Böcker av Maurizio Ferraris

However you view the present time, it is a new century, a new world, and also a new humanity - in fact, humanity is not something that was ever defined once and for all, but remains an open project. For several decades we have been witnessing a revolution. However, unlike the political and ideological revolutions that took place around the First World War, this is a technological and much more radical one that does not depend on people's beliefs, but rather on the tireless labour of machines. The rise of automation has brought about a revelation of something that had hitherto remained hidden in the workshops of homo faber . That is, there are very few functions, apart from consumption, where a machine cannot replace a human being, be these material or spiritual - machines need energy, but they can also do without it, whereas humans die if deprived of it, or one can imagine a machine producing symphonies, but not enjoying them. So while human beings are still needed, their roles and scopes have to be reconsidered. Workers may be superfluous, but humans are still needed, including those who until recently only recognised themselves as producers. The exclusion of workers from production does not discount humans being able to produce value in the form of consumption. Recognising this will enable us to conceive the "Webfare" - a new digital system that will teach us to find new names and new forms, more tolerance and room for traditional human needs. Above all, it will teach us how to transform the time given to us by automation into an opportunity for progress.

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.

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.