Philosophical Debate Research Articles

How metaphysical ignorance shape the discussion on the nature of the mind

Despite the fact that humans experience the reality of consciousness first hand, a remarkable paradigm shift within the Western worldview has entrenched the notion of an inverted cognitive order: first we have objects, and only then minds, if we have them at all. How the community of minds developed such a counterintuitive theory, and how this mental product was elevated to the status of an undisputable ‘scientific’ principle is a long story, one that involves more cultural history than sound philosophical arguments, and nearly no science. Oddly, mainstream materialism helped qualifying another model for which very little rational support is available: dogmatic dualism. Psychiatrists in general lack the basic knowledge to deal with this metaphysical aspect of their ‘objects’, which greatly impoverishes the efficiency and decelerates the advancement of our understanding of the mind. This article will present the major inconsistencies of dualism, and why they ultimately promote materialism. Finally, I will stress how this diversion has been harmful for medicine, and how philosophical education could mitigate it.

Comparing a Microprocessor to the Brain: Exploring Knowledge, Intelligence, and Consciousness in an Age of Artificial Intelligence

Brains and microprocessors, while seemingly distinct, share a profound complexity that challenges our understanding of both. In "Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?" by Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording, this complexity is explored through a comparative analysis, raising questions about knowledge, complexity, and the relationship between humans and machines. The authors challenge the common analogy of brains as nature's computers, highlighting the struggle neuroscientists face in comprehending systems like microprocessors, despite their similar composition of billions of interconnected components. Jonas and Kording argue that the limitations of current neuroscience frameworks hinder a deep understanding of brain function, suggesting that methodologies from computer science could enhance the field. Their critique extends to fundamental philosophical debates about consciousness and intelligence, questioning what the difficulties in understanding complex systems reveal about the nature of knowledge. This essay dissects these limitations and their impact on our understanding of brain processes, advocating for an interdisciplinary approach to intelligence that encompasses both biological and artificial systems. By embracing the parallels between brains and microprocessors, we can advance a more comprehensive understanding of both.

Derrida and Kant's staging of capital punishment

AbstractJacques Derrida's claim that Immanuel Kant was the most rigorous defender of the death penalty has rekindled interest in this topic in the context of Kant's work. Understandably, most articles have focused on Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals, in which he defends the legitimacy of capital punishment. However, many of these readings ignore the fact that the death penalty is a recurring theme in his writing. This article explores references to capital punishment in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and uncovers a consistent theme: the connection between morality and acts of self‐sacrifice. It aims to demonstrate the challenges of formulating a philosophical argument for the abolition of the death penalty.

Collingwood on Spinoza and the Social-Political Role of Art

Abstract We argue that the proper context for understanding Collingwood’s The Principles of Art is his claim that it has bearing “upon the condition of art in England in 1937”. We thus argue that he formulated a philosophical argument that underpins avant-garde dramatic poetry and theatrical practices (Eliot, Auden and the Group Theatre), taking his interpretation of Spinoza’s Ethics 5 prop. 3 to be the book’s central thesis: it is through art that one knows, against the ‘corruption of consciousness’, what emotions one feels and recognizes them as one’s own. Collingwood further believed that this could only be achieved through collaboration between the artist and the community, validating new theatrical practices involving interaction with the audience. We analyse these views in the context of England in 1937: in an era marked by the rise of Fascism and Nazism, Collingwood believed that art thus conceived could help restoring emotional support for the defense of liberal democracies. We conclude with an exploration of parallels with and divergences from the Spinozist idea of ‘mobilizing affects’ in contemporary ‘left populism’ (Mouffe).

“All knowledge is either conception or assent”. On the history and significance of a fundamental distinction in Islamic philosophy

ABSTRACT Following Aristotle, classical Islamic philosophers distinguished between two types of knowledge: conception and assent. This paper argues that the discussions elicited by this distinction are an essential feature of postclassical Islamic philosophy (ca. 1200–1800). The early postclassical philosophers made the distinction central to logic and thereby to epistemology and scientific inquiry at large. As the distinction came to be perceived as problematic, it sparked philosophical arguments about a range of issues in logic and epistemology. One particularly pertinent problem was the nature of the distinction itself: it was understood as an exclusive disjunction, but it seemed impossible to define one notion without recourse to the other. In the fourteenth century this led to the emergence of a new genre of philosophical writings exclusively dedicated to discussing the precise nature of the distinction. This paper discusses some of the central arguments of these writings, showing how philosophers grappling with that problem devised new theories of judgement and new forms of the proposition as they were continuously developing their theory of knowledge.

Okot p’Bitek’s case against traditional African theism

In this article, I locate Okot p’Bitek’s evaluation of African traditional religion and his critique of the traditional African theistic stance in the broader African limited God tradition. I argue that while p’Bitek’s claim is plausible that traditional African societies do not believe in a supreme being that possesses the omni-properties in the context of commitment to the limitation thesis, the other claim, that these societies are atheistic because they merely acknowledge the reality of mystical forces and powers rather than God or gods, constitutes a hasty, unsustainable generalisation. Adopting the method of philosophical exposition and argumentation, I point out that in purporting to make a cultural statement in favour of atheism, p’Bitek fails to reckon with the existence of two culturally rooted but conflicting views of God in African traditional religion and traditional African thought. One view endorses traditional theism while the other, for the most part, proposes that God is limited in power, knowledge and goodness. I argue that both views are damaging to p’Bitek’s second claim.

Cioran and Time

Abstract This contribution endeavors to excavate Cioran’s metaphysics of time as emerging from a critique of Nietzsche’s view(s) of eternal return. Thereby, I argue against reducing Cioran to a self-contradictory and destructive thinker with stylistic qualities but on the margins of philosophical debates, particularly those on the question of time. To retrieve Cioran’s understanding of time, my innovative method is to assemble his disordered aphorisms under a Nietzschean angle in order to unearth Cioran’s intimate spiritual journey on the question of time. I conclude that if Cioran’s coherence has eluded scholarly investigation it is because his identified stance is intricately intertwined with his secretive and agnostic theological quest. To develop a better understanding of Cioran’s metaphysics, I introduce and advocate for a “wandering paradigm” in order to deconstruct what I refer to as the “sedentary paradigm” derived from the nihilist or Nietzschean interpretation.

Doubt Method Between (Al-Ghazali and Descartes)

This research, The Method of Doubt between (Al-Ghazali and Descartes), interprets and explains the similarities and differences of the two philosophers on the issue of knowledge from doubt to certainty. In order to understand the truth and different dimensions of this issue, which belongs to two different worldviews and eras in the medieval Islamic and modern European world, the theses and arguments of both philosophers on doubt as the beginning and path to knowledge and certainty are discussed. This is done by highlighting their main views on their chain of reasoning, how arguments begin with the precedence of doubt until they reach the truth. Although most of their arguments are similar, but they differ in the way they get rid of doubt and reach certainty. This radical difference is that Descartes reaches certainty and truth through doubt, within rational thinking, and his Cogito (I think, Therefore I am), but Al-Ghazali in his Sufi Philosophical journey (Mysticism), he waits for the truth to be revealed to him by God (Allah) and put into his heart as a bright and illuminating light, which is a kind of enlightenment of the heart. However, despite the methodological differences between both of them in the Rational and the heart knowledge, doubt and the method of doubt for both are steps towards achieving certain knowledge beyond all doubt, to access emphatic knowledge, but each gives different status to consciousness and emotion, as well as to mind and heart. As a result, we find that the experiences of both philosophers in sustaining preconceptions and methods of arriving at truth are important and unique, even though they belong to two different philosophical and religious worldviews.

Por las puertas de la apercepción: Acercamientos a la filosofía de Francisco Gavidia

In the following paper, the author points out some of the aspects of the philosophical project of the Salvadoran writer Francisco Gavidia. One important contribution is that the author reflects on whether a Latin American philosophy is possible, long before the philosophical debates regarding this matter during the 1960s. Gavidia maintained that this philosophy must overcome the limitations of positivism and provide a perspective of reality rooted both on scientific reason and poetic intuition, given the particularities of Latin American identity. That is what the author calls “apperception”, which he considers as the foundation of his philosophical and cultural project for El Salvador. Nevertheless, Gavidia thought has both the scope and limitations of a philosophy rooted in the 19th century intellectual context but focused on the 20th century problems. Realidad, Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, No. 164, 2024: 89-136.

Advancing Children’s Participation Rights in Healthcare Through Play

Abstract Within the vulnerable clinical context, children’s participation rights are easily compromised in relation to their protection and service provision. Unfortunately, failure to engage children in medical conversations can make this stressful context even more acute. In response to this problem, this Article presents the legal, philosophical and evidence-based arguments for incorporating play as a child-friendly intervention to engage young patients in meaningful participation in clinical settings. Play as the natural language of children can make them receive and assimilate medical information without fear. Play is also a well-recognised mechanism of child agency and their most natural form of participation, and as such can become a springboard for engaging and empowering children in healthcare.

The body politic has private parts: market creation as a policymaking tool

Abstract Philosophical arguments about government contracting either categorically oppose it on legitimacy grounds or see it as largely anodyne. I argue for a normatively distinct kind of contracting – the advance market commitment, or AMC – and show that it is justified by the same liberal values that justify the welfare state.

A crítica de Hegel à certeza sensível e a sua reabilitação por Feuerbach sob a perspectiva da teoria da fotografia

Feuerbach proposes a break with modern philosophy through his critique of Hegelian speculation. Aiming for a new materialist philosophy, he conceptualizes sense and immediate intuition as the primary organ of reality. The article examines Feuerbach’s re-evaluation of Hegel’s critique of sense-certainty and his rehabilitation of this figure of consciousness. His rehabilitation is contextualized within the cultural-media revolution of photography, suggesting that this approach responds to the impact of the new media techniques of the time. According to the author, sense-certainty should be understood as a “theoretical reflection of a figure of the spirit of the people based on a media technique.” Therefore, it shows that photography, as a new technical medium, plays a central role in Feuerbach’s rehabilitation of sense and immediate certainty. The analysis reveals that the discussion on this figure of consciousness goes beyond the philosophical debate, as it reflects a significant change in the way experience and reality are organized and understood.

Gerd Bornheim leitor da Estética de Hegel

This article analyzes Gerd Bornheim's reading of Hegel’s aesthetics in order to show in what sense it plays a fundamental role in the Brazilian philosopher's thinking on the question of History. In addition, it is a question of looking at the panorama of philosophical debates in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s to show how the fact that Bornheim was reading and discussing Hegel and Marx went against the dominant trend of the time, which was strongly marked by resistance to both thinkers due to the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989. Although in Dialética Bornheim aligned himself with Heidegger to critique the notion of totality in Hegel's philosophy of history, he did not adhere to the Heideggerian proposal of a “return to origin”, popular in philosophy departments in Rio de Janeiro at the time. Arguing that the theme of sensibility was itself an obstacle to Hegel’s idealism, Bornheim sought to construct a meaning for history based on the assumption of the theme of difference in the 20th century philosophy.

Analysis of Patristic Interpretation of the “Shema” in Deuteronomy 6:4-5

The Patristic period stands as a pivotal era in the development of Christian doctrine, marked by profound theological and philosophical debates. Amidst these discussions, the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 retains its central importance for both Jewish and Christian faith traditions, offering insights into the nature of God. This paper explored the Patristic interpretation of the Shema, highlighting the perspectives of the Alexandrian and Antiochene Schools of thought. Key theological issues addressed include the monotheistic concept of God, the symbolic significance of Israel, the unity of God, and the Trinitarian debate. A historical approach was used where the views of selected theologians were explored within their socio-cultural and political settings. Drawing from African perspectives, the study reflected on the enduring relevance of these theological inquiries for contemporary society. Ultimately, the theological insights garnered from Patristic interpretations continue to inform and enrich modern theological discourse, bridging the gap between ancient wisdom and contemporary understanding. Keywords: God, Patristic Era, Shema, Trinity

Vulnerable Research Participant Policies at U.S. Academic Institutions.

Background: Historically, some of the worst abuses of human research participants have involved populations which are vulnerable to coercion, harm, or exploitation, such as prisoners, children, and people with compromised decision-making abilities. Although there has been considerable philosophical and ethical debate about how to protect vulnerable populations, there have been only a handful of empirical studies on vulnerable population policies. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study on vulnerable population policies from the 105 top funded U.S. academic research institutions. We used deductive and inductive methods to develop our framework for coding the policies. We tested for associations between policies and research and development expenditure rank, public vs. private status, geographic region, and Association for Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs accreditation (AAHRRP). Results: U.S. academic institutions have a variety of policies for research with vulnerable populations. Every institution in our sample had at least 2 policies for research with vulnerable populations (including a general policy) and most had 8 or more. As expected, the most highly prevalent policies pertained to populations covered in subparts B, C, and D of the Common Rule (pregnant women, fetuses, neonates, prisoners, and children) but other groups were well-represented, including people with disabilities; people with impaired decision-making capacity; students/trainees; and people with limited English proficiency including illiteracy. AAHRRP accreditation was positively associated with eight different types of policies. Conclusion: U.S. academic institutions have a variety of policies for research with vulnerable populations. Additional research is needed to better understand the types of safeguards that institutions have adopted to protect vulnerable populations and the factors that influence policy development.

‘I felt’: Intimate geographies of sentient diplomacy

This paper explores feelings in diplomatic intimacies in the United Nations in New York. Drawing upon arguments in philosophy on emotional experience and supported by oral testimonies of diplomats, it supplements and complements the rich body of work on practices in diplomacy by exploring how feelings can reach out and be directed towards things in the world beyond the bounds of the body and this is part of the phenomenology of everyday diplomatic lives. I set out three key interconnected goals in order to personify state diplomacy: First, I show how feelings are bound up with cognition and perception and are not the mere effects of these. Secondly, I link feelings with the affective context of the United Nations Security Council in order to expose everyday existential experiences of individual diplomats. Thirdly, I reveal the perceived importance of eliciting events in this geopolitical setting, and the personal meaning of these to diplomats as expressed through their own feelings as state representatives. This is a unique approach to understanding diplomacy in political geography, and also the first of its kind in the study of the intimate geopolitics of the UN.

Suicide in the Austrian Littoral at the turn of the 20th century

The paper seeks to examine the social image of suicide at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the case of Trieste as a major Austrian urban centre, where the suicide rates were more visibly increasing at least from the 1870s onwards. The perception of the growing presence of suicide in society made it possible to observe what the reflections on suicide from the last quarter of the 19th century brought from different parts of Europe (Morselli, Masaryk, Durkheim) and at the same time how the discourses around suicide shed light on a somewhat broader picture of society, including its fears (of social problems and change, not least the potential threat of the imitative effect that the daily press was believed to create by reporting on suicides). The newspaper discourse usually followed the scientific publications of the time, and the contemporaneous observations on the mass of suicides were confirmed through statistical analyses and medical, sociological, philosophical and other debates, while also raising many other social issues with which suicide in urban areas could be linked (alcoholism, the growth of the proletariat, poverty, changing values, etc.). All of this shaped the public debate on suicide as a problem of modern society, with an emphasis on (big) cities, where the problem of suicide was much more pronounced than in smaller non-industrial towns or in the countryside of the Austrian Littoral.

THE ARTWORK’S JUDGE: THE LEGACY OF KANT AND HUME IN THE LIGHT OF EMPIRICAL AESTHETICS

Recent advances in neuroscientific and psychological research demand a re-evaluation of Hume’s and Kant’s philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgement. While Hume emphasises the role of art experts in establishing a standard of taste, Kant advocates a personal judgement of beauty based on a disinterested feeling of pleasure. Little research has been conducted on the direct empirical support for these theories. Through studying aesthetic judgement, this paper explores the interdisciplinary nexus of empirical philosophy, which seeks to integrate insights of empirical aesthetics to advance the philosophical debate on aesthetic judgement. Empirical findings not only highlight the distinctly separate judgement of beauty of experts and non-experts, but also build on the Kantian legacy, emphasising the role emotion and intuition play in aesthetic judgement.

Is phenomenal consciousness really a special case in science?

In the metaphysics of science, it is often held that higher-level properties are grounded in micro-physical properties. According to many philosophers, however, phenomenal consciousness resists this view. Many famous arguments in Philosophy of Mind have been given to reject this notion. In this paper, we argue that there is something odd about the idea that phenomenal consciousness is a special case in science and give a constructive proposal on how consciousness can fit in the natural world. To do so, we will first introduce a general notion of what grounding is. Then, we will briefly explain how the arguments for the specialness of phenomenal consciousness work by considering two famous examples, namely the zombie and the knowledge argument. In a further step, we will briefly discuss two cases from other areas in science, i.e., in particle physics and chemistry. We will demonstrate that the standard view about the reductive relation does not hold, even in these paradigm cases of the natural sciences. If what we argue is true, we think that most arguments from phenomenal consciousness cannot defeat physicalism per se. Finally, we will introduce an alternative way to naturalize phenomenal consciousness.

Beyond pain privacy and pain meters: a new vision for pain biomarkers.

To an individual, pain is unambiguously real. To a caregiver, assessing pain in others is a challenging process shrouded in doubt. To explain this challenge, many assume that pain "belongs" exclusively to the bearer of that experience and accept the dogma that pain is private. However, privacy also entails that it is not possible to identify, share, or communicate that experience with others. Obviously, this is not true and the consequences of pain privacy would be devastating for healthcare. Pain is indeed unique and subjective, but not necessarily private. Pain is in fact readily communicable, though perhaps not as effectively and reliably as caregivers would like. On the other hand, healthcare systems mandate objective metrics in pain diagnosis. Smiley face caricatures are a staple of clinical practice and a universal standard for reporting pain levels. These conditions create a double paradox: Assess a private experience that is inaccessible, and use numerical scales to measure subjective attributes. Navigating this stressful environment, medical professionals experience intellectual dissonance, patients are frustrated, and value-based care is undermined. Offering a way out, first, we refute the privacy and objectification of pain citing philosophical, behavioral, and neuroscientific arguments. We discuss Wittgensteinian views against privacy, explore the clear evolutionary advantage of communicating pain to others, and identify neural circuits in the mammalian brain that contribute to empathy. Second, we highlight the subjectivity of pain, embracing the complexity and uniqueness of an individual's pain. We also provide compelling evidence for brain mechanisms that actively shape the pain experience according to predictive coding principles. Third, we offer a vision for the development of biomarker technologies that assess pain fairly without engendering bias against the patient's narrative. Our recommendations are based on the overwhelming appreciation that "medicine by emoji" is inadequate for capturing the multidimensional nature of pain. Our view is that the most promising candidates for pain biomarkers consist of self-reports as ground truth augmented by physiological signatures of biological relevance to pain. Integration of subjective and objective multimodal features will be key for the development of comprehensive pain assessment models.