“New Habits in Mind: In Search of a Graphic Philosophy” (GraPhil) takes its starting point from the
acknowledgement of i) a social fact and ii) a disciplinary need: i) our informational world is more and more
transforming our ways not only of communicating knowledge, but also of designing and producing it; ii) even
philosophy should rethink and reorient its own practice accordingly to such a condition.
Thus, the main challenge of the project is to reveal, address, and start to fill a gap both in the philosophical
discourse and in the philosophical practice. GraPhil will face the question “is it possible to read and produce
philosophical works and knowledge not only textually, namely through written words?”. It will give a two-fold
answer: a theoretical one and a practical one. On the one hand, it will propose a new theoretical framework to
re-interpret the nature of the production of philosophical knowledge through anthropological lens, based on the
idea that philosophers suffer the bias of “the myth of written words” in their practices, and thus they have to
understand and transform their deepest habits of thought. On the other hand, it will test directly the possibility
of overcoming such a bias in a more effective and specific way, which entails the concrete production of
philosophy through comics (thus not simply of comics on philosophy, and similar).
Consequently, GraPhil will be innovative not only for its contents and results, but also for its methodology, for
two main reasons. The first is that it envisages creating a peculiar hub for a genuine co-work and co-research,
which will host not only philosophy researchers and students (disciplinarity), not only simply also nonphilosophy academic researches and students (interdisciplinarity), but even also non-academic professionals,
scholars, experts, students, and users. The second is that it will address the question of a new ethics for new
media not just by operating a reflection “on” ethics, but by practically experimenting a new different habit of
thought.