Corso di laurea magistrale in Filosofia

 

 

 

At the end of the course the student should be familiar with:

- Problems and methods of contemporary realism;

- Specific terminology;

- The main theoretical positions;

- The main critical discussions.

The lessons, of the overall duration of 36 hours (6 CFU), will be held in presence.

The evaluation will be based on a final oral test and on oral presentations of papers assigned by the instructor during the first week of the course. The oral exam will be centered on a critical commentary of key passages of texts, and on a critical analysis and historical and philosophical contextualization of the main themes developed during the course. As far as the presentations are concerned, the instructor will assess the students’ argumentative abilities and the depth of the argument developed in the paper.

 

The skills and knowledge provided will be verified through the preparation and discussion of a written paper and a final oral exam. The preparation will be considered adequate (by a maximum grade of thirty), if the student demonstrates skills of argumentation and exposition, using the terminology required and if, without relying on the arguments offered by the textbooks, they prove themeself to be familiar with the topics and theories covered during the course, offering new arguments.

Realism and fiction

Realism traditionally understood consists in drawing a line between what is real and what is not. In the latter category one usually finds fictions among other non-beings. Some new brands of realism, however, make a point of asserting the existence of fictional entities. It is, in particular, the case of the variety of ‘New Realism’ advocated by the German philosopher Markus Gabriel.
Should realism make us so liberal as to countenance the existence of fictional entities? Or does realism exclude fictions, as the traditional metaphysics seemed to think? What should realism do about fictions?
We are going to address this question by discussing Markus Gabriel’s new ontology, as presented in Sinn und Existenz (Suhrkamp, 2016; English version: Fields of Sense, Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and his recent book specifically dedicated to fictions Fiktionen (Suhrkamp, 2020). In this discussion we shall draw upon two kinds of resources: philosophical analyses of fiction as we inherit them from the metaphysical and logical tradition and analyses of the fictional discourse as they have experienced a rebirth in the two last decades in literary theory, in particular in France.

* Markus Gabriel: Fields of Sense, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015
* Markus Gabriel: Sinn und Existenz, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2016
* Markus Gabriel: Fiktionen, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2020.
* Jocelyn Benoist: Représentations sans objet, Paris, P.U.F., 2001
* Maurizio Ferraris: Postverità e altri enigmi, Bologna, il Mulino, 2017
* Maurizio Ferraris: Intorno agli unicorni. Supercazzole, ornitorinchi, ircocervi, Bologna, il Mulino, 2018
* Gérard Genette: Fiction et diction, Paris, Seuil, 1991
* Gérard Genette: Métalepse : de la figure à la fiction, Paris, Seuil, 2004
* Françoise Lavocat: Fait et Fiction. Pour une frontière, Paris, Seuil, 2016 
* Thomas Pavel: Fictional Worlds, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1986  
* Jean-Marie Schaeffer: Pourquoi la fiction ?, Seuil, 1999 (Eng. trans. Why Fiction?, University of Nebraska Press, 2010)
* Amie L. Thomasson: Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,  1999
* Alberto Voltolini: How Ficta Follow Fiction. A Syncretistic Account of Fictional Entities, Dordrecht, Springer,  2006`