Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio: Announcements
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).
CFP: Call for papers - Vol. 21, n. 1/2027 - Emergence and language (eds. J. Miller & E. Onnis)
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. Papers exploring, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome: The emergence of natural and/or artificial languages; The emergence of grammar; The emergence of linguistic structures and meanings; The relationaship between emergence and creativity; Emergent social facts and their relationships with linguistic facts; Natural and/or artificial languages as complex dynamical systems; The nature of linguistic novelty; Philosophical frameworks able to capture emergence in language (weak strong, ontological vs. epistemological, synchronic vs. diachronic). Manuscripts, in Italian or in English, must be accompanied by an abstract (max. 250 words), a title, and 5 keywords. All submissions must be prepared for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation and title of the contribution should be indicated in a separated file. Contribution must be sent in .doc or .docx format to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com Maximum contribution length 45000 characters, including spaces, bibliography, and endnotes. Guidelines The manuscript must be prepared using the template at this link: http://www.rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc. Submission deadline Novembre 15th, 2026 For any questions, please write to erica.onnis@unicusano.it
Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio
CFP: Vol. 20, N. 2/2026 Wittgenstein and Literature
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 central role. Other scholars have instead employed tools and insights taken from Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to respond to issues that have shaped contemporary aesthetic reflection on literary language, above all, the problem of the cognitive value of literature. In this context, Wittgenstein-inspired perspectives draw upon the idea that literature offers a form of non-propositional knowledge, making available to the reader a presentation of the interweaving of forms of life, cultural practices, and concepts that are “the expression of our interest” (PI § 570). This often hangs together with a particular emphasis on the ethical dimension of our engagement with reading, which calls for the activation of the moral imagination in exploring the conceptual organisation of different points of view on the world, as exemplified, for instance, in the work of Cora Diamond. As has recently been suggested (John Gibson), Wittgenstein may thus serve as a shared common ground for philosophers and literary scholars, especially (but not only) by virtue of the nuanced quality and openness of his reflections on language and the ways it is interwoven with life. It is sometimes observed that the analytic tradition works with overly narrow conceptions of such notions as ‘truth,’ ‘meaning,’ and ‘knowledge,’ which generate paradoxes or strong tensions once applied to the aesthetic domain of literary language—in a way that makes it difficult for literary scholars to acknowledge the issues as taking shape in those terms. What motivates certain scholars to turn to Wittgenstein is precisely the possibility of adopting a broader view of language: for instance, by developing a conception of meaning “as rooted in practice” (Bernard Harrison); by approaching literary language as a domain in which the sense of our concepts and criteria is displayed; or, again, by pursuing a non-reductive way to account for the broader ethical significance of the aesthetic experience of reading. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s philosophical method invites us to critically reconsider the way “traditional” questions have been framed in philosophical reflection on literature—indeed, questions that have at times taken the form of theoretical puzzles concerning the truth, knowledge and values that literature may afford. The idea is that Wittgenstein’s method may offer resources for rethinking debates about literary meaning and literary understanding by showing how certain problems emerge from misleading or limited pictures of language and its relation to the world. Unsurprisingly, Wittgenstein’s anti-dualistic spirit has sometimes served to diagnose and dismantle false oppositions—for example, between reality and fiction and, correspondingly, between ordinary and literary language. In doing so, it promotes an anti-dichotomous attitude characteristic of his philosophical approach and claims the complexity of linguistic operations as they unfold in the literary domain. In this way, we believe that Wittgenstein’s philosophy proves sufficiently subtle to provide a basis for a productive and methodologically sensitive dialogue with literature understood as a family of different practices. It also offers resources for a fruitful interaction with the multifaceted network of concrete practices that revolve around literature—such as literary studies and literary criticism—without generating explanatory accounts that drift away from the reality of the practices themselves. This suggests that there remain unexplored directions at the intersection of Wittgenstein and literature that deserve to be examined and pursued from both sides. Papers exploring, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome: Uses of Wittgensteinian topics such as practice, language-games, grammar, meaning as physiognomy, aspect perception, etc. for the analysis of literary texts Wittgenstein’s writing style as a model for engaging with literary language The relationship between philosophical language and literary language Wittgenstein and poetic language Wittgenstein’s style and its connection to imagination in literary and fictional practices Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy as a resource for literary criticism and understanding literary language Rule-following, criteria, and the shaping or subversion of literary conventions, genres, and other narrative practices Forms of life, shared criteria, primitive reactions, and literary interpretation and critical appreciation The sense/nonsense distinction in literary language and critical interpretation Applications of Wittgenstein’s method to debates about literary meaning and value Wittgensteinian approaches to rethinking traditional problems in the philosophy of literature The significance of Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical method for approaching literary texts The fact/fiction distinction and the Wittgensteinian use of fictional scenarios for clarifying the grammar of concepts Literary understanding as a process of “assembling reminders” or displaying what we already know The ethical significance of the experience of reading Reading pleasure, aesthetic engagement, and the transformative value of literature Prospects for Wittgenstein-inspired approaches to literature … We call for articles in Italian, English and French. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be prepared using the template at this link: https://rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com. Instructions for authors: Maximum contribution length: 40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes); Submission deadline: Publication: December 2026
CFP: Vol. 20, n.1/2026 Language, Nature, and Culture in Wittgenstein (ed. Begoña Ramón Cámara)
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 important question, namely, the question of why and in what sense this emphasis on the fact that imagining a language means imagining a culture (a form of life) is related to Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a conceptual investigation. If it is not easy to deal with the Wittgensteinian approach to language, it is perhaps even less easy to understand his use of the concepts ‘culture’, ‘form of life’ or ‘natural history’––another central concept which in human beings implies an unavoidable cultural dimension, with its habits, reactions, practices, certain beliefs, etc.––and the way in which he understands the relationship between these concepts and language. We therefore consider it appropriate to bring this problem to the fore by reading, from this perspective, the various Wittgensteinian texts, both those published and those belonging to his vast Nachlass. We also think that it can be hermeneutically clarifying to do this interpretative work of his texts by contrast with and against the background of—to use Wittgenstein’s own expression—the reflections of those other thinkers who have also dealt with the subject or who may have stimulated him to think about language in its relation to human nature and culture (Sophists, Cynics, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Hume, Schopenhauer, Marx, James, Nietzsche, Mauthner, Spengler, among others). Papers exploring, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome: Language and human nature; Animality, language and culture; Language and natural history; Nature, culture and the method and aims of philosophy; Ethics, nature and culture; Science, language and culture; Religion, nature and culture. We call for articles in English and Italian. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max. 250 words), a title, and 5 keywords. The manuscript must be prepared using the template at this link: http://www.rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com Maximum contribution length: 40000 characters (including spaces, bibliography, and endnotes) Submission deadline: November 30th, 2025 Publication: June 2026 For any questions, please write to begonia.ramon@gmail.com
CFP_EN: CFP Vol. 19, N. 2/2025 Visages and bodies between emotions and language: new interdisciplinary perspectives
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. When it comes to the role of the body as the pivot of the link between emotions and language, there seems to be a lack, in essence, of an interdisciplinary vision that does not simply juxtapose different perspectives and allows for fertile dialogue and common ground. While it is easy to see in this gap a reflection of a large part of the history of Western philosophy for which body and emotions have often been conceived as negative elements (as prison of the soul and obstacle to rationality, respectively), this very history shows us how issues of physical acting and feeling have been a trans-historical and trans-cultural constant in reflections on thinking, feeling, interpreting, acting, and communicating. Moreover, the history of the study of emotions shows how they are constantly contested between theories that emphasize the role of the body and that of culture and language. A tension between body and language, which also recurs in the theoretical conflict between those who conceive the expression of emotions, especially in the face, as innate and spontaneous, and those who instead interpret those movements in terms of semiotic strategies. From a certain perspective, it seems peculiar that the language/emotion/body triad, so recurrent in the premises of thinkers in the philosophical and scientific traditions, has had as its legacy the often dualist theories that, in some ways, have been based on the exclusion by petitio principii of some of these three terms. Instead, this special issue wants to start precisely from the body and its communicative pragmatics, with a particular interest in the face, in order to address the theme of its relationship with emotions and language. A body to be studied both as present and as mediated, as long as it is not metaphorical and/or too abstractly modeled. Keeping these three terms together responds for us to two different needs. First, it is a matter of valuing those in the studies of language and cognition who have adopted a prismatic perspective on mind and body and, thanks to this minor perspective, now contribute to the dialogue with disciplines that are not strictly philosophical. It also involves taking into account the state of contemporary research and the attempts at reconciliation that are taking place in different fields. In the specifics of the philosophy of language and semiotics, special attention has been paid in recent years to the body and face by producing texts that have touched on such major themes as subjectivity, cultural identity, persuasion, expression, intentionality, and much more. Putting the body and the face at the center of this reflection, that is, making it the starting object and privileged vantage point of philosophical-linguistic reflection on emotions, does not necessarily imply favoring so-called 4E theories at the expense of different approaches. On the contrary, it means creating a common ground for discussion from which we can question many of the established theories, including those of the 4Es. In short, the body and face seem to us to be the most suitable field for developing new perspectives on language and for not falling into the paradox of wanting to counter one reductionism with another. Having ventured in these uncharted lands as a part of the ERC project FACETS (Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies), we urge other scholars to join us in this exploration. Papers exploring, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome: Connections, filters, exchanges and clashes between body, emotion and language Contested emotion between semiotics, phenomenology, psychology and neuroscience Multimodality of communication and emotion Facial expressions and cultural habit Life forms and corporeality Body mediation and emotion between old and new media Face and rhetoric Expression of emotion and expression of subjectivity Meaningfulness of acting and material feeling Gradients of materiality of face and transformation of meaning Empathy as emotion and expression of otherness Emotions and feelings in the I.A. and in virtual and augmented realities Subjectivity effects of intersubjective and embodied feeling Performance and pathemic forms Body, recollection and narrative Readings and hallucinations of feeling in the face Bodily presence in the languages of music and theatre Education in emotion Emotion and language as a discriminator of otherness Emotional memories of experience between body and language Cultural inscription of bodily feeling and resistance Translations and representations of emotion and the body Disgust and eros between face, body, and language Deformation of face, body, and usual in the comic … We call for articles in Italian, English and French. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be prepared using the template at this link: http://www.rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com. Instructions for authors: Maximum contribution length: 40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes); Submission deadline: May 15,2025 Publication: December 2025
CFP: Vol. 18, 2/2024: Certainty and Language (eds. A. Coliva & L. Zanetti)
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 variety of philosophical projects that have been highly influential in the history of philosophy and that still inspire philosophical projects nowadays. In the transcendental tradition - from Kant to German Idealism and Husserl, up to the recent debates on transcendental arguments - one fundamental question, to which a variety of transcendental strategies attempt to answer, is whether we can know with certainty whether our conceptual schemes can reach the way things are. In Wittgestein’s reflections in On certainty and in more recent debates at the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology that draws inspiration from Wittgesteins’ work, we find both lively debates on our language of certainty - that is, how the way in which we speak about certainty reveals how we should think of knowledge, justification and certainty - and debates on the very nature of the psychological state of being certain. These are just illustrations of some among many noteworthy interactions between certainty and language in a variety of influential philosophical debates. In this special issue we invite contributions that explore these and other aspects of the relationships between certainty and language both from theoretical and historical perspectives. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): certainty and language in acquaintance; certainty and intuition; the myth of the given; (non)conceptual content of experience; certainty and ineffability; certainty and transcendental arguments; certainty and language in transcendental philosophy; certainty as the norm of assertion and belief; certainty and language in the history of philosophy; certainty and language in Wittgenstein; Apel’s transcendental pragmatics. We call for articles in English, Italian, French, or Spanish. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be prepared using the journal template Download template. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com. For any question, please write to luca.zanetti10@unibo.it or to a.coliva@uci.edu Maximum contribution length: 40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes). Deadline 15/7/2024. Publication: December 2024
CFP: Vol. 18, N. 1/2024 Interdisciplinary perspectives on cancel culture (eds. S. Di Piazza & A. Spena)
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 welcome: the inextricable intertwining of cancel culture with language, starting with its stinging form represented by hate speech; the connections with the set of linguistic-argumentative strategies that are part of political correctness; the possibility of a “semiotics of cancellation”; the use of the syntagma “cancel culture” as a knock-out argument; the rhetorical-argumentative strategies in favour of, and against, cancel culture; the relationship between cancel culture and memory; analogies and differences with respect to damnatio memoriae; analogies and differences with respect to censorship; the complex relationship with ideology and polarisation. We call for articles in Italian, English and French. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be prepared using the template at this link: http://www.rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com. Instructions for authors: Maximum contribution length: 40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes); Submission deadline: February 15, 2024 Publication: June 2024
CFP: Vol. 17, n.2 - CFP Language and economy
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 production sites of life as such, in which entertainment, communication, work and affection are constantly intermingled. The rider and the call-center, the real estate agent and the social media manager are all figures who make a living through the ability to sustain word-centered social relationships and their cognitive and semiotic entanglements. Precisely because it is so broad, this landscape is still lacking a comprehensive critical description, especially from the perspective of philosophies of language. The second aspect of the problem is purely theoretical. What are the anthropological, ethical and political consequences of the fusion of work and language? Is the phenomenon leading to the end of the concept of “work,” understood as the buying and selling of human abilities in market society, or is it decreeing its endless expansion? In this process, are language and human cognitive abilities themselves being twisted? And, if so, how? Is there a relationship between the assertion of linguistic work and the widespread feeling that history, meant as the properly human time of transformations of means of production and institutions, is now over? In light of these considerations, this issue of the journal will welcome essays that explore, even though non-exclusively, the following themes: The relationship between financial economics and performative acts, both illocutionary and perlocutionary; The linguistic-semiotic description of contemporary forms of production; The contribution to the language-work question according to the theoretical perspective of “operaism”; The analysis of the relationship between commodity, labor and semiosis from Rossi Landi’s writings; The perspective of “capital as semiotic operator” introduced by Guattari; The possible reinterpretation of the notion of the Anthropocene from a linguistic-work perspective, in terms of “Capitalocene”; The relationship between linguistic work and cognitive research on “extended mind” and Embodied Cognition; The language-work pair and Vygotsky’s research on mind, sign and tool; The emergence or redefinition of affects, passions, care relationships that can be described as typical of a world dominated by linguistic work; Childhood, schooling, and training in the age of “I speak, therefore I work”; Political institutions related to the most recent semiotic-linguistic production processes. We call for articles in Italian, English and French. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be prepared using the template at this link: http://www.rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com. Instructions for authors: Maximum contribution length: 40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes); Submission deadline: June 10, 2023 Publication: December 2023
CFP: Vol. 17, n.1 - The interdisciplinary language of science, philosophy and religious studies
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 debate by scientists, questioning what philosophy and theology might say on that. Here the language discovers its own limits. In the study of reality and its foundations, the role of metaphors, images, analogies, narrations and even that of poetical elements, is then explored. The present issue of RIFL, then, intends to offer a qualified place to reflect upon the conditions and properties which render a language adequate for hosting interdisciplinary topics which involve science, philosophy and religious studies. Promoting the study on this wide and appealing subject-matter, this issue of RIFL calls for papers dealing with, but not limited to, the following topics: Philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of scientific language The role of analogy in scientific discovery and formulations Self-consistency of scientific language and its semantic openness The use of metaphors and images in science, and the strength of narrative language in science, philosophy and religion Polysemy and vagueness in interdisciplinary dialogue between religion and science The search for an effective language in science popularization Mythos and Logos in the discourse on God Apophatic language in science, philosophy and theology Keywords of interdisciplinary dialogue (e.g. nature, infinity, beauty, space-time, order, etc.): their import and implications We call for articles in Italian, English and French. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be edited using the template at this link: http://rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must have a maximum length of 40,000 characters, including bibliography and footnotes, and be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com.
CFP: Vol. 16, n. 2 - CFP "Aesthetic and Linguistic Practices" - DEADLINE: September 30, 2022
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 aims to carry out a reflection on the topic at issue with a focus on contemporary society. Papers exploring, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome: Linguistic forms used in aesthetic practices; Aesthetic experiences afforded by linguistic practices; Aesthetic and linguistic competence; Aesthetics and language in contemporary art; The role of words in design and visual communication; “Truth” and value of aesthetic predicates; The question of the primacy of judgment in aesthetics: pros and cons of the Kantian tradition; The conceptualization of implicitness and explicitness in aesthetic experience; The contraposition between (art) criticism and (everyday) choices; Forecasting and transitionsbetween aesthetic and linguistic practices We call for articles in Italian, English and French. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be prepared using the template at this link: http://rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc . All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com. Instructions for authors: Maximum contribution length: 40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes); Template: http://rifl.unical.it/authortemplate/template_eng.doc Submission deadline September 30, 2022 Publication: December 2022
CFP: Rhetoric and health (ed. Maria Grazia Rossi)
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 resistance, the social campaigns to combat pollution or against smoking in public spaces. However, it is not obvious to find a consensual framework to define what counts as communication of quality, even if rhetoricians investigated heavily on this issue. Not necessarily a successful communication is also desirable from an ethical perspective. Obtaining persuasion – to be able to change attitudes and/or behaviours, it is not necessarily equivalent to do it in an ethically way. For example, implicit persuasion strategies often (but not always) can be described in terms of manipulation tools attempting to manipulate people and to change their habits. Again, this applies at the individual level within the interactions between patients and healthcare providers, with therapeutic recommendations described as genuine persuasive acts. At the collective level, it also applies to public communication, including the communication made on social networks, where fake news and misinformation spread even more quickly. The links between rhetoric and health can be therefore analysed from two different points of view. From a linguistic point of view, the main problem is to figure out which communicative strategies are effective to persuade patients (and citizens) in changing a given behaviour and/or accepting the treatment more appropriate to a specific medical condition. From an ethical point of view, the main problem is to figure out which effective communicative strategies are legitimate, meaning they respect values defining both the patient (citizen) agenda and the doctor (political/health system) agenda. The discussions concerning the frameworks of value-based medicine and patient-centered medicine fit in this context, as well as fall in this debate the current attention given to the frameworks of narrative medicine and persuasive technology (applied to telemedicine, mobile apps, social networks, etc.). Vol. 15, N. 1/2021 of RIFL expects to explore the links between rhetoric and health, accepting papers aim at considering the role of communication in the context of health, and papers considering persuasion from an ethical point of view – at the individual level (between patients and providers) and the collective/societal one (between institutions and citizens, between media and citizens). Papers should be theoretical or empirical. All fields will be considered (Philosophy of Language, Classic studies, Literary studies, Linguistics, Psychology, etc.) if they are relevant to discuss the persuasive and/or the ethical dimension of communication in the context of health. Papers exploring the following areas are very welcome: ● Words and language as pharmakon ● Communicating science, communicating the COVID-19 pandemic ● Doctor-patient communication ● Persuasion, argumentation and manipulation in the context of health ● Ethic of the medical discourse and ethics for health ● Ethical relevance and effectiveness of narrative medicine ● Shared decision-making between patients and providers ● Social campaigns and advertisement for health ● Persuasive technology and health ● Social networks and seeking information on the web ● Value-based medicine ● Patient-based medicine ● Public opinion and health ● Visual persuasion and the role of images in the context of health ● Linguistic strategies developed for healthcare providers ● Emotions and interpersonal relations in the context of health ● Language and placebo effect We call for articles in Italian, English and Portuguese. All manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract (max 250 words), a title and 5 keywords in English. The manuscript must be prepared using the journal template Download template. All submissions must be prepared by the author for anonymous evaluation. The name, affiliation to an institution and title of the contribution should be indicated in a file different from that which contains the text. The contribution must be sent in electronic format .doc or .rtf to segreteria.rifl@gmail.com. Instructions for authors: Maximum contribution length: 40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including bibliography and endnotes). Deadline 20.01.2021 Publication: June 2021