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Review of F. De Vecchi, La società in persona. Ontologia sociale qualitativa
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Date
2025-08-26
Authors
Ruggeri, Cinzia
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Publisher
Routledge
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Abstract
In this remarkable monograph Francesca De Vecchi applies insights from the phenomenological tradition (particularly from Husserl and Scheler) to develop a qualitative social ontology. As the author succinctly explains in the introduction, the main aim of the book is to develop an ontology of the social world that provides an account of our being, living, and acting in the world as personal subjects together with others. Two themes can be singled out as central to De Vecchi’s project: the phenomenological concept of the person and the relation between the person and the axiologically qualified things that populate her social world. The author’s main intuition is that we, as persons, do not experience the things of the world as bare things: namely, as mere physical (spatio-temporally located) objects or just as sensible (sensorially perceivable) objects, but rather as objects constantly endowed with values or disvalues (negative values). Consequently, De Vecchi advocates for combining a qualitative ontology of things, that is, an ontology that focuses on the axiological nature of the things of the world, with qualitative social ontology, namely a social ontology that accounts for the axiological relation that persons have with their social sphere. In so doing, De Vecchi provides us with a fascinating, convincing, and though-provoking way of re-conceptualising the relation between the person and the social world.
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Keywords
Francesca De Vecchi , La società in persona. Ontologia sociale qualitativa , Q2025ualitative social ontology , ~Law - Book chapters~
Citation
Ruggeri, C. (2025) 'Review of F. De Vecchi, La società in persona. Ontologia sociale qualitativa', in Hopkins, B. C and De Santis, D. (eds.) The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 23(1-2). London: Routledge, pp. 365-375. Available at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003647805-24/review-de-vecchi-la-societ%C3%A0-persona-ontologia-sociale-qualitativa-cinzia-ruggeri (Accessed: 16 September 2025)