Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 11
  • Publication
    Rudolf Carnap
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2016)
    Tripodi, Paolo
    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.
      110  197
  • Publication
    Margaret Gilbert, Joint Commitment. How we make the social world, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 449
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2016)
    Terravecchia, Gianpaolo
    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.
      85  60
  • Publication
    Futuri contingenti
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2016)
    Gallina, Francesco; Spolaore, Giuseppe
    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.
      277  374
  • Publication
    Federico Laudisa, Anche Einstein gioca a dadi. La lunga lotta con la meccanica quantistica, Roma, Carocci, 2015, pp. 320
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2016)
    Laudisa, Federico
    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.
      100  232
  • Publication
    Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer
    (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2016)
    Franchella, Miriam
    The Dutch mathematician Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1889-1966) is famous in topology due to some relevant theorems (like the fixed point theorem) and he is well known both in the history of mathematics and in philosophy as the father of intuitionism. What strongly characterizes his scientific production is the strict linking between his Weltanschauung and his project of a constructive mathematics. Namely, starting with a mystical viewpoint about life, Brouwer has realized his project of building mathematics independently of language and without applicative aims: it is as an exploitation of the potentialities of our intuition of time.
      225  297