Giuliano Torrengo

What, if anything, are we talking about when we say that time passes? In the Western tradition, philosophical investigations on the nature of time divide between realist approaches according to which there is a truth beyond the metaphor of the passage, and antirealist approaches according to which the passage of time is ultimately an illusion. In this contribution, I will give an overview of the logical space in which various options for the realist and the antirealist are to be found: time idealism and passage antirealism, various forms of standard realism, and non-standard forms of realism of passage.

Proposals for gender-fair language in Italian include Alternative grammatical Gender Encoding Devices (AGEDs) such as the schwa (ə) or asterisk, potentially also accommodating non-binary identities. These solutions, though, often pose challenges for oral communication, accessibility, and social acceptance, as they may be perceived as external to the Italian language system. We examined the possibility of employing diphthongs—integral components of standard Italian phonology—as more internalized AGEDs by testing whether replacing typical masculine or feminine word endings (-o/-i (M), -a/-e (F)) with various diphthongs (e.g., ai, eu) could produce forms interpreted by native speakers as more gender-neutral. We conducted a within-subject experiment, where Italian participants (N = 424) were asked to rate words ending in diphthongs (1) along a five-point scale from feminine to masculine and (2) as singular, plural or unclear for number. Results revealed a significant Diphthong × Number Judgement interaction, with certain diphthongs interpreted as more gender-neutral than others. Specifically, diphthongs that excluded or combined the sounds typically associated with masculine and feminine grammatical genders were rated as more neutral. These findings suggest that select diphthongs could serve as AGEDs, potentially offering an accessible, linguistically coherent pathway toward more inclusive and gender-fair Italian language practices.

According to the “received view” the disagreement between endurantism and perdurantism is ontological and concerns the existence of temporal parts of continuants. In a recent paper, Wasserman (2016) argues that the ontological conception of these theories does not address the crucial point: explaining the way things persist. According to Wasserman, perdurantism is not just the view that things have temporal parts; it is the view that things persist by (or in virtue of) having temporal parts. Moreover, in the last decade an alternative understanding of the dispute between endurantism and perdurantism, the so called “locative turn”, has led to an understanding of these two theories as concerning crucially locational rather than mereological notions. Our main aim in this paper is to bring together those two revisionary approaches to the received view, and show how they can enrich each other and open up further dimensions of the debate. Finally in the last section we focus on some of the non-standard accounts of persistence and location that arise from this approach, such as “autonomism of persistence and location” and “reverse locational endurantism/perdurantism”.

In this paper, I offer a commentary on the recent article “The moving open future, temporal phenomenology, and temporal passage,” focusing on the temporally aperspectival hypothesis. According to it, the widely shared belief in robust passage is due to a low-level perceptual mechanism involving awareness of temporally aperspectival perceptions being replaced over time. I interpret the phenomenology at play as ambiguous between an inward-directed awareness (focused on the renewal of experiences themselves) and an outward-directed interpretation (focused on the renewal of what we experience). Following in part some suggestions by the authors, I argue that this duality, combined with the influence of passage-friendly language and metaphors, may explain the observed distribution between those who do and do not believe in robust temporal passage. I also suggest that distinguishing between two related but distinct beliefs—the Priorian Belief in external robust passage and a Husserlian Belief in the internal renewal of experience—could clarify the 70%–30% split in intuitions about temporal passage documented by X-phi studies.

This paper explores taste fragmentalism, a novel approach to matters of taste and faultless disagreement. The view is inspired by Kit Fine’s fragmentalism about time, according to which the temporal dimension can be constituted—in an absolute manner—by states that are pairwise incompatible, provided that they do not obtain together. In the present paper, we will apply this metaphysical framework to taste states. In our proposal, two incompatible taste states (such as the state of rhubarb’s being tasty and the state of rhubarb’s being distasteful) can both constitute reality in an absolute manner, although no agent can have joint access to both states. We will then develop a formalised version of our view by means of an exact truthmaker semantics for taste assertions. Within this framework—we argue—our linguistic and inferential practices concerning cases of faultless disagreement are elegantly vindicated, thus suggesting that taste fragmentalism is worth of further consideration.

Many philosophers take for granted that there is a strong pre‐theoretical intuition that the future is open and that it is worth trying to make sense of that intuition in theoretical terms. In this paper, I give a characterisation of the ordinary intuition in terms of three elements: our sense of agency, the difference in normativity between memories and expectations and naïve understanding of causality. Those intuitions allow us to pin down certain desiderata that an account of openness should respect. Firstly, the fact that the future is open is not merely due to our epistemic situation (the fact that we do not know what the future will bring). Secondly, openness is not merely a matter of nomological indeterminism; even if indeterminism is part of what makes the future open, it cannot be the end of the story. Thirdly, openness requires more than ‘modal flexibility’ (i.e. the fact that the future could be different from what actually will be). I provide a minimal theory of openness, which respects those desiderata and which is based on the semantic notion of unsettledness and the metaphysical notion of indeterminacy. Roughly, the future is open if future‐tensed claims concerning contingent matters are such that their truth value is presently unsettled, and they are semantically unsettled because the future is metaphysically indeterminate. I then argue that this theory is compatible with what I call the closed future view. According to the latter, there is only one way in which things will go, although, given indeterminism, it is unsettled which way it is. I then consider an objection to my compatibility claim: if the open future claim is metaphysically substantive, there should be a way to differentiate it from the closed future scenario. I consider whether a friend of openness could rely on a dynamic metaphysics of time (such as presentism, or the growing block view) in order to differentiate their position from the closed future scenario. I argue that the appeal to a dynamic universe is ineffective.

The social world is populated by many entities, such as promises, contracts, presidents, money, debts, and financial crises. Many philosophers regard collective behaviour and attitudes as the ground of social reality. According to this standard view, social ontology is at bottom composed of collective intentions and cooperative behaviours, and that holds both for simple cases concerning small groups and complex institutional structures. In this paper, this view is challenged and an alternative approach is proposed in which the role of collective intentions and cooperative behaviour is very different in (a) small group cases, where it can be seen as the ground of social roles and obligations, and (b) cases concerning complex institutions, in which documents and records of social acts in general are the ground that determines rights, duties, and all other complex status functions.

When we cook, by meticulously following a recipe, or adding a personal twist to it, we sometimes care not only to (re-)produce a taste that we can enjoy, but also to give our food a certain aftertaste. This is not surprising, given that we ordinarily take aftertaste to be an important part of the gustatory experience as a whole, one which we seek out, and through which we evaluate what we eat and drink—at least in many cases. What is surprising is that aftertastes, from a psychological point of view, seem to be analogous to afterimages, and thus have little or no epistemic import. In this paper we tackle this puzzle, and argue that we are right in treating aftertastes seriously. The moral is that both from a metaphysical and an epistemic point of view aftertastes should be categorized differently from afterimages.

In societies with a non-elementary degree of complexity, we find institutions, social roles, promises, marriages, corporations, enterprises, and the large variety of what we can label “social objects”. On the one hand, we commonly speak and think of such entities as if they existed on a par with entities such as tables and persons. On the other hand, there is a clear link between what people think and how people behave and the social domain. We argue that the widespread “reductionist” approach in social ontology fails to account for both those aspects of social reality, and put forward a new approach. The main idea is that a particular kind of social objects, namely documents – and more generally records of social acts – are the ground of social reality. The fundamental difference from the reductionist approach is that the content of collective intentions will turn out to be not so important in accounting for the ontological variety of complex social realities such as ours.

Quel bon vent, quel joli vent, ma vie m’appelle, ma vie m’attend French folk song 1. Presentists and Growing Block theorists appeal to ‘powerful intuitions’ when they defend their respective conceptions of time. Eternalists are prepared to go some length towards ‘reconciling’ the view from nowhen with at least some of these intuitions, or try to explain them away. Unaided intuitions may in fact underdetermine any particular metaphysical choice. One set of intuitions about time seems to have been neglected, though, in spite of its power. These intuitions are the mirror image of those supporting the Growing Block theory, and they are modelled on a pre-reflective understanding of our own life. According to the intuitions, only the future and the present are real; the past isn’t. The present is the constantly eroding edge of the future, which thus shrinks incessantly. There is less and less future as the present proceeds. The obvious intuitive model of this view of time is our life; from which every day eats up a little bit. Smaller scale models are available in everyday life. As you are reading this text, you have less and less to read. You know it. You know that at some point you’ll finish, or stop, reading it. But a model is not enough to make a grand philosophical claim, and indeed the very existence of the model is the ground for a negative claim: a picture, it may be said, is holding you captive. The Future Shrinker has two tasks. The first is to show that the intuitive picture supporting the claim is robust and does not make implausible epistemological claims. The second task is to show that her theory is at least compatible with scientific lore, and at best a good way ….

Many philosophers regard collective behavior and attitudes as the ground of the whole of social reality. According to this popular view, society is composed basically of collective intentions and cooperative behaviors; this is so both for informal contexts involving small groups and for complex institutional structures. In this article, I challenge this view, and propose an alternative approach, which I term institutional externalism. I argue that institutions are characterized by the tendency to defer to elements that are external to the content of collective intentions—such as laws, declarations, and contracts. According to institutional externalism, those elements are the grounds of institutional statutes, rights, and duties.

There seems to be a "what it is like" to the experience of the flow of time in any conscious activity of ours. In this paper, I argue that the feeling that time passes should be understood as a phenomenal modifier of our mental life, in roughly the same way as the blurred or vivid nature of a visual experience can be seen as an element of the experience that modifies the way it feels, without representing the world as being in a certain way. I defend my positions against the deflationary view according to which the passing of time does not have a specific phenomenal character, and the representationalist view according to which the feeling of time passing is a feature of the representational content of our experience, like being red or yellow.

What is the ontological status of the “objects” we find in the social realm, such as Universities, marriages, fines, meetings, and the like? In this paper I present three alternative answers to this question. Sanguine realism, according to which the existence and identity of social objects is independent from the existence and intentions of subjects. Moderate realism, according to which the identity of social objects is at least in part independent from that of the subjects, but their existence is not. And anti-realism, according to which talk of social objects is a mere façon de parler. I focus on moderate realism, and argue that the fundamental constrain on the existence and identity of social objects is their dependence upon documents and inscriptions.

The hyper-Russellian skeptic is someone who thinks that only one of all your experiences was, is, and will ever be conscious. Which one? The very one you are having now. Before you were always a zombie, and you will be a zombie for ever after. In the present literature on the metaphysics of passage of time, there is disagreement on whether our feeling that time passes — the “dynamic flavor” of our ordinary experience — provides support to the A-theory, that is, the thesis that the passage of time is an objective feature of reality. Lately, several philosophers have argued against this idea. In this paper I want to push this line of reasoning further by exploiting the hyper-Russellian scenario against the A-theory of time.