18 APhEx num 18, anno 2018

According to anti-exceptionalists, logical laws do not enjoy any privileged epistemological or metaphysical status, and the choice between rival logical theories should be carried out by means of an abductive methodology (§1). We will try to clarify which properties antiexceptionalists want to deprive logic of (§2), review the main implementations of the abductive model (§3), and clarify its criteria (§4). Along the way, we will highlight some of the difficulties the position seems to face; as we will see, many among these consist in circularity objections.

Composition is a relation that holds between pluralities of objects and particular objects. Composition seems to have many analogies with identity relation, and some philosophers suggest to consider the first a particular case of the second: in a nutshell, composition would be identity. Mereology and plural logic are needed to develop this intuition in a perspicuous way. Despite the arguments for the identity of the two relations, there are nevertheless some objections strong enough to maintain that composition and identity are two distinct relations, and they are characterized by different principles.

Gödel's disjunction is the philosophical thesis according to which either it is impossible to mechanize the mathematical endeavour or else there exist absolutely unsolvable mathematical problems. After briefly describing the historical and theoretical context of the disjunction, we stress its relevance to both philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of mind. We then present a possible proof of the disjunction by highlighting its philosophical and mathematical assumptions as well as the problems of idealization involved. Furthermore, we discuss in detail the two horns of the disjunction together with various attempts to establish their respective validity.

Ernst Mach's (1838-1916) researches stemmed from two intellectual traditions: European physics of late nineteenth century, and post-Kantian German philosophy. He looked upon human thoughts and experiences as elements of the natural world: his monism or radical naturalism rested upon the intrinsic link between physics and psychology. He focused on the historical and critical analysis of physics, in order to inquire into its physiological, empirical, and logical foundations. Mach saw scientific theories as intrinsically provisional and incomplete achievements, and the history of science was the suitable cure for any dogmatic attitude. Physics and the emerging philosophy of science in the early twentieth century owed much to Mach's meta-theoretical theses and researches.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is one of the most influential early modern philosophers, and in reason of this a never-ending critical interest focuses on his works. Such a critical attention gave rise to a broad literature and it is in fact quite easy to find valuable introductory books to Berkeley's works. It would be thus superfluous to provide a further summary of the entire production of Berkeley. Rather, I focus on a specific issue, namely the main points of interest of immaterialism for the contemporary debates in philosophy. The currently most discussed Berkeleian arguments are those from his earlier production (those developed around 1709-1713). Thus, I will be mainly concerned with the conceptual structure of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Among Berkeley's early works, this is the one that was thought as a systematic illustration for philosophers of his ideas.

In this article I shall summarily reconstruct the main threads of Hilary Putnam's philosophical thought, focusing on issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind. More specifically, I shall highlight computational functionalism, semantic externalism, different versions of realism, the criticism to the naturalization of intentionality and pragmatism. Eventually, in the short conclusions, I shall critically assess the results.

This book introduces the main concepts and formal issues about modal logics, while also engaging the major philosophical debates such formal systems gave rise to. In Chapters I and II, Marcello Frixione presents the notion of a possible world from the standpoint of some theoretical problems in the philosophy of language and shows how a possible world semantics is applied to the main systems of alethic modal logic. In Chapters III and IV, Samuele Iaquinto introduces deontic, tense, conditional, and epistemic logics. In Chapters V, VI, and VII Massimiliano Vignolo addresses quantified modal logic and the main philosophical issues it gives rise to, such as the construal of de re modal statements and the problem of mere possibilia.

Margaret Gilbert (1942) is a British philosopher, full professor in Moral Philosophy at Irvine University (CA) since 2006. Gilbert is one of the leading philosophers in the field of social ontology. In 1989, in On Social Fact, she elaborated the plural subject theory. Since then, in the following thrity years she went on refining this theory, applying it to different fields ranging from political philosophy to epistemology. At present, her research focuses on the notion of joint commitment and on issues concerning rights and duties embedded in sociality.

The paradoxes of intensionality differ from the set-theoretic as well as the truth-theoretic paradoxes. They include the paradoxes of Prior, of Kaplan, and of Russell-Myhill: paradoxes which afflict "naïve" theories of propositions and propositional attitudes (just like naive set theory is afflicted by Russell's paradox). The paradoxes of intensionality concern the formal foundations of semantic theory, and the logic of operators like "believe" and "assert". An account of these paradoxes raises questions about the nature of intensionality, the study of (hyper-) intensional logics, and the metaphysics of propositions.

Di recente la nozione di verità parziale ha attirato l'attenzione di filosofi e logici. Questa nota presenta brevemente un problema che una teoria della verità parziale deve risolve e discute alcuni tentativi di soluzione.