05 APhEx num 5, anno 2012
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SOMMARIO
TEMI
Adornetti Ines
Ruzzene Attilia
Meccanismi causali nelle scienze sociali
Giudice Tiziana
Torrengo Giuliano
Laudisa Federico
Morganti Matteo
Severini Eleonora
LETTURE CRITICHE
Ferretti Francesco
Ervas Francesca
Bruni Domenica
Gola Elisabetta
PROFILI
Gusmano Francesco
Calemi Francesco F.
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Browsing 05 APhEx num 5, anno 2012 by Issue Date
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- PublicationTelmo Pievani, La vita inaspettata. Il fascino di un'evoluzione che non ci aveva previsto, Milano, Raffaello Cortina Editore, Collana "Scienza e Idee", 2011, pp. 253(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Bruni, DomenicaThe unexpected life is a book written by Telmo Pievani (Raffaello Cortina, 2011) that, starting from Charles Darwin, the first man having the courage to "go beyond the sign", clearly and precisely describes the state of the art on evolution. The key concept of the book is the idea that evolution is characterized by the historical contingency. In Pievani’s perspective, it is not the specificity of human beings that is called into question, but the anthropocentrism that we use in arguing this specificity.
192 230 - PublicationCarla Bazzanella, Rosa Pugliese, Erling Strudsholm, Numeri per parlare. Da 'quattro chiacchiere' a 'grazie mille', Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2011, pp.166(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Gola, ElisabettaThe text offers a Critical Review of "Numeri per parlare. Da 'quattro chiacchiere' a 'grazie mille'" by Carla Bazzanella, Rosa Pugliese e Erling Strudsholm. The author critically reflects on the book by considering its methodologies, its arguments, and its relation with other books of the same type and on the same subject.
221 184 - PublicationRaymond W. Gibbs, Herbert L. Colston, Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader, Lawrence Erlbaum, New York, 2007, pp. 607(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Ervas, FrancescaFor a long time irony has been considered as an antiphrastic mechanism, as saying the opposite of what you mean. The book Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader (2007), edited by Gibbs and Colston, aims at giving a more complex picture of the studies on this rhetorical figure, by highlighting not only the alternative linguistic theories, but also the cognitive processes involved in irony comprehension. Irony is the overthrow of perspective which opens new alternatives in thought, when reality does not completely satisfy our expectations.
181 341 - PublicationMetafora(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Giudice, TizianaIn this paper I will focus on the two most relevant approaches for the study of metaphor in the contemporary debate: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Relevance Theory. I will explore the main theoretical steps from a way to analyse metaphor as a ‘language event’ to the idea we have to consider metaphorical process as a ‘thought event’. This latter point of view is used by Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Relevance Theory in their studies about the nature and role of metaphor.
245 698 - PublicationTropi(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Morganti, MatteoWhat kind of entity is a property? Should we conceive of properties as Platonic universals, such that, for example, all good men are in some sort of relation with the same entity, 'Goodness' in itself? Moreover, are objects constituted, as Locke suggested, by something over and above their properties - a 'substratum' that supports and unifies those properties? The idea that both universals and substrata exist may seem plausible at first. Trope theorists, however, are antirealists about universals and think that, except in language and thought, every property instance is nothing more than a unique particular. together with the rejection of substrata, this line of thought leads to the radical form of nominalism according to which reality is exclusively constituted by particular property instances. From the foregoing, a series of philosophical questions emerge.
103 528 - PublicationCausalità(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Laudisa, FedericoThe concept of causality has been employed in philosophy throughout its history and is rich of implications for the relationship between philosophical analysis and scientific investigation. This paper describes and discusses some of the main issues raised by reflection on this concept by taking as a starting point the appreciation of two fundamental circumstances: first, the growing consensus on the need for a pluralistic attitude towards the different meanings of the concept of causality in different theoretical areas of philosophy and science; second, the variety of implications that causal pluralism has in the light of the distinction between ontological and epistemological aspects of causality.
275 2805 - PublicationWilfrid Sellars(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Gusmano, FrancescoWilfrid Stalker Sellars (Ann Arbor, 1912 – Pittsburgh, 1989) has been one of the most important American philosophers of the twentieth century. Referring back to some central issues of pragmatism and developing, in the wake of Carnap, typical insides of logical positivism, has called into question the general paradigm of Givenness. In his most famous work, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, has criticized the concept of the Given in its main articulations. He also developed a concept of naturalism based on the recognition of centrality, at descriptive level, of scientific knowledge and, together, on the principle of irreducibility of normative discourse. Sellars has taught at various universities (Minnesota, Yale, Pittsburgh), influencing several generation of students (among his pupils, Paul Churchland and Robert Brandom).
179 200 - PublicationMichael C. Corballis, The Recursive Mind. The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 291(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Ferretti, FrancescoThe text offers a Critical Review of "The Recursive Mind. The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization" by Michael C. Corballis. The author critically reflects on the book by considering its methodologies, its arguments, and its relation with other books of the same type and on the same subject.
247 215 - PublicationMeccanismi causali nelle scienze sociali(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Ruzzene, AttiliaMechanistic reasoning is on the surge among the philosophers of science who regard it as fruitful to shed new light on the social scientific practice. In this paper, I characterize the concept of mechanism and the epistemic benefits that derive from its use in the philosophical and methodological discourse about the social sciences. In particular, I highlight the virtue of mechanistic explanation with respect to the deductive-nomological model and the role of mechanisms in facilitating causal inference. I conclude with a note of caution and a plea for the judicious and non-unrestrained use of mechanistic reasoning.
110 1333 - PublicationFilosofia del tempo(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Torrengo, GiulianoOur temporal experience is rich and variegated. Time flows, and by flowing it modifies people and objects. Although we are never in a position to alter the past, often we can influence the future. Which ones among all temporal aspects that constitute our experience are fundamental aspects of reality, and which ones merely reflect the way we represent it? In this article I tackle that problem, by presenting an overview of the contemporary debates in philosophy that are connected to it.
196 609 - PublicationNeuroni Specchio(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Severini, EleonoraThis essay takes into account mirror neurons with the aim to provide an introduction to the main steps of their discovery and a critical discussion of such finding. First, I will present the debate originated within the scientific community focusing on the presence, or not, in human beings of this kind of nervous cells. Then, I will examine the discussion about their relevance in cognition and in particular in mind reading process. This will be the occasion to assess the philosophical implications, and more precisely the anthropological and ethical ones, of mirror neurons. My purpose is indeed to present an example of how science and philosophy may work together, in order to show the weakness of some anthropological paradigms and to gain a more adequate conception of human being.
404 1211 - PublicationDavid Malet Armstrong(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Calemi, Francesco F.David Malet Armstrong (Melburne 8 July 1926 – 13 May 2014) has been one of the most influential contemporary metaphysician working in the analytic tradition and surely the greatest 20th century Australian philosopher. His main merit is to have reestablished metaphysics as a respectable branch of philosophy placing it at the heart of the philosophical debate, and giving it the status of an authoritative and competent interlocutor of both rational and empirical sciences. This paper aims to illustrate some of the most influential theses that constitute Armstrong’s metaphysical system.
166 496 - PublicationOrigine del linguaggio(EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2012)Adornetti, InesIn this paper we examine the issue of the origin of human language by comparing two of the main theoretical options proposed in this regard: the vocal hypothesis (the idea that language originated through the auditory medium) and the gestural hypothesis (the idea that language originated by exploiting the visual medium).Through theoretical arguments and empirical evidence, we show the difficulties of the vocal hypothesis and, basing of these difficulties, we support the validity of the gestural origin. According to the gestural model, human language is the final outcome of a long evolutionary process that originated from cognitive systems based on perception and action shared (at various degree) with other primates. This model respects the naturalistic Darwinian tradition, according to which human language is based on capacities already present in other animal species, and thus offers a valid alternative to the Cartesian perspectives according to which language cannot be conceived in continuity with other forms of animal communication.
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