While the philosophy of the new millennium has been marked by a shift towards ‘New Realism’, another paradigm has been gradually emerging since the late 1990s, which we may call the ‘paradigm of presence’. Despite the obvious differences between their methods and goals, both paradigms respond to the same desire to promote a description of reality and subjectivity which, unlike postmodern constructivist philosophies, tries to account for the ‘materiality’ of existence, the ‘things of the world’ and human action. At the same time, these paradigms fruitfully respond to the need to acknowledge and reassign value to the ‘work’ of the senses. As Frank Ankersmit puts it, they form part of a more general movement ‘away from language toward experience’, especially as far as the interpretation and the configuration of history are concerned. In Maurizio Ferraris’ view, the movement's main objective is to overturn constructivist hierarchies in the relationship between things and meanings: ‘The organization is first in the world, then in the eye, and only as a last resort in the brain.’ The trend is further confirmed by an emerging interest, in philosophy as well as in the cognitive sciences, in the role of perception and the ‘reasons’ of the body, with a view to reconnecting the action of thought to that of the senses.

Against this background we may also historically account for the renewed attention to the processes by which ‘vital’ qualities are attributed to images, a subject long regarded as a province of the anthropology of art which has now expanded into a study of the nonaesthetic, ongoing relationships between human subjects and images experienced in terms of living presence.