The first session was devoted to a review of the history of dispositional properties and the main current approaches to their nature and scope, and to the issues they raise not only in epistemology, but also in metaphysics and ethics. A detailed analysis has been given of the stages that have led from their elimination to their rehabilitation (in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and psychology, probability theory), and successively presented the phases of elimination (Quine) or reduction (Ryle, Goodman, Carnap) that dispositions have undergone, then the main forms by which they have been rehabilitated and understood in the sense of an increasingly realistic commitment, first in the form of categoricalism (D. Armstrong), followed by integral dispositionalism (Mellor, Popper), which maintains that all properties are dispositional. We have already indicated that the functionalist approach, due in particular to S. Mumford, constitutes an interesting way of avoiding the difficulties inherent in all approaches, but one that is undoubtedly insufficiently "realistic", if we want to be able to account for the importance of real dispositions at work in nature.
16:30 - 18:30
