Andrea Bonomi is an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 philosopher and logician. Born in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 in 1940, he studied with Enzo Paci. After an initial interest in phenomenology (Existence and structure: Essay on Merleau-Ponty, 1967), he decided to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to the study of analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...

, particularly the philosophy of language

Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...

. He was probably among the first, groundbreaking Italian philosophers to make serious contributions to this field.

His major contributions have been concentrated in the area of formal semantics, especially in the field of the logic of epistemic, modal and temporal sentences. In particular, in Mental Events (1983), he proposed an original solution to the problem of the intentionality of propositional attitude attributions, based on the idea of perspectivity: the systematic ambiguity of interpretation

Interpretation (logic)

An interpretation is an assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language. Many formal languages used in mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science are defined in solely syntactic terms, and as such do not have any meaning until they are given some interpretation...

 which characterizes propositional attitude sentences is explained by way of the contrast between the point of view of the attributor and the point of view of the person who entertains the attitude attributed. Also of notable importance is his semantic analysis of fictitious contexts of language use (Universes of Discourse, 1979; The spirit of narration, 1994).

The figure of Bonomi has had a decisive role in the development of analytic philosophy in Italy, both through his popular introductions and editions of the works of the classics in that tradition (The Logical Structure of Language, 1973) as well as through his teaching: many Italian philosophers of language went through their period of formation at his school.

Books

• Sintassi e Semantica nella Grammatica Trasformazionale (with G. Usberti), Il Saggiatore, Milano. 1971.
• La Struttura Logica Del Linguaggio, Bompiani, Milano. 1973.
• Le Vie Del Riferimento, Bompiani, Milano. 1975
• Universi Di Discorso, Feltrinelli, Milano. 1979
• Eventi Mentali, Il Saggiatore, Milano. 1983.
• Le Immagini Dei Nomi, Garzanti, Milano. 1987.
• Lo Spirito Della Narrazione, Bompiani, Milano 1994
• Tempo e Linguaggio. Introduzione Alla Semantica Del Tempo e Dell'Aspetto Verbale(with A. Zucchi), Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2001

Articles

Articles in Italian:

• "Linguistica e Logica", in Intorno alla linguistica, a cura di C. Segre, Feltrinelli, Milano 1983
• "Determinismo e Semantiche per le Logiche Temporali", in Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Logica, 1-5 ottobre 1979", Bibliopolis, Napoli. 1980
• "Sul Cogito Cartesiano: Natura Inferenziale e Criteri di Giustificabilità", in Problemi fondazionali nella teoria del significato, a cura di G. Usberti, Olschki Editore, Firenze 1991

Articles in English:

• “The Problem of Language in Husserl”. TELOS
  TELOS (journal)
  Telos is an academic journal published in the United States. It was founded in May 1968 to provide the New Left with a coherent theoretical perspective. It sought to expand the Husserlian diagnosis of "the crisis of European sciences" to prefigure a particular program of social reconstruction...
  
  06 (Fall 1970). New York: Telos Press
• "On the Concept of Logical Form in Fregre, in H. Parret (ed.), History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics W. de Gruyter, Berlin-NewYork 1976 (pp.719–732)
• "Existence, Presupposition and Anaphoric Space,in Journal of Philosophical Logic, 6, 1977 (pp. 239–267)
• "A Problem About Intentionality", Topoi, 5, 1986 (pp. 91–100)
• "Relevant Situations", Synthese, 73, 1987 (pp. 623–636)
• "Persistent Truths", Intellectica, 1/2, 1992, (pp. 79–103)
• "Only:Association With Focus in Event Semantics" (with P. Casalegno), Natural Language Semantics 2, 1993 (pp. 1–45)
• "Tense, Reference and Temporal Anaphora", in Lingua e Stile, 30, 3, 1995 (pp. 483–500)
• "Transparency and Specificity in Intentional Contexts", in P. Leonardi and M. Santambrogio (eds.), On Quine, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995 (pp. 164–185)
• "Aspect and Quantification", in P. M. Bertinetto, V. Bianchi, H. Higginbotham, M. Squartini (eds), Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality, vol. I, Rosenberg & Sellier, Torino 1995 (pp. 93–110)
• "Aspect, Quantification and When-Clauses in Italian", Linguistics and Philosophy, 20, 1997 (pp. 469–514)
• "The Progressive and the Structure of Events", in Journal of Semantics, 14, 1997 (pp. 173–205)
• "Indices and Contexts of Discourse, in Lingua e Stile, 33.3, 1998 (pp. 471–485)
• "Book Review: P. Ludlow, Semantic, Tense and Time, Linguistics and Philosophy, 25, 2002, (pp. 81–95)
• "A Pragmatic Framework for Truth in Fiction (with S. Zucchi), Dialectica, 57, 2003, (pp. 103–120)

External links

• Collection of on-line texts by Andrea Bonomì