The Speculative Realism series at Edinburgh University Press would never have been complete without a book by Maurizio Ferraris, long-time Professor of Philosophy in Turin – the city where he was born in 1956. Amidst the ongoing resurgence of realism in continental philosophy, it is worth recalling that Ferraris has a good claim to be the first full-blown realist in the continental tradition since Nicolai Hartmann, a now-distant contemporary of Martin Heidegger. Given that the education of the young Ferraris was closely linked with the famed anti-realists Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, one would expect him to place the question of reality in sceptical quotation marks, or even ridicule it outright. Instead, Ferraris had sufficient courage to walk an initially lonely path towards the realist ontology he defends today. A stunningly prolific figure, Ferraris has authored somewhere on the order of seventy books, of which eleven are available in English translation at the time of this writing. Yet far from being a reclusive scholar, this book-writing machine of a man is also a socially dynamic organiser, a hero to Italian notaries due to his book Documentality, and someone who crosses the proverbial analytic–continental divide as easily as if he held a diplomatic passport. He is the driving force behind Labont (Turin's Centre for Ontology), and as affable a dinner companion as one could hope to meet. Along with the German philosopher Markus Gabriel of Bonn (whose own book Fields of Sense appeared previously in this series), Ferraris spearheads the New Realism movement in philosophy. No matter how grim the challenges still faced here and there by realist philosophy, Ferraris always appears to be in high spirits and never ceases working. Even a chance encounter with him at a conference often leads one to receive valuable news and to be drafted into two or three future projects.

As Ferraris tells us at the beginning of his book, its two main parts, ‘Observation’ and ‘Speculation’ (renumbered as Two and Three to make room for a fresh introductory passage), were written twenty-one years apart. This helps us understand at least two things about the book. First, it demonstrates the consistency of Ferraris's philosophy since the occurrence of his realist turn.