A metaphysical controversy arises concerning the nature of the referents of so-called connected names ; namely, proper names such as “London”, “Richard the Lionheart”, or “Napoleon” when used in fiction-involving sentences, that is, sentences that deal directly or indirectly with fiction. According to antiexceptionalist realists , such names refer to their standard referents; namely, ordinary real individuals. Yet, according to exceptionalist hyperrealists , at least in some cases, such names refer to fictional surrogates , that is, fictional characters that are counterparts of the relevant individuals. In this paper, I put forward a further argument in favor of the exceptionalist position, understood in its moderate form: the argument from parity of generation . I also argue that this argument draws on theses defended by Kripke (2013), thereby moving in a direction that Kripke himself might have viewed favorably.

In (2025), contra Voltolini (2021) in his revised endorsement of Wollheim’s theory of seeing-in as applied to mirrors, Luca Marchetti argues that mirror perception is not a seeing-in perception. Instead, for Marchetti mirror perception is a particular kind of transparency perception, since he actually departs from the standard account of transparency perception as applied to mirrors, according to which in that perception one sees the real object facing the mirror through the mirror itself. For according to Marchetti, in having to do perceptually with a mirror, one sees a virtual object through it. However, not only Marchetti’s negative arguments, though intriguing, are not ultimately convincing, since they can be resisted bya defender of the seeing-in approach to mirror perception. But also, his positive thesis that mirror perception is a particular kind of transparency perception does not ultimately serve its critical purposes

In this paper, first of all, I want to give a criterion for the perceivability of higherlevel properties, i.e., the properties that depend for their own instantiation on the instantiation of low-level properties (colors, shapes, sounds, textures ...); namely, conditions that are necessary and jointly sufficient in order for such a property to be perceivable. Here it is: the higher-level property is given i) immediately; ii) via a grouping operation that involves a perceptual form of attention Moreover, I want to show why some candidate higher-level properties fulfill it and some other such candidates don't (they are only pseudo-perceivable).

A venerable view starting with Plato holds that shadows can be pictures. Yet independently of whether Plato’s illusionist-like theory of depiction is correct, it nowadays seems that the perceptual experience affecting shadow apprehension goes against the view. For that experience seems to be either a perception of physical transparency or a perception of ephemera; hence, nothing that may, at least prima facie, count as a pictorial experience. In this paper, however, I will first try to show that shadows perception either is not perception of physical transparency or, if it is perception of ephemera, this does not prevent it from being a perception of something having a pictorial value. Second, I will try to show that since shadows can be grasped in seeing-in experiences à la Wollheim, they can be bona fide pictures, i.e., pictorial representations viz. depictions, under the Wollheimian conception that a seeing-in experience is the mark of pictoriality, i.e., the necessary condition in order for something to be a bona fide picture.

This paper critically examines leading feminist philosophical arguments asserting that inegalitarian pornography inherently perpetuates the objectification and silencing of women, thereby warranting moral condemnation or legal restriction. While recognizing the seriousness of these concerns, we argue that neither objection holds, regardless of how objectification or silencing is conceptualized. Central to our position is the distinction between fictional and non-fictional pornography. As fiction, we contend, pornography does not intrinsically validate real-world beliefs or behaviors regarding women’s subordination. Even in non-fictional (“documentary”) contexts, the purported causal link between pornography and harm remains unsubstantiated. The paper deliberately sets aside ethical concerns about coercion in pornography’s production (e.g., exploitation, abuse) to focus on its alleged social effects. By interrogating the assumed mechanisms of influence—whether through fictional representation or documentary realism—we challenge the foundational premises of anti-pornography arguments and advocate for a more nuanced assessment of pornography’s role in shaping social norms.

In this paper, I want to defend the following claim. There is a good chance of keeping the Meinongian account of the individuation of fictional works and applying it to the individuation of versions of such a work, provided one properly takes into account some factors characterizing the make-believe games underlying the production of such versions, namely factors characterizing having to do with the remaking of such games, in order to explain why such versions are versions of that work, not mere individual works just as any other.

Perceptual experiences and imaginative experiences phenomenally are both similar and dissimilar. They are phenomenally similar in that they may share their presentational character: namely, certain of their own properties in their feature of presenting worldly properties. Yet they are phenomenally dissimilar insofar as their mode is respectively constituted by a feeling of presence towards their objects and by presentification, which is a make-believe neutralizing modification of that feeling. Since mode counts for the metaphysical individuation of a mental state, then perceptual and imaginative experiences characterize metaphysically different kinds of such states.

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 also endorsing its most problematic consequence; namely, that internal states, whether standing (e.g., dispositional beliefs or desires) or occurrent (subpersonal states), that are not phenomenally aware are not mental. For I try to show why this consequence is not so problematic as it seems.

In this chapter, first of all, I want to show that Sainsbury's new irrealist argument against Meinongianism regarding non-existent intentional objects (intentionalia) does not go through. Yet moreover, this dismissal of Sainsbury's argument does not show that one must endorse an ultrarealist Meinongian perspective on such objects. For there is an intermediate way between irrealism and ultrarealis m about non-existent intentionalia that stems from Crane's phenomenological conception of intentionalia as schematic objects, having as such no metaphysical nature. This is a conception that Sainsbury himself actually embraces.

In this paper, we want to maintain that the puzzle of imaginative resistance is basically a pragmatic issue due to the failure of participative imagination, as involving a pre-semantic level relating to a wide context (the overall situation of discourse). Since the linguistic meanings of the relevant fiction-involving sentences violate some of our basic norms, what such sentences (fictionally) say cannot be participatively imagined. That failure leads one to refrain from ascribing such sentences the fictional truth-conditions they would have in narrow fictional contexts (sets of fixed parameters) as determined by those meanings in those contexts. Yet one could still make that ascription, for one can cognitively imagine what such sentences would say in those contexts. As is proved by the fact that if one either adopts an alternative view on such norms or, for some reason, brackets them, one can again perform that ascription.

In this article, I want to defend two claims. First, as regards fictional characters ( ficta), one must appeal to constitutive properties, i.e., properties that are not only necessary but also essential for a fictum involved by a certain narration; namely, the internal discourse about a fictum. Such properties are indeed the properties that are truly predicated of ficta, either explicitly or implicitly, in that narration. For the appeal to such properties may explain not only i) the truth of important bits of external discourse, i.e., the discourse concerning a fictum outside that narration, but also ii) a fictum's individuation, i.e., what makes that fictum the object it is. Second, ficta are truly internally predicated such properties, i.e., they possess such properties in a specific, constitutive, mode. For those properties are members of the property sets with which ficta are somehow correlated; indeed, possession of truly internally predicated properties precisely amounts to set-membership.

In this work, I will first of all try to show how to stick to an austere conception of meaninglessness fails to adequately account for the issue of nonsense in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (TLP), notably as regards the so-called pseudo-propositions of the "good" metaphysics, i.e., the pseudo-propositions that should express, if they could, the theses about the nature of language and of the world Wittgenstein allegedly defended in TLP. Moreover, I will claim that the traditional reading of TLP, which positively defends the theses that are denied by the four negative commitments constituting the core of the socalled resolute reading of TLP, is still the best interpretation of early Wittgenstein's masterpiece.