Maurizio Ferraris

The Ontology of Social Reality

Monday, March 10, 2014, 4-6pm

440 Park Hall, UB North Campus

Poster

Maurizio Ferraris is a leading Italian philosopher who worked with Gadamer in Heidelberg and later became a friend and collaborator of Derrida in Paris. More recently, Ferraris has become an outspoken proponent of philosophical realism. He is the founder of CTAO (the Center for Theoretical and Applied Ontology) and of Labont (the Laboratory of Ontology) in the University of Turin. He is also the author of some 30 books, including:

• History of Hermeneutics
• The Ontology of the Mobile Phone
• Goodbye, Kant !

and

• Documentality

In his talk, Ferraris will defend a view of deontic entities such as laws, rules, permissions and obligations as being ontologically dependent on legal and other documents. Such documents, which include not only legal codes and court documents but also invoices, calendars, work orders, create and sustain our deontic surroundings. Human beings are on this view primarily passive receptors – rather than active producers – of deontic entities, which should thus be viewed as being “socially dependent” rather than “socially constructed.”

For further information please contact Barry Smith.