Maurizio Ferraris

"Goodbye, Kant! delivers a nontechnical, entertaining, and occasionally irreverent overview of Immanuel Kant's Critique of pure reason"--Cover.

First published in Italian in 1988, History of Hermeneutics constitutes the first comprehensive reconstruction of the historical development of hermeneutics. Its translation, augmented by an extensive theoretical afterword especially written by the author for this English-language edition, is an important and timely contribution to philosophy. The breadth of scholarship is impressive: Not only does the author discuss thinkers such as Plato, Vico, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, and Derrida, but he also considers the contributions of figures outside the contemporary canon of maitres a penser, including Reformation philosophers, biblical interpreters of the German Enlightenment, and contemporary theoreticians. The first two chapters trace the history of the art of interpretation from its origins in Greece as a specialized technique for the transmission of divine messages by the poets and oracles, to the nineteenth century, a time that was characterized by a new awareness of the problem of tradition and by the influence of positivism on the theory of interpretation. In the following three chapters, Ferraris examines the universalization of the domain of interpretation with Heidegger, the development of Heideggerian philosophical hermeneutics with Gadamer and Derrida, and the relation between hermeneutics and epistemology, on the one hand, and the human sciences, on the other. This is an invaluable work for philosophers and for scholars in disciplines as diverse as literary studies, cultural studies, religious studies, history, and the social sciences. At the same time, its clear and concise presentation of the historical unfolding of hermeneutics makes it ideal for use as a textbook in introductory and advanced courses.

Why should a box of soap pads or an urinal be a cause for reflection? Avant-garde art knows how to answer better than classical and romantic art. What makes art prophetic is not a mysterious inspiration, but the creative answer to emergencies coming from technology and incorporated into objects. What are the pen and the pen drive for? They are there to make plans and renegotiate contracts. Technology does not disappear: we are not dealing with the dematerialization or sublimation of an artwork that becomes pure spirit. Technology is transformed, bringing to the fore the link between artwork and reproducibility as well as between artwork and contract. Contemporary art highlights a character proper to the artworks of all times and types: a document dimension. Indeed, this dimension is not a break with the essence of traditional art: the latter postulates cooperation (and therefore an implicit contract) between author and user.

Celebrating the Moleskine travelling exhibition which, since 2006, has showcased, in various cities around, this title features a collection of more than 250 Moleskine notebooks that have been decorated, hacked, and sketched, delivering an intimate insight into the authors creative process and showing the possibilities that arise from using paper.

"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"--