Dario Vaccaro
Dario Vaccaro
PhD Philosophy Student, GTA
I am originally from Milan, Italy. I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Philosophy from the University of Milan. As part of my Master’s program, I also attended a full academic year at King’s College London. I moved to the US in August 2022, to pursue an academic career in philosophy.
I specialize in epistemology, because I think it deals with the most important and fundamental questions one can ask, but I have very wide-ranging philosophical interests and am passionate about most philosophical questions. I think that a good philosopher should engage with a wide variety of topics, and I try to live up to my belief.
When I don’t do philosophy, I enjoy videogames (mostly single-player adventures and competitive fighting games), I listen to (mostly Italian) music, I work out regularly, and I can be quite the party animal in the right context.
Education
M.A., Philosophy, University of Milan, 110/110 summa cum laude
Dissertation: Naturalizing Kripkenstein: How Dispositional, Primitivist, and Skeptical Answers to Kripke’s Wittgenstein All Fit within an Evolutionary Account of Meaning (Theoretical Philosophy, Professors Andrea Guardo and Paolo Spinicci)
M.A., Philosophy, King’s College London
Exchange student for the academic year 2019/2020
Teacher Training FOR24
Qualified to teach History and Philosophy in Secondary Education institutions.
B.A., Philosophy, University of Milan, 110/110
Capstone: Reason and other Paradoxes in Robert Fogelin’s “Walking the Tightrope of Reason” (Theoretical Philosophy, Professor Paolo Spinicci)
Research
Most of my research is either directly engaging with problems in epistemology or at the intersection of epistemology and other philosophical areas.
Here is a list of current works in progress and ideas I recently developed:
- Epistemic Overshooting and Encroachment: I claim that it is rational to check again what one already has sufficient epistemic support for, only when one is not sure that they have reached the required epistemic support for the belief. This idea is part of a more general endorsement and defense of pragmatic encroachment on function-first epistemology grounds: we should be encroachers because of what the point of knowledge should be.
- Against Kantian Fallibilism: I provide novel arguments to support Lawrence Pasternack’s rejection of Andrew Chignell’s reading of Kant as a precursor of fallibilism in epistemology.
- Against Moore’s Naturalistic Fallacy: I claim that Moore’s naturalistic fallacy argument is circular and that the related open-question argument provides no epistemic support against reductionism.
- Epistemic Privilege and Disability: I am considering whether persons with disabilities, unlike most oppressed social groups, lack epistemic privilege regarding their condition as disabled. So far, I have developed a three-tiered view: most non-sensory, non-mental disabilities provide full epistemic privilege; most sensory, non-mental disabilities provide partial epistemic privilege; most mental disabilities do not provide epistemic privilege.
- (Free Will) Skepticism: I provide a general taxonomy of “skepticism” as used in different areas of philosophy, and show that all -apparently very different- understandings of the term have one core commitment in common. I then apply the finding to the free will skepticism debate, and show that Derk Pereboom’s use of the term is problematic.
- Free Will and Control: I suspect that the best conception of freedom compatibilists endorse entails lack of control in the sense developed by Palmer (2021), where S has control over A only if “no-one else and nothing else has control over whether [A] occurs”. I think that this is not a problem for compatibilism.
On top of refining these, I intend to focus my research in the near future on the following topics: Function-First Epistemology; The Power of Conceptual Resources; Attention; Knowledge as a Natural Kind; Perceptual Knowledge; Fallible Warrant.
Presentations
- The Philosopher’s Nest, ‘Dario Vaccaro on Analytic vs Continental Philosophy and Reliability in Knowledge’, November 2022 (https://open.spotify.com/episode/ 2o6NsBRzUp0MWsiiOPTgyL?si=1396f7089cea4086)
- “Kantian Fallibilism vs Kantian Infallibilism: An Analysis”, Tennessee Philosophical Association, Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN) – 10/21/2023
- “G. E. Moore’s Naturalistic Fallacy”, Binghamton University Graduate Conference, Binghamton University (Binghamton, NY) – 11/03/2023
- “Epistemic Overshooting”, The Inquiry Network (online workshop for academic researchers in epistemology) – 11/29/2023
Teaching
For University of Tennessee, Knoxville:
Fall 2023 – Professional Responsibility (Primary: Ryan Windeknecht)
Spring 2023 – Introduction to Philosophy (Primary: Sam von Mizener)
Fall 2022 – Introduction to Philosophy (Primary: Kristina Gehrman)
For “Parini” Classical High School:
Spring 2017 – The “Actio”: Voice, Proxemics and Interpretation
Community
I am in the early stages of organizing with my supervisor, Georgi Gardiner, a series of workshops titled “Philosophy through Theater Games”. The idea is to engage with high schools in the Knoxville area and beyond, to show teenagers how different conceptual resources can help us think about and cope with big challenges of our time, like global warming, via fun improv theater games.