• De «re» et «de corpore»
    Revue de Théologie Et de Philosophie 124 (3): 271-289. 1992.
  •  20
    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, …Read more
  •  88
    Ontologia dell'arte
    Rivista di Estetica 43 (23): 3-159. 2003.
  •  5
    I defend a cognitive theory of pictures, according to which the central paradigm of our concept of a picture is the representational picture, i.e., the one which induces recognitional abilities in the perceiver. I show how to classify different pictorial styles in terms of their distance from the paradigm, and I criticize alternative accounts
  •  391
    False beliefs and naive beliefs: They can be good for you
    with Marco Bertamini
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6): 512-513. 2009.
    Naive physics beliefs can be systematically mistaken. They provide a useful test-bed because they are common, and also because their existence must rely on some adaptive advantage, within a given context. In the second part of the commentary we also ask questions about when a whole family of misbeliefs should be considered together as a single phenomenon
  •  300
    True and False: An Exchange
    with Achille C. Varzi
    In André Chapuis & Anil Gupta (eds.), Circularity, Definition, and Truth, Indian Council of Philosophical Research. pp. 365-370. 2000.
    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 tri…Read more
  •  115
    Cognitive aspects of gerrymandering
    Topoi 20 (2): 203-212. 2001.
    Some philosochical and cognitive aspects of political gerrymandering are investigated. The basic assumption of gerrymandering practices is that regions be connected. This assumption is questioned, as it seems to result for a cognitive bias for connectedness (a preference for unitary objects).
  •  26
    The Unity of the Kind Artwork
    Rivista di Estetica 23 (43): 3-31. 2002.
    A defence of a meta-representational theory of artworks, accounting for the unity of the kind. Artworks are surmised to be artefacts that are produced with the intention of being recognised as having been produced with the intention of eliciting a conversation
  •  30
    Some varieties of spatial hearing
    with Jérôme Dokic
    In Matthew Nudds & Casey O'Callaghan (eds.), Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press. 2009.
    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 au…Read more
  •  3
    Minor entities : surfaces, holes, and shadows
    In Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge. 2009.
  •  16
    Introduction. The interdisciplinary study of drawing
    Rivista di Estetica 47 3-7. 2011.
    Drawing — and I speak here of outline drawing that uses just lines: monochrome, with no particular concern for what fills the spaces left between the lines — is a human artifact as ancient as it is mysterious. Even a simple enumeration of facts about it is bound to arouse interest and theoretical curiosity. Here are a few. Drawings are just as old as the oldest human representations known to us. The painted animals in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet are surrounded by thick lines that have a...