Manuel García

In this paper I explore two possible ways of being quietist in philosophy and relate them to the work of Wittgenstein and McDowell. On the one hand, quietism could be understood as an imperative to remain quiet regarding what we value the most. The final aphorisms of the Tractatus seem to gesture in this direction. On the other hand, it could be seen as a refusal to produce philosophical theories regarding general and abstract issues such as meaning or thought. McDowell has recommended reading the Investigations under this light and has followed the advice in most of his work. I discuss some consequences of this approach to issues such as rule following, mental externalism and ethical particularlism and try to show that there is much exciting philosophical work to be done even after abandoning grand theoretical aspirations.

The effect of ASDEX Upgrade edge localized mode -mitigation coils on fast ion wall loads was studied with the fast particle following Monte Carlo code ASCOT. Neutral beam injected particles were simulated in two AUG discharges both in the presence and in the absence of the magnetic field perturbation induced by the eight newly installed in-vessel coils. In one of the discharges beams were applied individually, making it a useful basis for investigating the effect of the coils on different beams. However, no ELM mitigation was observed in #26476, probably due to the low plasma density. Therefore, another discharge demonstrating clear ELM mitigation was also studied. The magnetic perturbation due to the in-vessel coils has a significant effect on the fast particle confinement, but only when total magnetic field, B tot, is low. When B tot was high, the perturbation did not increase the losses, but merely resulted in redistribution of the wall power loads. Hence, it seems to be possible to achieve ELM mitigation using in-vessel coils, while still avoiding increased fast ion losses, by simply using a strong B tot. Preliminary comparisons between simulated and experimental fast ion lost detector signals show a reasonable correspondence. © 2012 IAEA, Vienna.

Wittgenstein distinguished between two uses of “I”, one “as object” and the other “as subject”, a distinction that Shoemaker elucidated in terms of a notion of immunity to error through misidentification (“IEM”); first-personal claims are IEM in the use “as subject”, but not in the other use. Shoemaker argued that memory judgments based on “personal”, episodic memory are not strictly speaking IEM; Gareth Evans disputed this. Similar issues have been debated regarding self-ascriptions of conscious thoughts based on first-personal awareness, in the light of claims of “thought insertion” in schizophrenic patients. The paper aims to defend a Shoemaker-like line by critically engaging with some compelling recent contributions. Methodologically, the paper argues that to properly address these issues the all-inclusive term “thought” should be avoided, and specific types of thoughts countenanced.

John McDowell has defended a position called minimal empiricism, that aims to avoid the oscillation between traditional empiricism’s commitment to a set of contents working as external justifiers for our system of beliefs and a coherentist position where our thought receives no constraint from the world. We share McDowell’s dissatisfaction with both options, but find his minimal empiricism committed to the idea of a tribunal of experience where isolated contents are infused into our network of inferences. This commitment is prone to sceptical attacks and waters down McDowell’s holism. We propose to retain McDowell’s partial re-enchantment of nature—without appealing to McDowell’s Kantian conception of experience—, and argue that it is sufficient to avoid the oscillation and to make sense of the objectivity of thought.

Richard Moran has argued, convincingly, in favour of the idea that there must be more than one path to access our own mental contents. The existence of those routes, one first-personal—through avowal—the other third-personal—no different to the one used to ascribe mental states to other people and to interpret their actions—is intimately connected to our capacity to respond to norms. Moran’s account allows for conflicts between first personal and third personal authorities over my own beliefs; this enable some instances of Moore-paradoxical cases to be meaningful. In this paper we reflect on the consequences of this view for the acquisition of beliefs, and argue that, as in the moral case, excessive concentration on a thirdpersonal understanding of thought undermines the very idea of being directed to the world and of being capable to fully own our own beliefs. We suggest that maybe too much attention to epistemic virtues or tojustification is misdirected and could produce beliefs that are themself not first-personal enough.

De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. How should a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature look like? In spite of extended discussion of the issue since it was brought to the attention of the philosophical community in the late fifties by Quine (1956), we are far from having a plausible response. This is glaringly revealed by the contrasting recent takes on the issue by writers such as Soames (2005) – who adopts the view by Donnellan (1979) to be outlined presently – and Jeshion (2001), otherwise sharing a similar direct-reference approach to the prototypical expression of those contents. Discussing the matter in connection with the status of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori in the just mentioned article, Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving ‘one meter’ or ‘Neptune’ famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content that is contingent; he distinguished to that end between knowing a true proposition expressed by an utterance, and knowing that an utterance expresses a true proposition. (Thus, for instance, if, while listening to an utterance in a language that I do not know, I am told by a reliable person who knows the language and whom I trust that the utterance is true, I come thereby to know that the sentence expresses a truth, without knowing the truth that it expresses.) Evans (1979) replied that, for a very specific sort of cases involving “descriptive names”, a related proto-two-dimensionalist account should be preferred, on which it is not the singular contingent content, but rather a general descriptive one which is knowable a priori. In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion (2000, 2001) has recently attacked Donnellan's proposal, arguing in favour of the most straightforward interpretation of Kripke's claim: in the relevant cases, the very same singular content can be both contingent and knowable a priori. In this paper, I will appeal to a generalized version of two-dimensional semantics to advance an account of the Kripkean cases along the lines of Evans's, and I will argue that Jeshion's compelling arguments against Donnellan's view do not apply to this version.

Propuesta de un nuevo y complementario enfoque —el traductológico— para el estudio de los romanceamientos granadinos considerados en cuanto que testimonios únicos para la historia de la traducción del árabe al español y la historia del arabismo en España. Dicho enfoque se lleva aquí a la práctica ilustrado con dos romanceamientos inéditos llevados a cabo en 1517 por Bemardino Xarafí, escribano público y romanceador de la ciudad de Granada y su Reino. La edición de los mismos se acompaña de un amplio estudio traductológico, una panorámica general sobre los Xarafí y otros romanceadores granadinos del primer tercio del XVI y un análisis descriptivo comparado con otros romanceamientos del siglo XVI y con los procedimientos de traducción actualmente aceptados en la traducción jurada del árabe al español.