13 APhEx num 13, anno 2016

In order to provide an overview of Rudolf Carnap's philosophy, in this Profile I shall focus on metaphilosophical issues; in particular, I shall point out some significant examples of how Carnap - in the three main phases of his intellectual career - conceived of the task of philosophy (especially in its relation with one of the main themes of Carnap's thought, namely, the idea that metaphysical problems should be deflated or dissolved): since the time when he was a young scholar (1922-1926) and his main goal was the constitution of scientific knowledge (starting from a phenomenal basis and using only logical or structural relations), up to the time when he worked in Vienna and Prague (1926-1936) and he intended to build a logic of science, until the time when, after emigrating in the US (1936-1970), he progressively refined the idea that philosophy is a kind of conceptual explication.

The paper presents and discusses the main results of Joint Commitment. How We Make the Social World, the book published by Margaret Gilbert in 2014. The author presents and defends her plural subject theory: against methodological individualism she shows that joint commitment can create a plural subject which is irreducible to its own parts. This idea, already presented in previous books of the author, is discussed dealing with new interesting topics such as collective guilt feelings, love, patriotism. The final section of the paper stresses some of the stengths of the book and shows also some of its weaknesses, such as the need of a discussion of joint commitment within a phenomenology of social stances.

The review focuses on the book of Don Howard, Anche Einstein gioca a dadi. La lunga lotta con la meccanica quantistica, Carocci, Rome 2015, devoted to the analysis of the reservations that Einstein developed about the foundations of quantum mechanics. The review emphasises the essential contributions of Don Howard, historian and philosopher of physics of the Notre Dame University and one of the finest experts of Einstein's work and its cultural context, in restoring the complexity inherent in the Einstein's philosophical outlook and in refuting the view according to which Einstein became a critic of quantum mechanics just because he could not follow anymore the developments of the XXth century theoretical physics.

Future contingents are statements that predict events (or a states of affairs, or facts) that are neither inevitable nor impossible. The standard example of a future contingent is the claim 'Tomorrow there will be a sea battle'. Some traditional and prima facie strong arguments lead, from the premise that future contingents have a determinate truth-value at their moment of use, to the conclusion that the future is inevitable. Philosophers are thus faced with a difficult choice between rejecting these arguments, subscribing to the principle of bivalence, and adopting fatalism. Each of these options has deep philosophical consequences concerning, for instance, the nature of time and free will. Moreover, the debate about future contingents has fostered important insights in the semantics of temporal and modal languages.

Sensorimotor Enactivism (SE) claims that visual perception is a form of action. The aim of the present article is to offer a careful examination of the implications of this notion of visual perception in relation to the philosophical questions raised by the analysis of the contemporary theories of cognitive, motor and vision neuroscience. I will focus on the the different debates, concerning vision, that have been investigated by SE: the debate on conscious vision/visual consciousness and on its relation with action, the debate on the perception of objects' shape and size, the one about the presence of visual representations, the one about the relationship between vision and the other sensory modalities and about the neural correlates of visual experience. Finally, I will review the problems that the sensorimotor theory of vision proposed by enactivists faces with. Particular attention will be devoted to the experimental results that turn out to be relevant for these philosophical issues.