LIBRI DI CLAUDIO CALOSI

The book contains different essays in honor of Vincenzo Fano, for his 60th birthday. They address several foundational issues in the philosophy and metaphysics of science, epistemology, history of science and philosophy, and the relation between philosophy, science, and art. The crucial aspect of the book is the constant dialogue between different forms of knowledge: from science to art, from philosophy to philology, from the classics to contemporary research. This also reflects the breadth of Fano’s philosophical research.

Starting from the Thirties, Italy has been one of the leading countries in the development of physics. Gino Tarozzi has long been and still is one of the best Italian scholars in the field. The present volume collects several valuable contributions touching upon different philosophical problems, such as entanglement, realism, causality, quantum logic... In the occasion of Tarozzi’s 60th birthday many distinguished scholars, which collaborate with him, evaluate and discuss these topics.

Quantum mechanics is often credited for having clearly shown that the whole is something over and above the sum of its parts. We want to assess whether this is really the case, and if so, in what sense. We argue that there is indeed a sense in which this is true. Our argument is that even a weak realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics renders a particular metaphysical principle about property instantiation, that we label Property Compositional Determinateness, untenable. Yet there is another metaphysical principle about composition that is usually maintained to imply that composition of parts exhausts the whole they are part of, namely Mereological Extensionalism. In this case, contrary to widespread agreement, we argue that quantum mechanics does not provide any reason, either direct or indirect, to abandon such principle.

We present a new thought experiment that raises a threat for Minimal Physicalism, i.e. the thesis according to which mental properties supervene on physical properties. Our proposal is an example of the so called hard problems in philosophy of mind, in particular the problem of maximal consciousness. We do not however presuppose anything about its very nature apart from the minimal, weak assumption that it is determined by first order mental properties. We argue that (i) either Minimal Physicalism is unable to give an adequate account of the new thought experiment we present or (ii) has to explain the fact that two numerically distinct but physically indistinguishable individuals have different maximal consciousness due to their spatial location. We contend that this last conclusion is strongly at variance with our contemporary scientific image of the world.