Scuola Normale Superiore
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1989
Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology
Value Theory
  •  1
    Contexts, Fiction and Truth
    In A. Capone, M. Carapezza & F. Lo Piparo (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy, Springer. pp. 489-500. 2013.
    In this paper I want to hold that contextualism – the position according to which wide context, i.e., the concrete situation of discourse, may well have the semantic role of assigning truth-conditions to sentences – may well accommodate (along with some nowadays established theses about the semantics of proper names) three data about fiction, namely, the facts that as far as discourse involving fiction is concerned, i) sentences about nothing are meaningful ii) they may be true in fiction iii) y…Read more
  •  3
    The nameability of possible objects
    From a Logical Point of View 3 14-33. 1994.
    Within the general framework of the theory of direct reference, there is no agreement as to whether unactualised possible objects (from now on, possibilia) can be referred to by means of directly referential singular terms (from now on, DR terms). While some have maintained that such a direct reference can be established e.g. via some fixing-reference description (Kaplan, Salmon, and perhaps Kripke himself), others have denied any such possibility. In what follows, I will scrutinise such denials…Read more
  •  129
    Are there Non‐Existent Intentionalia?
    Philosophical Quarterly 56 (224): 436-441. 2006.
    In his recent book on the philosophy of mind, Tim Crane has maintained that intentional objects are to be conceived as schematic entities, having no particular intrinsic nature. I take this metaphysical thesis as fundamentally correct. Yet in this paper I want to cast some doubts on whether this thesis prevents intentionalia, especially nonexistent ones, from belonging to the general inventory of what there is, as Crane seems to think. If my doubts are grounded, Crane’s treatment of intentionali…Read more
  •  96
    How demonstrative pictorial reference grounds contextualism
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (3): 402-418. 2009.
    In a very recent paper (2010), Dominic McIver Lopes has claimed that pictures perceptually ground demonstrative reference to depicted objects. If as I think Lopes is right, this has important consequences for the debate on the semantics/pragmatics divide. For one can exploit Lopes' claim in order to provide one more argument in favour of the well-known contextualist thesis that wide context has not only both a pre- and a post-semantic role, but also a semantic role – to put it in Perry's (1997) …Read more
  •  5
    Reference intentionality is an internal relation
    In S. Miguens, J. A. Pinto & C. E. Mauro (eds.), Analyses, Facultade De Letras Da Universidade Do Porto. pp. 66-78. 2006.
    In this paper, I will focus on the basic form of intentionality, reference intentionality (from now on, RI), the property an intentional state has of being ‘directed upon’ a certain object, its intentional object. I will try to prove that (as Husserl, Wittgenstein and others originally envisaged) RI is not only a state - intentional object relation, but it also is an internal, i.e., a necessary, relation between that state and that object, at least in the sense that the state could not exist if …Read more
  •  28
    A che titolo titoliamo immagini?
    Aisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 4 (2). 2011.
  • Ficta et opera
    Rivista di Estetica 44 (26): 171-188. 2004.
  •  156
    In this paper, I explore the consequences of the thesis that externalism and internalism are (possibly, but as we will see not necessarily, opposite) metaphysical doctrines on the individuation conditions of a thought. If I am right, this thesis primarily entails that at least some naturalist positions on the ontology of the mind, namely the reductionistic ones, are hardly compatible with both externalism and a version of internalism so conceived, namely relational internalism. Indeed, according…Read more
  • The best of possible naturalism
    Etica E Politica 11 179-191. 2009.
  •  252
    Il est rare, en philosophie, qu'on rencontre un problème ayant reçu une solution définitive. Dans le cadre de la philosophie contemporaine du langage, cependant, la critique de Russell à Meinong fait souvent figure d'exception à la règle - ce que l'on ne peut, eu égard à certains aspects de la philosophie de Meinong, que déplorer. Selon l'interprétation courante, la théorie des descriptions définies de Russell - que Ramsey qualifia de “paradigme de philosophie” - aurait mis hors jeu une fois pou…Read more
  •  16
    Intenzionalità, normatività e riferimento
    Rivista di Estetica 34 (34-36): 163-180. 2007.
    Che cos’hanno a che fare tra loro un filosofo che, a partire da Wittgenstein, ha sviluppato una teoria di impianto naturalista e che cerca di conciliare una prospettiva individualistica con una tendenzialmente socioesternista della competenza semantica, una teoria che studi di psicologia cognitiva e di neuroscienze si stanno incaricando di inverare, e un altro che, a partire dallo stesso Wittgenstein, ha sviluppato una concezione antinaturalista tanto dell’intenzionalità quanto della normativ...
  •  9
    From Fictionalism to Realism (edited book)
    with Carola Barbero and Maurizio Ferraris
    Cambridge Scholars Press. 2013.
    In ontology, realism and anti-realism may be taken as opposite attitudes towards entities of different kinds, so that one may turn out to be a realist with respect to certain entities, and an anti-realist with respect to others. In this book, the editors focus on this controversy concerning social entities in general and fictional entities in particular, the latter often being considered nowadays as kinds of social entities. More specifically, fictionalists (those who maintain that we only make-…Read more
  •  139
  •  439
    Heidegger's Logico-Semantic Strikeback
    Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 22 19-38. 2015.
    In (1959), Carnap famously attacked Heidegger for having constructed an insane metaphysics based on a misconception of both the logical form and the semantics of ordinary language. In what follows, it will be argued that, once one appropriately (i.e., in a Russellian fashion) reads Heidegger’s famous sentence that should paradigmatically exemplify such a misconception, i.e., “the nothing nothings”, there is nothing either logically or semantically wrong with it. The real controversy as to how th…Read more
  • Varietà nella supposta giungla
    Rivista di Estetica 30 71-85. 2005.
  •  6
    Holistic narrow content?
    Il Cannocchiale 2 197-209. 1997.
    In the course of his philosophical development, Jerry Fodor has indicated two sorts of non-broad (i.e., non-truthconditional) content of mental representations, namely content of mental state types opaquely taxonomized (de dicto content: DDC) and narrow content (NC) qua mapping function from contexts (of thought) to broad contents. According to the former conceptualization, mental state tokens which are truth-conditionally identical may be such that they cannot both truthfully ascribed to one an…Read more
  •  1041
    A Suitable Metaphysics for Fictional Entities
    In Stuart Brock & Anthony Everett (eds.), Fictional Objects, Oxford University Press. pp. 129-146. 2015.
    There is a list of desiderata that any good metaphysics of fictional entities should be able to fulfill. These desiderata are: 1) the nonexistence of fictional entities; 2) the causal inefficacy of suchentities;3)the incompleteness of such entities;4)the created character of such entities; 5) the actual possession by ficta of the narrated properties; 6) the unrevisable ascription to ficta of such properties; and 7) the necessary possession by ficta of such properties. (Im)possibilist metaphysics uncont…Read more
  •  13
    A syncretistic ontology of fictional beings
    In T. Koblizek, P. Kot'atko & M. Pokorny (eds.), Text + Work: The Menard Case, Litteraria Pragensia. pp. 89-108. 2013.
    In the camp of the believers in fictional entities, two main paradigms nowadays face each other: the neo-Meinongian and the artifactualist.1 Both parties agree on the idea that ficta are abstract entities, i.e. things that exist (at least in the actual world) even though in a non-spatiotemporal way. Yet according to the former paradigm, ficta are entities of a Platonic sort: either sets of properties (or at least ‘one-one’ correlates of such sets) or generic objects. According to the latter para…Read more
  •  16
    Ficta versus Possibilia
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 48 (1): 75-104. 1994.
    Although both belong to the domain of the nonexistent, there is an ontological distinction between ficta and possibilia. Ficta are a particular kind of abstract objects, namely constructed abstract objects which generically depend on authors for their subsistence. Moreover, they are essentially incomplete entities, in that they are correlates of finite sets of properties. - On the other hand, possibilia are concrete objects. Being a possible object is indeed being an entity that might have exist…Read more
  • Qualia immateriali ma senz'anima
    Rivista di Estetica 41 (18): 70-86. 2001.
  •  40
    Another Argument for Cognitive Phenomenology
    Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 7 (2): 256-263. 2016.
    __: In this paper, we want to support Kriegel’s argument in favor of the thesis that there is a cognitive form of phenomenology that is both irreducible to and independent of any sensory form of phenomenology by providing another argument in favor of the same thesis. Indeed, this new argument is also intended to show that the thought experiment Kriegel’s argument relies on does describe a genuine metaphysical possibility. In our view, Kriegel has not entirely succeeded in showing that his own ar…Read more
  •  9
    In his Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta, Recanati maintains two main theses regarding meta-representational sentences embedding allegedly empty proper names. The first thesis concerns both belief sentences embedding allegedly empty names and (internal) meta-fictional sentences (i.e., sentences of the form “in the story S, p”) embedding fictional, hence again allegedly empty, names. It says that such sentences primarily have fictive truth-conditions: that is, conditions for their fictional truth. The…Read more
  • Is liberal naturalism possible?
    In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity, Cambridge University Press. pp. 69-86. 2010.
  •  349
    What's in a (Mental) Picture
    In A. Torza (ed.), Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers, Springer. pp. 389-406. 2015.
    In this paper, I will present several interpretations of Brentano’s notion of the intentional inexistence of a mental state’s intentional object, i.e., what that state is about. I will moreover hold that, while all the interpretations from Section 1 to Section 4 are wrong, the penultimate interpretation that I focus in Section 5, the one according to which intentional inexistence amounts to the individuation of a mental state by means of its intentional object, is correct provided that it is nes…Read more
  •  59
    In recent works, Chomsky has once more endorsed a computational view of rulefollowing, whereby to follow a rule is to operate certain computations on a subject’s mental representations. As is well known, this picture does not conform to what we may call the grammatical conception of rule-following outlined by Wittgenstein, whereby an elucidation of the concept of rule-following is aimed at by isolating grammatical statements regarding the phrase ‘to follow a rule’. As a result, Chomskyan and Wit…Read more
  •  14
    Can negative existentials be referentially vindicated?
    Lingua E Stile 29 397-419. 1994.
    In The Theory of Objects, Alexius Meinong used true negative existentials to argue in favour of non-existent objects: in order to assert veridically that an object O does not exist, one has to refer to O itself1. From Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting" onwards, it has become a commonplace to say that this argument does not work. For every sentence apparently concerning non-existents one can provide a paraphrase which eliminates the singular term contained in it and therefore dispels the illusion o…Read more