Remis Ramos Carreño

The rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology—the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind—could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by “teleology” as well as what is meant “nature”. I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the twentieth century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly “self-controlled” systems. Against cybernetics, Hans Jonas argued that cybernetics failed as a naturalistic theory of teleology and that the reality of teleology is grounded in phenomenology, not in scientific explanations. I shall argue that Jonas was correct to criticize cybernetics but that contemporary work in biological organization succeeds where cybernetics failed. I will then turn to contemporary uses of Jonas’s phenomenology in enactivism and argue that Jonas’s phenomenology should be avoided by enactivism as a scientific research program, but that it remains open whether enactivism as a philosophy of nature should also avoid Jonas.

Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, which portrays a Ludovician model of temporality that firmly denies the possibility of temporal editing, this paper defends the strength of the contextualist position.

I argue that wholes are neither identical to nor distinct from their parts. Instead, wholes are invariants under some transformations in their parts. Similarly, higher-level properties are neither identical to nor distinct from their lower-level realizers. Instead, higher-level properties are aspects of their realizers that are invariant under some transformations in their realizers. Nowhere in this picture is there any ontological hierarchy between levels of composition or realization. Neither wholes nor their parts are more fundamental. Neither is prior. Neither reduces to the other. Neither is eliminated. Ditto for higher-level properties and their lower-level realizers. Instead, wholes and their properties as well as parts and their properties are different yet invariant aspects of reality. The result is an egalitarian account of composition and realization.

Resumen La filosofía de Hume se ha interpretado tradicionalmente como radicalmente escéptica respecto de la posibilidad de otorgarle justificación epistémica a nuestras creencias inductivas acerca del futuro y lo inobservado. En este artículo me focalizaré en las creencias inductivas originadas en la costumbre y señalaré - contra la tradición exegética- que un análisis riguroso de las características propias de los mecanismos psicológicos involucrados en la formación de esta clase de creencias sí nos permite otorgarles mérito epistémico y atribuirles justi ficación bajo una lectura externalista.Hume'sphilosophy has been traditionally interpreted as radically skeptical about the possibility of giving epistemic justification to our inductive beliefs about the future and the unobserved. In this article I willfocus on the inductive beliefs originated in custom and I willpoint out - against the exegetical tradition - that a rigorous analysis of the characteristics of the psychological mechanisms involved in the formation of this class of beliefs does allow us to grant them epistemic merit and attribute justification to them under an externalist reading.