Books by Maurizio Ferraris

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.

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.

An analysis of the history and social role of mobile phones today (with an enhancement of their primary writing function) is followed by a proposal of a philosophical theory of objects, which is meant to be complementary to Searle's 'collective intentionality', that places writing at the basis of social reality.