Mind, Language & Action
MLAG works within the tradition of analytic philosophy, building on former projects (2003-2017) on e.g. the natures of conciousness and subjectivity, judgement, perception, agency and rationality, and personhood. Our focus on the history of contemporary philosophy helps us extend beyond analytic philosophy strictly considered. Since we started we have counted on 17 FCT Post-doctoral and doctoral fellowships and grants as well as several externally funded projects. Members have published articles in international journals such Dialectica, Topoi, Philosophical Studies, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Mind and Language and European Journal of Philosophy, among others, as well as books and book chapters in publishers such as OUP, Routledge, Vrin, MIT Press, De Gruyter and Harvard UP.
In 2013-2017 two funded Projects were especially relevant for developing a realist-disjunctivist perspective on perception and judgement: The Bounds of Judgement and Hallucinations. The first was also instrumental for work on the history of contemporary philosophy (e.g. Kant, Frege and Wittgenstein on judgement), the second for an application to cognitive science. Project Rationalität, Selbsterkenntnis und menschliches Handeln (DAAD) pursued work on action and rationality. Project Estranged from Oneself (start 2017) continues our cognitive science-oriented work.
In 2018-2022 we aim to develop, through a purely philosophical branch (B1) and a branch oriented towards cognitive science (B2), a unified contextualist approach to the metaphysics of representation and agency. Contextualism in the philosophy of language usually concerns mostly the implications of pragmatic phenomena in language for a view of semantics and truth. In B1 we intend to go beyond technical treatments of pragmatic phenomena in language and focus on how the objectivity of thought withstands occasion-sensitivity phenomena. B2 tries to make explicit the connections between B1 and embodied cognition / enactivism
