Autore: Giangiuseppe Pili

Giangiuseppe Pili è Ph.D. in filosofia e scienze della mente (2017). E' il fondatore di Scuola Filosofica in cui è editore, redatore e autore. Dalla data di fondazione del portale nel 2009, per SF ha scritto oltre 800 post. Egli è autore di numerosi saggi e articoli in riviste internazionali su tematiche legate all'intelligence, sicurezza e guerra. In lingua italiana ha pubblicato numerosi libri. Scacchista per passione. ---- ENGLISH PRESENTATION ------------------------------------------------- Giangiuseppe Pili - PhD philosophy and sciences of the mind (2017). He is an expert in intelligence and international security, war and philosophy. He is the founder of Scuola Filosofica (Philosophical School). He is a prolific author nationally and internationally. He is a passionate chess player and (back in the days!) amateurish movie maker.

I LIBRI DI SCUOLAFILOSOFICA: ACQUISTALI QUI CON LO SCONTO DEL 25% DIGITANDO SFSCONTO NELLA VOCE BUONO SCONTO ALL'INTERNO DEL CARRELLO

Memory, Meanings and Language – How We Think About Things

Giangiuseppe Pili
23 Ottobre, 2025

How does language connect to the world? A simple, ancient question that should hunt every serious scholar in any field. For example, what do we mean when we say, ‘The army fought bravely against Nazi Germany’ or ‘All crows are black’? How can we connect an ‘army’ to ‘braveness’ and its ‘fighting’ ‘against Nazi Germany’? What do we actually mean by ‘all crows’? No matter how one wants to tackle the problem, this is quite an astonishing open-ended hurdle that every new generation of thinkers must recalibrate or reframe.[1]

Plato started the quest because of his idealist conceptualization of knowledge, which was understood only as perfect in terms of access to the ideas which, in turn, must refer to the world somehow. However, how to connect his ideas to a specific ‘table’ is not an easy endeavor and Aristotle tried to reverse the process: we describe ‘tables’ given the knowledge we get from every specific table. But then, how can we have a general notion of tables? From where this ‘generality’ comes from and how can it be justified? Ultimately, these answers can be partially given reformulating the problem in terms of meaning. The meaning of the sentence ‘the table is black’ depends on the meanings of its constituent components. What does meaning mean? We need to clarify what the meanings of words (in theory, all of them, including prepositions, indexicals, and prepositions).

Interestingly, so-called idealist philosophers such as Renè Descartes and Baruch Spinoza reinterpreted the idealist vision in subjective terms. Plato assumed that ideas are external non-causal entities existing outside the phenomenon and the mind. They stay there eternally unmoving mysteriously able to give us a real glimpse of a stable world. Firstly, Descartes reinterpreted this concept within the subject itself: ideas are stable construction of the cognitive subject whose access is granted by direct introspection whose strength is supplemented by reason. However, the grasp of concepts can be independent from reason, which has the primary goal to make arguments based on those ideas and concepts. Of course, Descartes had the same problem Plato had; that is, how to connect ideas to the world. In his case, he had to make a brilliant and convoluted argument based on the alignment between ideas and the world granted by God and by the general architecture of cognition.[2] Spinoza, partially endorsing and criticizing Descartes, extended those lines of arguments: not only ideas can be explicitly grasped directly through a special direct introspection (intuition) but reason is the sole means to grant justification in elaborating new ideas.[3]

Agostino – Felicità, godimento della contemplazione di Dio

Giangiuseppe Pili
30 Agosto, 2025

[Originariamente pubblicato in data 20 novembre 2022]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo#/media/File:Saint_Augustine_by_Philippe_de_Champaigne.jpg

La storia del pensiero antico sulla felicità si è incentrato su alcuni concetti e termini comuni. La felicità è il risultato dell’applicazione della virtù ed essa è alla portata dell’uomo, purché quest’ultimo si concentri nel pieno dispiegamento della sua stessa natura che, come abbiamo visto, è concepita essenzialmente nella sua razionalità. “Sii la tua ragione” poteva essere il comandamento comune alle teorie considerate sino ad ora e la visione dell’uomo come essere razionale è il fil rouge che unisce le teorie dell’antichità classica. Ma con l’avvento del cristianesimo si introduce un nuovo termine nella complessa equazione il cui risultato è la suprema felicità: il Dio creatore cristiano.

In queste pagine abbiamo già incontrato la figura del dio, ora declinata come puro pensiero di pensiero (il caso di Aristotele), ora declinata come provvidenza immanente nel mondo (come nella filosofia stoica), ora concepita come semplice entità indifferente rispetto alle sorti degli esseri umani (come sosteneva Epicuro). Ma nella filosofia cristiana e, come vedremo, nel pensiero di Agostino, il ruolo di Dio, un Dio creatore la cui essenza è l’amore, è di gran lunga di maggior spessore anche perché in Lui Agostino rintraccia la fonte stessa della felicità umana. Per tale ragione, il nostro percorso inizierà proprio da una succinta analisi di cosa sia il Dio di Agostino e quale sia la sua connessione con l’uomo e la felicità.

Emojis Logics – How to Explain Logical Thinking to a Four-Year Old

Giangiuseppe Pili
6 Agosto, 2025

Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head or tail out of it. – Groucho Marx

Introduction to Emoji Logics and Caveats

For many years I studied formal logics and set theory alongside everything else. They were the intrinsic foundation of my background work, the one that never appeared on the surface because it was too personal and too specific at the same time.[1] Moreover, in spite of many applications of formal logic thinking from war to society, I never fully embraced the sheer love for machinery or formal symbolism because I am much more semantically driven.[2] In fact, I am obsessed by semantics and natural language and the more I think about them the deeper the obsession. Although I have been always skeptical on analytic philosophy implicitly share belief that it is all about bad use of unclarified language and truth-values, I am in fact as obsessed as the later Wittgenstein or Kant in the three major critiques, which are essentially a quest for understanding how our judgements (statements) is even possible. In fact, I even argued that the deconstruction of judgement through language was ultimately what Kant achieved in the Critique of Pure Reason.[3]

However, this does not change my sheer admiration for those pillars of thought who elaborated formal logics how we know it and Kurt Godel has been my logical hero since I started my logical quest twenty-four years ago.[4] As a result of my effort to teach formal and informal logics, I arrived to conceive an idea to how teach basic principles of formal logics to kids. I am not very versatile with very young kids, that is, less than 14 and I don’t have any evidence of specific applications of the system I am proposing here, but the idea is very simple. Formal logic is about creating a system of codified symbols to be manipulated syntactically, that is, through the ‘simple’ application of rules, we can be creative in selecting what symbols we want to use. What if we are creative and use emoticons for formalizing propositional logic?

With this intuition in mind, I propose the following formal logic game that could be used for teaching logic to kids. I welcome any reader to try and report what happened and how it worked in the comments section.

Beethoven’s Autobiographical Notes – A Life (Un)Like Many Others

Giangiuseppe Pili
23 Marzo, 2025

By Joseph Karl Stieler – Google Arts & Culture, rotated and cropped to remove the potentially copyrighted photo of the frame., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133271390

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is an unreplaceable milestone in the history of Western civilization, whose dimension is so crystal clear that, no matter the weaving moment of political and moral fashion of the day, his music is executed everywhere in the world. The reason is simple. Those who had the fortune to encounter and understand his music will never stop to be baffled by it, by its unique capacity to embed human sentiments inside a strict iron rational logic.

Differently from Chopin, who is so emotional to be undigestible to some, differently from Bach, whose love for abstract structure makes him the embodiment of the XVII century mechanicism, Beethoven is the unique pinnacle of intellect, reason and sensibility, a rare Kantian union of different aspects of human cognition and experience. But what about the life behind the music? Is Beethoven a man unlike many others? The answer is ambivalent when reading a selection of biographical notes and other annotations left in his Conversation Books and here, I will only draw some remarks without entering in the specificities of Beethoven’s life, which is assumed sufficiently known to the reader.

What I want to report here are the common threads that Beethoven shared with many other great thinkers. Yes, thinkers, because Beethoven only by accident was a musician, as his music is a philosophical act as Kubrick’s movies. As argued elsewhere, philosophy is not the land of written language necessarily but of argumentation for the sake of truth reached through a merciless critique of language. As such, it is pointless to draw a rigid line between Beethoven and Kant or Spinoza, to mention two major thinkers whose life wasn’t as different from Beethoven’s – Gens una sumus.

Levels of Human Action – Stages and Interplays of Human Reality

Giangiuseppe Pili
24 Febbraio, 2025

Humans purposefully act every day and all the time. They act differently, however, every single time, as they are all immersed in a changing environment.[1] As such, all actions are different, at least, according to time, where ‘time’ here is intended as conventional and landscape-time (meaning, the natural flow of events).[2] Instead, from a human perspective, it is the action taken that determines the perception of time flow and the related awareness and meaning of time change.[3] This is a flat way to understand different types of actions, however, because the order in which actions are executed does not tell anything about their different nature, that is, the type of causal events they are immersed and part of in relation to some desired effect to be determined.

As Ludwig von Mises argued, human action is based on the premise of change: “Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into agency, is aiming at ends and goals (…) [human action] is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.”[4] Although all actions are taken according to specific dispositional belief, that is, according to a given intention formulable in a sentence in which the factual components indicate the desired state of affairs to be reached,[5] they can be classified according to what piece of reality they are intended to bring change.

Preconditions and Premises for Understandability of Human Actions

The best way to understand the different typologies of actions is to divide them into causal/effect categories. Any purposeful human action is rationally calculated in function of given desired effects intended to be reachable through a given intention to be fully translated into the realm of extension.[6] For understanding how humans act, it is necessary to assume that they know how they can make a meaningful difference in the world of the extension.[7] In other words, they assume that they can translate their intentions into proper action, where the action is causally determined by a correspondent state of the mind, whose factual determination is also the definition of the goal to be achieved through the action itself.[8] It is assumed that any mental state is part of a chain of causes whose result is action and its associated state of mind.[9]

The Natural Order of Money – Roy Sebag

Giangiuseppe Pili
7 Agosto, 2024

Economics was time ago dubbed as the ‘sad science,’ because of its intrinsic predictive limitations, in spite of its colossal mathematical foundation. In this regard, economic libraries seem to disprove Galileo’s abused saying that ‘the book of nature is written in mathematical language.’ It might be so only because we, humans, so decided.[1] Alas, portions of this book do not seem to respond very well to mathematics.[2] Marxists and neo-Keynesians differently embraced the need to change economics in a ‘happy’ science, finally able, as all the rest of the successful sciences, to predict future facts and events through mathematical calculations over axioms and logical derivations. They tried the endeavor differently.

Natural language and set theoretical and formal logic reductions

Giangiuseppe Pili
15 Luglio, 2024

Structure - Dr. Pili Author — Structure – Dr. Pili Author

Natural language and set theoretical and formal logic reductions – A philosophical account

A sheer love for propositions – An obsession with analytic philosophy, logics and mathematics

Analytic philosophy was born out of the general problem of solving metaphysics through a careful diagnostic of natural language. After the early days of formal logics and set theory with Boole and Cator, Frege and Russell arrived at the conclusion that natural language spontaneously produces irreducible paradoxes such as the liar and the sorites paradoxes. Through the length of these paradoxes, they concluded that traditional metaphysics was a gigantic mistake, formulable as it was under mistaken conception of language. The idea was ingenuous and simple to grasp. If I use very bad components and tools, I can only produce flawed engines, whose appearance is similar to a working engine until we check it. This ‘diagnostic’ approach to philosophy is as old as the Greeks, who were the first to outline different ways to ‘unveil life-threating mistakes through reasoning’. This was firstly tried in the realm of ethics, especially during the Alexandrine philosophies.[1] Wildly differently, this was tried again by the founding fathers of analytic philosophy.

Frege elaborated an entire philosophical system out of a new conception of logics applied to semantics through the instruments of the ‘new’ developments in formal logic, a Leibnizian ideal language through which all problems could be formulated and, then, solved by ‘brute force’ calculations.[2] In this broad category I am including set theory – in fact, it is arguable that formal logics and set theory cannot even be thought independently in the human mind.[3] In the following writing, I will consider set theory as the broad category including naïve set theory and Zermelo-Frankel theory plus the axiom of choice (ZFC).[4] It could be a matter of contentious, but set theory is, itself, a parallel endeavor that overlaps with the development of formal logic as we know. Moreover, set theory and formal logics are intended to mirror one another, where the sets are intended to be the object-domain of the propositions formulable in a formal language.[5] Set theory and formal logics tied together for solving all the natural language’s problems posed to human understanding, or so the founding fathers of analytic philosophy believed.

Un nuovo Editor in Chief per Scuola Filosofica!

Giangiuseppe Pili
22 Maggio, 2024

Hello Everyone,

Spero di trovarvi tutti bene! Vi scrivo in quanto parte dei lettori di Scuola Filosofica con un long lasting interest nella piattaforma – con un sincero ringraziamento a tutti voi. Dati i miei molteplici impegni, non riesco piu’ a dedicare il tempo necessario per mantenere il sito nella giusta direzione e garantire il costante impegno richiesto per il successo della piattaforma in termini di entrate, nuovi autori e nuove opportunità, come d’altronde è stato per quasi 13 anni dei 15 totali. Inoltre, non credo che mantenere il comando tanto a lungo sia una salutare procedura in qualsiasi genere di istituzione. Ad un certo punto, c’e’ bisogno di cambi di prospettive, nuovi punti di vista e opportunità. Per tale ragione, dopo un po’ di tempo necessario, penso di aver trovato la persona giusta in Simone Di Massa.

Simone Di Massa e’ un giovane studioso di linguistica e lettere moderne, con una unmatched qualita’ nella conoscenza della lingua italiana (che ne fa un editor ideale). Egli ha lavorato per due anni con me a vari progetti editoriali dentro e fuori Scuola Filosofica. Di Massa ha anche dimostrato di avere eccellenti qualita’ nel seguire partner come la casa editrice Diarkos, e autori internazionali. Inoltre, egli è un grande sostenitore degli ideali che costituiscono il sito e che hanno fatto una piattaforma seguita da decine di migliaia di lettori. Infine, Di Massa è stato inserito come autore senior quasi da subito, avendo dimostrato qualita’ indubitabili. Infine, Di Massa ha la giusta locazione anagrafico-geografica (vivendo e studiando a Milano) per fare del sito quel che tutti vogliamo che sia.

Naturalmente, io rimarro’ il fondatore, autore e supervisore in ogni caso, ma da ora in avanti sarà Simone a stabilire agende e traiettorie, nonchè occuparsi delle minuzie necessarie all’esistenza di un blog.

Spero allora che questo sia il nuovo passo che Scuola Filosofica stava cercando ed è mia personale convinzione che Simone sarà l’outstanding editor in chief e decision maker che ha già dimostrato di essere. Invito tutti a rivolgervi direttamente a lui per le future richieste e proposte e colgo l’occasione di ringraziare voi, come tutti gli altri autori, per credere nella Ragione, Cultura e Filosofia.

Un caro saluto cordiale,

Giangiuseppe Pili

Defining Intelligence as a Cognitive Capacity – A Reply to a Reader

Giangiuseppe Pili
5 Febbraio, 2024

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_the_brain._Wellcome_L0008294.jpg

How do you define intelligence in the cognitive domain?

I never delved deeply into the intelligence-mind problem. Defining intelligence is a slipper problem and, in my opinion, not necessarily very interesting. Moreover, there is too much talk about it, which shows that we are possibly hitting a wall. When I first read Turing and approached the philosophy of mind, I never believed there was much promise in that space (definition of intelligence) for many reasons. One reason is the significant confusion about what we can confidently claim to know versus what remains unknown or not fully understood from the neurobiological perspective. When Turing tackled the topic, he simply demonstrated that intelligence essentially boils down to performance when it can be concretely defined. In other words, if x produces y, and if a human would produce y in a manner that we, as humans, would deem intelligent, then x is intelligent (thus, the trick lies in constructing a transitive argument for comparison, etc., which is fair enough for programmers or pure logicians attempting to create some form of computing machine). Turing was very candid in setting limits to the thought experiment. I believe that intelligence pertains to a certain type of performance that necessitates specific properties at the causal level.

[I] If S produces x through I, where I has causal capacity such that x is not produced by chance and x achieve a solution for a given problem, then S is intelligent.

A Pluralistic Understanding of Time – Time as Eternal truths

Giangiuseppe Pili
19 Gennaio, 2024

Abstract

‘Time is said in many ways’, to paraphrase Aristotle. In this essay, time is comprehended in four distinct yet parallel ways: subjective time, event time, conventional time, and landscape time. Subjective time measures the interval between two subjective experiences recorded by memory. Event time represents the order of events involved in a process. Conventional time is the measurement of a given physical interval registered by a clock and intersubjectively assumed as common. Landscape time refers to the current disposition of all changing facts in the universe. These four types of time are independent and autonomous from one another, as the essay will demonstrate. Although distinct, these time types can be related, collectively contributing to our understanding of the concept of time and how we use the term in language. The conclusion supports a pluralistic view of time, where time is partitioned into four categories, each explaining a distinct portion of reality.

Introduction – Time in the History of Philosophy

Time was not a major concern of the Greek-Roman philosophical tradition. From one side, time was conceived as the form of the appearances, that is of what it does not exist. Parmenides, essentially, banned time from his ontology, as the only things that exist is ‘the being,’ which was to be intended as eternal, meaning a-temporal, an object that does not change, hence does not exist in time.[1] Any subsequent metaphysical approach which endorsed implicitly or explicitly any form of Parmenidean ontology (something that does exist in its perfection because it never changes) is, in a way or another, banning time in a very fundamental sense.[2] Both Plato and Aristotle essentially (here intended ‘literally,’ i.e. in their understanding of what ‘really exists’) endorsed Parmenides’ vision. For some interesting reasons, today this notion is called ‘Platonic,’ but the conception of a perfect unchanging being independent from how things look like in and through time is, in fact, originated by Parmenides.