RIVISTA DI ESTETICA

March 2011: Ontology of Film
Advisory Editor: Domenico Spinosa (dspinosa1ATgmail.com)
Deadline for submission: July 30, 2010

Description
The question of what it means to study cinema has been recently attracting attention again. What is of remarkable relevance is that film (meant as an aesthetic, cultural, and social object) has gone through a transformation of its nature, that is, the passage from an analogical-photographic medium to that of digital-video. Many have pointed out the importance to understand the philosophical consequences of the disappearance of the photographic base in film as well as to discuss the future of Film Studies. It seems evident that the debate on “what film is” has been renovated. A first considerable effect is linked to the decentralization of the cinematographic experience connected to the fruition of cinemas, a phenomenon that has deep repercussions on what we can define as “the phenomenology of the spectator.” It is not a coincidence that we have lost the habit of saying “let’s go to the cinema.” The future of the very theory of cinema, which perhaps continues to apply traditional categories to a by now deeply changed setting, seems quite uncertain. What is left of cinema then? In reality, not little. If film is extinguished, cinema lives on, at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. A certain idea of cinema, in fact, persists and is confirmed in new media and in the last experiences and tendencies of contemporary art. This element also suggests that we might not be able to imagine how new languages and the future forms of art will be the day we get rid of the cinematographic metaphor.

October 2011: Themes from Documentalità [A partire da Documentalità]
Advisory Editors: Elena Casetta, Pietro Kobau, Ivan Mosca (pietro.kobauATunito.it)
Deadline for submission: December 30, 2010

Description
This issue of Rivista di Estetica is devoted to documentality, namely the theory of documents as proposed by Maurizio Ferraris in several recent works, in particular in his book "Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce" (Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2009). Documents play many important roles in our everyday life. In our daily life we collect receipts, sign checks and contracts, request certificates, buy tickets, renew passports. Our birth and our death are marked by documents. But documents are not only (perhaps the most important) social objects among other objects of the same nature. According to the ontology of social reality proposed by Maurizio Ferraris, the nature of social objects, as distinct from physical and ideal objects, is defined by the law Social Object = Inscribed Act. Social objects are social acts (involving at least two agents) that have the distinctive feature of being inscribed – on paper, on a computer file, or in people's “mind” - in order to be recalled. Any social object depends therefore on the existence of a relative document. Contributors are invited to address questions that are raised by this ontological theory of social reality.