» Religion has been the institution most affected by the plurarization of social reality. This is because the overall symbolic role of religion as an institution inclusive and meaningful, is undermined from the plausibility of their social definitions of reality. The cause of this situation is that people live-subjetive consciousness-new institutional roles, new interpretative schemes, new values and beliefs. If something always remains constant in the daily lives of the people, says Berger, the fear of marginal situations and anomie. Neither the process of secularization with its symbolic universe (diurnal philosophy and secular theodicies) and the religious revival and global (desecularization public-politic) could give a plausible and convincing explication of these phenomena that affect the subjective consciousness and identity of individuals. In this regard, and after the failure of previous worldviews in their attempt to give meaning to reality and the ordinary life of people, Berger uses a new establishment of «nomos religioso». (shrink)

Cumulative technological culture (CTC) refers to the increase in the efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques in human populations over generations. A fascinating question is to understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon. Because CTC is definitely a social phenomenon, most accounts have suggested a series of cognitive mechanisms oriented toward the social dimension (e.g., teaching, imitation, theory of mind, and metacognition), thereby minimizing the technical dimension and the potential influence of non-social, cognitive skills. What if we have failed (...) to see the elephant in the room? What if social cognitive mechanisms were only catalyzing factors and not thesufficient and necessaryconditions for the emergence of CTC? In this article, we offer an alternative, unified cognitive approach to this phenomenon by assuming that CTC originates in non-social cognitive skills, namely technical-reasoning skills which enable humans to develop the technical potential necessary to constantly acquire and improve technical information. This leads us to discuss how theory of mind and metacognition, in concert with technical reasoning, can help boost CTC. The cognitive approach developed here opens up promising new avenues for reinterpreting classical issues (e.g., innovation, emulation vs. imitation, social vs. asocial learning, cooperation, teaching, and overimitation) in a field that has so far been largely dominated by other disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, mathematics, anthropology, archeology, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Long undervalued in France, philosophical anthropology has played an essential role in Germany, helping to address some of the most important issues straddling philosophy and the social sciences: humanity's place in nature and in history; the individual and others; and relations between human groups.

Illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. This thesis is widely judged to be uniquely counterintuitive: the idea that consciousness is an illusion strikes most people as absurd, and seems almost impossible to contemplate in earnest. Defenders of illusionism should be able to explain the apparent absurdity of their own thesis, within their own framework. However, this is no trivial task: arguably, none of the illusionist theories currently on (...) the market is able to do this. I present a new theory of phenomenal introspection and argue that it might deal with the task at hand. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness appears to be particularly normatively significant. For this reason, sentience-based conceptions of ethics are widespread. In the field of animal ethics, knowing which animals are sentient appears to be essential to decide the moral status of these animals. I argue that, given that materialism is true of the mind, phenomenal consciousness is probably not particularly normatively significant. We should face up to this probable insignificance of phenomenal consciousness and move towards an ethic without sentience.