•  16
    Ontological commitment and reconstructivism
    Erkenntnis 55 (1): 33-50. 2001.
    Some forms of analytic reconstructivism take natural language (and common sense at large) to be ontologically opaque: ordinary sentences must be suitably rewritten or paraphrased before questions of ontological commitment may be raised. Other forms of reconstructivism take the commitment of ordinary language at face value, but regard it as metaphysically misleading: common-sense objects exist, but they are not what we normally think they are. This paper is an attempt to clarify and critically as…Read more
  •  1
    Book Reviews (review)
    with Rainer Bäuerle, N. C. A. Da Costa, O. Bueno, Javier De Lorenzo, Alberto Zanardo, Alan R. Perreiah, K. Misiuna, H. Sinaceur, T. Hailperin, S. Bringsjord, T. Wiliamson, and Barry Smith
    History and Philosophy of Logic 17 (1-2): 155-177. 1996.
    Gennaro Chtjerchia, Dynamics of meaning: anaphora, presupposition, and the the of grammar. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.xv+ 270 pp, £59.95, £31.95 G. Pr...
  •  19
    Intuitionistic Mereology II: Overlap and Disjointness
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (4): 1197-1233. 2023.
    This paper extends the axiomatic treatment of intuitionistic mereology introduced in Maffezioli and Varzi (_Synthese, 198_(S18), 4277–4302 2021 ) by examining the behavior of constructive notions of overlap and disjointness. We consider both (i) various ways of defining such notions in terms of other intuitionistic mereological primitives, and (ii) the possibility of treating them as mereological primitives of their own.
  •  13
    On Three Axiom Systems for Classical Mereology
    Logic and Logical Philosophy 28 (2). 2019.
    Paul Hovda’s excellent paper ‘What Is Classical Mereology?' has fruitfully reshaped the debate concerning the axiomatic foundations of classical mereology. Precisely because of the importance of Hovda’s work and its usefulness as a reference tool, we note here that one of the five axiom systems presented therein, corresponding the ‘Third Way’ to classical mereology, is defective and must be amended. In addition, we note that two other axiom systems, corresponding to the ‘First Way’ and to the ‘F…Read more
  •  27
    Atoms, Gunk, and the Limits of ‘Composition’
    Erkenntnis 81 (2): 231-235. 2016.
    It is customary practice to define ‘x is composed of the ys’ as ‘x is a sum of the ys and the ys are pairwise disjoint ’. This predicate has played a central role in the debate on the special composition question and on related metaphysical issues concerning the mereological structure of objects. In this note we show that the customary characterization is nonetheless inadequate. We do so by constructing a mereological model where everything qualifies as composed of atoms even though some element…Read more
  •  96
    The niche
    Noûs 33 (2): 214-238. 1999.
    The concept of niche (setting, context, habitat, environment) has been little studied by ontologists, in spite of its wide application in a variety of disciplines from evolutionary biology to economics. What follows is a first formal theory of this concept, a theory of the relations between objects and their niches. The theory builds upon existing work on mereology, topology, and the theory of spatial location as tools of formal ontology. It will be illustrated above all by means of simple biolo…Read more
  • Vagueness, logic and ontology
    In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language, Routledge. 2010.
  •  33
    On Perceiving Abs nces
    Gestalt Theory 44 (3): 213-242. 2022.
    Can we really perceive absences, i.e., missing things? Sartre tells us that when he arrived late for his appointment at the café, he saw the absence of his friend Pierre. Is that really what he saw? Where was it, exactly? Why didn’t Sartre see the absence of other people who were not there? Why did other people who were there not see the absence of Pierre? The perception of absences gives rise to a host of conundrums and is constantly on the verge of conceptual confusion. Here I focus on the nee…Read more
  •  121
    The Structure of Spatial Localization
    Philosophical Studies 82 (2). 1996.
    What are the relationships between an entity and the space at which it is located? And between a region of space and the events that take place there? What is the metaphysical structure of localization? What its modal status? This paper addresses some of these questions in an attempt to work out at least the main coordinates of the logical structure of localization. Our task is mostly taxonomic. But we also highlight some of the underlying structural features and we single out the interactions b…Read more
  •  2
    Complementary Logics for Classical Propositional Languages
    Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 1 (4): 20-24. 1992.
  •  14
    Schaum's Outline of Logic
    with John Eric Nolt and Dennis Rohatyn
    Mcgraw Hill. 1988.
    An outline of the material covered in courses on Formal and Informal Logic. The outline includes chapters on mathematical approaches to logic as well as on fallacies, deduction and induction, probability, and other major topics. Logic is traditionally taught by means of problem solving exercises, so the subject is well suited to a Schaum's Outline approach.
  •  9
    Events
    Dartmouth. 1996.
    Philosophical questions about events lie at the crossing of several disciplines, from metaphysics and logic to philosophy of language, action theory, the philosophy of space and time.
  •  8
    Italian translation of "Holes and Other Superficialities" (1994)
  •  4
    Ontologie
    Ithaque. 2010.
    French translation of "Ontologia" (2005)
  •  62
    Events
    Stanford 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.
  •  46
    Holes
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.
    A brief introduction to the main philosophical problems and theories about the nature of holes and such-like nothingnesses.
  •  4
    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
  •  38
    Mereology
    Oxford 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
  • Classical Logic through Refutation and Rejection
    In 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
  •  126
    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
  •  42
    What 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
  •  15
    The Magic of Holes
    In 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
  •  24
    A Slow Impossible Mirror Picture
    Perception 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.
  •  21
    Ballot Ontology
    with Roberto Casati
    In Sara Bernstein & Tyron Goldschmidt (eds.), Non-Being: New Essays on the Metaphysics of Nonexistence, 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
  •  15
    Counterpart theories for everyone
    Synthese 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
  •  19
    Counting the Holes
    with Roberto Casati
    Australasian 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.
  •  72
    Crimes and punishments
    Philosophia 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?
  •  67
    The formal ontology of boundaries
    Electronic 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.
  •  10
    Variable-Binders as Functors
    In Vito Sinisi & Jan Woleński (eds.), The heritage of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Rodopi. pp. 303. 1995.