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253In Defence of the Acquaintance Principle in AestheticsEpisteme 1-19. forthcoming.Making an adequate aesthetic judgment about an object or an aesthetic property requires first-hand experience of that object or property. Many have suggested that this principle is a valid epistemic norm in the epistemology of the aesthetic. However, some recent philosophers have argued that certain works of conceptual art and other counterexamples disprove the principle in question, even suitably modified. In this paper, I argue that these philosophers are mistaken and that, when properly quali…Read more
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269Aesthetic Testimony and Aesthetic ConceptsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1): 59-72. 2024.I propose a new account of the limits of aesthetic testimony. One of this new account's main claims is that, among the kinds of aesthetic cognitive achievements, it is useful to distinguish aesthetic understanding. In particular, I suggest that the aesthetic understanding of X involves an understanding of why X is aesthetically valuable. In turn, aesthetic understanding is essentially connected to the deployment of aesthetic concepts. Given the fine-grained structure of some of these concepts, c…Read more
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38The Structure and Content of Architectural Experience: Scruton on Architecture as ArtEstetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 49 (1): 26. 2012.The notion of architectural experience has been explored by Roger Scruton in an essay in which he provides an account of both its structure and content, along with clarifications of certain key concepts in architectural criticism, such as architectural success and architectural beauty. In this article, I introduce Scruton’s theory and argue that, despite its intuitive appeal, some crucial elements for the appreciation of buildings as works of architecture are not adequately addressed there. I th…Read more
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110What is an aesthetic concept?Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 1-17. 2022.Aesthetic concepts and conceptions are structured mental representations partly composed of phenomenal concepts. I defend this claim by appealing to contemporary accounts of concepts and to the current literature on phenomenal concepts. In addition, I discuss the relationship between aesthetic concepts and aesthetic understanding — an epistemic state at the centre of much work in contemporary epistemology.
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62Centred Worlds, Personal Identity and ImaginationTheoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 88 (4). 2022.The Centred View offers an account of the connection between imagination and possibility that combines the centred world framework with some allegedly appealing intuitions regarding our persistence over time. In particular, Dilip Ninan suggests that the Centred View has the theoretical advantage of respecting our intuitions about cases of personal identity in certain imaginative scenarios while also being compatible with physicalism. Unfortunately, the Centred View faces a series of serious obje…Read more
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133Aesthetic Realism and Manifest PropertiesJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (2): 201-213. 2022.This article outlines a realist theory of aesthetic properties as higher-order manifest properties and defends it from several objections, including a possible conflict with contextualist approaches to the aesthetic properties of works of art.
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38Pretending and DisbelievingInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6): 1991-2004. 2024.I formulate and criticise a condition that captures some recent ideas on the nature of pretence, namely, the disbelief condition. According to an initial understanding of this condition, an agent who is pretending that P must also disbelieve that P. I criticise this idea by proposing a counterexample showing that an agent may be in a state of pretence that does not imply disbelief in what is pretended. I also draw some general conclusions about the nature of pretence.
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53Metaphysical Egoism and Personal IdentityJournal of Value Inquiry 56 (4): 587-599. 2022.Metaphysical egoism pursues what Gregory Kavka called ‘the reconciliation project’ (roughly, the project of reconciling the demands of morality with our rational self-interest) by appealing to one version of the psychological approach to personal identity. I argue that, for reasons related to its commitment to an implausible understanding of the notion of a psychological connection, this form of egoism is not plausible. I also explore one way in which metaphysical egoism may be amended, but I ul…Read more
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80Personal Identity and Trivial SurvivalTheoria 85 (5): 402-411. 2019.Your replica is created on Mars and you, on Earth, are destroyed. Parfit claims that your replica may still have what prudentially matters for you – provided that you are psychologically connected and continuous with your replica. If someone accidentally destroys the tapes containing your psychological profile used in the production of your replica and this same action fortuitously produces a functionally equivalent tape, Ehring claims that Parfit should maintain that the resulting new individua…Read more
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169Animalism, Abortion, and a Future Like OursThe Journal of Ethics 23 (3): 317-332. 2019.Marquis’ future-like-ours argument against the morality of abortion assumes animalism—a family of theories according to which we are animals. Such an assumption is theoretically useful for various reasons, e.g., because it provides the theoretical underpinning for a reply to the contraception-abstinence objection. However, the connection between the future-like-ours argument and one popular version of animalism can prove lethal to the former, or so I argue in this paper.
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516The Simplicity of the Simple Approach to Personal IdentityIn Luca Bellotti, Luca Gili, Enrico Moriconi & Giacomo Turbanti (eds.), Third Pisa Colloquium in Logic, Language and Epistemology. Essays in Honour of Mauro Mariani and Carlo Marletti, Edizioni Ets. pp. 347-358. 2019.I provide a simple solution to the problem of determining the characterising feature(s) of the simple approach to personal identity, sometimes also called the simple view: instead of focusing on claims regarding the analysability, reducibility, or triviality of the concepts used in simple theories of personal identity, I propose instead a metaphysical criterion to define this approach. In particular, I claim that the simple approach is (best seen as) that family of theories according to which pe…Read more
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76On the Study of Imaginative ResistanceAnalytic Philosophy 60 (2): 164-178. 2019.I argue that the current methodology employed to study imaginative resistance should not be used to draw general conclusions about the influence of genre on episodes of imaginative resistance caused by complex works of art. One of the main problems is that the mini stories upon which the current methodology relies are inadequate—mostly because they are artless and ‘flat’. Mini stories cannot generate imaginative experiences structurally similar to the experiences elicited by complex and interest…Read more
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159Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons: An Introduction and Critical Inquiry (edited book)Routledge. 2020.Derek Parfit (1942–2017) is widely considered to be one of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Reasons and Persons is arguably the most influential of the two books published in his lifetime and hailed as a classic work of ethics and personal identity. Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons: An Introduction and Critical Inquiry is an outstanding introduction to and assessment of Parfit’s book, with chapters by leading scholars of ethics, metaphysics and of Parfit’s work.…Read more
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112Life-extending enhancements and the narrative approach to personal identityJournal of Medical Ethics 44 (4): 219-225. 2018.Various debates on the desirability and rationality of life-extending enhancements have been pursued under the presupposition that a generic psychological theory of personal identity is correct. I here discuss how the narrative approach to personal identity can contribute to these debates. In particular, I argue that two versions of the narrative approach offer good reasons to reject an argument against the rationality of life-extending enhancements.
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101The future‐like‐ours argument, animalism, and mereological universalismBioethics 32 (3): 199-204. 2018.Which metaphysical theories are involved—whether presupposed or implied—in Marquis’ future-like-ours argument against abortion? Vogelstein has recently argued that the supporter of the FLO argument faces a problematic dilemma; in particular, Marquis, the main supporter of the argument, seems to have to either abandon diachronic universalism or acquiesce and declare that contraception is morally wrong. I argue that the premises of Marquis’ argument can be reasonably combined with a form of unrest…Read more
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204The Will to Make‐Believe: Religious Fictionalism, Religious Beliefs, and the Value of ArtPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (3): 620-635. 2018.I explore some of the reasons why, under specific circumstances, it may be rational to make-believe or imagine certain religious beliefs. Adopting a jargon familiar to certain contemporary philosophers, my main concern here is to assess what reasons can be given for adopting a fictionalist stance towards some religious beliefs. My understanding of fictionalism does not involve solely a propositional attitude but a broader stance, which may include certain acts of pretence. I also argue that a pl…Read more
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78The Early Reception of Bernard Williams’ Reduplication ArgumentArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (3): 326-345. 2017.The reduplication argument advanced by Bernard Williams in 1956 has greatly stimulated the contemporary debate on personal identity. The argument relies on a famous thought experiment that, although not new in the history of philosophy, has engaged some of the most influential contemporary philosophers on the topic. I propose here an interpretation of the argument and a reconstruction of the early reception that Williams’ paper had in the 6 years immediately after its publication. The works disc…Read more
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143‘Soul’, ‘self’, ‘substance’ and ‘person’ are just four of the terms often used to refer to the human individual. Cutting across metaphysics, ethics, and religion the nature of personal identity is a fundamental and long-standing puzzle in philosophy. Personal Identity and Applied Ethics introduces and examines different conceptions of the self, our nature, and personal identity and considers the implications of these for applied ethics. A key feature of the book is that it considers a range of d…Read more
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400Concrete possible worlds and counterfactual conditionals: Lewis versus Williamson on modal knowledgeSynthese 176 (3): 345-359. 2010.The epistemology of modality is gradually coming to play a central role in general discussions about modality. This paper is a contribution in this direction, in particular I draw a comparison between Lewis’s Modal realism and Timothy Williamson’s recent account of modality in terms of counterfactual thinking. In order to have criteria of evaluation, I also formulate four requirements which are supposed to be met by any theory of modality to be epistemologically adequate.
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154Ethicism and Immoral Cognitivism: Gaut versus Kieran on Art and MoralityJournal of Aesthetic Education 46 (3): 107-118. 2012.The aims of this paper are (1) to reconstruct the dialectic between two rival theories on the relation between art and morality, (2) to argue against Berys Gaut’s recent defense of ethicism, and (3) to elaborate some of my critical remarks and propose new considerations in favor of immoralism. To a first approximation, an ethicist maintains that the moral value of a work of art, when relevant, is an important element of its artistic value. In particular, assuming that the moral value of a work, …Read more
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70The Definition of Religion, Super-empirical Realities and MathematicsNeue Zeitschrift für Systematicsche Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie 58 (1): 67-75. 2016.Providing a precise definition of “religion”—or an analysis in terms of sufficient and necessary conditions of the concept of religion—has proven to be a difficult task, more so in light of the diverse types of practices considered religious by scholars. Here, I discuss Kevin Schilbrack’s recent definition of “religion”, elaborate it and raise several objections, one of which is based on a specific theory in philosophy of mathematics: mathematical realism.
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114Gendler on the Puzzle(s) of Imaginative ResistanceActa Analytica 31 (1): 1-9. 2016.Gendler reformulated the so-called imaginability puzzle in terms of authorial breakdown. The main idea behind this move was to isolate the essential features displayed by the alleged problematic cases and to specify a puzzle general enough to be applied to a variety of different types of imaginative resistance. I offer various criticisms of Gendler’s approach to imaginative resistance that also raise some more general points on the recent literature on the topic.
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250On Architecture as a Spatial ArtNordic Journal of Aesthetics 23 (43): 53-64. 2012.I present and evaluate various criticisms against the view that architecture and architectural value are to be understood solely in terms of internal space. I conclude that the architectural value of a building should not be limited to its internal spatial effects because the value of other elements, such as (non-spatial) function, materials, ornamentation, and so on cannot all be reduced to spatial values.
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137Art and MoralityOxford Bibliographies Online. 2013.A great number of works of art, it is commonly claimed, are aesthetically valuable. Some philosophers have even argued that providing an aesthetically pleasing experience is their only proper function. However, some of these artworks display or invite us to adopt an immoral point of view. Even worse, they even seem to make immoral situations delightful and appealing. The following questions thus arise: Does the alleged immorality of these works count as an aesthetic or artistic defect? Can an im…Read more
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128Sibley on ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Ugly’Philosophical Papers 43 (3): 377-404. 2014.Frank Sibley's ideas have been particularly influential among contemporary philosophers interested in aesthetics. Most studies, however, have focused only on his earlier works. In this essay, I explore Sibley's account of the adjectives ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, paying particular attention to three papers that have only recently been published and that have not yet received adequate attention. In particular, I discuss his account of the adjective ‘beautiful’, which relies on the controversial noti…Read more
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113Functional Beauty, Architecture, and Morality: A Beautiful Konzentrationslager?Philosophical Quarterly 62 (246): 128-147. 2012.Some works of architecture have remarkable aesthetic value. According to certain philosophers, part of this value derives from the appearance of such constructions to fulfil the function for which they were built. I argue that one way of understanding the connection between function and aesthetic value resides in the concept of functional beauty. I analyse a number of recent accounts of this notion, then offer a better way of understanding it. I then focus my attention on the relation between ae…Read more
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1374La Critica Etica dell'ArteAphex 8. 2013.Alcune opere d'arte manifestano (o suggeriscono di assumere) prospettive morali dubbie e, in certi casi, chiaramente deprecabili. Ad esempio, il documentario propagandista Il Trionfo della Volontà di Leni Riefensthal esprime (e cerca di evocare) ammirazione nei confronti di Adolf Hitler. Nonostante ciò, Il Trionfo della Volontà è considerato un capolavoro nel genere dei documentari. Questo e molti altri esempi simili suggeriscono le seguenti domande: É possibile considerare un'opera d'arte un ca…Read more
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92The Merited Response Argument and Artistic CategoriesJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71 (3): 239-246. 2013.The merited response argument is an argument in favor of artistic ethicism. According to this view, the interaction between art and morality is such that a moral defect in a work of art negatively influences the work's artistic value (and a moral merit, when relevant, is always an artistic merit). I contend that the argument relies on a criterion of aesthetic and artistic relevance that, when properly understood, fails to constitute a premise that either the artistic contextualist or the autonom…Read more