Powers are properties defined by what they do. The focus of the large majority of the powers literature has been mainly put on explicating the (multifaceted) results of the production of a power in certain (multifaceted) initial conditions: but all this causal complexity is bound to be—and, in fact, it has proved to be—quite difficult to handle. In this paper we take a different approach by focusing on the very activity of producing those multifaceted manifestations themselves. In this paper, we propose an original account of what the essence of a power consists in which stems from a radical reconceptualisation of power-causation according to which counterfactuals are to be explained away by powers, and not vice-versa. We call this approach the dynamical operator account of powers. According to this account, the causal role of powers consists in their ensuring that the ontological transition from a stimulus S to a manifestation M happens. Powers thus have a dynamical essence which consists in the fundamental activity of generating the counterfactuals typically associated with them. We show that if one conceptualises this functional activity as the metaphysical fulcrum around which counterfactual-based causation revolves, one is granted not only an improved methodology to individuate powers but also a better understanding of their knowability, modality and directedness.

What is the Specious Present? Which is its duration? And why, ultimately, do we need it to figure in our phenomenological account of temporal perception? In this paper, after introducing the role of the Specious Present in the main models that account for our phenomenological present, and after considering the deflationary objection by Dennett (that the debate relies on the fallacy of the Cartesian Theatre of Mind, the idea that it is meaningful to ask where and when an experience becomes conscious), I claim—thanks to a spatial analogy—that there could be a good criterion to distinguish between a present experience and a past experience, that there are good reasons to sustain the Specious Present (while snapshots are in no sense part of our phenomenological life), and that there could be a precise way to define the nature—and to measure the duration—of the Specious Present; as I will clarify, our capability and possibility to act and react are central in this perspective. If we accept this change of perspective, there is a definite sense in which the Specious Present is part of our temporal phenomenology.

In this paper I defend situated approaches of cognition, and the idea that mind, body and external world are inseparable. In the first section, I present some anti-Cartesian approaches of cognition and discuss the intuition they share that there is a constitutive interaction between mind, body and external environment. In the second section, I present the fallacy of the Cartesian theater of the mind and explain its theoretical premises. In the third section, I present a spatial argument against it, and argue that some case studies could give support to the idea of the mind stretching over the boundaries of the skull. In the fourth section, I present a temporal argument, and argue that even in this case the idea of an interaction between our cognitive life and the external world has at least a very strong intuitive palatability. 1 See e.g. Greeno (1989) for a presentation of this topic, or Suchman 1987 for a research in cognitive science-where cognition is taken to be continuous with processes in the environment. 2 See Rowlands (2010): 51.

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The model presented by the authors can explain an inherent contradiction in people's naïve theory of time. In this commentary I suggest a way in which another paradox of our phenomenal temporality may be addressed along these lines. In the final section, I also discuss some concerns that may arise about the clear-cut distinction between humans and non-human animals.