Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía

Stewart Duncan, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke

Benjamin Hill — 2024-11-07

Stewart Duncan, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022, 248pp., ISBN: 9780197613009

José Medina, The Epistemology of Protest. Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance

Miriam Jerade — 2024-11-25

José Medina, The Epistemology of Protest. Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance, Oxford University Press, Nueva York, 2023, 436pp. ISBN 9780197660904

Un recorrido analítico sobre la culpa del sobreviviente

Juliana Mejía Quintana — 2024-11-14

Carlos Muñoz-Serna, y Carlos G. Patarroyo Gutiérrez, Culpa sin trasgresión. Un análisis filosófico de la culpa del sobreviviente, Lambda, Ciudad de México, 2023, 152pp., ISBN-10: 6075971564, ISBN-13: 978-6075971568

Two Senses of ‘Essence’ and a Straw Man

Teresa Robertson Ishii — 2024-11-07

In this paper, I distinguish two senses of the word ‘essence’ both of which figure prominently in recent analytic metaphysics. To disambiguate, I adopt the terminology of ‘modal essence’ (for how a thing metaphysically must be) and ‘whatness essence’ (for what a thing is). With the help of this terminology, I address Kit Fine’s charge that modal metaphysics in the framework of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity proffers an incorrect conceptual analysis of whatness essence. I show that the charge is baseless, and thus that there is no justification for Fine’s verdict that the Kripkean conception of metaphysics should be given up.

Robustness, Exploitable Relations and History: Assessing Varitel Semantics as a Hybrid Theory of Representation

Nicolás Sebastián Sánchez — 2024-11-08

A constitutive theory of representation must address two challenges. The content determination challenge requires specifying why a particular state has a given content. The job description challenge requires spelling out the explanatory role that representational notions play in that theory. Recently, Nicholas Shea has advanced varitel semantics as a hybrid approach to representation to answer those challenges, supplementing teleosemantics with non-historical features —namely, exploitable relations and robustness. In this paper, I critically assess the hybrid theory’s answers to both challenges, arguing that their hybrid nature undermines their merits. In each case, I will show that it is hard to establish how the alleged complementariness of the hybrid account components works. I will conclude that internal problems beset Shea’s theory of representation.