My paper provides reasons in support of the view that vague identity claims originate from a conflict between rigidity and precision in designation. To put this stricly, let x be the referent of the referential terms P and Q. Then, that the proposition “that any x being both a P and a Q” is vague involves that the semantic intuitions at work in P and Q reveal a conflict between P and Q being simultaneously rigid and precise designators. After having (...) shortly commented on an example of vague identity claim, I make the case for my proposal, by discussing how reference by baptism conflicts with descriptive attitudes towards understanding conceptual contents. (shrink)

Most literature on religious beliefs and disagreements among traditions focuses on a bit of mainstream assumptions: religions should be construed in substantive terms; religions are to be individuated by their core belief systems; adherents to a single tradition assent to the same belief system; religious beliefs have factual content; incompatible religious beliefs cannot be both true; and so on. In my work I question all these claims in order to defend a non kantian approach to deep pluralism. In the first (...) part I develop a narrative theory of doxastic practices. My fundamental intuition is that ambiguity, vagueness, and indeterminacy of meaning are non amendable features of any ordinary belief. Consequently, no proposition has a definite meaning, and there is no a priori reason to assume that if two believers assume the same belief, they both hold the same content. What I'm trying to do is to argue in support of a realist epistemology, without assuming a normative and rationalist stance. My evidential body is mainly drawn from psychology and psychoanalysis. In the second part I apply such a narrative theory to the study of the doxastic character of religions. I reject both functionalist and substantive approaches to religion, and I defend my own viewpoint which I label experentialism. After providing a characterization of religious beliefs, I refute how Alston, Ward and Hick account for the the doxastic features of religions. I then propose a definition of religious diversity which turns out to be alternative to the mainstream one. I work by empirical evidence from semiotics, sociology of religion and history of religions. In the third and conclusive part of my book, I give reasons against the mainstream approach to religious diversity, and I explain how my definition can be more appropriate to the sociological study of religious beliefs than the mainstream one. Finally, I provide an account of deep pluralism, I show that my approach to religious epistemology and religions is compatible with (and recommended by) deep pluralism, I differentiate kantian from non kantian pluralism, and I explain why non kantian deep pluralism resists the traditional objections to pluralism. Throughout the book I discuss relevant materials from Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (shrink)

My paper characterizes religious beliefs in terms of vagueness. I introduce my topic by providing a general overview of my main claims. In the subsequent section, I develop basic distinctions and terminology for handling the notion of religious tradition and capturing vagueness. In the following sections, I make the case for my claim that religious beliefs are vague by developing a general argument from the interconnection between the referential opacity of religious belief content and the long-term communitarian history of the (...) precisification of what such content means. I start from describing an empirical example in the third section, and then I move to settle the matter in a conceptually argumentative frame in the fourth one. My conclusions in the final section address a few of consequences relevant to debates about religious epistemology and religious diversity. (shrink)

My paper argues for the claim that religious experience may provide evidential reasons in support of religious beliefs. I name such a claim epistemic view of mystical experience (EM). In the first section, I sketch two approaches to EM. Swinburne, Alston and Plantinga (among others) develop a notable defense of EM. On the contrary, seminal works by Feuerbach and Bultmann offer the opposite account. I briefly show how to resist to the criticism of EM. In light of such line of (...) reasoning, I move to Alston's Theory of Doxastic Practices (TDP) in the second section. After giving a skeletal account of TDP, I construe an argument in Alstonian terms against the naturalist refutations of EM. In the third section, I highlight the main problem with TDP, that is, the claim that perceptions and religious experiences have an analogical relation. Examples from sacred texts of different traditions show that such a claim fails to grasp what a religious experience is. In the final section I give a preliminary account of the notion of presentational experience, and show that it is possible to defend EM more plausibly than TDP does by the use of this notion. (shrink)

My paper concerns Berkeley’s notion of theology. After brief considerations on the general attitude toward religion by Berkeley, I try to assess the immaterialistic approach to three main topics of theology: the ground of any theological knowledge, natural theology, revealed theology. My argument takes in consideration particularly Berkeley’s criticism of Scholasticism. My claim is the following: Berkeley holds that all men have an immediate experience of God’s presence, but this experience is not direct conceptual knowledge. I shortly compare my views (...) with D.Berman’s in section two of the paper. The third section deals with the lines of direction of immaterialistic theology. I claim that Berkeley argues for a twofold source of the experience of the divine. The first is natural and regards all human kind. Platonism is the context of Berkeley’s treatment. The second is historical and concerns just Christians. Reference is to the Bible. I treat the problem of the consistency of these two different ways to make an experience of God, comparing my position with that by J.S.Spiegel. Finally I briefly consider Berkeley’s defence of historico-critical reading of the Bible, as a consequence of his attitude towars the second source of theology. (shrink)

Anecdotal pluralism (AP) is the claim that, when two individuals disagree on the truth of a religious belief, the right move to make is to engage in a communal epistemic process of evidence sharing and evaluation, motivated by the willingness to learn from each other, understand the adversary's views and how these challenge their own, and re-evaluate their own epistemic position in regards to external criticisms. What I will do in my paper is to provide a presentation of AP and (...) give a few reasons in support. I will begin with showing how pluralism can be promoted by religious experiences inhering in any (historical) tradition. To this regard, my purpose is to analyse such experiences as conducive to the assumption of the two main principles defining any pluralist view. Subsequently, I will construe AP by seven claims, and I will focus my efforts on justifying its superiority both to exclusivism/inclusivism and other varieties of pluralism. My next and final move is to list a few reasons which support my view. (shrink)

Victoria S. Harrison’s theory of internal pluralism approaches religious beliefs in terms of conceptual schemes. To her, this approach has the advantage of preserving core pluralist intuitions without being challenged by the usual difficulties. My claim is that this is not the case. After providing a succinct presentation of internal pluralism, I show that the critique of traditional pluralist views such as Hick’s may also be addressed to Harrison. There are two main reasons in support of my claim. Firstly, a (...) believer’s common understanding of religious experiences conflicts with the way in which internal pluralism understands religious belief. Such conflict implies that if internal pluralism were a sound theory, most religious beliefs would turn out to be false, and, contrary to Harrison’s intention, they would be rendered cognitively irrelevant. Secondly, internal pluralism excludes the possibility of religious disagreements. By applying to religions an epistemological approach based on conceptual schemes, doxastic dissent is actually dismantled at the cost of developing an entirely solipsistic reading of religious beliefs. In the final section of my paper, I will show that such unattractive features are consequences of the notion of conceptual scheme. (shrink)

Most literature on religious disagreements focuses on the epistemic problems related to doctrinal disputes. While, the main argument of my paper does not address such a topic, my purpose is to point at a practical exit strategy from the blind spot to which most disagreements lead. However, in order to argue for my views, I need to provide a substantive account of how religious beliefs work and which epistemic obligations they involve. Such account challenges most mainstream assumptions, and needs to (...) be developed in some details. My method consists, then, in construing a theory for religious beliefs, and exploring its consequence concerning disagreements. I will focus particularly on the positive task. Indeed, if my account for religious beliefs works, consequences easily follow. (shrink)

An overview of the recent debate on the Trinity in the analytic philosophy of religion. I move from putting forward the Logical Problem of the Trinity (LPT) according to R.Cartwright and M.Rea. I then define two useful notions in order to evaluate the interpretive force of the mainstream approaches to answer LPT; i.e. , be X a concept, I define maximally robust reading of X and sufficiently robust reading of X. In the subsequent section, I offer an expository analysis of (...) Latin Trinitarianism, Social Trinitarianism and Material Constitution Trinitarianism in line with such concepts. I finally advance some reasons why neither of these properly work. My main argument is that every traditional phrasing of the doctrine of the Trinity asks Christians to hold maximally robust reading both of the onefoldness of God and the threefoldness of Divine Persons. Now, while Latin Trinitarianism, Social Trinitarianism and Material Constitution Trinitarianism provide maximally robust account of God's onefoldness, they can't give a maximally robust account for Persons' threefoldness. (shrink)

My paper challenges the externalist mainstream assumptions towards the understanding of religious beliefs (i.e., reliabilism by W.Alston, the warrant belief approach by A.Plantinga, the neowittgensteinian analysis of doxastic systems). According to such assumptions, religious beliefs should be evaluated rational in terms of the same doxastic standard giving justification for ordinary factual beliefs. Moving from the empiricist intuition that the kind of content of belief matters to the form of belief and the justification practices for it, I argue for the claim (...) that religious beliefs do not concern facts or experiences but assiological interpretations of facts or experiences. After some brief introductory considerations, in the second section of my paper I provide criteria for distinguishing between factual and non factual beliefs, and I offer a general account for the doxastic spectrum. In the subsequent section I characterize the assumption of religious beliefs as qualitative, mostly implicit and in the de dicto modality. In order to prove my characterization I draw a phenomenology of religious belief from individual testimonies concerning religious conversion. I finally conclude answering some objections in the fourth section of the paper. (shrink)

The paper is divided in two parts. The first presents my exegesis of the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. My main claim is that the composer of the text manipulate the chronological order of miracles in his "signs source" in order to approach the story of the woman from Samaria together to the healing of the son of the roman officer in Kapharnaus. The two episodes deal with two different ways to convert to faith. Consequently, they provide a (...) complete phenomenology of the formation process of religious belief. The second part considers two fundamental interpretations of the johannine notion of faith, i.e. the fideistical and the existentialist. I reject both: the first is logically inconsistent within the Johannine framework (the Gospel of John assumes principles whose consequences contradict the fideistic interpretation of faith); the second is ontologically senseless. (shrink)

Evolutionary research on the biological fitness of groups has recently given a prominent value to the role that prosocial behaviors play in favoring a successful adaptation to ecological niches. Such a focus marks a paradigm shift. Early views of evolution relied on the notion of natural selection as a largely competitive mechanism for the achievement of the highest amount of resources. Today, evolutionists from different schools think that collaborative attitudes are an irremovable ingredient of biological change over time. As a (...) consequence, a number of researchers have been attracted by evolutionary studies of human behaviors. Some think that a continuity among prosocial attitudes of human beings and other social mammals can be detected, and that this fact has relevance for accounting for human morality. Others deny one or the other of these claims, or both. The papers in the present special issue address how these topics impact ethics and religion. (shrink)

My paper moves from Kant's taxonomy for the arguments for the existence of God. After providing a brief survey of Kant's account, I claim that contemporary arguments from design fit Kant's characterization of the physico-theological argument. Then, in the second section, I deal with the logical frame of the argument from design. In the third section I introduce Berkeley's divine language argument (DLA), in order to demonstrate that DLA is an argument from design. Consequently, in the fourth section, I give (...) a refutation of Hooker's and Kline's reading of DLA. Finally, in the last section, I take Berkeley's DLA as a paradigmatic case of the argument from design, showing a fundamental difficulty the argument endorses. (shrink)

Intractable disagreements are commonly analyzed in terms of the semantic opposition of (at least) couples of disputed beliefs (purely epistemic view, from here on PEV). While such a view seems to be a very natural starting point, my intuitions are that such an approach is misleadingly unrealistic, and that an empirical modeling towards how individuals hold beliefs in intractable opposition constitutes a strong defeater for PEV. My work addresses disagreements within the religious domain. Accordingly, I will be concerned with developing (...) my empirical understanding of religious beliefs, and will show the consequences of such proposal on how to answer the problem of religious diversity. (shrink)

I consider an argument by Plotinus to show how the notion of transcendence is used in explaining the nature of knowledge. The argument is set forth in sections 4-6 of the treatise V.8 (31). In my opinion this argument provides a good example of the philosophical frame of Platonism. I sum up this frame in the following theses: a) for a thing being is to be real and true; so that for a thing being real and being true is equivalent; (...) but b) for a thing being real and true means being intelligible; that is to say: a thing could be understood because that thing is a being; thus, c) for a thing being is the identity of its ontological and epistemological nature. (shrink)

Discuto la tesi di Micheletti secondo la quale ogni spiegazione fattuale presuppone premesse di ordine superiore rispetto alla spiegazione (M.Micheletti, “Radical Divine Alterity and the God-World Relationship”). Nella prima sezione del testo introdurrò la tesi, muovendo dalla analisi di alcuni esempi di spiegazione, ed elencherò le ragioni che (apparentemente) richiedono la postulazione di higher-degree propositions per rendere conto di factual propositions. Nella seconda sezione regimenterò logicamente la tesi di Micheletti. Nella terza sezione discuterò la validità della logica della spiegazione così (...) introdotta, con un’attenzione particolare alla analisi semantica della nozione di spiegazione, allo statuto modale delle ragioni che costituiscono una spiegazione, e all’approccio grammaticale alle higher order propositions. Nella quarta e ultima sezione avanzerò brevissime considerazioni conclusive. (shrink)

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is one of the most influential early modern philosophers, and in reason of this a never-ending critical interest focuses on his works. Such a critical attention gave rise to a broad literature and it is in fact quite easy to find valuable introductory books to Berkeley's works. It would be thus superfluous to provide a further summary of the entire production of Berkeley. Rather, I focus on a specific issue, namely the main points of interest of immaterialism (...) for the contemporary debates in philosophy. The currently most discussed Berkeleian arguments are those from his earlier production (those developed around 1709-1713). Thus, I will be mainly concerned with the conceptual structure of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Among Berkeley's early works, this is the one that was thought as a systematic illustration for philosophers of his ideas. (shrink)

An introduction to how heteronomous views address the topic of moral autonomy. In the first section I provide a short history of the rise of the autonomy stance in meta ethics. Then I sketch the relationship between Kant and mainstream contemporary Kantians. I finally outline a summary of the papers in the special issue of Dialegesthai.

Persistent disagreements may induce parties in the disagreement to experience a strong state of anxiety. Such anxiety has a psychological nature in ordinary cases of disagreement (i.e., cases which do not impact on the doxastic identity of the opposing epistemic agents). On the contrary, the more the content of a disagreement concerns basic issues related to the non-negotiable views for the parties involved, the more anxiety turns out to be of an epistemic kind, and, accordingly, suggests a set of normative (...) consequences. I will outline the main differences between ordinary and doxastic-identity-related disagreements in terms of the nature of the anxiety they give rise. In light of this distinction, I will characterize religious disagreements as disagreements of the latter type, and I will provide a few insights for approaching them. (shrink)

According to René Girard, all religious traditions - and so every tradition- originate from a communitarian violence towards a randomly chosen individual. I provide an introductory construal of Girard’s proposal in the first section of my paper. In the second section, I will address a conceptual view of the theory by making explicit its principles and their inferential relations. In the third section, I will explain how philosophers of language address slurs and hate-speech. Particularly, I will apply such materials to (...) Girard’s assumption that the three friends’ discourses to Job are instances of hate-speech. My purpose is to defend the use of a presuppositional account of derogatory epithets in the philosophy of religion, and to argue for the legitimacy of reading a number of religious statements which cement a social group into a “we” in opposition to an individual who is individuated as an instance of a “not-we” as slurs. In the fourth section, I will argue that, if Girard is right in thinking that speech-hate and the use of slurs are means for the identification of a scapegoat within a group, then Girard’s theory needs to be adjusted in order to accommodate some obvious difficulties. Finally, in the fifth section, I will sum up my conclusions and then provide a few suggestions for defending the theory. (shrink)

The theorizing about the doctrine of the Trinity by contemporary analytic philosophers of religion has recently been imbued with an air of enthusiastic excitement and self-confidence. My intuition is that there’s room for saying something more in support to the embarrassment and puzzlement traditionally related to the predication of God’s onefoldness and threefoldness. My purpose is to deliver a general argument for (weak) trinitarian skepticism. My view is that the argument provides substantive reasons in support to the common sense intuition (...) that either God’s onefoldness and threefoldness aren’t actually compatible or God’s onefoldness and threefoldness aren’t robustly construed. (shrink)

My paper addresses what a religion is. I comment briefly on the "substantive versus functionalist" debate, and I provide reasons to reject both of them. While I offer short summary arguments against the functionalist approach, I develop two detailed arguments against the substantive one. The former moves from the evidence that religious beliefs change over time. The latter moves from internal disagreements about the meaning of the core beliefs of a faith. These two arguments show that it is impossible to (...) reduce the belief system of any historical faith to a set of propositions which all the adherents to a tradition assent to. Although my arguments are conceptual, I include also empirical materials in support of my view. I then conclude by presenting a pluralist account of religions from an internalist standpoint. (shrink)

My paper provides a preliminary work towards a theory of freedom and agency which I name "Theory of Procedural Agency (TPA)". Since TPA relies on intuitions which can not be settled into the metaphysical framework of contemporary approaches to freedom and agency, I focus on some reasons which explain why these intuitions should be preferred to the competing ones. My strategy is to argue for my view defending an embryonal version of TPA, that is Berkeley's considerations on free will, agency (...) and determinism. In the first section I deal with Berkeley's treatment of free will. My idea is that his arguments offer clear and evident reasons in support of the first intuition grounding a TPA like approach to freedom. In the second section I move some criticisms to Berkeley's theory of will, claiming that, in order to overcome these, the assumption of the constitution view concerning self-knowledge would help. In the third section I set forth a logical formulation for TPA, showing how Berkeley's consideration on agency provide grounding reasons for that. Finally, in the last section, I plan the work to be done to achieve a consistent and complete version of TPA. (shrink)

The critical target of my paper is the normativist stance of Kantian meta ethics. After a very short introduction, I develop a characterization of contemporary mainstream Kantism as a conjunction of a normativist claim, a rationalist claim and a proceduralist claim. In the subsequent section I make the case against the normativist claim by drawing a counterexample, and defend the relevance of such counterexample as a reason that defeats the appeal of the Kantian approach to meta ethics. I finally conclude (...) by highlighting the main reasons why the challenge my counterexample rises are not answerable within a Kantian framework. (shrink)

David Berman's work on experimental philosophy is a defence of a traditional approach to empiricism against both contemporary rationalism and logico-analytic philosophy. While his approach focuses on empirical evidence in support of theoretical claims, Berman distinguishes his position from the kind of experimentalism recently risen from the analytic world. After having highlighted the merit of Berman's approach to philosophy, I comment on his main views, addressing particularly the relationship between language, intuitions and experience from the standpoint of the epistemological topic (...) of belief justification. (shrink)

My paper addresses the notion of moral responsibility in religious ethics. I begin with the outline of the doctrine of moral heteronomy. The scripture stories of the Tables of the Laws and the Holy Covenant provide the general pattern for heteronomic ethics. My claim is that heteronomic ethics transfers the responsibility for the action A an agent x is performing from x to the normative system commanding x to perform A. I then picture the architecture of the normative system of (...) the Decalogue (System D) and I work out criteria for the completeness and consistency of the system. In the next section I make the case for the actual incompleteness and inconsistency of D. As a consequence, an agent subject to the authority of D can not rule his moral conduct by the norms in D. Therefore, the acceptance of D transfers the moral responsibility for the actions by x from x to D, but D does not provide a complete and consistent system of norms to rule x's conduct. In the final section of the paper I briefly present the way religious ethics deals with this problem, by offering an alternative approach to the notion of moral responsibility. (shrink)

My main claim is that, in order to account for the nature of human mind, philosophy of mind should embody topics usually treated by disciplines as ethics or applied philosophy so as to enrich the pure notion of cognitive experience to the extent of treating the whole of human experience. I begin with considering the Cartesian approach to the "cogito". I argue for the claim that cartesian-like dualists (Descartes and Locke, Kant and Husserl) fail in treating the opposition of internalism (...) and externalism concerning experience. This failure commits them to a form of epistemological idealism unable to manage the "veil of perception" objection. I then settle a provisional account for the mind, mainly dependent on a Berkeleyan-Humean deflationist approach to it, showing the necessity to incorporate in it robust practical topics from an ontological point of view. (shrink)

My starting assumption concerns the default view in western aestethics. My claim is that the view can be characterized in the following manner: while the arts and religious experience are formally different kinds of human experience, the arts have the same content of religious experience (Essentialist claim, EC). I argue that both from a realist and antirealist standpoint EC does not make sense. Consequently, EC should be rejected as the right approach to the relation between the arts and religious experience.

My purpose is to compare Berkeley’s and Gentile’s idealism, interpreting Berkeley’s Treatise, §§22–23, and Gentile’s reading of this passage. The Italian philosopher finds in Berkeley’s master argument the original source of the true idealistic way of thinking, but he believes that Berkeley has not been sufficiently consistent in deducing all the consequences from his new principle. This criticism is the ground of Gentile’s actual idealism. Comparing the two positions is very instructive both to elucidate the general issue of idealism and (...) to understand Berkeley’s philosophy. (shrink)

Determinism is the view that any event is determined by previous events and the laws of nature. My claim is that Plotinus's, Leibniz's and Berkeley's rejection of determinism is structurally similar. Indeed, while determinism holds that phenomenal changes (ontologically) depend only on the way the laws of Nature apply to the previous conditions of the states of the world, the three philosophers all argues for the claim that the laws of Nature are not independent on the mind (the Hypostasis of (...) Soul or the Divine Mind). That is to say: laws of nature are not mechanisms producing the succeeding of one event to the others, namely are not properties of a non mental substance. Rather, they are regularities (ontologically dependent on the mind, since) established by a Mind. Plotinus, Leibniz and Berkeley hold a two steps argument: a) laws of nature aren't properties of a material substance accounting for phenomenal changes, since undifferentiated matter doesn't exist; b) even if regularities in phenomenal changes could be refer to properties of a substance, these regularities couldn't be construed as non mental mechanisms, because any transition from, say, event A to event B, lacks causal power. (shrink)

My main claim is that, contrary to the assumptions of mainstream literature, epistemic religious diversity is not a matter of an abstract comparison among the belief systems of different religions or denominations; rather, it is a relation arising from the epistemic encounter among individuals who adhere to different doxastic groups. Particularly, while epistemic symmetry inclines to treat our doxastic opponents as peers, epistemic peerhood is not the starting point of doctrinal comparisons, but the potential outcome of the epistemic process of (...) the construal of shared evidence. A key point in my approach is that such a process is anecdotally constituted. My working plan is the following. In the first section I will introduce the challenge of religious diversity. In the next section, I will distinguish between two characterisations of the relation among seminal claims of doxastic groups, namely, beliefs which stand in a competing relation and beliefs which are merely alternative. I will provide a degree view of this distinction. The subsequent section consists in a overview of the outcomes from the epistemology of disagreement. In the fourth section, I will provide two basic motivations in support of TE. Finally, I will conclude by sketching how TE motivates the assumption of a schema for handling religious disagreements which I name anecdotal pluralism. (shrink)

My paper is a philosophical comment on Plotinus' treatise "On Eternity and Time". My work is divided into three parts. In the first section I approach Plotinus' general argument for the dependency of time on eternity trying to demonstrate that it makes sense just within a Platonic framework. I argue that there are no evident reasons to assume the Platonic framework. Consequently, there are no evident reasons in support of Plotinus' argument. In the second section I focus on Plotinus' characterization (...) of eternity. Notoriously, Plotinus holds that eternity is not a substance but a property. Particularly, Plotinus believe that eternity is a property of intellegibility. Now, while Plotinus' theory is untenable for the reasons I deal with in the first section, I defend the claim that his characterization of eternity phenomenologically grasps some important features of the ontological realm of being. Therefore I try to justify the thesis that eternity is not a property of intellegibility but the (first) property of (any) being. In the third and last section, I finally address the way in which Plotinus relates the generation of time to the being of eternity. I defend the Plotinian treatment showing that, given the viewpoint pictured in the second section, Plotinus' argument possesses robust experiential evidence. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a definition of immaterialism as a kind of philosophy holding five grounding principles: a) any evidence is ontologically unsubsisting without the mind; b) all evidences are ontologically unrelated among them; c) the mind supports the subsistence of what is actually evident to her perceiving; d) the mind produces or acknoweldges an order in the coming of an evidence after the others; e) experience is the symbolic framing of relationships among given elements. After having defined immaterialism, (...) firstly, I offer some reasons for the claim that Berkeley's and Hume's philosophy are somewhat cognate (even if I believe that Hume is not a Berkeleian, but a different kind of immaterialist philosopher), and, secondly, I show that both Berkeley's and Hume's philosophy equally fit the definition of immaterialism. (shrink)

Consider two entities x and y, and a relation R which holds among them. Is R’s existence accountable merely in terms of the non relational properties exhibited by x and y, once they interact? Or, is it more appropriate to say that R is independent of x and y, and these acquire sets of relational properties because of their being related through R? In case the former option obtains, the existence of relations is reducible to the relevant properties of the (...) related terms. As a consequence, some version of antirealism or eliminativism towards relations turns out to be true. Otherwise they are irreducible, and ontological analysis cannot be dispensed with relations treated as basic or primitive entities. The first section of my paper provides a framework for handling ontological facts about relations. I will address the assessment of the notions of internal and external relations by K. Mulligan. In the second section I will put my cards on the table. My purpose is to defend a Moorean approach to relations, i.e. both internal and external relations exist. I will briefly outline my methodology, and I will comment on the kind of evidence usually referred to in the debate. My view is that evolutionary research on groups behavior may play an important role. In the third section of the paper I will show that commonsense intuitions on relationships among human beings endorse an external reading of relations. My claim is supported by notorious examples drawn from literature. In the final section I will consider whether evolutionary research on human prosociality provides an empirical setting for the assessment of the commonsense understanding of (at least some) relations in terms of externality. I expand such setting to include behaviors of social animal in general (i.e., animals whose behaviors depends on groups’ hierarchy), and I advance a few reason why empirical research needs postulating the independent existence of relations. (shrink)

My purpose is to compare Berkeley’s and Gentile’s idealism, interpreting Berkeley’s Treatise, §§22–23, and Gentile’s reading of this passage. The Italian philosopher finds in Berkeley’s master argument the original source of the true idealistic way of thinking, but he believes that Berkeley has not been sufficiently consistent in deducing all the consequences from his new principle. This criticism is the ground of Gentile’s actual idealism. Comparing the two positions is very instructive both to elucidate the general issue of idealism and (...) to understand Berkeley’s philosophy. (shrink)

I take a survey of M.Vannini's views on authentic religious life, commenting on his theses. While I assent to most of his arguments, I reject some of his grounding claims.