Documentality

Maurizio Ferraris is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin. He is the co-author, with Jacques Derrida, of A Taste for the Secret and the author of Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces (Fordham).

"Documentality re-energizes the traditional philosophical debate on realism by contextualizing this problematic within the field of new media and positioning it in the wake of the momentous philosophical contributions of Derrida and Foucault." -- -Alessia Ricciardi Northwestern University "The growth of modern civilization depends to a surprising degree on the power of documents. Law, commerce, science, government all depend on documents to transcend the constraints of pre-modern, face-to-face communication. Yet documents, thus far, have played only a tiny role in the work of social ontologists. Maurizio Ferraris shows in this brilliant new work how documents can be used as a springboard for an entirely new view of the structure of social reality -- in which documents form the very tracks along which the engines of our mental and social lives run." -- -Barry Smith Director of the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR) "A clear, fast-paced, truly exciting book." -- -Jean-Michel Rabate University of Pennsylvania "The most stimulating feature of the book is not so much that documents allow Ferraris to develop an ontology, but rather that his ontology allows him to understand and to help us to understand what documents are and what society is." -- -Umberto Eco author of The Name of the Rose