Two hundred years after it was first published, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus remains relevant. This novel has endured because of its literary merits and because its themes lend themselves to analysis from multiple viewpoints. Scholars from many disciplines have examined this work in relation to controversial scientific research. In this paper, we review the academic literature where Frankenstein is used to discuss ethics, bioethics, science, technology and medicine. We searched the academic literature and carried out a content (...) analysis of articles discussing the novel and films derived from it, analyzing the findings qualitatively and quantitatively. We recorded the following variables: year and language of publication, whether it referred to the novel or to a film, the academic discipline in which it was published, and the topics addressed in the analysis. Our findings indicate that the scientific literature on Frankenstein focuses mainly on science and the personality of the scientist rather than on the creature the scientist created or ethical aspects of his research. The scientist’s responsibility is central to the ethical interest of Frankenstein; this issue entails both the motivation underlying the scientist’s acts and the consequences of these acts. (shrink)

BackgroundAdvances in biomedicine can substantially change human life. However, progress is not always followed by ethical reflection on its consequences or scientists’ responsibility for their creations. The humanities can help health sciences students learn to critically analyse these issues; in particular, literature can aid discussions about ethical principles in biomedical research. Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus(1818) is an example of a classic novel presenting complex scenarios that could be used to stimulate discussion.Main textWithin the framework of the 200th anniversary (...) of the novel, we searched PubMed to identify works that explore and discuss its value in teaching health sciences. Our search yielded 56 articles, but only two of these reported empirical findings. Our analysis of these articles identified three main approaches to usingFrankensteinin teaching health sciences: discussing the relationship between literature and science, analysing ethical issues in biomedical research, and examining the importance of empathy and compassion in healthcare and research. After a critical discussion of the articles, we propose usingFrankensteinas a teaching tool to prompt students to critically analyse ethical aspects of scientific and technological progress, the need for compassion and empathy in medical research, and scientists’ responsibility for their discoveries.ConclusionFrankensteincan help students reflect on the personal and social limits of science, the connection between curiosity and scientific progress, and scientists’ responsibilities. Its potential usefulness in teaching derives from the interconnectedness of science, ethics, and compassion.Frankensteincan be a useful tool for analysing bioethical issues related to scientific and technological advances, such as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and cloning. Empirical studies measuring learning outcomes are necessary to confirm the usefulness of this approach. (shrink)

: In The View From Here, Jay Wallace emphasises that an agent's capacity to regret a past decision is conditioned by the attachments that she may have developed as a result. Those attachments shape the point of view from which she retrospectively deliberates. Wallace stresses, however, that not every normative aspect of her decision is affected by this change in perspective, because her decision will remain as unjustified as it was in the past. I will argue, however, that this approach (...) to justification is inconsistent with the normative import that Wallace ascribes to the actual dynamics of our attachments in his defence of the rationale of regret. If I am right, Wallace's approach is caught in the following dilemma: Either he renounces a nonperspectival approach to justification or he revises his view about the normative import of the actual dynamics of our attachments. (shrink)

In the ongoing debate, there are a set of mind-body theories sharing a certain physicalist assumption: whenever a genuine cause produces an effect, the causal efficacy of each of the nonphysical properties that participate in that process is determined by the instantiation of a well-defined set of physical properties. These theories would then insist that a nonphysical property could only be causally efficacious insofar as it is physically implemented. However, in what follows we will argue against the idea that fine-grained (...) mental contents could be physically implemented in the way that functional properties are. Therefore, we will examine the metaphysical conditions under which the implementing mechanism of a particular instance of a functional property may be individuated, and see how genuine beliefs and desires—insofar as they track the world—cannot meet such conditions. (shrink)

Nondescriptivist Cognitivism vindicates the cognitive value of moral judgements despite their lack of descriptive content. In this paper,I raise a few worries about the proclaimed virtues of this new metaethical framework Firstly, I argue that Nondescriptivist Cognitivism tends to beg the question against descriptivism and, secondly, discuss Horgan and Timmons' case against Michael Smith's metaethical rationalism. Although I sympathise with their main critical claims against the latter, I am less enthusiastic about the arguments that they provide to support them.

A subject is a being who has a life to lead. In this paper, I explore the array of resources that are available to us (i.e., Westerners at the turn of the millennium) to articulate and assess our lives. Specifically, I shall reflect on the impact that such matters may have on our naturalist conviction that the world ultimately consists of a causal network where notions such as sense and value have no direct bearing. Sometend to assume that an implication (...) of our naturalist world-view is that the notions of sense and value are inevitably relative to the subject’s desires and inclinations. This is, however, a line of reasoning that I would like to resist. For I am convinced that this approach unnecessarily restricts the number of resources to which we can legitimately appeal in order to lead our lives. This restriction will turn out to be quite serious because, as we shall see, it dramatically distorts our perception of the relevance that social ties may have in the life of a subject, as well as the conditions under which a human life may escape the absurd. (shrink)

In Authority and Estrangement Richard Moran takes some rather illuminating steps towards getting rid of the Cartesian picture of self-knowledge. I argue, however, that Moran’s crucial distinction between deliberative and theoretical attitude is seriously contaminated by that traditional picture. More specifically, I will point out why some crucial aspects of the phenomena that Moran describes in terms of the interplay between the theoretical and the deliberative attitude, should rather be interpreted as a process that takes place within the deliberative attitude (...) itself. The theoretical attitude will, as a result, constitute a rather marginal attitude towards one’s own psychological dispositions and experiences, the adoption of which only makes sense in rather peculiar, often pathological, situations. (shrink)

In Values and the Reflective Point of View (2006), Robert Dunn defends a certain expressivist view about evaluative beliefs from which some implications about self-knowledge are explicitly derived. He thus distinguishes between an observational and a deliberative attitude towards oneself, so that the latter involves a purely first-person point of view that gives rise to an especially authoritative, but wholly non-observational, kind of self-knowledge. Even though I sympathize with many aspects of Dunn's approach to evaluative beliefs and also with his (...) stress on the practical significance of self-knowledge, I argue that his proposal seriously misinterprets the role of observation and evidence within the first-person point of view and, derivatively, in the formation of evaluative beliefs. (shrink)

This volume includes a lucid discussion of recent developments by philosophers such as Block, Davidson, Fodor, Kim, Lewis, Mellor, Putnam, Schiffer, Shoemaker, ...

Quassim Cassam distinguishes between trivial and substantial cases of self-knowledge. At first sight, trivial cases are epistemically distinctive insofar as the agent needn't provide any sort of evidence to ground her claim to knowledge. Substantial cases of self-knowledge such as ‘I know I want to have a second child’ do not seem to bear this distinctive relation to evidence. I will argue, however, that substantial cases of self-knowledge are often epistemically distinctive and, to this end, I will challenge a crucial (...) assumption in the current debate about self-knowledge, namely: if a piece of self-knowledge is based on evidence, it must have been delivered by a detached, theoretical attitude toward oneself (_The Detachment Assumption_). My case against the Detachment Assumption combines a negative and a positive programme. Regarding the negative aspect, I will first present Cassam's case for Inferentialism; second, I will argue that this view about self-knowledge is at odds with the sort of self-improvement that he vindicates in his analysis of epistemic vices and, third, I will conclude that only by allowing for an engaged relation to evidence, can we make sense of that sort of self-improvement. Regarding the positive programme, I will first examine the sensitivity to the music that is specific of a graceful dancer and, on this basis, outline an attitude toward oneself that, despite involving evidence, is not detached or theoretical but engaged, so that it gives rise to a kind of substantial self-knowledge that is both transformative and epistemically distinctive. (shrink)

I1. Anil Gupta distinguishes between thin and thick experiences. There are thick experiences like, say, the American Experience of a European traveller. And thin experiences like looking at a yello...

La experiencia del daño tiene, a primera vista, dos polos: el polo de quien causa el daño y el polo de quien lo sufre. Existe, no obstante, una tercera perspectiva: la de quien no causa daño ni lo sufre, pero la del verdugo hiriendo a la víctima. El verdugo puede hacer sentir su voz, insistir en su representación de los hechos. En cambio, la víctima permanece indefensa y la verdad de su daño queda soterrada bajo la palabra del verdugo. Quien (...) tiene noticia acaba aceptando el discurso legitimador del verdugo, acaba convencido de qLie el daño causado estaba justificado por un bien ulterior. En este escrito, examino el papel de la vergüenza, la culpa y el resentimiento en la recuperación de la voz de la víctima. Esta recuperación no consistirá simplemente en reconstruir lo que dice la víctima, sino en reivindicar su autoridad epistémica. Esta reivindicación de la autoridad de la víctima involucra, en cada caso, la descripción de los mecanismos mediante los que el verdugo distorsiona la verdad que algunas víctimas sienten la imperiosa necesidad de revelar. (shrink)

In this wholly original study, Josep Corbi asks how one should relate to a certain kind of human suffering, namely, the harm that people cause one another. Relying upon real life examples of human suffering--including torture, genocide, and warfare--as opposed to thought experiments, Corbi proposes a novel approach to self-knowledge that runs counter to standard Kantian approaches to morality.

To begin, I introduce an analysis of interlevel relations that allows us to offer an initial characterization of the debate about the way classical and connectionist models relate. Subsequently, I examine a compatibility thesis and a conditional claim on this issue.With respect to the compatibility thesis, I argue that, even if classical and connectionist models are not necessarily incompatible, the emergence of the latter seems to undermine the best arguments for the Language of Thought Hypothesis, which is essential to the (...) former. (shrink)

In the ongoing debate, there are a set of mind-body theories sharing a certain physicalist assumption: whenever a genuine cause produces an effect, the causal efficacy of each of the nonphysical properties that participate in that process is determined by the instantiation of a well-defined set of physical properties. These theories would then insist that a nonphysical property could only be causally efficacious insofar as it is physically implemented. However, in what follows we will argue against the idea that fine-grained (...) mental contents could be physically implemented in the way that functional properties are. Therefore, we will examine the metaphysical conditions under which the implementing mechanism of a particular instance of a functional property may be individuated, and see how genuine beliefs and desires—insofar as they track the world—cannot meet such conditions. (shrink)

As I see bus no. 29 approaching, I raise my arm. The bus stops, I take a few steps and get on it. This happens because the driver, having seen my arm raised, interpreted the gesture as a conventional expression of my wish to get on the bus. If it had been bus no. 17, I would not have raised my arm because I know that that bus follows quite a different route. This is not, of course, the end of (...) the story. I might also mention the reasons why I really wanted route 29, and so on. Fortunately, there is no need to go into the details. The important point is that in the explanation of this trivial set of actions I can quite naturally appeal to a number of mental states: perceptions, beliefs, interpretations, desires, etc. The previous story assumes, for instance, that. (shrink)

Abstract: There is much that I admire in Richard Moran's account of how first-person authority may be consistent with self-knowledge as an achievement. In this paper, I examine his attempt to characterize the goal of psychoanalytic treatment, which is surely that the patient should go beyond the mere theoretical acceptance of the analyst's interpretation, and requires instead a more intimate, first-personal, awareness by the patient of their psychological condition.I object, however, that the way in which Moran distinguishes between the deliberative (...) and the theoretical attitudes is ultimately inconsistent with a satisfactory account of psychoanalytic practice; mainly because, despite Moran's claims to the contrary, such a distinction is still inspired by a Cartesian picture of the self. I argue that, in the light of his distinction, Moran may emphasize that an agent's psychological dispositions should be permeable to her decisions and projects, but is forced to reject the idea that permeability could go the other way too. I explore Bernard Williams' notion of acknowledgment and Simone Weil's distinction between two notions of necessity, in order to articulate a notion of receptive passivity which may help us to characterize this second direction of permeability. I finally outline why receptive passivity (and, thereby, the double direction of permeability) is crucial in order to identify the goal of psychoanalytic treatment and, derivatively, to understand how a certain kind of awareness may have a significant therapeutic effect. (shrink)

Robert Dunn and Richard Moran have emphasized the importance of deliberation to account for the privileged authority of self-ascriptions. They oppose a theoretical attitude toward oneself to a deliberative attitude that they regard as more intimate, as purely first-personal. In this paper, I intend to challenge Dunn’s and Moran’s understanding of how the deliberative attitude is to be conceived of and, in particular, I will call into question their claim that this attitude is wholly non-observational. More positively, I will elaborate (...) on the sort of self-observation that must play a central role in an agent’s deliberation if she is to recognize a certain belief, decision, or intention as genuinely her own and, therefore, as expressing a purely first-person point of view. In the elaboration of my argument, I will rely on a number of situations as they are described in Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda. (shrink)

In Authority and Estrangement Richard Moran takes some rather illuminating steps towards getting rid of the Cartesian picture of self-knowledge. I argue, however, that Moran’s crucial distinction between deliberative and theoretical attitude is seriously contaminated by that traditional picture. More specifically, I will point out why some crucial aspects of the phenomena that Moran describes in terms of the interplay between the theoretical and the deliberative attitude, should rather be interpreted as a process that takes place within the deliberative attitude (...) itself. The theoretical attitude will, as a result, constitute a rather marginal attitude towards one’s own psychological dispositions and experiences, the adoption of which only makes sense in rather peculiar, often pathological, situations. (shrink)

En su Investigación sobre el entendimiento humano, David Hume consideró la cuestión de las relaciones entre libertad y necesidad como “el tema más discutido de la metafísica, la ciencia más discutida”. El debate sobre esta venerable cuestión sigue siendo hoy tan vivo como lo fue en tiempos de Hume. El presente volumen colectivo es una buena muestra de ello. Los ensayos que lo forman, escritos desde una pluralidad de perspectivas, ponen de manifiesto la complejidad y la unidad interna del problema (...) al que responden. Elaborados con un estilo carente de tecnicismos, pero no de rigor, estos Ensayos sobre libertad y necesidad despertarán el interés tanto de la persona culta como del especialista en filosofía. (shrink)

Presentación de las tres conferencias impartidas por Barry Stroud en la Càtedra Filosofia i Ciutadania J.L. Blasco, 2014.

La claridad y la argumentación sirven de refugio frente a la charlatanería en el filosofar, pero quienes enfatizan tales principios metodológicos tienden a identificar la claridad con la literalidad y la argumentación con la formalización. En este trabajo, considero los límites de una elucidación filosófica de nuestras prácticas morales que descanse en tal identificación; para ello, examino la relevancia de la posición original de John Rawls para la determinación de los principios de la justicia y, en general, de los experimentos (...) mentales para el estudio de la moralidad. La relevancia de la posición original depende, a mi entender, de un supuesto de concordancia según el cual, a menos que incurramos en algún error deliberativo, no puede haber discrepancia alguna entre nuestros juicios relativos a la justicia acerca de una situación hipotética y nuestros juicios cuando nos enfrentamos realmente a la misma. A lo largo del texto, trato de mostrar que tal supuesto es insostenible a partir del examen de una experiencia moral particular: a saber, la experiencia del soldado; y, para ello, revindico las virtudes deliberativas de la conciencia expresiva de ciertos hechos frente a una mera conciencia declarativa de los mismos; finalmente, extraigo algunas consecuencias de esta distinción para la definición de un estilo filosófico. Astress on clarity and argumentation may serve as a refuge against quackery, but often those who focus on such methodological principles tend to identify clarity with literalness and argumentation with formalization. My reflection upon the limits of a philosophical style inspired in such an identification is mainly concerned with the use of thought experiments in the elucidation of our moral practices and, more specifically, with the relevance of John Rawls' original position for the determination of the basic principles of justice. To this purpose, I emphasize that the relevance of the original position rests on a matching assumption according to which, if agents deliberate appropriately, there should not be any gap between our judgments concerning justice about a hypothetical situation and our judgments whenever we are actually confronted with it. I will, nevertheless, explore a particular moral experience, namely, that of the soldier, only to conclude that such an assumption is untenable. More specifically, I will defend the deliberative virtues of an expressive awareness of certain facts as opposed to a mere declarative awareness of them. In the last section, I will derive some implications of this distinction as to the articulation of a philosophical style. (shrink)

I discuss, in this paper, the view of value that is associated with Humean motivational theories. I argue that these theories unjustifiably constrain the kind of element that may contribute to our motivational economy and, thereby, unduly reduce our capacity to recognize certain sources of value. To this purpose, I will examine some axiological experiences that, if I am right, are inaccessible to a Humean analysis of our motivational structure. I will insist, for instance, on a sense in which social (...) links may be important in the life of a human being which the Humean notion of desire cannot apprehend. (shrink)

Relatar lo ocurrido como invención: una introducción a la filosofía de la ficción contemporánea ofrece al lector en castellano una magnífica oportunidad para familiarizarse con algunos aspectos centrales de la filosofía del lenguaje contemporánea y sus implicaciones para la teoría de la ficción. García-Carpintero recorre los argumentos fundamentales en favor y en contra de cada una de las posiciones relevantes, y nos propone finalmente un análisis alternativo de la norma de la ficción y una teoría neofregeana de los términos referenciales (...) que logra esquivar algunas objeciones tradicionales. Esta discusión incluye, no obstante, dos objeciones a su norma de la ficción: una se refiere a las formas de la conciencia que esa norma presupone y la otra a la naturaleza del interés que suscitan los proyectos imaginativos vinculados a las obras de ficción. (shrink)

On analyzing the problem that arises whenever the set of maximal elements is large, and a selection is then required (see Peris & Subiza 1998), we realize that logical ways of selecting among maximals violate the classical notion and axioms of rationality. We arrive at the same conclusion if we analyze solutions to the problem of choosing from a tournament (where maximal elements do not necessarily exist). So, in our opinion the notion of rationality must be discussed, not only in (...) the traditional sense of external conditions (Sen 1993), but in terms of the internal information provided by the binary relation. (shrink)

In this chapter, I focus on the experience of torture and, more specifically, on Jean Améry's account of it in his book *At the Mind's Limits*. There he claims that the loss of confidence in the world is the most devastating effect he experienced as a victim of torture. I thus explore what cosmopolitan aspiration may be revealed by this loss and also discuss whether it is to be discredited as an irrational reaction on the victim's side or instead as (...) proportional to the facts and, consequently, as relevant to the conditions under which a certain cosmopolitan aspiration could be achieved or, at least, favored. (shrink)

The centenary of the birth of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) provided an opportunity for recovering some of the great Wittgensteinian subjects, for re-examining them and for discussing their implications and relevance. This volume is the result of the interchange that took place in Girona (Spain) among well-known scholars of Wittgenstein's work in different countries. The eleven contributions are organized into three main subjects: on Wittgenstein's method (B. McGuinness, E. Tugendhat and J.M. Terricabras), on knowledge and meaning (G.E.M. Anscombe, R. Bambrough, N. (...) Malcolm, and P.T. Geach), on language and use (D. Pears, E.v. Savigny, J. Bouveresse and J. Ferrater Mora). This volume is not only the result of the different and mature reflexions of its authors, but in two cases (Malcolm and Ferrater Mora) it has also unfortunately become their last contribution to the subject. (shrink)

Contrary to what he expected, Primo Levi didn’t experience his life after being released from Auschwitz as cheerful and light-hearted. He – like many other survivors – was haunted by an obscure and solid anguish. It took some effort for him to discern the object or source of this anguish. He finally identified it as springing from a sense of shame or guilt in front of the drowned, that is, of those who were exterminated in the Lager. He could not (...) determine, however, whether his shame or guilt was at all rational. In this paper l examine Levi’s shame in light of what I regard as the dominant conception of practical deliberation, according to which principles and emotional detachment are central to our ability to deliberate appropriately. This conception underlies the role that John Rawls ascribes to the original position in the determination of the fundamental principles of justice. Deliberation in the original position is supposed to abstract away from any particular moral situations that one may actually have faced, since these are purely circumstantial elements to be discarded as both irrelevant and misleading for a proper deliberation on the principles of justice. In this paper, I intend both to make a case against the conception of practical deliberation on which Rawls’ original position relies and to vindicate the rationality of Levi’s shame, once some well-entrenched assumptions are brought to light and challenged. (shrink)

Relatar lo ocurrido como invención: una introducción a la filosofía de la ficción contemporánea offers to the Spanish reader an excellent opportunity to get in touch with central aspects in the current philosophy of language and their implications for fiction theory. In his book, García-Carpintero carefully presents the fundamental lines of argument for and against the most relevant views and, on this basis, defends his own analysis of the norm of fiction as well as a neo-Fregean theory of referential terms (...) that averts some traditional objections. My review includes, however, two objections concerning García-Carpintero’s norm of fiction, one relative to the forms of awareness that it seems to presuppose, and the other regarding the nature of the interest associated with the imaginative projects that are constitutive of fictional works. (shrink)

Event‐related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an adjective predicated of it. The rapid detection of this anomaly would indicate that the parser had established the coreference relation between the null subject and an antecedent, and that the processor (...) had rapidly consulted verb control information to select the proper antecedent of the null subject. The results showed that for both subject and object control items ungrammatical adjectives elicited a P600 effect. These data imply that the processor has coindexed the null subject with an antecedent, and that the antecedent has been selected on the basis of control information. These results are compatible with parsing models that emphasize the rapid influence of verb‐specific information on sentence processing. (shrink)

Marta Suria writes *Ella soy yo* as part of her response to the irruption of the memories of the sexual aggressions she had suffered since childhood. She is convinced that the way she narrates her experience will transform and liberate her. How is it at all possible that a certain kind of narrative may transform and li- berate us? In this paper, we will first describe the conception of the relationship between language and experience that lies behind this perplexity and, (...) secondly, we will sketch an alternative conception that will hopefully allow us to account for the transformative power of certain kinds of narratives. This alternative conception will hinge on the idea of expression and on the concept of aspect perception. For this purpose, we will firstly argue that language can be used not only to describe or evaluate our experience, but also to express it; we will, then, defend the view that linguistic or gestural expressions of our experiences not only announce or manifest them, but contribute to shaping and modulating them; finally, we will highlight the transformative, humanizing power of certain expressive uses of language. (shrink)

The received view about rationalizing explanations divides our psychological status into two kinds: beliefs and desires. In *The Retrieval of Ethics*, Talbot Brewer makes a case against this view. In this paper, I examine our experience as readers of *The Castle* by Franz Kafka to support Brewer's critical program, that is, his challenge to the received view. I will argue, however, that a proper analysis of this experience poses a serious problem to Brewer's alternative approach, that is, to his attempt (...) to retrieve our agency thanks to a proper understanding of the role of the good in rationalizing explanations. (shrink)