<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>The clinical empiricism of Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) and his definition of <italic>especie morbosae</italic> represented a substantial turn in the medicine of his time. This turn supposed the shift towards an ontological conception of diseases, from a qualitative to quantitative interpretation. Sydenham’s clinical proposal had a great influence on empiricism philosophical thinking, particularly in John Locke and his delimitation of knowledge. The dialogue between medicine and philosophy, set out by Sydenham-Locke, reactivates the problem of the clinical and theoretical foundations of medical thought, as well as the limits of scientific knowledge. Similar to problem exposed in the Hippocratic treatise <italic>On ancient medicine</italic>, seventeenth-century medicine seeks its epistemological foundations and the solution to its difficulties in clinical experience, probability and analogy. The aim of this work is to show the Sydenham’s contribution to one of the great controversies between medicine and philosophy.</abstract>

The Ontological Concept of Disease and the Clinical Empiricism of Thomas Sydenham

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Meinong’s thought has been rediscovered in recent times by analytic philosophy: his object theory has significant consequences in formal ontology, and especially his account of impossible objects has proved itself to be decisive in a wide range of fields, from logic up to ontology of fiction. Rejecting the traditional ‘prejudice in favour of the real’, Meinong investigates what there is <italic>not:</italic> a peculiar non-existing object is precisely the fictional object, which exemplifies a number of properties (like Sherlock Holmes, who lives in Baker Street and is an outstanding detective) without existing in the same way as flesh-and-blood detectives do. Fictional objects are in some sense <italic>incomplete</italic> objects, whose core of constituent properties is not completely determined. Now, what does it imply to hold that a fictional object may also occur in true statements? We shall deal with the objections raised by Russell and Quine against Meinong’s view, pointing out limits and advantages of both perspectives.</abstract>

Centaurs, Pegasus, Sherlock Holmes: Against the Prejudice in Favour of the Real

Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU), País Vasco,

Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU) País Vasco,

Leibniz crítico de Euclides. El método del Analysis Situs

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>According to the traditional view, the following incompatibility holds true: in reasoning, either there is warrant (certainty) or there is novelty. If there is warrant, there is not novelty: that would be the case of deductive reasoning. If there is novelty, there is not warrant: that would be the case of inductive reasoning. Causal reasoning would belong to the second group because there is novelty and, therefore, there is not warrant in it. I argue that this is false: reasoning may have novelty and, nevertheless, be a deductive one. That is precisely what happens in (some) causal reasoning. And I will develop the following line of argumentation: one thing is to warrant that some state of affairs exists and other thing is to warrant that warrant. So we may have correct deductive reasoning without having certainty of that correction, like in some cases of causal reasoning.</abstract>

From Effect to Cause: Deductive Reasoning

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>According to an influential epistemological tradition, science explains phenomena on the basis of laws, but the last two decades have witnessed a neo-mechanistic movement that emphasizes the fundamental role of mechanism-based explanations in science, which have the virtue of opening the “black box” of correlations and of providing a genuine understanding of the phenomena. Mechanisms enrich the empirical content of a theory by introducing a new set of variables, helping us to make causal inferences that are not possible on the basis of macro-level correlations (due to well-known problems regarding the underdetermination of causation by correlation). However, the appeal to mechanisms has also a methodological price. They are vulnerable to interference effects; they also face underdetermination problems, because the available evidence often allows different interpretations of the underlying structure of a correlation; they are strongly context-dependent and their individuation as causal patterns can be controversial; they present specific testability problems; finally, mechanism-based extrapolations can be misleading due to the local character of mechanisms. At any rate, the study of mechanisms is an indispensable part of the human sciences, and the problems that they raise can be controlled by quantitative and qualitative methods, and an epistemologically informed exercise of critical thinking.</abstract>

Laws and Mechanisms in The Human Sciences

Is testability falsifiability?

Special Issue Truth and Falsity: Introduction

On how statistics is used and abused to find truth in Science

A parrésia em Foucault - tecimentos

A Pós-Verdade, Para Além do Verdadeiro e do Falso

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
From the initial analysis of John Morris in 1976 about if computers can lie, I have presented my own treatment of the problem using what can be called a computational lying procedure. One that uses two Turing Machines. From there, I have argued that such a procedure cannot be implemented in a Turing Machine alone. A fundamental difficulty arises, concerning the computational representation of the self-knowledge a machine should have about the fact that it is lying. Contrary to Morris’ claim, I have thus suggested that computers – as far as they are Turing Machines – cannot lie. Consequently, I have claimed that moral agency attribution to a robot or any other automated AI system, cannot be made, strictly grounded on imitating behaviors. Self-awareness as an ontological grounding for moral attribution must be evoked. This can pose a recognition problem from our part, should the sentient system be the only agent capable of acknowledging its own sentience.
</abstract>

Lying, computers and self-awareness

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Rorty saw the course of philosophy in the twentieth century as an effort to part from two major philosophical trends, namely historicism and naturalism, only to inevitably return at the end of a tortuous path to these very same tendencies. If we can concede without major objections (although perhaps with many objections of detail) Rorty’s diagnosis of the trends in contemporary continental and analytical philosophy, which seem to reveal the exhaustion of modern philosophy, based as it has been on epistemology, we must, on the other hand, examine carefully the three main questions that this diagnosis leaves open: (1) How does Rorty reconcile continental idealist subjectivism with materialistic behaviorism? (2) Is it really inevitable that philosophy (and philosophers) blinded by Geist are unable to question prevalent beliefs? (3) Finally, is the acceptance of a liberalism that is not able to give reasons for itself the most effective and pragmatic liberalism? In answering these questions, it may not be possible to avoid a non-dogmatic, but pragmatic, metaphysics: a vocabulary of vocabularies that allows Rorty (and us) to speak of the problems of justice in Plato and Rawls, of the soul in Aristotle and Descartes, of the dystopias in Moro and Orwell. On pragmatic terms, perhaps a modest version of a metaphysic’s “vocabulary” turns out to be as legitimate and practical as any other vocabulary.
</abstract>

Dispensing with Truthfulness: truth and liberty in Rorty’s thought

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This paper tries to understand the phenomenon that humans are able to empathize with robots and the intuition that there might be something wrong with “abusing” robots by discussing the question regarding the moral standing of robots. After a review of some relevant work in empirical psychology and a discussion of the ethics of empathizing with robots, a philosophical argument concerning the moral standing of robots is made that questions distant and uncritical moral reasoning about entities’ properties and that recommends first trying to understand the issue by means of philosophical and artistic work that shows how ethics is always relational and historical, and that highlights the importance of language and appearance in moral reasoning and moral psychology. It is concluded that attention to relationality and to verbal and non-verbal languages of suffering is key to understand the phenomenon under investigation, and that in robot ethics we need less certainty and more caution and patience when it comes to thinking about moral standing.</abstract>

Why Care About Robots? Empathy, Moral Standing, and the Language of Suffering

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Human thinking is heterogeneous, and among its different forms, thinking in dyadic oppositions is associated with the concept of themata. Gerald Holton characterises themata as elements that lie beneath the structure and development of physical theories as well as of non-scientific thinking. Themata have different uses, such as a thematic concept, or a thematic component of the concept; a methodological (or epistemological) thema; and a propositional thema. Serge Moscovici has placed the concept of themata in the heart of his theory of social representations which is based on ‘natural thinking’ and on forms of daily knowing, including common sense. In this article I shall explore some features of thematic concepts and of methodological themata in scientific theories and in common sense. More specifically, I shall refer to the significance of the methodological (or epistemological) thema the Self and Other(s) in common-sense thinking and in social practices.</abstract>

Themata in science and in common sense

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>According to Enactivism, cognition should be understood in terms of a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. Further, this view holds that organisms do not passively receive information from this environment, they rather selectively create this environment by engaging in interaction with the world. Radical Enactivism adds that basic cognition does so without entertaining representations and hence that representations are not an essential constituent of cognition. Some proponents think that getting rid of representations amounts to a revolutionary alternative to standard views about cognition. To emphasize the impact, they claim that this ‘radicalization’ should be applied to all enactivist friendly views, including, another current and potentially revolutionary approach to cognition: predictive processing. In this paper, we will show that this is not the case. After introducing the problem (section 2), we will argue (section 3) that ‘radicalizing’ predictive processing does not add any value to this approach. After this (section 4), we will analyze whether or not radical Enactivism can count as a revolution within cognitive science at all and conclude that it cannot. Finally, in section 5 we will claim that cognitive science is better off when embracing heterogeneity.</abstract>

Enactivism, Radical Enactivism and Predictive Processing: What is Radical in Cognitive Science?

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In this paper, first of all, I want to try a new defense of the utterance approach as to the relationship between fictional and nonfictional works on the one hand and between fictional and nonfictional utterances on the other hand, notably the idea that the distinction between fictional and nonfictional works is derivative on the distinction between fictional and nonfictional utterances of the sentences that constitute a text. Moreover, I want to account for the second distinction in minimally contextualist semantic terms. Finally, I want to hold that what makes a fictional utterance, hence a fictional work, properly fictional is the contextually pre-semantic fact that its utterer entertains an act of make-believe, where such an act is accounted for in metarepresentational terms. This ultimately means that the fiction/nonfiction distinction is not clarified in terms of the fictional works/nonfictional works distinction, for things rather go the other way around.</abstract>

The Nature of Fiction/al Utterances

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>According to Kant, the axioms of intuition, i.e. space and time, must provide an organization of the sensory experience. However, this first orderliness of empirical sensations seems to depend on a kind of faculty pertaining to subjectivity, rather than to the encounter of these same intuitions with the real properties of phenomena. Starting from an analysis of some very significant developments in mathematical and theoretical physics in the last decades, in which intuition played an important role, we argue that nevertheless intuition comes into play in a fundamentally different way to that which Kant had foreseen: in the form of a formal or “categorical” yet not sensible intuition. We show further that the statement that our space is mathematically three-dimensional and locally Euclidean by no means follows from a supposed <italic>a priori</italic> nature of the sensible or subjective space as Kant claimed. In fact, the three-dimensional space can bear many different geometrical and topological structures, as particularly the mathematical results of Milnor, Smale, Thurston and Donaldson demonstrated. On the other hand, it has been stressed that even the phenomenological or perceptual space, and especially the visual system, carries a very rich geometrical organization whose structure is essentially non-Euclidean. Finally, we argue that in order to grasp the meaning of abstract geometric objects, as <italic>n</italic>-dimensional spaces, connections on a manifold, fiber spaces, module spaces, knotted spaces and so forth, where sensible intuition is essentially lacking and where therefore another type of mathematical idealization intervenes, we need to develop a new form of intuition.</abstract>

The Role of Intuition and Formal Thinking in Kant, Riemann, Husserl, Poincare, Weyl, and in Current Mathematics and Physics

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Reasoning from a naturalistic perspective, viewing the mind as an evolved biological organ with a particular structure and function, a number of influential philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that science is constrained by human nature. How exactly our genetic constitution constrains scientific representations of the world remains unclear. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it often leads to the unwarranted conclusion that we are cognitively closed to certain aspects or properties of the world. Secondly, it stands in the way of a nuanced account of the relationship between our cognitive and perceptual wiring and scientific theory. In response, I propose a typology or classification of the different kinds of biological constraints and their sources on science. Using <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_kjps-2017-0002_ref_008_w2aab2b8b2b1b7b1ab1ab8Aa">Boden’s (1990)</xref> notion of a conceptual space, I distinguish between constraints relating to the ease with which we can reach representations within our conceptual space (which I call ‘biases’) and constraints causing possible representations to fall outside of our conceptual space. This last kind of constraints does not entail that some aspects or properties of the world cannot be represented by us – as argued by advocates of ‘cognitive closure’ – merely that some ways of representing the world are inaccessible to us. It relates to what <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_kjps-2017-0002_ref_015_w2aab2b8b2b1b7b1ab1ac15Aa">Clark (1986)</xref> and <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_kjps-2017-0002_ref_030_w2aab2b8b2b1b7b1ab1ac30Aa">Rescher (1990)</xref> have framed as ‘the alien scientist hypothesis’ (the possibility that alien scientists, endowed with radically different cognitive abilities, could produce representations of the world that are unintelligible to us). The purpose of this typology is to provide some much needed clarity and structure to the debate about biological constraints on science.</abstract>

How Our Biology Constrains Our Science

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Kairos. Journal of Philosophy & Science

 Kairos. Journal of Philosophy &amp; Science is an open access peer reviewed journal published by the Center for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon...

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 Kairos. Journal of Philosophy &amp; Science is an open access peer reviewed journal published by the Center for Philosophy...