This paper examines cognitive processes from an evolutionary, ecological and systemic perspective. Starting from Darwinian theory and the development of Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the reference to evolutionary biology allows a rethinking of minds as complex phenomena "at the crossroads" between organisms and the environments they inhabit and contribute to build. It is proposed that this vision opens a space to overcome philosophical traditions that see in the minds "things" and in cognition a mirroring or representation of the world, to come (...) to an understanding of the former in terms of complex systems and to interpret the latter through the concept of "enaction". (shrink)

The first modern edition of the Instituzione d’ogni stato lodevole delle donne cristiane (1575), and the Ricordi di Monsignor Agostino Valier Vescovo di Verona lasciati alle monache nella sua visitazione fatta l’anno del santissimo Giubileo 1575 (1575) by Cardinal Agostino Valier (Venice, 7 April 1531 – Rome, 23 May 1606). The Instituzione includes three texts meant respectively for unmarried women, widows, and married women (Del modo di vivere delle vergini che si chiamano demesse; Della vera e perfetta viduità; (...) Instruzione delle donne maritate), while the Ricordi is a book for nuns on monastic life. The texts by Agostino Valier are an important example of conduct literature for and about women in Counter-Reformation Italy. Contents include: a historical introduction to the author and his works; the Italian texts with notes; an index of names cited in the treatises; a bibliography. (shrink)

Different notions of analysis have been both theorized and put to use in early analytic philosophy. Two of them stand out: connective analysis and analysis as paraphrase. The latter played a central role in the development of analytic philosophy from Frege to Quine and beyond. With the advent of formal semantics of natural language in the 1970s, paraphrase came to be characterizable as translation into a formal “target language”. While I claim that the method cannot achieve its original philosophical aims, (...) I insist that, in spite of them, it is far from being a theoretically empty operation and that it lives on in some contemporary philosophical enterprises. (shrink)

This books offers an annotated edition of Nifo’s De intellectu (1503), including an extensive analytical summary of the contents, as well as a chronology of Nifo’s life and works, and a full index of the chapters of this work.

Recent years have been blessed with an abundance of logical systems, arising from a multitude of applications. A logic can be characterised in many different ways. Traditionally, a logic is presented via the following three components: 1. an intuitive non-formal motivation, perhaps tie it in to some application area 2. a semantical interpretation 3. a proof theoretical formulation. There are several types of proof theoretical methodologies, Hilbert style, Gentzen style, goal directed style, labelled deductive system style, and so on. The (...) tableau methodology, invented in the 1950s by Beth and Hintikka and later per fected by Smullyan and Fitting, is today one of the most popular, since it appears to bring together the proof-theoretical and the semantical approaches to the pre of a logical system and is also very intuitive. In many universities it is sentation the style first taught to students. Recently interest in tableaux has become more widespread and a community crystallised around the subject. An annual tableaux conference is being held and proceedings are published. The present volume is a Handbook a/Tableaux pre senting to the community a wide coverage of tableaux systems for a variety of logics. It is written by active members of the community and brings the reader up to frontline research. It will be of interest to any formal logician from any area. (shrink)

"Diego Marconi analizza in questo saggio alcune tappe fondamentali della riflessione di Wittgenstein, illlustrando i motivi per cui gran parte della discussione filosofica odierna risalga all'esperienza intellettuale del filosofo di Vienna: dal "sapere senza fondamenti" al "pensiero debole", dalla filosofia analitica all'ermeneutica.

Este artigo contribui para uma nova leitura do misticismo de Meister Eckhart, comparando-o com passagens chave do Itinerarium e da Legenda Maior de São Boaventura. A interpretação especulativa baseada na cristianização de Eckhart de Parmênides e na dialética é compensada pelo destaque da passividade do intelecto e da agência do amor divino no Nascimento de Deus dentro das profundezas da alma. A dialética se mostra, assim, como sendo apenas um momento de partilha com um todo feito também de liturgia e (...) ética. Pode-se argumentar que a veia ética específica do êxtase de Eckhart combinada com o papel da passividade no Nascimento de Deus poderia tornar seu misticismo de alguma forma próximo da concepção da ética em Levinas. (shrink)

Putnam and others have argued that semantic externalism extends to artifactual kind words such as “pencil” or “doorstop”. I first show that, even with natural kinds, externalism applies to words for ground level kinds. The issue then arises of which categories of artifacts should be identified as kinds in the relevant, restricted sense. I argue that, though there are natural taxonomies of artifactual categories at least some of which have well-defined ground levels, even words for such kinds do not appear (...) to have externalist semantics, as they do not support ignorance or error arguments. Some think that membership to any kind is determined by objective features. Against this, I argue that the makers’ productive intentions are often crucial in selecting which pattern of features counts as constitutive of a kind. Though externalists may insist that membership to a kind is ultimately determined by sharing objective features, the resulting version of externalism can hardly be distinguished from internalism. (shrink)

. David Chalmerss version of two-dimensional semantics is an attempt at setting up a unified semantic framework that would vindicate both the Fregean and the Kripkean semantic intuitions. I claim that there are three acceptable ways of carrying out such a project, and that Chalmerss theory does not coherently fit any of the three patterns. I suggest that the theory may be seen as pointing to the possibility of a double reading for many linguistic expressions (a double reading which, however, (...) is not easily identified with straightforward semantic ambiguity). (shrink)

In our information societies, tasks and decisions are increasingly outsourced to automated systems, machines, and artificial agents that mediate human relationships, by taking decisions and acting on the basis of algorithms. This raises a critical issue: how are algorithmic procedures and applications to be appraised and governed? This question needs to be investigated, if one wishes to avoid the traps of ICTs ending up in isolating humans behind their screens and digital delegates, or harnessing them in a passive role, by (...) curtailing their freedom and autonomy. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a detailed proof-theoretical analysis of a natural deduction system for classical propositional logic that (i) represents classical proofs in a more natural way than standard Gentzen-style natural deduction, (ii) admits of a simple normalization procedure such that normal proofs enjoy the Weak Subformula Property, (iii) provides the means to prove a Non-contamination Property of normal proofs that is not satisfied by normal proofs in the Gentzen tradition and is useful for applications, especially in formal argumentation, (...) (iv) naturally leads to defining a notion of depth of a proof, to the effect that, for every fixed natural k, normal k-depth deducibility is a tractable problem and converges to classical deducibility as k tends to infinity. (shrink)

The connection between sense, verification, and mode of verification never entirely disappeared from Wittgenstein’s philosophy. However, there was a time – the years 1929– 1932 – when Wittgenstein upheld explicitly verificationist views: he identified a proposition’s meaning with the mode or method of its verification, and he said that to understand a proposition is to know how the proposition is verified. This has been regarded as puzzling, in view of the fact that the Tractatus is usually considered not to be (...) committed to verificationism; indeed, it is usually regarded as incompatible with verificationism. Several people have proposed to revise such a received view: Michael Wrigley (1989) has claimed that verificationism must be implicit in the Tractatus; and P. M.S. Hacker (1986) has argued that the Tractatus, though not verificationist, is not as distant from verificationism as it has been taken to be. In another paper (Marconi, forthcoming) I discuss their views. Here I will just notice that, even if one regards the Tractatus as implicitly verificationist, the problem remains of explaining why and how did Wittgenstein reach the explicitly – indeed, blatantly – verificationist outlook of the early Thirties. This is the first question I would like to try to answer in this paper. The second question is, why was such rampant verificationism short-lived? Or in other words, why was verificationism de-emphasized so that, although verificationist themes are undoubtedly present in the later Wittgenstein’s writings, the extreme formulations of the early Thirties tend to disappear after 1933? (shrink)

We investigate the semantics of the logical systems obtained by introducing the modalities and into the family of substructural implication logics (including relevant, linear and intuitionistic implication). Then, in the spirit of the LDS (Labelled Deductive Systems) methodology, we "import" this semantics into the classical proof system KE. This leads to the formulation of a uniform labelled refutation system for the new logics which is a natural extension of a system for substructural implication developed by the first two authors in (...) a previous paper. (shrink)

This introduction is a short critical presentation of the topic and main arguments of Andrea Iacona’s book Logical Form. Furthermore, it summarizes the commentators’ views on two central issues: Iacona’s rejection of the uniqueness thesis, i.e. his claim that no single notion of logical form can be adequate to the tasks that logical form has been supposed to perform, and the relation between a sentence’s logical form and its truth conditions.

The analysis is restricted to the architectural aspect. It puts in evidence a dialectical procedure which makes the gnoseological importance of the verb to look stand out clearly. The pharisee's knowledge is based on religious convictions ; that of the blind man on his experience.

I discuss Paolo Casalegno's objections to my views about semantic normativity as presented in my book Lexical Competence (MIT Press, 1997) and in a later paper. I argue that, contrary to Casalegno's claim, the phenomenon of semantic deference can be accounted for without having to appeal to an “objective” notion of reference, i.e. to the view that words have the reference they have independently of whatever knowledge or ability is available to or within the linguistic community. Against both Casalegno and (...) Timothy Williamson, I argue that a semantic norm based on objective reference would be really inapplicable, even though a speaker might believe to be guided by such a norm. (shrink)

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein addressed the issue of beliefs that are not to be argued for, either because any grounds we could produce are less certain than the belief they are supposed to ground, or because our interlocutors would not accept our reasons. However, he did not address the closely related issue of justifying a conclusion to interlocutors who do not see that it follows from premises they accept. In fact, Wittgenstein had discussed the issue in the Remarks on the (...) Foundations of Mathematics; his view had been that certain inferential practices are constitutive of our notions of thinking and inferring. I argue that his treatment of unfounded beliefs in On Certainty essentially replicates, mutatis mutandis, his treatment of basic logical inference. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION The editors of this volume - Jarvie and D'Agostino - encountered John Watkins at such different times in his career that they have never ...

Philosophy of Social Science, that social scientific investigations do not and cannot meet the liberal requirement of "neutrality" most familiar to social scientists in the form of Max Weber's requirement of value-freedom. He argues, moreover, that this is for "institutional," not idiosyncratic, reasons: methodological demands (e.g., of validity) impel social scientists to pass along into their "objective" investigations the values of the people, groups, and cultures they are studying. In this paper, I consider the implications of Root's claims for the (...) use of social scientific results in the formation of policy in a democratic society. In particular, I argue that Root's results amplify familiar "post-modernist" conclusions: there is no "neutral" and "objective" basis for policy-making. (shrink)