Daniele Bertini

University Of Rome 2, Tor Vergata
  •  76
    The Refutation of Intentionalism
    Logos and Episteme 14 (4): 353-386. 2023.
    My purpose is to refute the intentionalist approach to perception. Drawing from mainstream literature, I identify a principle on which any version of intentional theory relies. My paper is a detailed attack on the truth of the principle. In the first section I will introduce terminology and will taxonomize various statements of the intentional view. In the second section I will briefly outline a sketch of the skeletal intentionalist theory that develops from the assumption of the principle alone…Read more
  •  4
    How to reason about religious beliefs
    Dialogo 8 (1): 179-193. 2021.
    Intractable disagreements are commonly analyzed in terms of the semantic opposition of (at least) couples of disputed beliefs (purely epistemic view, from here on PEV). While such a view seems to be a very natural starting point, my intuitions are that such an approach is misleadingly unrealistic, and that an empirical modeling towards how individuals hold beliefs in intractable opposition constitutes a strong defeater for PEV. My work addresses disagreements within the religious domain. Accordi…Read more
  •  158
    Anecdotal Pluralism
    Logos and Episteme 13 (2): 117-142. 2022.
    Anecdotal pluralism (AP) is the claim that, when two individuals disagree on the truth of a religious belief, the right move to make is to engage in a communal epistemic process of evidence sharing and evaluation, motivated by the willingness to learn from each other, understand the adversary's views and how these challenge their own, and re-evaluate their own epistemic position in regards to external criticisms. What I will do in my paper is to provide a presentation of AP and give a few reason…Read more
  •  207
    How to Reason About Religious Beliefs
    Dialogo Journal 8 (1): 179-193. 2021.
    Intractable disagreements are commonly analyzed in terms of the semantic opposition of (at least) couples of disputed beliefs (purely epistemic view, from here on PEV). While such a view seems to be a very natural starting point, my intuitions are that such an approach is misleadingly unrealistic, and that an empirical modeling towards how individuals hold beliefs in intractable opposition constitutes a strong defeater for PEV. My work addresses disagreements within the religious domain. Accordi…Read more
  •  164
    La logica della spiegazione come argomento per l'esistenza di Dio
    Nuovo Giornale di Filosofia Della Religione 1 (1): 77-106. 2021.
    Discuto la tesi di Micheletti secondo la quale ogni spiegazione fattuale presuppone premesse di ordine superiore rispetto alla spiegazione (M.Micheletti, “Radical Divine Alterity and the God-World Relationship”). Nella prima sezione del testo introdurrò la tesi, muovendo dalla analisi di alcuni esempi di spiegazione, ed elencherò le ragioni che (apparentemente) richiedono la postulazione di higher-degree propositions per rendere conto di factual propositions. Nella seconda sezione regimenterò lo…Read more
  •  186
    Hate-speech in Girard's reading of the Book of Job
    Dialegesthai. Rivista Telematica di Filosofia 23. 2021.
    According to René Girard, all religious traditions - and so every tradition- originate from a communitarian violence towards a randomly chosen individual. I provide an introductory construal of Girard’s proposal in the first section of my paper. In the second section, I will address a conceptual view of the theory by making explicit its principles and their inferential relations. In the third section, I will explain how philosophers of language address slurs and hate-speech. Particularly, I will…Read more
  •  420
    Introduction. The Evolutionary Approach to Ethics: From Animal Prosociality to Human Morality
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (3): 3-22. 2020.
    Evolutionary research on the biological fitness of groups has recently given a prominent value to the role that prosocial behaviors play in favoring a successful adaptation to ecological niches. Such a focus marks a paradigm shift. Early views of evolution relied on the notion of natural selection as a largely competitive mechanism for the achievement of the highest amount of resources. Today, evolutionists from different schools think that collaborative attitudes are an irremovable ingredient o…Read more
  •  186
    Ansia epistemica e diversità religiosa
    Nuovo Giornale di Filosofia Della Religione 14 2-10. 2020.
    Persistent disagreements may induce parties in the disagreement to experience a strong state of anxiety. Such anxiety has a psychological nature in ordinary cases of disagreement (i.e., cases which do not impact on the doxastic identity of the opposing epistemic agents). On the contrary, the more the content of a disagreement concerns basic issues related to the non-negotiable views for the parties involved, the more anxiety turns out to be of an epistemic kind, and, accordingly, suggests a set …Read more
  •  27
    Anecdotal Pluralism, Total Evidence and Religious Diversity
    Philosophia 49 (1): 155-173. 2021.
    My main claim is that, contrary to the assumptions of mainstream literature, epistemic religious diversity is not a matter of an abstract comparison among the belief systems of different religions or denominations; rather, it is a relation arising from the epistemic encounter among individuals who adhere to different doxastic groups. Particularly, while epistemic symmetry inclines to treat our doxastic opponents as peers, epistemic peerhood is not the starting point of doctrinal comparisons, but…Read more
  •  401
    The Vagueness of Religious Beliefs
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (2): 181-210. 2020.
    My paper characterizes religious beliefs in terms of vagueness. I introduce my topic by providing a general overview of my main claims. In the subsequent section, I develop basic distinctions and terminology for handling the notion of religious tradition and capturing vagueness. In the following sections, I make the case for my claim that religious beliefs are vague by developing a general argument from the interconnection between the referential opacity of religious belief content and the long-…Read more
  •  390
    The Conflict of Rigidity and Precision in Designation
    Logos and Episteme 11 (1): 19-27. 2020.
    My paper provides reasons in support of the view that vague identity claims originate from a conflict between rigidity and precision in designation. To put this stricly, let x be the referent of the referential terms P and Q. Then, that the proposition “that any x being both a P and a Q” is vague involves that the semantic intuitions at work in P and Q reveal a conflict between P and Q being simultaneously rigid and precise designators. After having shortly commented on an example of vague ident…Read more
  •  39
    Victoria S. Harrison’s theory of internal pluralism approaches religious beliefs in terms of conceptual schemes. To her, this approach has the advantage of preserving core pluralist intuitions without being challenged by the usual difficulties. My claim is that this is not the case. After providing a succinct presentation of internal pluralism, I show that the critique of traditional pluralist views such as Hick’s may also be addressed to Harrison. There are two main reasons in support of my cla…Read more
  •  1
    Social Worlds are Relational
    In Daniele Bertini & Damiano Migliorini (eds.), Relations. Ontology and Philosophy of Religion. 2018.
    Consider two entities x and y, and a relation R which holds among them. Is R’s existence accountable merely in terms of the non relational properties exhibited by x and y, once they interact? Or, is it more appropriate to say that R is independent of x and y, and these acquire sets of relational properties because of their being related through R? In case the former option obtains, the existence of relations is reducible to the relevant properties of the related terms. As a consequence, some ver…Read more
  • Hume e l'immaterialismo
    Aquinas (2/3). 2006.
    In this paper I provide a definition of immaterialism as a kind of philosophy holding five grounding principles: a) any evidence is ontologically unsubsisting without the mind; b) all evidences are ontologically unrelated among them; c) the mind supports the subsistence of what is actually evident to her perceiving; d) the mind produces or acknoweldges an order in the coming of an evidence after the others; e) experience is the symbolic framing of relationships among given elements. After having…Read more
  •  338
    George Berkeley
    Aphex 18. 2018.
    George Berkeley (1685-1753) is one of the most influential early modern philosophers, and in reason of this a never-ending critical interest focuses on his works. Such a critical attention gave rise to a broad literature and it is in fact quite easy to find valuable introductory books to Berkeley's works. It would be thus superfluous to provide a further summary of the entire production of Berkeley. Rather, I focus on a specific issue, namely the main points of interest of immaterialism for the …Read more
  •  92
    Berkeley and Gentile
    Idealistic Studies 37 (1): 43-50. 2007.
    My purpose is to compare Berkeley’s and Gentile’s idealism, interpreting Berkeley’s Treatise, §§22–23, and Gentile’s reading of this passage. The Italian philosopher finds in Berkeley’s master argument the original source of the true idealistic way of thinking, but he believes that Berkeley has not been sufficiently consistent in deducing all the consequences from his new principle. This criticism is the ground of Gentile’s actual idealism. Comparing the two positions is very instructive both to…Read more
  •  17
    Relations: Ontology and Philosophy of Religion (edited book)
    Mimesis International. 2018.
    In 1924 B.Russell wrote that the issue of relations is one of the most important in philosophy, and that many unresolved philosophical problems depends on how relations are understood. Such observation is more than still fundamental for the contemporary philosophical agenda: ontology, philosophy of religion and other fields of theoretical inquiry require to account for the very nature of what a relation is and how it works. The present edited collection is a fresh contribution to the internation…Read more
  •  24
    The anecdotal nature of religious disagreements
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80 (3): 215-229. 2019.
    Most literature on religious disagreements focuses on the epistemic problems related to doctrinal disputes. While, the main argument of my paper does not address such a topic, my purpose is to point at a practical exit strategy from the blind spot to which most disagreements lead. However, in order to argue for my views, I need to provide a substantive account of how religious beliefs work and which epistemic obligations they involve. Such account challenges most mainstream assumptions, and need…Read more
  •  168
    Esperienza religiosa e pratiche doxastiche
    Hermeneutica 2017 211-236. 2017.
    My paper argues for the claim that religious experience may provide evidential reasons in support of religious beliefs. I name such a claim epistemic view of mystical experience (EM). In the first section, I sketch two approaches to EM. Swinburne, Alston and Plantinga (among others) develop a notable defense of EM. On the contrary, seminal works by Feuerbach and Bultmann offer the opposite account. I briefly show how to resist to the criticism of EM. In light of such line of reasoning, I move to…Read more
  • Teologia dell'esperienza (edited book)
    with Giovanni Salmeri and Paolo Tiranni
    Nuova Cultura. 2010.
  •  279
    Il pluralismo doxastico delle tradizioni religiose
    Dialegesthai. Rivista Telematica di Filosofia 18. 2016.
    My paper addresses what a religion is. I comment briefly on the "substantive versus functionalist" debate, and I provide reasons to reject both of them. While I offer short summary arguments against the functionalist approach, I develop two detailed arguments against the substantive one. The former moves from the evidence that religious beliefs change over time. The latter moves from internal disagreements about the meaning of the core beliefs of a faith. These two arguments show that it is impo…Read more
  •  288
    Una proposta per la caratterizzazione della credenza religiosa
    Dialegesthai. Rivista Telematica di Filosofia 16. 2014.
    My paper challenges the externalist mainstream assumptions towards the understanding of religious beliefs (i.e., reliabilism by W.Alston, the warrant belief approach by A.Plantinga, the neowittgensteinian analysis of doxastic systems). According to such assumptions, religious beliefs should be evaluated rational in terms of the same doxastic standard giving justification for ordinary factual beliefs. Moving from the empiricist intuition that the kind of content of belief matters to the form of b…Read more
  •  221
    Realismo e antirealismo nella relazione di arte e esperienza religiosa
    In Massimo IIritano & Sergio Sorrentino (eds.), Arte e esperienza religiosa, Fredericiana. 2011.
    My starting assumption concerns the default view in western aestethics. My claim is that the view can be characterized in the following manner: while the arts and religious experience are formally different kinds of human experience, the arts have the same content of religious experience (Essentialist claim, EC). I argue that both from a realist and antirealist standpoint EC does not make sense. Consequently, EC should be rejected as the right approach to the relation between the arts and religi…Read more
  •  277
    David Berman's work on experimental philosophy is a defence of a traditional approach to empiricism against both contemporary rationalism and logico-analytic philosophy. While his approach focuses on empirical evidence in support of theoretical claims, Berman distinguishes his position from the kind of experimentalism recently risen from the analytic world. After having highlighted the merit of Berman's approach to philosophy, I comment on his main views, addressing particularly the relationship…Read more
  •  518
    An overview of the recent debate on the Trinity in the analytic philosophy of religion. I move from putting forward the Logical Problem of the Trinity (LPT) according to R.Cartwright and M.Rea. I then define two useful notions in order to evaluate the interpretive force of the mainstream approaches to answer LPT; i.e. , be X a concept, I define maximally robust reading of X and sufficiently robust reading of X. In the subsequent section, I offer an expository analysis of Latin Trinitarianism, So…Read more
  •  541
    The Transcendence of Sophia in Plotinus' Treatise on Intelligible Beauty
    In Robert M. Berchman & John F. Finamore (eds.), Metaphysical Patterns in Platonism, University Press of the South. pp. 34-44. 2007.
    I consider an argument by Plotinus to show how the notion of transcendence is used in explaining the nature of knowledge. The argument is set forth in sections 4-6 of the treatise V.8 (31). In my opinion this argument provides a good example of the philosophical frame of Platonism. I sum up this frame in the following theses: a) for a thing being is to be real and true; so that for a thing being real and being true is equivalent; but b) for a thing being real and true means being intelligible; t…Read more
  •  412
    My paper provides a preliminary work towards a theory of freedom and agency which I name "Theory of Procedural Agency (TPA)". Since TPA relies on intuitions which can not be settled into the metaphysical framework of contemporary approaches to freedom and agency, I focus on some reasons which explain why these intuitions should be preferred to the competing ones. My strategy is to argue for my view defending an embryonal version of TPA, that is Berkeley's considerations on free will, agency and …Read more
  •  409
    My paper moves from Kant's taxonomy for the arguments for the existence of God. After providing a brief survey of Kant's account, I claim that contemporary arguments from design fit Kant's characterization of the physico-theological argument. Then, in the second section, I deal with the logical frame of the argument from design. In the third section I introduce Berkeley's divine language argument (DLA), in order to demonstrate that DLA is an argument from design. Consequently, in the fourth sect…Read more
  •  203
    Fondazione del problema del pensare
    Segni E Comprensione 21 (62): 124-140. 2007.
    My main claim is that, in order to account for the nature of human mind, philosophy of mind should embody topics usually treated by disciplines as ethics or applied philosophy so as to enrich the pure notion of cognitive experience to the extent of treating the whole of human experience. I begin with considering the Cartesian approach to the "cogito". I argue for the claim that cartesian-like dualists (Descartes and Locke, Kant and Husserl) fail in treating the opposition of internalism and exte…Read more