Rivista di Estetica (Dec 2015)
Ikealismo assoluto
Abstract
If I had to choose a single book written by Maurizio Ferraris to take with me on the proverbial desert island, I would choose Una ikea di università. I would do so for three different reasons. The first is autobiographical: thanks to (or because of) this book, I ended up dealing with philosophy. The second reason is aesthetic: there is, in this book, a joy of writing that is rare to find not only in philosophy but also in literature; maybe I let idiosyncratic factors influence me but, in my opinion, Una ikea is one of the most beautiful Italian texts of the last twenty years. Finally, the third reason is properly philosophical. The way I see it, Una ikea marks a turning point in Ferraris’ philosophical evolution. This book – starting from the reflection on the nature and function of a peculiar object: university - provides the foundations for the doctrines to come: documentality and new realism. In my essay, I propose to read Una ikea in retrospect, showing that the basic principles of documentality and new realism were already at work, in the form of vivid insights, well before these theories received a proper name and treatment. Particularly, in Una ikea Ferraris sets the critical-methodical principle that from that point on will lead his entire research: “It could be argued that here one deals with a classic confusion between ontology and something that is not ontology (and that could be many other things: hermeneutics, philosophy of history, psychology of worldviews, history of mentalities, theory of science, or at least animism, as in the age of Druids). As it were, the fact that there is something – totally independently from human initiative – is confused with the fact that one can describe that something in many ways, and that we are relatively free in this description » (Una ikea di università: 42).
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