22 APhEx num 22, anno 2020

L’aggregazione di opinioni individuali per formare una decisione collettiva è l’oggetto di studio di Judgment Aggregation, una disciplina che coinvolge logica, economia, filosofia politica ed informatica. Il problema della presa di decisione collettiva a partire da posizioni individuali è comune nella vita di tutti i giorni e, sebbene la procedura da seguire sembri evidente, i risultati possono nascondere paradossi sorprendenti. La formalizzazione del problema dell’aggregazione di giudizi individuali ha permesso di portare un buon numero di risposte, di evidenziare legami con la teoria della scelta sociale e l’aggregazione di credenze, e di aprire la strada a nuove ricerche che permettono di applicare buona parte dei risultati ad altri paradigmi della decisione collettiva. Obiettivo di questo lavoro è di introdurre il problema dell’aggregazione di giudizi, motivare l’interesse per tali questioni, presentando i risultati principali ottenuti e indicando alcune delle piste di ricerca attuali.

The aim of this article is to provide a historical and theoretical introduction to plural quantification. After a presentation of Boolos' plural semantics for second-order logic and the resulting formal system, i.e. plural logic, I will tackle the most famous issues they face. Finally, I will present a few possible applications of plural logic to the foundations of mathematics and logic.

Science and democracy are unanimously considered the cornerstone of Western civilization. For this reason, one may assert that science and democracy are perfectly compatible. However, antiscientific movements are common both in the academic world and in public opinion; the most radical constructivists maintain that the alleged scientific truths are nothing but the outcome of social negotiations and power relations, while many people accuse scientific communities of being at the service of big corporations and established powers. The relationship between science and democracy has consequently become a much-debated issue. In recent years, we have even seen an exponential growth in literature on the subject. Pierluigi Barrotta’s book – Scienza e democrazia. Verità, fatti e valori in una prospettiva pragmatista – takes part in the actual debate, arguing that in a liberal democracy scientists and laypeople should be considered as members of a single community of inquirers whose objective is the truth.

In this essay, I propose a profile of Bernard Williams focusing on themes related to his moral philosophy. More specifically, the profile I shall propose aims at reconstructing Williams's fragmented discussions about the idea of moral objectivity. After examining his criticisms against the very idea of moral theory, I offer a metaethical framing of his position and then conclude by showing some of his relevant affinities with the ethical thought of the Greeks and, in particular, of Aristotle.

Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), one of the most brilliant and outstanding philosophers among Brentano's pupils, is nowadayswidely discussed in analytic philosophy duetosome (relatively) recent developmentsof his fundamental ideas.In this introductive profile, after some notesabout Meinong's life (§ 1) and conception of philosophy as an inquiry about mental data (§ 2), I shall examine the main branches of his doctrine: the taxonomy of psychic phenomenaand the key-role played by representations (§3); the problem of empty representations, from which the Theory of Objects arises (§ 4); the objective foundation that this theory offers to practical philosophy and the central notion of value (§ 5). Finally, in § 6, I shall briefly present neo-Meinongian theories.

Recently, in metaethics, several authors have taken into account the view according to which moral knowledge can be based on perceptual or quasi-perceptual experience. This kind of knowledge is defined as moral perception. This paper aims to introduce the recent debate about moral perception. Specifically, the possibility of moral perception will be discussed, and many different views of moral perception will be compared.

Jean Hampton (1954-1996) was an influential voice in the landscape of US Philosophy of the second half of the 20th century. The majority of her writings falls within the sphere of Political Philosophy, although her interests ranged from Ethics to the Philosophy of Law, from the Rational Choice Theory to the History of Modern Philosophy and Feminism. In this context, I will analyse Hampton's contractarianism and her view of Liberal Feminism.

Imaginative resistance occurs when a subject is struggling to imagine the content of a fiction (even part of it) (§1). First the different ways to characterize the philosophical puzzle connected to this phenomenon will be presented (§2). The two different strategies delineated in the literature to characterize the phenomenon and to explain it, will be then analyzed: the conceptual solution (§3) and the evaluative solution (§4). For each of the two strategies, the reasons for adopting it and the different ways in which it has been developed will be outlined. By the end, a brief conclusive evaluation will be produced and a possible line of research for the future suggested (§5).

The debate around the perception of temporal properties, or Temporal Perception, is about explaining how it is possible to perceive unfolding events, like motion, change and rest, given that perceptual contents seem to be about single instants. This is indeed the heart of the Paradox of Temporal Experience, whose solutions (the snapshot theories, retentionalism and extensionalism) will be here assessed. Finally, our perceptive acts themselves enjoy temporal properties, and these play a role at solving the Paradox.

Topics such as privacy, freedom of speech, responsibility, digital divide, distributed morality and pornography online are some of the most new and challenging fields of ethics. They are usually dealt with bottom-up solutions. Luciano Floridi’s book, on the contrary, has the ambition to develop a general ethics to provide good answers with a new conceptual design. Floridi developes a patient oriented informational perspective and a ontocentric ethics. The book is a must for those interested in Floridi’s Principia Philosophiae Informationis, since it constitutes its second part.