Maurizio Ferraris

Maurizio Ferraris (born February 7, 1956 in Turin) is an Italian philosopher and scholar. His name is attached to the philosophical current named new realism (he wrote the Manifesto of New Realism in 2012, published by SUNY Press in 2014), that shares significant similarities with speculative realism and object oriented ontology. A pupil of Gianni Vattimo, and influenced by Jacques Derrida, he started as a theorist of hermeneutics before turning his attention to the analytic strand. Over the years he has been able to create an effective synthesis between the two approaches, creating a new ontological realism that rejects Kant's schematism in the cognitive area.

Since 1995 Ferraris has been full Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he also runs the LabOnt (Laboratory for Ontology). He studied in Turin, Paris and Heidelberg and has taught at major European Universities. He is the director of the Rivista di Estetica and is part of the directive committee of Critique and aut aut. From 1989 to 2010 he has written for the cultural supplement of Il Sole 24 ORE; since 2010 he has been writing for the cultural section of la Repubblica. His main areas of expertise are hermeneutics, aesthetics and ontology.

Ferraris graduated from Philosophy at the University of Turin in 1979, under the guidance of Gianni Vattimo. In the early years of his career he divided his time between teaching, research and cultural journalism. From 1979 to 1988 he has been an editor, and then co-director, of Alfabeta, whose directive committee includes, among others, Antonio Porta, Nanni Balestrini, Maria Corti, Umberto Eco, Francesco Leonetti, Pier Aldo Rovatti and Paolo Volponi. In the early eighties he began his relationship with Derrida, who deeply marked his philosophical training. On the academic level, in 1984, after two years of teaching in Macerata (1982–83), he began to teach in Trieste, interspersing his didactic activities with a series of stays in Heidelberg. Here, after getting in contact with Gadamer, he started his studies in hermeneutics.

In 1995, Ferraris was called in Turin, as a full Professor of Aesthetics, and later began teaching Metaphysics (Filosofia teoretica) in 1999. While working as a director of program (i.e. teacher) at the Collège international de philosophie from 1998 to 2004, in 1999 he founded the Laboratory for Ontology (LabOnt) and the Inter-University Centre for Theoretical and Applied Ontology (CTAO). Currently Ferraris is full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he is also the President of the LabOnt (Laboratory for Ontology) and of the Centre for Theoretical and Applied Ontology (CTAO). He is a Fellow of Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Recht als Kultur” (Bonn) and a Honorary Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies of South East Europe (Rijeka). Ferraris has been Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. He has also been Directeur d’études of the Collège International de Philosophie and a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) as well as other European and American Universities.

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