13 APhEx num 13, anno 2016

In order to provide an overview of Rudolf Carnap's philosophy, in this Profile I shall focus on metaphilosophical issues; in particular, I shall point out some significant examples of how Carnap - in the three main phases of his intellectual career - conceived of the task of philosophy (especially in its relation with one of the main themes of Carnap's thought, namely, the idea that metaphysical problems should be deflated or dissolved): since the time when he was a young scholar (1922-1926) and his main goal was the constitution of scientific knowledge (starting from a phenomenal basis and using only logical or structural relations), up to the time when he worked in Vienna and Prague (1926-1936) and he intended to build a logic of science, until the time when, after emigrating in the US (1936-1970), he progressively refined the idea that philosophy is a kind of conceptual explication.

This paper is built upon the theoretical framework of the Aristotelian Rhetoric and of the contemporary Deep Rhetoric. In particular, it considers the conceptual duo of logos and polis. The paper describes some epistemological, technical and anthropological features of rhetoric. Furthermore, it explains some critical issues in the contemporary debate, especially those related to the notion of fallacy. The paper specifically refers to the aim and the subject of rhetoric, on the relation between emotions and judgements and on the role of both speaker and audience.

In this short profile, after an outline of Dewey's life, we first of all illustrate and explain his reconstruction of philosophy; then we show its deep relevance as a coherent basis of his pedagogical thinking and his theory of democracy.

Sensorimotor Enactivism (SE) claims that visual perception is a form of action. The aim of the present article is to offer a careful examination of the implications of this notion of visual perception in relation to the philosophical questions raised by the analysis of the contemporary theories of cognitive, motor and vision neuroscience. I will focus on the the different debates, concerning vision, that have been investigated by SE: the debate on conscious vision/visual consciousness and on its relation with action, the debate on the perception of objects' shape and size, the one about the presence of visual representations, the one about the relationship between vision and the other sensory modalities and about the neural correlates of visual experience. Finally, I will review the problems that the sensorimotor theory of vision proposed by enactivists faces with. Particular attention will be devoted to the experimental results that turn out to be relevant for these philosophical issues.

The paper presents and discusses the main results of Joint Commitment. How We Make the Social World, the book published by Margaret Gilbert in 2014. The author presents and defends her plural subject theory: against methodological individualism she shows that joint commitment can create a plural subject which is irreducible to its own parts. This idea, already presented in previous books of the author, is discussed dealing with new interesting topics such as collective guilt feelings, love, patriotism. The final section of the paper stresses some of the stengths of the book and shows also some of its weaknesses, such as the need of a discussion of joint commitment within a phenomenology of social stances.

The Dutch mathematician Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1889-1966) is famous in topology due to some relevant theorems (like the fixed point theorem) and he is well known both in the history of mathematics and in philosophy as the father of intuitionism. What strongly characterizes his scientific production is the strict linking between his Weltanschauung and his project of a constructive mathematics. Namely, starting with a mystical viewpoint about life, Brouwer has realized his project of building mathematics independently of language and without applicative aims: it is as an exploitation of the potentialities of our intuition of time.

The moral status of a being is the condition conferring moral considerability and (possibly) moral rights to such a being. There has been a wide philosophical debate about the basis upon which moral status should be attributed and the kinds of beings to which it should be granted. There are three main questions regarding the notion of moral status: What does it mean for a subject to have a moral status? On which basis should it be attributed? To which subjects should it be recognized (persons, "marginal" human beings, animals, chimeras) ? In this paper I examine the different responses that moral individualism, the species-based theories, the relational theories and contractualism have provided to these questions.

The review focuses on the book of Don Howard, Anche Einstein gioca a dadi. La lunga lotta con la meccanica quantistica, Carocci, Rome 2015, devoted to the analysis of the reservations that Einstein developed about the foundations of quantum mechanics. The review emphasises the essential contributions of Don Howard, historian and philosopher of physics of the Notre Dame University and one of the finest experts of Einstein's work and its cultural context, in restoring the complexity inherent in the Einstein's philosophical outlook and in refuting the view according to which Einstein became a critic of quantum mechanics just because he could not follow anymore the developments of the XXth century theoretical physics.

Pragmatics studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. In his book, Domaneschi discusses the main, classical themes in pragmatics: speaker's meaning, implicatures, presuppositions, speech acts, explicit and implicit meaning distinction, figurative language, politeness rules, etc. Domaneschi also introduces a flourishing interdiscipline, called “Experimental Pragmatics”, that in the last years has brought classical pragmatic theories in front of the tribunal of experience to test their power of explanation and prediction

John Ellis McTaggart is, with Francis Bradley, one of the most notable exponent of English Idealism and an important metaphysician in the early XXth century. In this entry, besides summarizing the main topics discussed in McTaggart's magnum opus, The Nature of Existence (ontology and idealism, ethics, mysticism), particular attention will be devoted to the core of his proof about the unreality of time, the work for which the English philosopher is best known today. McTaggart's conclusion isn't considered valid almost by anyone at present. Still, the philosophy of time ensuing his proof goes a way, an exponential growth of conceptual analysis, that had not taken before.

Future contingents are statements that predict events (or a states of affairs, or facts) that are neither inevitable nor impossible. The standard example of a future contingent is the claim 'Tomorrow there will be a sea battle'. Some traditional and prima facie strong arguments lead, from the premise that future contingents have a determinate truth-value at their moment of use, to the conclusion that the future is inevitable. Philosophers are thus faced with a difficult choice between rejecting these arguments, subscribing to the principle of bivalence, and adopting fatalism. Each of these options has deep philosophical consequences concerning, for instance, the nature of time and free will. Moreover, the debate about future contingents has fostered important insights in the semantics of temporal and modal languages.