Roberto Casati

Understanding of elementary topological equivalencies is impaired by preconceptions about the topological structure of ordinary objects, so that the equivalencies turn out to be counterintuitive. Here I will discuss some of these preconceptions, namely the dominance of gestalt properties of the visual display of the configuration, the neglect of holistic properties, the dominance of transformations the preserve metric properties over those that preserve topological properties only, the assumption that holes are objects of their own. These factors delineate an empirical research field, intuitive topology. An explanatory hypothesis for the preconceptions suggests that they are hard-wired.

This major bibliography offers a comprehensive overview of the recent literature on the nature of events and the place they occupy in our conceptual scheme. The subject has received extensive consideration in the philosophical debate over the last few decades, with ramifications reaching far into the domains of allied disciplines such as linguistics and the cognitive sciences. The starting point for this work is Hans Reichenbach's pioneering contribution on the logical form of action sentences, and the broad scope includes entries from the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of space, time, and causation, and situation theory. Approximately 1,850 entries from more than 900 authors are listed in alphabetical/chronological order by author, and most entries are annotated. This excellent work also includes Subject, Name, and Second and Subsequent Authors indexes.

Classically, truth and falsehood are opposite, and so are logical truth and logical falsehood. In this paper we imagine a situation in which the opposition is so pervasive in the language we use as to threaten the very possibility of telling truth from falsehood. The example exploits a suggestion of Ramsey’s to the effect that negation can be expressed simply by writing the negated sentence upside down. The difference between ‘p’ and ‘~~p’ disappears, the principle of double negation becomes trivial, and the truth/falsehood opposition is up for grabs. Our moral is that this indeterminacy undermines the idea of inferential role semantics.

We provide some meta-theoretical constraints for the evaluation of a-spatial theories of sounds and auditory perception. We point out some forms of spatial content auditory experience can have. If auditory experience does not necessarily have a rich egocentric spatial content, it must have some spatial content for the relevant mode of perception to be recognizably auditory. An auditory experience devoid of any spatial content, if the notion makes sense at all, would be very different from the auditory experiences we actually enjoy. This is enough to dismiss current a-spatial theories of auditory perception. As a consequence, our initial taxonomy of proximal, medial, and distal theories, as well as our phenomenological argument in favor of distal theories, are still topical.