Search

This paper adds to the discussion on quality of space by analyzing it through the lens of valuation theory, thus introducing an evaluative notion of quality that moves beyond the descriptive identification of general spatial characteristics.The first section of the paper argues that quality conveys an affirmative connotation derived from an evaluator’s positive assessment of an object’s properties. Building on this, the second part links the evaluative conceptualization of quality to orders of worth (Boltanski, Thévenot, 2006). Accordingly, the paper defines the quality of space as those spatial characteristics that are of relative value within a subject’s order of worth. The third section illustrates these conceptualizations by analyzing the redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin during the 1990s and the orders of worth that shaped this historical event. This analysis shows how orders of worth generate conflicts regarding the quality of space but also foster alliances and complicities in such a way that certain spatial arrangements get realized while others do not.

‘Quality’ and ‘space’ were not treated jointly as a key consideration in the main social scientific paradigms. Nor were ‘experience’ and ‘place’. This paper asks what vocabulary could close this gap without falling into a trap of reductive materialism that treats emplaced qualities like reified ‘variables’, or reductive idealism that disembodies them and treats as ‘signs’ and ‘ideas’. We address this issue by jointly thematizing two important pairs of concepts: distributive and attributive quality, and lived and reflective experience, and relating them to space. Many culturalist frameworks have ignored space and prioritized reflective attribution of quality. This is an epistemological problem because as Merleau-Ponty had already showed spatial emplacement of human experience is existentially and culturally fundamental. This has been transformed into a lingering methodological problem, largely because phenomenology was marginalized in English speaking social sciences. Drawing on its over-looked classic concepts, notably the ones by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schütz, as well as congenial new conceptions, the present paper offers relational holistic definitions of space, place, quality and experience, and it situates them vis-à-vis traditional dimensions of qualitative sociological analysis. Subsequently, an outline of a phenomenological theory of ‘emplaced qualities’ is proposed. The iconic club Berghain in Berlin provides a provisional exemplification framed by Henri Lefebvre’s anti-idealist notion of “architecture of enjoyment” and Michel Foucault’s spatio-cultural notion of “heterotopia”.

This paper traces the tenuous relationship of prestige television, the culture industry and blackness. The opening section aims to get a hold on what is meant by prestige television. We review literature that introduces and problematizes the intuitive arguments of prestige television’s elevated status as high art and ultimately conclude with a sociopolitical argument that minimises the distinction between form and content in order to emphasise and show the hierarchy inherent in the culture industry based on legitimacy. The second section introduces the idea of blackness to the conversation of prestige television by analysing the final scene of The Sopranos – a cut to the black screen – as not merely the event that officially inaugurates prestige television, but as an event that also announces the possible escape from its parameters of legitimacy. To do the latter we reflect upon “Black Bieber” as a figure of illegitimate blackness in Donald Glover’s Atlanta. In the third and concluding sections of the paper, we continue our elaboration of the uniqueness of blackness by putting into conversation Fred Moten’s conception of fugitive blackness with Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory. In the conclusion, we show how blackness challenges the totalizing aspect of the culture industry, totalizing aspect of the culture industry, pointing us towards something altogether new, after black(ness).

Research on spatial quality generally evaluates the quality of space through the factors of infrastructure, use of streets and shared spaces, security, accessibility, and inclusiveness of various activity centers and districts. However, how people perceive a place as one with good qualities and establish an attachment depends on their needs and the affordability of the place. This paper discusses the dynamic process of spatial appropriation through the findings of research on intra-European cross-border labor commuters. Differences resulting from uneven developments in Europe are still the prominent factor for many to seek employment opportunities abroad for higher incomes, better living standards or attractive and secure jobs. However, upon employment cross-border workers continue to reside in their home countries and practice a circular mobility. Despite the difficulties of dealing with the dual frame of two nation-states’ legal settings on taxation, social security regulations, and employment rights, cross-border commuters, through their mobility across borders, enjoy the flexibility of choosing their place of residence depending on their changing needs and on affordability. This relation between needs, affordability and spatial appropriation is shown in the paper through place attachment narrations of lifestyle- and livelihood-oriented commuters.

The following paper explores the categorisation of groups. Indeed, there are different ways to distinguish human groups from one another: on the one hand, sociological analyses focus their attention on the distinction between being inside and outside of groups; on the other hand, collective action theories mainly focus on the distinction between collectives and aggregates, based on the kind of action that groups can perform, i.e., joint or not. In this paper, we offer an alternative view by adopting the agent’s perspective and creating a scale based on the importance the agent attributes to his or her membership to different groups. While this perspective seems to lose objectivity as it does not allow the formulation of an unambiguous scale that applies to all individuals, it does allow us to understand the process of identification and the consequent phenomenon whereby very often we act in accordance with other people’s actions, in a collective way, without prior coordination. A practical example based on the so-called “acting white” will be explored in order to test the paper’s proposal. The analysis intends to offer a common ground on the basis of which it would be possible to have further inquiries on the social dimension of self-experience.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the function of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism within Adorno’s thought. In order to do so, I have chosen to focus on the issue of the social significance of the work of art and the role played by the concept of literary material. Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, can be read as a reinterpretation of the idealist aesthetic model based precisely on a non-idealist notion such as that of aesthetic material.If one is to allow a seemingly brutal simplification, there are two ways to think about the social meaning of literature. One identifies somehow the subject of the text, assesses whether or not this challenges the society from which the literary work stems, and on this ground establishes its social character. According to this perspective, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl can be seen as socially engaged literature, while Proust’s Recherche cannot, or can only to a lesser extent. The other approach argues instead that any literary work, and in any of its instances, says something about the society in which it takes shape. In this contribution I would like to focus on this latter approach. In particular, I am interested in understanding how literature is connected to society, that is, through which identifiable elements literary works express certain aspects of society. The Hegelian idealistic idea according to which Greek tragedy expresses the constitutive features of Athenian society, and which is found again and again in the authors who in various ways have taken up Hegel’s legacy, is generally accepted as such and valued for the explanatory opportunities it offers. It is my opinion, however, that one notion in particular can be retrieved within the whole inherited baggage of that aesthetic tradition, which may be able to further clarify the relationship between literature and society. This concept is that of material and the author who has most thoroughly investigated it is Adorno. In this paper I will try to outline the main features of a counterintuitive notion such as that of “literary material” and thereby explain why it plays such an important role in Adorno’s rework of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism. The concept of material, in fact, is key to the definition of another aesthetic category around which, according to Adorno, most of the problems connected to works of art gravitate, that is to say, the notion of form. From Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, one of his most insightful readers, Peter Szondi, draws the main principle for his study of the historical form of modern drama, namely the idea that form is essentially a precipitation, a sedimentation of contents1. The work of art, then, at least according to this definition, is essentially identified by its form. Or, better said, the artwork must be interpreted as the way in which a certain (historical) content sediments in a certain external form. That the form of the work of art is precipitated content means, in simple terms, that no effective disjunction can be assumed between form and content. This is how Adorno reinterprets the concept of “identity of form and content” stressed by classical aesthetics. The content is such only insofar as it is precipitated into a certain form. This amounts to saying that no objective distinction can be established between one and the other. Now, if one were to ask how the form is made, Adorno’s answer is quite straightforward: the form is made by means of organization and, precisely, by means of the organization of the material. As one reads in Aesthetic Theory, in fact, “the substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials,” and the particular form of an artwork is defined as the “organization” of its “materials” (Adorno 1970, transl. 1997: 201). The concept of material, therefore, is key to the definition of the very notion of work of art in its constituent components, namely the relationship between form and content. In this paper I will first of all clarify the notion of artistic material in general and subsequently I will turn to strictly literary material. Finally, and this is the main goal of this essay, I will show to what extent this definition of the material possibly contributes to a better understanding of a widely and variedly debated literary phenomenon of our time, namely the form of the so-called postmodern novel.

Aim of the paper is to situate the meaning of competence by outlining the relation between the architectural practice and the “Super Ecobonus”. This policy framework, introduced by the Italian government in 2020 and revised a number of times, provides fiscal incentives for buildings renovation aimed to energy-efficient adaptation and sustainability goals. Within such framework, a huge amount of efforts and job opportunities for many firms are converging on a national scale. The paper approaches Super Ecobonus as an indirect experiment for operationally defining competence: such peculiar contingency offers a frame of what competences are according to the actions done by architects confronted in their everyday practice with performing the tasks the norm requires.Through a series of semi-structured interviews and their graphical organisation is presented a scenario of rather complex consequences brought by the regulatory constraints, diverging or integrating previous know-hows. Finally, it concludes that, despite a context of high bureaucratic density and logistical and timing pressures, each of the practices defines its action along original paths.

Within the broader scope of joint actions, there is a particular kind, i.e. transgenerational actions, the realization of which requires a long time span and, consequently, a complex and peculiar subject. This paper starts from the detailed definition of transgenerational actions, such as complex, long-term, and asymmetrical actions and aims at outlining a theory of their subject. Such a theory, without embracing the principles of holism, is able to give account of subjects’ specificities. In particular, this is possible if we focus on the notion of end, as defined by Seumas Miller. The paper will then examine an example of transgenerational action to highlight how a theory which is both non-reductionist and non-holistic allows us to address the question of responsibility – and therefore of normativity, so pressing when it comes to social issues – from another point of view: the phenomenological one. Not implying a notion of collective responsibility, like the one held by traditional plural subject theories, this point of view focuses on the possibility of stimulating the sense of responsibility in the individuals who constitute the collective subject.

The ontology of artworks tells us that a work of art, for example, a painting, cannot be identified as either physical or mental object. By the same token, this paper argues the working of art or artistic labor cannot be identified as either physical or mental labor. However, the works and workings of art are regarded as either physical or mental in the prevailing aesthetic theory. The main reason is that classical Western metaphysics is bifurcated. However, traditional Chinese division of ontological categories is not a bifurcation but a trifurcation, which consists of dao道, xiang象, and qi器. This tripartite distinction avoids substantivism, while at the same time providing a framework that encompasses both the objective and the subjective face of the art work, by means of a dynamic exchange between the two poles. This paper shifts our perspective from classical Western metaphysics to traditional Chinese metaphysics and sets up a dialogue between Chinese and Western aesthetics. The ontological status of works and workings of art is neither physical nor mental, but the “betweenness” of the two.

This paper argues that “work” rather vividly captures the efforts of artworkers, who work tirelessly to ensure that myriad artworks “achieve work”, as Arthur Danto termed it. More basically, “work” is what we know about an “artwork” that guides artworkers, whether curators, writers or art lovers to know how to place it (historically, politically, socially, artistically, culturally), much like scores, scripts and texts facilitate performances of musical, theatrical and literary artworks. In cheering on artists such as Danto’s fictional artist J, who carried the indiscernible red square “triumphantly across the boundary as if he had rescued something rare”, artworkers prompt their publics to appreciate such heroic events and/or unfamiliar objects as meaningful artworks. Being a shared, third-person account of an artwork’s significance, work typically begins as a public discussion that inspires additional artworkers to generate articles, books, catalogues and reviews. This paper thus links Danto’s focus on achieving work to Hannah Arendt’s account of work, such that artists’ actions yield artworks, whereas artworkers’ work makes the artworld where artworks perdure as work. I begin by reviewing Danto’s use of work and content in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. I next offer an alternative approach for “achieving” work and show how this process accords with Alfred North Whitehead’s having distinguished “eternal objects” from “actual entities”. My noting that work reflects the efforts of myriad artworkers working in tandem across the globe enables me to better assess how “work” as in effort and/or meaning relates to and/or survives an artwork’s varying contexts.

As a recent phenomenon in the Italian underworld scenario, the paper examines the crime of Nigerian criminal groups in Italy. It presents the main research results based on a variety of judiciary proceedings and interviews with prosecutors, police officers, and representatives of NGOs working with Nigerian trafficked women and asylum seekers. The aims of the paper are to depict the organizational structure and management of the main illegal activities in which Nigerian criminal groups operating in Italy are involved. The first part is based on the main literature on Nigerian criminal groups worldwide. The second outlines the methodology followed, the collected sources and the research questions. The last part analyses the characteristics of their organizational structure and the main criminal activities of drug trafficking and the exploitation of prostitution.

The first part of this paper surveys types of olfactory art as well as some of the philosophical denials that odors and the sense of smell can be used for serious art making, raising the paradox that olfactory art seems actual, but the mainstream philosophical tradition has declared that one cannot make genuine artworks from odors. The second and third part of the paper address the primary argument against possibility of an olfactory aesthetics, namely, the claim that the human sense of smell does not have sufficient cognitive capacity to support rational aesthetic discussion and judgment. The second part (The intuitive case for smell’s cognitive powers) examines and answers intuitive philosophical arguments against smell’s cognitive potential and the third part (The empirical case for the cognitive capacity of smell) first surveys evidence from the sciences that could be interpreted as supporting the negative position, before marshalling other empirical evidence in favor of smell’s cognitive powers. I conclude that on balance contemporary neuroscience and psychology support the view that the human sense of smell has the cognitive capacity to sustain rational aesthetic discussion and judgment.

The paper examines the connection between art and poiesis, moving from Aristotle’s Metaph. A 1 and Z 7-9. In particular, the analysis of those passages suggests dividing the genesis of artworks into noesis and poiesis. The noesis is the phase in which the artist plans in his mind the eidos (aspect) of the work that he is going to produce; the poiesis is the realization which actualizes – through its extrinsecation – the “aspect” mentally planned by the artist. After the exposition of Aristotle’s theory, the related conceptual elements are developed, also having recourse to musical examples, in order to show the strict link between speculation and artistic praxis. The term enopé occurs in this part of the work as a metaphor which renders the peculiar form of presence of the work of art, whose essence emerges in the course of production. Moreover, a specific section is devoted to illustrating that ready-mades can be conciliated with the poietic nature of art. Finally, the paper focuses on performing (called «re-productive») arts, such as music; those forms of art include two poietic phases: the poiesis of the author (e. g., the composer) and the poiesis of the interpreter. The last paragraph considers the musical avant-gardes and explains that they confirm the poietic foundation of art, instead of denying it.

This paper focuses on Howard University and a distinguished group of its scholars who, in the 1930s through 1950s across various fields of social science, broke away both from the mainstream U.S. disciplinary approaches of the time and from the institutional limitations of black universities to engage in transformative scholarship and intellectual theorizing on race and empire in the United States and around the world. This paper roots the intellectual history of “the Howard School” in the institutional architecture they forged at Howard at the time. I argue that, as part of a larger effort to confront the coloniality of knowledge and forge an academic and activist decolonial agenda, the Howard scholars established institutions and academic spaces of knowledge production that were unique in the American academy in their organization, mission, vision and methods of research, and played a vital role in sustaining critiques and alternatives to mainstream thinking on race.

With reference to Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (PoM) in my paper I will address three points, namely: To what extent Schelling’s PoM provides us with arguments in favour of 1. Realism, 2. Emergentism and 3. Documentality (Ferraris 2009). Accordingly, in the first section, Reality, I will present Schelling’s PoM as realism, arguing that in mythology Schelling finds the traces of the developing of consciousness, regarded as a real fact. But, as this latter can only be real if having a history, i.e. if emerging from a previous natural status, which is devoid of any consciousness, PoM should be regarded as strongly related with a sort of emergentism. This will thus be the object of the second section, where I will investigate the genetic interpretation of Schelling’s Weltalter proposed by Wolfram Hogrebe (Hogrebe 1989) and suggest that precisely this analysis of the Weltalter explains also why Schelling’s project couldn’t but fail. In fact, against its intention, the Weltalter, as it was trying to explain the rise of semantics together with it the true genesis of the our acknowledgment of the world, still remains affected by an idealistic stance and hence couldn’t succeed in becoming positive philosophy. Eventually, in the third section of this paper, Documentality, I argue, that a solution of the problems left open by Schelling’s Weltalter and positively addressed in the PoM is offered by the interpretation of this latter as a contribution to Documentality. Even if created before and apparently independently from the act writing, in fact mythology relies on the possibility of recording tales, hence it is made of and eventually ends up in a written corpus. This means that the consciousness mythology gives us an account of, is the one that for the first time is able to present itself in narrated tales. It is not the mere possibility of acknowledging something, but in fact the possibility of binding our will to a freely formulated law trough our memory, i.e. the birth of conscience upon consciousness, which is the real sense of religion. In this sense Ferraris’ concept of documentality provides us an important theoretical framework to understand the hidden presuppositions of Schelling’s PoM and to relate this latter to its realistic and emergentistic character.

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie was, from the outset, more concerned with ontogeny than ontology, i.e. not on what nature is but on what it does: ubiquitous creation. Therefore, the processes articulated in the Philosophy of Mythology remain instances of a philosophy driven by what might be called a post-naturalist naturalism. The two aims of this paper are, firstly, to demonstrate this nature-philosophical continuity throughout Schelling’s so-called Protean philosophical projects in order, secondly, to re-prepare Schellingian themes for current debates concerning ontology. To this end, I draw on the worldmaking and abundance postulates of Goodman and Feyerabend, respectively, to demonstrate the persistence of Schellingian ontogenetic pathways for remodelling process metaphysics for contemporary philosophy. Finally, the paper argues that the logical form of the hypothesis (antecedent and consequent) is itself consequent upon the ontogeny it hypothesises.

The paper proposes a new understanding of the relationship that links philosophy and literature, assuming the Greek tragedy of the 5th century BC as the exemplary occasion for the development of this enquiry. In this perspective, moving from the original interpretation of the tragedy recently offered by Pierre Judet de La Combe, the paper shows how the specific cognitive function of the tragedy, understood as “artistic form”, consists in its ability to bring to manifestation, in exemplary way, the “conditions of sense” that make possible any knowledge of experience, with the consciousness of the aesthetical-imaginative and not logical-conceptual character of these same conditions. From this point of view, the critical and reflexive function of the tragedy is due – according to the Adornian interpretation – to the autonomy of the “form”, i.e. to the sensible configuration of the tragedy. What emerges, here, is the “non-reproductive” but “productive” nature of the tragic form: what it offers to the spectator is not the representation of a sense already given in the world, but rather an “indefinite opening to meaning”, i.e. a form able to construct an indeterminate multiplicity of “possibilities of sense”.

This paper is an introduction for the special issue of “Rivista di estetica” devoted to the role of ontology in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of art. It describes the most dominating trends within current ontological inquiry in aesthetics and philosophy of art as well as presents papers collected in the issue.

The concept of design, and designing, is so ambiguous that even the most obvious cornerstones, commonly built around opposite couples like the opposition between ontology and epistemology, or architectural theory and design theory. Going beyond those couples, as difficult as it may be, requires a third glance, whose reasoning may generate a new way of looking at things and, thus, act. That’s why we propose a Side-by-side Reading: on the one hand, a philosophical though about design, on the other, an architectural one. No intersections are provided, other than paragraph articulation. The reader will have the chance, and the power, to build as many bridges between the two parts as he’ll desire, so that the punctual inspiration of one part could serve also for the other. Concerning the general meanings, the premises and the actual conceptual outcomes, the two parts are totally on the same side. But at the same time, their ultimate meaning should not be limited to the words, without those conceptual bridges, even unconscious ones: also, that’s consistent with the contents of the paper. No dialogues of the deaf, here: the paper propose something more like the Fourth Simphony by Charles Ives, where two orchestra plays two different things at the same time, connected by a third element – a distant chorus. Here, the chorus, the referent, is the act of design, or the act of knowing, unveiling, deciding, hoping a future: and the key for breaking the opposite couples is a new glance aimed at considering design as the effective strategic exploitation of potential.

The paper aims to investigate, on the one hand, the discourses of being a woman, an immigrant, and a Muslim in today’s Hungary. On the other hand, it endeavors to illustrate the multiple and diverse aspects of identity among Muslim women in Hungary. Qualitative methods, participant observations, and interviews are the main sources of empirical information. This paper presents and analyzes accounts related to wearing and not wearing the hijab among Muslim women living in Budapest, including immigrants and Hungarian convert women as well. The analyzed discourse segments pertain to presence of wearing the hijab in public spaces, and illustrate the different experiences and performances about our interviewees’ identity as a woman, a Muslim, and an immigrant, depending on their background, past and present experiences with their own group and with outer group/s. The data demonstrate various challenges of wearing the hijab, including, the phenomenon we describe as the “hijab paradox.” With this coined term, we attempt to delineate the paradoxical situation when the hijab is simultaneously the requisite for countering uninvited attention, in accordance with Muslim cultural habits and religious requirements, and, at the same time, the hijab is precisely the element that provokes unwanted attention from members of the host society. The collected materials indicate that Muslim women`s perception of their roles and multi- faceted identities within the Muslim and the Hungarian community influence what they consider a conflict, discrimination, and oppression, and how they cope with the tensions, the bigotry, and the oppression they face.

The present paper traces some of the main articulations of the book Marcel Proust and the signs (1964), in which the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze affirms the superiority of literature on classical rationalist philosophy in the search for truth. Proust’s work rivals the philosophy itself, since it brings into play the involuntary nature of memory and intelligence – a condition which lies at the beginning of every thought – which can grasp the truth only solicited and forced by chance encounters. Classical rationalist philosophy as a methodical exercise, induced by the good will of the thinker, can instead reach only abstract and conventional truths. The paper underlines how, according to Deleuze, Proust’s work will represent the model of authentic philosophy, the one that comes to produce with violence new concepts forced by problems and urgencies that impose themselves from outside. In fact, in Difference and Repetition (1968), the characteristics ascribed to the Proustian Recherche are explicitly attributed to a philosophy of Difference, which is posited by the author as the real need of his own time. In 1991, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari posed the question: What is philosophy? The attributes previously assigned to the literature, reappeared in the answer to such a question. A paradoxical necessity – reached through contingent encounters on one side, and the involuntary nature of thought on the other side – will appear at the center of the book that closes the theoretical trajectory of Deleuze: such a paradox shows itself as the only condition for the “invention of concepts”, which is at the same time the definition and ultimate task of philosophical practice.

In the present essay we analyse the role of philosophical investigation for the interdisciplinary research field of the Border Studies. The main thesis of the paper is that a border cannot be ontologically considered as an object, and neither metaphorically as a simple line. Indeed, these approaches tend to extremely simplify the very nature of borders and bordering processes. Here we argue that borders are complex social phenomena produced by the coherent combination of several different elements. Therefore, we suggest that a fruitful way in order to conceptualize the nature of the border is the concept of dispositive, provided by Michel Foucault. The paper is structured as follows: in the first and second paragraph we show why the analysis of borders are increasingly a crucial topic both for scientific and public debate; in the third paragraph we criticize the approach provided by social ontology, focused on the conceptualization of the border as an object; in the fourth paragraph, starting from a Rousseau’s suggestion, we analyse the phenomenology of bordering practices, and we argue that a border should be understood as a complex articulation of material and immaterial elements; in the fifth paragraph we introduce the notion of dispositive in order to catch the complex nature of borders; in the conclusions we summarize the main results of the paper and we sketch possible further lines of research.

This paper provides a background to, detailed exploration, and then critique of, the influential notion of economic performativity. It begins with a broad sweep of the theoretical developments in economic sociology in the years before the advance of the performativity program. In doing so it outlines the theoretical quandary that performativity sought to move beyond. Having set the scene, it then looks at the performativity thesis in detail, explaining how it seeks to do away with modern ontological binaries like the object/subject dichotomy. Once the performativity thesis has been unpacked, it is critiqued. Leading to the conclusion, that while there have been some benefits to the performative approach, especially in research looking at finance, the performativity thesis ultimately fails in its attempt to move beyond the ontology of “the moderns”, and does little to shift the debates in economic sociology that predated its popularity.

The Action Theory of Exchanges is based on three main assumptions: i) an exchange is motivated by people having convergent preferences, ii) people exchange actions, and iii) offers and acceptances are crucial parts of an exchange and they bring about rights and obligations. The main aim of this paper is to discuss three aspects of this theory to better understand its ontological implications and, possibly, improve it. I first examine the expression “transferring the ownership” by showing an ontological issue behind it; after that, I propose an interpretation that might solve this issue. I then show that convergent preferences are not enough to motivate an exchange; accordingly, one has to introduce two more preferences possessed by the agents. I finally propose a characterization of buying and selling (and buyer and seller) which, in addition to being compatible with the Action Theory of Exchanges, has the advantage of accounting for both monetary and non-monetary exchanges.

This (somewhat polemical) paper focuses on the ontological nature of money and draws comparisons to the ontological status of gauge freedom in physics. The parallels allow us to move beyond the social constructivist theories of Searle et al., and thereby avoid some pitfalls with such views. Since we have a reasonably good grasp of the ontological features in the physics context, we can pull back lessons from there onto the economic domain. In general, we find that this approach offers a nice lens through which to view the ontological peculiarities of money.

This paper aims to highlight some aspects of the Anselmian thought, that is, those that deal with the problem of the signification of nothingness. Anselm think over this problem in some of his main writings, in particular in the Monologion and in the De casu diaboli: considering the signification interpreted as adaequatio rei et intellectus, i.e. of a correspondentist theory of truth, it is problematic for the early-medieval philosopher to establish in what way there are names (such as "nothing") which, although they have no referent in objective reality, nevertheless seem to perform some function in language. In order to fully understand the theoretical procedure carried out by Anselm, it is also essential to take into account other works, such as the De grammatico and the De veritate, in which, even if there is no real discussion about nothingness, some foundamental assumptions of Anselmian thought are made explicit. They are essentials to fully understand his speculation around these problems. Next, we will try to show how Anselm comes to identify some constitutive characteristics of logical negation, aware of the distinction between the sometimes improper form that language can take in its ordinary use and the "straight" one, that is the logical one, which correctly expresses how things are in reality for him.

The paper develops a phenomenology of hyper-reading (i.e. the act of reading hypertexts) moving from the prejudicial approach to such texts, developing the three moments of presence, boredom and authority and concluding with some remarks on the freedom of readers in the act of navigation of hypertexts – especially those on the Web.

This is a paper about how we relate to institutions. Its aim is two-fold: accounting for what it is to ‘trust an institution’, and cashing out the right attitude to have towards public institutions. The descriptive account shows that ‘trusting institutions’ is a complex and ambivalent phenomenon, which oscillates between proper trust (as a two-place relation) and mere reliance, depending on the social function of the institution at hand. The normative proposal highlights the merit of a liberal form of trust in public institutions, as opposed to totalitarian and libertarian attitudes. To do this, the paper, reviewing a large set of public and private institutions, focuses on two cases, healthcare and educational institutions.

Though the financial crisis in 2008 did not hit as hard in Denmark as elsewhere, its imprints make visible how fluctuating market forces take an active part in the shaping of architecture and urban spaces. Recent theoretical developments in the field of architectural anthropology stress that architecture, rather than being a static entity, is a moving project in which numerous human and nonhuman actors continuously entangle. This paper builds on and advances such an approach by focussing on the vicissitudes of the market as an actor in the complex ecology of architectural design. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in what is here referred to as the place-making processes of new Danish residential architecture; that is, the ways in which architects, users, investors, branding strategies, building materials and financial fluctuations all interact in the continuous creation of places. The paper demonstrates how the contemporary architect designs places in interaction with the global market as much as in interaction with building sites and materials. Consequently, it introduces the concept of ‘unintended design’ in relation to architecture, and argues in favour of an architectural anthropology that studies place-making across the habitually distinguished phases of design and use.

The paper argues that the architectural drawing, as a technology for thinking and communicating design ideas between project stakeholders, has remained largely untouched by the advent of Actor-network theory (ANT) and the so-called ‘ethnographic turn.’ Rather than changing to reflect a distributed understanding of agency or the lived on-goingness of projects and buildings, the drawing continues to describe a simple line (from agent to patient) and to congeal into artifacts used to impart commands, increase the architect’s status or construct brands (the monologue-drawing and the brand-drawing). From the perspective of Living Architecture, an EU-funded research scheme combining architecture, bio-energy and synthetic biology, the paper proposes new modes of drawing (the medium-drawing, the exaptation-drawing and the seed-drawing) that challenge binary abstractions and demand that the architect relinquish a measure of authorship and control to engage in conversations with the other – large and small, disciplinary and non-disciplinary, human and nonhuman, alive and inert.

This paper looks critically at how design evolves through an interaction between human and non-human relations. We introduce different ways of understanding this by considering the mediating role that affect has on the design process. To do this we explore a recent work of New Zealand architect Simon Twose through an ethnographical framework. By focusing on affect we highlight the affective capacities and connections between humans and nonhumans. We argue that the affective capacities of non-human objects, matter and spaces are fundamental to the design process, and how knowledge is produced through design. Thus, this paper questions the privileging of human subjectivity – of seeing humans as radically other to matter, where human life remains special and spirited, over the brute force of matter.

In this paper the author analyzes the issue of the statal wall through an interdisciplinary perspective which connects ontology, philosophy of technology and political philosophy. The main argument of the paper is that there is an ontological difference between a statal wall and the border on which it is inscribed. After a brief discussion of some well-known ontological theories, the author argues that a wall is not a social object, but rather an artifact. More specifically, a wall is a political artifact, because it is an instrument that materially inscribes on the space a complex relation of power. In order to conceptualize an emerging global political rationality, a new term has been coined by french scholars Florine Ballif and Stéphane Rosière: teichopolitics. The term comes from the ancient greek teichos, which literally means “the wall of the city”. Therefore, teichopolitics is the politics of building walls, most of the time for security purposes. The paper deals with some aspects of contemporary teichopolitics from a philosophical point view. In the first part of the paper, the author criticizes the postmodern idea of a virtual and fluid global space, and the connected idea of an historical and political consummation of modern categories (e.g. State, territory, sovereignty); in the second part, he analyzes thoroughly the ontological difference between wall and border and some phenomenological aspects related; in the third part, he shows how and why a wall studied as an apparatus (dispositif) implies the acknowledgement of different forms of power (e.g. sovereign, disciplinary, governamental); in the last part, he argues that the issue of statal walls should be analysed through what he calls a political ontology of the artifacts.

The goal of the paper is to examine the concept of archival image in the era of participatory culture. The text discusses two different definitions of archival image: a) The archival image is a record stored by an institution; b) The archival image is the result of an elaborative process of appropriation and relocation – which usually takes place within the artistic or cinematographic fields – that produces an effect on the viewer, who will recognize the image as such). Moving from these two possible definitions, the paper comes to identify the technical and aesthetic specificities of the archival image in the contemporary media configuration. In the final part two works of the American artist Natalie Bookchin are presented and examined, as examples of a form of elaboration of archival images based on the contemporary media practices.

This paper places video games within the area of what I call “designed experiences”. Designed experiences are experiences – in the real world or via media – that are designed to elicit specific effects or affects. In previous work I have investigated how teachers, in their classrooms, or game designers, in their games, design experiences that are meant, in both cases, to lead to learning. However, designed experiences can be intended to elicit other things than learning. They can also seek to elicit things such as social change, attitude or behavioral changes, emotions, or other effects of (or on) the body, the mind, or the soul. In this paper I take up the relationship between games as designed experiences and games as art.

The ‘inter’ in interaction is often passed over as merely a point of contact between two pre-determinated entities such as sender and receiver, or user and computer. What would it mean to take the ‘inter’ seriously as a generative field that preconditions these endpoints? Instead of being conceived as a place to pass across, this paper considers the inter as a ‘betweenness’ that can be cultivated through techniques of relation. The paper looks at several examples of collaborative performance, image-making and research creation, including collaborative projects in which the author has been involved. It proposes that techniques of relation that are both rigorous and improvisational and that allow intensities to emerge between all elements allows betweenness its due. And allowing this durational collaborative relationality to emerge also opens artistic practices onto new modes of expression.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of the vulnerable group-based approach in the case law of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). ECtHR mostly use the notion of vulnerability to identify, isolate and protect some specific groups of population. I will highlight two important effects of these policies: the construction and affirmation of stable identities and the consequent limitation of the political agency of the social actors through the boundaries defined by the list of the available vulnerable groups. I will conclude the paper by providing a different, multifaced conception of vulnerability meant to take into account at the same time its universality and its specificity.

This paper investigates the limitations of the ideal of political equality under non-ideal circumstances and focuses specifically on the way in which structurally unjust social contexts endanger individuals’ perception of their own worth. Starting from Rawls’ definition of the social bases of self-respect as a primary good to be fairly distributed, the paper main goal is to provide normative arguments in favor of a power sensitive theory of political agency. A power sensitive theory, in fact, proves to be necessary as it sheds a light over the way in which power relationships affect the very possibility, for some members of the constituency, of fully enjoying the status of political reflexive agents. Against this background, in the paper I defend two main theses. First, I argue that the contemporary debate concerning the implementation of the ideal of equality within liberal democracies has been overlooking the epistemic dimension of the basis of political equality. Second, I claim that specifying the epistemic dimension of political equality has at least two important effects. a. It is important from the perspective of conceptual analysis, as it allows to properly distinguish between the normative job played by moral arguments on the one hand, and the epistemic aspects of political equality on the other hand. b. The specification of the epistemic aspects of political equality has at least on important normative upshot, namely the possibility to show that epistemic forms of injustice are detrimental to the very ideal of political equality as an essential feature of liberal conceptions of democracy.

The paper begins with an account of the intellectual background to Henry Sidgwick’s writing of his Methods of Ethics and an analysis of what Sidgwick meant by a ‘method’. His broad distinction between three main ethical theories – egoism, consequentialism, and deontology – is elucidated and accepted. Sidgwick’s different forms of intuitionism are explained, as are his criteria for testing the ‘certainty’ of a potentially self-evident belief. Section 3 discusses dogmatic intuitionism (common-sense morality systematized) and Sidgwick’s own view, in the light of his requirement for precision in ethics. The final section concerns the implications of Sidgwick’s position on disagreement for ethical theory. It is suggested that we have some knowledge in ethics, on which most converge, but not much. The paper concludes with a recommendation for a more eirenic and less dogmatic approach to philosophical ethics.

This paper clarifies the distinction that Edmund Husserl makes between two different ways of understanding other persons, their actions and motivations: the experiential or empirical way, on the one hand, and the genuinely or authentically intuitive way, on the other hand. The paper argues that Husserl’s discussion of self-understanding clarifies his concept of the intuitive understanding of others and allows us to explicate what is involved in it: not just the grasping of the other’s actual motivations of action but also the grasping of her motivational possibilities. The paper ends by discussing the dynamic character of the personal subject.

The present paper focuses on a specific aspect of Michel Foucault’s interest in literature, addressing his study on the French poet and novelist Raymond Roussel. Published only few days before The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), Death and the Labyrinth (1963) provides a philosophical reading of some Roussel’s writings, in a constant confrontation with the posthumous essay How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935) in which Roussel explains his peculiar process of composition. Here, I propose considering that Death and the Labyrinth offers not only a critical account on the relationship between philosophy and literature, but it also displays the significance of philosophy towards the study of literature. From this perspective, I will mainly focus on three themes – the death of the language; the repetition of the language; the duality of the language –, showing also that the first source of the Foucauldian further interest on the relationship between “words” and “things” has been Roussel’s oeuvre.

The aim of this paper is to explore the interaction between aesthetic properties and cognitive value in serial television. This study is based on a survey focused specifically on one television series: the second season of My Brilliant Friend, created by Saverio Costanzo. The survey was designed with the aim of getting respondents to express their perceptions of the relationship between the aesthetic qualities of the series and their assessment of it in cognitive terms. The responses obtained in the survey offer a clear answer to the key question of concern for this article. The vast majority of respondents (more than 90% in almost all cases) believe that aesthetic and cognitive qualities mutually influence one another. Additionally the qualitative results invite us to further explore interactionism conceptually: the cognitive content is taken as a criterion for evaluating the season’s aesthetic value overall, suggesting a link between meaning and narrative form.

My aim in this paper is to explore the appeal of contemporary television serial drama. I argue that there are four main aspects of serials that inspire viewers’ interest and long-term commitment: serials’ overall aesthetics, its narrative complexity, strong emotional pull and serious mimetic aspect. I analyse each of these and I show how each stimulates our more general interests and emotional dispositions, primarily those related to aesthetic reward, intellectual challenge, moral clarity and entertainment. My analysis shows how these four elements unite and how their union inspires and maintains viewers’ long-term commitment to the show. In the process, I explore viewers’ emotional engagement with the characters, suggesting it is of secondary importance for their long-term commitment to the show. This commitment, I argue, is motivated by viewers’ sense of care for the work developed in response to its repeated providing of pleasurable stimuli.

In this paper I aim to test a general interpretation of television series as narrative epics, in the sense defined by Aristotle’s Poetics and canonised by Renaissance literary theorists.