The Vattimo Dictionary book launch

The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts is pleased to host the first online book launch of The Vattimo Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), edited by IDSVA Director Simonetta Moro. Three authors who contributed to the Dictionary will participate in the conversation: Silvia Mazzini (IDSVA), David Webb (Staffordshire University), and Santiago Zabala (ICREA/Pompeu Fabra University).  

The Vattimo Dictionary presents an essential introduction in English to the philosophical thought of Gianni Vattimo (1936–2023), considered the most important Italian philosopher of the last fifty years and one of Europe’s foremost contemporary thinkers. A-Z entries provide coverage of more than 100 of Vattimo’s key concepts and themes, as well as philosophers who have influenced his thinking and terms of biographical interest. Contributors include 53 prominent authors in the field, from Franca d’Agostini, Carmelo Dotolo, Silvia Mazzini, Eduardo Mendieta, Robert Valgenti, Federico Vercellone, David Webb to Santiago Zabala. The Vattimo Dictionary includes a biographical introduction as well as a comprehensive bibliography.

A previous presentation of the volume took place on November 7, 2023, at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, in the context of a tribute to Gianni Vattimo. Professor Zabala, the supervisor of the Vattimo Archives at Pompeu Fabra University, organized the event.

This online presentation on Monday, December 11, 12–1pm EST, is free and open to all. Please register here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Silvia Mazzini is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Art Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She has published on art and politics in Vattimo, Bloch, and Pasolini, on tragic and comic thought, and community theatre; currently, she is writing on the philosophy of poverty. Among her publications are Für eine mannigfaltige mögliche Welt. Kunst und Politik bei Ernst Bloch und Gianni Vattimo (Peter Lang, 2010) and, as co-editor, Making Communism Hermeneutical: on Vattimo and Zabala (Springer, 2017).

Simonetta Moro is Professor of Art, Philosophy, and Visual Studies, Director and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She is a visual artist who exhibits internationally and a published author whose work focuses on cartographic practices and their theoretical examinations, most recently in the book Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art: Poetic Cartography (Routledge, 2022).

David Webb is Professor of Philosophy at Staffordshire University. He is the author of Heidegger, Ethics, and the Practice of Ontology (Bloomsbury, 2009) and Foucault’s Archaeology: Science and Transformation (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and has also published on the work of Gaston Bachelard and Michel Serres. Of Gianni Vattimo, he has translated The Transparent Society, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, and co-translated Belief and Religion.

Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of many books, including Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) and Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017). His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Al-Jazeera, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other international media outlets.