04 APhEx num 4, anno 2011

The review presents Alva Noë’s enactivist view, and aims at discussing some of its ideas. Thought, consciousness, and cognition are not understandable, Noë claims, without taking into proper consideration the role played by the body and the environment. It would be wrong indeed to go on thinking that our brain alone is responsible for human cognitive processes: the program searching for the neural correlates of consciousness is hopeless in principle, because it neglects from the beginning the body and the environment; research programs in artificial intelligence are as well compromised, not only with a computationalist view of cognition, but also with the old idea that an artificial brain will suffice for cognition just like a natural one. Thereafter, two experimental perspectives, that Noë uses to support his view, are examined: Mriganka Sur’s studies on neural plasticity of ferrets (certain newborn ferrets have undergone a rewiring of their nervous connection, permitting vision thanks to the system constituted by their eyes and auditory cortex), and Paul Bach-Y-Rita’s tactile-visual substitution system (it connects a camera to somatosensory cortex allowing a kind of vision). Noë argues that these results are crucial in supporting his view, but, as the discussion highlights, their pro-enactivism meaning is not so clear and unambiguous. Finally, a balance of the book follows, where the many elements of interest are presented together with the acknowledgment of some weak points, that the book shares with the majority of the proposals that deal with the embodiment’s insight: on the one hand, a structural difficulty concerns the possibility to identify clearly the constitutive elements of the mental; on the other hand, the reference to radical versions of externalism seems to entail many difficulties as well.

How do we know our own mind? What kind of relationship we have with our own mental states? Are we the passive observers of mental events that populate our mind or do we have with them a first-person relation? The opposition to Cartesianism and the affirmation of naturalism in philosophy of mind have coincided with the triumph of a third-person perspective, of an observational kind, on our own mental states. However, there are manifest phenomenological reasons to maintain that the relation that we have with our own mental states is not primarily of a spectatorial and observational kind.

The Principle of Compositionality says that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituents and by its syntactic structure. It is traditionally considered as one of the fundamental principles of Semantics: in fact, it works as a criterion of adequacy for natural language semantic and philosophical theories. In spite of this, many questions are still open. Thus, this contribution aims to illustrate the main difficulties concerning compositionality: that is, the problems concerning the content of the principle (what it says and what it does not say), the soundness of the arguments that support its adoption and, finally, the (alleged) counter-examples to compositionality.

Crispin Wirght (born 1942) is a British philosopher whose works cover fields like the philosophy of language and mathematics of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein (in both cases, through the influence of Michael Dummett's thought), the debate between realism and anti-realism, vagueness, first-person knowledge of mental states, and skepticism. By promoting novel and promising research programs (here outlined in their essentials) in all these areas, Wright stands out as one of the most authoritative figures in contemporary analytic philosophy.

The text offers a Critical Review of "Storia naturale dell'amore" by Domenica Bruni. 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.

Fictional entities are those entities we find in fictional works (novels, movies, paintings, etc.) and that are particularly interesting both from an ontological and from a semantical point of view since on the one hand it is not easy to see how they can legitimately be considered as objects, on the other it is controversial how to establish the truth value of sentences containing names of fictional objects.

In the twentieth century the morality of the relations between humans and non-human animals has been the subject of systematic philosophical analysis, eventually forming the domain of a subfield of applied ethics now known as "Animal Ethics." This subfield of the ethical and philosophical reflection is concerned with arguing in favor of the moral status of non-human animals and with analyzing the resulting responsibilities for humans. Despite the differences among them, the theoretical proposals belonging to this area of reflection put forward a common request for a change in the relations between human and non-human animals, especially with respect to the use of animals for food and experimentation.

After an introduction on the aims and structure of the volume, focused on Fischer’s distinction between philosophy as therapy and philosophical therapy, the review examines the three parts in which the text is divided, following the author’s analysis and argumentations. The first part analyses the way in which images shape the philosophical reflection, through the literal application of conceptual metaphors. In the second part it is shown how this process generates cases of philosophical delusion, materializing in insolvable, though illusory, puzzles. The third part concerns the urgency, felt by the author, of a new form of philosophical therapy based on cognitive epistemology. Eventually, the review observes that this kind of approach, although interesting, belongs to a scientific more than to a philosophical outlook, particularly with reference to the Wittgensteinian therapeutic method.

Is there any entity in virtue of which the proposition that Aphex is an on-line philosophical Review is true? Entities of this kind, if any, have been called “Truth-makers”: truth-makers are those entities that make propositions true. The debate on truth-makers has been one of the focuses of the philosophical discussion in the last twenty years: notions such as truth-maker and making-true seemed in fact to be able on the one hand to build a bridge among different branches of philosophy, such as the theory of truth, ontology and metaphysics, and, on the other hand, to bring new life to the time-honoured, but by the time out of fashion, correspondence theory of truth. In what follows the principal lines of the debate on truth-makers and truth-making will be highlighted. The debate has focused on two main questions: 1) what is the content of the very notion of “making true”? That is to say: what is truth-making? 2) Are there truth-makers? What kind of arguments can be provided in favour of the existence of entities of such kind?

In this paper we discuss Francesco Ferretti’s book “At the origin of human language. The evolutionary point of view”. We show that Ferretti’s main aim is to propose a model of language plausible from a cognitive and evolutionary point of view based on the primacy of pragmatics on grammar. Specifically, Ferretti maintains that the origin of language is tied to the cognitive systems that allow individuals to navigate in space which are at the basis of the construction of pragmatically appropriate discourses.

In this essay I move from the perspective of David Hume’s moral sentimentalism and examine the notion of moral self in the light of some relevant issues in contemporary philosophical ethics. I start by contrasting Hume’s moral sentimentalism with Kantian constructivism. I then consider Bernard Williams’s way of conceiving ethics as a form of genealogy, and argue that this hinges on a consideration of human beings as sentimentally defined individuals. I conclude by examining the place of the notion of moral self in normative ethics, making reference in particular to virtue ethics.

Within the liberal theory, the idea of neutrality of the State is a criterion to manage and solve religious or moral conflicts arising in pluralistic contemporary democracy. In this essay I will pursue three main goals: to analyse the internal complexity of the concept of neutrality; to clarify the kind of problems to which the principle of neutrality should be applied; to identify the form of liberalism (political liberalism) whose the principle of neutrality is at the basis. I will also refer to the idea of equal respect as a ground on which such a principle could be defended.

Behavioural economics, or behavioural game theory, tests with an experimental methodology some fundamental hypothesis of economic theory, as the emergence of cooperation, altruism and social equality. The study of social norms and social conventions represents then a particular domain of investigation inside this broader paradigm. Specific evolutionary theories illustrate and confirm behavioural results obtained in this domain. This article presents the concept of social norm in behavioural economics, shedding light on empirical investigations and methodological questions about this subject.

During the last several decades, the legislative work of national and international institutions has been promoting the protection and conservation of what the dictates of law define as cultural heritage. What is, however, an asset properly belonging to such heritage? What a worthless burden? Does this distinction presuppose a subjective judgment or an objective skill? To address these and other questions is necessary that philosophical inquiry consider the problem of the essence of cultural assets and the selection procedures of the protected heritage by tracing the outlines of a new discipline: the ontology of cultural heritage. This line of research, emerging today, presents itself as a branch of ontology endowed with great application potential thanks to the combination of the most advanced results of anthropology, informatics and law studies with those of social ontology, semantics, and mereology.

There is a fight between the constructivist and culturalist idea of “gender" and the biological determinism that stands for “sex". But, what are we talking about when we refer to sex and gender? What makes each individual a woman or a man? The fundamental question is: what kind of attitude about "sex" and “gender" we actually have, while the human self-knowledge itself is challenged by the scientific and social changes? Perhaps we need to reconsider what we mean by “woman”, “man", “male”, and “female". The essay by Vera Tripodi, Philosophy of sexuality (Carocci, 2011), provides the reader with a clear synthesis of the results of the last two decades discussion in these issues.