Cartesian Humility and Pyrrhonian Passivity: The Ethical Significance of Epistemic Agency

While the Academic sceptics followed the plausible as a criterion of truth and guided their practice by a doxastic norm, so thinking that agential performances are actions for which the agent assumes responsibility, the Pyrrhonists did not accept rational belief-management, dispensing with judgment in empirical matters. In this sense, the Pyrrhonian Sceptic described himself as not acting in any robust sense of the notion, or as ‘acting’ out of sub-personal and social mechanisms. The important point is that the Pyrrhonian advocacy of a minimal conception of ‘belief’ was motivated by ethical concerns: avoiding any sort of commitment, he attempted to preserve his peace of mind. In this article, I argue for a Cartesian model of rational guidance that, in line with some current versions of an agential virtue epistemology, does involve judgment and risk, and thus which is true both to our rational constitution and to our finite and fallible nature. Insofar as epistemic humility is a virtue of rational agents that recognise the limits of their judgments, Pyrrhonian scepticism, and a fortiori any variety of naturalism, is unable to accommodate this virtue. This means that, in contrast to the Cartesian model, the Pyrrhonist does not provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of cognitive disintegration. The Pyrrhonist thus becomes a social rebel, one that violates the norm of serious personal assent that enables the flourishing of a collaborative and social species which depends on agents that, however fallible, are accountable for their actions and judgments

H. P. Lovecraft: creencia estética y asentimiento intelectual

The aim of this article is to analyse the epistemological and aesthetic grounds for Lovecraft’s theory of cosmic horror. In order to make sense of the celebrated epithet applied to Lovecraft, describing him as «a literary Copernicus», what is needed is an understanding of the deep connection between his narratives and scientific images of the world, his distinctions between intellectual assent and aesthetic belief and between the mundanely gruesome and true cosmic fear, and the metaphysical assumptions that underpin his late literature

Estado de naturaleza, naturaleza del Estado

The author aims at: (1) Analyzing Hobb’s and Lock’s social-pact models, showing their defficiencies, especially their link to a political optimism, proved to be wrong through facts. (2) Proposing a criteria based upon the coexistence dynamism for the evaluation of the political legitimacy , a criteria that would serve as an approach to history and to the socialization process developed in it. (3) Describing the basic kinds of societies, making a special emphasis on the characteristics of the human kind fostered by liberal societies with a high technological development.The text is inscribed within what one might denominate as a disenchanted rationalism. Rousseau provides some of the instruments applied and developed herein.Las pretensiones del autor son: (1) Analizar los modelos hobbesiano y lockeano de pacto social, mostrando sus deficiencias, especialmente, su vinculación a un optimismo político desmentido por los hechos. (2) Proponer un criterio basado en el dinamismo de la convivencia para la evaluación de la legitimidad política, criterio que sirva como acercamiento a la historia y al proceso de socialización que en ella se ha desarrollado. (3) Describir los tipos básicos de sociedad, haciendo especial hincapié en las características del tipo humano fomentado por sociedades liberales de alto desarrollo tecnológico.El escrito se inscribe dentro de lo que podría llamarse un racionalismo desencantado. Rousseau proporciona algunas de las herramientas que aquí se aplican y desarrollan

Against a Nomic Virtue Epistemology

AbstractIn Judgment and Agency, Ernest Sosa argues for a particular methodology –what he calls ‘metaphysical analysis’– whose aim is to provide a speci c sort of explanation of knowledge –a metaphysical explanation–. As I read it, this revolutionary step points to the bulk of the ontological dispositional web that necessarily sustains a virtue epistemology, contributes to a proper understanding of accidentality in epistemology, and breaks the hold of Humean contingency. I will argue that Sosa’s account of the constitution of knowledge is not only able to rule out apparent counterexamples to a robust virtue epistemology, as well as to combine rational integration and knowledge explanation, but that also breaks the Pyrrhonian (and internalist) impasse. I will also argue that a principled distinction between cases of knowledge and cases of mimicking is unavailable to anti-luck virtue epistemologists, so that they face a dilemma between their theory collapsing into a robust virtue epistemology or its collapsing into a form of nomic virtue epistemology. What binds anti-luck virtue epistemologies and nomic theories together is a common problem in binding, one that is absent from a theory, such as Sosa’s theory, that locates knowledge in the domain of higher-order competences and rational guidance. Keywords: Anti-luck virtue epistemology; dispositional directedness; Humean contingency; mimics; nomic necessities. Resumen:En Judgment and Agency, Ernest Sosa defiende una metodología específica –a la que denomina ‘análisis metafísico’– cuya función es la de proporcionar una explicación particular del conocimiento –una explicación metafísica–. Se trata de un procedi- miento signi cativo, que apunta a la red disposicional que necesariamente sostiene a la epistemología de virtudes, contribuye a la comprensión adecuada de la acciden- talidad en epistemología, y rompe el dominio de la contingencia humeana. En este artículo argumento que la explicación que Sosa proporciona de la constitución del conocimiento, además de evitar aparentes contraejemplos para una epistemología de virtudes robusta y de combinar la explicación del conocimiento y la integración racional, es una herramienta fundamental para contrarrestar las intuiciones pirrónicas (e internistas). También argumento que la ‘epistemología de virtudes anti-suerte’ es incapaz de establecer una diferencia razonada entre casos de conocimiento y casos de acierto accidental debidos a la intervención de bloqueadores epistémicos (mimics), de forma que dicha teoría solo puede optar entre una epistemología de virtudes robusta y una epistemología de virtudes nómica. Es el problema de la combinación adecuada de los factores que contribuyen al conocimiento aquello que vincula epistemología de virtudes nómica y epistemología de virtudes anti-suerte. Dicho problema no existe en teorías como la de Sosa, teorías para las que el conocimiento es explicable en función de competencias de segundo orden y guía racional apropiada.Palabras Clave: Bloqueadores epistémicos; contingencia humeana; direccionalidad disposicional; epistemología de virtudes anti-suerte; necesidades nómicas.     &nbsp

Wittgenstein and the Duty to Believe

[EN] It is generally assumed that hinge-commitments are deprived of an epistemically normative structure, and yet, that although groundless, the acceptance of Wittgensteinian certainties is still rational. The problem comes from the intellectualist view of hinge-approvals which many recent proposals advance—one that falls short of the necessities and impossibilities pertaining to what would be the right description of how it is like to approve of hinges. I will raise the Newman-inspired worry as how to cash the abstract acceptance of principles of enquiry into real assent, as well as the question about how to extend normativity all the way back to foundations. It is my aim here to argue that ethical normativity is the only kind of normativity capable to ground the rationality of hinges. In defence of this, I will draw some consequences from Ernest Sosa’s claim that hinges about the external world are logically related to the cogitoPublicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCLE

Libertad, Derechos Individuales Y Poder Público De Acuerdo Con Spinoza

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of Spinoza’s most conspicuous political doctrines: his rejection of classical contractualism, his doctrine of the equivalence of right and power, his description of the limits of government either as logical limitations or as restrictions, not of power, but of impotence, and his defence of democracy as the most natural and most rational form of the state. Also, two alleged paradoxes that permeate Spinoza’s political thought are solved: the conflict between a naturalistic approach and a discourse whose purpose is to shed light on the grounds of political legitimacy, and the tension between the dynamics of freedom and the dynamics of power. Far from obsolete, Spinoza’s political philosophy comes to light as able to meet the demands of the contemporary world. Resumen El objetivo de este artículo es arrojar luz sobre las doctrinas políticas más significativas de Spinoza: su rechazo del contractualismo clásico, la tesis de la equivalencia de derecho y poder, la descripción de los límites del gobierno bien como limitaciones lógicas o como medios para garantizar la independencia y el poder del estado, y su refrendo de la democracia como la forma más natural y racional de constitución política. Además, se resuelven dos paradojas que, supuestamente, amenazan con desarticular su pensamiento político: el conflicto entre una perspectiva naturalista y un discurso que pretende alcanzar los fundamentos de la legitimidad política, y la tensión entre la dinámica de la libertad y la del poder. El resultado es una vindicación de la relevancia de la filosofía política de Spinoza para el mundo contemporáneo

The Ethical and the Metaphysical Will in the Early Wittgenstein (and Beyond)

In the Notebooks 1914-1916, Wittgenstein engages himself in a dialogue with Schopenhauer’s project —one that Wittgenstein makes his own— of substituting an immanent metaphysics of human experience for the transcendent metaphysics discredited by Kant’s critique, and thus for finding a path that would be able both of capturing the reality of human agency and of staying away from the kind of self-alienation that appears to be the necessary consequence of philosophical reflection. Wittgenstein’s reflections on the ethical and the metaphysical will are instrumental to bring this project to successful completion. However, I will go well beyond Wittgenstein’s early work in order to elucidate what strikes me as the solution provided by the late Wittgenstein (mainly, in On Certainty) to two problems that the Notebooks and the Tractatus left unanswered. On the one hand, there is the question about whether the agreement between agency and passivity is possible—namely, about how to come to see the friction of the world not only as something that is, but rather as something that ought to be. On the other, there is the problem of how to make of ethical subjectivity and metaphysical subjectivity two constitutively co-related aspects of the same transcendental subjectivity.In the Notebooks 1914-1916, Wittgenstein engages himself in a dialogue with Schopenhauer’s project —one that Wittgenstein makes his own— of substituting an immanent metaphysics of human experience for the transcendent metaphysics discredited by Kant’s critique, and thus for finding a path that would be able both of capturing the reality of human agency and of staying away from the kind of self-alienation that appears to be the necessary consequence of philosophical reflection. Wittgenstein’s reflections on the ethical and the metaphysical will are instrumental to bring this project to successful completion. However, I will go well beyond Wittgenstein’s early work in order to elucidate what strikes me as the solution provided by the late Wittgenstein (mainly, in On Certainty) to two problems that the Notebooks and the Tractatus left unanswered. On the one hand, there is the question about whether the agreement between agency and passivity is possible—namely, about how to come to see the friction of the world not only as something that is, but rather as something that ought to be. On the other, there is the problem of how to make of ethical subjectivity and metaphysical subjectivity two constitutively co-related aspects of the same transcendental subjectivity.  

Sosa, general assumptions, and the skeptical trojan horse

For many hinge epistemologists, general, background assumptions are principles that help providing default or presumptive justification to our empirical beliefs. However, the ‘blanketing’ nature of a priori arguments to the end of supporting the rationality of general assumptions might be seen as the Trojan horse through which radical scepticism threatens the common sense picture of the world. Sosa’s recent distinction between background presuppositions and domain-defining conditions, as well as his claim that agents are not negligent for dismissing global scenarios as irrelevant to epistemic normativity, are instrumental to avoid an epistemic construal of über hinges, and thus, to a reassessment of the function they really perform in regards to ordinary practices of judgment

El giro epistemológico en la analítica

Las pretensiones del autor son: (i) Describir los rasgos metafilosóficos de las dos corrientes dominantes en el pensamiento analítico contemporáneo: el relativismo terapéutico y el naturalismo; subrayando la crisis de identidad de la filosofía que configura su trasfondo y deteniéndose especialmente en el análisis del programa quineano de naturalización de la epistemología. (ii) Realizar una evaluación de dichas tendencias que desemboca en la defensa de un humanismo crítico, de una concepción autónoma y sustantiva de la actividad filosófica y de la necesaria conciliación de lógica y ética. (iii) Mostrar cómo la superación del divorcio entre verdad y significado y la recusación del principio de aislamiento constituyen el hilo conductor de tres de los filósofos más sobresalientes en el panorama anglosajón del último siglo: Wittgenstein, Davidson y Sosa.We pretend: (i) To describe the metaphilosophical views pertaining to the two main trends in contemporary analytical philosophy: therapeutic relativism and naturalism; stressing how they must be understood against the background of the present crisis of identity in philosophy and focusing on Quine's project of a naturalized epistemology. (ii) To assess those trends, evaluation which results in our support to a critical humanism, to the autonomous and substantive character of philosophical theses and methods and to the agreement between logic and ethics. (iii) Finally, to show how the overcoming of the divorce between truth and meaning and the rejection of the principle of insulation are elements deeply ingrained in the writings of the most daring and original philosophers of the last century: Wittgenstein, Davidson and Sosa

Los principios del conservadurismo político

Las pretensiones del autor son: (i) Mostrar cómo el conservadurismo político se sostiene en una concepción de la naturaleza humana de corte racionalista, que, oponiéndose al modelo antropológico de Hobbes, reconoce tanto el poder de la razón sobre los afectos como una debilidad intrínseca en el hombre que no ha de confundirse con inclinación natural al mal. En este sentido, la política moderada del conservadurismo resulta de su pesimismo mitigado. (ii) Señalar cómo de acuerdo con este paradigma político los criterios de legitimidad política son la protección de las minorías, la preservación de la igualdad de derechos y el mantenimiento de una libertad racional de la que participan por igual todos los miembros del cuerpo político; es decir, cómo la medida de la legitimidad es el imperio de la ley. (iii) Finalmente, subrayar que porque para que exista Estado de derecho la ley no puede estar sujeta a voluntad particular alguna, sea de un individuo o de una mayoría, el conservadurismo es baluarte de una democracia constitucionalista que es condición natural de la naturaleza humana