Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The seven papers included in this special issue of Argumenta might be ideally divided into two parts. On the one hand, this issue collects four contributions dealing with some important topics in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of language: the modularity of mind (the connections between the “pragmatic” module and epistemic vigilance mechanisms), the problem of perception and its link with action (the alleged anti-representational character of enactivism), the nature of phenomenal content (the plausibility of naïve realism in explaining the phenomenology of veridical visual experience), and the alleged irreducibility…

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…

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) is one of the few contemporary philosophers of the analytic tradition who offered significant contentious contributions to many different areas of philosophy while preserving a semi-systematic character in his writings. His output was huge, ranging from decision theory to philosophy of  language, from metaphysics to philosophy of action, from philosophy of mind to epistemology.

The philosophical interest in political conspiracy theories is a rather recent phenomenon. Although philosophers have always been interested in conspiracies—Niccolò Machiavelli and David Hume, for example, studied them—not much has been written about conspiracy theories. However, conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing have recently gathered a considerable amount of attention among a number of disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, history, law, psychology and political science. This special issue of Argumenta delves into the ethical and epistemological questions of political conspiracy theories.