Carlo Penco, August 1948 –, is an Italian analytic philosopher and full professor in philosophy of language at the University of Genoa in Italy.

Biography

Born to Emilio Penco (engineer) and Margherita Castello (high school Italian teacher), Penco received his Ph.D. in Philosophy Summa cum Laude at the University of Genoa in 1972 with a specialization in the philosophy of science (at the time in Italy there were no PhD; he became a member of the PhD program later as a teacher). He studied with Evandro Agazzi in Genoa, with Michael Dummett in Oxford, and later with Robert Brandom and John McDowell at the University of Pittsburgh (he later organized a congress on Brandom's analytic pragmatism). He has received various academic awards and fellowships including: CNR Fellow (1976), NATO Fellow at Oxford University (1979), Fellow of the Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science (1997-1998) and Fellow of the Institute of Philosophy (London) (2013-2014). He has been President of the Italian Society for the Analytic Philosophy (2002-2004), and member of Steering Committee of the Italian Society for Logic and the Philosophy of Sciences and the European Society for Analytic Philosophy. Together with Joao Branquino and Josep Corbi, he began a series of "Latin Meeting in Analytic Philosophy", in order to foster the exchange of ideas among Analytic Philosophers in the southern countries in Europe, with connection with Latin America. He has been teaching in South of Italy (University of Lecce) between 1988 and 1991; then he went to the University of Genoa, where he taught as full professor in Philosophy of Language until 2017. President of the Master in Philosophy during the period 2004-2010, he became Head of the Doctoral School in Human Science. He has been working in the Editorial or Scientific Committees for various journals, such as Epistemologia, An International Journal for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Networks, A journal for the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and the Cognitive Sciences, European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, Theoria (A Swedish Journal for Philosophy). His early research interests has been mainly on the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and the philosophy of Frege. He began to work on the problem of context for the Meetings "Modeling and Using Contexts" since 1999. His latest interests are more strictly linked to different topics in the Philosophy of Language and Pragmatics, mainly on the problem of the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics and the relation between indexicals and demonstrations. He is a founder of the Philvideos Project.

Published works

Books (author) Books (editor) Selected papers