From Meaning to Being: Papers on Semantics, Epistemology and Ontology

"There is a subtle line to follow from meaning to being, and an invisible door to pass between them..." This book presents for the first time a series of papers on semantics, philosophy of science and pre-Socratic philosophy written over the past ten years. 'Meaning without Reference' examines the semantic and epistemological difficulties faced by any referential theory of meaning to propose as a suitable alternative a purely logical theory that abandons any relation with whatever is assumed to be real and destined to remain unknown. The two following papers, 'Time and Being in Parmenides' and 'Parmenides? Dualism' aim at reconstructing the Parmenidean thought to underline its internal coherence and the originality of the work and the conception of the pre-Socratic thinker. One and the same vision is the fundament of the true-being being / true-appearing doxa dualism: the onto-logical impossibility (and the gnoseologic unthinkability) of the existence of a non-being. Finally, some closing considerations investigate in 'Ex Oriente Lux?' the likelihood of possible contacts between early Indian thought, as preserved in the Vedas or in the first Upanishads, and Parmenides? doctrine.