01 APhEx num 1, anno 2010

The text offers a Critical Review of "La mente in bilico. Le basi filosofiche della scienza cognitiva" by Massimo Marraffa. The author critically reflects on the book by considering its methodologies, its arguments, and its relation with other books of the same type and on the same subject.

The text offers a Critical Review of "L'autocoscienza. Cosa è, come funziona, a cosa serve" by Pietro Perconti. The author critically reflects on the book by considering its methodologies, its arguments, and its relation with other books of the same type and on the same subject.

Norms are standards of assessment and guide our rational behavior. All areas of philosophy deal with norms and normative concepts. This paper briefly outlines the main issues concerning norms and normative concepts currently discussed in analytic philosophy: the metaphysical question, the epistemological question, the problem of motivation, and the extension of the scope of the normative from domains traditionally conceived as normative, such as ethics and action theory, to the study of meaning and mind.

The paper introduces the linguistic phenomenon of vagueness and the philosophical questions raised by it. First of all, the common features of all vague terms in ordinary language are taken into account: borderline cases, (apparently) no sharp boundaries, Sorites paradox. Taking those features into account, we can consider what vagueness has to be distinguished from: ambiguity, underspecificity, mere context-dependence. In the second place, the relevant theories that try to explain the phenomenon of vagueness and to solve the related logical problems, are briefly explained.