Elisabetta Sassarini

I am a DPhil student in Philosophy at Jesus College, Oxford. Prior to Oxford, I earned a BA (2018) and MA (2021) in Philosophy from the University of Bologna, followed by a one-year MA (2022) at Uppsala University. My doctoral research is supervised by Professor Timothy Williamson and Dr Matthew Parrott, and is co-funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP and Jesus College.

My research explores Frege puzzles and opacity in metaphysics. Frege puzzles arise in opaque contexts, where sentences that differ only in co-referential expressions appear to differ in truth value. These cases challenge the principle of compositionality, which holds that the semantic value of a complex expression is determined by the semantic values of its parts, and thus expressions with the same semantic value should be freely substitutable without affecting truth value. My thesis examines a range of longstanding philosophical problems through the framework of Frege puzzles. Chapter 1 discusses verbal disputes; Chapter 2 addresses the Knowledge Argument against physicalism; Chapter 3 analyses reductive accounts of metaphysical explanation. My thesis aims to show, first, that the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions plays a central role in these debates, and that the intuitions driving them frequently arise from the presence of expressions that give rise to apparently opaque contexts. Second, it argues that potential solutions to the problems in question—including the relevant error theories—often amount to familiar strategies for resolving Frege puzzles. By drawing out these connections, my thesis aims to bring together seemingly unrelated issues, while providing insights into the scope and significance of Frege puzzles and the conceptual tools involved in their formulation. More broadly, it seeks to motivate an anti-exceptionalist stance to the problems discussed. Recognizing these issues as manifestations of a familiar phenomenon reduces the need for ad hoc theoretical devices tailored to each individual case