Bacon against Descartes. Emotions, Rationality, Defenses

Far from being a natural kind, ‘emotion’ turns out to be a conventional label that captures quite diverse phenomena; and such phenomena can no longer be relegated, as the ideology of passions suggested, to a ‘lower’ and ‘primitive’ psychic sphere, which threatens the nobility of ‘the thinking thing’. They belong to the unlevelled universe to which all psychological events belong. In general, cognitive sciences have brought to light the heterogeneity not only of emotions, but also of what is traditionally meant by ‘reason’. The experimental investigation of rationality and reasoning by the cognitive sciences has shown that there is no unitary cognitive sphere. There is instead a toolbox of imperfect analytic and operative tools that is heterogeneous and scattered, and consequently lacks the hierarchical structure that, according to the Cartesian model, culminated in self-conscious rationality. Thus, a paradigm shift is underway. Some research areas in cognitive sciences adopt a Baconian logic, in which errors and self-deceptions are seen as intrinsic to the ordinary cognitive-affective processes. Therefore, whereas in Freud the naive subject normally deceives herself because she is unable to accept the presence, deep down, of ‘inadmissible’ sexual and aggressive drives, in a dynamic psychology informed by the renewal of the traditional psychological categories outlined above, intrinsically defensive cognitive-affective mechanisms become the principles that rule over the construction of everyday reality

Il migliore dei naturalismi possibili

In this paper, we first set out three requirements that each e-theory – a theory whose task is to explain data – must fulfill in order to be one such good theory: i) an ontological requirement, i.e. adequate simplicity, ii) a methological requirement, i.e. plurality of research procedures, iii) an epistemological requirement, i.e. compatibility with the best available epistemical procedures. Moreover, we will claim that from the metaphilosophical point of view, unlike scientific naturalism on the one hand and supernaturalism on the other, liberal naturalism is the only philosophical approach capable of fulfilling all such requirements

Free Will and Retribution Today

The paper addresses two issues that have been recently debated in the literature on free will, moral responsibility, and the theory of punishment. The first issue concerns the descriptive project, the second both the substantive and the prescriptive project. On theoretical, historical and empirical grounds, we claim that there is no rationale for fearing that the spread of neurocognitive findings will undermine the ordinary practice of responsibility attributions. We hypothetically advocate two opposite views: (i) that such findings would cause the collapse of all punitive practices; (ii) that, on the contrary, such findings would open the way to more humane forms of punishment, which would be justified on purely utilitarian grounds. We argue that these views are both wrong, since whereas a sound punitive system can be justified without any reference to moral responsibility, it will certainly not improve the humaneness of punishment

Filozoficzny realizm między naturą a zdrowym rozsądkiem, część II

W pierwszej części tego artykułu, opublikowanej w poprzednim numerze tego czasopisma, omawiałem renesans filozoficznego realizmu, skupiając się głównie na różnych wersjach zdroworozsądkowego realizmu. W tym artykule omówię realizm naukowy i inną, pośrednią wersję realizmu (pluralistyczną pod względem ontologicznym i epistemologicznym). Moim zdaniem ta wersja realizmu jest w stanie uwzględnić najlepsze elementy realizmu zdroworozsądkowego i naukowego, a jednocześnie uniknąć ich wad

Medicine and philosophy: back to the antiquity

Abstrac

Filozoficzny realizm między naturą a zdrowym rozsądkiem, część I

W ciągu ostatnich trzech dekad liczba filozofów na całym świecie, którzy określali siebie jako realiści zarówno w tradycji kontynentalnej, jak i analitycznej, stale rosła. W pierwszej części tego artykułu zostaną przedstawione zagadnienia z zakresu współczesnej dyskusji nad realizmem i antyrealizmem. Następnie omówiona zostanie rodzina poglądów, którą można by nazwać “zdroworozsądkowym realizmem”, biorąc pod uwagę jej postawę wobec nauki