Juan Colomina-Alminana

Drawing primarily on her early work (1931-1934), I argue that Alice Ambrose’s philosophical project at the time centers on preserving the rigor of extensional logic while rejecting the metaphysical and epistemological endorsements of logicism because of its commitment to the notion of material infinity. Positioning Ambrose as a transitional figure between Russell’s formalism and the constructivist turn represented by Brouwer’s and Weyl’s intuitionism, I demonstrate how Ambrose offers a clever practice‑oriented statement of finitist extensionalism. Employing only extensional methods—considering classes, relations, and propositions by reference to their members and truth-values instead of mental processes—, Ambrose reformulates an existential claim about π as an explicit infinite disjunction of concrete instances insisting, against intensional projects, that such claims gain meaning only through a finite stopping rule that produces a witness.

This paper critically examines Barkasi’s, (2021) claim that perceptual experience is “temporally thick,” shaped not only by current sensory input but also by the phenomenal contribution of long term memory. Barkasi defends two theses: that reactivated mnemonic traces partly constitute perceptual phenomenology (Past in Perception), and that memory should therefore be treated as a sensory modality (Memory as Sensory Modality). I argue that this dual proposal overextends the empirical evidence by conflating memory’s causal influence with phenomenal contribution, and by treating subpersonal mechanisms as phenomenally manifest. Moreover, elevating memory to the status of a sensory modality risks collapsing important distinctions between perception, imagination, and recollection. I develop a moderate alternative grounded in predictive processing models, according to which long term memory functions analogously to Bayesian priors: It shapes perceptual inference without supplying distinct phenomenal content. This framework preserves Barkasi’s empirical insight while maintaining the unity and present directedness of perceptual experience.

This book offers a metaphysical development of the notion of perspective. By explaining the functional nature of point of view, and by providing a concrete definition of point of view as a window through which to see the world, it offers a scientific realist theory that explains that points of view are real structures that ground properties and objects as well as perspectives. The notion of point of view has been of key importance in the history of philosophy, and different philosophical schools have used this notion to conduct analyses from the external reality to the inner phenomenal status, or even to construct an entire philosophical system. However, there has been a lack of systematic analysis of what a point of view is and what its structure is; this book fills the gap in the literature and makes the transition between semantics and epistemology, and the philosophy of science.

This book seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the relationships between the objective and subjective aspects of time. It discusses the existence of fluent time, a controversial concept in many areas, from philosophy to physics. Fluent time is understood as directional time with a past, a present and a future. We experience fluent time in our lives and we adopt a temporal perspective in our ways of knowing and acting. Nevertheless, the existence of fluent time has been debated for both philosophical and scientific reasons, thus creating a rift between the subjective and objective aspects of time. Starting from the basic notion of points of view, or perspectives, this book explores the relationships between objective or external time, as it has been conceptualized by science, and subjective or internal time, which is involved in our lived experiences. It establishes a general framework encompassing the nature, structure and mode of existence of points of view, in which the objective and subjective aspects of time can be integrated. The book mainly addresses researchers and postgraduates in philosophy and logic. Additionally, it offers inspiration for physicists and computer scientists involved in the modeling and simulation of complex behaviors for which the representation of internal time should be considered together with the notion of objective, external time.

Nuestra intuición nos dice que a pesar de pertenecer a un mundo determinado físicamente somos libres. Nosotros argumentaremos que tras este postulado se encuentra una concepción errónea de sujeto, que ilusoriamente nos hace creer que nosotros elegimos hacer lo que acabamos haciendo. Contra este argumento, Galen Strawson plantea una objeción basada precisamente en la imposibilidad del agente de configurarse a sí mismo, pero es una objeción que recae en la misma equivocada noción de sujeto. A partir de aquí analizaremos los argumentos dennettianos a favor del compatibilismo, lo que nos permitirá concluir apuntando a la correcta dirección que debería recorrer todo intento de estipulación de una noción de individuo plausible.Our intuition says us that in spite of belonging to a determinate world we are physically free. We will argue that after this postulate is an erroneous conception of subject that very falsely makes us think that we chose to do what we ended up doing. Against this argument, Galen Strawson raises an objection based indeed on the impossibility of the agent to form itself, but it is an objectionthat falls to the same one mistaken subject notion. From this point, we will analyze the dennettian arguments in favour of the compatibilism which will allow us to conclude pointing at the correct direction that would have to cross all attempt of stipulation of a reasonable notion of individual.

This chapter offers different ways of comparing metaphysical points of view, and distinguishing between weak and strong notions of comparison. These encompass a spectrum of incompatibility to full agreement, distinguishing different ontological requirements that points of view must demonstrate in different occasions. Besides being the fundamental ground for everything else to sustain contingent and non-hierarchical relations between them, a description of Modal Perspectivism, which solves the problem of perspectival invariance, closes the chapter.

This chapter provides a historical introduction to points of view at the same time that offers a key distinction between two different models for explaining them. Points of view can be explained, first, following the model of propositional attitudes. This model assumes that a subject, a set of contents, and a set of relations between the subject and that content constitute the internal structure of a point of view. If one chooses to follow the second approach though, as this monograph does, the internal structure of a point of view is not directly addressed and, therefore, points of view are directly identified by their function and solely understood as ways of accessing the world.

, 3661–3678, 2020) argues that a positivistic defense of science’s objectivity is incoherent because bias in the generation of scientific theories (implies that the rational evaluation of theories will also be biased. Even though this is an idea easy to agree with, this approach is flawed for two different but related reasons. First, Dellsén’s notion of bias does not account for many ordinary biases. Second, Dellsén’s use of bias at the community-level is inconsistent. It shifts from individual scientists generating new theories and making decisions to scientific communities evaluating and accepting what theories are valid. This article offers a stronger response than Dellsén’s about aseptic objectivity in science by providing a more adequate account of bias, where psychological and behavioral aspects of individual scientists and community-level scientific practices are considered.

This chapter differentiates between a Kantian, teleological way of adopting a point of view and a Humean, non-causal way to do so. After analyzing the pros and cons of both positions, a re-worked and more substantial behaviorist dispositional option is emphasized. The main reason is that, against positions that follow a certain kind of principle in order to adopt a point of view or merely referring to expressivist agreement in attitudes, Modal Perspectivism encourages the adoption of points of view via identifying them with their own coherence, consistency, and explanatory scope.

This chapter defines points of view as the ground from where every other entity holds. In contrast to traditional approaches of grounding, metaphysical points of view are not identified with their intrinsic parts. At the same time, they are not irreflexive either. The reason is that metaphysical points of view further fine-grain the entities of the world when required. Besides the fact that metaphysical points of view facilitate fundamental indeterminacy, they still may be considered asymmetrical. Distancing from ontological approaches based in the determinable-determinate relation, a new formal approach to metaphysical points of view re-shape thinking about ontological dependence. This theory is demonstrated as coherent, consistent, and complete, which furnishes a fine-graining mechanism with metaphysical and logical robustness while advocating for the fragmentation of the world.

This chapter provides a preliminary account to the notion of points of view. After distinguishing between the epistemological and metaphysical character of points of view, it establishes the later as prior, and argues for its fundamentality. The chapter also offers a negative definition of metaphysical points of view by actually resisting its reduction to other traditional notions, such as natural kinds and scientific models. The chapter ends potencing the novelty of the proposal here defended, Modal Perspectivism, in regard to other contemporary options, allowing for a positive definition of metaphysical points of view according to their structural possession conditions, which establish their role.

This chapter argues for a notion of time that allows time travel. In order to time traveling to happen, in contrast to Presentism, the chapter demonstrates that we can change the past and we have some place where to travel. It shows the advantages of a non-presentist ontology that advocates for indeterminacy of future facts based not on its absence of truth-value, but on the overdetermination of future facts. The conclusion is that to break the causal chain is impossible in we are placed in the same causal line. But if we rethink the time traveling as a trans-world traveling, it is possible to open a new causal line anytime that someone travel in time, to the past as well as to the future.

This chapter centers on two different but related problems. First, it focuses in clarifying why the discussion about metaphysical points of view cannot be considered as a merely verbal dispute. To do so, I distinguish between verbal disputes and merely verbal disputes, and show that, besides the illusion that the dispute about the existence of metaphysical points of view seems to be based upon the different terminology employed by different points of views to represent the world, this is not the case because a substantial deeper dispute is in place, one that requires meta-linguistic negotiation. Second, the chapter shows how, if metaphysical points of view and indeterminacy are considered as fundamental, the language employed to differently represent the ways the world might be actually capture the changing and conflicting shifting reality that the world is, being the nexus between metaphysical and epistemic points of view.