Call for papers - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio www.rifl.unical.it

Vol. 19, N. 2/2025   Visages and bodies between emotions and language: new interdisciplinary perspectives

Edited by Gianmarco Thierry Giuliana and Emanuela Campisi

Submission deadline: April 30, 2025

The relationship between emotions and language is a philosophical theme that has a long history and is today more topical than ever. It is no coincidence that just three years ago a special issue of RIFL came out in which Italian semiologists and philosophers of language reflected on this matter. In this issue, we propose to tackle the same theme once again by focusing on two main interrelated aspects that have been partially neglected in the past. Firstly, we want to the emphasize the central role that the body, and in particular the face, plays in the relation between emotions and language. Secondly, we want to reflect on such relationship in light of the of contemporary digital technologies and media landscape which increasingly call for constant updating of both experimental and theoretical research. Indeed, the contemporary literature on emotions and language, although boundless, presents a substantial split, both epistemological and in terms of perspective; the risk is the polarization of two different ways of approaching the problem from both the epistemological and methodological points of view. On the one hand, there are those who consider the study of the production and interpretation of emotions as beyond the scope of theories of Language and as the semi-exclusive domain of embodied theories or the label, both as generic and anachronistic, of non-verbal communication. On the other hand, there are those who focus their attention on the thought body, rather than the present body, making it a purely metaphorical and/or too abstractly modelled concept.