23 APhEx num 23, anno 2021

Computer science today is undoubtedly one of the most important disciplines with a significant impact on scientific research, technological development and the daily life of everyone. At a closer look, more than a discipline, it is nowadays a heterogeneous set of disciplines ranging from more theoretical studies, mostly included in the academic environment, to a wide range of application areas that intersect various aspects of scientific research, industry and business. This heterogeneity is reflected in the lack of an unambiguous definition of the term Computer Science and, consequently, in the lack of a clear characterization of what should be considered its Fundamentals. Traditionally, in the academic environment, the name "Fundamentals of Computer Science" is employed to refer to that set of research programs, including Formal Language Theory, Computability Theory, Computational Complexity Theory and Algorithm Theory (Brookshear: 2006).

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) renewed contemporary moral philosophy and assumed a critical and crucial role within the analytic tradition. Murdoch's philosophical reflection focuses on ethics considered in relation to language and the mind, to esthetic and religious experiences, to the various ways in which we know and describe other people and the world. This profile aims to present Murdoch's moral thought through three main axes: the critic of the fact-value distinction and her conception of the moral language; moral psychology and her perfectionist understanding of the moral life; Murdoch's metaphilosophical approach to the relationship between philosophical reflection and the moral life.

Un filosofo a Wall Street, Egea, offers a thorough philosophical analysis of financial theories and stock markets’ dynamics. Through conceptual analyses and technical descriptions, Emiliano Ippoliti provides a discussion concerning the most controversial aspects of the financial discipline, technical as well as theoretical. Moving from such discussion, he then puts forwards possible reinterpretations of financial paradigms so that they might include the notion of economic, cultural and social responsibility of financial markets within a highly “financialized” world.

The recent book Putnam by Massimo Dell’Utri concerns the philosophical and argumentative journey of Hilary Putnam, that lead him to explore the implications of Quine’s views about analyticity and the many ways in which realism can be understood in epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, its main entailments for the philosophy of mind, and more recently about issues concerning ethics, meta-ethics, and value-theory. The present critical review briefly recollects the reading presented in the book, and then highlights some of the implications of this reconstruction, especially those concerning a key passage in the evolution of Putnam’s thought: Putnam’s abandonment of internal realism and the endorsement of natural realism.

Conceptual engineering is a branch of philosophy characterised by a normative approach towards representation. The fundamental assumption of it is that our representational devices can be defective. Conceptual engineering is then the activity consisting of identifying the defects of such devices and putting in place ameliorative strategies. This paper illustrates the fundamental issues for a theory of conceptual engineering: what does this activity consist of? How can we implement it? What mechanisms regulate the formation of representational devices? Can we have an influence over those mechanisms? Moreover, it will be presented an objection to conceptual engineering and various responses to it.