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Copyright of Studi Junghiani is the property of FrancoAngeli srl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper relates Elias's thought to Mead's, starting from the embodied dimension of emotions. The approach of the two authors to emotions is affected by a conception of society as deeply intertwined with biological and somatic aspects. Rediscovering and enhancing these aspects is configured as a radical challenge to the disciplinary barriers with which such topics are traditionally addressed. This allows to relate the thought of the two authors within a theoretical framework that can shed light on the embodied aspects of emotional action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Scienze del Territorio is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper will focus on the very complex compositional techniques found in the poetry-musical heritage of arbëresh communities. In particular, by drawing on Parry and Lord's research, the study applies new perspectives of approaching oral narrative songs in arbëreshë communities in Italy, which is the specific subject of the current investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Enthymema is the property of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory & Philosophy of Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper considers a "befallment" that occurred in the course of analysis at a time when the focus of work was too much at a conscious level, dissociated from the patient's embodied and visceral depths. A rigidly held attitude of focal attention is considered as potentially a defence against embodied experiences of overwhelm and vulnerability that may haunt shadowy realms which remain unlit by the narrow beam of conscious awareness. Rather as a dream drifts in from the unconscious, an enactment by the analyst brought neglected aspects of the transference and countertransference relationship into the room. Later, the patient's own dreaming mind offered images that suggested an underlying dynamic. These subtle communications, alongside the patient's attitude toward the analyst's lapse, are considered as factors in the achievement of greater embodied integration. The analyst's difficulty in arriving at a formulation of such events is discussed, along with the necessity of holding such "befallments" in mind over long periods of time before any explanation can be adumbrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Form@re is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The research discussed in this paper situates itself within experiential and critical approaches to architectural and urban space through GPS-based mobile app technology. It uses Waze, a crowd-sourcing satellite navigation app, as its case study to discuss how the app enables new digitally mediated spatial practices performed and embodied by users. To explore how Waze informs spatial relations and practices – both physical and digital – the app is analyzed as a material object, particularly addressing the design and spatial properties of the interface, while framing it within a Cyberfeminist theoretical framework. The paper seeks to fill a gap in digital spatial theory by upholding that apps are made at a fast pace to help increase their commercial value, but their development, design, and research currently lacks critical study. As such, it looks into Waze’s implications regarding the social reconfiguration of urban relations and identity-formation. Collecting its data through a series of interviews with users as well as personal analyses, this paper aims to critically address how through its interface Waze: a) contests notions of “community” among a group of drivers on the road, b) creates transactional collaborations between Wazers, and c) sets up a digital space where users perform and move in relation to each other. The paper argues that studying Waze’s properties enables a space-based theorization of embodiment, and that through Waze’s avatars, users construct a sense of embodied self-awareness and a social understanding of their immediate context by being able to visually position themselves within an expansive network of others.

In his late lecture course titled “Nature and Logos: The Human Body” (1959-1960), Merleau-Ponty proposed that we understand human symbolism, language, and reason by viewing the human being initially as a variant on animal embodiment and perception prior to being a rational animal. To elaborate this project, he outlined an “esthesiology” informed by the study of evolution. However, in the sketches that survive of “Nature and Logos,” we find neither a detailed explanation of how Merleau-Ponty understood this approach nor its concrete execution with respect to the human body. In this paper I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology. An animate body possesses two “sides”: it is a sensing organism open onto the world and a sensible part of the natural world. Visual animals such as humans can see, see themselves, and be seen by others. To understand their way of life, we must study not only the body’s capacities for perception and action, but also how those capacities are seen by other organisms, especially conspecifics. The body’s visibility shapes the social prospects of a species and its potential for developing complex sociality, language, and cognition. I apply this basic esthesiological principle to study the human eye. Both in its vision and its visibility, the human eye is a distinctive variation of animality and one that conditions and shapes human sociality and cognition. I develop this insight with respect to a central philosophical theme of Merleau-Ponty’s late work, the relation of the visible and the invisible. I conclude by discussing the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology for his late thought and current discussions of the naturalization of phenomenology.

Being conscious or experiencing the world with all its vivid qualities is something humans intimately cherish. The fact that consciousness provides us with a lively phenomenology is what makes life worth living. Yet, when it comes to understanding how consciousness fits into the natural world, we feel deeply puzzled. In this context, one important claim about consciousness consists in the idea that our awareness is not only about the world but also reveals an intimate subjectivity. This aspect of phenomenal consciousness is often referred to as pre-reflective self-consciousness. It is often held that this type of self-awareness is intrinsic and essential to any form of conscious experience, i.e. there is no conscious experience without also being implicitly self-conscious. Being of such importance to the nature of consciousness, the recent literature mainly discusses two ways of accounting for pre-reflective self-consciousness, its role for conscious experience and how it fits into the natural world. On the one hand, there are relational views; on the other hand, there are non-relational accounts. This paper will argue that both approaches are not sustainable as they stand, since either important aspects are lost or not sufficiently embedded in the natural world. Consequently, I will argue for an alternative that allows for both a functional and an embodied nature of pre-reflective self-consciousness.

This paper focuses on the reasons for, and consequences of, expanding our notions of human embodiment to virtual worlds. Increasingly, it is within virtual environments that we seek to extend, and enhance, who we are. Yet, philosophical worries persist about what sorts of selves count as moral agents, and the extent to which self-enhancements affect personal identity and agency. This paper critiques and expands the discourse on embodiment and personal identity by locating it within the virtual environments of Second Life, challenging the prevailing limitations of what counts as identity-constituting embodiment. I argue that more inclusive notions of embodiment make possible a deeper understanding of its moral and epistemic force that constitutes and locates our identities in a universe of shared moral understandings. Thus, by including enhanced virtual embodiments alongside the non-virtual, not only do we expand our ideas of what it might mean to be embodied, but we also deepen our moral vocabularies of the self.

This paper uses Extended Mind Theory (EMT) to explore Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), demonstrating how this conceptual framework provides a wide-ranging interpretation of the potential integration of user and computer. After a preliminary analysis of first- and second-wave EMT arguments and other pragmatic criteria, I present BCI technology, addressing the issues that arise. Can BCIs extend our mental processes and to what degree? What EMT criteria should be applied to this technology? What is the role of the body in the process of integrating user and computer? What are current limits to complete cognitive and bodily extension by BCIs? In line with this discussion, I suggest a pluralist approach to BCIs, allowing for specific and appropriate application of the various models and paradigms. I also advocate greater focus on the integration of body and tool, primarily for clinical purposes, but also for applications that will meet daily needs in the future.

In this paper we argue that Ricoeur’s concept of suspicion is significant for present-day neurocognitive studies on literature, with regard to the issues of embodiment, bodily simulation, and interpretation of textual latent meanings. Ricoeur’s practice of suspicion is one of the two poles of our present inquiry on literary texts, being the second a neurohermeneutic approach that we have developed in past studies (Gambino and Pulvirenti, Storie, menti, mondi; “Neurohermeneutics. A Transdisciplinary Approach to Literature”).We will refer to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, a principle which is often quoted in literary critical discourse but not always precisely defined, considering it as an act of mistrustful interpretation, which bases on intersubjectivity and aims to disclose latent and hidden meanings in sign systems, specifically in literary texts, which is the field of our inquiry.In the perspective of what we here define as neurohermeneutics of suspicion, the reader becomes an interpreter, questioning the text with regard to its multilayered surface features as marking inferential clues unveiling secondary meanings. The meaning-making process depends on a creative act of the reader’s imagination embodying mental (re-)construction of the situation described by a text. Therefore, suspicious interpreting does not rely in either the text, the author, the reader or the cognitive and cultural context, but in their complex and dynamic relationship, pivoting around the common human nature rooted in corporeity. We claim that particularly in the postcritical venture, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics may be helpful in refiguring the pleasure of deciphering the fictional worlds of literature, challenging the reader to “play” with the text intended as a terra incognita of inexhaustible multiple meanings.

Copyright of Studi Junghiani is the property of FrancoAngeli srl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper I will examine the embodied dimension of emotions, and of inner life more generally, according to Wittgenstein’s anti-subjectivistic account of expression. First of all, I will explore Wittgenstein’s critique of a Cartesian disembodied account of the inner life, and the related argument against the existence of a private language. Secondly, I will describe the constitution of inner life as the acquisition of embodied ways of expressing oneself and of responding to others within a shared context, against the background of an inherited weave of cultural expressive practices. Here, I will analyze Wittgenstein’s embodied account of expression, the ‘modified concept of sensing’ and ‘seeing’ which is involved in seeing the emotions of others as their expressions, and consequently Wittgenstein’s critique of an epistemological account concerning our ‘knowledge’ of others’ minds. Finally, with reference to Cavell’s and Mulhall’s readings, I will reflect on the figure of the ‘aspect-blind’, one who ‘just knows’ the emotion of others but cannot acknowledge it, and accordingly is not able to see it as the embodied expression of the other’s inner life. In this way, I wish to argue that Wittgenstein not only calls into question a disembodied account of the inner life from a theoretical point of view, but also shows the ethical consequences of a disembodied account of self through the figure of the aspect-blind.

Con la dicitura “revisionismo cognitivo”, intendo un processo di rilettura della storia culturale alla luce delle recenti acquisizioni degli studi cognitivi, sia metodologiche che conoscitive. Una carica revisionistica è presente nella maggior parte degli orientamenti cognitivi, soprattutto quelli connessi con gli studi narrativi o più specificamente letterari, tesa sia a integrare le conoscenze pregresse mostrando lati nuovi della storia culturale e del potenziale comunicativo della letteratura, sia a smascherare atteggiamenti della critica ritenuti fallaci alla luce delle nuove conoscenze. Nel presente lavoro metto a confronto il revisionismo storico e quello cognitivo rispetto allo studio del neorealismo novecentesco dell’Italia meridionale. Nella prima parte illustro il caso studio: la critica agli intellettuali che orbitavano intorno alla rivista «Sud» nel capitolo finale di Il mare non bagna Napoli. Nella seconda parte, descrivo l’operazione di revisionismo storico realizzata con la pubblicazione delle lettere di Anna Maria Ortese a Pasquale Prunas, direttore della rivista, e descrivo la stretta relazione tra la poetica di Ortese e quella di «Sud» alla luce di in confronto col realismo socialista proposto dal PCI. Nella terza parte, propongo un approccio revisionistico di tipo cognitivo, utilizzando come premessa generale l’ipotesi secondo la quale la lettura di narrativa incrementa la ToM (Hutto, Zunshine, Kidd-Castano), e analizzando il realismo visionario di Ortese sulla base degli indici di coinvolgimento fisico del narratore nell’ambiente, sulla scorta della teoria conosciuta come embodied mind. Lo studio condotto mette in evidenza alcuni limiti del revisionismo storico, e della literary politics, nella valutazione del realismo come pratica politica, ed enfatizza il ruolo che le metodologie cognitive possono svolgere nel processo revisionistico dei materiali letterari, grazie alla loro capacità di analizzare la poetica indipendentemente dalle intenzioni comunicative dichiarate o apparenti. With the term "cognitive revisionism", I mean a process of re-reading cultural history in light of recent acquisitions of cognitive studies. A revisionist approach is present in most cognitive schools, especially those related to narrative or more specifically literary studies, aimed to integrating past knowledge by showing new sides in cultural history, as well as by exposing critical attitudes considered fallacious in the light of new knowledge. In this paper, I compare historical and cognitive revisionism in the study of the neorealism in the twentieth century of southern Italy. In the first part I illustrate the case study: criticism of intellectuals who orbited around the magazine "South" by Anna Maria Ortese. In the second part, I describe the operation of historic revisionism made with the publication of the letters by Anna Maria Ortese to Pasquale Prunas, editor of the magazine, and describe the close relationship between Ortese's poetry and that of "South", in the light of comparison With the socialist realism proposed by the PCI. In the third part, I propose a cognitive revisionistic approach, using hypothesis of relation between reading and increasing of ToM (Hutto, Zunshine, Kidd-Castano) as a premise, and analyzing the visionary realism of Ortese on the basis of the physical involvement of the narrator in the environment (embodied mind). The study underlined some limitations of historical revisionism and literary politics in evaluating realism as a political practice, and emphasizes the role that cognitive methodologies can play in the revisionist process of literary materials, thanks to their ability to analyze poetics without taking into account the declared or apparent communication intentions.

This work presents a survey on gender identity - conducted on a sample of about 4,000 Italians - which explores the differences between genders regarding embodiment, that is the consciousness we have of our body, the awareness of "having" a body and "being" a body, and the relationship between these differences, age, and political orientation. The debate nature vs. nurture, that is whether the differences between genders are more related to genetic heritage or to the influence of the environment, is millennia old and it is outlined with mentions from ancient Greece to the French Revolution and positivism, also to the different waves of feminism, and finally to the contemporary contributions of neuroscientists. In order to study empirically, on a large number of cases, the influence of gender on conceptions and desires about one's own body, trying to circumvent "social desirability", an original tool was used. This tool consists of a battery of twenty-eight self-anchoring scales which, unusually for a survey, explore the desire to possess bodily faculties peculiar to animals and plants, or to natural events, which human beings do not possess or which they possess in a reduced form. Therefore, no direct questions are asked about value options or attitudes; nor are social meanings offered, as "non-social" objects are asked to be evaluated. The choices of the subjects and the relationships with the mentioned properties (age and political orientation) are analyzed and interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main contributors to the idea of sharing and the creator of the idea of dialogism as a counterweight to monologism has been Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, the well-known Russian 20th-century theorist. Using the concepts of “I and thou” developed by his predecessors, most notably Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen, he fought against the hegemonic consciousness of his day and age, and established the imperative of dialogue between generations, interlocutors and ideas. Th is paper takes a look at the Christian aspect of the theory of dialogism, increasingly popular in contemporary Western thought. It opens up with Bakhtin’s relationship with Christian thought and discourse, and then analyses the concepts of perichoresis, embodiment and the word (logos). Th e work then focuses on the particular Orthodox strain in Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism, the sanctity of the human body, the phenomenon of Fool-for-Christ, and Russian (and Eastern) communality, or sobornost’.

The paper traces the particular quality of human existence as linguistic embodied existence. In asking whether language is like body, it spells out what linguistic experience entails and what kind of picture results from this analysis as grounding the “person” (following Gallagher & Zahavi’s definition) in space/time/body and language. Understanding linguistic existence as embodied existence also facilitates an argument against a representationalist view of language. Nietzsche’s concern is taken up and analyzed: Does the self-reflexivity resulting from linguistic experience threaten individuality? Against his pessimistic conclusion, the article suggests to see language as enabling the individual agent-self.

In this paper I aim at highlighting the role touch plays in comparison to other sensory modalities both in our apprehension of reality and in the development of our bodily selfawareness. I will try to discuss above all the latter topic by showing that touch enjoys an unique status among the senses because of the coincidence between its bodily organ – the flesh – and its material sensory medium. For this essential link with the whole living organism touch ensures at the highest degree our anchorage to the world and exerts an epistemological supremacy since its cognitive performances contribute to establishing a robust sense of reality, by confronting ourselves with the resistance opposed by the things. In its essential connection with proprioception, kinesthesia and bodily feelings tactile perception constitutes the bodily intentionality in its basic form and therefore assures the mutual interplay between different sensory modalities. Another exclusive feature of tactile perception consists in its double function as proprioceptive and exteroceptive direction, as shown by the unique phenomenon of touchant/touché. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty have devoted their attention to the relevance of this experience in generating the bodily self-awareness in its reflexive structure.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the role that our lived body has in shaping our perceptual life. Through Husserl’s description of the way in which we perceive the world around us, we will underline the fact that our body is not just an object among others for us, but a fundamental constitutive principle of our own experience. In this way, we will try to maintain that to perceive is, in some sense, to have an implicit and pre-reflective knowledge of our embodied relation to the world.

In this paper we attempt to advance the enactive discourse on perception by highlighting the role of bodily affects as prenoetic constraints on perceptual experience. Enactivists argue for an essential connection between perception and action, where action primarily means skillful bodily intervention in one’s surroundings. Analyses of sensory-motor contingencies (as in Noë 2004) are important contributions to the enactive account. Yet this is an incomplete story since sensory-motor contingencies are of no avail to the perceiving agent without motivational pull in one direction or another or a sense of the pertinent affective contingencies. Before directly addressing the issue of affect in perception, we explain our peculiar, low-level conception of affect as a form of worldinvolving intentionality that modulates (minimally) bodily behavior without necessarily possessing informational value of any kind. We then address the deficiency concerning affect in enactive accounts of perception by examining some exemplary forms of bodily affect that constrain perception. We show that bodily affect significantly contributes to (either limiting or enabling) our contact with the world in our perceptually operative attentive outlook, in a kind of perceptual interest or investment, and in social perception.

This paper seeks to study the way in which the human body is socially constructed, with emphasis on the case of aesthetic surgery. Drawing from semi-structured qualitative interviews with plastic surgeons and individuals who modified their body through aesthetic surgery, it is illustrated a contrast between the medical discourse and the patient’s discourse, in terms of the motives for conducting these surgical procedures. For plastic surgeons, on the one hand, the reasons prompting individuals into aesthetic surgery pertain to their psychological improvement and the enhancement of their inner self, something that legitimatize their intervention as “therapeutic”. Persons submitted to these interventions, on the other hand, waive the psychology aspect and give priority to the superficial factor, elevating body appearance to a supreme value and attributing a purely utilitarian character to their decision.

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the character of embodiment in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics based on Lakoff, collaborators and interlocutors. Initially I characterize the embodied mind, via cognitive experientialism. In these terms, the theory shapes how human beings build and process knowledge structures which regulate their individual and collective lives. Next, the Neural Theory of Language in which embodiment is rebuilt from a five level paradigm, where structured connectionism carries on the very burden of computational description and explanation is discussed. From these assumption, classical problems about computational implementations for models of natural language functioning as reductionist-physicalist approaches, I then conclude by assuming that embodiment, as an investigation phenomenon, shouldn't be formulated in terms of levels, being treated as interfaces instead, at such manner that: (a) the epistemological commitments should be synchronically sustained in all interfaces of the investigation paradigm; (b) the conventional computational level should be taken as one of the problems which has to be treated in the structured connectionism plan; (c) the strategic reduction levels paradigm and the results obtained from it might imply a kind of modularization of the program of research itself; e (d) the modules would be interdependent only as a result of the reductionist proposal. As a result, I assume that it is possible to do Cognitive Linguistics without adhering to structured connectionism, or to neurocomputacional simulation, as long as one would operate with interfaces constructions between domains of investigation and not with a reductionist features paradigm treated in terms of "levels".Este artigo é uma reflexão sobre o caráter da corporeidade no quadro da Lingüística Cognitiva associada a Lakoff, colaboradores e interlocutores. Inicia-se com a caracterização de mente corpórea, via experiencialismo cognitivo. A teoria, nesses termos, modela como os seres humanos constroem e processam estruturas de conhecimento que regulam sua vida individual e coletiva. Em seguida, discute-se a Teoria Neural da Linguagem, em que a corporeidade é reconstruída a partir de um paradigma de cinco níveis, em que o conexionismo estruturado carrega o peso da descrição e explanação computacional. Em vista disso, retomam-se problemas clássicos sobre implementações computacionais para modelos de funcionamento da linguagem humana, em abordagens reducionistas-fisicalistas. Como conclusão, defende-se que a corporificação, como fenômeno de investigação, que se problematize sua formulação em termos de níveis, tratando-a, em vez disso, como interfaces, de modo que: (a) os compromissos epistemológicos deveriam ser sincronicamente mantidos nas interfaces; (b) em função de (a), o nível das computações deveria ser tomado como um dos problemas a serem tratados no plano do conexionismo estruturado; (c) a estratégia de um paradigma em níveis de redução e os resultados obtidos a partir dela implicam uma espécie de modularização do programa de pesquisa; e (d) esses módulos seriam interdependentes apenas em vista dos níveis criados para atender a determinados objetivos. Como resultado, assume-se que é possível fazer-se Lingüística Cognitiva sem aderir ao conexionismo estruturado ou à simulação neurocomputacional, desde que se operaria com construções de interfaces entre domínios de investigação, e não com um paradigma em níveis, com traços reducionistas.

It was not until the political transformation in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s that freedom, democratisation and new opportunities in travelling emerged. In connection with broader economic, social and cultural changes after the collapse of communism, tourism promotion acted in multiple ways; among them, modification of the decades-rooted image of the region – and particular countries – may be considered the key function. In this article, I propose reflection on what role in this process is played by references to the embodiment of tourist practices and performances, sensuality, love and eroticism, used by the senders of the message to reshape the image of Poland in selected promotional campaigns issued between 2004 and 2015. The main goal of this paper is not only to discuss the methods and techniques chosen by the broadcasters, but also to pay attention to the content that remains (un)intentionally ambiguous.