14 APhEx num 14, anno 2016

With an ironical, exuberant and almost goliardic "divertissement" the authors of «Le Tribolazioni del Filosofare» announces to have «discovered, compiled, edited and commented» from an original text by an anonymous medieval poet (dressing their inventio retorica up with a sort of "comedy of art" style) this philosophical poem, originally written in dantesque tercets. So, Achille Varzi and Claudio Calosi's book is a magnificent and very pleasant - never simply caricatural -fresco of more than 2800 years of history of western philosophy, this latter interpreted as the poetical narration of a long gallery of characters - philosophers and their schools - with all their theoretical idiosyncrasies, aversions, intolerances and peculiarities. The "invention retorica" clearly refers to the more famous "orationes obliquae" or "meta-narration" of J. L. Borges, Umberto Eco, or to the Manuscript trouvé à Saragosse by J. Potocky, and the same title of the work refers to the dantean "Comedia". On the other hand, the famous dantean work doesn't represent only a literary pretext in poetical form, but it furnishes an ambitious and very wise attempt to reconstruct and to reenact the intimate interconnection between every single philosophical theory and each other in all its nature of aporia. So, Varzi and Calosi individuate in a sort of dantesque infernal punishment of any respective philosopher, punishment which is eternalizing in a a-temporal and unchangeable "state of affairs" (in the wittgensteinian sense of the syntagma), conveniently opposed and correlated each with the others, the rhetorical and narrative mechanism to describe the path and the route of the philosophical adventure of historicistic view of history of philosophy, with all its cyclical flashback and - not less infrequent or rhapsodic - flashforward.

In 'Against Facts' Betti aims to show that none of the arguments brought forward by philosophers and linguists in favour of the existence of facts is convincing. Betti distinguishes compositional facts, whose exclusive explanatory role would be to make true relational sentences, and propositional facts, which would be the objects of factive propositional attitudes, such as knowledge. According to Betti, compositional facts are ad hoc entities. However, the charge of adhocness seems to depend in part on the fact that Betti focuses from the start on a single explanatory role for compositional facts. For what concerns propositional facts, Betti contends that there is no good reason to think that they are the referents of 'that'-clauses. However, Betti does not discuss other roles which facts could play in the analysis of propositional attitudes. Betti fails to show convincingly that there are no facts. Nonetheless, anybody interested in facts will benefit greatly from reading this book. Moreover, Betti's book has the important merit of discussing an underexplored metaphysical alternative to facts: relata-specific relations.

Bernard Bolzano (1781 – 1848) was a Bohemian polymath who made important contributions in philosophy, mathematics, theology, and most of all in what he saw as the foundation of these sciences: logic. He developed a logic based on abstract propositions and ideas in themselves, which enabled him to rigorously define logical concepts such as consequence, validity, and the analytic-synthetic distinction. His unpreceededly extensive writings on scientific explanation inspired and keep inspiring the contemporary debate on grounding. Bolzano presented a definition of the natural numbers in terms of collections akin to Frege's, and his refelections on the mathematical infinite were admired by Peirce, Cantor, and Dedekind.

Daniele Molininiís book offers an introduction to the problem of mathematical explanation, both in mathematics itself and in science. After a historical reconstruction of the notion of mathematical explanation, and a survey of its relations with the notion of scientific explanation, Molinini discusses the many philosophical issues raised by reflection on mathematical explanation in the recent debate, pausing on their connections with the notion of proof, with arguments for mathematical platonism, with the nature of mathematical representation and finally with the several conceptions of the applicability of mathematics.

Starting from the famous argument by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935 until the experimental violation of Bell's inequality (Aspect et al. 1982), the philosophical and scientific debate on quantum mechanics and locality has become endless. It is certainly not possible in these few pages to give an exhaustive review of it. For this reason, on the occasion of the centenary of Einstein's general relativity (1915-2015), we present a particular way of introducing the theme of Bell's inequality. As recently showed by Don Howard (2015), Einstein would have more easily given up determinism than separability. In this paper, we will explore how to interpret the experimental violation of Bell's inequality in the light of this ontological stance.

Social epistemology is the discipline that studies the social aspects involved in the formation and the transmission of belief and knowledge, and also of the social dimension of scientific research. This discipline experienced a great development in the last decades. In this essay, I introduce two ways to classify social epistemology accounts: one distinguishes the theories on the basis of their continuity respect to traditional epistemology, the other one characterizes the accounts on the basis of the kind of epistemic subject they study.

Gerhard Gentzen (1909-1945) is one of the most illustrious mathematical logicians and one of the great figures of the twentieth century. He is the father of the natural deduction calculi and sequent calculi and, thanks to his results, he has succeeded in surmounting (at least partially) the famous goedelian limitative results. This profile aims to describe and illustrate, in the clearest and simplest way, some of the most important Gentzen's contributions, dedicating a particular attention to their philosophical significance.

The book edited by Katrina Hutchison e Fiona Jenkins, Women in Philosophy. What Needs to Change? (2013), aims at examining the following questions: why there are few women philosophers and what are the causes of this gender disparity in philosophy? Are there reasons, beyond those strictly ethical and political, for promoting women’s participation in philosophy? To answer these questions, the articles collected in the book show how gender gap is linked to some philosophical and methodological practices that make this discipline particularly inhospitable to women.

Constructive mathematics uses intuitionistic rather than classical logic. This makes it an algorithmic form of mathematics, as its adherence to intuitionistic logic allows us to interpret its theorems as algorithms. This characteristic of constructive mathematics has the potential to change the opinion of mathematicians on this enterprise: from deviant and non-standard practice, in the near future it could become central component of ordinary mathematics. In the present article, I shall survey the principal aspects of constructive mathematics, including its most remarkable differences with the classical tradition. I shall further hint at differences with other kinds of mathematics that also use intuitionistic logic. Finally I shall illustrate the motivation that some prominent constructive mathematicians of the Bishop school have adduced for their constructive turn.

Sensory perception has always been a central topic in philosophy. Some philosophical problems concerning perception are raised by the possibility of illusion and hallucination, which seems to undermine our ordinary conception of perceptual experience, on the one hand, and the epistemological role of perception in justifying our empirical knowledge, on the other hand. The present contribution provides a general overview on the main theories of perception, with a special focus on the way they address the problem of illusion and hallucination.

The theory of scientific explanation hinges on two fundamental axes. On the one hand it aims at clarifying the difference between descriptive and explanatory knowledge. On the other it aims at capturing those features that distinguish scientific explanation from a generic concept of explanation. In this essay we review the most relevant theories of scientific explanation starting from the first most significant proposals dating back to the '50s, until the most recent. In particular, this overview focuses on the relationship of explanatory relevance that each of the illustrated models identifies as the essence of scientific explanation.