Since the second half of the 20th century, the virtual has represented a major issue for the debate around the phenomenon of derealisation, which has variously engaged French thinkers (among which Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Pierre Lévy, Philippe Quéau) who explored the ontological relationship between virtuality and reality from different perspectives.

On its side, the subjective experience of the virtual has also been addressed from phenomenological and aesthetic perspectives. As for the former, Lambert Wiesing in Artificial Presence (Stanford University Press, 2010) has worked on how new media affect the traditional interpretation of the relationship between perception, image consciousness, and phantasy. As for the aesthetic approach, Grant Tavinor (in The Aesthetics of VirtualReality, Routledge 2022) has proposed to think of virtualisation in terms of remediation, i.e.a transformative process through which something maintains its function, while being instantiated in a non-customary way.

In the context of analytic philosophy, the ontological implications of virtual entities have been at the core of the discussion triggered by David Chalmers in relation to the nature of the virtual worlds, of the objects in them, and of the actions that can be performed in them.Should we define them as unreal, or should we rather speak of a different form of reality?In the latter case, what about the perception of (immersive) virtual worlds? And how isVirtual Reality to be interpreted in relation to different, yet associated technologies such asAugmented, Mixed, and Cross Reality, which articulate in as many different ways the interplay between the real and the virtual?

Given all the above, it is evident that the contemporary technologies of Virtual Reality, while posing stimulating questions to the philosophical reflection, are far from accounting for the conceptual richness of the notion of the virtual, which is in need of an in-depth critical examination.

The present issue of “Aisthesis” welcomes contributions* concerning:

• The overarching yet vague notion of the virtual and the many “virtualities” underlying it;
• The ontological status of the virtual in relation to the most recent debates;
• The perceptual and phenomenological implications of virtualities;
• The relationship between the virtual and cognate yet distinct notions such as the digital;
• The concrete (political, social, anthropological…) impact of “virtualisation” in today’s society.

Deadline: 30 September 2022

Expected release: December 2022

Advisory Editors:

Federica Cavaletti, Università di Milano Statale (federica.cavaletti@unimi.it);

Filippo Fimiani, Università di Salerno (fimiani@unisa.it);

Andrea Pinotti, Università di Milano Statale (andrea.pinotti@unimi.it)

Submissions should be made through the usual mask at: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/about/submissions.