This book proposes a narrative model for the creation of immersive and interactive filmic experiences, in which the interactor has agency within the virtual environment to alter the course of the story and shape their own journey. The book focuses in detail on the epistemology of the immersive interactive movie by analysing its aesthetic, narrative and interactive features, examining the workflow of production and presenting an evaluative protocol for VR experiences of this kind. From the nature of the frameless moving image to the newest human-computer interfaces, passing through the design and evaluation of interactive digital narratives, this volume builds a bridge between cinema and VR, proposing that all VR movies should be interactive.

Since their invention, computers have kept revolutionizing the world at a staggeringpace. And yet, through recent conquests in AI and computer graphics, the profound effects of this revolution threaten to upend much of the previous world order. Sitting squarely at the crossroads of computer science, history, socioeconomics, ethics, and philosophy, and written by an insider who contributed foundational work to many of the latest and most pervasive technologies, this book offers a much-needed reframing of the past, present, and future of computing.

The volume examines the process of globalization from a genealogical point of view. By doing so, it offers a contribution to the understanding of the deep and critical spatial transformation reshaping our world from both a political and a conceptual point of view, taking into consideration recent developments including Brexit and the politics of Donald Trump. Focusing his analysis on the natural element of “air”, Vegetti provides an original approach to globalization. Following in the the footsteps of the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, Vegetti defines our global age as characterized by the transformation of the air into a concrete social space, first through the advent of airplanes, radio waves, and radar and now in the present-day structure of global networks.

ANTHROPOCENE AND CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY. CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY AFTER MERLEAU-PONTY (PART II). AROUND MERLEAU-PONTY. TEXTS BYNicola Banwell, Gael Caignard, Myriam Coté, Stanislas De Courville, Gianluca De Fazio, Elena De Silvestri, Luca Fabbris, Emmanuel Falque, Giovanni Fava, Lisa Guenther, Galen A. Johnson, Rajiv Kaushik, Corinne Lajoie, Emily S. Lee, Federico Leoni, Paolo Missiroli, Cinzia Orlando, Pietro Pasquinucci, Marie-Anne Perreault, Stéphanie Perruchoud, Andrea Pitts, Joel Michael Reynolds, Camille Roelens, Tristana Martin Rubio, Davide Scarso, Alessandra Scotti, Jenny Slatman, Bryan Smyth, Ted Toadvine

The contagious joy of a party, the solemn silence in a church, the gloomy atmosphere of endless rows of identical houses in an ugly city. Through a criticism of the reification and psychologization that goes back to the very beginning of Western philosophy, Hermann Schmitz offers a fundamentally new theory of embodiment and feelings based on atmospheres, unstable but powerful phenomena that fill the “surfaceless spaces” of lived experience. This collection of essays, selected by Schmitz himself, offers a comprehensive portrait of his theory, both in its fundamental outlines and later progress.

Beyond the Bible, Beyond the West is a research in ontological hermeneutics: it is critical of “textual positivism” – which makes the univocity and clarity of a text the main goal of its task – and also of “cultural positivism” – a cultural matrix that elevates univocity and clarity as the ultimate goal of contemporary systems. This essay indirectly sketches a cultural critique and not only a theological one. Means, medium and guarantor of this ontological indelible reserve are ambivalence and paradox. We will try to follow the trace of these throughout the hermeneutic arc – and not only at its beginning.

From the Moon to Rhinos is the story of Michele Sofisti, a Geologist who became a valued and itinerant manager – in Ferrari, Omega, Swatch, Gucci – and then actively “returned” to Nature, engaging in the conservation of animal species, forests, and oceans. It is a collection of life experiences, meetings, and emotions laid bare. It is an ongoing journey that aims to sensitize people to believe that a change towards a better interaction between humans and the natural world, which feeds and sustains us, is possible and must be undertaken instantly. This journey symbolically began with the Apollo missions on the Moon – which, for the first time, showed us the uniqueness of our wonderful planet from a new perspective – and ends with Rhinos that are slaughtered for their horn and have unfortunately become a symbol of human ignorance and greed, proving and confirming how the stupidity of a few people in interacting with Nature can be extremely destructive for everyone. The story’s intent – narrated amidst tennis and skiing, Ferraris and wonderful watches – is to convey a final message and spur the reader to act urgently and positively towards our planet, yet not to save it, as planet Earth can go on without us, but to preserve ourselves and our future generations.

This book aims to investigate Surrealism’s precedents in visual tradition and to explore its influence on contemporary art. Taking the ideational power of vision as their starting point, these thirteen essays apply different perspectives to themes essential to the Surrealist avant-garde — dreams, magic, madness — but also mystic visions, hybridity and the ongoing relevance of syncretic figures as protean germinations of the irrational. The collection opens with a reconsideration of André Breton’s late book, L’Art magique (1957). The other essays cover a wide array of themes, ranging from witches’ iconography in the early modern period to immersive contemporary video installations, while devoting particular attention to specific Surrealism-related topics. Following the fil rouge traced by Breton, the possibility of an alternative art-historical narrative clearly emerges.

This volume, written from a diachronic perspective, is devoted to the initatic and deeply transformative dimension of religious experience in Neoplatonic philosophy which aims at restoring the soul’s condition prior to its descent into matter. It brings together philosophers and historians of religions, specializing in the study of mithraism, theurgy, Christian mysticism and the philosophical exegesis of the Chaldean Oracles.

We live in the Golden Age of space exploration. Humanity’s achievements include the continued operation of the International Space Station, rapid advancements in reusable rockets, and soon, a return to the Moon. Within our lifetime, we might have human outposts on the lunar surface and flags flying on the plains of Mars. These strides are not just about reaching new frontiers. They have profound implications for life on Earth. The data from climate satellites overhead, innovative materials and recycling systems designed for space habitats, and emerging spacebased energy solutions are essential to addressing Earth’s conservation challenges. Space enables the understanding of Earth as much as Earth enables the exploration of space. This bright tomorrow is not assured, however. Space junk, international conflicts and fiscal calamities loom as threats to all that might be accomplished. For the human adventure to continue beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, the time is now to reconsider the nature of sustainability.

Bergson is rightly considered the philosopher of duration. Has this theory, however, been sufficiently elucidated? Is there a domain, aside from life itself, to which the characteristics of duration can be meaningfully ascribed? Why, in his thesis from 1907, does Bergson write of a “real” duration? His subsequent work Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory (1922) is the only volume written by Bergson in the period separating Creative Evolution (1907) and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Duration and Simultaneity represents a polemical, unique, mature and relatively neglected work, one that allows us however to respond to these questions – provided that we read it as a work of philosophy and metaphysics. This book was awarded the 2020 Polydore de Paepe Prize of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.

How can we approach the world and guide our thinking in the face of profound, myriad challenges? This is the ambitious question that animates the current volume. The book seeks to formulate these challenges and develop ways to tackle them through a set of wide-ranging interviews with leading intellectuals of our times, including Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Michael Walzer and Etienne Balibar. Contributing fresh perspectives on current events – from the liberation of women’s voices to the crisis of secularism; from populism, the pandemic, and the rise of conspiracy theories to new forms of resistance – these essays show a refusal to lapse into rigid and reductive oppositions, instead providing critically nuanced interpretations of contemporary events and struggles. The collection brings together original and accessible points of view, selected by researchers from the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, in the pursuit of and safeguarding intellectual freedom.

Focusing on the Libyan crisis, the volume sets discourse on interference within a theoretical framework. The first part tries to understand the lawfulness of the duty to interfere and the responsibility to protect, as well as the semantic difference between these two forms of interventionism. The second part offers an investigation on how the right to protect was applied in Libya in 2011.

The book offers a study of ancient rhetoric within a philosophical reflection that aims to reconstruct its history. Through the various definitions of rhetoric and all its practical, ethical, social and political implications, the author leads us to the rhetorical languages of today, developed within the democracies and the so-called populisms that characterize the West – or rather, what remains of it.

Written by four hands, the current volume moves on two planes that fruitfully intersect and sometimes conflict in their interpretations. On the one hand, Petar Bojanič proposes that gestures are not parasitic of social acts but instead constitute a supporting element. From this interpretative angle, gestures contribute to the constitution of a group or institution. On the other hand, Virgilio Cesarone first presents a phenomenology of gesture, showing that non-instrumental gestural expression, which refers to the constitution of another's body as alter ego, is truly human. Furthermore, gesture shows its essentiality precisely at the moment when it serves no purpose. He thus proposes a hermeneutics of gesture, aiming to show that gesture cannot be considered an accessory and expressive element of a thought that is inwardly closed, but part of a thought that moves with the hand itself.

This book aims to reflect on mental illness through considering the influence that criticism and German idealism exerted on directions of philosophical, scientific and psychoanalytical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which can still be perceived today. It aims, therefore, not only to offer today's cultural and scientific debate an analysis of otherwise undetected aspects of classical German philosophy but also to shed light on subjects and issues present within current philosophical, psychiatric and scientific investigation.