24 APhEx num 24, anno 2021

This text discusses Yehoshua Bar-Hillel's contribution to theoretical linguistics, the philosophy of language and of science, and cybernetics. While building on a solid logical framework, Bar-Hillel forcefully contended that the study of language demanded a synthesis of approaches, and that theorists from different fields should come together and contribute to a scientifically accurate image of language. Here we provide a detailed discussion of his theoretical motivation and of his main achievements in the areas of formal pragmatics, universal semantics and machine translation.

Mereological nihilism is the thesis that there are no composite objects such as people, mountains, trees, planets, smartphones, molecules, ..., but, maybe, only mereologically simple objects arranged peoplewise, mountainwise, treewise, .... Maybe though, since nihilism can be spelled out in many ways. This paper offers a critical introduction to nihilism, its motivations, and dialectical strategies. An emphasis is given to the presentation of its various forms, from the more to the less popular and standard, the main anti-nihilistic objections, and the possible nihilistic replies.

The following profile retraces the life and philosophical works of the 12th-century logician Peter Abelard (1079-1142), highlighting the relevance and originality of his thought in the fields of logic and metaphysics. The description particularly focuses on the many affinities that could be established between Abelard's approach to philosophy and the contemporary analytical approach, affinities that are found both at the level of content and at a methodological level. The main parallels that will be considered concern logical questions, and especially the relationship between natural and formal language, as well as the other questions in the fields of ontology, semantics and the philosophy of language.

This is a synthetic guide to situated affectivity, a recent and prolific development between the philosophy of emotion and situated cognition. First, I will introduce the theoretical instruments to understand the statement according to which "affective phenomena are situated". Then, I will present the main theses that have been proposed in the field, distinguishing between situated and extended affective states, as well as the theoretical notions that have been used, like "affective scaffolds" and "affective artifacts".

A paraconsistent logic is a logic in which the inference rule (ECQ): a˄¬a|- b is not valid. After settling the preliminaries in section 1, in section 2 I present the motivations for paraconsistency; in section 3 I present the justification of (ECQ), which lies in a seemingly straightforward proof of this rule, and identify the possible strategies to block the proof. The following sections are devoted to the analysis of the various alternatives: devising partially paraconsistent logics, invalidating the disjunctive syllogism, invalidating the transitivity of logical consequence, and rejecting the uniqueness of disjunction.