Editor-in-Chief

Tiziana Andina

Editorial Board

Carola Barbero, Executive Editor

Elena Casetta & Vera Tripodi Managing Editors

Francesco Camboni

Davide Dal Sasso

Gabriele Gava

Valeria Martino

Erica Onnis

Gloria Sansò

Giuliano Torrengo

Advisory Board

Chair: Maurizio Ferraris, University of Turin

Tiziana Andina, Università di Torino

Alessandro Arbo, Université de Strasbourg

Marco Belpoliti, Università di Bergamo

Mauro Carbone, Università di Milano

David Carrier, Indipendent scholar

Roberto Casati, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris

Jean-Pierre Cometti †, Université de Provence

Arthur C. Danto †, Columbia University (New York)

Stephen Davies, The University of Auckland

Mario De Caro, Università di Roma Tre

Pina De Luca, Università di Salerno

Fabrizio Desideri, Università di Firenze

Giuseppe Di Giacomo, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

Günter Figal, University of Freiburg

Grahm Harman, American University in Cairo

Pietro Kobau, Università di Torino

Jerrold Levinson, University of Maryland

Giovanni Lombardo, Università di Messina

Armando Massarenti, Università di Bologna

Giovanni Matteucci, Università di Bologna

Pietro Montani, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

Jacques Morizot, Université de Provence

Frédéric Nef, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Mario Perniola †, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”

Nicola Perullo, Università di Scienze Gastronomiche, Pollenzo

Lucia Pizzo Russo †, Università di Palermo

Roger Pouivet, Université de Nancy

Luigi Russo †, Università di Palermo

Amie Thomasson, University of Miami

Salvatore Tedesco, Università di Palermo

Achille Varzi, Columbia University (New York)

Nicla Vassallo, Università di Genova

Stefano Velotti, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

Rivista di estetica (2/2025)

What is the NEW?

Advisory Editors: Petar Bojanić (University of Belgrade), Francesca De Vecchi (San Raffaele University, Milan), Snežana Vesnić (University of Belgrade)

Mail to: redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline: April 30, 2024

DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Due to the numerous requests, we have decided to extend the deadline of the special issue of Rivista di Estetica on “What is the NEW?” until May 31st. We look forward to receiving your submissions!

The status of “novelty” and the various figures of what belongs to the register of the “new” – innovative, unclassified, unexpected, unrecognizable, etc., as well as the possibility of the “new,” the creation and production of the “new” or its discovery – are at the heart of this call for Rivista di Estetica. Our aim is to think about what is most difficult to reflect, because not there or not yet there, or else successfully evades any projection and thematization.

This issue intends to identify, across different disciplines and scientific fields – philosophy (particularly aesthetics, phenomenology, social ontology, and metaphysics), art, architecture, or technology-related disciplines – how something that has never appeared or perceived as extant is conceptualized, created, produced, or discovered. How does the “new” manifest and present? What is the relationship between the new and the change? How is change possible and when does it acquire the status of the “new?” What is “new” in the “novel” or what is “novel” in the “new?” Is the “new” never really “new?”

What might be crucial is the attempt to carefully consider the meaning of uncertainty indicated by the quotation marks around the “new” (that is, the concept of the “new”) as “discovery,” “invention,” “event,” “the present,” or “now.” In a certain way, they warn of debate or disagreement about the new (not under quotation marks). They count on the danger of a naïve belief in unrestrainable progress. However, the debate opened by those quotation marks may already pave the way for the new insofar as they call for an agreement upon what the new is. As in the Babylonian confusion, with the impossibility of an agreement and joint work, the category of the new ceases to exist since the group’s heteroglossia guarantees that the newness of the Tower of Babel will never be outreached.

This issue of Rivista di Estetica encourages submissions about the following and related topics:

• Origin of the new, the concepts characteristics and history
• What is old, decadent, obsolete, non-contemporaneous, forever gone; “now”
• Phenomenology of the experience of the new in our everyday life
• Responsibility and authorship of the new in ethics and in legal and political philosophy
• Innovation in social epistemology and social ontology
• New things or new types of things in metaphysics
• The position of the expert in the production or discovery of new problems and innovation
• Art and architecture as the creation of new forms, new concepts, and new ways of seeing
• Philosophy as the production of new problems and new concepts
• Social change as a new resolution of new/old problems

Articles must be written in English or Italian, and should not exceed 40,000 characters (notes and blank spaces included).

To submit your paper, please register and log in to:

http://labont.it/estetica/index.php/rivistadiestetica/login. 

Please note: when asked “What kind of file is this,” select the relevant CFP.

Rivista di Estetica (1/2025)

The Epistemology of Narrative Knowledge

Advisory editors: Erica Onnis (University of Turin), Sarah Worth (Furman University)

Mail to: redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline: March 15, 2024

Historically, human beings have been variously characterised as “social”, “political”, “rational”, or “economic” animals. Recently, another definition has presented them as “storytelling animals” belonging to the species Homo fictus, the “great ape with the storytelling mind” (Gottshall, J., The Storytelling Animal, p. 10).

Humans do love to tell stories, but storytelling is not only an amusing and entertaining activity, nor a peculiar and more or less successful style of communication. Stories play fundamental epistemological roles. They help humans in organising and understanding the complex dynamics in which they live; they provide a structure to facts and ideas that would otherwise remain separated; they encode a form of knowledge that is easy to remember and enables action; they describe the world without defining it. The universal scope of this human disposition and the epistemic consequences of understanding reality through stories require a deep philosophical analysis. What can be called “narrative knowledge” appears to involve facts and events, but also agents and motives, being based on empirical evidence but also background assumptions and personal beliefs. It is a participatory, interpretative, situated knowledge tied to particular points of view, and for these reasons, its epistemic content is close to the individual and salient from a cognitive and emotional point of view.

This issue of Rivista di Estetica welcomes submissions about the following – and related – topics:

• Epistemological features characterising narrative knowledge;
• Differences between narrative knowledge and philosophical/scientific knowledge;
• Narrative knowledge in the history of philosophy;
• Narrative knowledge and criminology;
• Narrative knowledge and cultural knowledge;
• Narrative knowledge and the genre of memoir;
• Potentials of narrative knowledge in dealing with the global challenges that present generations are facing (e.g., climate change, social inequalities, political instabilities);
• Potentials of narrative knowledge in benefiting historical knowledge, as with oral histories.

Submissions must be written in English and prepared for blind review. They must not exceed 40,000 characters. The evaluation will follow a double-blind process.

In order to submit your paper, please register and login to: http://labont.it/estetica/index.php/rivistadiestetica/login

When asked “What kind of file is this”, select the relevant CFP.

Rivista di estetica (3/2024)

Kant, race, and racism: understanding and reckoning

Advisory Editors: Gabriele Gava (University of Turin), Huaping Lu-Adler (Georgetown University) and Achim Vesper (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Mail to: redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline: June 30, 2023

DEADLINE EXTENDED!

Due to the numerous requests, we have decided to extend the deadline of the special issue of Rivista di Estetica on “Kant, race, and racism: understanding and reckoning” until September 15. We look forward to receiving your submissions!

This special issue is scheduled to appear in 2024, the 300th anniversary of Kant’s birth. We believe that it is important to continue to address Kant’s account of race and his racist remarks even during this important celebration year.

The issue of race appears at various points in Kant’s writing. Famously, he dedicated three texts to developing a theory of human races in 1775, 1785 and 1788. But it also surfaces in many other texts, both published and unpublished during his life. In many of these writings, Kant clearly accepts a hierarchical ordering of the races, where white Europeans go on top. This ordering is further backed by racist remarks on people of color that are scattered throughout his corpus.

Kant’s remarks on race have been a subject of scholarly debate for a long time. Recently, the issue gained broader attention, especially in Germany, in the aftermath of the renewed “Black Lives Matter” movement that emerged after the killing of George Floyd. In the past, scholars tended to address the problem by taking one of two opposed sides. One was to call into question Kant’s moral and political theories in light of his racist views (Charles Mills, for instance, called for a radical revision of those theories). The other was to register those views as reprehensible but set them aside as mere personal prejudices that do not affect Kant’s core philosophy at all.

However, it is not enough simply to acknowledge that Kant held racist views. Nor is it clear that there is any non-question-begging way to insulate the supposed “core” of Kant’s philosophy from those views. We need to explore all the ways in which Kant’s views on race may be integral to his entire philosophical system.  Furthermore, if it turns out that “race” is more central to Kant’s thought than previously assumed, we need answers to the question of how to reckon with the effects of his race thinking.

We welcome submissions that discuss Kant’s theory of race and his racist views along those lines.

Submissions should be written in English and prepared for blind review. They must not exceed 45,000 characters (approx. 7,000 words), including notes, bibliography and blank spaces. The evaluation will follow a triple blind process. Neither the reviewers nor the advisory editors will be informed about the identity of the authors.

In order to submit your paper, please register and login to: http://labont.it/estetica/index.php/rivistadiestetica/login.

Please note: when asked “What kind of file is this”, select the relevant CFP.

Rivista di Estetica (1/2024)

The Philosophy of the City

Advisory Editors: Alessandro Armando (Politecnico di Torino), Nicola Siddi (University of Turin)

Mail to: redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline extended: January 20, 2023

Today, approximately 55 per cent of the world’s population lives in cities, and this percentage, according to the UN’s World Urbanization Prospects 2018, is set to grow to 68 per cent in 2050. The future of humanity seems therefore tied to the urban dimension and in the last few decades an increasing attention to the nature of the city has been indeed observed.

Cities are complex entities. It is possible to approach them from a metaphysical and/or epistemological point of view, dealing with questions such as what cities are, whether there are ontological differences between villages, towns, cities, and megacities, whether living in a city changes or not the individual psychology, or what disciplines and which kind of theories can explain urban dynamics and phenomena.

Cities, however, can also be approached keeping in mind their relationships with the environment. In this frame, how conceiving and designing sustainable or green cities become relevant, as well as how human-wildlife conflicts and interactions should be managed, given that cities always host a huge number of non-human animals (among which there are our pets). And what about the relationship between urban density and diseases? Should cities be different in the post-pandemic era?

These are some examples of the many research strands that can be developed in the frame of a philosophical analysis of the city. This issue of Rivista di Estetica encourages submissions about these and related topics.

• Ontology and epistemology of the city
• Psychology and the city
• Urban inclusiveness and segregation
• Green and sustainable cities
• Urban aesthetics
• The city as the theatre of social conflict
• The future of the city
• The city of non-human animals
• City, healthcare, and pandemics
• Technology and the city

Articles must be written in English or Italian and should not exceed 40,000 characters, notes and blank spaces included.

In order to submit your paper, please register and login to: http://labont.it/estetica/index.php/rivistadiestetica/login.

Please notice: when asked “What kind of file is this”, select the relevant CFP.

Rivista di Estetica (2/2024)

Speculative Thinking

Advisory Editors: Luca Illetterati (Università di Padova), Zdravko Kobe (Univerza v Ljubljani), Giulia Bernard (Università di Padova)

Mail to: redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline for submission: April 30, 2023

The term ‘speculative’ closely characterizes Hegel’s philosophy, to the point of designating his own philosophical proposal: speculative thinking as opposed to intellectual-abstract and negative-rational thinking, speculative philosophy as a totality of knowledge organized as a system, and speculative logic as departing from transcendental and formal logic are just a few examples that surface when considering Hegel’s philosophy in terms of its differences from other philosophical projects. The term has thus become almost a proper name. And yet it is all but clear what determines the speculative as such: its specific form.

A similar fate seems to have befallen the later revivals of the concept in those who referred to it, in a genealogy directly or indirectly dependent on Hegel. We have seen an increase of interest in the speculative (Alfred North Whitehead, Theodor W. Adorno, Dieter Henrich, Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Žižek) and an upsurge of theoretical proposals that refer back to the speculative (speculative realism, speculative materialism, speculative naturalism), but do so by explicitly distancing themselves from something like ‘speculative thinking’, which in their view represents a legacy to be overcome. The question is: What does speculative thinking actually mean? And in what way do these new conceptions of the speculative succeed in freeing themselves from the allegedly cumbersome burden carried by the term?

This issue of Rivista di Estetica aims at addressing these questions by dwelling on the different uses and meanings of the term ‘speculative’ in Hegel’s philosophy, and the issues that have defined speculative thinking as such. Its scope is to arrive at a conceptual clarification of ‘speculative thinking’ and to examine some of its outcomes in contemporary debate.

Submissions focusing on the following issues (or related topics) are welcome:

• Speculative thinking and its form in Hegel:
  • the logical form of the speculative
  • discursivity and performance
  • the language of the speculative
  • the ‘three sides’ of the logical as attitudes of thinking: the side of abstraction or of understanding; the dialectical or negatively rational; the speculative or positively rational
  • the relationship between the sayable and the unsayable

• Hegel’s contentious genealogy and legacy: what does it mean for philosophy to be ‘speculative’?
  • the genealogy of ‘speculative thinking’ from pre-critical rationalism to Classical German Philosophy
  • its legacy in critical theory, hermeneutics, deconstruction, processual metaphysics, and analytic philosophy, among others
  • ‘speculative’ in theoretical proposals nowadays: speculative realism, speculative materialism, speculative naturalism, speculative pragmatism, speculative anthropology

Articles must be written in English or Italian and should not exceed 40,000 characters, notes and blank spaces included.

In order to submit your paper, please register and login to: http://labont.it/estetica/index.php/rivistadiestetica/login.

Please notice: when asked “What kind of file is this”, select the relevant CFP.

Rivista di Estetica (3/2021)

The Senses of Smell: Scents, Odors and Aromatic Spaces

Advisory Editors: Nicola Perullo (University of Pollenzo), Elena Mancioppi (University of Pollenzo)

Mail to: n.perullo@unisg.it and redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline for submission: July 30, 2020

Description

It is often said that smell is not essential for civilized and urban life. Nevertheless, private environments as well as public spaces, bodies, objects and food are increasingly deodorized and/or scented. In fact, in everyday experiences, the sense of smell is a driving force of human behavior and has a pivotal role in orientating emotional reactions, expectations, choices, preferences, and judgments.

Since the eighties of the 20th century, a new interest, both in human and in natural sciences, seems to have been flourishing in order to recognize its processes, functions and effects. Many studies have shown its relevance in identity formation, social life, bodily health and psychological well-being, and olfaction turns out to be deeply influential in the perceptual engagement with the environment and in the relationship with the otherness and the familiar.

However, in philosophy, with exceptions, the sense of smell is still a marginal and accidental object of inquiry. It is mainly linked to subjectivity, recollection, idiosyncratic association, intuition and sagacity. From a phenomenological and aesthetic perspective, odors are temporary and transient phenomena; furthermore, they are difficult to grasp also by language and taxonomy, as difficult attempts throughout history to fix stable classification and terminology show.

This issue of “Rivista d’Estetica” has two main aims. On the one hand, to shed light on potentialities, inconsistencies, cognitive features and aesthetic values of olfactory perception; on the other, to suggest interpretations of smells and flavors understood as affective stimuli used not only in arts (for example theatre and performance art) but also in culinary practices, space and product design, chemical industry, perfumery, etc.

Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 40.000 characters.

Rivista di Estetica (1/2022)

Title: Aesthetics of Contemporary Work: Depictions, Narratives, Conceptualization

Advisory Editors: Angela Condello (University of Messina), Tiziano Toracca (University of Ghent/University of Turin), Zhao Kuiying (University of Nanjing)

Submission: angela.condello@unito.it and redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline for submission: May 2, 2021

Description

This issue aims at analysing the depiction and conceptualization of contemporary work in the fields of art and philosophy. By addressing “contemporary work” we refer to a temporal phenomenon (i.e. to the idea of work as it is perceived in the era of globalization) and we thus encourage submissions concerning artworks (performative arts, figurative arts, comics, photography, literature, cinema, tv series, web series) or concerning philosophical re-conceptualizations of the world of work over the last forty years (1980-2020).

Work is today among the most debated themes in public discourse not only because it represents an anthropological aspect of continuity of human action and one of the main forms of social recognition and exchange (especially starting from the re-evaluation of work that occurred in the Middle Ages, with the birth of the middle class in contrast to aristocracy), but also because it has gone through radical transformations whose reasons and consequences are at the centre of a pluri-disciplinary, international and political debate.

The concepts of “work” and “labour” today are often used not properly: this is proved by the large bibliography produced on these themes as well as the fact that the meaning of the terms ‘work’ and ‘labour’ is far from clear and thus hard to categorize. Labour appears to be a stratified phenomenon mixing hyper-modern elements with hyper-arcaic ones; that crosses all modernity; that is based on formal, logic and positive parameters but that at the same times implies emotional, uncountable symbolic elements (e.g. fatigue, happiness, realization), forms of representation, concepts like identity or social status.

It is a loose category, which links together very different phenomena all far in reality (in space and time) and in our imaginary.

The issue welcomes papers addressing the following questions:

• To which extent can we define human action according to the criteria defining the working life0
• How does work distinguish man from other species (if it does)?
• What is the opposite of work? Otium? Freedom?
• How can the exemplary worker be depicted? As a citizen?
• Which myths and symbolic structures are at play in similar representations?

Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 30.000 characters, notes and blank-spaces included.

Rivista di Estetica (2/2022)

Rethinking Through Art: East and West

Advisory Editors: Xiao Ouyang (Wuhan University, China), Tiziana Andina, (Università di Torino, Italy)
Mail to: ouyang.xiao@whu.edu.cn and redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline for submission: 28 February 2021

Description
Over the centuries, art has been a prominent form of cultural exchange between the East and the West. This role has become even more prominent in the last three hundred years. Western painting and music introduced by European missionaries shaped the tastes of the Chine
se imperial courts since the 17 th century. The “Chinoiserie” style inspired by Chinese aesthetics contributed a great deal to the dynamics of the 18 th -century European art-world. Japanese Ukiyo-e – the art of the “floating world” – was believed to have a significant impact on the Impressionists. It becomes evident that contemporary artists from the East and the West have formed a collaborative community of creativity. While more and more art historians are shifting part of their research interest to the Eastern art traditions, looking into them in their own right, or investigating art history in a greater trans-cultural context, many philosophers of art still remain relatively reluctant to either philosophize about art from a cross-cultural perspective, or try to conceptualize its central issues by drawing on diverse cultural experiences and studies of the non-Western histories of art. In the last several decades, the field of philosophy of art and aesthetics in the West has seen many great theoretical achievements, which enable us to think about and create art in a profoundly meaningful way, bringing art more than ever closer to “pure” philosophy. But, when we look closely at these influential philosophical inquiries into art, we find they are, by and large, exclusively inspired and dominated by the European art tradition and engages research materials from very specific origins, often shunning potential challenges from non-Western art as well as the historical facts of artistic interaction and the on-going confluence of artistic practice in our age. This issue aims to reopen a ground for rethinking some fundamental philosophical
questions about art within a cross-cultural context. We encourage reflection on any important topic in the philosophy of art on the basis of Eastern-Western comparison or synthesis. We especially prefer submissions addressing the following issues: the definition of art, ontology of art, art and creativity, art and self-cultivation. Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 40.000 characters, notes and blank-spaces included.

Rivista di Estetica (3/2022)

Title: The Aesthetics of Idealism. Facets and Relevance of a Theoretical Paradigm

Advisory Editors: Giovanna Pinna (Università del Molise), Serena Feloj (Università di Pavia), Robert Clewis (Gwynedd Mercy University)

Mail to: giovanna.pinna@unimol.it and redazionerivistadiestetica@gmail.com

Deadline for submission: June 30, 2021

Description

The last few decades have seen an increased interest in the aesthetics of German Idealism. In particular, this turning point in the history of philosophical reflection on beauty and art has been made fruitful for explorations of contemporary artistic practices. The focus, however, has so far been put primarily on a limited number of themes and authors, with a marked prevalence of investigations into Hegel and the issue of the ‘end of art’.

The publication of the transcripts of Hegel’s lectures and new annotated editions of other works (such as Schelling’s Philosophie der Kunst or Solger’s Vorlesungen über Ästhetik) have significantly broadened the textual base. This fresh material has allowed scholars to explore in more depth the development of the thought of individual authors, as well as the relationships, affinities and distances between their differing positions.

The aim of this volume is to reconsider post-Kantian aesthetics by dwelling on the variety of thinkers, and theoretical issues that defined it, in order to discuss the outcome – in terms of aesthetic theory – of these positions and their possible contribution to current discussions on art and its social and philosophical relevance.

Submissions focusing on the relationship between German Idealism and Romanticism, or on the position of authors like Hölderlin, Fichte, Schelling, Vischer, or Solger within the framework of post-Kantian aesthetic thought, or on specific aspects of the theory of Idealism, including relatively overlooked topics like the comical or humorous, are welcome.

Articles must be written in English or in Italian and should not exceed 40.000 characters, notes and blank-spaces included.

Rivista di Estetica (1/2023)

Title: Unpacking the social world: groups and solidarity

Advisory editors: Francesco Camboni (University of Eastern Piedmont), Raul Hakli (University of Helsinki), Valeria Martino (University of Genoa)

Deadline for submission: January 8, 2022

“Sociality” is a fuzzy word that can be found in a wide range of scopes and debates, from antiquity to the contemporary age. Notwithstanding or rather just in virtue of its wide currency, however, there is no explicit consensus on the meaning “sociality” has. While biology and sociology have rather wide notions of sociality, the focus of social ontology is on the social world, that is, the ontological domain which is populated by social entities. While according to some sociality occurs as long as there is interaction among people, involving joint commitments and plural subjects, others refer to the social world as mostly made of institutional facts or social objects, or deal with social actions and practices.

This issue of Rivista di Estetica aims at shedding light on sociality by addressing two core classic subjects of social philosophy: groups and solidarity. Indeed, groups are the most obvious result of sociality as the tendency of grouping, depending on living and interacting with others. On the other hand, as another branch of sociality, solidarity has only recently attracted remarkable attention from social and political philosophers; while some propose to unpack it in terms of joint action, others explore the forms of mutual recognition that are combined in solidarity.

Topics and research questions include (but are not limited to):

• The nature and identity of social groups;
• Is sociality a constitutive feature of groups of people?
• The nature of solidarity, and – if any – its opposite;
• The kind of psychological mechanisms involved in dynamics of solidarity;
• Is solidarity related to some distinctive group kind?
• Is solidarity a necessary or sufficient condition for group formation?

 Instructions: Submissions focusing on other aspects of social groups and solidarity, both from a theoretical and an ethical point of view are welcome. Articles must be written in English or in Italian and should not exceed 40.000 characters, notes and blank-spaces included.

In order to submit your paper, please register and login to: http://labont.it/estetica/index.php/rivistadiestetica/login.

Please notice: when asked “What kind of file is this”, please select the relevant CFP.

Rivista di Estetica (2/2023)

Title: The Philosophy of Television Series

Guest editors: Mario Slugan (Queen Mary University of London) and Enrico Terrone (Università di Genova)

Deadline for submission: 1 April 2022

It is often said that television series are nowadays as good as films, or even better than them, but the philosophical inquiry into the former remains much less developed than the philosophy of film. A handful of recent books have tried to fill the gap, but there is much work still to be done. Significant contributions to the aesthetics of television series are coming from television studies and film studies, raising issues which philosophers are challenged to address. The special issue of Rivista di estetica looks for philosophical perspectives on television series with the aim of exploring this new fascinating area of research in which aesthetics and media studies can fruitfully interact. Topics for papers may include but are not limited to the following:

• Is TV series a self-standing form of art or is it to be traced back to the cinema?
• What is the relationship between television series and films?
• What is the relationship between television series and other forms of television (e.g. talk shows, reality shows, news)?
• What sets the Golden Age of Television (Peak Television) apart from the preceding era?
• Is there a narrative specificity of television series?
• What is the effect of seriality/seasonality on television series?
• How are television series related to other serial narratives such as comics?
• How do television series deal with the system of film genres?
• The fiction/nonfiction divide in television series.
• The antihero and the antiheroine as outstanding characters in television series
• Philosophical themes in television series

Instructions: Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 30.000 characters.

In order to submit your paper, please register and login to: http://labont.it/estetica/index.php/rivistadiestetica/login

When asked “What kind of file is this?”, please select the relevant CFP.

Please notice: when asked “What kind of file is this”, please select the relevant CFP.

Rivista di Estetica (3/2023)

Title: Ontology of Finance

Guest editors: Gloria Sansò (University at Buffalo) and Barry Smith (University at Buffalo)

Deadline for submission: 30 June 2022

One famous scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is the dialogue between the young Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the expert trader Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna is complaining that the stock market is unpredictable; it’s “fugazi … it’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is not matter. It’s not on the element chart. It’s not real”. But the fact that something is unpredictable and non-physical does not imply that it does not exist. On the other hand, its unpredictability, non-physicality, and the fact that the stock market trend is largely determined by investors’ beliefs, do make its nature difficult to grasp.

This special issue of Rivista di Estetica aims to explore the financial sector from an ontological point of view. While the ontology of money has been extensively studied, few scholars have focused on the stock market and, more generally, on those entities belonging to the investment landscape. Matters are made more complicated by the fact that the financial sector is characterized by an ever-increasing use of digital technology, including software elements that trade in the market themselves. We believe that a careful study of this phenomenon may help us better to understand the role of artificial agents in the social world.

Topics and research questions include (but are not limited to):

• The nature of financial instruments, financial risk, financial markets
• The nature of buying, selling and investing
• The problem of performativity in the financial world
• What is the difference between price and value?
• Are the orders placed by an automated trading system social acts?
• What is the role of documents in finance?
• Can the financial market be fair?

Instructions: Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 40.000 characters, notes and blank-spaces included.

In order to submit your paper, please register and login to: http://labont.it/estetica/index.php/rivistadiestetica/login.

Please notice: when asked “What kind of file is this”, select the relevant CFP.

For further information, mail to: gsanso@buffalo.edu

Webpages: https://labont.it/labont/rivista-di-estetica/
https://journals.openedition.org/estetica/