[NOTE: This is a Google-translated English version of a Call for Papers written in French. Submissions in English are invited but see the details below. –Matthew]
Call for Contributions
“The virtual and its avatars”
For the journal Philosophical Implications
https://www.implications-philosophiques.org/appel-a-contributions-dossier-le-virtuel-et-ses-avatars/
Deadline for submission of abstracts: January 15, 2025
File coordinated by Charles Bodon, doctoral student in contemporary philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, attached to the Institute of Legal and Philosophical Sciences of La Sorbonne (ISJPS), Center for Contemporary Philosophy (PhiCo), Experience and Knowledge pole (EXeCO), UMR 8103, Paris 1-CNRS.
INTRODUCTION
Today, the virtual is put in the spotlight by new digital devices and its various products, whether video games, augmented/mixed/virtual reality headsets, digital simulations, or images generated by artificial intelligence. A term proposed by computer scientist Jaron Lanier in the 1980s to describe all the techniques that allow the representation of phenomena using digital simulations, everyday language naturally uses the word “virtual” as a noun (the virtual) to designate the space of the Web and what relates to computing in general.
However, what is virtual, as a predicative, is first a concept stemming from philosophy, although it has taken different forms throughout its history. Heir to the Aristotelian concept of dunamis, which can be understood as possibility or power, the philosophical virtual can be used to designate a modality or a potentiality inherent in an object (for example, the tree is virtually contained in the seed). It is notably in the 13th century with Thomas Aquinas that the translation of dunamis by virtus, virtualis appears to express, on the one hand, the relation of containment that principles have with respect to their effects (mathematical principles virtually contain the equations that they can produce, just as God virtually contains all knowledge and creation), and, on the other hand, the ontological difference between two beings and the preeminence of one over the other. To exist virtually, for Thomas Aquinas, is in fact to have an intelligible existence which comes before actual existence. That is to say, to have a certain ideality (or virtue) in relation to what is in act and which is degraded in sensation.
Then, it was in the 17th century with Leibniz that the virtual would acquire a logical dimension. In particular, within the framework of his monadology, the necessary and contingent propositions that are true about a subject are considered to be virtually identical, that is to say formally equivalent, with regard to an understanding capable of calculating all of their consequences. But, also, with Leibniz, the virtual begins to appear as a force (a meaning that we find in the root vir of the word virtus) that pushes towards the realization of an action. For example, the sculptor sees in the rock a virtual statue, schematized, from the real elements that are there (lines of the rock that trace the beginning of a face, matter and form that give it a first silhouette, etc.) and which push or guide him to realize it.
The virtual thus passes in the 20th century from the logical and ontological plane to a psychophysiological plane. Bergson was the first to show through the notions of virtual perceptions virtual actions, and virtual images, that the virtual presents itself as a mental background projected onto the world and from which sketches are deployed, that is to say the possible actions of the body as well as its relations with other objects, before their realization. It is then the phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and metaphysicians like Deleuze who will extend these analyses by making the virtual a space that is not fictitious, nor only possible, but rather latent and in which abstract movements, those of a body schema or projected mental objects, have the capacity to determine themselves in an actual object. Deleuze will affirm in particular in Difference and Repetition (1968) a new distinction according to which the virtual is not opposed to the real, but more precisely to the actual, and the real as that which is opposed to the possible. The possible can still be distinguished from the virtual by the fact that what is possible is realized in a uniform manner (either it is realized, or it is not realized), where what is virtual has a multirealizability (it is always several possible actions and objects which are projected into a virtual space, although it is only one action which ends up being actually realized).
Through this brief history, we see that the virtual inherits multiple meanings that trace many possible paths of understanding, but sometimes contradictory among themselves, and whose lack of unity highlights the properly ambiguous character of virtuality. Often associated with fiction, non -being, the possible, but also with force, virtue, identity, space, action or perception, and, of course, the image, this concept seems to present itself as an expression with an indeterminate extension, almost like a rhetorical facility allowing to respond to any type of contradiction between possible and real. However, the virtual still seems to have its own character and to follow the logic of “neither…nor”: neither only possible, nor completely real or actual, always already present, everything never being fully realized, the virtual inserts itself as an interstice, an intermediary, or a process between the ontological extremes (between possibility and reality, being and non-being, presence and absence, visible and invisible, etc.).
The question of the virtual that then arises is that of its logic and its ontology: what about its reality? If the virtual is, with the actual, one of the two faces of reality, where does one begin and the other end? How can we accommodate this chiasmatic structure of the relationship between reality and possibility that it seems to embody, without falling into oxymoronic simplifications such as those of “virtual reality” or “virtualization of reality”, so often used today? Finally, what form does the relationship between the real and the virtual take? Is it necessarily necessary to speak of it in moral terms (the real as a truth that can be experienced, versus the virtual as a derealizing fiction) and hierarchical terms (for example, through the progressive colonization of the real by connected objects)? Or, on the contrary, does the virtual today play a new constitutive and generative role of social reality(ies), as we can see, in particular, through social networks and the advent of virtual assistants such as ChatGPT?
The second half of the 20th century will try to update this ambiguity that virtuality imposes on reality, notably through a critique of the digital technology associated with it. In this regard, we will think, among others, of the work of Günther Anders in The Obsolescence of Man (1956), Jean Baudrillard in Simulacres and Simulation (1981), and more recently the studies of Bernard Stiegler through the three volumes published by Fayard of Technology and Time (2018). These authors will first warn against the “phantomization of the world”, that is to say the progressive erasure of the presence of reality that is brought about by modern technology (for example, through the emergence of telecommunications and television), as well as against the automation of society and the control of affects and the symbolic established by the “industries of the mind” (GAFAM). But, also, these approaches will attempt to question the new types of environments co-constituted by the operations and relationships that can be found between digital tools and organisms (organic and mechanical couplings between subject-artefacts, imaginaries at work in virtual fictions, role of desire in human-machine interaction, etc.).
It is then in the 21st century that the philosophical treatment of the virtual will take a realistic turn. New research work will indeed attempt to reinvest this concept by taking into account technological progress and its philosophical heritage, although not all positions always agree with each other.
In this sense, we will mention the historical approaches of Marcello Vitali-Rosati (2012) and Marc Parmentier (2023) who expose and relate the many meanings of the virtual throughout the history of philosophy. These comparative approaches question the alterations that this concept may have undergone through its different translations (both in the history of philosophy and in its recent meaning in computer science), but also the unity of meaning that this concept may have today in light of this heritage.
There are also new debates about the ontology and realism of virtual entities. For example, in David Chalmers (2022) who supports the full and complete reality of virtual entities while revisiting the question “Are we in a simulation?” against the backdrop of the Cartesian dream argument and the Evil Genius hypothesis. In contrast, the recent contribution of New Realism, through the work of Maurizio Ferraris (2014, 2021) and Markus Gabriel (2018, 2023), in particular, places greater emphasis on the normative and social character of the virtual. By aiming to eliminate what it considers to be an extension of postmodernist caricatures, New Realism thus attempts to redefine the effects of fiction and to reharmonize the objects and concepts that make up the fields of the virtual (artificial intelligence and human thought, digital documents and traditional writing, virtual avatars and social networks, etc.) by adhering to their respective norms and grammars.
Other perspectives that draw more specifically on technical notions specific to computer science or those of web engineering, such as those of Brian C. Smith (1996), Pierre Lévy (1998), and Alexandre Monnin (2014) have also emerged. These approaches are based in particular on the analysis of different technical processes (virtualization, programming) and computer standards (URI, resources, languages and ontologies) in order to then draw from them the philosophical lines of interpretation that make it possible to restore their technical and social reality.
Finally, the whole aesthetic and hermeneutic dimension of the virtual is obviously taking on a new lease of life today with the recent arrival of generative technologies (AIs, text-to-video, prompting, deepfake). This raises new questions in particular about the nature of the works that the virtual allows to produce, but also about the mediation and reception of these works through new digital media (computers, tablets, screens, digital texts).
We can therefore see that the virtual, far from being just a fad today, brings with it a wide range of philosophical domains that can grasp it and how this concept allows communication between these domains. Contributions can therefore be part of the following four lines of work, without however being restricted to them, and which of course allow communication between them:
- Definitional and historical approaches to the virtual: Contributions may here question the issues of translations of the concept, as well as the losses, gains, and transformations that may have taken place from one author to another throughout the history of philosophy or in a particular author. A critical approach may also be considered, aiming to compare the historical philosophical meaning of the concept and the new contemporary meaning specific to digital technologies (World Wide Web, Internet, AIs, etc.). Also, a perspective providing conceptual distinctions between the different degrees of virtuality (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, metaverse) may be the subject of an investigation.
- Ontological and realistic approaches to the virtual: Contributions may aim to report the position of an author or the debate on the subject, or propose an analysis of the ambiguity of the concept and its entities. These contributions may in particular focus on the differences in nuances and reality found not only between virtual objects and real objects, but also between virtual objects (in particular between mental virtual objects and computer virtual objects). Similarly, they may focus on the strictly logical status of the virtual and its positioning as an intermediary between possibility and reality, whether on the cognitive, computer or conceptual level.
- Aesthetic approaches to the virtual: Contributions here may propose two non-mutually exclusive avenues. First, the analysis of the question of the appearance of the virtual as well as its properties across different media. Then, the heritage in art history from which new generative artistic practices arise (for example, through the relationship between pictorial arts and computer graphics, cinema and video games, etc.), what they change or what they extend.
- Applied approaches to the virtual: Contributions may here specifically focus on the computer and physical dimension of the virtual. For example, they may be led to work on engineering concepts (web resources, programming languages, software, computer simulations, etc.) with a view to clarifying the meaning of the virtuality of their objects, or to putting into perspective how computer science is acquiring its scientific status today with regard to the epistemic interest that virtual objects can bring (for example, through simulation and 3D modeling). They may also aim to show in what sense the virtual can serve the discourse of contemporary physics, particularly in relation to quantum entities and states.
Without being obligatory, the bibliography serves as a reference track and must in this sense allow contributors to inform and enrich their production. Any other contributions related to the subject and falling within one or more of the suggested research tracks are also acceptable.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Proposals for contributions should be sent to the following address before January 15, 2025: Charles.Bodon@univ-paris1.fr
Proposals should not exceed 750 words and should include the title, the theme in which they are included and five keywords. They should be sent in a PDF document for review by the AAC coordinators.
The articles written must not exceed 10,000 words, including bibliography, notes and spaces.
They must comply with the journal’s presentation standards, available on the following page: https://www.implications-philosophiques.org/soumettre-un-article/.
They should be sent in an anonymized .doc document for double-blind evaluation.
Please indicate (only in the body of the email): the author’s first and last name, the title of their proposal, their institutional affiliation, and a contact email address.
Contribution proposals and articles may be written in French or English, although it should be noted that articles in English will only be accepted if they are written by native English-speaking authors or those whose writing level is at least equivalent, as the journal team cannot correct the language or call upon professional proofreaders.
CALENDAR
Deadline for submission of abstracts: January 15, 2025
Author Responses: February 1, 2025
Submission of the fully written article: April 30, 2025
First return to authors: June 1, 2025
Final version of the article sent: July 15, 2025
Expected publication: summer 2025
INDICATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works
Buthaud M. & Varenne F. (dir.), Virtual worlds and video games, Éditions Matériologiques, 2024
Chalmers D., Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, WW Norton & Company, 2022
Ferrarato C., Prospective philosophy of software: a Simondonian study, Iste Éditions, 2019
Ferraris M., Documentality: why it is necessary to leave traces, (2009), Les éditions du Cerf, 2021
- Soul and iPad, University of Montreal Press, translated by Hélène Beauchef and Matteo Treleani, 2014
- Doc-humanity, Mohr Siebeck, 2022
Gabriel M., Why human thought is incomparable, JC Lattès, 2018
- Fictions, Vrin, 2023
Gaston-Granger G., The probable, the possible, the virtual, Odile Jacob, 1995
Hui Y., On the Existence of Digital Objects, University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis, London, 2016
Levy P., What is the virtual?, La Découverte, 1998
Monnin A., Towards a Philosophy of the Web: the Web as a Becoming-Artifact of Philosophy (between URIs, Tags, Ontology(ies) and Resources), Thesis, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2013
Parmentier M., Archives of the virtual, Vrin, 2023
Quéau P., In Praise of Simulation, Éditions Champ Vallon, 1986
Romele A., Digital Hermeneutics: Philosophical Investigations in New Media and Technologies, Routledge, 2021
Smith BC, On the origin of objects, The MIT Press, 1996
Tisseron S., Psychoanalysis of the image: From the first features to the virtual, Librairie Arthème Fayard/Pluriel, 2010
Vial. S., Being and the Screen. How Digital Changes Perception, Paris, PUF, coll. “Hors collection”, 2013
Vitali-Rosati M., Finding your way in the virtual world, Hermann Éditeurs, “Digital Cultures” Collection, 2012
Items
Aarseth, E. “Doors and Perception: Fiction vs. Simulation in Games”, Intermedialities / Intermediality, (9), 2007, p. 35-44 (https://doi.org/10.7202/1005528ar)
Berthoz A., Armand Amato E., Perény E., “Attention, presence and engagement: plural concepts illuminated by neurophysiology in interaction with digital worlds”, Interfaces numériques, no. 1, 2018
Chalmers D., “The Virtual and the Real”, Disputatio vol. 9, no. 46, 2017, p. 309-352
Declos A., “The ontology of the virtual”, Klēsis – Philosophical Review, vol. 52, 2022
Guichard É., “Talking about the virtual in digital times”, 2019 (hal-02403360)
Halpin H., Declerck G., “Philosophical Engineering: Towards a Philosophy of the Web,” Intellectica. Journal of the Association for Cognitive Research, no. 61, 2014
Juul J., “Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK)”, Disputatio journal, 2019 (https://doi.org/10.2478/)
Lévy P., “Hypertext, instrument and metaphor of communication”, Réseaux, vol. 9, no. 46-47, 1991, pp. 59-68
McDonnell N., Wildman N., “Virtual Reality: Digital or Fictional?”, Disputatio, vol.11, no. 55, p. 37-397, 2019
Monnin A., Pierre Livet, “Distinguish/Explicit. Web ontology as an “operational” ontology ”, Intellectica, 2014, p. 59-104
Varenne F., “Philosophy of simulation and finitude”, Philosophical Review of France and Abroad, 2021, pp. 183-201
Vial S., “Against the virtual: a deconstruction”, MEI – Mediation and information, 2014, The territories of the virtual, no. 37, p. 177-188
Vitali Rosati M., “The virtuality of the Internet: An attempt at terminological clarification”, Sens public, Revue internationale, 2009
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