Maurizio Ferraris

Social Ontology and Documentality

Social objects exist, the proof being the difference between thinking to promise something, and actually promising something: once you give your word, the promise keeps on existing, even in case you forget about it, or—as more frequently happens—you change your mind. The first aim of this article is to expand on the nature of social objects, as contrasted with physical and ideal objects, and to spell out the steps that lead to their discovery. Secondly, I will illustrate and criticize the major contemporary theory on social objects, John Searle’s theory, and compare it with another theory, according to which social objects are a kind of inscription. Lastly, I want show how, from this standpoint, a social ontology evolves naturally into a theory of documents, which I propose to name “documentality”.

Where are you? : an ontology of the cell phone

Foreword by Umberto Eco Where Are You? The Pharaohs Mobile Phone Writing Recording Constructing Realism and Textualism Weak Textualism Notes Index

Lo schema del cane

Articolo pubblicato in Rivista di Estetica , n.s., 8, (2/1998), XXXVIII, pp. 3-27.

From Capital to Documediality

Documediality indicates the allegiance between the constitutive power of documents and the mobilizing power of the media. The chapter proposes to treat documediality as the ending point of a great historical transformation whose previous phases have been capitalism and mediality. Capitalism in the strict sense corresponds to the economic era of production, and to the political era of liberalism. When populism prevails over liberalism, and communication has the upper hand over production, we enter the phase of mediality. Finally, documediality corresponds to a third phase, characterized by recording: that is, by the use of a huge apparatus, namely the Web, which has the essential feature of keeping track of any interaction. This chapter highlights the key features of documediality in comparison to those of capitalism and mediality.

Realism as emergentism

ABSTRACT In this paper, I assume that, if knowledge does not refer to something other than itself, the words ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘epistemology’, ‘ontology’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘reflection’ would be meaningless. I define the transcendental fallacy as involving faith in the existence of a spirit independent from matter, capable of producing representations and things. In terms of matter and memory, the fact that the past is repeated by matter is even more important than the fact that it is recalled by memory, because without matter there would be no memory and no ability to remember. I remind the reader that only individuals exist and that the first character of individuals is that they are external with respect to others. Finally, I consider how epistemology should be considered in terms of Pentecostal meaning and emergent meaning: Pentecostal meaning follows the path Meaning → Expression → Inscription. Emergent meaning goes from Inscription → Expression → Meaning.

Letter of Pharisaism

Apparently, in his later years, Heidegger confessed to his assistant: “I still haven’t let the cats out of the bag” (“die Katze noch gar nicht aus dem Sack gelassen”). The saying is linked to another common manner of speaking in Germany: “ich kaufe doch nicht die Katze im Sack”, that is, “Surely I won’t buy the cat in the bag” (i.e. without seeing it), which refers to the times when people would pass off cats as rabbits at the market. In short, “I will not buy a pig in a poke.” Heidegger’s statement can be understood as follows: the situation is still unclear, there is still something in store. And maybe: “I have not spilled the beans yet.”

A brief history of new realism

In this paper I try to sketch a brief history of new realism. Starting from nineteenth century idealism, I then move on to discuss twentieth century postmodernism, which, I argue, is the heir of idealism and the theoretical enemy of new realism. Finally, I offer a reconstruction of how and why contemporary new realism came into being and propose a few remarks on its future perspectives. Keywords: idealism, post-modernism, new realism, ontology, epistemology

Nuovo Realismo 2016

The essay presents the traits of what has recently been called new realism in philosophy, arguing that this new trend aims at engaging with the existence of certain classes of objects, trying to avoid devolving to scientific thinking all questions about the existence of reality. The new realistic philosphical approach is indeed closer to 19th-century idealism than to postmodern thought. It finds its forebears in American “new realism” and “critical realism” and tries to oppose the “transcendental fallacy”, that is, the confusion between ontology and epistemology, and asks whether the 20th-century wave againt realism, and the deconstruction of metaphysics, meant a comtinuity or a break with 19th-cent idealism. By a survey of the rare new realists who meant to oppose both 20th-century post-idealism and analytical philosophy, new realism tries to oppose the “hermeneutic fallacy”. The author traces the steps by which the notion of new realism came to the fore and highligths: a coming together of new realism, speculative realism, and the realistic elements in phenomenology and analytic philosophy. The essay ends up allowing for the existence of different kinds of realisms: “negative realism”, “neutral realism”, “positive realism”.

Collective intentionality or documentality

In this article I defend two theses. The first is that the centrality of recording in the social world is manifested through the production of documents, a phenomenon which has been present since the earliest phases of society and which has undergone an exponential growth through the technological developments of the last decades (computers, tablets, smartphones). The second is that the centrality of documents leads to a view of normativity according to which human beings are primarily passive receptors of rules manifested through documents. We are not intentional producers of values. The latter, as I shall suggest in my conclusion, should be viewed as being ‘socially dependent’ rather than ‘socially constructed’.

Otherness: The Prevalence of the Real

The paper considers three uses of the real in literature that bear witness to what I would call “prevalence” of the real as the ultimate otherness. The first concerns the way in which the real bursts into fiction; the latter does indeed draw from the former details and surprises little accessible to imagination. The second is the way in which sometimes the pretext of fiction is used to mitigate the consequences of its claims; this mode is the strongest evidence of the extent to which fiction is steeped in reality. The third refers to the postmodern world, in which theory itself purported to be literaturised; certain statements (otherwise false or morally serious) are possible in such a theoretical context since the postmodern discourse theorizes the loss of the distinction between reality and fiction, and between philosophy and literature. The thread that unites these three ways to represent the relationship between fiction and reality is that all three of them are represented in the contemporary cultural landscape. The minimalist moral that can be drawn from this is therefore that realism – as well as anti-realism – is said in many ways that are not always transparent.