Carlo Penco

After receiving his master's degree in philosophy at the University of Genoa (Italy), Carlo Penco went to Oxford to study with Sir Michael Dummett, of whom he translated the introduction to 'Frege: Philosophy of Language'. He taught philosophy of science at the University of Salento in southern Italy and later philosophy of language at the University of Genoa, where he became a full professor in 2005. He spent one academic year at the University of Pittsburgh, where he attended a seminar with Robert Brandom and John McDowell, and he spent a period of research at the Institute of Philosophy in Senate House, London, in 2014, the year that started the discussion about Brexit. He has published books and papers on Frege and Wittgenstein and on different topics in the philosophy of language, mainly on context dependence, definite descriptions, demonstratives, and slurs. He edited many collections, among which: 'Explaining the Mental' (Cambridge S.P. 2007) with Michael Beaney and Massimiliano Vignolo, 'What is Said and What is Not. On the boundary between semantics and pragmatics' (CSLI, Chicago U.P. 2013) with Filippo Domaneschi, a reading on context dependence in the philosophy of language and a popular book, 'I take it back. Uses and Abuses of Insinuations' [in Italian] (2016). He now teaches Theories of Communication, working on different aspects of pragmatics, from Speech acts to implicatures and presuppositions (on which he has also done some experimental work).