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.
Maurizio Ferraris has worked in the field of aesthetics, hermeneutics and social ontology, attaching his name to the theory of documentality, and contemporary new realism.
Ferraris’ early interests lay in French post-structuralist philosophy, with special attention to authors such as Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze.
While working with Gadamer, starting in the early eighties, Ferraris then turned to hermeneutics, writing: Aspetti dell’ermeneutica del Novecento (1986), Ermeneutica di Proust (1987), Nietzsche e la filosofia del Novecento (1989) and especially Storia dell’ermeneutica (1988) History of Hermeneutics, Humanities Press, 1996 At the end of the eighties, Ferraris developed an articulated critique of Heidegger and Gadamer's tradition (see, in particular, Cronistoria di una svolta, the 1990 afterword to Heidegger's conference “The Turn”), which makes use of post-structuralism to challenge the romantic and idealistic legacy affecting such tradition.
Oftentimes, both philosophers and ordinary people despise the letter (the rules and constraints instituted through documents and inscriptions of various kinds) and set the spirit (i.e. thought and will) above it, recognizing the creative freedom of the latter as opposed to the former.
The external world, recognized as unamendable, and the relationship between conceptual schemes and sensory experience (aesthetics, restored to its etymological meaning of "science of sensory perception", acquires a primary significance – see, in particular, Analogon rationis (1994 ), Estetica (1996, with other authors), L’immaginazione (1996), Experimentelle Ästhetik (2001) and Estetica razionale (1997)) are the dominant themes of the second phase of Ferraris’ thought, which involves a re-reading of Kant through the naive physics of the perceptologist Paolo Bozzi (see Il mondo esterno (2001) and Goodbye Kant!
Ontology of the Cell Phone, forthcoming for Fordham UP] and went on with Babbo Natale, Gesù adulto (2006), Sans Papier (2007), La fidanzata automatica (2007) and Il tunnel delle multe (2008).
As noted by Barry Smith (2003), this perspective has difficulty in accounting for both negative entities – such as debts, which apparently do not have a physical counterpart – and the new, seemingly intangible, social objects generated by the Web.
First, it has been able to account for the substantial growth of documents and recording devices in the Web world, which is very well explained by the proposed constitutive law of social reality.
New Realism – the principles of which were anticipated by Ferraris in an article published in La Repubblica on 8 August 2011[5] and which then started a massive debate[6] – is primarily a consideration of some historical, cultural and political phenomena (i.e. the analysis of postmodernism up to its deteriorating into media populism).
From these reflections follows the urge to shed light over the outcomes produced by the derivations of postmodernism within contemporary thought (i.e. the interpretation of philosophical realisms and "theories of truth" that developed starting from the end of last century in response to a deviation of the relationship between the individual and reality).
This, in turn, leads to the proposal of an antidote to the degeneration of postmodernist ideology and the degraded and mendacious relationship with the world that it has caused: New Realism, in fact, identifies itself with the synergistic action of three key words, Ontology, Critique and Enlightenment.
New Realism has been the subject of several debates and national and international conferences and has called for a series of publications that involve the concept of reality as a paradigm even in non-philosophical areas.
In fact, the debate on new realism, for number of contributions and media response, has no equivalent in the recent cultural history, to the point of being chosen as 'case study' for the analysis of the sociology of communication and linguistics.
[7] In the international arena, the Manifesto of new realism can be found in several translations: English (SUNYI Press), French (Hermann), German (Klostermann), Spanish (Biblioteca Nueva) ecc.
[9] Furthermore, the topic was re-elaborated both in Warum es die Welt nicht gibt by Markus Gabriel (Berlin, Ullstein Verlag 2013) and in Manifiesto del nuevo realismo analógico (Buenos Aires, Circulo Herméneutico 2013) by Mauricio Beuchot (México-UNAM) and José Luis Jerez (Argentina-UNCo).
The production of this value, through so-called big data, should be recognised as a form of work and lead to a redistribution of profits, thanks to a welfare system that, because it is web-based, Ferraris calls Webfare.