The 'cultural industry', as it was described by Adorno and Horkheimer, imposed a new relationship between culture and free time. Based on the analyses of the Frankfurt School, Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, professor at the Department of Communication and Social Psychology at the University of Alicante, author, among other books, of Mascaras de la mentira: el nuevo desorden de la posverdad [Masks of lies: the new post-truth disorder], writes about the regime of entertainment under the condition of digital culture.

In this dossier, we examine curiosity, in its scientific, literary and artistic forms. We also trace the key moments in its history: from being regarded in the Middle Ages as a vice and a transgression deserving of moral and religious punishment to being considered a valuable faculty in the modern age (or even, as Hobbes classified it, one of many passions) that lies at the root of the search for knowledge and the new scientific spirit. While this theme occupies no obvious place in our times – when learning and information are driven by mechanisms beyond the desire for knowledge that defines curiosity – it raises trans-historical issues about knowledge, morality and religion. In this context, it is apposite to recall that the etymology of the word ‘curiosity’ stems from the Latin curare, thus encompassing a semantic field that relates to the idea of caring. Here, then, we take a careful look at several questions which curiosity raises.

On 26 November 2011, at 15:02 (UTC), a space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. After a journey of 560 million kilometres, it arrived on Mars at 05:17 on 6 August 2012, its mission to explore the planet and carry out scientific research. The probe’s name was Curiosity.

Known above all for her important work on Leibniz and the Encyclopaedia, Olga Pombo, a professor at the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, writes on the debt science and knowledge as a whole owe to curiosity from the days of Aristotle.

‘With its grand title O Problema da Habitação [The Housing Problem], Daniel Malhão’s project is a set of images resulting from a process of permanent wandering through the city. In fact, through two cities: Lisbon and Vienna […] with no programme other than stopping for long enough to look at that which has no history, or at that which has not been captured by its history.’ The art critic and curator Delfim Sardo presents the collection of photographs that make up this ‘Metropolitan’ in an essay that is itself a wandering through the History of Photography that leads to the history of these photographs. Represented in important collections and with work shown in several national and international exhibitions, Daniel Malhão is a recognised contemporary Portuguese photographer, whose work has been marked by a close connection of photography with architecture.

On the seventh centenary of Dante’s death (1265-1321), Antonio Montefusco, professor in Medieval Latin Literature at the Universidade Ca’ Foscari de Veneza, discusses the poet of the Divine Comedy, who ‘invented the figure of the modern intellectual’ and introduced the ‘vernacular’ to poetry in the place of Latin. He looks critically at the ideological and political uses to which official commemorations of earlier centenaries have been subjected since the 19th century.

One of the most eagerly anticipated books of the last decade, the monumental study The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, draws on modern anthropology and archaeology to radically transform how history has been told over the last three centuries, dismantling certain assumptions about social evolution – from the invention of agriculture and the city, to the origins of inequality and democracy – to summon new possibilities for human emancipation. Afonso Dias Ramos writes about a book that has found itself embroiled in a heated intellectual discussion.

In the series of drawings he selected for Electra, North American artist Dean Monogenis imagines the world before a new flood, conceiving this Portfolio as an artwork in itself – as a painting or a sculpture. In his work, space is a time that becomes space. Imagination is construction, utopia is reality, and the past is the future.

Gender issues have indeed revolutionised the conventional way of thinking about sexual difference. However, it is now clear that we must challenge its limitations, point out its failed possibilities, and critique its representations and conventions.

Barbara Stiegler, a Nietzsche scholar and author of a book on neoliberalism, writes, together with historian Christophe Pébarthe, also from the University of Bordeaux–Montaigne, on the issues and challenges that 20th-century neoliberalism, as a new political phenomenon, poses to democracy in relation to 19th-century liberalism. The course of this reflection leads to the historical – Greek – sources of democracy.