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597EventsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.A critical survey of the main philosophical theories about events and event talk, organized in three main sections: (i) Events and Other Categories (Events vs. Objects; Events vs. Facts; Events vs. Properties; Events vs. Times); (ii) Types of Events (Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, and States; Static and Dynamic Events; Actions and Bodily Movements; Mental and Physical Events; Negative Events); (iii) Existence, Identity, and Indeterminacy.
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418HolesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.A brief introduction to the main philosophical problems and theories about the nature of holes and such-like nothingnesses.
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2050 Years of Events: An Annotated Bibliography, 1947 to 1997Philosophy Documentation Center. 1997.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
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133MereologyOxford University Press. 2021.Is a whole something more than the sum of its parts? Are there things composed of the same parts? If you divide an object into parts, and divide those parts into smaller parts, will this process ever come to an end? Can something lose parts or gain new ones without ceasing to be the thing it is? Does any multitude of things (including disparate things such as you, this book, and the tail of a cat) compose a whole of some sort? Questions such as these have occupied us for at least as long as phil…Read more
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Classical Logic through Refutation and RejectionIn Achille C. Varzi & Gabriele Pulcini (eds.), Landscapes in Logic (Volume on Philosophical Logics), College Publications. forthcoming.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 …Read more
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367Nothing, Everything, Something!In Fosca Mariani-Zini (ed.), The Meaning of Something: Rethinking the Logic and the Unity of Metaphysics, Springer. 2022.Universalist and nihilist answers to philosophical questions may be extreme, but they are clear enough. Aliquidist answers, by contrast, are typically caught between the Scylla of vagueness and indeterminacy and the Charybdis of ungroundedness and arbitrariness, and steering a proper middle course—saying exactly where in the middle one is going to settle—demands exceptional navigating powers. I myself tend to favor extreme answers precisely for this reason. Here, however, I consider one sense in…Read more
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225What is a City?Topoi 40 (2): 399-408. 2019.Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, as with t…Read more
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637The Magic of HolesIn Pina Marsico & Luca Tateo (eds.), (eds.), Ordinary Things and Their Extraordinary Meanings, Charlotte (NC),, Information Age Publishing. pp. 21-33. 2019.There is no doughnut without a hole, the saying goes. And that’s true. If you think you can come up with an exception, it simply wouldn’t be a doughnut. Holeless doughnuts are like extensionless color, or durationless sound—nonsense. Does it follow, then, that when we buy a doughnut we really purchase two sorts of thing—the edible stuff plus the little chunk of void in the middle? Surely we cannot just take the doughnut and leave the hole at the grocery store, as we cannot just eat the doughnut …Read more
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53A Slow Impossible Mirror PicturePerception 49 (12). 2020.A new type of impossible picture is presented and described. The picture involves an object along with its reflection in a plane mirror, delivering two apparently irreconcilable views of the object itself when seen simultaneously in its flesh and in the mirror. Contrary to other, more familiar impossible pictures, its interpretation requires explicit reasoning about the represented reality. It is a slow impossible picture.
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45Ballot OntologyIn Sara Bernstein & Tyron Goldschmidt (eds.), Non-Being: New Essay on the Metaphysics of Non-Existence, Oxford University Press. 2021.The U.S. presidential election of 2000 was crucially decided in Florida. And, in Florida, the election hinged crucially on a peculiar sort of question: Does this ballot have a hole? “Yes, it does”, so the ballot is valid and ought to be counted. “No it doesn’t”, and the ballot must be discarded. If only one could tell! Where were the hole experts when we needed them? Eventually the matter was thwarted by the Supreme Court and we all gave up. But we did learn something. We learned that even the d…Read more
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79Counterpart theories for everyoneSynthese 197 (11): 4691-4715. 2020.David Lewis’s counterpart theory is often seen as involving a radical departure from the standard, Kripke-style semantics for modal logic, suggesting that we are dealing with deeply divergent accounts of our modal talk. However, CT captures but one version of the relevant semantic intuition, and does so on the basis of metaphysical assumptions that are ostensibly discretionary. Just as ML can be translated into a language that quantifies explicitly over worlds, CT may be formulated as a semantic…Read more
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297Counting the HolesAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1): 23-27. 2004.Argle claimed that holes supervene on their material hosts, and that every truth about holes boils down to a truth about perforated things. This may well be right, assuming holes are perforations. But we still need an explicit theory of holes to do justice to the ordinary way of counting holes--or so says Cargle.
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326Crimes and punishmentsPhilosophia 34 (4): 395-404. 2006.Every criminal act ought to be matched by a corresponding punishment, or so we may suppose, and every punishment ought to reflect a criminal act. We know how to count punishments. But how do we count crimes? In particular, how does our notion of a criminal action depend on whether the prohibited action is an activity, an accomplishment, an achievement, or a state?
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313The formal ontology of boundariesElectronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 5 (5). 1997.Revised version published as Barry Smith and Achille Varzi, “Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60: 2 (March 2000), 401–420.
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19Variable-Binders as FunctorsIn Vito Sinisi & Jan Woleński (eds.), The Heritage of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Rodopi. pp. 303. 1995.
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100Points as Higher-order Constructs: Whitehead’s Method of Extensive AbstractionIn Stewart Shapiro & Geoffrey Hellman (eds.), The Continuous, Oxford University Press. 2021.Euclid’s definition of a point as “that which has no part” has been a major source of controversy in relation to the epistemological and ontological presuppositions of classical geometry, from the medieval and modern disputes on indivisibilism to the full development of point-free geometries in the 20th century. Such theories stem from the general idea that all talk of points as putative lower-dimensional entities must and can be recovered in terms of suitable higher-order constructs involving o…Read more
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34Carnapian EngineeringIn Stefano Borgo, Roberta Ferrario, Claudio Masolo & Laure Vieu (eds.), Ontology Makes Sense. Essays in Honor of Nicola Guarino, Ios Press. pp. 3-23. 2019.Ontology has come to gain huge currency in the information sciences, with techniques, applications, and results vastly exceeding the traditional concerns of philosophy. How did that happen? Where are we heading to? I do not have the answers. But I know what it took and what is needed. It took—and we need—the skills of a good Carnapian engineer, someone capable and willing to build bridges across fields even though each side regards them as a troublesome intruder.
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148Natural axioms for classical mereologyReview of Symbolic Logic 12 (1): 201-208. 2019.We present a new axiomatization of classical mereology in which the three components of the theory—ordering, composition, and decomposition prin-ciples—are neatly separated. The equivalence of our axiom system with other, more familiar systems is established by purely deductive methods, along with additional results on the relative strengths of the composition and decomposition axioms of each theory.
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132Indeterminate Identities, Supervaluationism, and QuantifiersAnalytic Philosophy 61 (3): 218-235. 2020.I am a friend of supervaluationism. A statement lacks a definite truth value if, and only if, it comes out true on some admissible ways of precisifying the semantics of the relevant vocabulary and false on others. In this paper, I focus on the special case of identity statements. I take it that such statements, too, may occasionally suffer a truth-value gap, including philosophically significant instances. Yet there is a potentially devastating objection that can be raised against the supervalua…Read more
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118Intuitionistic mereologySynthese 198 (Suppl 18): 4277-4302. 2021.Two mereological theories are presented based on a primitive apartness relation along with binary relations of mereological excess and weak excess, respectively. It is shown that both theories are acceptable from the standpoint of constructive reasoning while remaining faithful to the spirit of classical mereology. The two theories are then compared and assessed with regard to their extensional import.
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319Environmental MetaphysicsIn Uwe A. Meixner Meixner (ed.), Metaphysics in the Post-Metaphysical Age. Proceedings of the 22nd International Wittgenstein-Symposium, Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 231-242. 2001.We propose the beginnings of a general theory of environments, of the parts or regions of space in which organisms live and move. We draw on two sources: on the one hand on recent work on the ontology of space; and on the other hand on work by ecological scientists on concepts such as territory, habitat, and niche. An environment is in first approximation a volume of space; it is a specific habitat, location, or site that is suitable or adequate for given purposes (of foraging, resting, hunti…Read more
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609Ontological tools for geographic representationIn Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Ios Press. pp. 77--85. 1998.This paper is concerned with certain ontological issues in the foundations of geographic representation. It sets out what these basic issues are, describes the tools needed to deal with them, and draws some implications for a general theory of spatial representation. Our approach has ramifications in the domains of mereology, topology, and the theory of location, and the question of the interaction of these three domains within a unified spatial representation theory is addressed. In the final p…Read more
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33On Drawing Lines across the BoardIn Leo Zaibert (ed.), The Theory and Practice of Ontology, Palgrave Macmillian. pp. 45-78. 2016.In his Romanes Lecture of 1907, Lord Curzon emphasized the overwhelming influence of “natural” and “artificial” frontiers in the political history of the modern world. As Barry Smith has shown, the same could be said, more generally, of the natural and artificial boundaries that are at work in articulating every aspect of the reality with which we have to deal, not only in the world of geography, but the world of human experience at large. Moreover, once the natural/artificial distinction has be…Read more
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48La metafisica nella filosofia analitica contemporaneaIn Enrico Berti (ed.), Storia della metafisica, Carocci. pp. 355-384. 2019.An overview of the origins and development of analytic metaphysics. The first part is strictly historical, focusing mainly on Russell and Moore, and then on Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Stebbing, but also on other authors whose work has been more or less directly influential, from Husserl to Twardowski, Kotarbiński, and Leśniewski. The second part deals with later developments, including recent work in ontology and meta-ontology, identity, persistence through time, and the metaphysics of modality.
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931Mettere a Fuoco Il Mondo. Conversazioni sulla Filosofia di Achille Varzi (Special Issue of Isonomia – Epistemologica) (edited book)ISONOMIA – Epistemologica. University of Urbino. 2014.Achille Varzi è uno dei maggiori metafisici viventi. Nel corso degli anni ha scritto testi fondamentali di logica, metafisica, mereologia, filosofia del linguaggio. Ha sconfinato nella topologia, nella geografia, nella matematica, ha ragionato di mostri e confini, percezione e buchi, viaggi nel tempo, nicchie, eventi e ciambelle; e non ha disdegnato di dialogare con gli abitanti di Flatlandia, con Neo e con Terminator. Tra le sue opere principali: Holes and Other Superficialities e Parts and Pl…Read more
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98Holes and Other Superficialities (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (3): 734-736. 1997.
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112Un altro mondo?Rivista di Estetica 19 (1): 131-159. 2002.Alexandre Koyré wrote that Newton and the science that followed led to a splitting of the world: on the one hand is the “world of qualities and of sensible perceptions”, on the other is the “world of quantities and of reified geometry”. A comparison between facts held true by common sense and false by the scientific image of the world (or vice versa) seems to confirm this view. But is the dichotomy a real one? Is the world of common sense really “another world” relative to the world of the natur…Read more
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14Insurmountable Simplicities: Thirty-nine Philosophical Conundrums (edited book)Columbia University Press. 2006."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 …Read more
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701Event ConceptsIn Thomas F. Shipley & Jeffrey M. Zacks (eds.), Understanding Events: From Perception to Action, Oxford University Press. 2008.This chapter analyzes the concept of an event and of event representation as an umbrella notion. It provides an overview of different ways events have been dealt with in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. This variety of positions has been construed in part as the result of different descriptive and explanatory projects. It is argued that various types of notions — common-sense, theoretically revised, scientific, and internalist psychological — be kept apart.
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |