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  • Call for papers - Vol. 21, n. 1/2027 - Emergence and language (eds. J. Miller & E. Onnis)

    2026-07-27

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

    Vol. 21, n. 1/2027: Emergence and Language

    Editors: James Miller (Durham University), Erica Onnis (Cusano University)

    Emergence is broadly understood as the appearance of genuinely novel and therefore irreducible properties, structures, and behaviours arising from the interaction of simpler components.

    Despite being a central topic in philosophy of science and metaphysics, its implications for philosophy of language and linguistics remain comparatively underexplored. However, the linguistic dimensions seem to offer compelling and philosophically rich instances of emergent phenomena: the evolutionary origin of natural languages; the emergence of grammar and linguistic structures; that of meaning and creativity; that of social and institutional facts through linguistic acts and their inscription. These phenomena are cases in which something genuinely new comes into being through complex historical, linguistic, cognitive, and/or social processes and makes a difference to the world.

    This issue of the Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio invites original contributions investigating the relationships between emergence and language. The issue aims to bring together work in philosophy of language and linguistics, philosophy of science, aesthetics, complexity science, metaphysics, and social ontology.

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  • Vol. 20, N. 2/2026 Wittgenstein and Literature

    2026-01-04

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

    Vol. 20, N. 2/2026   Wittgenstein and Literature
    Edited by Marcello Di Massa and Wolfgang Huemer

    Invited contributors:
    Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, University of Hertfordshire
    Severin Schroeder, University of Reading

    Submission deadline – update: J̶u̶n̶e̶ ̶1̶0̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶2̶6̶ 10 July, 2026

    In recent decades, the relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein and literature has increasingly become a fertile and promising area of inquiry. Although Wittgenstein rarely addressed the topic of literature explicitly, his way of doing (and writing) philosophy can be taken to open up fresh and illuminating perspectives on questions concerning our engagement with literary and fictional works, as well as on the task of investigating literary language and, more broadly, literature as a linguistic and social phenomenon.

    Read more about Vol. 20, N. 2/2026 Wittgenstein and Literature

  • Vol. 20, n.1/2026 Language, Nature, and Culture in Wittgenstein (ed. Begoña Ramón Cámara)

    2024-11-19

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

    Vol. 20, N. 1/2026, Language, Nature, and Culture in Wittgenstein
    Edited by Begoña Ramón Cámara

    Submission deadline: November 30th, 2025
    Publication: June 2026

    Wittgenstein has been one of the twentieth century thinkers who has made one of the most interesting contributions, often implicit or latent in his writings, to the topic of the relationship between language, nature, and culture.

    Relating language and culture means rethinking, on the basis of that relationship, both language and culture. For example, language ceases to be considered an abstract entity and culture takes on an anthropological connotation in a broad sense. This explains the sense in which Wittgenstein can state in the Brown Book that to imagine a language means to imagine a culture. This connection is taken up and reiterated in the Philosophical Investigations (§19), in which, however, he uses for ‘culture’ not the German ‘Kultur’, but the expression ‘form of life’ (Lebensform). In this passage the Spenglerian connotation of the word ‘Kultur’ (which Wittgenstein had used in an important text of 1929), disappears. In turn, the expression ‘form of life’ serves to underline both the physical-biological and animal aspect of our life and its historical-cultural and conventional aspect, as well as its facticity.

    Read more about Vol. 20, n.1/2026 Language, Nature, and Culture in Wittgenstein (ed. Begoña Ramón Cámara)

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

    2024-08-01

    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

    UPDATE - Submission deadline: May 15, 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.

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

  • Vol. 18, 2/2024: Certainty and Language (eds. A. Coliva & L. Zanetti)

    2024-02-01

    Guest editors: Annalisa Coliva (University of California, Irvine) & Luca Zanetti (INDIRE)

    Deadline: 15/7/2024

    Questions about the interplay between certainty and language cut through the whole history of philosophy, from ancient to contemporary debates. One traditional line of thought considers language as some sort of obstacle to the acquisition of absolute certainty. Certain knowledge seems to require a direct doubt-free access to the way things are. Yet language seems to mediate our access to the way things are, thereby creating the space for doubt and uncertainty. This strand of thought interacts with a great variety of classical and contemporary debates on the interplay between language and certainty: one debate concerns the very possibility of there being doubt-free certain foundations for knowledge and the way in which we should think about these foundations; on this line, one classical picture thinks about foundations in terms of some strong epistemic relation with reality, such as acquaintance or intuition; another connected set of questions concerns the very possibility of unmediated language-free epistemic relation with reality, a question which is often nowadays explored in the debates surrounding what Sellars famously described as the myth of the given.

    Read more about Vol. 18, 2/2024: Certainty and Language (eds. A. Coliva & L. Zanetti)

  • Vol. 18, N. 1/2024 Interdisciplinary perspectives on cancel culture (eds. S. Di Piazza & A. Spena)

    2023-07-18

    The pulling down of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol or those of Christopher Columbus in Richmond and Minneapolis, the literary crusades of #disrupttexts against Homer or Shakespeare, the shitstorms against Woody Allen, Philip Roth or Kanye West: they are all qualified as conduct of cancel culture. Even in Italy, the expression is now entering common usage; it was used to connote the defacement of Indro Montanelli’s statue in via Palestro in Milan, but also the request to remove Mussolini’s effigy from the Mise building or, a few years ago, the fuss raised by some passages of the promotional campaign dedicated by the pasta company “La Molisana” to “colonial” pasta formats, such as the “Tripoline” or the “Abissine rigate”.

     

    Read more about Vol. 18, N. 1/2024 Interdisciplinary perspectives on cancel culture (eds. S. Di Piazza & A. Spena)

  • Vol. 17, n.2 - CFP Language and economy

    2022-12-17

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

    Vol. 17, N. 2/2023     Language and economy

    Edited by C. Marazzi, M. Mazzeo, A. Bertollini

     

    Submission deadline: June 10, 2023

    The traditional productive world is marked by a clear-cut dichotomy: “it’s work or talk.” Whether it is the farmer dealing with sowing, the fisherman in the middle of the sea, or the worker forced into the assembly line, the equation returns. Talking is disturbing: it wastes the farmer’s time, it draws the fish away from the net, it distracts the industrial worker tending to run away from the factory.

    Read more about Vol. 17, n.2 - CFP Language and economy

  • Vol. 17, n.1 - The interdisciplinary language of science, philosophy and religious studies

    2022-06-18

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

    The interdisciplinary language of science, philosophy and religious studies

    Vol. 17, N. 1/2023

    Edited by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti and Ivan Colagè

    Submission deadline: February 15th, 2023

    Publication date: June 2023

    Contemporary culture highly fosters interdisciplinary work, but less attention is given to “the language” required for such an enterprise to be successful. Each discipline and research field has its own language and is thought to have all the necessary semantic resources for its work and development. For this reason, translation from the language used within a specific research field into another is not an easy task.

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  • Vol. 16, n. 2 - CFP "Aesthetic and Linguistic Practices" - DEADLINE: September 30, 2022

    2022-01-12

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

    Vol. 16, N. 2/2022     Aesthetic and Linguistic Practices

    eds. Gioia Laura Iannilli and Stefano Oliva

     

    Submission deadline: September 30, 2022

    Publication: December 2022

    The reflection on the relationship between Aesthetics and Philosophy of language is often confronted with a double commonplace. On the one hand, aesthetic experience seems to be reducible to its sensual and perceptual side and therefore its nature appears to be entirely pre-linguistic. On the other hand, this reduction is often based on the idea that language is entirely equivalent to the propositional form. In order to overcome this double commonplace, or rather, shortcoming, it may be useful to approach the aesthetic and linguistic import of experience from the point of view of practices.

    Read more about Vol. 16, n. 2 - CFP "Aesthetic and Linguistic Practices" - DEADLINE: September 30, 2022

  • Rhetoric and health (ed. Maria Grazia Rossi)

    2020-07-23

    Call for papers - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio www.rifl.unical.it
    Vol. 15, N. 1/2021 Rhetoric and health
    Edited by Maria Grazia Rossi

    Deadline: 20.01.2021

    Words can act as a pharmakon, becoming a remedy or a poison. Considering both theoretical tenets and empirical findings, we have convincing evidence on the power of language and words in changing minds and fostering behavioural change.

    In the context of health, it has been underlined how the quality of communication affect (clinical) outcomes, at the individual level (on patients) and the collective or societal level (on citizens). During the current COVID-19 pandemic, it has become even more clear that such communication effect is indirect and mediated by factors such as understanding, motivation, social assistance, trust in the system, etc. Words that are well-spoken but also, obviously, well understood can have a strong impact on the quality of our lives, concerning the clinical, emotional and social spheres.

    Read more about Rhetoric and health (ed. Maria Grazia Rossi)