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Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective (review)Philosophical Review 124 (1): 156-158. 2015.
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The Two Faces of RealismQuaestio 12 503-513. 2012.According to some philosophers, philosophical realism is an obsolete, specious and irrelevant conceptio. In this essay I argue that this thesis is deeply flawed because the issue of realism is philosophically inescapable. Then I discuss two versions of philosophical realism that are particularly widespread today: common sense realism and scientific realism. These conceptions tend to be hegemonic, and consequently often in conflict with each other. The biggest challenge for philosophical realism …Read more
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Un catalogo del mondoRivista di Estetica 50 255-258. 2012.The paper discusses Maurizio Ferraris’ Documentalità by raising two objections. The first objection concerns Ferraris’ view that, in the case of all natural entities, there cannot be differences in the way a normal adult, a little child and an animal perceive them. It is claimed that this is not true for objects such as the sun that we (differently from little children and animals) cannot help perceiving as a gigantic hot celestial body. The second objection concerns the thesis that all social o…Read more
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Tolerance: Too Little Or Too Much? On Robert Audi's Democratic Authority And The Separation Of Church And StatePhilosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche 3 (2). 2013.
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The view from outside: On a distinctively cinematic achievementPhilosophy and Social Criticism 42 (2): 154-170. 2016.What aesthetic interest do we have in watching films? In a much debated paper, Roger Scruton argued that this interest typically comes down to the interest in the dramatic representations recorded by such films. Berys Gaut and Catharine Abell criticized Scruton’s argument by claiming that films can elicit an aesthetic interest also by virtue of their pictorial representation. In this article, we develop a different criticism of Scruton’s argument. In our view, a film can elicit an aesthetic inte…Read more
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Interpretations and Causes: New Perspectives on Donald Davidson’s Philosophy (edited book)Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1999.
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Naturalism in question (edited book)Harvard University Press. 2004.
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Cartography of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection (edited book)Springer. 2007.
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Cartographies of the Mind: The Interface between Philosophy and Cognitive Science (edited book)Springer. 2007.
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Scetticismo: una vicenda filosofica (edited book)Carocci. 2007.
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Cartographies of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection , Series: Studies in Brain and Mind, Vol. 4 (edited book)Kleuwer. 2007.
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Cartographies of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection (edited book)Springer. 2007.
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The architecture of knowledge: epistemology, agency and science (edited book)Roma Tre Università degli studi. 2010.
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Naturalism and Normativity (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2010.Normativity concerns what we ought to think or do and the evaluations we make. For example, we say that we ought to think consistently, we ought to keep our promises, or that Mozart is a better composer than Salieri. Yet what philosophical moral can we draw from the apparent absence of normativity in the scientific image of the world? For scientific naturalists, the moral is that the normative must be reduced to the nonnormative, while for nonnaturalists, the moral is that there must be a transc…Read more
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Continenti filosofici: la filosofia analitica e le altre tradizioni (edited book)Carocci. 2011.
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The Claims of Naturalism. 2004.
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Critical notice of: François Recanati, Direct Reference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) (review)European Review of Philosophy 2 175-184. 1997.Everything you wanted to know about direct reference and always dared to ask is contained in Recanati's new book, which is not only a comprehensive survey on the received doctrine but also an original attempt to find a new way out of the many puzzles which surround the "new theory of reference" (in H. Wettstein's words) since its origins. Principles and conceptions are indeed acutely specified and Recanati's own theses are argued for in a very subtle and rigorous way. One cannot leave the volume…Read more
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Book review. Lexical competence. Diego Marconi (review)Journal of Semantics 14 (3): 311-318. 1997.
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Book reviews (review)Acta Analytica 18 (1-2): 231-240. 2003.
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Anthony Everett, The Nonexistent, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, viii + 246 pp., £40 , ISBN 9780199674794 (review)Dialectica 69 (4): 611-620. 2015.
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I See Not Only a Madonna, but Also a Hole, in the PicturePacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (2): 224-239. 2019.According to an intuitive claim, in saying that one sees a picture's subject, i.e., what a picture presents, in the picture's vehicle, i.e., the picture's physical basis, by ‘in’ one does not mean the spatial relation of being in, as holding between such items in the real space. For the picture's subject is knowingly not in the real space where one veridically sees the picture's vehicle. Some theories of pictorial experience have actually agreed with this intuition by claiming that the picture's…Read more
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Cognitive penetrability and late visionRivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 11 (3): 363-371. 2020.: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos provides a new defense of the thesis that, unlike early vision, late vision is cognitively penetrable, in accordance with a new definition of cognitive penetrability that is centered on the ideas of direct influence of cognition upon perception and of the epistemic role of perception. This new definition allows him to maintain that late vision is a genuinely perceptive stage of the perceptual process. In thi…Read more
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What We Can Learn From Literary AuthorsActa Analytica 36 (4): 479-499. 2021.That we can learn something from literature, as cognitivists claim, seems to be a commonplace. However, when one considers matters more deeply, it turns out to be a problematic claim. In this paper, by focusing on general revelatory facts about the world and the human spirit, I hold that the cognitivist claim can be vindicated if one takes it as follows. We do not learn such facts from literature, if by “literature” one means the truth-conditional contents that one may ascribe to textual sentenc…Read more
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Recensione di M. De Caro, RealtàRivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 12 (2): 210-211. 2021.
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Pictorial misrepresentation without figurative mispresentationStudi di Estetica 19. 2021.As many people have underlined, as regards pictures there are at least two different layers of content. In Voltolini, these layers are: i) the figurative content of a picture, i.e., what one can see in it viz. what the picture presents; ii) the pictorial content of a picture, i.e., what the picture represents, as constrained by its figurative content. As regards ii), there undoubtedly ispictorial misrepresentation. Having the possibility of misrepresenting things is a standard condition in order…Read more
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Intentionality in the TractatusDisputatio 10 (18). 2021.In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein seems to appeal to the idea that thoughts manage to explain how sentences, primarily elementary sentences, can be such that their subsentential elements refer to objects. In this respect, he seems indeed to appeal to the claim that thoughts, qua endowed with not only original, but also intrinsic, intentionality, lend this intentionality to names, by transforming them into ‘names-of’, i.e., symbols endowed with intrinsic intentionality as well. Such a claim, however…Read more
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Troubles with Phenomenal IntentionalityErkenntnis 87 (1): 237-256. 2019.As far as I can see, there are two basic ways of cashing out the claim that intentionality is ultimately phenomenal: an indirect one, according to which the intentional content of an experiential intentional mental state is determined by the phenomenal character that state already possesses, so that intentionality is so determined only indirectly; a direct one, which centers on the very property of intentionality itself and can further be construed in two manners: either that very property is de…Read more
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Tim Crane, The Objects of Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, xii + 182 pp., £27.50 , ISBN 978-0-19-968274-4 (review)Dialectica 70 (2): 245-252. 2016.
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Beliefs, make-beliefs, and making believe that beliefs are not make-beliefsSynthese 199 (1-2): 5061-5078. 2021.In this paper I want to hold, first, that one may suitably reconstruct the relevant kind of mental representational states that fiction typically involves, make-beliefs, as contextually unreal beliefs that, outside fiction, are either matched or non-matched by contextually real beliefs. Yet moreover, I want to claim that the kind of make-believe that may yield the mark of fictionality is not Kendall Walton’s invitation or prescription to imagine. Indeed, in order to appeal in terms of make-belie…Read more