• Neue Theorien der Referenz (edited book)
    mentis. 2004.
  •  12
    This volume does what it says on the tin: it collects Eva Picardi’s (1984-2017) essays on themes in Frege’s philosophy. The first part, ‘Frege in Context: Logic.
  •  14
    Deeper into Brentano’s mind: response to critics
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (8): 1440-1462. 2023.
    Laura Gow, Uriah Kriegel, Hamid Taieb, and David Woodruff Smith raised help – and insightful points of criticism about my book Brentano’s Mind. In this paper, I will defend and expand on the main claims of the book. My responses are organized around four topics: Psychology without a Soul, Plural Intentionality (and Conceptual Parts), Intentionality and Intentionality Primitivism, Mark of Mental.
  •  11
    Lotze on Comparison and the Unity of Consciousness
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (5): 556-572. 2022.
    Hermann Lotze argued that the fact that consciousness simultaneously “holds objects together as well as apart” such that they can be compared implies (a) that there is a simple thinker and (b) that consciousness is an ‘indivisible unity.’ I offer a reconstruction and evaluation of Lotze’s Argument from Comparison. I contend that it does not deliver (a) but makes a good case for (b). I will relate Lotze’s argument to the contemporary debate between “top-down” and “bottom-up” views of the unity of…Read more
  •  1
    Exemplification and Idealisation
    In Gerhard Ernst, Jakob Steinbrenner & Oliver R. Scholz (eds.), From Logic to Art: Themes from Nelson Goodman, Ontos. pp. 207-218. 2009.
  • Are Particulars or States of Affairs Given in Perception?
    In Maria Elisabeth Reicher (ed.), States of Affairs, Ontos. pp. 129-150. 2009.
  • Does Strawson Answer Ramsey’s Challenge?
    In Sarah-Jane Conrad & Silvan Imhof (eds.), P. F. Strawson - Ding und Begriff / Object and Concept, De Gruyter. pp. 35-50. 2010.
  •  13
    Brentano on Act, Content and Intentionality
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 100 (1-2): 173-196. 2023.
    This article offers a reconstruction of Brentano’s notion of act content that identifies the content of a mental act with a combination of marks (Merkmale) or a single such mark. The author will first clarify the role act content plays in Brentano’s philosophy of psychology and then go on to locate the proposed notion of content in the historical context of Brentano’s work as well as in his writings at the time of Psychologie. The author will defend this notion against potential objections and e…Read more
  •  11
    Literal and metaphorical meaning: in search of a lost distinction
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    The distinction between literal and figurative use is well-known and embedded in ‘folk linguistics’. According to folk linguistics, figurative uses deviate from literal ones. But recent work on lexical modulation and polysemy shows that meaning deviation is ubiquitous, even in cases of literal use. Hence, it has been argued, the literal/figurative distinction has no value for theorising about communication. In this paper, we focus on metaphor and argue that here the literal–figurative distinctio…Read more
  •  36
    The nineteenth century saw the development of reductive views of attention. The German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) proposed an original reductive view according to which attention is nothing but interest and interest itself is a positive feeling. Stumpf’s view was developed by Francis Bradley (1846-1924), George Frederick Stout (1860-1944), and Josiah Royce (1855-1916), but has been overlooked in the recent literature. In this paper, I will expound Stumpf’s view of atten…Read more
  • Frege on) sense and reference
    In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: foundations, history and methods, De Gruyter. 2019.
  •  20
    Textor reveals the roots of analytic philosophy in a great age of Austro-German philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He introduces Brentano, Mach, and other key figures, and traces the development of the landmark ideas that there can be 'psychology without a soul', and that metaphysics lies beyond the limits of knowledge.
  •  274
    Moods: From Diffusivness to Dispositionality
    with Alex Grzankowski
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    The view that moods are dispositions has recently fallen into disrepute. In this paper we want to revitalise it by providing a new argument for it and by disarming an important objection against it. A shared assumption of our competitors (intentionalists about moods) is that moods are “diffuse”. First, we will provide reasons for thinking that existing intentionalist views do not in fact capture this distinctive feature of moods that distinguishes them from emotions. Second, we offer a dispositi…Read more
  •  234
    Tolerating Sense Variation
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1): 182-196. 2023.
    Frege famously claimed that variations in the sense of a proper name can sometimes be ‘tolerated’. In this paper, we offer a novel explanation of this puzzling claim. Frege, we argue, follows Trendelenburg in holding that we think in language—sometimes individually and sometimes together. Variations in sense can be tolerated in just those cases where we are using language to coordinate our actions but are not engaged in thinking together about an issue.
  •  35
    That’s correct! Brentano on intuitive judgement
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (4): 805-824. 2022.
    Philosophers have long tried to articulate the specific epistemic status of judgements that neither need nor admit of justification by drawing on the metaphor of ‘the light of truth’. In contrast, in Brentano's account of intuitive judgement correctness is central: intuitive or immediately evident judgements are ‘characterized as correct (right)’. The aim of my paper is to introduce and explore Brentano’s correctness-based view. I will conclude by relating it to the work of his students Meinong,…Read more
  •  47
    Attitudinal evaluation, emotion, and the will
    European Journal of Philosophy 31 (2): 468-478. 2023.
    European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  61
    ABSTRACT Recently, the content/force distinction has had a bad press. It has been argued that the distinction is not properly motivated and that it makes the problem of the unity of the proposition intractable. I will argue that Frege’s version of the content/force distinction is immune from these objections. In order to do so, I will reconstruct his argument that ‘the nature of a question’ requires a distinction between force and content. I will answer the concern about the unity of the proposi…Read more
  •  70
    Mach’s Neutral Monism
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (1): 143-165. 2021.
    The father of neutral monism, Ernst Mach, argued that the fundamental constituents of the world are neither mental nor physical and that the distinction between the mental and physical ought to be erased. This article offers a reconstruction of Mach’s view. There is a “pure drive for knowledge” (reiner Erkenntnistrieb), and satisfying it, Mach argues, requires abandoning the mental/physical distinction. The reconstruction given will help to articulate and assess the differences between Mach’s po…Read more
  •  42
    Saying Something about a Concept: Frege on Statements of Number
    History and Philosophy of Logic 42 (1): 60-71. 2021.
    The paper gives a historically informed reconstruction of Frege's view of statements of number. The reconstruction supports Frege's claim that a statement can be 'about a concept' although it does not contain a singular term referring to the concept. Hence, Frege's philosophy of number is not subject to the problems Frege sees for singular reference to concepts.
  •  32
    Carl Stumpf, “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (6): 1181-1216. 2020.
    by Carl Stumpf. [467] ii When Zeller, iii in the lecture “On the meaning and mission of epistemology”, iv called for a renewed fostering of this science, he designated as its mission the study of t...
  •  19
    Stumpf between criticism and psychologism: introducing “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (6): 1172-1180. 2020.
    It is well known that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Brentano school interacted fruitfully with early analytic philosophy: the Russell-Meinong debate is a paradigm example...
  •  13
    Brentano’s work contains the seeds of an account of meaning of assertoric utterances according to which the correctness commitment of judgement enables these acts to mean states of affairs. In this point, Brentano’s work contrasts with Marty’s and Grice’s approaches to meaning in which communicative intentions are central. In my contribution, I will develop Brentano’s suggestion in order to make plausible that it is a viable alternative to Grice’s work.
  •  11
    Brentano on the Doxastic Nature of Perceptual Experience
    History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 10 (1): 137-156. 2007.
  •  76
    The distinction between content and force is ‘a corner-stone of 20-century philosophy of language’ (Recanati 2013, 622). Yet, in recent years it has been argued that (a) the motivation for drawing the content-force distinction is flawed and (b) that making it bars us from solving the problem of the unity of the proposition. In this paper I will go back to the source of the content-force distinction in Frege’s work. Frege argued that ‘the nature of a question’ requires a distinction between forc…Read more
  •  25
    Stumpf between criticism and psychologism: introducing “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (6): 1172-1180. 2020.
    It is well known that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Brentano school interacted fruitfully with early analytic philosophy: the Russell-Meinong debate is a paradigm example...