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.

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.

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.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the main philosophical interpretations of the General Theory of Relativity that mostly characterized the epistemological reflection regarding the results and the theoretical framework of this theory. It will be payed specific attention to the opposition between a neo-Kantian, an empirical and an idealistic-transcendental approach that serves as a background to the early attempts to generalize Einstein's masterpiece. In the end, the philosophical reflection on the nature of spacetime will be briefly introduced, running over to the old substantivalist-relationalist debate.