Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The issue of the relationship between our cogitative abilities, in particular the ability of thinking about something that does not exist, and modal characteristics, in particular those featuring unactualized (im)possibilities, i.e., the ways the world might (not) have been, has always been very intricate. In analytic philosophy, reflection on this matter has started by reviving an optimistic thesis traditionally ascribed to Hume, according to which conceivability entails possibility: if something is conceivable, then it is also possible. As Wittgenstein clearly suggests in the incipit of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, where he…

In this paper, I want to revive an idea stemming out of the Cartesian-Husserlian phenomenological tradition as regards what makes the case that something—primarily a state, but also an event, or even a property—is mental; namely, the both necessary and sufficient conditions of mentality, i.e., the mark of the mental. According to this idea, the mark of the mental is, primarily for a state, its being an experience, to be meant as the property of having a phenomenal character that makes that state phenomenally aware. I defend this idea while…