Introduction to New Realism provides an overview of the movement of contemporary thought named New Realism, by its creator and most celebrated practitioner, Maurizio Ferraris. Sharing significant concerns and features with Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, New Realism can be said to be one of the most prescient philosophical positions today. Its desire to overcome the postmodern antirealism of Kantian origin, and to reassert the importance of truth and objectivity in the name of a new Enlightenment, has had an enormous resonance both in Europe and in the US. Introduction to New Realism is the first volume dedicated to exposing this continental movement to an anglophone audience. Featuring a foreword by the eminent contemporary philosopher and leading exponent of Speculative Realism, Iain Hamilton Grant, the book begins by tracing the genesis of New Realism, and outlining its central theoretical tenets, before opening onto three distinct sections. The first, 'Negativity', is a critique of the postmodern idea that the world is constructed by our conceptual schemas, all the more so as we have entered the age of digitality and virtuality. The second thesis, 'positivity', proposes the fundamental ontological assertion of New Realism, namely that not only are there parts of reality that are independent of thought, but these parts are also able to act causally over thought and the human world. The third thesis, 'normativity,' applies New Realism to the sphere of the social world. Finally, an afterword written by two young scholars explains in more detail the relationship between New Realism and other forms of contemporary realism.

A best seller in Italy, Maurizio Ferraris s "Goodbye, Kant " delivers a nontechnical, entertaining, and occasionally irreverent overview of Immanuel Kant s "Critique of Pure Reason." He borrows his title from Wolfgang Becker s "Goodbye Lenin ," the 2003 film about East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which depicts both relief at the passing of the Soviet era and affection for the ideals it embodied. Ferraris approaches Kant in similar spirits, demonstrating how the structure that Kant elaborates for the understanding of human knowledge can generate nostalgia for lost aspirations, while still leaving room for constructive criticism. Isolating key themes and concerns in the work, Ferraris evaluates Kant s claims relative to what science and philosophy have come to regard as the conditions for knowledge and experience in the intervening two centuries. He remains attentive to the historical context and ideals from which Kant s "Critique" emerged but also resolute in identifying what he sees as the limits and blind spots in the work. The result is an accessible account of a notoriously difficult book that will both provoke experts and introduce students to the work and to these important philosophical debates about the relations of experience to science."

Presenting legal and philosophical essays on money, this book explores the conditions according to which an object like a piece of paper, or an electronic signal, has come to be seen as having a value. Money plays a crucial role in the regulation of social relationships and their normative determination. It is thus integral to the very nature of the "social", and the question of how society is kept together by a network of agreements, conventions, exchanges, and codes. All of which must be traced down. The technologies of money discussed here by Searle, Ferraris, and Condello show how we conceive the category of the social at the intersection of individual and collective intentionality, documentality, and materiality. All of these dimensions, as the introduction to this volume demonstrates, are of vital importance for legal theory and for a whole set of legal concepts that are crucial in reflections on the relationship between law, philosophy, and society.

Since the 1780s, Western philosophy has been largely under the spell of Immanuel Kant's transcendental philosophy. In this book, Maurizio Ferraris offers a number of important criticisms of Kant in a book of two parts, written 21 years apart. The first part of the book, 'Observation', originally published in 2001, lays the foundations of Ferraris' New Realism, foreshadowing the realist turn that has become characteristic of 21st century philosophy. The second part, 'Speculation', written in 2021, outlines a complete metaphysical theory of realism. What ties both parts of the book together is the the notion of hysteresis, the ability of effects to survive even when their causes have ceased to exist.

Presenting legal and philosophical essays on money, this book explores the conditions according to which an object like a piece of paper, or an electronic signal, has come to be seen as having a value. Money plays a crucial role in the regulation of social relationships and their normative determination. It is thus integral to the very nature of the "social", and the question of how society is kept together by a network of agreements, conventions, exchanges, and codes. All of which must be traced down. The technologies of money discussed here by Searle, Ferraris, and Condello show how we conceive the category of the social at the intersection of individual and collective intentionality, documentality, and materiality. All of these dimensions, as the introduction to this volume demonstrates, are of vital importance for legal theory and for a whole set of legal concepts that are crucial in reflections on the relationship between law, philosophy, and society.

Since the 1780s, Western philosophy has been largely under the spell of Immanuel Kant's transcendental philosophy. In this book, Maurizio Ferraris offers a number of important criticisms of Kant in a book of two parts, written 21 years apart. The first part of the book, 'Observation', originally published in 2001, lays the foundations of Ferraris' New Realism, foreshadowing the realist turn that has become characteristic of 21st century philosophy. The second part, 'Speculation', written in 2021, outlines a complete metaphysical theory of realism. What ties both parts of the book together is the the notion of hysteresis, the ability of effects to survive even when their causes have ceased to exist.

This books ushers in a new way of talking about social phenomena. It develops an ontology of social objects on the basis of the claim that registration or inscription—the leaving of a trace to be called up later—is what is most fundamental to them. In doing so, it systematically organizes concepts and theories that Ferraris’s predecessors—most notably Derrida, in his project of a positive grammatology—left in an impressionistic state. Ferraris begins by redefining ontology as a way of cataloguing the world. Before any epistemology can discuss the validity of scientific or nonscientific judgments, one faces a collection of objects, be they natural, ideal, or social. Among these, Ferraris focuses on social objects, elaborating a theory of experience in the social world that leads him to define social objects as “inscribed acts.” He then uses this notion to interpret social phenomena, also in light of a systematic discussion of the concept of performatives, from Austin to Derrida and Searle. Moving into considerations of the present technological revolution, Ferraris develops a “symptomatology of the document” that leads to a consideration of legal systems, finding in them original applications for his theory that an object equals a written act. Written in an easy, often witty style, Documentality revises Foucault’s late concept of the “ontology of actuality” into the project of an “ontological laboratory,” thereby reinventing philosophy as a pragmatic activity that is directly applicable to our everyday life.

This books ushers in a new way of talking about social phenomena. It develops an ontology of social objects on the basis of the claim that registration or inscription-the leaving of a trace to be called up later-is what is most fundamental to them. In doing so, it systematically organizes concepts and theories that Ferraris's predecessors-most notably Derrida, in his project of a positive grammatology-left in an impressionistic state. Ferraris begins by redefining ontology as a way of cataloguing the world. Before any epistemology can discuss the validity of scientific or nonscientific judgments, one faces a collection of objects, be they natural, ideal, or social. Among these, Ferraris focuses on social objects, elaborating a theory of experience in the social world that leads him to define social objects as "inscribed acts." He then uses this notion to interpret social phenomena, also in light of a systematic discussion of the concept of performatives, from Austin to Derrida and Searle. Moving into considerations of the present technological revolution, Ferraris develops a "symptomatology of the document" that leads to a consideration of legal systems, finding in them original applications for his theory that an object equals a written act. Written in an easy, often witty style, Documentality revises Foucault's late concept of the "ontology of actuality" into the project of an "ontological laboratory," thereby reinventing philosophy as a pragmatic activity that is directly applicable to our everyday life.

This book sheds light on the most philosophically interesting of contemporary objects: the cell phone. "Where are you?"-a question asked over cell phones myriad times each day-is arguably the most philosophical question of our age, given the transformation of presence the cell phone has wrought in contemporary social life and public space. Throughout all public spaces, cell phones are now a ubiquitous prosthesis of what Descartes and Hegel once considered the absolute tool: the hand. Their power comes in part from their ability to move about with us-they are like a computer, but we can carry them with us at all times-in part from what they attach to us (and how), as all that computational and connective power becomes both handy and hand-sized. Quite surprisingly, despite their name, one might argue, as Ferraris does, that cell phones are not really all that good for sound and speaking. Instead, the main philosophical point of this book is that mobile phones have come into their own as writing machines-they function best for text messages, e-mail, and archives of all kinds. Their philosophical urgency lies in the manner in which they carry us from the effects of voice over into reliance upon the written traces that are, Ferraris argues, the basic stuff of human culture. Ontology is the study of what there is, and what there is in our age is a huge network of documents, papers, and texts of all kinds. Social reality is not constructed by collective intentionality; rather, it is made up of inscribed acts. As Derrida already prophesized, our world revolves around writing. Cell phones have attached writing to our fingers and dragged it into public spaces in a new way. This is why, with their power to obliterate or morph presence and replace voice with writing, the cell phone is such a philosophically interesting object.

Positive Realism could be seen as the "sequel" to Maurizio Ferraris' Manifesto of New Realism and Introduction to New Realism. The focus here is the other side of unamendability: a notion, described in his previous books, according to which reality is "unamendable", it cannot be corrected at will. This "resistance" of the real is what ultimately tells us that, in opposition to the claims of post-Kantian philosophy, the world is not a result of our conceptual work: if it were so, our power over reality would be much greater. Now, the often disappointing limits that the real sets against our expectations are also a resource: and this is the key point of the present book. Things exist, and therefore undoubtedly resist us, but in doing so they offer affordances, resources, opportunities. And that the greatest opportunity, which underlies all the other ones, is the fact that we share a world that is far from liquid: on the contrary, it provides the solid ground on which everything rests, starting from our happiness or unhappiness.

In ontology, realism and anti-realism may be taken as opposite attitudes towards entities of different kinds, so that one may turn out to be a realist with respect to certain entities, and an anti-realist with respect to others. In this book, the editors focus on this controversy concerning social entities in general and fictional entities in particular, the latter often being considered nowadays as kinds of social entities. More specifically, fictionalists (those who maintain that we only make-believe that there are entities of a certain kind) and creationists (those who believe that entities of a certain kind are the products of human activity) present themselves as the champions of the anti-realist and the realist stance, respectively, regarding the above entities. By evaluating the pros and cons of both these positions, this book intends to focus new light on a longstanding debate.