Sofia Miguens is Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. She was a Visiting Scholar at New York University (Fall 2000), a Visiting Research Fellow at Institut Jean Nicod-Paris (2007-2008), a Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney – Australia (2013) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Picardie (Amiens) (2017). She was President of the Portuguese Philosophical Association (Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia, SPF) (2004-2006). She is the Founder and Principal Investigator of MLAG (Mind, Language and Action Group, http://mlag.up.pt), a research group at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto (start: 2005) and the Director of GFMC (Gabinete de Filosofia Moderna e Contemporânea) of the same Institute (since 2008). She is also currently the Director of the Institute of Philosophy. She has supervised a large number of doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers with Portuguese Research Agency FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) grants and often works as member of FCT committees.
Sofia Miguens is author of seven books: A Physicalist Theory of Content and Consciousness: Daniel Dennett and the debates in philosophy of mind (2002), Rationality (2004), Philosophy of Language – an introduction (2007), Is my Mind inside my Head? – Essys on philosophy and cognitive science (2008), Understanding Mind and Knowledge (2008), John McDowell – an Analysis from the Viewpoint of Moral Philosophy (2014) and A Reading of Contemporary Philosophy – Figures and Movements (2019).
She is also editor of several others, most recently Consciousness and Subjectivity (Frankfurt, Ontos, 2012), Conversations on Practical Rationality (Newcastle, CUP, 2013) Pre-Reflective Consciousness - Sartre and contemporary philosophy of mind (Routledge, 2016) and The Logical Alien (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). She has published widely in Portuguese, English and French on several topics in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology and cognitive science, moral and political philosophy and history of contemporary philosophy.
She was Principal Investigator of FCT Projects Rationality, Belief, Desire II – from cognitive science to philosophy (2005-2008) (POCTI/FIL/55555/2004), The Bounds of Judgement – Frege, cognitive agents and human thinkers (PTDCI/FIL-FIL/109882/2009) (2011-2014) and FLAD-funded Project Conversations on Practical Rationality and Human Action. She was the Portuguese coordinator of the CNRS network PloCo La philosophie du langage ordinaire. She is currently the co-PI of FCT Project Epistemology of Religious Belief – Wittgenstein, Grammar and the Contemporary World (PTDC/FER-FIL/32203/2017)
Most recent books:
Figuras e Movimentos – uma leitura da filosofia contemporânea (Lisboa, Edições 70, 2019, 435 pp.)
Os contornos da filosofia contemporânea são difíceis de traçar. Como poderemos orientar-nos por entre autores como E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, M. Merleau-Ponty, E. Lévinas, H. G. Gadamer, P. Ricoeur, M.Foucault, J. Derrida, T. Adorno, W. Benjamin, , G. Deleuze, G. Agamben, S. Zizek, A. Badiou, G. Frege, B. Russell, L. Wittgenstein, W.V.Quine, J.L. Austin, H. Putnam, D. Davidson, R. Rorty, S. Kripke, J. McDowell ou S. Cavell? Como poderemos orientar-nos por entre termos como fenomenologia, filosofia analítica, existencialismo, pragmatismo, feminismo, pós-modernismo, nietzscheanismo, naturalismo, materialismo ou cognitivismo? Apresentando um percurso por entre figuras e movimentos da filosofia contemporânea este livro sugere uma resposta, apoiando a exploração pessoal pelo leitor.
The Logical Alien (S. Miguens ed.), Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press (forthcoming 2019)
Are there forms of thought which are alien to us, but home to others? Is our form of thought just one among many? Or is it (in essentials) the form of thought per se? Are such questions even sensible? Descartes, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, among many, were exercised by such questions. Frege, and then Wittgenstein, discussed the possibility of a logical alien, a thinker whose thought is guided by a different logic yet still counts as a thinker. In 1991 Chicago philosopher James Conant published a paper which brought this issue into clear form, and placed its illuminatingly into historical context. A 2011 Conference at the University of Porto – Portugal marked the twenty years of its publication. The present volume gathers the original article and the reflections on it by a number of distinguished philosophers (Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Arata Hamawaki, Martin Gustafsson Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan and Charles Travis), followed by answers by Conant. The issues range from the nature of logical truths (the initial focus of Conference) to the nature of thinkers, and the nature of philosophy.
Recent articles
“Seeing what a ‘science of rationality’ founders on (with a little help from D. Davidson)” (com João Alberto Pinto), Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 111, april 2018 pp. 71-92. doi 0.63/979004359475_005. Special volume Rationality and Decision Making – from normative rukes to heuristics, edited by Marek Hetmanski
“Is seeing judging? Radical contextualism and the problem of perception”. In David Zapero and Eduardo Marchesan, Objectivity, Truth and Context London, Routledge, 2018, pp. 124-158.
“Is there really a single way for all humans to be human? Some problems for Aristotelian naturalism in contemporary moral philosophy”,. eds. Revista da Faculdade de Letras – Universidade do Porto. PP. 171-190. Número especial Philosophy of the City 2017.
“Temptation and Therapy –Wittgensteinian responses to other minds skepticism”, (Nuno Venturinha ed.), Wittgenstein Studien, Band 10, pp. 227-239. https://doi.org/10.1515/witt-2019-0014
Forthcoming:
“Les problèmes philosophiques de la perception”. In Lire Le bruit du sensible de Jocelyn Benoist. Danielle Cohen-Levinas et Raoul Moati (orgs). Paris, Éditions Hermann, Collection Rue de la Sorbonne.
“The problem with J. Searle’s idea that ‘all seeing is seeing-as’(or what Wittgenstein did not mean with the duck-rabbit)”. In The Philosophy of Perception and Observation Proceedings of the 40th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Edited by Friedrich Stadtler & Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau. Berlin, De Gruyter