•  1214
    Aboutness in Imagination
    Philosophical Studies 175 (8): 1871-1886. 2018.
    I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is nat…Read more
  •  33
    Modal Meinongianism and Actuality
    Humana Mente 6 (25). 2013.
    Modal Meinongianism is the most recent neo-Meinongian theory. Its main innovation consists in a Comprehension Principle which, unlike other neo-Meinongian approaches, seemingly avoids limitations on the properties that can characterize objects. However, in a recent paper A. Sauchelli has raised an objection against modal Meinongianism, to the effect that properties and relations involving reference to worlds at which they are instantiated, and specifically to the actual world or parts thereof, f…Read more
  •  29
    Un'interpretazione analitica della dialettica hegeliana
    Iride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 17 (3): 569-592. 2004.
  •  14
    Modus Tollerns. Kant, Hegel e la critica della nozione logica di sostanza
    Giornale di Metafisica 25 (2): 287-304. 2003.
  • Quale barba per il rasoio di ockham?: Problemi del riduzionismo metafisico
    with Enrico Bellinelli
    Divus Thomas 110 (2): 9-28. 2007.
  • Dialettica come semantica
    Epistemologia 26 (1): 5-44. 2003.
  •  630
    Williamson on Counterpossibles
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 47 (4): 693-713. 2018.
    A counterpossible conditional is a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. Common sense delivers the view that some such conditionals are true, and some are false. In recent publications, Timothy Williamson has defended the view that all are true. In this paper we defend the common sense view against Williamson’s objections.
  •  2
    Review (review)
    Hegel-Studien 39 211-214. 2005.
    Hegel und Russell. Logik und Ontologie im modernen und zeitgenössischen Denken.
  •  304
    Dialetheism
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2018 (2018). 2008.
    A dialetheia is a sentence, A, such that both it and its negation, ¬A, are true (we shall talk of sentences throughout this entry; but one could run the definition in terms of propositions, statements, or whatever one takes as her favourite truth-bearer: this would make little difference in the context). Assuming the fairly uncontroversial view that falsity just is the truth of negation, it can equally be claimed that a dialetheia is a sentence which is both true and false
  •  1182
    Άδύνατον and material exclusion 1
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2). 2008.
    Philosophical dialetheism, whose main exponent is Graham Priest, claims that some contradictions hold, are true, and it is rational to accept and assert them. Such a position is naturally portrayed as a challenge to the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). But all the classic formulations of the LNC are, in a sense, not questioned by a typical dialetheist, since she is (cheerfully) required to accept them by her own theory. The goal of this paper is to develop a formulation of the Law which appears t…Read more
  •  2399
    The gödel paradox and Wittgenstein's reasons
    Philosophia Mathematica 17 (2): 208-219. 2009.
    An interpretation of Wittgenstein’s much criticized remarks on Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem is provided in the light of paraconsistent arithmetic: in taking Gödel’s proof as a paradoxical derivation, Wittgenstein was drawing the consequences of his deliberate rejection of the standard distinction between theory and metatheory. The reasoning behind the proof of the truth of the Gödel sentence is then performed within the formal system itself, which turns out to be inconsistent. It is show…Read more
  •  4471
    This book is both an introduction to and a research work on Meinongianism. “Meinongianism” is taken here, in accordance with the common philosophical jargon, as a general label for a set of theories of existence – probably the most basic notion of ontology. As an introduction, the book provides the first comprehensive survey and guide to Meinongianism and non-standard theories of existence in all their main forms. As a research work, the book exposes and develops the most up-to-date Meinongian t…Read more
  •  58
    Modal Noneism: Transworld Identity, Identification, and Individuation
    Australasian Journal of Logic 11 (2). 2014.
    Noneism a is form of Meinongianism, proposed by Richard Routley and developed and improved by Graham Priest in his widely discussed book Towards Non-Being. Priest's noneism is based upon the double move of building a worlds semantics including impossible worlds, besides possible ones, and admitting a new comprehension principle for objects, differerent from the ones proposed in other kinds of neo-Meinongian theories, such as Parsons' and Zalta's. The new principle has no restrictions on the sets…Read more
  •  754
    Impossible Worlds
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013). 2013.
    It is a venerable slogan due to David Hume, and inherited by the empiricist tradition, that the impossible cannot be believed, or even conceived. In Positivismus und Realismus, Moritz Schlick claimed that, while the merely practically impossible is still conceivable, the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable. An opposite philosophical tradition, however, maintains that inconsistencies and logical impossibilities are thinkable, and sometimes believable, to…Read more
  •  652
    Conceivability and possibility: some dilemmas for Humeans
    Synthese 195 (6): 2697-2715. 2018.
    The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of P at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental r…Read more
  •  58
    Wittgenstein on Incompleteness Makes Paraconsistent Sense
    In Francesco Berto, Edwin Mares, Koji Tanaka & Francesco Paoli (eds.), Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications, Springer. pp. 257--276. 2008.
    I provide an interpretation of Wittgenstein's much criticized remarks on Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem in the light of paraconsistent arithmetics: in taking Gödel's proof as a paradoxical derivation, Wittgenstein was right, given his deliberate rejection of the standard distinction between theory and metatheory. The reasoning behind the proof of the truth of the Gödel sentence is then performed within the formal system itself, which turns out to be inconsistent. I show that the models of …Read more
  •  4222
    'Ontology and Metaontology: A Contemporary Guide' is a clear and accessible survey of ontology, focussing on the most recent trends in the discipline. Divided into parts, the first half characterizes metaontology: the discourse on the methodology of ontological inquiry, covering the main concepts, tools, and methods of the discipline, exploring the notions of being and existence, ontological commitment, paraphrase strategies, fictionalist strategies, and other metaontological questions. The sec…Read more
  •  1673
    Modal meinongianism and fiction: The best of three worlds
    Philosophical Studies 152 (3): 313-35. 2011.
    We outline a neo-Meinongian framework labeled as Modal Meinongian Metaphysics (MMM) to account for the ontology and semantics of fictional discourse. Several competing accounts of fictional objects are originated by the fact that our talking of them mirrors incoherent intuitions: mainstream theories of fiction privilege some such intuitions, but are forced to account for others via complicated paraphrases of the relevant sentences. An ideal theory should resort to as few paraphrases as possible.…Read more
  •  1147
    A Modality Called ‘Negation’
    Mind 124 (495): 761-793. 2015.
    I propose a comprehensive account of negation as a modal operator, vindicating a moderate logical pluralism. Negation is taken as a quantifier on worlds, restricted by an accessibility relation encoding the basic concept of compatibility. This latter captures the core meaning of the operator. While some candidate negations are then ruled out as violating plausible constraints on compatibility, different specifications of the notion of world support different logical conducts for negations. The a…Read more
  •  435
    There’s Plenty of Boole at the Bottom: A Reversible CA Against Information Entropy
    with Jacopo Tagliabue and Gabriele Rossi
    Minds and Machines 26 (4): 341-357. 2016.
    “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, said the title of Richard Feynman’s 1959 seminal conference at the California Institute of Technology. Fifty years on, nanotechnologies have led computer scientists to pay close attention to the links between physical reality and information processing. Not all the physical requirements of optimal computation are captured by traditional models—one still largely missing is reversibility. The dynamic laws of physics are reversible at microphysical level, dis…Read more
  •  3126
  •  698
    On Conceiving the Inconsistent
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114 (1pt1): 103-121. 2014.
    I present an approach to our conceiving absolute impossibilities—things which obtain at no possible world—in terms of ceteris paribus intentional operators: variably restricted quantifiers on possible and impossible worlds based on world similarity. The explicit content of a representation plays a role similar in some respects to the one of a ceteris paribus conditional antecedent. I discuss how such operators invalidate logical closure for conceivability, and how similarity works when impossibl…Read more
  •  1499
    Impossible worlds and propositions: Against the parity thesis
    Philosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 471-486. 2010.
    Accounts of propositions as sets of possible worlds have been criticized for conflating distinct impossible propositions. In response to this problem, some have proposed to introduce impossible worlds to represent distinct impossibilities, endorsing the thesis that impossible worlds must be of the same kind; this has been called the parity thesis. I show that this thesis faces problems, and propose a hybrid account which rejects it: possible worlds are taken as concrete Lewisian worlds, and impo…Read more