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41Anthony Everett, The Nonexistent, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, viii + 246 pp., £40 , ISBN 9780199674794 (review)Dialectica 69 (4): 611-620. 2015.
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47Is Wittgenstein a Contextualist?Essays in Philosophy 11 (2): 150-167. 2010.There is definitely a family resemblance between what contemporary contextualism maintains in philosophy of language and some of the claims about meaning put forward by the later Wittgenstein. Yet the main contextualist thesis, namely that linguistic meaning undermines truth-conditions, was not defended by Wittgenstein. If a claim in this regard can be retrieved in Wittgenstein despite his manifest antitheoretical attitude, it is instead that truth-conditions trivially supervene on linguistic me…Read more
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2Compositional supervenience without compositional meaning?In M. De Glas & Z. Pawlak (eds.), WOCFAI 95. Second World Conference on the Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence, 3-7 July 1995, Angkor. pp. 441-452. 1995.An attempt is first made to clarify why Stephen Schiffer may legitimately claim that his noncompositional account of meaning differs from other non-compositional semantic doctrines such as the hidden-indexical theory of propositional attitudes. Subsequently, however, doubt is cast upon Schiffer's main contention that, as far as language of thought is concerned, a compositional supervenience theory can adequately satisfy all the desiderata a compositional meaning theory is traditionally called up…Read more
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42Intentionality deflated?Philosophical Issues 8 117-126. 1997.Horwich’s paper is an intriguing and subtle attempt to extend deflationism from the theory of truth to the theory of meaning. Horwich endorses a use-theory of meaning which claims that one replacement instance of the schema “‘x’ means x”, e.g. “‘t1’ means t1”, is paraphrasable as U(‘t1’), while another replacement instance is..
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433Probably the Charterhouse of Parma Does Not Exist, Possibly Not Even That ParmaHumana Mente 6 (25): 235-261. 2013.In this paper, I will claim that fictional works apparently about utterly immigrant objects, i.e., real individuals imported in fiction from reality, are instead about fictional individuals that intentionally resemble those real individuals in a significant manner: fictional surrogates of such individuals. Since I also share the realists’ conviction that the remaining fictional works concern native characters, i.e., full-fledged fictional individuals that originate in fiction itself, I will here…Read more
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51Why Frege cases do involve cognitive phenomenology but only indirectlyPhilosophical Explorations 19 (2): 205-221. 2016.In this paper, I want to hold, first, that a treatment of Frege cases in terms of a difference in cognitive phenomenology of the involved experiential mental states is not viable. Second, I will put forward another treatment of such cases that appeals to a difference in intentional objects metaphysically conceived not as exotica, but as schematic objects, that is, as objects that have no metaphysical nature qua objects of thought. This allows their nature to be settled independently of their bei…Read more
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10Contingent and necessary identitiesActa Analytica 12 73-98. 1997.A new theory of identity statements is put forward which appeals to a basic distinction between two notions of identity, i.e. strict and loose identity. The former is the traditional necessary relation of an object with the object itself, whereas the latter is a contingent relation of reduction of some (at least two) possible unactual objects to a possible actual object. By appealing to strict identity, one can maintain that some tokenings of identity sentences express a semantic content which i…Read more
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28How to get a non-intensionalist, propositional, moderately realist truthconditional account of internal metafictional sentencesGrazer Philosophische Studien 72 (1): 179-199. 2006.In what follows, I will first try to show that both anti-realist and realist intensionalist truthconditional accounts of internal metafictional sentences (i.e., sentences of the form "in the story S, p") are unsatisfactory. Moreover, I will claim that this does not mean that propositional truthconditional accounts of those sentences are to be dispensed with; simply, one has to provide a non-intensionalist propositional truthconditional account of those sentences. Finally, I will show that this a…Read more
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315A Syncretistic Theory of Proper NamesIn A. Bianchi, V. Morato & G. Spolaore (eds.), The importance of being Ernesto: Reference, truth and logical form, Padova University Press. pp. 141-164. 2016.In this paper, I want to show that, far from being incompatible, a Predicate Theory of proper names and the Direct Reference thesis can be combined in a syncretistic account. There are at least three plausible such accounts – one which compares proper names in their referential use to referentially used proper definite descriptions, another one that compares them in this use to demonstratives, and a third one which, although it is as indexicalist as the second one, conceives proper names in this…Read more
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75The Mark of the MentalPhenomenology and Mind 4 124-136. 2013.In this paper, I want to show that the so-called intentionalist programme, according to which the qualitative aspects of the mental have to be brought back to its intentional features, is doomed to fail. For, pace Brentano, the property that constitutes the main part of such intentional features, i.e., intentionality, is not the mark of the mental, neither in the proper Brentanian sense, according to which intentionality is the both necessary and sufficient condition of the mental, nor in its ‘w…Read more
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497All the Existences that There AreDisputatio 4 (32): 361-383. 2012.In this paper, I will defend the claim that there are three existence properties: the second-order property of being instantiated, a substantive first-order property (or better a group of such properties) and a formal, hence universal, first-order property. I will first try to show what these properties are and why we need all of them for ontological purposes. Moreover, I will try to show why a Meinong-like option that positively endorses both the former and the latter first-order property is th…Read more
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11Russell e l'abbandono del suo meinonghianesimo nascostoRivista di Estetica 32 (32): 93-107. 2006.In questo paper cercherò di mostrare che la visione tradizionale del mutamento da parte di Russell della sua teoria delle descrizioni definite negli anni che vanno dai Principles of Mathematics del 1903 a «On Denoting» del 1905, visione secondo cui Russell produce una nuova teoria delle descrizioni (anche) per liberarsi dagli impegni ontologici manifesti di stampo meinonghiano ad entità inesistenti connessi alla sua precedente teoria delle descrizioni, non è convincente, perché le due teorie...
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72Against against fictional realismGrazer Philosophische Studien 80 (1): 47-63. 2010.In a recent paper, Anthony Everett has mounted a very serious attack against realism with respect to fictional entities. According to Everett, ficta raise deep logico-ontological worries, for they violate some basic logical laws and are problematically indeterminate with respect to both their existence and identity. Since an antirealist account for sentences apparently committing us to ficta is available, no such committment is really needed. In this paper I will try to show, first, that the ant…Read more
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432Towards a syncretistic theory of depictionIn C. Calabi & K. Mulligan (eds.), The Crooked Oar, The Moon’s Size and The Necker Cube. Essays on the Illusions of Outer and Inner Perception, . 2012.In this paper I argue for a syncretistic theory of depiction, which combines the merits of the main paradigms which have hitherto faced themselves on this issue, namely the perceptualist and semioticist approaches. The syncretistic theory indeed takes from the former its stress on experiential factors and from the latter its stress on conventional factors. But the theory is even more syncretistic than this, for the way it accounts for the experiential factor vindicates several claims defended by…Read more
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11Oggetti fittizi: lo stato dell'arteIride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 17 (1): 177-188. 2004.
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Il migliore dei naturalismi possibiliEtica E Politica 11 (2): 179-191. 2009.In this paper, we first set out three requirements that each e-theory – a theory whose task is to explain data – must fulfill in order to be one such good theory: i) an ontological requirement, i.e. adequate simplicity, ii) a methological requirement, i.e. plurality of research procedures, iii) an epistemological requirement, i.e. compatibility with the best available epistemical procedures. Moreover, we will claim that from the metaphilosophical point of view, unlike scientific naturalism on th…Read more
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114Fiction and IndexinamesJournal of Literary Theory 8 (2). 2014.In this paper, I will first of all claim that once one takes proper names as indexicals of a particular sort, indexinames for short, one may account for some tensions that affect our desiderata regarding the use of such names in sentences directly or indirectly involving fiction. According to my proposal, a proper name “N.N.” is an indexical whose character is roughly expressed by the description “the individual called ‘N.N.’ (in context)”, where this description means “the individual one’s inte…Read more
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2“Analitico/Sintetico” vs “Grammaticale/Fattuale”: l’analisi concettuale ai tempi della naturalizzazioneRivista di Estetica 34 (1): 41-59. 2007.Negli ultimi vent’anni si è instaurato nella filosofia analitica un clima confusamente naturalistico, in cui non sempre si è distinto tra il progetto di riportare ricerche tradizionalmente filosofiche entro l’ambito delle scienze naturali e l’idea che la filosofia stessa sia “continua con la scienza”, cioè che non ci sia una distinzione di principio tra ricerche scientifiche e ricerche filosofiche. Questa seconda idea si contrappone alla tradizionale immagine, che vuole la filosofia come un’i...
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126Consequences of schematismPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (1): 135-150. 2009.In his (2001a) and in some related papers, Tim Crane has maintained that intentional objects are schematic entities, in the sense that, insofar as being an intentional object is not a genuine metaphysical category, qua objects of thought intentional objects have no particular nature. This approach to intentionalia is the metaphysical counterpart of the later Husserl's ontological approach to the same entities, according to which qua objects of thought intentionalia are indifferent to existence. …Read more
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469How Creationism Supports for Kripke’s Vichianism on FictionIn Franck Lihoreau (ed.), Truth in Fiction, Ontos Verlag. pp. 38--93. 2010.In this paper, I want to show that a reasonable thesis on truth in fiction, Fictional Vichianism (FV)—according to which fictional truths are true because they are stipulated to be true—can be positively endorsed if one grounds Kripke’s justification for (FV), that traces back to the idea that names used in fiction never refer to concrete real individuals, into a creationist position on fictional entities that allows for a distinction between the pretending and the characterizing use of fiction-…Read more
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105How fictional works are related to fictional entitiesDialectica 57 (2). 2003.The paper attempts at yielding a language-independent argument in favour of fictional entities, that is, an argument providing genuinely ontological reasons in favour of such entities. According to this argument, ficta are indispensable insofar as they are involved in the identity conditions of semantically-based entities we ordinarily accept, i.e. fictional works. It will also be evaluated to what extent this argument is close to other arguments recently provided to the same purpose.
Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |