Resumen: El siguiente trabajo pretende analizar la categoría de “romanticismo político” desarrollada por el filósofo alemán Carl Schmitt, aplicando su acepción de “política romántica” al caso del poeta-político chileno Guillermo Matta Goyenechea. Por medio de términos tales como imaginación, lenguaje cósmico, progreso moral, democracia, entre otros, este poeta-político articuló su discurso social durante el periodo de 1853 a 1858, como elementos de disputa con el poder regente bajo la intención de reformar la sociedad chilena de su época.: The present work (...) had the purpose of defining the category of "political romanticism" developed by the German philosopher Carl Schmitt, applying its meaning of "romantic politics" to the case of the Chilean political poet Guillermo Matta Goyenechea. Through the terms stories such as imagination, cosmic language, moral progress, democracy, among others, this poet-politician articulated his social discourse during the period from 1853 to 1858, as elements of dispute with the ruling power under the intention of reforming the chilean society of his time. (shrink)

We review and discuss A. H. Louie’s book “More than Life Itself: A Reflexion on Formal Systems and Biology” from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, involving both biology and mathematics, taking into account new developments and related theories.

'Everyone knows what attention is’ according to William James. Much work on attention in psychology and neuroscience cites this famous phrase only to quickly dismiss it. But James is right about this: ‘attention’ was not introduced into psychology and neuroscience as a theoretical concept. I argue that we should therefore study attention with broadly the same methodology that David Marr has applied to the study of perception. By focusing more on Marr's Computational Level of analysis, we arrive at a unified (...) answer to the question of what attention is, what role it plays in the mind, and why organisms like us have that capacity. I propose a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level that optimizes in a three-dimensional space: it should capture core aspects of our first-person experience of attention, be explanatorily powerful in psychology and neuroscience, and fertile in an interdisciplinary context. I show how this methodology leads to what I call the priority structure account of attention. Attention is what organizes current information to make it more useful for the organism. We can identify it by four features. Attention, in this way, helps a cognitive system to integrate its informational state with its current motivational state. I describe how this account improves on alternatives and shows why attention is a useful concept in many disciplines and for connecting them. -/- This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science. (shrink)

Although the advantage of biorobotics over traditional modelling tools is not always evident from the studies on animal search addressed in the target article, this commentary argues that testing different robotic architectures and specific biological organisms in structured search spaces, where environmental constraints matter, might prove one of the most promising research strategies in comparative cognition.

El objetivo de este escrito es exponer las características del Estado democrático como lo concibe Spinoza en su Tratado teológico político, conciliando la libertad individual con la paz del Estado. Para esto, en primera instancia se contrastan los efectos de gobernar de forma autoritaria, liberal y democráticamente. Luego presento los fundamentos del Estado a partir del derecho natural individual y una ley universal humana para poder establecer los requisitos para que se conserve el Estado democrático: obediencia, fidelidad y libertad de (...) expresión de parte de los súbditos, determinando los límites tanto de los individuos como de parte del Estado. Finalmente, se presenta la degeneración de la razón de Estado como la concibe Maquiavelo, dejando abierta la reflexión para lo que sucede en el ámbito de la política actual. (shrink)

Este texto trabaja a partir de la poesía de José Manuel Arango. Dada la formación filosófica del poeta, se buscó en su obra una reflexión con respecto a las preguntas fundamentales al ser humano y que la filosofía ha intentado responder desde la antigüedad: qué idea del hombre, del mundo y de la existencia hay en su poesía, de tal forma que pudiera establecerse un puente entre la filosofía y la literatura; y derivada de esta última, pero igualmente importante, se (...) indagó por la reflexión estética que allí subyace, su concepción del arte, del artista y particularmente de la poesía. Y ambas preguntas tendieron, a su vez, a un fin común: encontrar la posibilidad de verdad que hay en su obra. (shrink)

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element (...) of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective. (shrink)

Chomsky's “revolution” and the revolution in sign language linguistics began around the same time, but they did not directly affect each other for a while. This chapter focuses on Chomsky‐inspired research on sign language grammar and the ways that the study of sign languages connects to theories of innateness, the two main ways that Chomsky's impact has been felt in sign linguistics. Chomsky's linguistic legacy has two primary arms: one in theories of syntax, and the other in theories of language (...) acquisition. Chomsky's strong claim is that the input provided to young children acquiring their native language is too poor to constitute a complete inductive basis for general cognitive learning principles to succeed. Specifying the content of the “language acquisition device” has been a central concern of Chomskian linguistics. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the enterprise of evaluating and improving our representational devices. But how should we conduct this enterprise? One increasingly popular answer to this question proposes that conceptual engineering should proceed in terms of the functions of our representational devices. In this paper, we argue that the best way of understanding this suggestion is in terms of normative functions, where normative functions of concepts are, roughly, things that they allow us to do that matter normatively (for example, things in (...) virtue of which we have normative reasons to have these concepts). Not only does this introduce a novel view about functions to the literature. This proposal also fits more naturally than the alternatives with conceptual engineering as a normative enterprise, and it allows functions to play all of the explanatory roles assigned to them in the conceptual engineering literature. Our discussion of the explanatory advantages of normative functions also advances the understanding of the ways in which concepts can be authoritative, what this means for conceptual engineering, and highlights the importance of political philosophy for thinking about conceptual engineering in practice. Furthermore, the paper explicates what kind of role considerations about function can and should actually play in conceptual engineering. (shrink)

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine raises fundamental ethical issues. As one example, AI systems in the field of mental health successfully detect signs of mental disorders, such as depression, by using data from social media. These AI depression detectors (AIDDs) identify users who are at risk of depression prior to any contact with the healthcare system. The article focuses on the ethical implications of AIDDs regarding affected users’ health-related autonomy. Firstly, it presents the (ethical) discussion of AI (...) in medicine and, specifically, in mental health. Secondly, two models of AIDDs using social media data and different usage scenarios are introduced. Thirdly, the concept of patient autonomy, according to Beauchamp and Childress, is critically discussed. Since this concept does not encompass the specific challenges linked with the digital context of AIDDs in social media sufficiently, the current analysis suggests, finally, an extended concept of health-related digital autonomy. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Haze’s brief argument for the falsity of the theory that instantial terms refer arbitrarily, proposed by Breckenridge and Magidor in 2012. In this paper, I characterise instantial terms and outline the theory of arbitrary reference; then I reconstruct Haze’s argument and contend that it fails in its purpose. Haze’s argument is supposed to be a _reductio ad absurdum:_ according to Haze, it proves that a contradiction follows from the most basic tenets of the theory (...) of arbitrary reference. I will argue, however, that the contradiction in question follows not from these tenets, but from the surreptitious use that Haze makes of a self-referential expression. I conclude, consequently, that Haze’s argument is nothing more than an illustration of the well-known fact that self-referential expressions produce paradoxical results. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on a theory of the ideological public sphere in the age of digital media. It describes the public sphere as an initially ascending and then descending communication process that includes both polarising and integrating publics, which are organised by antagonistic media and compromise-building mass media. This framework allows us to distinguish between hegemonic, populist, and popular-oriented flows of communication, as well as register changes in the interplay of different publics driven by digital media platforms. Digital transformations of (...) the public sphere give rise to antagonistic and networked-individualistic flows of populist communication that put public hegemony under constant pressure. The challenge is to find ways to strengthen popular communications that enable democratic learning processes and the flourishing of communicative competences of all citizens. (shrink)

There are compelling reasons to believe that musical works are abstract. However, this hypothesis conflicts with the platitude that musical works are appreciated by means of audition: the things that enter our ear canals and make our eardrums vibrate must be concrete, so how can musical works be listened to if they are abstract? This question constitutes the audibility problem. In this paper, I assess Julian Dodd’s elaborate attempt to solve it, and contend that Dodd’s attempt is unsuccessful. Then I (...) discuss what I take to be the ideal response to the audibility problem, and show that it ultimately fails. I contend, consequently, that the project of construing musical works as audible is disheartening. Accordingly, in my last section, I will argue the audibility problem may be satisfactorily resolved without ascribing audibility to musical works. (shrink)

The online version of the original article can be found under doi:10.1007/s11948-007-9045-2.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or Google’s Bard have shown significant performance on a variety of text-based tasks, such as summarization, translation, and even the generation of new...

According to Ladyman, the world consists of nothing more than relations that relate to no particulars. Could the world be nothing but structure? In this chapter it is argued that even though there are a number of problems with the standard view of relations accompanied by a particularist ontology, substituting for it a world of pure structure is not progress. A world of pure structure would be no more than a Platonic entity, lacking any resources for concretization. Consequently, there would (...) be no possibility of distinguishing between a world-kind and its concrete instance or instances. It is also argued that the view has insufficient empirical motivation. The history of science does not support the claim that structure is preserved through theory change nor that the structural components of a theory are extricable from its ontological commitments. (shrink)

Pegaso Zorokin es una novela experimental que fue publicada en 2012 en cinco volúmenes de la revista digital [Radiador] Magazine. Está compuesta por veintitrés capítulos sin aparente conexión entre ellos. Esta estructura complica una lectura global y pone en crisis la idea de novela. Sin embargo, es posible encontrar continuidad dentro de los fragmentos si se atiende a los puentes hipertextuales dentro del texto. Estas conexiones logran la unidad buscada. La conformación de la novela es muy similar a la de (...) cualquier red social digital. El objetivo de este artículo es explicar este funcionamiento dinámico. El trabajo analítico fue realizado bajo un método semiótico que involucra los conceptos semiósfera y persona semiótica de Yuri Lotman; hipertextualidad de Gerard Genette y propagabilidad de Gabrielle Marino. El análisis fue aplicado a tres de las cinco entregas de la novela de Arana, demostrando que el texto está compuesto por una red interna cohesionadora. (shrink)

This article reads some familiar examples of contemporary visual arts, such as Cindy Sherman, Mona Hatoum, Robert Gober, John Miller, Eva Hesse, Orlan and Robert Mapplethorpe, by engaging with diff...

ABSTRACT The difference between perception and cognition seems introspectively obvious in many cases. Perceiving and thinking have also been assigned quite different roles, in epistemology, in theories of reference and of mental content, in philosophy of psychology, and elsewhere. Yet what is the nature of the distinction? In what way, or ways, do perception and cognition differ? The paper reviews recent work on these questions. Four main respects in which perception and cognition have been held to differ are discussed. First, (...) their phenomenal character, such as the often-remarked vivacity or immediacy of perception. Second, the way in which they represent the world, e.g. the non-propositional nature of the contents, or non-discursive character of the vehicles, that have been held to characterise perceptual representation. Third, their place in cognitive architecture, i.e., roughly, in the information-flow of the mind, such as their alleged (non-)modularity. Fourth, their mind-world relations, e.g. the way in which perceptions seem to be tightly causally linked with distal or proximal stimuli. Against this background, we distinguish some main options for an account of the perception/cognition distinction, in particular concerning whether there is one, several, or no interesting and principled distinction(s) to be drawn here. (shrink)

According to Russell and Norvig’s (2009) classification, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the field that aims at building systems which either think rationally, act rationally, think like humans, or...