It is often said that television series are now- adays 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 con- tributions to the aesthetics of television series are coming from television studies and film studies, raising issues which philosophers are challenged to address. This special issue aims to offer philosophical perspectives on television series that are meant to explore this new area of research in which aesthetics and media studies can fruitfully interact.
Groups and solidarity are, separately, widely debated concepts in contemporary social philosophy, yet their interplay remains largely unexplored and undertheorized. In fact, when it comes to investigating one of these concepts, more often than not the other is at best vaguely mentioned as a background assumption, and vice versa. This issue aims to foster a discussion of groups and solidarity as intimately related subjects, and this proposal is addressed to the domain of social philosophy. However, it is also intended to highlight some peculiar features that both discussions own independently, which could provide a preliminary groundwork for bridging the gap.
The last few decades have been characterized by an increasing interest in the aesthetics of German Idealism. In particular the recent scholarly debate on Hegel’s philosophy has given new impetus to the reflection on art as a structural element of the self understanding of the modern subject. At the same time, this Hegel Renaissance has opened the door for a more nuanced comprehension of Idealistic aesthetics. This issue of Rivista di estetica aims to explore the Idealistic philosophy of art as a constellation of themes, problems and partly conflicting positions, rather than as a unified and closed theoretical model.
Today, work is a widely debated theme: despite relevant criticalities due to the changes in the economic and political orders, it remains a basic component of our daily lives, a foundational aspect of human action as well as one of the main forms of social recognition. Across such background, the issue engages with a wide set of reflections concerning not only the representation and the conceptualization of work, but also the relationships between art and work: how does work define the artwork? How is the work of artists valued today?
Contributions cover the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of art, ontology of art and work, legal and political philosophy, as well as literary theory.
Although recent years have seen a growing philosophical interest in smell, aesthetic research on it still covers a relatively small domain, confinedto a niche. The present issue deals with smell as a very serious philosophical issue, in some cases even as a vector of a whole philosophical project.The papers here collected show how olfaction, odors, fragrances and, more in general, the aerial dimension of being and knowing cover a huge range of problems that even exceeds the aesthetic domain in its conventional sense. This is why readers will not find papers written exclusively by professional philosophers, but also by curators, artists, perfumers and semiologists.The relationship between smell, cognition and aesthetic experience, the use of odors in the arts and their symbolic meanings, and the socio-ontological and socio-aesthetic engagement through the ethical and political implications of smell are some of the topics the essays tackle through different approaches and perspectives.
In Europa, gli scritti più conosciuti di Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013) restano certamente quelli di filosofia dell’arte. Negli ultimi vent’anni, la ricezione europea di questi lavori ha generato una vivace discussione, soprattutto in ambito estetico. Tale successo va interpretato nel riflesso dei complessi rapporti intrattenuti da Danto con i classici del pensiero continentale. Il presente fascicolo di Rivista di Estetica tenta di far luce sul variegato panorama di questi rapporti. Gli articoli di cui è composto interrogano, da prospettive differenti, la maniera in cui Danto ha assunto e rielaborato alcuni temi- chiave della tradizione continentale: lo statuto della narrazione, la mimesis, la bellezza, il sublime, la storicità dell’arte, il nesso fra arte ed esperienza sensibile. Ne risulta un quadro plurale che conferma quanto questa “conversazione europea” sia stata cruciale per l’originale attività di Danto come filosofo e critico d’arte: continuativa ma esposta a ripensamenti, vasta nei riferimenti, ispiratrice e irregolare nelle forme, peculiare nel metodo, eterodossa negli esiti.
The theoretical path of Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was that of a great intellectual who ranged from non-fiction to literary production. His was a very extensive research programme. On the basis of studies concerning
aesthetics, communication and medieval thought, Eco developed it by elaborating a semiotic theory and studying language and cognition. His reflections on the method and possibilities of theoretical formulation have been crucial to his research – precisely because, as he wrote, no theoretical system comes without contradictions. Philosophers therefore do not have the task of eliminating them but rather of seeking them out where they are not apparent. This issue of Rivista di Estetica collects essays that contribute to investigating several aspects and specificities of Eco’s research in philosophy, semiotics and the arts, in order to bring to light his reflection on theoretical investigation and his commitment to developing a practice that can offer important resources for today’s research. It is an invitation to rethink those three theoretical fields by drawing on the teachings of this great scholar.
Few would deny that we are currently experiencing an environmental crisis of unprecedented magnitude and severity. Yet, much less clear is what phenomena the environmental crisis refers to and why they are particularly unjust. For instance, one might wonder whether the environmental crisis is unjust because it impinges on the intrinsic value of the environment, or because it severely affects humans and their human rights in particular. Equally, it is far from clear who should bear the responsibility to remedy the environmental crisis and to what extent.
This issue of Rivista di Estetica addressees these questions with the aim of clarifying what the environmental crisis is and involves, as well as how we should frame it from a justice-based perspective. It accomplishes this in four sections. The first section investigates what the environment is. The second section addresses the environmental crisis through the normative lenses of the concept of responsibility. The third section analyses the environmental crisis through a human-rights perspective. Finally, the fourth section introduces some new paths that the literature may and perhaps should take. This issue will appeal to anyone interested in the environment and its crisis.
This issue of “Rivista di Estetica” has two main aims: examining how and to which extent the contemporary international debate on New Realism brought to the forefront Schelling’s Naturphilosophie; and exploring the value of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as a theoretical resource for several fields of research such as the contemporary philosophy of nature and the ontology of powers, the concept of identity and the mind-body problem, the speculative realism and the metaphysical issue of the ground.