The notion of ‘cause’ has a bipolar personality within the sciences. On the one hand, it is difficult to resist to the old Aristotelian dictum that real scientific knowledge (episteme) is knowledge of the causes; after all, one of the goals of scientific theories is to give explanations, and most people assume that to have […]
Imagine the following situation: about 100 people have to choose one of them for an important position; they have different preferences about who must be chosen, some may have a stronger or lighter interest in being elected, but, and this is essential, it is very likely that most of them will have to cast their […]
Imagine yourself listening to someone who is talking in a language very different from any one you know. Most probably, for you it will be just a series of meaningless noises. If, instead, you are listening to someone speaking in your own native language, usually the meaning of his or her utterances would be as […]
One traditional and difficult question in philosophy and metaphysics has been the knowledge we have of other minds. It is well known that for the founder of contemporary philosophy, the Frenchman René Descartes, non-human animals were probably what we would call today ‘robots’ or ‘zombies’: mere complex machines with no consciousness (in the sense of […]