01 APhEx num 1, anno 2010

Andrea Borghini’ "Che cos’è la possibilità, (Carocci, Roma)" is a serious attempt to show how and why the same concept of possibility is a crucial entry of every philosophical lexicon regardless its “school” or its “history” (analytical, continental, phenomenological, ermeneutical and so on); Nevertheless, Borghini’s work doesn’t betray its original complex methodological setting, and remain a classical (preparatory) essay conceived and written from a perspective and a point of view genuinely analytical. This, because – that’s the Borghini’s book aim – every philosophical approach concerning logical, ontological and metaphysical themes concerns modal problems too. All this effort is going on in more then one hundred pages volume. Of course the principal virtue of these one hundred pages is making every topic of the whole argumentation gravitate around the ground question, the basic problems and the fundamental conceptual definition before to examine in depth more general historiographic taxonomies of every author mentioned by Borghini. From this problematic view, on the contrary, to make an history of the same concept of “possibility” is a task that Borghini explicitly, and very kindly, refuse as impossible in a so brief, short and very manageable book. These features is the most remarkable of Andrea Borghini’s book, and they make this a precious and lively contribute, useful to an inexperienced public as the typical young reader of high school, which is the fundamental characteristic that a good preparatory book of philosophy ought to possess and to infuse.

Suppose there are true or well-confirmed scientific theories, and that some mathematical theories turn out to be indispensable to them, in some sense to be further specified. If we assume that these scientific theories can be true (or well-confirmed) only if the mathematical theories that are indispensable to them are true (or well-confirmed), we can conclude that the latter are also true (or well-confirmed). If we also believe that these mathematical theories are about a given domain of objects, and can be true (or well-confirmed) only if these objects exist (or if we are justified in believing that they exist), we can conclude that they exist (or that we are justified in believing that they do). This is, in a nutshell, the core idea underlying the indispensability argument, which was originally suggested by Quine and Putnam, and which is now the source of a vast philosophical debate. Despite its apparent simplicity, the argument can in fact appeal to a number of controversial assumptions and notions. Also for this reason, there are several different versions of the argument that can be offered and discussed.

Claudia Bianchi's book, Pragmatica cognitiva. I meccanismi della comunicazione (2009), provides the reader with a reasoned map of the main stances held by the scholars investigating our beliefs and expectations in the attribution of meaning to others' words. By analysing the possibilities and the limits of the theories in the field, the author wonders whether and to which extent talking about "language as a code" or about "literal meaning" makes sense. To answer this question, the book brings in front of the tribunal of the philosophical analysis - but also in front of the tribunal of the empirical research - the main contemporary trends in philosophy of language.

The inhabitants of the world are many yet somehow one: how is it possible? This conundrum gives rise to one of the most ancient but nevertheless topical debates in philosophy: the problem of universals. From Plato to Quine, via Aquinas, Galilei and Russell – just to name a few representative cases –, the problem of universals has had a great relevance for issues pertaining to epistemology, theology, science, mathematics and semantics. This paper is meant to be expository and it focuses on the core issue, i.e. how is it possible – if at all – for numerically different things to have an identical qualitative nature? In the following discussion, I will review the foremost solutions, viz. Universalism, Nominalism and Particularism, considering the pros and the cons of each.

Which are the features of the meaning of a singular term or a sentence? In what does consist properly the understanding of the sense or reference of a linguistic expression? In Sense and Meaning, Frege shows that the knowledge does not imply the knowledge of its reference. The reference is not, namely, an ingredient in meaning and is not part of what a speaker has to know when she understands an expression. The understanding of a certain expression, Frege suggests, does not merely consist in our associating a certain thing with it as its referent. We must have “some means” by which this association is effected. This “means” is precisely what the sense of an expression is.

Why is the “linguistic turn” a prerogative of the analytical philosophy and what does exactly define it? From the thesis which made this turn, it is possible to distinguish the following three: (1) the philosophy of language has priority over all other areas of philosophy; (2) the extrusion of thoughts from the mind; (3) thoughts are public and articulated.

The critical eview considers the book that Sbisà devoted to implicit communication and the role it plays in comprehension, and to the necessity to analyze it efficiently in order to better use it even in ordinary speech; it also hints to the theoretical distinction between presuppositions and implicatures the author proposes, a distinction based on the criteria at which a given attribution of implicit sense to a text may be considered as legitimate.

The text offers a Critical Review of "La mente in bilico. Le basi filosofiche della scienza cognitiva" by Massimo Marraffa. The author critically reflects on the book by considering its methodologies, its arguments, and its relation with other books of the same type and on the same subject.

In my review I explain the central theses of each of the three chapters of Life and Action (∫∫ 2-4) and the framework informing the overall project (∫ 1) and then offer some critical remarks (∫ 5). The reader is provided with a general picture of how Thompson develops and responds to the work in practical philosophy of some of the most influential figures in the analytic tradition (Anscombe, Foot, Davidson, Gauthier, Rawls) and of his analysis and appropriation of a philosophical method, which he credits Anscombe with, that combines lessons coming from two very different thinkers: Aristotle and Frege.

Norms are standards of assessment and guide our rational behavior. All areas of philosophy deal with norms and normative concepts. This paper briefly outlines the main issues concerning norms and normative concepts currently discussed in analytic philosophy: the metaphysical question, the epistemological question, the problem of motivation, and the extension of the scope of the normative from domains traditionally conceived as normative, such as ethics and action theory, to the study of meaning and mind.

The text offers a Critical Review of "L'autocoscienza. Cosa è, come funziona, a cosa serve" by Pietro Perconti. The author critically reflects on the book by considering its methodologies, its arguments, and its relation with other books of the same type and on the same subject.

The term ‘Responsibility’ has different senses, as it may designate: a duty deriving from a role; the condition of who possesses the capacities required to be attributed the moral consequences of their actions; the position of who has carried out blameworthy actions or omissions; the position of who has to respond for damages (or benefits) caused by their behavior. Many see blameworthiness or culpability – the so-called ‘moral responsibility’ – as the paradigmatic sense of responsibility, and claim that this can be philosophically justified only through a metaphysical conception of “free will”. However, attributions of blameworthiness and culpability – taken as a whole – are morally justified mainly through their positive effects in terms of their reducing unwanted behavior. Indeed, in their more specific applications, attributions of culpability involve moral issues which cannot be solved without a reference to the metaphysics of personhood, the metaphysics of mind and action as well as to normative evaluations of justice and fairness. A similar conceptual structure is to be found in the other senses of responsibility.

Simone Pollo’s book "La morale della natura, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2008", represents an absolute newsness in the italian philosophy landscape, and, even if it belongs to a small-size editorial publishing series, it performs a micro-monographic work about this specific topic: the problem of natural(istic) grounds of ethics and morality. This work is a contribution which is tending, with a very clever fluency of the principal questions and with very high mastery of exposition, to unite critical knowledge of analyzed themes and philosophical (and political, in the classical, ancient greek meaning of polites attitudes) militancy. As a result we can find in La morale della natura a clear, rich reading about problems like «Is it possible to defend the foundations of a system of ethics upon the natural basis of human behaviour and it biological ground? How can we do it?» with their (negative, but not simplistic) response, indispensable for every scientific or not-academic reader who wants to deal with or to examine in depth the very hard dominion of the nature-ethics interconnection. The aim of Simone Pollo’s book is to reach this aims from a laical, secular and aconfessional point of view and from an perspective quite liberal, free and exempt from a certain simpleton nihilism, very a la page today. Of course, from this angle, the most virtue of Pollo’s work is its efficacious way to present the deep root and the embedding of “naturalistic fallacy” – in the G. E. Moore’ sense – in a panoply of laical and confessional approach (first of all in these latter), and in its attempt of debunking of the same mistaking setting.

The paper introduces the linguistic phenomenon of vagueness and the philosophical questions raised by it. First of all, the common features of all vague terms in ordinary language are taken into account: borderline cases, (apparently) no sharp boundaries, Sorites paradox. Taking those features into account, we can consider what vagueness has to be distinguished from: ambiguity, underspecificity, mere context-dependence. In the second place, the relevant theories that try to explain the phenomenon of vagueness and to solve the related logical problems, are briefly explained.