Maurizio Ferraris

Ferraris graduated in Philosophy in Turin in 1979, under the guidance of Gianni Vattimo. In the early years his activity was divided between teaching, research and cultural journalism. From 1979 to 1988 he was an editor, then co-director, of Alfabeta, whose steering committee included, among others, Antonio Porta, Nanni Balestrini, Maria Corti, Umberto Eco, Francesco Leonetti, Pier Aldo Rovatti and Paolo Volponi. At the beginning of the 1980s his relationship with Jacques Derrida began, which deeply marked his formation. On the academic level, after two years of teaching in Macerata (1982-83), in 1984 he began teaching in Trieste, interspersing his teaching activity with a series of stays in Heidelberg where, in contact with Hans-Georg Gadamer, he undertook studies in hermeneutics. In 1995 Ferraris was called to Turin as a full professor of Aesthetics. He would move on to teaching Theoretical Philosophy in 1999. A program director (that is, a teacher) at the Collège international de philosophie from 1998 to 2004, in 1999 he founded the Laboratory of Ontology (LabOnt) and the Interuniversity Center of Theoretical and Applied Ontology (CTAO).