08 APhEx num 8, anno 2013

Alfred Tarski (1901-1983) is unanimously recognised as one of the greatest logicians in history. His contributions range from set theory to model theory, from the semantics of formal languages to the foundations of geometry, from the algebra of logic to the logic of algebra. This profile gives an overview of his work and its influence.

Neurosciences challenge some key concepts of law and consequently of our lives. The concepts of rationality, freedom, guilt and punishment are therefore radically questioned. Some emotions predominate over reason and many circumstances unconsciously influence us. Neuroscience and genetic research force the legal system to rethink the main concepts on which it is based. Andrea Lavazza and Luca Sammicheli in their book Il delitto del cervello (Codice, 2012) clearly sketch out the philosophical and legal consequences of this change.

Over the last decades, a symbolic, a modal approach has dominated the cognitive sciences. Today, a large part of the scientific and philosophical community states that this view is only an approximation, and that bodily structures play a critical role in cognition. This paper aims at introducing the debate about the embodied approach to cognition.

The paper is a review of Colin McGinn’s Mindfucking: a critique of mental manipulation. After a short introduction to McGinn’s work, the first part of the paper offers a thorough chapter-by-chapter analysis of the book. The second part follows other commentators in pointing out that several arguments in the book are not bullet-proof, and eventually suggests that the book is better appreciated as a mere philosophical divertissement. An appendix reports about recent events that led McGinn to resign his position at the University of Miami.

What is the mental realization of the knowledge of lexical meaning? Does our ability to use words depend on the possession of lexical concepts specifically designed to represent their senses, or is it a product of other factors, such as encyclopedic knowledge and non-linguistic categorization? The paper introduces some of the main answers that philosophers of language, linguists and psychologists have given to this question, discusses their key arguments, and summarizes the recent debate on the topic.

Some works of art manifest (or recommend) dubious and, in some cases, clearly despicable moral perspectives. For example, the propaganda film Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefensthal expresses (and tries to evoke) admiration for Adolf Hitler. Nevertheless, Triumph of the Will is considered a masterpiece of the documentary genre. This and many other similar examples raise the following questions: Is it possible to consider a work of art a masterpiece and, at the same time, an instance of immorality? Does or should the moral assessment of a work of art affect its artistic assessment?

This paper is an introductory explanation of the concept of definite description that was brought to attention of philosophers since the publication of Bertrand Russell's “On Denoting” in 1905. The introduction focuses on the semantics of definite descriptions. After presenting the Russellian theory of definite descriptions and the way it is nowadays interpreted in terms of restricted quantifiers, the paper addresses the main objections raised against it and presents an assessment of the Contextualist theory of definite descriptions.

The phenomenon of disagreement has been receiving a great deal of attention in contemporary philosophy of language and epistemology, though for different reasons. In philosophy of language,The aim of the present paper is to provide a survey of both debates by presenting and assessing the most interesting proposals on these two topics advanced thus far.

Analytic philosophy of film was born and has been so far developed mainly in the field of aesthetics, but ends up also cover other areas of philosophy. Cinema is in fact a cultural phenomenon that, like language, can create works of art, but is not limited in the domain of art: it is not reducible to an art form. The paper will present the contemporary debate on cinema and will address some questions about films that are preliminary with respect to the aesthetic issue. First, the ontological question: what is the mode of existence of films? Second, the question of the definition: what is a film? Third, the semantic question: how can films carry meaning? Fourth, the pragmatic question: for what purposes are films used?

The text offers a Critical Review of "La conquista delle parole. Per una storia naturale della denominazione" by Grazia Basile. 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.

Empirical research within cognitive sciences may support philosophical inquiry about the ontological and epistemological status of mental concepts, and in particular of the concept of belief. Since thirty years, psychologists have employed the false belief test to assess children's capacity to attribute mental states to themselves and others. Nevertheless, we are still trying to understand which cognitive capacities constitutes necessary prerequisites to pass the test and how they develop. In this article, I analyze the impact of the executive function and linguistic abilities on the capacity to pass the false belief test. I suggest that this capacity depends on the acquisition of a new representational format to encode the falsity of others' mental states. Available data, however, does not clarify the nature of this format.

The issue of translation has been pivotal in analytical philosophy of language because it is strictly bound to the problem of meaning. The aim of the paper is introducing and discussing the main translation theories, showing the limits of translation definitions. On the one hand, it aims at understanding why the definition of translation on the basis of other concepts, such as meaning or equivalence, brought to paradoxical outcomes. On the other hand, it aims at showing why such outcomes are not so dramatic and how the notion of translation is instead useful to clarify the deeper mechanisms of language comprehension and linguistic phenomena, in both their semantic and pragmatic aspects.