In recent decades, English has become the uncontestable lingua franca of philosophy of science and of most other areas of philosophy and of the humanities. To have a lingua franca produces enormous benefits for the entire scientific community. The price for those benefits, however, is paid almost exclusively by non-native speakers of English. Section 1 identifies three asymmetries that individual NoNES researchers encounter: ‘publication asymmetry’, ‘resources asymmetry’, and ‘team asymmetry’. Section 2 deals with ‘globalized parochialism asymmetry’: thanks to English being (...) a lingua franca, a special perspective, mostly US and British, is being globalized and is replacing European topics and approaches. This has serious consequences for history of philosophy as well as for philosophical theory: thinkers of the past tend to be dealt with on the global level at best only if and insofar they are translated into English. Similarly, the theoretical agenda of globalized philosophy of scien... (shrink)

Arthur Pap worked in analytic philosophy while maintaining a strong Kantian or neo-Kantian element throughout his career, stemming from his studying with Ernst Cassirer. I present these elements in the different periods of Pap’s works, showing him to be a consistent critic of logical empiricism, which Pap shows to be incapable of superseding the Kantian framework. Nevertheless, Pap’s work is definitely analytic philosophy, both in terms of the content and the style. According to Pap, the central topics of analytic philosophy (...) concern meaning, modality, and analysis. Pap was also influenced by pragmatism, especially in his dissertation, although he does not fully embrace it in either its classical or its Quinean form. (shrink)

The author discusses the evolution of Heidegger’s conception of science and brings out its limits as well as its possible developments. An eminent representative of contemporary thinking in the theory of knowledge, Paolo Parrini stands in a line of critical realism in the Kantian neopositivist tradition. This paper returns to and develops the lectio delivered at the award of the ‘Giulio Preti’ Prize in November 2008.

Today’s critical state of philosophy is examined by considering two of its aspects: the way in which philosophy presently is ever more typically practised and the new challenges it has to face to keep up with the changed scientific, and more generally cultural and social context. The essay outlines some prospects of progress in the light of those which still now can be considered the proper tasks of philosophical inquiry. Such tasks are singled out through an historical survey of the (...) original characters of philosophy and an appraisal of its theoretical motivations. The importance of the history of philosophy and the necessity of achieving a virtuous relation among the various philosophical disciplines are stressed to contrast the dangers of excess specialisation and professionalism. (shrink)

This appreciation outlines the life and work of Giulio Preti, a philosopher of the critical rationalist movement. His was a tormented and conflictual philosophical itinerary from his intellectual roots in 1930s Italy, via the philosophical journal Studi filosofici in the 1940s, to his major works Praxis and Empiricism and Rhetoric and Logic in the 1950s and 1960s. His anxiety about the ambiguity of contemporary reality, it is suggested, is also ours.

Reichenbach’s early solution to the scientific problem of how abstract mathematical representations can successfully express real phenomena is rooted in his view of coordination. In this paper, I claim that a Reichenbach-inspired, ‘layered’ view of coordination provides us with an effective tool to systematically analyse some epistemic and conceptual intricacies resulting from a widespread theorising strategy in evolutionary biology, recently discussed by Okasha (2018) as ‘endogenization’. First, I argue that endogenization is a form of extension of natural selection theory that (...) comprises three stages: quasi-axiomatisation, functional extension, and semantic extension. Then, I argue that the functional extension of one core principle of natural selection theory, namely, the principle of heritability, requires the semantic extension of the concept of inheritance. This is because the semantic extension of ‘inheritance’ is necessary to establish a novel form of coordination between the principle of heritability and the extended domain of phenomena that it is supposed to represent. Finally, I suggest that – despite the current lack of consensus on the right semantic extension of ‘inheritance’ – we can fruitfully understand the reconceptualization of ‘inheritance’ provided by niche construction theorists as the result of a novel form of coordination. (shrink)

The paper gives an overview of key themes of twentieth century philosophical treatment of the language of science, with special emphasis on the meaning variance of scientific terms and the comparison of alternative theories. These themes are dealt with via discussion of the topics of: (a) the logical positivist principle of verifiability and the problem of the meaning of theoretical terms, (b) the postpositivist thesis of semantic incommensurability, and (c) the scientific realist response to incommensurability based on the causal theory (...) of reference. (shrink)

The concept of quality points at a significant philosophical problem. The issue of the ontological status of the qualities of experience and reality leads us to discuss the issues of naturalism and reductionism in philosophy of mind. I argue that a transcendental version of the enactive approach is able to address these issues, thanks to its conception of the relation between subject and object as dependent co-origination. In this way, the enactive approach constitutes an alternative to both the internalism and (...) the externalism about qualities, constituting a process-oriented and relationist framework that can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of different ontological domains. In the conclusive section, I distinguish between an ontological and a metaphysical interpretation of this view, stressing the advantages of the former. (shrink)