20 APhEx num 20, anno 2019

Alvin Plantinga is one of the most prominent living metaphysicians and philosophers of religion. In this profile, after having sketched his intellectual training, I shall consider some aspects of his thought: Plantinga's possible worlds theory; his theory of the epistemic warrant of beliefs, which is based on the concept of proper function; Plantinga's version of the ontological argument for the existence of God; his criticisms of the argument from evil against the existence of God; Plantinga's argument against naturalism.

Even though Socrates might have not agreed, the best possible answer to a question of the form “What is an X?” (such as “What is a human being?” or “What is a thought experiment?”) is not an attempt at a definition, but rather it consists in showing an example of X. Even better if ten different examples of Xs are shown, and carefully described, explaining not only what they look like at first sight, but also what structure they have, and what their function is. At this point, the person who made the initial question should be in a position to recognize another X if they meet one, and, if they have the interest and the ability to do so, to offer their own definition of X. Angelucci explicity takes this route in answering the question “What is a thought experiment?” and, I believe, succeeds in reaching the goal. This book represents an excellent introduction to the study of thought experiments, and also an effective introduction to analytic philosophy as a whole.

Counterfactuals are a kind of conditionals where the antecedent is usually assumed to be false. To interpret such conditionals, a peculiar cognitive ability seems to be required: the ability to imagine alternate scenarios and reasoning about such imagined scenarios. In this work, three approaches to the semantics of counterfactual will be presented and compared: the standard approach (at least among philosophers), developed by R. Stalnaker and D. Lewis and based on relations of "similarity" among possible worlds, the approach developed by A. Kratzer, based on the idea that the truth of a counterfactual depends on the specification of a set of premises and, finally, the approach recently developed by K. von Fintel and A. S. Gilles according to which the role of a counterfactual in a conversation is that of making salient some possibilities.

The review is intended to present the book Il suono. L’esperienza uditiva e i suoi oggetti by Di Bona and Santarcangelo. It highlights specific aspects such as the uniqueness and completeness of the book, as well as the systematic approach employed in it. Di Bona and Santarcangelo’s work is the first handbook in Italian language concerning the philosophy of auditory perception. Furthermore, it has the virtue to present an organic, up-to-date and interdisciplinary summary of the field of research analysed. Some of its sections are centred on the psychological and neuroscientific literature, while others are more focused on the proper philosophical debate: the overview provides a well-structured and fluid text. References to ordinary auditory situations and to specific musical pieces help the reader to follow the arguments presented and complete the book.

Abraham Robinson (1918-1974) lived his youth in the troubled years of nazism and World War II in Europe, being led to work for the Air Forse in the defence of London and developing a deep and longstanding interest in aeronautics (especially supersonic flight) and in general in applied mathematics. With the advent of peace he resumed also his early involvement with logic, studied in Jerusalem with a.a. Fraenkel, and became one of the most influential mathematical logician of the twentieth century. He gave shape to the discipline of model theory, developing the metamathematics of algebra with the introduction of many new concepts, such as model-completeness, techniques for completeness and quantifier elimination, and new structures; in the sixties he invented Nonstandard Analysis and model-theoretic forcing. Robinson was one of the last universal mathematician.