12 APhEx num 12, anno 2015

Daniela Angelucci's book Filosofia del cinema (2013) offers a conception of cinema as "a place for the production of thought", which involves a dialectic between vision and narrative. The critical reading offered here argues that films essentially produce a perceptual experience, which constrains the capacity of cinema to function as a form of thought comparable to philosophy.

The aim of this paper is to introduce some well known argumentative fallacies. The expedient to introduce this list of fallacies is by involving a number of examples arising from everyday life communication. Quite surprisingly, the reader can realize that, although fallacious arguments are not correct from a logical point of view, a suitable use of some fallacies can even make the argument more persuasive.

Social scientists use different types of model to investigate social objects and social phenomena. In this paper, I offer an overview of various models used in social research, especially quantitative and qualitative. I highlight differences with other charaterisations of models, notably the one inherited from logical positivism, and I discuss the use of experiments and simulation in social contexts. The paper also investigates intersections between models and other notions, such as explanation and causality, truth and validity.

Bertrand Russell has been one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century. The importance of his work can not be confined to a particular thematic area such as mathematical logic or philosophy of language. Extraordinary vital, extremely curious and with a very acute intellect, he has produced an immense body of work.

Wittgenstein, lo sguardo e il limite portrays Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a gaze placed on the limits – closed off to science – of what can be thought. This interpretation is finally applied not only to the early Wittgenstein, but to the whole of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and beyond the differences which are present in its different phases. This gaze has a methodological role: in the Tractatus, it unfurls through the unspoken, through which the that of the world – that the world is – shows itself. Later on, the gaze’s methodological role undergoes a metamorphosis which at once results in the invitation both not to think and to look – not to try to explain, rather to look beyond the concepts, through the method of the synoptic representation. The author, Anna Boncompagni, shows that not only the language, but also the gaze, in its variations, is a unifying theme behind all of Wittgenstein’s works, be it the gaze of the ineffable metaphysical subject, or the anthropological gaze that meets the limits of the human form of life – the gaze, aimed at understanding their meaning, towards the use of the words.