Achille C. Varzi

This original and enticing book provides a fresh, unifying perspective on many old and new logico-philosophical conundrums. Its basic thesis is that many concepts central in ordinary and philosophical discourse are inherently circular and thus cannot be fully understood as long as one remains within the confines of a standard theory of definitions. As an alternative, the authors develop a revision theory of definitions, which allows definitions to be circular without this giving rise to contradiction (but, at worst, to “vacuous” uses of definienda). The theory is applied with varying levels of detail to a circular analysis of concepts as diverse as truth, predication, necessity, physical object, etc. The focus is on truth, and hope is expressed that a deeper understanding of the Liar and related paradoxes has been provided: “We have tried to show that once the circularity of truth is recognized, a great deal of its behavior begins to make sense. In particular, from this viewpoint, the existence of the paradoxes seems as natural as the existence of the eclipses” (p. 142). We think that this hope is fully justified, although some problems remain that future research in this field should take into account.

This volume aims to offer an up-to-date indication of the on-going debate on the nature of logic. The focus is on questions pertaining to the existence and individuation of clear boundaries delineating the concerns of logic: What is their distinctive character? What makes logic a subject of its own, separate from (and generally in the background of) the concerns of other disciplines? What is it for an expression to be a logical constant? Or, perhaps equivalently, what is it for an operation or a relation to be logical? Can these questions be addressed in a general setting, or are they intrinsically unanswerable except within specific frameworks of reference (e.g., a language, or a conceptual scheme)? How are they to be addressed—are they semantic, syntactic, pragmatic? And how do semantics, syntax, or pragmatics contribute to our understanding of these questions? Are the answers fully captured by extant systems of logic? Contributors: E. Bencivenga, J. van Benthem, D. van Dalen, M. García-Carpintero and M. Pérez Otero, A. P. Hazen, A. Koslow, G. Priest, G. Sher.

The idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. On the one hand, so many linguistic phenomena appear to be explained if (and, according to some authors, only if) we make room for logical forms in which reference to or quantification over events is explicitly featured. Examples include nominalization, adverbial modification, tense and aspect, plurals, and singular causal statements. On the other hand, a number of deep philosophical questions arise as soon as we take events into consideration. Are events entities of a kind? What are their identity and individuation criteria? How does semantic theorizing depend on such metaphysical issues? The aim of this book is to address such issues in some depth, with emphasis precisely on the interplay between linguistic applications and philosophical implications. Contributors: N. Asher, P. M. Bertinetto, J. Brandl, D. Delfitto, R. Eckardt, J. Higginbotham, A. Lenci, T. Parsons, A. ter Meulen, H. Verkuyl. A comprehensive introductory essay (pp. 3-47) is included.

This is a revised and extended version of the formal theory of holes outlined in the Appendix to the book "Holes and Other Superficialities". The first part summarizes the basic framework (ontology, mereology, topology, morphology). The second part emphasizes its relevance to spatial reasoning and to the semantics of spatial prepositions in natural language. In particular, I discuss the semantics of ‘in’ and provide an account of such fallacious arguments as “There is a hole in the sheet. The sheet is in the drawer. Ergo *there is a hole in the drawer”.

In ‘Something to Do with Vagueness ...’, Linda Burns defends an analogy between the informational and the borderline-case variety of vagueness. She argues that the latter is in fact less extraordinary and less disastrous than people in the tradition of Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright have told us. However, her account involves presuppositions that cannot be taken for granted. Here is to take a closer look at some of these presuppositions and argue hat they may—when left unguarded—undermine much of Burns’ general account.

According to a popular line of reasoning, diachronic vagueness creates a problem for the endurantist conception of persistence. Some authors have replied that this line of reasoning is inconclusive, since the endurantist can subscribe to a principle of Diachronic Unrestricted Composition (DUC) that is perfectly parallel to the principle required by the perdurantist’s semantic account. I object that the endurantist should better avoid DUC. And I argue that even DUC, if accepted, would fail to provide the endurantist with the necessary resources for explaining diachronic vagueness in familiar semantic terms.

According to a certain familiar way of dividing up the business of philosophy, ontology is concerned with the question of what entities exist (a task that is often identified with that of drafting a “complete inventory” of the universe) whereas metaphysics seeks to explain, of those entities, what they are (i.e., to specify the “ultimate nature” of the items included in the inventory). This distinction carries with it a natural thought, namely, that ontology is in some way prior to metaphysics. One must first of all figure out what things exist (or might exist); then one can attend to the further question of what they are, specify their nature, speculate on those features that make each thing the thing it is. I sympathize with that thought, but there is a major worry lurking in the background and there are several complications that emerge in the foreground. The purpose of this paper is to address such worries and complications and to come up with a plausible way of understanding the “priority thesis” that makes it both reasonable and, hopefully, useful.

Assuming that events form a genuine ontological category, shall we say that a good inventory of the world ought to include “negative” events—failures, omissions, things that didn’t happen—along with positive ones? I argue that we shouldn’t. Talk of non-occurring events is like talk of non-existing objects and should not be taken at face value. We often speak as though there were such things, but deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to avoid serious ontological commitment.

[ES] Aquí articulo y luego defiendo las dos afirmaciones siguientes: que es un error pensar que la estructura del mundo debe reflejar la estructura de las teorías por las cuales lo representamos, y por medio de las cuales tratamos de descifrarlo, simplemente porque estas teorías parecen funcionar; entre las consecuencias más lamentables de este error está la tendencia generalizada a pensar que debe haber una pluralidad de realidades, o varios niveles diferentes e irreductibles de una realidad estratificada, simplemente porque nuestro credo incluye una pluralidad de teorías cada una de las cuales aparenta ser tan importante y confiable como es irreductible a las demás. [EN] I articulate and then defend the following two claims: it is a mistake to think that the structure of the world should mirror the structure of the theories by which we represent it, and through which we try to decipher it, simply because those theories appear to work; among the most deplorable consequences of this mistake is the widespread tendency to think that there must be a plurality of realities, or several different and irreducible levels of a stratified reality, merely because our credo includes a plurality of theories each of which appears to be as important and trustworthy as it is irreducible to the others.

A selection of essays dedicated to Hans Herzberger with affection and gratitude for both his profound work and his lasting example. Contributors: I. Levi (on whether and how a rational agent should be seen as a maximizer of some cognitive value), C. Normore (on medieval accounts of logical validity), J. P. Tappenden (on the local influences on Frege's doctrines), A. Urquhart (on the inexpressible), A. C. Varzi (on dimensionality and the sense of possibility), and S. Yablo (on content and carvings, and from there to mathematical realism).

Since its first appearance in 1966, the notion of a supervaluation has been regarded by many as a powerful tool for dealing with semantic gaps. Only recently, however, applications to semantic gluts have also been considered. In previous work I proposed a general framework exploiting the intrinsic gap/glut duality. Here I also examine an alternative account where gaps and gluts are treated on a par: although they reflect opposite situations, the semantic upshot is the same in both cases--the value of some expressions is not uniquely defined. Other strategies for generalizing supervaluations are considered and some comparative facts are discussed.

A scholarly annotated epic poem on the pitfalls and tribulations of “good philosophizing”. Divided into twenty-eight cantos (in medieval Italian hendecasyllabic terza rima), the poem tells of an allegorical journey through the downward spiral of the philosophers’ hell, where all sorts of thinkers are punished for their faults and mistakes, in the endeavor to reach a way out of the condition of intellectual impasse in which the narrator has found himself. The affinities with Dante’s Inferno are apparent. Whereas Dante’s poem is about human sins and moral felonies, this one is about philosophical errors and fallacies; whereas Virgil takes Dante through the gluttons, the wrathful, the violent, the traitors to parties and countries, etc., here Socrates takes us through the realists, the skeptics, the dualists, the nichilists, the worshipers of language and easy mythos, etc. And yet this is not just a philosophical counterpart of Dante’s masterpiece, even less a parody. We can’t say exactly when, how, and why it was written, but this is an authentic piece of philosophy, a poem of love, a passionate testimony of militant metaphysics. It is the inspired and inspiring journey of someone, anyone, who is truly moved by the Love for Wisdom and by the grueling purification of the intellect that it demands.

A philosophical exchange broadly inspired by the characters of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues. Hylas is the realist philosopher: the view he stands up for reflects a robust metaphysic that is reassuringly close to common sense, grounded on the twofold persuasion that the world comes structured into entities of various kinds and at various levels and that it is the task of philosophy, if not of science generally, to “bring to light” that structure. Philonous, by contrast, is the anti-realist philosopher (though not necessarily an idealist): his metaphysic is stark, arid, dishearteningly bone-dry, and stems from the conviction that a great deal of the structure that we are used to attribute to the world out there lies, on closer inspection, in our head, in our “organizing practices”, in the complex system of concepts and categories that unrerlie our representation of experience and our need to represent it that way.

It is shown that a complete axiomatization of classical non-tautologies can be obtained by taking F (falsehood) as the sole axiom along with the two inference rules: (i) if A is a substitution instance of B, then A |– B; and (ii) if A is obtained from B by replacement of equivalent sentences, then A |– B (counting as equivalent the pairs {T, ~F}, {F, F&F}, {F, F&T}, {F, T&F}, {T, T&T}). Since the set of tautologies is also specifiable by purely syntactic means, the resulting picture gives an improved syntactic account of classical sentential logic. The picture can then be completed by considering related systems that prove adequate to specify the set of contradictions, the set of non-contradictions, and the set of contingencies respectively.

A lot of work in metaphysics relies on linguistic analysis and intuitions. Do we want to know what sort of things there are or could be? Then let’s see what sort of things there must be in order for what we truthfully say to be true. Do we want to see whether x is distinct from y? Then let’s see whether there is any statement that is true of x but not of y. And so on. In this paper I argue that this way of proceeding is full of traps and is bound to be pretty useless unless we already have a good idea of what sort of things there are, and of how we are going to count them.