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The Reality of the Future: Spacetime Physics and the Objectivity of Temporal BecomingDissertation, The Johns Hopkins University. 1993.Temporal becoming is usually considered the essence of the concept of time. But in our century most physicists and philosophers have defended the view that becoming is dependent on the existence of conscious beings and that there is no ontological difference between past and future. I evaluate these related claims both in light of their conceptual implications and by bringing to bear our best spacetime theories. ;Since a mind-independent becoming should be grounded in an ontological, non-epistem…Read more
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22Facts, Events, Things and the Ontology of PhysicsPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 76 343-364. 2000.
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44Time and the metaphysics of relativity - William Lane Craig, kluwer academic publisher, dordrecht, 2000, 292pp. $US 92, ISBN 0-792-36668- (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 34 (1): 154-158. 2003.
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322Determinism, chance, and freedomIn Harald Atmanspacher & Robert C. Bishop (eds.), Between Chance and Choice: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Determinism, Thorverton Uk: Imprint Academic. pp. 321--38. 2002.After a brief but necessary characterization of the notion of determinism, I discuss and critically evaluate four views on the relationship between determinism and free will by taking into account both (i) what matters most to us in terms of a free will worth-wanting and (ii) which capacities can be legitimately attributed to human beings without contradicting what we currently know from natural sciences. The main point of the paper is to argue that the libertarian faces a dilemma: on the one ha…Read more
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118Scientific explanation and scientific structuralismIn Alisa Bokulich & Peter Bokulich (eds.), Scientific Structuralism, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of science, Springer. pp. 161--176. 2009.In this paper we argue that quantum mechanics provides a genuine kind of structural explanations of quantum phenomena. Since structural explanations only rely on the formal properties of the theory, they have the advantage of being independent of interpretative questions. As such, they can be used to claim that, even in the current absence of one agreed-upon interpretation, quantum mechanics is capable of providing satisfactory explanations of physical phenomena. While our proposal clearly canno…Read more
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Aspetti epistemologici del concetto di tempoNuova Civiltà Delle Macchine 13 (1/2): 99-111. 1995.In questo saggio analizzo alcuni problemi sollevati dalla concezione analitia del tempo
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95In 1877 Peirce distinguished four different methods of “fixating our beliefs”, among which I here concentrate on what could be called the “method of tenacity” and the “method of science”. I then use these distinctions to argue that despite their apparent conflict, pragmatism, relying on the method of tenacity, and naturalism, relying on the method of science, can and should coexist, both in science and in metaphysics.
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32The natural ambiguity of the notion of "natural", and how to overcome itEpistemologia 35 71-87. 2012.In this paper I will explore the ramification ofthe distinction between fact and values in order to show that human values enter in various ways in both science and technologies without violating Humes factlvalue distinction. Among the nanotechnologies, I will discuss the case study provided by the use of microchips implanted under our skin: though they do not obviously overcome the limits of the natura! laws , their application might in principie jeopardize our ethical principles in a way that …Read more
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85On becoming, relativity, and nonseparabilityPhilosophy of Science 63 (4): 585-604. 1996.In a reply to Nicholas Maxwell, Stein has proved that Minkowski spacetime can leave room for the kind of indeterminateness required both by certain interpretations of quantum mechanics and by objective becoming. By examining the consequences of outcome dependence in Bell-type experiments for the co-determinateness of spacelike-related events, I argue that the only becoming relation that is compatible with both causal and noncausal readings of the quantum correlations is the universal relation. T…Read more
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Il problema del realismo tra meccanica quantistica e relativita specialeEpistemologia 19 (1): 113-156. 1996.
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624In my review of Steven French's The structure of the world. Metaphysics & Representation. OUP, Oxford, 2014 I argue that the author is forced to navigate between the Scilla of Tegmark’s Pitagoreanism (2008) and the Carybdis of “blobobjectivism” (Horgan and Potrč 2008), namely the claim that the whole physical universe is a single concrete structurally complex but partless cosmos (a “blob”).
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34The Alexandroff Present and Minkowski Spacetime: Why it Cannot Do What it has Been Asked to Do1In Dennis Dieks, Wenceslao Gonzalo, Thomas Uebel, Stephan Hartmann & Marcel Weber (eds.), Explanation, Prediction, and Confirmation, Springer. pp. 379--394. 2011.
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35In his recent book Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity, William Lane Craig uses the concept of time to try to reconstruct strong conceptual links between theology, metaphysics and physics, three vertices of a triangle that until the 17th century were much less separated than they are today. In this review, I present and critically discuss the main theses of the book.
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52Physics and Metaphysics: Interaction or Autonomy?Humana Mente 4 (13). 2010.In this paper it is argued that if physics is to become a coherent metaphysics of nature, it needs an interpretation, namely (i) a clear formulation of its ontological/metaphysical claims and (ii) and a precise understanding of how such claims are related to the world of our experience, which is the most important reservoir of traditional, merely aprioristic metaphysical speculations. Such speculations − especially if conducted in full autonomy from physics, or imposed upon it “from the outside”…Read more
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673Events and the Ontology of Quantum MechanicsTopoi 34 (2): 369-378. 2015.In the first part of the paper I argue that an ontology of events is precise, flexible and general enough so as to cover the three main alternative formulations of quantum mechanics as well as theories advocating an antirealistic view of the wave function. Since these formulations advocate a primitive ontology of entities living in four-dimensional spacetime, they are good candidates to connect that quantum image with the manifest image of the world. However, to the extent that some form of real…Read more
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127Why Are (Most) Laws of Nature Mathematical?In Jan Faye, Paul Needham, Uwe Scheffler & Max Urchs (eds.), Nature's Principles, Springer. pp. 55--75. 2005.
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33Tempo della mente e tempo della materia. La natura del presente e la teoria della relativitàQuaestio 7 (1): 489-503. 2007.
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44In order to tackle the question posed by the title – notoriously answered in the positive, among others, by Heisenberg, Margenau, Popper and Redhead – I first discuss some attempts at distinguishing dispositional from non-dispositional properties, and then relate the distinction to the formalism of quantum mechanics. Since any answer to the question titling the paper must be interpretation-dependent, I review some of the main interpretations of quantum mechanics in order to argue that the ontolo…Read more
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155Structural explanations in Minkowski spacetime: Which account of models?In V. Petkov (ed.), Space, Time, and Spacetime, Springer. pp. 193-207. 2010.In this paper we argue that structural explanations are an effective way of explaining well known relativistic phenomena like length contraction and time dilation, and then try to understand how this can be possible by looking at the literature on scientific models. In particular, we ask whether and how a model like that provided by Minkowski spacetime can be said to represent the physical world, in such a way that it can successfully explain physical phenomena structurally. We conclude by claim…Read more
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67The paper is a review of Talal Debs and Michael Redhead's 2007 book, Objectivity, Invariance, and Convention, Harvard, Harvard University Press.
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785The Naturalness of the Naturalistic Fallacy and the Ethics of NanotechnologyIn Sven Ove Hansson (ed.), The Role of Technology in Science: Philosophical Perspectives, Springer Verlag. 2015.In the first part of this paper, I try to clear the ground from frequent misconceptions about the relationship between fact and value by examining some uses of the adjective “natural” in ethical controversies. Such uses bear evidence to our “natural” tendency to regard nature (considered in a descriptive sense, as the complex of physical and biological regularities) as the source of ethical norms. I then try to account for the origin of this tendency by offering three related explanations, the m…Read more
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89On various senses of “conventional” and their interrelation in the philosophy of physics: simultaneity as a case studyIn Thomas Uebel, Stephan Hartmann, Wenceslao Gonzalez, Marcel Weber, Dennis Dieks & Friedrich Stadler (eds.), The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 335--349. 2009.My aim in this note is to disambiguate various senses of ‘conventional’ that in the philosophy of physics have been frequently conflated. As a case study, I will refer to the well-known issue of the conventionality of simultaneity in the special theory of relativity, since it is particularly in this context that the above mentioned confusion is present
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95The paper defends two claims; Viewed from the perspective of the substantivalism/relationism debate, structural spacetime realism is a form of relationism; However, if we managed to reinforce Rynasiewicz’s point that the general theory of relativity makes the substantivalism/relationism dispute “outdated”, the re-elaboration of Stein ’s 1967 version of structural spacetime realism to be proposed here proves to be a good, antimetaphysical solution to the problem of the ontological status of space…Read more
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6The question of the reality of time and the model-theoretic approach to scientific theoriesLogique Et Analyse 41 (164): 313-325. 1998.
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Università degli Studi Roma TreDipartimento di Filosofia, Comunicazione e SpettacoloRegular Faculty