Analisa a influência do pensamento da “Escola de Frankfurt” na Ciência da Informação. Realiza estudo descritivo, de caráter epistemológico, subsidiado pela hermenêutica habermasiana. Apresenta interlocuções da “Teoria Crítica” de Frankfurt no campo das ciências sociais, notadamente, no contexto da Ciência da informação, por meio dos estudos e pesquisas publicados junto ao campo, na contemporaneidade. Dimensiona os pensadores frankfurtianos mais referenciados no campo da informação, com base no cenário contemporâneo do conhecimento no campo. Destaca as articulações dos constructos frankfurtianos às tendências (...) e tópicos teóricos, metodológicos e temáticos da Ciência da Informação, evidenciando aqueles mais expressivos, propulsores e representativos dessa articulação na contemporaneidade. Conclui destacando que os encaminhamentos frankfurtianos erguem-se sobremaneira fecundos como via para se conceber e perceber a informação e a Ciência da Informação em termos humanos, sociais e crítico-reflexivos, de modo a reafirmar seu pertencimento à condição de ciência social, muito além de projeções pragmatistas, tecnicistas e positivistas. (shrink)

O presente trabalho procura refletir sobre o processo de construção da educação como uma “educação da interioridade” que parte de uma concepção do cuidado de si, a partir do viés do pensamento filosófico do dinamarquês Sören Kierkegaard. Num primeiro momento, aponto paro o seu conceito de existencialismo, que versa a construção de um indivíduo singular, voltado para sua existência individual; e, num segundo momento, apresento, ainda, que de forma breve, a relação entre o mestre e o discípulo marcada na obra (...) Migalhas Filosóficas (2008) , como fundamento para uma educação da interioridade. Palavras-chave : cuidado de si, educação da interioridade, Kierkegaard. (shrink)

A partir de uma sugestão de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari – a de que todos os filósofos ocidentais terminaram construindo, no interregno do seu pensamento, personagens conceituais, uma espécie de assinatura do filósofo – este livro objetiva identificar esse traço a partir da obra de Michel Foucault. A tese em questão é que este autor não se enquadra em uma imagem única, como a do Juiz em Kant, ou a do sedutor em Kierkegaard, mas em uma imagem híbrida e (...) triádica, fazendo coro com muitos filósofos chamados de transversais e que se instalaram no horizonte de filosofias chamadas de pós-estruturalistas, como Deleuze. (shrink)

No contexto da pandemia, vivemos a incerteza de quando a vida tornará a sua normalidade. Esse momento de incerteza nos impulsiona a reflexão sobre o atual cenário, os desafios e possibilidades dessa nova forma de viver. Pensando nisso, o presente estudo de cunho bibliográfico hermenêutico busca refletir acerca da prática pedagógica e do ensino de filosofia no atual contexto, atendo-se aos seguintes problemas: é possível uma prática pedagógica de qualidade em meio a esse cenário? De que modo o ensino de (...) filosofia pautado na reflexão pode ser possível na modalidade à distância? Para dar conta de tais questões, buscamos nas reflexões de Antunes Neto (2020) e Barreto; Rocha (2020), o diálogo acerca da possibilidade da prática pedagógica em tempos de pandemia, assim como a possibilidade do ensino de filosofia por meio da reflexão presente nos escritos de Trombetta (2013). (shrink)

Sumário: 1. O conceito de revolução, Amélia de Jesus Oliveira; 2. Mudanças de concepção de mundo, Artur Bezzi Günther; 3. Habilidade e causalidade: uma proposta confiabilista para casos típicos de conhecimento, Breno Ricardo Guimarães Santos; 4. El realismo interno de Putnam y sus implicaciones en la filosofía de la ciencia y para el realismo científico, Marcos Antonio da Silva; 5.O papel da observação na atividade científica segundo Peirce, Max Rogério Vicentini; 6.Fact and Value entanglement: a collapse of objective reality?, Oswaldo (...) Melo Souza Filho; 7.Realismo interno e o paradoxo de Putnam, Renato Mendes Rocha; 8.Uma informação, dois formatos, dois destinos, Cícero Antônio Cavalcante Barroso; 9.O Mentiroso e as intuições acerca da noção de verdade na perspectiva de Saul Kripke, Ederson Safra Melo; 10.A conceptual difficulty with some definitions of behavior, Filipe Lazzeri; 11.A faceta epistêmica do problema da referência, Saulo Moraes de Assis; 12.Princípios metafísicos do método newtoniano, Bruno Camilo de Oliveira; 13.A resposta aristotélica para a aporia do regresso ao infinito nas demonstrações, Daniel Lourenço; 14.O uso da doutrina da ponderação aplicado ao principialismo, Cinthia Berwanger Pereira; 15.A fenomenologia da vida interior em Hannah Arendt, Elizabete Olinda Guerra; 16.Por que achar que o direito é formado por ordens é um fracasso?, ria Alice da Silva; 17 Por que ainda há poucas mulheres na filosofia? Uma versão modificada do modelo das “vozes diferentes”, Tânia A. Kuhnen; 18.Algumas considerações sobre Substância, Forma e Matéria na Metafísica de Aristóteles, Gabriel Geller Xavier. (shrink)

This major publication is a history of the semantic tradition in philosophy from the early nineteenth century through its incarnation in the work of the Vienna Circle, the group of logical positivists that emerged in the years 1925–1935 in Vienna who were characterised by a strong commitment to empiricism, a high regard for science, and a conviction that modern logic is the primary tool of analytic philosophy. In the first part of the book, Alberto Coffa traces the roots of (...) logical positivism in a semantic tradition that arose in opposition to Kant's theory that a priori knowledge is based on pure intuition and the constitutive powers of the mind. In Part II, Coffa chronicles the development of this tradition by members and associates of the Vienna Circle. Much of Coffa's analysis draws on the unpublished notes and correspondence of many philosophers. The book, however, is not merely a history of the semantic tradition from Kant 'to the Vienna Station'. Coffa also critically reassesses the role of semantic notions in understanding the ground of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge and questions the turn the tradition has taken since Vienna. (shrink)

In his essay against Eberhard, Kant denies that there are innate concepts. Several scholars take Kant’s statement at face value. They claim that Kant did not endorse concept innatism, that the categories are not innate concepts, and that Kant’s views on innateness are significantly different from Leibniz’s. This paper takes issue with those claims. It argues that Kant’s views on the origin of the intellectual concepts are remarkably similar to Leibniz’s. Given two widespread notions of innateness, the dispositional notion and (...) the input/output notion, intellectual concepts are innate for Kant no less than for Leibniz. (shrink)

This is the first monograph to develop a hermeneutic approach to the digital--as both a technological milieu and a cultural phenomenon. While philosophical in its orientation, the book covers a wide body of literature across science and technology studies, media studies, digital humanities, digital sociology, cognitive science, and the study of artificial intelligence. In the first part of the book, the author formulates an epistemological thesis according to which the "virtual never ended." Although the frontiers between the real and the (...) virtual are certainly more porous today, they still exist and endure. In the book's second part, the author offers an ontological reflection on emerging digital technologies as "imaginative machines." He introduces the concept of emagination, arguing that human schematizations are always externalized into technologies, and that human imagination has its analog in the digital dynamics of articulation between databases and algorithms. The author takes an ethical and political stance in the concluding chapter. He resorts to the notion of "digital habitus" for claiming that within the digital we are repeatedly being reconducted to an oversimplified image and understanding of ourselves. Digital Hermeneutics will be of interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, including those working on philosophy of technology, hermeneutics, science and technology studies, media studies, and the digital humanities. (shrink)

This article builds on the hypothesis that theoretical approaches to philosophy of technology are currently stuck in a false alternative: either embrace the “empirical turn” or jump back into the determinism, pessimism, and general ignorance towards specific technologies that characterized the “humanities philosophy of technology.” A third path is however possible, which consists of articulating an empirical point of view with an interest in the symbolic dimension in which technologies and technological mediations are always already embedded. Bourdieu’s sociology of the (...) symbolic forms represents an important and mostly unexplored resource in this respect. In this article, we introduce the notion of technological capital and its tree states—objectified, institutionalized, and embodied. In the first section, we briefly account of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology. Specific attention is then devoted to postphenomenology. We depict three perspectives in postphenomenology: standard postphenomenology, in which one single human-technology-world relation at a time is considered; the attempt of some technological mediation theorists to articulate postphenomenology and actor-network theory ; the original effort in Ihde, which is currently practiced by a minority of postphenomenologists, to combine an interest for the empirical dimension of technological mediations with an attention to the social and cultural conditions of possibility in which these mediations are embedded. In the second section, we consider some recent critiques of the limits of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, especially related to postphenomenology. Furthermore, we argue that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology may benefit the philosophy of technology. One might say that according to a Bourdieusian perspective, technologies are, in their invention, implementation, and use, embedded in symbolically organized interactions among social actors or groups. The notion of technological capital is introduced. A specific attention is given to its embodied state, which is related to the habitus. Such concept suggests that, to rephrase the famous sentence by Heidegger, “the essence of technology is not totally technological.” In the conclusion, we consider three risks related to a Bourdieusian approach to technology: transparency, determinism, and absolutism. (shrink)

Today, there is an emerging interest for the potential role of hermeneutics in reflecting on the practices related to digital technologies and their consequences. Nonetheless, such an interest has neither given rise to a unitary approach nor to a shared debate. The primary goal of this paper is to map and synthetize the different existing perspectives to pave the way for an open discussion on the topic. The article is developed in two steps. In the first section, the authors analyze (...) digital hermeneutics “in theory” by confronting and systematizing the existing literature. In particular, they stress three main distinctions among the approaches: between “methodological” and “ontological” digital hermeneutics; between data- and text-oriented digital hermeneutics; and between “quantitative” and “qualitative” credos in digital hermeneutics. In the second section, they consider digital hermeneutics “in action”, by critically analyzing the uses of digital data for studying a classical object such as the political opinion. In the conclusion, we will pave the way to an ontological turn in digital hermeneutics. Most of this article is devoted to the methodological issue of interpreting with digital machines. The main task of an ontological digital hermeneutics would consist instead in wondering if it is legitimate, and eventually to which extent, to speak of digital technologies, or at least of some of them, as interpretational machines. (shrink)

Some people have stressed that there is a close analogy between meaning experiences, i.e., experiences as of understanding concerning linguistic expressions, and seeing-in experiences, i.e., pictorial experiences of discerning a certain item – what a certain picture presents, viz. the picture’s subject – in another item – the picture’s vehicle, the picture’s physical basis. Both can be seen as fusion experiences, in the minimal sense that they are experiential wholes made up of different aspects. Actually, two important similarities between such (...) experiences may lead one to think that they are experiences of the same type. In this paper, however, I will try to show that notwithstanding such similarities, these experiences are typologically different. For there are two dissimilarities between such experiences that are more relevant on this typological concern than their similarities. Indeed, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are first of all recognitional experiences of a sort that makes them perceptual experiences as well. Moreover, again unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are fusion experiences in the substantial sense that the experiential whole is more than the sum of its experiential parts taken in isolation, for when such parts figure in that whole, they interact with each other. In a nutshell, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are proper fusion experiences. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to deal with the problem of how to find an adequate context of interpretation for indexical sentences that enables one to account for the intuitive truth-conditional content which some apparently puzzling indexical sentences like “I am not here now” as well as other such sentences contextually have. In this respect, I will pursue a fictionalist line. This line allows for shifts in interpretation contexts and urges that such shifts are governed by pretense, which has to (...) be understood in terms of socially shared make-believe games. By appealing to pretense so conceived, I will show that the fictionalist perspective is halfway between an intentionalist perspective, according to which the above indexical sentences have to be interpreted in a shifted intended context, (this perspective is primarily defined by Predelli 1998, Analysis 58, 107; Mind and Language 13, 400) and a conventionalist perspective, according to which indexical reference shifts in accordance with a conventional setting. (For this perspective, cf. Corazza et al. 2002, Philosophical Studies 107, See also Corazza 2004, Reflecting the Mind: Indexicality and Quasi-Indexicality, Oxford University Press). Finally, I will claim that the fictionalist analysis of cases of non-ordinary uses of indexicals like “here” and “now” can be retained in face of a new alternative analysis of those cases in terms of an ‘unbound anaphora’ – theory (cf. Corazza 2004, Synthese 138, 145). (shrink)

This paper argues that the AI ethics has generally neglected the issues related to the science communication of AI. In particular, the article focuses on visual communication about AI and, more specifically, on the use of certain stock images in science communication about AI — in particular, those characterized by an excessive use of blue color and recurrent subjects, such as androgyne faces, half-flesh and half-circuit brains, and variations on Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. In the first section, the author (...) refers to a “referentialist” ethics of science communication for an ethical assessment of these images. From this perspective, these images are unethical. While the ethics of science communication generally promotes virtues like modesty and humility, similar images are arrogant and overconfident. In the second section, the author uses French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concepts of “distribution of the sensible,” “disagreement,” and “pensive image.” Rancière’s thought paves the way to a deeper critique of these images of AI. The problem with similar images is not their lack of reference to the “things themselves.” It rather lies in the way they stifle any possible forms of disagreement about AI. However, the author argues that stock images and other popular images of AI are not a problem per se, and they can also be a resource. This depends on the real possibility for these images to support forms of pensiveness. In the conclusion, the question is asked whether the kind of ethics or politics of AI images proposed in this article can be applied to AI ethics tout court. (shrink)

Desde la perspectiva de las ciencias jurídicas y, en particular, del derecho internacional ambiental, la presente intervención aborda la emergencia de un Derecho internacional contemporáneo y acude a las ideas del cosmopolitismo blando y la vertiente normativa del constitucionalismo global, como debates filosóficos-jurídicos que podrían cimentar un terreno fértil, un sustrato material, para incidir en las fuentes formales de creación de normas internacionales para enfrentar los problemas globales ambientales. En ese sentido, hace mención a la emergencia y reconocimiento del derecho (...) humano al ambiente sano y saludable como un derecho humano autónomo y exigible, desde su vertiente sustantiva y procesal, lo que puede vislumbrase como el embrión de una ciudadanía global ambiental. (shrink)

Many theories of racism presuppose that ordinary usage of the term “racism” should be preserved. Rarely is this presupposition—the presumption of conservatism—defended. This paper discusses the work of Lawrence Blum, Joshua Glasgow, Jorge Garcia, Tommie Shelby, and others, in order to develop a critique of the presumption of conservatism. Against this presumption, I defend the following desideratum: If ordinary usage of “racism” prompts significant practical difficulties that can be averted by revising ordinary usage, then this counts as a mark against (...) the normative status of ordinary usage and so counts as a reason for revising it. The significance of this argument is that it clears the way for a rigorous defense of revisionism. My paper provides a prima facie case for revisionism, built on two practical criticisms of the ordinary usage of “racism.” First, ordinary usage reflects incompatible norms that promote conceptual confusion and misunderstanding, among other problems. Second, ordinary usage reflects an individualistic conception of racism that serves the interests of whites. By championing ordinary usage in our philosophical theories, we (unwittingly) promote the interests of whites over nonwhites. (shrink)

Beginning from some passages by Vācaspati Miśra and Bhāskararāya Makhin discussing the relationship between a crown and the gold of which it is made, this paper investigates the complex underlying connections among difference, non-difference, coreferentiality, and qualification qua relations. Methodologically, philological care is paired with formal logical analysis on the basis of ‘Navya-Nyāya Formal Language’ premises and an axiomatic set theory-based approach. This study is intended as the first step of a broader investigation dedicated to analysing causation and transformation in (...) non-difference. (shrink)

In this paper, against a new imagination-based account defended by Anna Ichino in some recent works, I defend the intuitive and traditional idea that so-called religious beliefs are indeed those doxastic attitudes that they are traditionally taken to be, i.e., bona fide beliefs. Yet I take that the objects of such beliefs amount to be different from what religious believers consciously take them to be; namely, they are mythological characters, a species of fictional characters – namely, fictional characters not consciously (...) recognized as such – instead of being concrete individuals possibly endowed with supernatural powers. Yet religious believers also unconsciously recognize the fictional nature of religious objects of belief as mythological characters, as their behavior ultimately shows. This account indeed allows me to give a different yet still doxastic explanation of the two main reasons that Ichino advocates in favor of her account; namely, the incompatibility of so-called religious beliefs with other beliefs and their imperviousness to evidence, especially of a negative kind. (shrink)

Este texto visa questionar as construções racistas que fundamentaram discursos sobre a irracionalidade de não europeus. Apontamos alguns posicionamentos de filósofos que corroboraram para a construção do racismo científico. A metodologia utilizada foi a pesquisa bibliográfica. O objetivo foi, por meio de propostas decoloniais, mostrar que africanos inventaram o objeto matemático fração, bem como sua notação atual. Os mais antigos registros históricos sobre esse objeto são os antigos papiros keméticos, sendo o Papiro de Ahmes, o mais importante deles. Mostramos exemplos (...) da forma hierática de representar frações e recorremos ao Mito Hórus, deus kemético para mostrar que frações estavam relacionadas ao cotidiano da civilização egípcia antiga. (shrink)

Alireza Bagheri supports a policy on organ procurement where individuals could choose their own definition of death between two or more socially accepted alternatives. First, we claim that such a policy, without any criterion to distinguish accepted from acceptable definitions, easily leads to the slippery slope that Bagheri tries to avoid. Second, we suggest that a public discussion about the circumstances under which the dead donor rule could be violated is more productive of social trust than constantly moving the line (...) between life and death. (shrink)

In this article I argue not only for the value of hermeneutics today but also, and especially, how the crucial gesture of hermeneutics is that of changing the subject for the sake of our today. Surveying briefly the main lines of hermeneutical positions along its history and critiques, and connecting these critiques to the discrepancy between theory and practice, between interpretation and the need to change the world, the article proposes that our reality today, reshaped through globalization and the virtual, (...) is performed as a hermeneutics of history. The challenge for today’s hermeneutics is to work out categories for understanding the present as on-going in a world that tends to capture and distort more and more the meaning of freedom of thought. In the final section, I propose a hermeneutics of the on-going, of gerundive time, partially under the inspiration of Paul Celan, as a response that develops the meaning of the freedom of thought. A defense of nearness and how to think in narrow nearness to the on-going is discussed. (shrink)

In philosophy of emerging media, several scholars have insisted on the fact that the “new” of new technologies does not have much to do with communication, but rather with the exponential growth of recording. In this paper, instead, the thesis advanced is that digital technologies do not concern memory, but imagination, and more precisely, what philosophers from Kant onwards have called productive imagination. In this paper, however, the main reference will not be Kant, but Paul Ricoeur, who explicitly refers to (...) the Kantian productive imagination in his works, but also offered an externalized, semioticized, and historicized interpretation of it. The article is developed in three steps. In the first section, it deals with Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, based on the notions of mimesis and mythos. In the second section, it is first argued that human imagination is always-already extended. Second, it will be shown how mimesis and mythos are precisely the way software works. In the third section, the specificity of big data is introduced. Big data is the promise of giving our actions and existences a meaning that we are incapable of perceiving, for lack of sensibility and understanding. Scholars have used the Foucauldian concepts of panopticon and confession for describing the human condition in the digital age. In the conclusion, it is argued that big data makes any form of disclosure unnecessary. Big data is an ensemble of technological artifacts, methods, techniques, practices, institutions, and forms of knowledge aiming at taking over the way someone narratively accounts for himself or herself before the others. Hence, another Foucauldian notion is representative of this age: the parrhesia, to speak candidly, and to take a risk in speaking the truth, insofar as such a possibility is anesthetized. (shrink)

In this paper I want to show that the idea supporters of traditional creationism (TC) defend, that success of a fictional character across different works has to be accounted for in terms of the persistence of (numerically) one and the same fictional entity, is incorrect. For the supposedly commonsensical data on which those supporters claim their ideas rely are rather controversial. Once they are properly interpreted, they can rather be accommodated by moderate creationism (MC), according to which fictional characters arise (...) out of a reflexive stance on a certain make-believe process. For MC, success of a fictional character across different works amounts to the fact that, first, different work-bound ficta are related with each other by means of a relation weaker than numerical identity, transfictional sameness, and second, that all those ficta are related by transfictional inclusion to a fictum that in some sense gather them all, the so-called general character. Since a general character is an abstract constructed entity, moreover, the more those particular ficta are generated, the more general fictional characters including all of them arise. (shrink)

En un estilo claro, despojado de t rminos t cnicos, Alberto Clemente de la Torre traza un recorrido por los principales t picos de la f sica cu ntica destinados a todos aquellos que quieren descubrir uno de los temas m s sugerentes de la ciencia contempor nea, sin exigirles Para ello conocimientos previos.

El presente trabajo busca exponer las premisas y la fundamentación teológica que subyace a la moral de Pedro Abelardo, con el fin de mostrar cómo en el sistema filosófico de dicho autor, conocido por su racionalismo, hay una justificación que extralimita dicho sistema. Para ello, se expondrá la terminología clave de su moral, la aplicación práctica de dichos conceptos, y una serie de objeciones tanto teológicas como filosóficas.

Este artículo busca problematizar parcialmente la constitución ontológica de la noción de praxis hegemónica en Antonio Gramsci; producir una definición de posthegemonía como posición política y no como doctrina; arriesgar la noción de que, de haber una “ontología” posthegemónica, convendría asentarla bajo tacha en el lugar de un posible pensamiento de la diferencia ontológica; describir brevemente un espacio de praxis emergente en el que la noción posthegemónica se hace explícita; y regresar a Antonio Gramsci a partir de una posible entrada (...) en crisis del concepto de hegemonía en su obra misma. (shrink)

Con esta ceremonia culminan los actos del otorgamiento del título de Doctor Honoris Causa de la Universidad de Buenos Aires al filósofo, maestro de maestros, Thomas Moro Simpson.De este modo nuestra Universidad, siguiendo una noble idea iniciada por los romanos mucho antes de que existieran las universidades, la idea de destacar la labor de aquellos ciudadanos que hubieran contribuido notablemente a mejorar la vida de la ciudad común, ha resuelto hacer público su reconocimiento de los excepcionales méritos intelectuales, éticos y (...) académicos de nuestro querido Tomás Simpson. He sido encargado de recordar ahora, sumariamente, ante la comunidad universitaria y, con eso, ante nuestra comunidad simpliciter, algunos de los motivos que condujeron a esta resolución. (shrink)

Gregorio Klimovsky argumentó en contra de los análisis sintacticistas de la noción de lenguaje. En este trabajo se examinan sus argumentos, destacando su vínculo con las discusiones recientes sobre universalidad expresiva, y se plantean algunas réplicas atendibles. Luego se adopta un enfoque general de la cuestión que resulta incompatible con el sintacticismo estricto pero que permite una reformulación aceptable, vinculada con una idea minimalista sobre el alcance de la teoría semántica. Gregorio Klimovsky argued against syntactical analyses of the notion of (...) language. In this paper I examine his arguments, noting their links with recent discussions of universal expressibility, and raise some plausible objections. Afterwards I adopt a general approach to the issue which is incompatible with strict syntacticism but allowing an acceptable reformulation, associated with a minimalist notion of the scope of the semantic theory. (shrink)

Along with a well-honoured tradition, we will accept that intentionality is at least a property a thought holds necessarily, i.e., in all possible worlds that contain it; more specifically, a necessary relation, namely the relation of existential dependence of the thought on its intentional object. Yet we will first of all try to show that intentionality is more than that. For we will claim that intentionality is an essential property of the thought, namely a property whose predication to the thought (...) is true in virtue of the identity, or nature, of such a thought. More particularly, for us intentionality will again be a relation, yet a relation of ontological dependence of the thought on its intentional object; specifically, the relation for the thought of being constituted by its object. Moreover, we will try to show that if intentionality is such a constitutive relation for the thought that has it, certain metaphysical consequences ensue. First, an objectual thought, a thought whose content basically consists in its intentional object, is nothing but that object in a certain cogitative modality, or, which is the same, as playing a certain motivational role for the subject entertaining the thought itself (at a certain time). Second, if an objectual thought is nothing but an intentional object in a cogitative modality, such a thought, not only as a type, but also as a token, is an abstract entity. More specifically, an objectual thought-type, an abstract object par excellence, is indeed instantiated by objectual thought-tokens which are again abstract particulars, yet of a specific kind: namely, tropes of a relational sort depending for their existence on their bearers (and possibly also on their temporal location). (shrink)

In this paper, I will first of all claim that once one takes proper names as indexicals of a particular sort, indexinames for short, one may account for some tensions that affect our desiderata regarding the use of such names in sentences directly or indirectly involving fiction. According to my proposal, a proper name “N.N.” is an indexical whose character is roughly expressed by the description “the individual called ‘N.N.’ (in context)”, where this description means “the individual one’s interlocutor’s attention (...) is called to by means of ‘N.N.’ (in context)”. This character is a partial function that maps narrow contexts onto referents. Such contexts are enriched narrow contexts, for they also include an ‘acquisition’ parameter, i.e., a parameter filled by a naming practice constituted by a dubbing, which consists in calling via the name one’s interlocutor’s attention to something (if any), and usually also by a certain transmission chain. I will also claim that such a proposal works independently of one’s ontological stance on fictional entities, that is, independently of whether one believes either that there are or that there are no such entities. Moreover, I will claim that such a proposal is better than similar indexicalist proposals such as the one put forward by Tiedke (2011), Finally, I will try to show how this proposal can deal with some objections one may raise against an indexicalist treatment of proper names. (shrink)

In this paper I will first contend that semantically based arguments in favour of or against problematic entities—like those provided, respectively, in a realist Meinongian and in an antirealist Russellian camp—are ultimately inconclusive. Indeed, only genuinely ontological arguments, specifically addressed to prove (or to reject) the existence of entities of a definite kind, suit the purpose. Thus, I will sketch an argument intended to show that there really are entities of an apparently specific kind, i.e. _intentionalia_, broadly conceived as things (...) that may actually exist as well as actually not exist. Finally, I will try to explain why that argument proves the existence of only some sorts of _intentionalia_, by showing how this is related to the fact that, as some have correctly maintained, _intentionalia_ have no intrinsic nature. (shrink)

The present paper is a continuation of a previous one by the same title, the content of which faced the issue concerning the relations of coreference and qualification in compliance with the Navya-Nyāya theoretical framework, although prompted by the Advaita-Vedānta enquiry regarding non-difference. In a complementary manner, by means of a formal analysis of equivalence, equality, and identity, this section closes the loop by assessing the extent to which non-difference, the main issue here, cannot be reduced to any of the (...) former. The following sections of this study will focus on the assessment of the eventual possibility of causation and transformation in non-difference. (shrink)