03 APhEx num 3, anno 2011

This review critically discusses Michael Potter’s book on Wittgenstein’s pre-Tractatus work the Notes on Logic. It concentrates on his reading of Wittgenstein’s account of the nature of the proposition and on his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s earliest insights about the nature of logic.

Deontic Logic, founded by Georg Henrik von Wright in 1951, has a strong relationship with analytic philosophy. In fact, it is usually considered as a logic of language’s normative uses. Its evolution across the centuries, although, is not clear at all nor free from uncertainty. Rather it shows a particular development path: from a logic of enunciative moods to a logic of practical rationality

The paper presents and discusses the main results of Making the social world, the book published by John R. Searle in 2010. Social philosophy or, as the author prefers to say, «Philosophy of Society» is the main topic of the book. Sociality, claims Searle, is created and maintained by collective intentionality trough the speech act of Assignment of Function (“We make it the case by Declaration that the Y status function exists in contexts C”). The two final chapters apply the main ideas of the book to important topics, such as Power and Human Rights. This leads the discussion to the field of political philosophy. The final section of the paper presents some critics to the book.

Gottlob Frege (Wismar 1848 – Bad Kleinen 1925) is one of the founding fathers of modern logic and philosophy of mathematics, and, in general, of analytic philosophy. He was the first to acknowledge that the problem of the foundations of mathematics awaited an answer, and it is in the light of his foundational programme that his whole intellectual development has to be read. To this aim, I will not go through his published works chronologically, but I will try to provide a general view of the main topics of Frege's proposal by embedding them in his logicist project.

The meanings of the words are not mysterious or abstract entities, placed in an unknown and indefinable space. Indeed, they are to be found in the daily practices of speech. The language serves to communicate own impressions, to convey own thoughts. Therefore, its meaning can not in any way be detached from concrete dimension of speaking. Two possible outcomes of such an approach to the problem of meaning are the theory of meaning as use and the theory of meaning as inference. According to the first conception, of which Wittgenstein is one of the leading exponents, the meaning of the words consists in their daily use, in the manner in which they are used and understood in the everyday conversation. Thus, to know the meaning is equivalent to master the rules of use of the words in the context of speech, within the concrete dimension that Wittgenstein defines with the notion of “language game”. According to the second conception, due to Wilfrid Sellars, the rules of use are analyzed in terms of inferential processes; hence, master a rule is to be able to developing all the implications that the words between them have.

Mereology is the formal theory of parthood and parthood relations. This contribution explores different mereological theories of different strengths and scopes, that differ in the endorsement of philosophically controversial axioms. It furthermore discusses different philosophical problems and (alleged) solutions raised by the endorsement of such axioms. A particular attention is given to fundamental problems in analytic metaphysics, such as composition and identity to mention a few.

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) was one of the most important analytical philosophers of the 20th century, not only because of the wide range of themes he covered (such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, theory of truth, theory of meaning, epistemology, aesthetics), but also due to the highly unified character of his thought. This essay focuses on the most influential topics of Davidsonian philosophy: the connection between truth and meaning, the central role of interpretation and rationality, the mind-body problem, the nature of beliefs, and the relationship between language and thought.

According W. V. O Quine, there are two famous aphorisms or capital maxims - maybe it could be more correct to define them, with hegelian style, "panlogisms" - derivable from an attentive analysis of his famous problem "On what there is" - both settled on the Parmenis' intuition in virtue of which "All is Being" or "The Being is the Identical": « To be is being the value of a variable» and «No entity without identity». These words summarize, using Francesco Berto introducing words of his «L'Esistenza non è logica; dai quadrati rotondi ai mondi impossibili», the so-called "Received View" about being conceived as something that cannot be (considered) as a logical property inter alia. But the parmenidean-eleatic received view of Quine and others (see the classical criticism against Meinong from B. Russell, or P. Van Inwangen, W. Lycan) is really philosophically satisfactory? All Francesco Berto's book consists in to furnish an absolutely negative answer to the latter question; and this negative question is in turn respectively articulated in two philosophical proposals: a "pars destruens" where, all the parmenidean, russellian, guinean received view's criticisms, limits, metaphysical and logical deficits are stressed, highlighted and stigmatized; and a pars costruendo, in which the author exposes four types of meinonghian "being-as-a-property" theory, openly showing his preference for the last and four theory. In the same words of Berto: «In my view, parmenidean thesis, is wrong [...], and showing, in this book, that opposite view is handsome and useful is for myself more interesting that to criticize received view».