11 APhEx num 11, anno 2015

This review essay provides a critical overview of various tendencies in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science since the 1980s. The first section offers a detailed account of developments within feminist empiricism and standpoint epistemology. The second focuses on feminist critiques of philosophical theories of rationality and on the overlapping concerns of work in the epistemology of ignorance and on epistemic injustice.

In the last fifteen years, in the phisophical and linguistic literature, there has been a renewed interest in the mechanisms underlying the computation of implicatures, scalar ones in particular. Largely, this interest has been sparked by the emergence of of a grammatical approach, according to which scalar implicatures would arise from the semantic component of the human cognitive faculty, rather than being rooted in more general pragmatic reasoning. The goal of this paper is to provide a presentation of some of the main arguments, motivating the grammatical approach. We will start by describing the main properties of scalar implicatures, which constitutes the core data that all different perspectives in the literature need to account for. Then, we will go more in detail into the phenomenon by looking at some of the characteristic features of the standard pragmatic approach to scalar implicatures, showing some of their weaknesses, as identified by the proponents of the grammatical approach. Finally, we will present the grammatical approach, discussing the advantages on the one hand, and the remaining challenges for this novel approach, on the other

The aim of this article is to review and discuss Matteo Morganti's "Combining Science and Metaphysics. Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense". I will offer a presentation of the issues that the author discusses. I will also provide a critical analysis of the arguments that are defended in the book, and of the case studies suggested in the second part of the book.

Quine is unanimously recognised as a central figure of the philosophical debate of the second half of last century. His contributions range from philosophy of language to epistemology and metaphysics. The different aspects of Quine's thought are, however, hard to separate from one another, as they are characterised by a high degree of coherence and systematicity. This piece aims at providing a comprehensive picture of the central themes of his work.

The C. Botti's book Prospettive femministe investigates the more actual bioethics reflections starting from a feminism perspective. It aims is to show how only from a feminist perspective is possible to construct a moral philosophy able to provide a moral judgment the more possible in accordance with the moral issues. In accordance to the results provided by the feminism theory, the author suggests to introduce also in the moral philosophy's debate a new moral paradigm based on particularly and on the ethics of relations, which should be oppose to the still classical theory of moral philosophy based on an rational, universal and impartial subject. If the first part of the book focus on the theoretical debate, the second part offers a carefully analysis of the more recent questions in bioethics (like the issue of abortion, the question of the end of life, the case of children born extremely premature etc.), providing a practical exercise on theoretical questions earlier discussed.