Sofia Miguens

My main purpose in this article is to explore the connections between views of concepts and of philosophy of mind. My analysis focuses on recent work on concepts and on the conceptual-non conceptual distinction by French philosopher Jocelyn Benoist (Benoist 2005, 2010, 2011). While tracing back Benoist’s contextualist counterproposal to representationalism in the philosophy of mind to converging influences ranging from phenomenology (Husserl 1994) to philosophy of language (Travis 2008), I spell out some of the problems posed by viewing concepts as representations in a mental repository (a conception which has survived all attacks to the classic necessary and sufficient conditions view in the last half century (Murphy 2002, Prinz 2002)).

The aim of the present article is to identify and analyze three particular disputes among current proponents of perceptual realism which may throw light on tensions present in the history of direct realism and current discussions. Starting from John Searle’s conception of direct realism, I first set McDowell and Travis’s approaches in contrast with it. I then further compare Travis’ view with McDowell’s. I claim that differences among the three philosophers are traceable first to methodological conceptions of the approach to perceptual experience (whether philosophical naturalism implies dealing with the sub-personal level), then to what makes for the particularity of a perceptual experience (whether it involves consciousness and a task of unity or not), and finally to what makes for the determinacy of an experience of things in the world (whether such determinacy characterizes the world itself or, as such, involves language and thought).

Within current philosophy of perception John McDowell has for quite some time been defending a view inspired by Kant. Charles Travis opposes such view and counters it with his own, Frege-inspired, approach. By analysing the clash between Travis’ idea of the silence of the senses and McDowell’s idea of intuitional content, the present article aims to characterize the core of their divergence regarding the nature of perceptual judgement. It also aims at presenting their engagement as a reformulated version of the debate around conceptual and nonconceptual content of perception, bringing forth some of its stakes. Such reformulated version of the debate makes it possible to bring out what a Kantian position on representation, consciousness and appearances ultimately amounts to, as well as to identify a particular angle of criticism to it.

There are similarities between Bernard Williams and Cora Diamond as moral philosophers: both their moral philosophies are marked by an engagement with the question of what it is like to be a human being, and both are engaged with experience more than theory. Still, such similarities rest on very different philosophical grounds. In this article, I consider whether a Nietzschean (Williams) and a Wittgensteinian (Diamond) could ever converge on a characterization of the ‘moral point of view’ as this involves views on life, thought, and language. I argue that divergences between Williams and Diamond persist, a very important one concerning relativism: whereas Diamond adumbrates a Wittgensteinian way out of relativism, it remains a last word for Williams.

All of Stanley Cavell's work, whether its topic is Shakespeare's or Beckett's theatre, Hollywood cinema, Caro's sculpture or Derrida's deconstruction, rests on the philosophies of language of Wittgenstein and Austin and on the vision that in these one finds the life of human animals in language and culture. Behind the question "What is art?" Thus, in Cavell, questions such as: How does one enter language? What is speaking on one's own behalf? How is it possible to escape from inexpressiveness? What does it mean to speak for others with whom we consent to associate? What is recognizing others, being recognized by them, or recognizing a community? What responsibility do I have for the way language means? What is consent and dissent? How do you come to have, not just your own voice, but a voice capable of articulating something new, for example, artistically new? How can that voice ever be shared?

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relations between the current debates on consciousness within analytical philosophy and the debates taking place in continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular within the work of Sartre. Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties this volume aims to rethink borders between what counts as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ when the nature of the mental is at stake

The contours of contemporary philosophy are difficult to trace. How can we orient ourselves among authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault, Derrida, Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze, Agamben, Zizek, Badiou , Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Austin, Putnam, Davidson, Rorty, Kripke, McDowell or Cavell? How can we orient ourselves among terms such as phenomenology, analytical philosophy, existentialism, pragmatism, feminism, postmodernism, Nietzscheanism, naturalism, materialism or cognitivism? Presenting a journey through figures and movements of contemporary philosophy, this book suggests an answer, supporting the reader's personal exploration.

A questão da racionalidade, da avaliação do pensamento, é uma questão antiga e um terreno tradicional da filosofia - é difícil, ou mesmo impossível, nomear um filósofo que não tenha pensado sobre os princípios que guiam a forma como pensamos e agimos. O que é novo é a forma como essa avaliação pode e deve ser feita considerando dados da ciência cognitiva. O que se procura, de qualquer forma, com uma teoria da racionalidade é - (i) uma descrição ou caracterização dos factores em jogo nas ocasiões em que agentes passam de determinadas crenças para outras crenças, adicionam ou eliminam crenças do seu corpo de crenças, ou optam, a partir de um conjunto de crenças e desejos, por um curso de acção por entre várias alternativas; (ii) um conjunto de hipóteses acerca da forma como decidimos entre critérios de correcção quando falamos da justificação ou racionalidade de crenças e acções; (iii) um conjunto de hipóteses acerca das razões por que queremos saber (se de facto queremos) se as nossas crenças são verdadeiras e os nossos raciocínios e acções racionais.