Volume 22 (2019): Edition 1 (December 2019)

According to Kant, the axioms of intuition, i.e. space and time, must provide an organization of the sensory experience. However, this first orderliness of empirical sensations seems to depend on a kind of faculty pertaining to subjectivity, rather than to the encounter of these same intuitions with the real properties of phenomena. Starting from an analysis of some very significant developments in mathematical and theoretical physics in the last decades, in which intuition played an important role, we argue that nevertheless intuition comes into play in a fundamentally different way to that which Kant had foreseen: in the form of a formal or “categorical” yet not sensible intuition. We show further that the statement that our space is mathematically three-dimensional and locally Euclidean by no means follows from a supposed a priori nature of the sensible or subjective space as Kant claimed. In fact, the three-dimensional space can bear many different geometrical and topological structures, as particularly the mathematical results of Milnor, Smale, Thurston and Donaldson demonstrated. On the other hand, it has been stressed that even the phenomenological or perceptual space, and especially the visual system, carries a very rich geometrical organization whose structure is essentially non-Euclidean. Finally, we argue that in order to grasp the meaning of abstract geometric objects, as n-dimensional spaces, connections on a manifold, fiber spaces, module spaces, knotted spaces and so forth, where sensible intuition is essentially lacking and where therefore another type of mathematical idealization intervenes, we need to develop a new form of intuition.

In this work we summarise the concept of bisimulation, widely used both in computational sciences and in modal logic, that characterises modal structures with the same behaviour in terms of accessibility relations. Then, we offer a sketch of categorical interpretation of bisimulation between modal structures, which comprise both the structure and the valuation from a propositional language.

with this paper, we intend to clarify some of the central notions that are commonly used in contemporary developments of Epistemic Logic, which lack a proper theoretical foundation. We want to follow the steps of some prominent epistemologists and epistemic logicians, who advocate for a correlation between their respective fields of study. We will proceed with a first small step that will consist in adapting one contemporary version of Epistemic Internalism to the framework of Awareness Logic, such that the key concepts in this logic can be sustained by an epistemological view, which, in turn, can work as a theoretical foundation for Awareness Logic.

Adam Elga has presented an anti-thermodynamic process as a counterexample to Lewis’s default semantics for counterfactuals. The outstanding reaction of Jonathan Schaffer and Boris Kment is revisionary. It sacrifices Lewis’s aim of defining causation in terms of counterfactual dependence. Lewis himself suggested an alternative: «counter-entropic funnybusiness» should make for dissimilarity. But how is this alternative to be spelled out? I discuss a recent proposal: include special science laws, among them the laws of thermodynamics. Although the proposal fails, it serves to uncover the limits of Elga’s example.

According to the traditional view, the following incompatibility holds true: in reasoning, either there is warrant (certainty) or there is novelty. If there is warrant, there is not novelty: that would be the case of deductive reasoning. If there is novelty, there is not warrant: that would be the case of inductive reasoning. Causal reasoning would belong to the second group because there is novelty and, therefore, there is not warrant in it. I argue that this is false: reasoning may have novelty and, nevertheless, be a deductive one. That is precisely what happens in (some) causal reasoning. And I will develop the following line of argumentation: one thing is to warrant that some state of affairs exists and other thing is to warrant that warrant. So we may have correct deductive reasoning without having certainty of that correction, like in some cases of causal reasoning.

Human behavior can range from automatic and even unconscious bodily movements to very elaborate and rational decisions. In this paper I develop a taxonomy based on the empirical analysis of the phenomenology associated with selected instances of different forms of behavior. The transition from sub-actional behavior to proper actions is shown to take place when the agent intervenes actively in the causal process leading from her mental states to the bodily movement by exercising her power to form intentions to act. It is argued that this type of analysis could be helpful to agent-causal accounts of action and free will.

The clinical empiricism of Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) and his definition of especie morbosae represented a substantial turn in the medicine of his time. This turn supposed the shift towards an ontological conception of diseases, from a qualitative to quantitative interpretation. Sydenham’s clinical proposal had a great influence on empiricism philosophical thinking, particularly in John Locke and his delimitation of knowledge. The dialogue between medicine and philosophy, set out by Sydenham-Locke, reactivates the problem of the clinical and theoretical foundations of medical thought, as well as the limits of scientific knowledge. Similar to problem exposed in the Hippocratic treatise On ancient medicine, seventeenth-century medicine seeks its epistemological foundations and the solution to its difficulties in clinical experience, probability and analogy. The aim of this work is to show the Sydenham’s contribution to one of the great controversies between medicine and philosophy.

This text is a reflection in action of an artistic process based on a scientific research. ENSAIO is the choreographic project that resulted from the translation mechanisms of laboratory concepts to a bodily approach, where it proposes a possible mainstreaming of artistic and scientific processes combined. This project joined artistic higher education schools in dance and scenic arts (ESD and FCSH) and Polavieja lab, a neuroscience research lab in Champalimaud Foundation – Center for the Unknown. This text aims to reveal the creative choreographic and performative potentials hidden in this scientific research concerning neurosciences. Identifying cross materials to artistic and scientific processes, it was possible to design a structure of the creation process and the construction of a choreographic performance. The common platform has been found in the process of translation and the definition of the same concept substrate, which made possible the approach of the two instances: studio and laboratory. One of its key features is the promotion of the communication among its agents: scientists and dancers. And the possibility of modelling and absorption from what it comes from this sharing and collaboration. The methods and the choreographic procedures mirrored and promoted this sharing and, therefore, the involvement of the body. Where, the body is the agent able to reflect and trigger this process, a body as an essay that is constantly in research. A body able to coordinate between various media and to expand the reflection on itself. Although science and art are individual instances that inevitably specialise and segregated away. Therefore, this text focuses on examples of cross-thinking of both scientific and artistic cultures, and the articulation of the theoretical and practical bodies in a practice-as-research on the development of the ENSAIO creative process.

The modern understanding of radiation got its start in 1895 with X-rays discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen, followed in 1896 by Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity. The development of the study of radiation opened a vast field of research concerning various disciplines: chemistry, physics, biology, geology, sociology, ethics, etc. Additionally, new branches of knowledge were created, such as atomic and nuclear physics that enabled an in-depth knowledge of the matter. Moreover, during the historical evolution of this body of knowledge a wide variety of new technologies was emerging. This article seeks to analyze the characteristics of experimental research in radioactivity and microphysics, in particular the relationship experience-theory. It will also be emphasized that for more than two decades, since the discovery of radioactivity, experiments took place without the theory being able to follow experimental dynamics. Some aspects identified as structural features of scientific research in the area of radiation and matter will be addressed through historical examples. The inventiveness of experiments in parallel with the emergence of quantum mechanics, the formation of teams and their relationship with technology developed from the experiments, as well as the evolution of microphysics in the sense of “Big Science” will be the main structural characteristics here focused. The case study of research in radioactivity in Portugal that assumes a certain importance and has structural characteristics similar to those of Europe will be presented.