05 APhEx num 5, anno 2012

The concept of causality has been employed in philosophy throughout its history and is rich of implications for the relationship between philosophical analysis and scientific investigation. This paper describes and discusses some of the main issues raised by reflection on this concept by taking as a starting point the appreciation of two fundamental circumstances: first, the growing consensus on the need for a pluralistic attitude towards the different meanings of the concept of causality in different theoretical areas of philosophy and science; second, the variety of implications that causal pluralism has in the light of the distinction between ontological and epistemological aspects of causality.

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (Ann Arbor, 1912 – Pittsburgh, 1989) has been one of the most important American philosophers of the twentieth century. Referring back to some central issues of pragmatism and developing, in the wake of Carnap, typical insides of logical positivism, has called into question the general paradigm of Givenness. In his most famous work, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, has criticized the concept of the Given in its main articulations. He also developed a concept of naturalism based on the recognition of centrality, at descriptive level, of scientific knowledge and, together, on the principle of irreducibility of normative discourse. Sellars has taught at various universities (Minnesota, Yale, Pittsburgh), influencing several generation of students (among his pupils, Paul Churchland and Robert Brandom).

The text offers a Critical Review of "Numeri per parlare. Da 'quattro chiacchiere' a 'grazie mille'" by Carla Bazzanella, Rosa Pugliese e Erling Strudsholm. 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 this paper I will focus on the two most relevant approaches for the study of metaphor in the contemporary debate: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Relevance Theory. I will explore the main theoretical steps from a way to analyse metaphor as a ‘language event’ to the idea we have to consider metaphorical process as a ‘thought event’. This latter point of view is used by Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Relevance Theory in their studies about the nature and role of metaphor.

The text offers a Critical Review of "The Recursive Mind. The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization" by Michael C. Corballis. 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.