Sulla metafisica degli analitici

Philosophical Inquiries, 2018

The purpose of the first part of this paper is to examine the major turning point events that transformed the attitude of analytic philosophers towards metaphysical discourse. We will focus on one such turning point, the modal revolution, based on the resources of possible world semantics, developed by Kripke (who devised suitable models for modal logic) and by philosophers such as Lewis and Plantinga (who offered influential metaphysical interpretations of those models). We shall see how the modal revolution, by bringing an unprecedented change in the way in which modal notions were understood by analytic philosophers, was central to the revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy. Yet, analytic philosophers encountered serious obstacles in their attempt to understand the ontological and epistemological foundations and implications of one of the most basic notions of the modal revolution, that of a possible world. In the second part of the paper, it will be argued that, surprisingly enough, the work of the pre-Kripkean " middle " analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, especially as interpreted and reconstructed by Robert Brandom, can perhaps throw light on the semantic, epistemic and ontological dimension of possible world talk. Sellars does this mainly through 1) (what Brandom calls) the " Kant-Sellars thesis about modality " , 2) his understanding of modal discourse as non-descriptive, expressive, categorial and " metaliguistic " , and 3) his nominalism about abstract entities. Thus, it will be suggested that the implications of this Sellars-inspired position are such that make it an unexpectedly relevant and novel contribution to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics.

Philosophy of Science, 1991

in: H. Jacobs (Ed.), The Husserlian Mind (Routledge) (https://www.routledge.com/The-Husserlian-Mind/Jacobs/p/book/9780367198671?fbclid=IwAR1QlofeW8ZtaxC3f9TEC9WZ2tqhUlU3ZDc4bS7IGTlgBVQZ3J7hOuJi-NI), 2021

20th century scholarship on phenomenology, especially during the second half of the last century and partially at the beginning of this century, condemned Husserl’s relation to metaphysics to a crass alternative. On the one hand, and based upon a single sentence from Logical Investigations, there are those who say that Husserl’s phenomenology is metaphysically neutral, thereby having no or little bearing on metaphysical concerns. On the other hand, and based upon a single statement from Cartesian Meditations, Husserl is said to commit to an all-encompassing “metaphysics of presence." While in the former case the question as to what Husserl means by metaphysics is not raised, in the latter an alien conception is imposed on him. In either case, nothing is conveyed regarding Husserl’s conception of “the queen of all the sciences.” Even if important attempts have been recently made at assessing Husserl’s metaphysics, a full study of its origins and development is still a desideratum.

Universa. Recensioni di filosofia, vol. 1 (3), 2014, 2014

The main goal of the present paper is to offer a preliminary study of the relations between phenomenology and metaphysics in Husserl. After a brief presentation of what Husserl means by the term " metaphysics " , the rest of our research will consist of a detailed commentary on §60 of the Cartesian Meditations (Metaphysische Ergebnisse unserer Auslegung der Fremderfahrung): our aim being to explain in what sense, according to Husserl, the " outcomes " of the phenomenological

Syzetesis, 2023

Semiotica, 2021

The paper begins with an account of the emergence of analytic philosophy of language in the twentieth century in the context of the development of logic and the linguistic turn. Subsequently, it describes two examples of analytic philosophy of language in its heyday when the discipline was conceived as first philosophy. Finally, it provides, by way of conclusion, a succinct outline of the current state of philosophy of language, marked by modesty and fragmentation. It is claimed that even if one retains optimism about the prospects of philosophy of language in the first century of the new millennium, it would be unreasonable to disagree with the opinion that the present-day philosophy of language is a highly specialized and diversified discipline and no longer so central for philosophical enterprise as it used to be.

Metaphilosophy, 2018

The distinction between quantitative and qualitative parsimony is supposed to allow David Lewis to dismiss one of the charges against his modal realism, i.e. the charge of bloated ontology. The aim of this paper is to undermine Lewis’s response to this objection. In order to do this, a distinction between multipliable and nonmultipliable objects is introduced. Based on this it is argued that the acceptance of Lewis’s response requires one to believe in the modal realism in the first place—that is, one has to believe in the view that the existence of nonactual spatiotemporal worlds does not affect the quality of the ontological commitment. Although the paper focuses on the problem of the metaphysics of possible worlds, this should be regarded merely as a case study. Accordingly, the results of this analysis should find applications in other metaphysical debates as well.

2011