Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Coping is customarily understood as those thoughts and actions humans adopt while undergoing situations appraised as threatening and stressful, or when people’s sense of who they are and what they should do is significantly challenged. In these cases, coping thoughts and actions help one endure and hopefully overcome these stresses, threats, and/or challenges. Discussions of coping are common among psychologists, but nearly absent from the philosophical literature despite their importance…

Generally speaking, the present literature on agency has been heavily focused on human agency. This approach proves to be very useful for the immediate applications of the philosophy of agency, e.g. to develop a definition ready for use in ethics or political philosophy. However, there are some limitations to this line of thought, as, for instance, it poses too restrictive requirements on agency, like purposefulness, consciousness, or willingness. In this…

In the first part of the paper, I discuss three possible ways to achieve some unity between Sellars’ manifest and scientific image of the world. The plurality of scientific methods that I am advocating is compatible with the fact that all empirical sciences strive for beliefs based on the normative concepts of evidence, explanatory power, and experimental accuracy. Such methods provide different means to reach the common purpose of justification.…

In contemporary philosophy there is much focus on conceptual engineering: the enterprise of revising and replacing concepts. In this talk, I focus on a theoretical issue that has not yet received much attention. What principled limits are there to this sort of enterprise? Are there concepts that for principled reasons cannot or should not be revised or replaced? Examples discussed include logical concepts and normative concepts.

At the commonsensical level of the manifest image, we seem to take for granted logical laws of all sorts, including classical logic (CL) and naive principles of truth and predication (TP), which, however, generate logical paradoxes such as the liar, Russell’s paradox and Curry’s paradox. The formal logic of the scientific image comes to the rescue by proposing many competing formal systems that restore consistency, by sacrificing either principles of…

We study different forms of ignorance and their correlations in a bi-modal logical language expressing the two modalities of knowledge and belief. In particular, we are mainly interested in clarifying which definitions of ignorance and which circumstances trigger higher-order forms of ignorance, inducing ignorance about ignorance and so on. To this aim, three ground conditions concerning knowledge and belief are presented, which may be seen as a cause of ignorance…

At least since Russell, mainstream analytic philosophy has distinguished internal and external relations and acknowledged the existence of both. This seems in line with both the manifest and scientific images of the world. However, there is a recent deflationary trend about relations, which focuses on the truthmakers of relational statements in order to show that putative external relations are in fact internal, and that internal relations do not really exist.…

Doing metaphysics by building on empirical sciences is a very controversial matter. This paper outlines a middle road between the Scylla of denying the possibility of metaphysics and the Charybdis of doing metaphysics a priori. This is possible if, on the one hand, we accept a moderate form of scientific realism. On the other, we establish a logico-epistemological framework adequate to face the underdetermination of metaphysical theses with respect to…

Da Costa, Lombardi and Lastiri (2013) have proposed an ontology of properties for non-relativistic quantum mechanics within the structure of the modal-Hamiltonian interpretation of the theory. Recently, this proposal has been developed in order to discuss the nature of entanglement and indistinguishability in such an ontology (Fortin and Lombardi 2022) and to explain how particles emerge from an ontology of properties (Lombardi and Dieks 2016). Oldofredi (2021) has also proposed…