Learning objectives
1. Knowledge and understanding:
The course will focus on a central issue in the analytic philosophy of language, allowing the students to identify the logical space in which the debate is situated as well as the state of the contemporary debate on the topic.
2. Applying Knowledge and understanding:
Students will be trained to recognize, reformulate, and criticize arguments with the goal to acquire the skills necessary for doing philosophical research.
3-4-5. Making judgments, communication and learning skills:
Students will be required to work on the proposed texts autonomously. Guidance during their preparing and writing the paper will allow them to develop the skills necessary to participate autonomously in the philosophical debate and to learn and enlarge their knowledge in an autonomous way.
Prerequisites
None.
Course unit content
After a short introduction to some basic semantic notions, the course will
focus on the functioning of the so-called "general terms", expressions
such as "cat", "chair", and "beer".
Full programme
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Bibliography
Most of the course will focus on two fundamental articles by Hilary Putnam, "Is semantics possible" e "The meaning of 'meaning', collected in H. Putnam, "Mind, language and reality", Cambridge University Press, 1975 (it. tr. "Mente, linguaggio e realtà", Adelphi).However, the reading list will be specific for each student and will be provided
when the paper's topic is chosen.
Teaching methods
Lectures, with discussion in class.
Assessment methods and criteria
The exam consists in writing a short paper in which the student is required to show their competences in formulating and discussing in an argumentative way a specific philosophical problem, to reconstruct and contrast the arguments that have been proposed by the philosophers discussed in class with the goal to draft a text that is informative for a non-expert reader. Students are invited to pay attention to their expressive tools, to the coherent use of technical terminology, and to the cogency of the arguments.
The oral part of the exam consists in a discussion of the paper.
Grading criteria:
30 cum laude: excellent knowledge, excellent expressive capacities, excellent understanding of the concepts and arguments.
30: very good. Complete and adequate knowledge, well-articulated and correctly expressed.
27-29: good, satisfactory knowledge, essentially correct expression.
24-26: fairly good, but not complete knowledge.
22-23: generally sufficient but superficial knowledge. Expression is often not appropriate and confused.
18-21: sufficient.
<18: exam failed. Insufficient or very incomplete knowledge, lack of guidance in discipline, expression seriously deficient.
Other information
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