Philosophies, Volume 7, Issue 5

This article studies natural food packaging as enabling artifacts of the traditional material culture of Antioquia in Colombia. For this purpose, we consider artifacts as objective nodes that combine design and use intentions, functions, materials, h...

From the 1910s through the 1930s, the American naturalist and photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury made time-lapse and microscopic films documenting what he, in common parlance, called the “miracles of plant life”. While these films are now m...

This essay analyses the role played by okra in The Underground Railroad, together with how it functions in relation to the soil that sustains it and which allows it to grow. I argue that okra represents an otherwise lost African past for both protago...

The conventional portrait of Thomas Hobbes that emerged in twentieth century histories of philosophy is that of the quintessential mechanical philosopher, who openly broke with philosophical tradition (together with René Descartes). Hobbes&rsq...

All levels of semiosis, from the materiality of signs to their contents and the contexts of their application, are structured by a selectivity in human experience and action that foregrounds only a fraction of the situation here and now. Before Sperb...

When putting semiotics and phenomenology in juxtaposition, the first task necessarily is to find out what a study of meaning, conceiving of itself as an empirical science, has to do with a philosophical school, the business of which it is to secure t...

An effective method is a computational method that might, in principle, be executed by a human. In this paper, I argue that there are methods for computing that are not effective methods. The examples I consider are taken primarily from quantum compu...

This article provides the existential and phenomenological conditions for addiction by applying the concepts of lack, escape and ‘hypervirtuality’ in new ways to the subject matter. There are five sections. The first is a brief review of...

This paper reconstructs Margaret Cavendish’s theory of the metaphysics of artifacts. It situates her anti-mechanist account of artifactual production and the art-nature distinction against a background of Aristotelian, Scholastic, and mechanist...

Traditional martial arts continue to be interesting and inspiring to many people around the globe. Some of their contemporary adaptations attract enthusiasts for whom they are especially important. In this article, the author bases his observations o...

Heidegger tries to explain our emotional life applying three schemes: causal explanation, mental internalisation of emotions and metaphorical expression. None of the three schemes explains emotion though. Either because the causal nexus does not alwa...

The symbol grounding problem (SGP) proposed by Stevan Harnad in 1990, originates from Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument” and refers to the problem of how a pure symbolic system acquires its meaning. While many solutions to this proble...

Altruism and solidarity are concepts that are closely related to organ donation for transplantation. On the one hand, they are typically used for encouraging people to donate. On the other hand, they also underpin the regulations in force in each cou...

The COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic dealt a severe blow to society as a whole and required countries to confront a situation that exceeded the limits of their borders. In this paper, we analyze how these countries as well as supranational organization...

This paper proposes that being able to feel self-pity is important to be resilient against injustices because it enables self-transformation. The suggestion for this reassessment of self-pity as a crucial self-conscious emotion for a more humanistic...

The view that emotions can provide defeasible justification for evaluative beliefs is widespread in the emotion literature. Despite this, the question of whether epistemic emotions can provide defeasible justification for theoretical beliefs has been...

Part of the rationale behind public health measures is protecting the vulnerable. One of the groups most vulnerable to COVID-19 are the elderly and, consequently, many countries adopted public health measures that aimed to keep the elderly safe. The...

Verbs and nouns gear θ-dependencies, Case, agreement, or construal relations. Building on Chomsky’s 1974 decomposition of such categories into ±N, ±V features, by translating said features into ±1, ±i scalars t...

This paper is focused on one of the key questions constituting the medieval debate about the ontological status of artefacts, which has to do with the productivity of art. We ordinarily speak about artefacts, such as statues or chairs, as produced by...

The philosophy of time travel has an illustrious pedigree, having seen ground-breaking physical and philosophical treatments in the late 1940s and early 1950s from Kurt Gödel [...]

One question that has sometimes cropped up in the debate on triage and the management of scarce healthcare resources concerns patients’ merits, demerits, and responsibility with regard to their own medical condition. During the current pandemic...

While Continental thought has no shortage of criticism and diagnosis of social, political, and ethical issues, it tends to avoid offering guidance on what to do about such issues. In Reconsidering the Life of Power, Garrison argues for a radical new...

Existing research on the “weapons effect” indicates that simply seeing a weapon can prime aggressive thoughts and appraisals and increase aggressive behavior. But how and why does this happen? I begin by discussing prevailing explanations...

I discuss the role of beauty in physics. Physicists are sometimes described as platonists for their conviction that the fundamental laws are elegant and aesthetic arguments represent an important epistemic tool. After a review of the ideas of Plato a...

I will take it that general intelligence is intelligence of the kind that a typical human being—Fred, say—manifests in his role as a cognitive agent, that is, as an acquirer, receiver and circulator of knowledge in his cognitive economy....

Eco-cognitive computationalism explores computing in context, adhering to some of the key ideas presented by modern cognitive science perspectives on embodied, situated, and distributed cognition. First of all, when physical computation is seen from...

Philosophers have understood propositional contents in many different ways, some of them imposing stricter demands on cognition than others. In this paper, I want to characterize a specific sub-type of propositional content that shares many core feat...

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, practitioners had to make tragic decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources in the ICU. The Italian debate has paid a lot of attention to identifying the specific regulatory criteri...

The central role of care in human history is beyond questioning [...]

Given his known predilection for ontological parsimony, Ockham’s ontology of artifacts is unsurprisingly reductionist: artifacts are nothing over and above their existing and appropriately ordered parts. However, the case of artifacts is notabl...