L’identità come relazione e le sue espressioni. Conversazione a due voci a partire da Frege

The dialogue develops from Frege’s 1892 article, On Sense and Denotation, and the source from which it springs: what is identity and how can it be expressed? S. Raynaud questions Eva Picardi, the scholar to whom the Italian speaking audience mostly owes its knowledge of Frege, raising a number of issues ranging from opposition experienced while teaching, focusing on identity as a central role, both from an ontological and a logical standpoint, to the position by Frege in the long developmental history of the topic. This also touches on the philosophers from Plato to Leibniz, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel. Other themes covered are the comparison of algebraic notation and «spoken language» to the practice of the use of proper nouns, the semantics of which provoked a flourishing debate in the second half of the nineteenth century. This contrasted with a semantics based on the unenlightened respect for the original noun imposition and a semantics in deference to the identifying knowledge of experts. The conversation ends by highlighting the developments of the post-Fregean debate, from Wittgenstein to Quine, Kripke, Geach and Dummett, concerning the possibility of thinking an indefinitely open system of identities, the relationships between ontology and metaphysics, and the logic of research.