The event of the pandemic that started in 2020 fed an affective phenomenon known as pandemic fatigue, medically near to “chronic fatigue syndrome”. Psychologi- cal explanation of the phenomenon provides a first approach that is enriched with phenomenological description and analysis of it as existential feeling in the present. This term stresses the bodily reference of the kind of existential moods displayed by Heidegger and contributes to a better description of the fatigue phenomenon relying on Levinas’ study. Present and profound (...) fatigue is therefore shown as a feeling of tiredness that ties existence to a no-being-possible or no-being-able for oneself to do what it was possible before, i.e. in the pre-pandemic past. Besides the description, phenomenological analysis of the bond between profound boredom —as studied by Heidegger— and pandemic existential fatigue stresses different levels in the ontological understanding of this last one and its harmful feature. (shrink)

The study of emotional phenomena such as Sympathy and Compassion opens a path to the reflection on the possibility of Intersubjectivity. Scheler’s Phenomenology of Feelings, moving away from others phenomenological analyses on the Empathy and the Understanding of the Others as others Ego, presents Sympathy Phenomena as basic ways in which the Interpersonal Link is constituted. At the same time, this constitution sends back to a radical intersubjective encounter in the spatiality in between the psychophysical corporalities. Compassion is this kind (...) of fundamental intersubjective encounter, which one was sharp analyzed by Schopenhauer, even if he did it within the frame of a Metaphysics of Will. An overlap between Schopenhauer and Scheler thoughts over human life of human beings gives the clue for a reflection on how the phenomenon of Sympathy between persons takes place in the intersubjective space laid bare in the compassionate link in psychophysical and corporal life. (shrink)

Some of the contemporary ethical debates have put in value the rational feature of feelings because of the estimative intentionality that is implied in them. In this context, some claim that the intentionality of emotions is a kind of value perception, as Phenomenology stressed at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly Max Scheler, by analysing emotional Feeling [_Fühlen_] in the frame of emotional life. In order to extend the context of this philosophical debate, and after describing Scheler’s phenomenology of (...) feelings of the intentional and non-intentional emotional life, firstly, we defend _the_ _axiological_ _and_ _emotional_ _intentionality_ _as_ _double_ _intentionality_ that—in our understanding—Scheler analyses phenomenologically, while taking distance from Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s intentional structure of estimative emotions. And, secondly, we propose a tentative interpretation of _the link_ between estimative and emotional double intentionality _as living_ _structure_ _of_ _ethical_ _life_, in the light of Martin Heidegger’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology. (shrink)

Es dentro del marco de la fenomenología de Husserl donde Heidegger lleva a cabo su propuesta filosófica, que implica una “destrucción” o “desmontaje” de los conceptos de la tradición, comenzando por los de la fenomenología de su maestro, y una construcción de su propio proyecto filosófico, basado en una analítica de la existencia.La “destrucción” es prácticamente elevada por Heidegger al rango de método filosófico, en paralelo pero en sentido contrario a la epoché, el método fenomenológico de Husserl. Esta diferencia de (...) método, respecto a una común consideración de la intencionalidad de la conciencia, separa los proyectos fenomenológicos del Husserl de Ideen I y del Heidegger de Sein und Zeit: eidético u ontológico. A partir de su método destructivo Heidegger radicalizará las nociones de la fenomenología de Husserl.Within the framework of the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger carries out a double philosophical proposal: the “destruction” or “dismantling” of the concepts from the tradition, beginning with those ones of the phenomenology of his teacher, and the construction of his own philosophical project, based on an analysis of the existence.The “destruction” is practically considered by Heidegger as a philosophical method, which is developed in parallel but in a contrary direction to the phenomenological method of Husserl: the epoché. This methodological difference, applied to the intentionality of the consciousness, that the two philosophers consider, separates the phenomenological projects of Husserl in Ideen I and Heidegger in Sein und Zeit: eidetic or ontological. So and from his destructive method Heidegger is going to radicalize the main notions of the phenomenology of Husserl. (shrink)

Background: The prevalence of anxiety and depression in young students is associated with biosocial factors and scholastic stress. However, few studies have evaluated emotional-affective symptoms that are related to the immune system and antioxidant parameters in young individuals without diagnoses of affective disorders.Aim: This study aims to assess the relationship between emotional-affective symptoms and glutathione concentrations and CD4 and CD8 lymphocyte counts in college students.Methods: College students completed standardized psychometric instruments, including the Perceived Stress Scale, Hamilton Anxiety Scale, Beck Depression (...) Inventory, Familiar Social and Friends Support Scale, and Rosenberg Scale. Blood samples were biochemically analyzed. Analyses of variance were conducted between four groups according to symptom severity.Results: A considerable prevalence of stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms was observed and negatively correlated with self-esteem and socio-familiar support. Perceived stress was sexually dimorphic. Although biochemical parameters were within reference ranges, glutathione, CD4, and CD8 tended to be lower in participants with anxiety and depression symptoms, which may be of predictive value.Conclusion: The relationship between antioxidant/immune parameters and socio-affective scores is latent in undiagnosed college students who might develop affective disorders. The findings suggest that during the initial development of affective disorders, stress management strategies should be implemented to help college students cope with the academic load and monitor negative changes in their physiological state. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to assess the knowledge, attitudes and experiences of Spanish nurses in relation to euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. In an online questionnaire completed by 390 nurses from Andalusia, 59.1% adequately identified a euthanasia situation and 64.1% a situation involving physician-assisted suicide. Around 69% were aware that both practices were illegal in Spain, while 21.4% had received requests for euthanasia and a further 7.8% for assisted suicide. A total of 22.6% believed that cases of euthanasia had (...) occurred in Spain and 11.4% believed the same for assisted suicide. There was greater support (70%) for legalisation of euthanasia than for assisted suicide (65%), combined with a greater predisposition towards carrying out euthanasia (54%), if it were to be legalised, than participating in assisted suicide (47.3%). Nurses in Andalusia should be offered more education about issues pertaining to the end of life, and extensive research into this area should be undertaken. (shrink)

The confinement of the population into their homes as a result of COVID-19 has entailed a notable increase in the consumption of diverse media. This exploratory study aimed to examine how the increase in media consumption was related to subjective happiness and psychological well-being. For this purpose, a questionnaire was administered to a sample of Spanish adults to assess their consumption of different media before and during confinement. Moreover, participants were evaluated for hedonic, eudaimonic, social, and experienced happiness by using (...) the Pemberton Happiness Index. The results underlined the great increase in the consumption of TV for entertainment and social networking sites during confinement. Furthermore, it was found that higher consumption was negatively correlated with the level of happiness, so that, people who reported greater well-being, both subjective and psychological, spent less time watching TV and using SNS. In contrast, no association was found between the level of happiness and the consumption of news and radio. Therefore, it seems that far from cultivating greater happiness, those who engaged in heavy consumption of TV entertainment and SNS during confinement were less happy than those who did so more moderately and spent more time using other media or performing other activities. (shrink)

Ao desenvolver a ciência biológica, o ser humano logrou obter novas variedades de animais e de plantas, a partir das silvestres. Quando as técnicas de engenharia genética se aplicaram a êstes organismos, obtiveram-se êxitos que se traduziram em dezenas de animais e de plantas com modificações genéticas agora hereditárias. Segundo o artigo, da análise bioética dos organismos modificados geneticamente e da sua utilizaçéo surgem várias propostas: 1) o direito do consumidor a ser informado em termos que possa entender acerca da (...) natureza das mudanças genéticas realizadas nos alimentos, 2) o direito do consumidor a decidir livremente se os quer consumir ou não e, 3) os deveres morais e científicos dos cientistas e das indústrias agro-alimentares para demonstrar a inocuidade destes animais e plantas transgénicos para o ser humano, o meio ambiente e a biodiversidade. /// Through the development of biological science, humankind was able to obtain new varieties of animals and plants in a process beginning with the wild species. When genetic engineering techniques were applied to these organisms, several dozens of transgenic organisms were obtained including plants and animals with specific inheritable changes, which are now transgenic foods. From the bioethical analysis of genetically modified organisms the article argues in favor of the right of the consumer to be informed in terms he or she can understand on the nature of genetic changes induced in foods, as well as in favor of the right of consumers to choose between standard or modified food. Finally, the article also argues in favor of the moral and scientific duties of scientists and food industries to demonstrate that genetically modified foods are not dangerous to human beings or noxious to the environment or biota. (shrink)

Classical epistemic logic describes implicit knowledge of agents about facts and knowledge of other agents based on semantic information. The latter is produced by acts of observation or communication that are described well by dynamic epistemic logics. What these logics do not describe, however, is how significant information is also produced by acts of inference— and key axioms of the system merely postulate "deductive closure". In this paper, we take the view that all information is produced by acts, and hence (...) we also need a dynamic logic of inference steps showing what effort on the part of the agent makes a conclusion explicit knowledge. Strong omniscience properties of agents should be seen not as static idealizations, but as the result of dynamic processes that agents engage in. This raises two questions: (a) how to define suitable information states of agents and matching notions of explicit knowledge, (b) how to define natural processes over these states that generate new explicit knowledge. To this end, we use a static base from the existing awareness literature, extending it into a dynamic system that includes traditional acts of observation, but also adding and dropping formulas from the current ' awareness' set. We give a completeness theorem, and we show how this dynamics updates explicit knowledge. Then we extend our approach to multi-agent scenarios where awareness changes may happen privately. Finally, we mention further directions and related approaches. Our contribution can be seen as a ' dynamification' of existing awareness logics. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene por objeto el estudio de la agravante de discriminación por razón de género recogida en el art. 22.4ª del C.P, por la Ley Orgánica 1/2015, de 30 de marzo. Nos vamos a centrar en el estudio del fundamento y elementos de la circunstancia agravante. Se prosigue, con el análisis de su compatibilidad con otras agravantes genéricas y su régimen de comunicabilidad a los partícipes del delito. Sin olvidar, el examen de las sentencias dictadas por el Tribunal Supremo.

The dialogue Bruno of 1802 is arguably the natural starting point for any investigation on the concepts of finitude, evil and human freedom in Schelling’s middle metaphysics. In this dialogue the author elaborates for the first time in his system a concept of freedom and independence of the finite, which extends via his reformulation in Philosophy and Religion of 1804 to the Freedom Essay of 1809 and beyond to the works of 1810 and 1811 – Stuttgart Private Lectures and The (...) Ages of the World. The central ontological problem of the dialogue relates to the possibility of a separation between the absolute and the world as space of finite beings, which, according to the system of identity first presented in 1801, cannot exist as such. The question we will then address concerns the status of the finite as such and how would it be possible to admit both its existence for consciousness and the positing of an absolute and infinite principle of philosophy. We will show how Schelling’s interest shifts, almost unintentionally, from the infinite principle to the finite as such, as a principle of freedom and self-initiation independent of the real. (shrink)

The use of black box algorithms in medicine has raised scholarly concerns due to their opaqueness and lack of trustworthiness. Concerns about potential bias, accountability and responsibility, patient autonomy and compromised trust transpire with black box algorithms. These worries connect epistemic concerns with normative issues. In this paper, we outline that black box algorithms are less problematic for epistemic reasons than many scholars seem to believe. By outlining that more transparency in algorithms is not always necessary, and by explaining that (...) computational processes are indeed methodologically opaque to humans, we argue that the reliability of algorithms provides reasons for trusting the outcomes of medical artificial intelligence. To this end, we explain how computational reliabilism, which does not require transparency and supports the reliability of algorithms, justifies the belief that results of medical AI are to be trusted. We also argue that several ethical concerns remain with black box algorithms, even when the results are trustworthy. Having justified knowledge from reliable indicators is, therefore, necessary but not sufficient for normatively justifying physicians to act. This means that deliberation about the results of reliable algorithms is required to find out what is a desirable action. Thus understood, we argue that such challenges should not dismiss the use of black box algorithms altogether but should inform the way in which these algorithms are designed and implemented. When physicians are trained to acquire the necessary skills and expertise, and collaborate with medical informatics and data scientists, black box algorithms can contribute to improving medical care. (shrink)

La teoria della conoscenza può essere intesa in due modi diversi, a seconda di che cosa si intende per conoscenza. In un primo senso, per conoscenza si intende il processo mediante cui conosciamo. In un secondo senso la conoscenza è intesa come il risultato di tale processo, ossia come sinonimo di sapere. Questi due significati sono riflessi nei diversi termini con cui vengono denotati in altre lingue. Mentre una teoria della conoscenza intesa come sapere non ha relazioni significative con le (...) neuroscienze (ma piuttosto con discipline filosofiche come la logica, la metodologia, la semiotica, l'ontologia), una teoria dei processi conoscitivi ha rapporti significativi con le neuroscienze, e fin dall'antichità i filosofi hanno riconosciuto nel cervello il supporto fisico delle attività cognitive superiori. Con ciò, tuttavia, le neuroscienze non possono presentarsi come surrogato di una teoria filosofica del conoscere, in quanto i processi cognitivi debbono essere preliminarmente definiti in sede filosofica, al fine di poter studiare le loro correlazioni (bidirezionali) con fenomeni nervosi. (shrink)

We look at two fundamental logical processes, often intertwined in planning and problem solving: inference and update. Inference is an internal process with which we uncover what is implicit in the information we already have. Update, on the other hand, is produced by external communication, usually in the form of announcements and in general in the form of observations, giving us information that might not have been available (even implicitly) before. Both processes have received attention from the logic community, usually (...) separately. In this work, we develop a logical language that allows us to describe them together. We present syntax, semantics and a complete axiom system; we discuss similarities and differences with other approaches and mention how the work can be extended. (shrink)

The basic aim of this work is to highlight the structure which Thomas Aquinas finds in Aristotle's Politics on natural servitude, trying to recover the doctine defended by the Philosopher and commented by St. Thomas.

Este artículo es una discusión con el concepto platónico de diálogo entendido como comedia, Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language (Ewegen, 2014. No hay traducción al español) fue usado como el recurso central de este artículo, el cual provee la base para diferentes interpretaciones en América Latina como las que defiende la profesora Buarque (2011) en nuestra región y, de manera mucho más general Gregorio Lury et al. (2018) en Ibero America. Sumado a ello, a diferencia del trabajo mencionado, este (...) trabajo lleva a cabo una comparación con la obra de Platón usando una metodología de carácter hermenéutico basado en los escritos de Platón y sus múltiples referencias a la risa a través de su reflexión escrita; se toma como punto de referencia la consigna hermenéutica de tomar la clara interpretación como un todo. El presente trabajo tiende entonces, a diferencia de la propuesta de Ewegen, a establecer el esfuerzo platónico mucho más próximo a a la tragedia que a la comedia como género de interpretación. Aunque existan secciones referidas enteramente a asuntos graciosos en los cuales el humor se aprecia, esta no puede ser la clave para la interpretación platónica como lo sostiene el enfoque de Ewegen. La forma del diálogo platónico debe ser entendida en un proyecto educativo, es decir de transformación. (shrink)

«En nuestros días la situación respecto de los valores y la ética fundada en ellos resulta realmente sorprendente. Ya no se habla tan sólo de valores bursátiles. Ahora también los pedagogos ensayan desde sus tarimas la educación en valores, los políticos apelan desde sus escaños a los valores constitucionales, los comités de ética disciernen en los hospitales los valores que han de respetarse en la actividad clínica, los filósofos de la ciencia se reúnen en sus institutos para cavilar sobre la (...) relación de ésta con los valores, los colectivos feministas reivindican en sus foros la consideración de la dependencia entre valores y 'género', hasta los sacerdotes exhortan desde sus ambones a la realización de los valores del Reino... Y, sin embargo, esta ubicua y recurrente alusión a los valores y a sus exigencias va acompañada a la vez de un clamoroso y tenaz silencio filosófico acerca de la naturaleza y el conocimiento de esos singulares objetos, al parecer tan importantes y omnipresentes. Las páginas que dan cuerpo a este libro han nacido de la necesidad de poner esas cosas de que tanto se habla en la tela de juicio de la filosofía.». (shrink)

Typically, existentialist analyses of “America” have been limited to North America (more specifically, the United States). I argue that developing an adequate framework for existentially analyzing America requires a turn to Mexican existentialism. In Emilio Uranga’s and Jorge Portilla’s writings, we discover new conceptual tools for understanding Americanness as such. These thinkers help us imagine an account of American being that does not restrict itself to the United States by using the concepts of existentialism to describe the crises their neighbors (...) to the north as well as they themselves face. American existence has been historically characterized by a convergence (oftentimes clash) of disparate races, ethnicities, languages, cultures, religions, and identities. As history unfolded, this convergence led to various existential crises across the Americas. Whereas the US American way of life is marred by a blustering, naïve, and purposeless misuse of freedom that disregards the other, the existential crisis the Mexican lives is characterized by “accidentality” and “zozobra.” Despite these important differences, all existentialists, and the Mexican existentialists of the Hyperion Group especially, remind us that there is a common way to overcome the various existential crises plaguing the Americas, and that is to exercise freedom in a purposeful, communally conscious manner. (shrink)

Epistemic logic with its possible worlds semantic model is a powerful framework that allows us to represent an agent’s information not only about propositional facts, but also about her own information. Nevertheless, agents represented in this framework are logically omniscient: their information is closed under logical consequence. This property, useful in some applications, is an unrealistic idealisation in some others. Many proposals to solve this problem focus on weakening the properties of the agent’s information, but some authors have argued that (...) solutions of this kind are not completely adequate because they do not look at the heart of the matter: the actions that allow the agent to reach such omniscient state. Recent works have explored how acts of observation, inference, consideration and forgetting affect an agent’s implicit and explicit knowledge; the present work focuses on acts that affect an agent’s implicit and explicit beliefs. It starts by proposing a framework in which these two notions can be represented, and then it looks into their dynamics, first by reviewing the existing notion of belief revision, and then by introducing a rich framework for representing diverse forms of inference that involve both knowledge and beliefs. (shrink)

The general objective of this essay is to systematize Jean-Luc Nancy’s post- deconstructive reflections on the concept of evidence. A general claim of this paper is that the post-deconstructive concept of evidence is genuinely an epistemic concept of evidence insofar as it refers to structures involved in verification processes. Evidence is the presentation of a state of affairs that relates the presentation not only to what we claim about this state of affairs but also to the singular circumstances of its (...) production. Verification (the production of a claim’s truth) results directly from the singularities involved in the production or presentation of evidence. This means that evidence is never exhausted in the truth it produces or the knowledge it validates but remains a priori exposed or available to produce and validate unknown knowledge about unknown states of affairs. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that, contrary to scholarly consensus, Antonio Caso draws inspiration from important principles and ideas from Kant’s philosophy in his critique of positivism. I first examine the prima facie textual reasons why someone might believe that Caso and Kant are philosophical enemies. To contradict this notion, I proceed by noting and developing three core ideas that the two share in common. First, Caso and Kant are both ardent critics of dogmatic philosophizing. Second, both Caso and Kant (...) carve out special room for intuition in their respective accounts of cognition, resisting the idea that the understanding has a more prominent role in the formation of knowledge. Third, Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic judgment paves the way for Caso’s de-intellectualized aesthetics. In the end, we see that Kant and Caso are closer to being philosophical friends than enemies. (shrink)

This article aims to develop a new account of scientific explanation for computer simulations. To this end, two questions are answered: what is the explanatory relation for computer simulations? And what kind of epistemic gain should be expected? For several reasons tailored to the benefits and needs of computer simulations, these questions are better answered within the unificationist model of scientific explanation. Unlike previous efforts in the literature, I submit that the explanatory relation is between the simulation model and the (...) results of the simulation. I also argue that our epistemic gain goes beyond the unificationist account, encompassing a practical dimension as well. (shrink)

This work proposes an understanding of deductive, default and abductive reasoning as different instances of the same phenomenon: epistemic dynamics. It discusses the main intuitions behind each one of these reasoning processes, and suggest how they can be understood as different epistemic actions that modify an agent’s knowledge and/or beliefs in a different way, making formal the discussion with the use of the dynamic epistemic logic framework. The ideas in this paper put the studied processes under the same umbrella, thus (...) highlighting their relationship and allowing a better understanding of how they interact together. (shrink)

We propose a view of identity beyond the individual in what we call interpersonal interidentities (IIIs). Within this approach, IIIs comprise collections of entangled stabilities that emerge in recurrent social interaction and manifest for those who instantiate them as relatively invariant though ever-evolving patterns of being (or more accurately, becoming) together. Herein, we consider the processes responsible for the emergence of these IIIs from the perspective of an enactive cognitive science. Our proposal hinges primarily on the development of two related (...) notions: enhabiting and coenhabiting. First, we introduce the notion of enhabiting, a set of processes at the individual level whereby structural interdependencies stabilise and thereafter undergird the habits, networks of habits, and personal identities through which we make sense of our experience. Articulating this position we lean on the notion of a tendency towards an optimal grip, though offering it a developmental framing, whereby iterative states of selective openness help realise relatively stable autonomous personal identities with their own norms of self-regulation. We then extend many of the notions found applicable here to an account of social coenhabiting, in particular, we introduce the notion of tending towards a co-optimal grip as central to the development of social habits, networks of habits, and ultimately IIIs. Such structures, we propose, also emerge as autonomous structures with their own norms of self-regulation. We wind down our account with some reflections on the implications of these structures outside of the interactions wherein they come into being and offer some thoughts about the complex animations of the individual embodied subjects that instantiate them. (shrink)

The only valid consideration of human being is what takes the person in his complexity. Human being is an open system in his relation with the medium. But, attending his racionality (deepest and most radical dimension), human being is free system. So, he is able to assert oneself ends according values.

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict exemplify (...) self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

Many philosophical accounts of scientific models fail to distinguish between a simulation model and other forms of models. This failure is unfortunate because there are important differences pertaining to their methodology and epistemology that favor their philosophical understanding. The core claim presented here is that simulation models are rich and complex units of analysis in their own right, that they depart from known forms of scientific models in significant ways, and that a proper understanding of the type of model simulations (...) are fundamental for their philosophical assessment. I argue that simulation models can be distinguished from other forms of models by the many algorithmic structures, representation relations, and new semantic connections involved in their architecture. In this article, I reconstruct a general architecture for a simulation model, one that faithfully captures the complexities involved in most scientific research with computer simulations. Furthermore, I submit that a new methodology capable of conforming such architecture into a fully functional, computationally tractable computer simulation must be in place. I discuss this methodology—what I call recasting—and argue for its philosophical novelty. If these efforts are heading towards the right interpretation of simulation models, then one can show that computer simulations shed new light on the philosophy of science. To illustrate the potential of my interpretation of simulation models, I briefly discuss simulation-based explanations as a novel approach to questions about scientific explanation. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that McDowell's brand of disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge is ill‐motivated. First, I present a reconstruction of one main motivation for disjunctivism, in the form of an argument that theories that posit a “highest common factor” between veridical and non‐veridical experiences must be wrong. Then I show that the argument owes its plausibility to a failure to distinguish between justification and warrant (where “warrant” is understood as whatever has to be added to true belief to yield (...) knowledge). (shrink)

From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism and (...) argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance. (shrink)