Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio: Announcements
type: channel
description: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio (RIFL) is a blind peer reviewed online journal that publishes papers concerning theoretical and empirical research on language, mainly in Philosophy, Semiotics, Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Epistemology. The journal's research team favours an interdisciplinary approach to a broader view of language. Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio (RIFL) aims to publish the best research articles in all areas where the philosophy of language meets other disciplines. Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio (RIFL) is ranked as a class A journal by ANVUR (the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes).
language: en-US
items: CFP: Vol. 20, N. 2/2026 Wittgenstein and Literature
items: CFP: Vol. 20, n.1/2026 Language, Nature, and Culture in Wittgenstein (ed. Begoña Ramón Cámara)
items: CFP_EN: CFP Vol. 19, N. 2/2025 Visages and bodies between emotions and language: new interdisciplinary perspectives
items: CFP: Vol. 18, 2/2024: Certainty and Language (eds. A. Coliva & L. Zanetti)
items: CFP: Vol. 18, N. 1/2024 Interdisciplinary perspectives on cancel culture (eds. S. Di Piazza & A. Spena)
items: CFP: Vol. 17, n.2 - CFP Language and economy
items: CFP: Vol. 17, n.1 - The interdisciplinary language of science, philosophy and religious studies
items: CFP: Vol. 16, n. 2 - CFP "Aesthetic and Linguistic Practices" - DEADLINE: September 30, 2022
items: CFP: Rhetoric and health (ed. Maria Grazia Rossi)

CFP: Vol. 20, N. 2/2026 Wittgenstein and Literature
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description: 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. Stanley Cavell’s writings provided an early stimulus for bringing Wittgenstein into dialogue with literature, and several studies have drawn on his example, while others have pursued more independent paths. Taken together, scholarship has thus developed in a variety of directions. Some scholars, taking into account the aesthetic dimension of Wittgenstein’s writing and his two works with the strongest authorial imprint (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations), have placed him within the historical and cultural context of European modernism, examining formal and rhetorical affinities. At the same time, Wittgenstein’s philosophy has been used in literary studies as a healthy counterweight to the theoretical excesses of the major strands of twentieth-century literary criticism, bringing to the fore a methodology more open and attentive to the way language acquires meaning and value within the diverse contexts of human life. Here, the appeal to the resources of ordinary language philosophy and to the practical, social, and existential dimensions of everyday life plays a …
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2026-01-04

CFP: Vol. 20, n.1/2026 Language, Nature, and Culture in Wittgenstein (ed. Begoña Ramón Cámara)
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description: 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. The tension between nature and culture is a thread running through the philosophy of the so-called ‘second Wittgenstein’, as shown, in particular, in several passages of On Certainty and in the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. But it had already emerged in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where it can be read that ‘everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it’ (4.002). This means that the relation of the considerations on language, nature, and culture to the philosophical method and to the task of conceptual clarification that is pursued with it, poses an importa…
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2024-11-19

CFP_EN: CFP Vol. 19, N. 2/2025 Visages and bodies between emotions and language: new interdisciplinary perspectives
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description: 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. In the former case, the risk is the study of the body without language; in the latter, the study of a language without a body. …
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2024-08-01

CFP: Vol. 18, 2/2024: Certainty and Language (eds. A. Coliva & L. Zanetti)
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description: 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. Another recent line of inquiry which tightly connects certainty and language concerns the normative profile of speech and thought. Certainty is one candidate among many (truth, knowledge, justification, etc.) for being the aim or norm of assertion, belief and related key ingredients in inquiry. The question whether certainty plays any normative role for speech and thought in turn interacts with another historically important, yet recently neglected, question: that is, the question whether certainty (of the kind Descartes was looking for in his Meditations) is or should be the aim of philosophy or inquiry more generally. The interplay between certainty and language also plays an important role in a variet…
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2024-02-01

CFP: Vol. 18, N. 1/2024 Interdisciplinary perspectives on cancel culture (eds. S. Di Piazza & A. Spena)
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description: 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”. Clearly, we are well on the way to trivialising that expression “cancel culture”, to making it a passe-partout referring to any public and widespread grievance against improprieties, real or presumed, of the most varied kind: from the most serious and demanding to the most futile and grotesque. Whether intentional or not, this trivialisation has the effect of debasing and stigmatising as a whole a phenomenon which, in reality, is very articulated and which, in its original inspiration, constitutes a reaction to historically encrusted forms of discrimination (first and foremost, racial and sexual), which – if one is willing to see them – emerge at every turn, in everyday or bureaucratic language, in toponymy, in monuments, in popular culture and in current practices. On the other hand, cases are not rare in which the logic of cancel culture is applied in an evidently unreasonable or excessive manner in relation to events with respect to which it appears to be an entirely disproportionate reaction. And again, especially in its most extreme manifestations, cancel culture seriously runs the risk of resolving itself into particularly pervasive forms of restriction of freedom of expression. Papers exploring, but not limited to, the following topics are…
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2023-07-18

CFP: Vol. 17, n.2 - CFP Language and economy
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description: 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. At the beginning of the 21st century, we are witnessing the strengthening of a paradigm not only different from the previous one but also inverted. “You want to work? Then talk!” In the age of financial capitalism, post or hypermodern world, neoliberal and risk-taking society (whichever wording you prefer), it has to be said that work and language become sides of the same coin. This pervasive process shows two characteristics on which this issue would like to offer a contribution of critical reflection. The first characteristic consists in the ubiquitous nature of the phenomenon, which certainly concerns the “high” spheres of production. Financial capitalism is organized by all-linguistic entities like calculation algorithms, by bets about the future performance of companies and speculative products, and by stock market effects related to real performative acts like the famous “whatever it takes” with which the president of the European Central Bank helped decide the fate of the Eurozone in 2012. The linguistic nature of work, however, is also visible from below: its most recent and expanding forms clearly draw on what F. de Saussure called “language faculty”, on L. Vygotsky’s “verbal thought,” and on the ability to understand and tell stories, which is now the focus of multidisciplinary interest. Digital platforms are not only huge global corporations but also product…
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2022-12-17

CFP: Vol. 17, n.1 - The interdisciplinary language of science, philosophy and religious studies
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description: 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. This task is quite challenging when interdisciplinary studies concerns mutual relationships between the natural and the human sciences, or, also, when one tries to tackle philosophical questions raised from scientific research. At times, interdisciplinary work on nature and its laws extends as far as to including natural theology and religious studies. In the last decades, this perspective gave rise to a new research field called “Science and Religion Studies” (sometimes indicated also “science & faith” or “science & theology”). Here the ambition is to let disciplines as far as the natural sciences, philosophy and religious studies mutually interact in a creative way, in order to achieve a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of nature in all its facets and dimensions. In such studies, reflection on language turns out to be strategic. Scientific language, for instance, makes use of implicit philosophical concepts, and the same terms may have very different senses and implications in different fields. What our language indicates as “the whole”, has different meanings in the sciences, in philosophy, and in theology, where it is labelled, respectively, as the “cosmos”, the “world”, or understood as “creation”. Even the notion of God is sometimes called into d…
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2022-06-18

CFP: Vol. 16, n. 2 - CFP "Aesthetic and Linguistic Practices" - DEADLINE: September 30, 2022
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description: 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. In fact, the aesthetic, which cannot be reduced to the realm of art, is actually and more extensively carried out in the wider framework of everyday practices. In this view language, which from Wittgenstein onwards has been considered as an open set of language games, equally presents itself as a constellation of practices. In this framework, of particular importance is the role played by those hybrid phenomena in which the two elements find themselves connected and harmonized in many respects. For example, one can observe a kind of chiasmus between aesthetics and language, in all those aesthetic experiences that presuppose the faculty of language and, conversely, in those linguistic practices that are conducive to aesthetic experiences. The idea of being competent aesthetically and linguistically, in fact, could contribute to make the thematic proposal of this issue of RIFL even more poignant precisely because it affords the possibility to prove how both the aesthetic and the linguistic have an effective component which can make a difference in our current life context. In light of these preliminary considerations, this issue of RIFL ai…
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2022-01-12

CFP: Rhetoric and health (ed. Maria Grazia Rossi)
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description: 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. This is why the proper and effective use of words should be considered as a common ethical responsibility: it is an ethical responsibility for healthcare providers that directly take care of patients, but it is also a responsibility of public and private institutions working to promote behaviours favouring the adoption of a healthier life and the building of healthier societies, respectful of other people and more environmentally friendly. What happened from a communicative point of view to justify the need to activate a state of emergency and maintain lockdown restrictions is exemplary in this respect, also to discuss the conflict between values that is pervasive in our complex and interconnected societies. Even beyond the pandemic, many examples can be mentioned to discuss the importance of both the effectiveness and quality of communication. Take as examples social campaigns and/or advertisements on health issues related to cases such as the public debate on vaccination or antibiotic res…
creator: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
date: 2020-07-23