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12AntidogmaRivista di Estetica 131-139. 2015.The philosophy of film usually presupposes two main assumptions or dogmas. First, films are autonomous audiovisual structures that can be instantiated by particular screenings. Second, the cinematic experience is a surrogate of the audiovisual perception. Experimental cinema can defy these assumptions by making films that either lack an autonomous structure or do not provide spectators with an audiovisual experience that emulates ordinary perception. The paper analyzes Ugo Nespolo’s experimental…Read more
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809Introduction to "Linguistic Justice and Analytic Philosophy"Philosophical Papers 47 (1): 1-20. 2018.In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to the underrepresentation, exclusion or outright discrimination experienced by women and members of other visible minority groups in academic philosophy. Much of this debate has focused on the state of contemporary Anglophone philosophy, which is dominated by the tradition of analytic philosophy. Moreover, there is growing interest in academia and society more generally for issues revolving around linguistic justice and linguistic discrimin…Read more
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11Mondi incidenti. Una soluzione ontologica al paradosso del cortocircuito rappresentazionale nei filmRivista di Estetica 46 183-196. 2011.If live-action fictions are photographic representations of theatrical representations, “collapsed seeing”, according to Robert Hopkins, is the experience of directly seeing in the films the narrated events, while overriding the theatrical representation. Collapsed seeing opens the door to a paradox: on the one hand, we would experience live-action films as photographic records of narrated events, on the other hand, we know that it is impossible to access directly fictional events. The paradox c…Read more
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8La cineteca di Babele. Per una nuova ontologia del filmRivista di Estetica 42 97-115. 2009.Moving from a cinematic reinterpretation of Borges’s Library of Babel, I attempt to provide a new answer to the old ontological question: “What kind of being is a film?”. This answer, which takes into account the coming of digital era, is developed through a comparison with Carroll’s philosophy of motion pictures. While discussing, criticizing and trying to complete his theory, I will examine the concept of a film under four different aspects: as a material object, as an ideal object, as a menta…Read more
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L'essere fotografato. Riflessione sugli specchi che scrivonoRivista di Estetica 43 (23): 139-159. 2003.
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18Ikealismo assolutoRivista di Estetica 60 135-141. 2015.Se dovessi scegliere un unico libro di Maurizio Ferraris da portarmi sulla proverbiale isola deserta sceglierei Una ikea di università. Lo farei per tre ragioni differenti. La prima è autobiografica: è il libro per merito – o per colpa – del quale ho finito per occuparmi di filosofia. La seconda è estetica: c’è in questo libro una felicità di scrittura che è raro trovare non solo in filosofia ma anche in letteratura; forse mi lascio condizionare da fattori idiosincratici, ma per me Una ikea è un…Read more
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317Appearance and History: the Autographic/Allographic Distinction RevisitedBritish Journal of Aesthetics 58 (1): 71-87. 2018.Nelson Goodman notoriously distinguished between autographic works, whose instances should be identified by taking history of production into account, and allographic works, whose instances can be identified independently of history of production. Scholars such as Jerrold Levinson, Flint Schier, and Gregory Currie have criticized Goodman’s autographic/allographic distinction arguing that all works are such that their instances should be identified by taking history of production into account. I …Read more
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27The Band of Theseus: Social Individuals and Mental FilesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (4-5): 287-310. 2017.Social individuals are social entities having a distinctive individuality, often signaled by the use of a proper name to designate them. This article proposes an account of social individuals based on the notion of a mental file, understood as a repository of information about a single individual. First, I consider a variant of the puzzle of the ship of Theseus in which the object having problematic identity conditions is a social individual, namely, a rock band. Then, I argue that we can figure…Read more
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17Che cosa esiste fuori dal testo?Rivista di Estetica 57 101-120. 2014.L’articolo si focalizza sulle relazioni fra la nozione di Ferraris di documentalità e le nozioni tradizionali di causalità, intenzionalità, e normatività. Mostrerò che la nozione di documentalità, al cui centro troviamo la nozione di traccia, si basa su una spiegazione della causalità stando alla quale i documenti sono costituiti da catene causali. Stando così le cose, occorre formulare un criterio per differenziare le catene documentali da altri tipi di catene causali. Argomenterò che, riconduc…Read more
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105On Fictional Characters as TypesBritish Journal of Aesthetics 57 (2): 161-176. 2017.Conceiving of fictional characters as types allows us to reconcile intuitions of sameness and difference about characters such as Batman that appear in different fictional worlds. Sameness occurs at the type level while difference occurs at the token level. Yet, the claim that fictional characters are types raises three main issues. Firstly, types seem to be eternal forms whereas fictional characters seem to be the outcome of a process of creation. Secondly, the tokens of a type are concrete par…Read more
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44The view from outside: On a distinctively cinematic achievementPhilosophy and Social Criticism 42 (2): 154-170. 2016.What aesthetic interest do we have in watching films? In a much debated paper, Roger Scruton argued that this interest typically comes down to the interest in the dramatic representations recorded by such films. Berys Gaut and Catharine Abell criticized Scruton’s argument by claiming that films can elicit an aesthetic interest also by virtue of their pictorial representation. In this article, we develop a different criticism of Scruton’s argument. In our view, a film can elicit an aesthetic inte…Read more
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17The Digital Secret of the Moving ImageEstetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 51 (1): 21-41. 2014.This article addresses the definition of cinema by focusing on the related ontological question of which basic category circumscribes cinematic works. According to Noël Carroll, the definition of cinema consists both of ontological conditions that treat the moving image as a type and of other conditions that treat it as a display. But following Carroll’s ontological conditions, the digital encoding of a moving image enigmatically ends up being both a type and a token. Solving such a puzzle by cl…Read more
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36Wittgenstein's Picture Theory of PicturesAisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 6 (1): 275-290. 2013.I rely on Frascolla's interpretation of the Tractatus ontology to develop an account of depiction in which a picture is conceived of as a visual structure constituted by pixels that are conceived of, in their turn, as elementary propositions. Then I argue that such an account is complementary to the considerations about «noticing aspects» in the Philosophical Investigations, to the extent that the visual structure constituted by pixels provides a design allowing the picture’s viewer to notice as…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Film |
Social Ontology |
Ontology of Film |
Areas of Interest
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Film |
Social Ontology |
Ontology of Film |