Achille C. Varzi

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.

A complementary system for a given logic is a proof system whose theorems are exactly the formulas that are not valid according to the logic in question. This article is a contribution to the complementary proof theory of classical propositional logic. In particular, we present a complementary proof-net system, $$\textsf{CPN}$$ CPN, that is sound and complete with respect to the set of all classically invalid (one-side) sequents. We also show that cut elimination in $$\textsf{CPN}$$ CPN enjoys strong normalization along with strong confluence (and, hence, uniqueness of normal forms).

"Perhaps not all the stories that follow are true. They could, however, be true, and the Reader is invited to ponder this." So begins _Insurmountable Simplicities_, Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi's colorful incarnation of the many philosophical conundrums that hide in the wrinkles of everyday life. Why do mirrors seem to invert left and right but not up and down? How do we know whether strawberries taste the same for everyone? Where is it written that we must observe the law, and if it is not written, why should we observe it? What if we could swap brains-or the rest of our bodies? _Insurmountable Simplicities_ is filled with stories, dialogues, and epistolary exchanges that cover a range of themes-such as personal identity, causality and responsibility, fortune, the nature of things, the paradoxes of time and space, the interface between logic and language-in captivating and inventive ways. Clear, concise, and intellectually engaging, this internationally acclaimed book brilliantly demonstrates that the beauty of philosophy resides in its thorough engagement with the simplicities of the world, insurmountable as they might initially appear

Like the journal TOPOl, the TOPOl Library is based on the assumption that philosophy is a lively, provocative, delightful activity, which constantly challenges our inherited habits, painstakingly elaborates on how things could be different, in other stories, in counterfactual situations, in alternative possible worlds. Whatever its ideology, whether with the intent of uncovering a truer structure of reality or of shooting our anxiety, of exposing myths or of following them through, the outcome of philosophical activity is always the destabilizing, unsettling generation of doubts, of objections, of criticisms. It follows that this activity is intrinsically a dialogue, that philosophy is first and foremost philosophical discussion, that it requires bringing out conflicting points of view, paying careful, sympathetic attention to their structure, and using this dialectic to articulate one's approach, to make it richer, more thoughtful, more open to variation and play. And it follows that the spirit which one brings to this activity must be one of tolerance, of always suspecting one's own blindness and consequently looking with unbiased eye in every comer, without fearing to pass a (fallible) judgment on what is there but also without failing to show interest and respect.

Dear Harriet Monroe:—Your recent issue of Poetry is quite interesting. The first poem of that young Italian chap is very good, the rest—unsuccessful. You are certainly the clearinghouse for a lot of mediocre stuff—so you should be: very democratic—keep up the good work. Yours,Williams This is William Carlos Williams writing to the editor of Poetry magazine on March 12, 1918.1 We know who the young Italian chap is: Emanuel Carnevali, age twenty, who had just made his debut in Monroe’s magazine with a six-page group of poems, “The Splendid Commonplace.”2 Less clear, perhaps, is what Williams means by “the rest” —the “unsuccessful,” “mediocre stuff.” “The Splendid Commonplace” consists of six...

Might we some day be in a position to move about in time, just as we can already move about in space? Today, few would question that deliberate change in temporal location is logically possible. There is no contradiction in the thought that Tim could step into a time machine and travel backwards to visit his grandfather, or forwards to visit his grandchildren. That is, there is no contradiction provided that we take time travel to involve influencing the course of history rather than changing it. But is time travel metaphysically possible? Is there a genuinely possible world—as opposed to a merely coherent scenario—in which one can freely change one’s location in time? Here is where puzzlement and bewilderment lead to philosophical controversy. For the answer depends on one’s views concerning a wide range of other matters, and such views are themselves the subject of major philosophical controversy. Consider

[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.

Much recent work aimed at extending model-theoretic semantics has been formulated in response to specific needs, and little effort has been made in the direction of a truly "general" generalization. This work is an attempt to overcome these limitations. The unifying view is that semantics must account for the main relationships between languages and models in a uniform fashion, regardless of the specific conditions that may be imposed upon either notion. And the upshot is a general framework within which a large variety of semantic theories naturally fall and from which the semantics of a wide class of logics can be obtained as special cases. ;The presentation is organized in two parts. In the first, a suitably general notion of a language is introduced along with a correspondingly general notion of a model, allowing for the possibility that the interpretation of some expressions be incomplete or inconsistent. The notion of a valuation is then systematically characterized by exploiting the idea that the value of an expression on a given model is always a function of the values it takes on the various ways of filling in the gaps and/or weeding out the gluts in the model. This account is shown to be grounded on some fundamental properties of the lattice of all admissible models, and may be viewed as a generalization of the method of super-valuations. ;The second part investigates the major properties of the resulting semantic apparatus. In particular, it is shown that the notion of logical validity as applied to single expressions is rather standard, and in fact reduces to the corresponding classical notion when this is available. Thus, gaps and gluts can be explained away as local phenomena that do not metastasize throughout the framework. However, with regard to the more comprehensive relation of entailment between expressions, the general picture is more intricate, as the notion of argument validity appears to escape the control of recursively specifiable systems. To shed light on this picture, a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed framework is offered in the concluding part

We offer a critical overview of two sorts of proof systems that may be said to characterize classical propositional logic indirectly (and non-standardly): refutation systems, which prove sound and complete with respect to classical contradictions, and rejection systems, which prove sound and complete with respect to the larger set of all classical non-tautologies. Systems of the latter sort are especially interesting, as they show that classical propositional logic can be given a paraconsistent characterization. In both cases, we consider Hilbert-style systems as well as Gentzen-style sequent calculi and natural-deduction formalisms.