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This essay explores the – admittedly taboo – theme of eros as it relates to education. While eros is generally understood today in the restricted sense of sexual desire (hence the taboo), there are good reasons to expand the concept to include the full range of embodied human experiences of attraction or sensuous affinity. Such experiences are not merely physiological, but also infused with emotion and imagination, and they constitute an indelible aspect of presence. While traditional education aims more or less explicitly at suppressing the erotic dimension of presence, performative approaches – precisely because they are rooted in the body – in effect open this dimension and make it available as an area of experience, a source of knowledge, and a motivation for learning. But this introduces an element of unpredictability, even volatility; and given the complex and often unconscious movement of eros, we are never far from the zones of social taboo and therefore of ethical concern. Proponents of a performative teaching and learning culture must therefore give careful thought to the question of how to approach the erotic aspect of presence honestly, ethically, and in ways that not only promote learning but also foster self-esteem and respect.

Presenting complex worlds where literary narrative, “visual experience”, and “esthetic perception” perfectly mix, comics, especially uperhero comics, are an original, compelling, and useful medium for an analysis on otherness and intersectional feminism. Studying the Ages of Comics, the article will underline the evolution of the medium and the fictional and historical fears, prejudices, hopes, and claims of its stories, also revealing the utopian and dystopian grounds of these realities. Behind tight-fitting suits, masks, and superpowers (or super-technology), comics often hide serious, compelling, urgent themes, such as, just to name a few, identity, discrimination, violence, segregation, migration, injustice, racism, misogyny, homophobia, illness, ecology, urbanization, materialism, and many more.

Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (945-959 AD) implements a peculiar institutional maintenance, based on the collection of books and materials from the past. A closer scrutiny of the sources shows some deeper meanings and reveals that the recurring metaphors of the body and the family shape his grand project, shedding light onto the institutional and social agenda which underpinned his embodied maintenance.

Aquest article examina l’articulació del principi humanitari de neutralitat i la llengua com a vehicle d’aquest posicionament polític en el Comitè Internacional de la Creu Roja (CICR). El CICR és un actor humanitari neutral reconegut per les Convencions de Ginebra i històricament vinculat a la neutralitat política i al multilingüisme suïssos. A través d’entrevistes, grups de discussió i documents institucionals, analitzem la negociació lingüística de la neutralitat per part dels delegats del CICR en trobades humanitàries. Basant-se en el procés semiòtic d’iconització (Gal i Irvine, 2000) amb un enfocament en la política de corporització (Bucholtz i Hall, 2016), l’anàlisi revela que les ideologies raciolingüístiques reforcen el domini de l’anglès (Footitt et al., 2020) i la figura imaginada de l’humanitari europeu, home i blanc (Fassin, 2012) que no parla llengües locals ni regionals com ara l’àrab. La neutralitat sorgeix com a concepte contextual i relacional basat en una negociació en termes de possessió d’un repertori lingüístic, corporització racialitzada i proximitat cultural. A l’Orient Mitjà i el nord d’Àfrica, això es tradueix en la percepció per part dels grups d’interès d’una menor neutralitat vinculada als “occidentals” i “àrabs” que parlen àrab, els quals desestabilitzen la figura humanitària imaginada i vinculada a la neutralitat.

Molti racconti fantascientifici di Primo Levi si basano su giochi di prospettive – contrapposte, rovesciate, innaturalmente ristrette. Una particolare forma di manipolazione prospettica è offerta dalle variazioni di scala. Attraverso l’analisi narratologica di due racconti fantascientifici, “Una stella tranquilla” e “Visto di lontano”, l’articolo esplora gli effetti ottenuti da Levi attraverso lo sfruttamento del concetto di scala, e riflette sulla visione di realtà e del nostro rapporto con essa che la tensione, variamente articolata, tra familiarità e straniamento contribuisce a costruire. In particolare viene suggerito che i giochi di scala non abbiano solo lo scopo di defamiliarizzare una rappresentazione, ma che provino allo stesso tempo a suggerire l’esistenza di profonde corrispondenze tra i diversi livelli. L’articolo indaga inoltre come il ruolo dell’esperienza, innegabilmente embodied (ossia radicata nel fatto di svilupparsi e realizzarsi attraverso un corpo dalla fisiologia e percezioni peculiarmente umane), interviene rispetto alla gestione delle variazioni di scala e degli effetti di straniamento.

Many of Levi’s speculative stories narrate dystopian scenarios in which individuals express anxiety about the creeping power of technology which is reifying and automating their posthuman bodies, affecting their physical and psychological freedoms. This article develops previous scholarship with a specific focus on the gendered dimension of Levi’s writing. I show how he critiques the problematic ways in which technologisation impacts specifically on women’s bodies. With a view to tracing the contemporary echoes of Levi’s work, I place his stories in dialogue with Nicoletta Vallorani’s recent, more explicitly feminist novels. I argue that Vallorani’s writing echoes and develops many of Levi’s concerns about how technology can be employed to constrain our bodies and consciousness, and the explicitly gendered dimensions of this oppression. A critical reading of these texts alongside one another reveals striking resonances and confirms how Levi’s intuitions regarding the importance of critiquing unfettered technologised embodiment remain urgently relevant today.

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The article reflects on the relationship between pedagogy and body moving from the sense of tact. Firstly, the question of the body-mind relationship in contemporary pedagogy is presented. Starting from the cartesian division of mind and body, we expose the main issues related to a possible overcoming of such dualism. In addition, we maintain that cartesian dualism significantly contributed to a dominance of mind over body in education. Then, we reconstruct the history of “pedagogical tact”: this concept changed from an original somatic significance to a more interpersonal sense, putting the question of the body aside. In conclusion, we maintain that re-considering tact in its somatic significance can help build innovative pedagogical theories and practices aimed at a broader reconsideration of bodies in education.

The author reports about a concrete example of embodied performative practice in the language classroom that can be adapted to different language levels. This workshop allows students to become pilgrims on Spain's El Camino (The Way) de Santiago de Compostela, a pilgrimage route with a long history that ends in the medieval city of Santiago de Compostela, located on the Northwest region of Galicia in Spain. While participating in the workshop Performing El Camino (The Way) of Santiago de Compostela, students must collaborate and complete several tasks while using the target language in a context similar to the real world. It is hoped that this proposal is helpful for language teachers and learners in the quest for fresh approaches to using embodied performative teaching in the classroom.

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.

The increased availability and usage of immersive devices, together with futuristic narratives promoted by technology and media “gurus” and entrepreneurs, has encouraged a strong revival of the notion of virtuality. At first sight, this notion appears straightforward, and its application clearly connected to specific objects and phenomena of our time. On closer inspection, however, confusion starts to arise. The concept of virtuality is still in need of in-depth critical examination. The challenge is not much solving highly specific thematic or terminological matters; but rather addressing them while considering their wider frame and background, so that the richness of the virtual is not neglected or depleted. This issue of Aisthesis aims at providing the ground precisely for such an attempt, by gathering contributions with multifarious angles and scope, yet unified by the awareness of the intricacies of “going virtual” today.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: This article presents embodiment in relation to four areas of human agency. The findings are part of a larger project on learning to be old. THE PROBLEM AND RESEARCH METHODS: The main research problem is understanding how strategies, actions, and attitudes toward one’s body differ among the study participants in various agency areas. The study is based on a constructivist paradigm and grounded theory methodology. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: Four fields of the agency have been presented on a continuum, where on one side, forces are pushing a person towards dependence, while on the other side, there is the individual’s independence. These areas were identified during the analysis of empirical data and allow for a departure from judgmental approaches to aging, serving as model areas for the functioning of an older adult . These areas were used to reflect on the embodiment of older people. Finally, the embodiment category was placed within broader structures such as discourses, concepts, and theoretical knowledge about aging and getting old. RESEARCH RESULTS: The findings indicate the multidimensional nature of the aging body. Different strategies, actions, and attitudes towards one’s embodiment are activated depending on the individual’s life situation and social position. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Embodiment occupies a special place in learning to be old. It is one of the primary regulators of this process. As it turns out, self-identification is primarily related to the body. Furthermore, the findings of this study allow moving away from a narrow understanding of aging as physical deterioration and decay.

The article aims to contribute to the debate on corporeity education, focusing on the question of subjectivity, understood as mind-body unity, as developed by phenomenology and embodied approaches. This allows to rethink the educational settings in which the living body is embraced. Within a cross-curriculum design, particularly in primary school, it offers an overview of possible devices in which corporeity is pivotal. Through conceptual frameworks such as those of space and time, the article underlines the innovative contribution of OE and outdoor education, suggesting possible directions for teacher training.

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.)

In questo lavoro distinguo tra due versioni della tesi del carattere incarnato della mente: “debole” e “forte”. Secondo la versione debole, il possesso di stati mentali presuppone l’esistenza di un corpo che si muove ed agisce nell’ambiente, ossia un corpo funzionale. Secondo la versione forte, invece, il possesso di stati mentali presuppone l’esistenza di un corpo non solo funzionale ma anche senziente, ossia: il corpo come sede della sensibilità o coscienza fenomenica. Sostengo che alcuni approcci all’interno della “scienza cognitiva incarnata” implicano la forma debole di embodiment: la robotica di Brooks, l’enattivismo sensomotorio di Noë e O’Regan e l’enattivismo radicale di Hutto e Myin. In contrapposizione a queste prospettive, e basandomi sull’analisi fenomenologica della corporeità vivente e vissuta, difendo la forma forte di embodiment, secondo cui la mente si fonda essenzialmente sul corpo funzionale e senziente.

The Montessorian proposal for childhood education appears highly modern and relevant in relation to the development of both motor skills and cognitive functions (Shivji, 2016;), strongly supported by neurosciences’ embodied theories (Roessingh, H. & Bence, M. 2018)), and the increasing wellbeing problem related to childhood (Pate et al, 2014; Ross, 2012). This review analyses Maria Montessori’s modern educational vision, in light of the emerging needs of today’s children. The contribution reviews existing literature focusing on body and movement, but connected with cognitive, emotional and well-being aspects, which are critical in preschool education, both for educators/teachers (Atli, 2016; Akkerman, 2014; Lillard, 2011), and for school reform policies (Lillard, 2019).

If, by definition, the performing event could not do without the co-presence in space and time of spectators and actors (Brook 21), history has shown us how profound reflections on the possibility of shifting the fundamental axes of theater have nevertheless come about. The increasingly substantial presence of video within performances, even if filmed in real-time, is one example that has called into question the fundamental concept of hic et nunc. The creation of performances for a single spectator has altered the anthropological binomial community/ritual in addition to the "non-human" entity of the performer, from metal theater to cyborg performance (Schrum). The Royal Shakespeare Company's new production (2021) Dream will be analyzed to discuss the particular artistic experimentation that has become widespread in the Covid era. This production, which is a technological performance watched by more than 20,000 people worldwide in just three days, brings performance and gaming technology together to explore new ways for the audience, a remote spectator, to experience live theater (Aebischer 21). As live play performances and readings continually crowd virtual platforms, theater is undergoing a radical shift from stage to screen and cyberspace. However, will these new formats survive in the post-pandemic times?

This article discusses some of the issues affecting storytelling in an immersive and interactive medium such as Virtual Reality. Interactive works which reconfigure their images as three-dimensional environments bearing affordances seems able to convey a proper sense of “spatial presence” – that is, the perceptive and cognitive illusion of being physically immersed in a digital environment, rather than in the material one which actually surrounds the body. However, I will show that VR technology is doomed to produce “breaks in presence”: moments which rise awareness of the mediated nature of the experience, shattering the illusion of presence, and which represent undesirable side-effects for the aesthetics of immersion generally promoted by VR works. In order to do so, I will use the VR game Resident Evil 7 as a case study. First, I will analyse the sophisticated formal solutions employed by the game to create a terrifying illusion of presence, highlighting their connection with cinematic strategies common to the horror genre; then, I will focus on sections of the interactive experience which nonetheless devaluate the effects of these stylistic gears by bringing consciousness about the impalpable and disembodied nature of the virtual body during the (simulated) physical interaction with the environment.

“Survivor holograms” and a VR rendition of the Majdanek concentration camp are two recent examples of the urgent effort to preserve the experience of Holocaust survivors in the “post-witness era.” These innovations, however, deny the tension between the premise of immortality associated with immersive technologies and their inherent planned obsolescence. By closely studying the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony, this essay explores how 3D digital projections and room-scale VR construct new regimes of mediation and immersion. This is achieved by developing an understanding of obsolescence as physical (the fragile body of the survivor), technological (non-compatible hardware, software, and algorithms), and narratological (turning testimonies into fragmented soundbites). Taken together, these categories demonstrate that technological solutionism cannot prevent embodied testimonies from sinking into oblivion, and force us to ask what form of memorialization might resist entropy.

This paper is based on one idea and built around one clinical experience that helped me to broaden my comprehension of it. The idea, underlying the work of several authors is that when the analytic field is saturated with primitive and unintegrated mental contents, the analyst's somatic countertransference is a precious indicator of a deep, dissociated form of communication. The clinical experience concerns the difficult elaboration of a complex, multifaceted countertransference that took place during the early stages of the analysis of a sensitive patient who used to communicate in a very dissociated way and that I found hard to contain. This experience, closely descripted in the article, led me to formulate the clinical idea that the transference field may be made of distinct layers (psychoid, affective, verbal), and that each one of them may potentially convey dissociated, even contrasting bits of information. The corollary of this is that the analyst should be ready to accept contrasting sensations, feelings, and thoughts at the same time, as they might be the basic ingredients of a complex reverie. The analyst could find himself/herself in front of his/her own internal unelaborated multiplicity before a symbolic image may emerge to link between them the scattered pieces of the experience. Nevertheless, the heart of this paper is not about suggesting an idea, but in the sharing of a complex working through, which fostered the birth of a new, more human relational perspective: the capacity of being together in time, in a transitional space where there is neither total separation nor fusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who suffer from traumatic brain injury (TBI) are frequently affected by pragmatic disorder (PD), among other communicative impairments. While largely neglected in terms of rehabilitation strategies, the skills impaired by PD play a fundamental role in the quality of life of people who suffer from TBI. PD uniquely impacts a person’s cognitive and interpersonal abilities, including those from their pre-morbid history. The aim of this work is to propose a theoretical framework, based on a dialogue between neuropsychology and phenomenology, that may provide a useful paradigm in approaches to rehabilitation in PD. Instead of fragmenting this disorder into a list of symptoms, we address it as a consequence of a non-historical alteration of “ipseity” in connection with the concept of “embodiment”. In conclusion, we suggest an intervention for this neuropsychopathology.

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.

Il contributo evidenzia come l’intervento educativo della Biodanza SRT, pedagogia a mediazione corporea orientata all’educazione del benessere, mediante un Embodied Trainining miri a rinforzare e sviluppare nei detenuti le life skills: capacità, competenze e strategie personali (fattori di protezione) utili a consolidare una modalità di fronteggiamento positivo grazie al quale è possibile affrontare efficacemente le richieste e le prove della vita quotidiana e ponendo le basi per la costruzione di un futuro progetto di vita. L’educazione emozionale, come complemento indispensabile allo sviluppo cognitivo e metacognitivo, facilita lo sviluppo dell’empowerment personale e l’acquisizione di Best Practice utili a favorire nei detenuti lo sviluppo di possibili fattori di protezione, l’acquisizione di strumenti e risorse personali per affrontare gli eventi stressanti e prevenire o contrastare disagio, comportamenti a rischio e devianze funzionali al reinserimento nella società degli ex detenuti, una volta usciti dal percorso penale. Perseguendo una esplicita attenzione mediante una intenzionalità educativa atta ad investire sulle pratiche educative capaci di generare cambiamenti tangibili (soprattutto a lungo termine), sviluppando la valorizzazione dei talenti ed il successo personale e sociale, concretamente si va a contribuire a stimolare nei detenuti quel senso di responsabilizzazione facilitante la “riprogrammazione” di nuovo un percorso di vita.

The relationship between inequalities and health has been widely studied. Several theories have been proposed to define the role of the factors that act on the health levels, their strength and the determination profile. This review recalls the main theories and interpretation proposed by different fields of knowledge and highlights that there is not a single way to generate inequalities in health. Deprivation, disadvantage drift, empowerment, structure and social capital, status syndrome, and embodiment are some of the concepts recalled and explored. Some theories consolidate each other, and some remain more isolated. To increase the knowledge on the mechanisms to define the disease distributions among individuals in the population can help to define new and greater equity intervention policies.

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.

To define the Self is extremely complex, because the same nature of the object that we propose ourselves to study, if it is relatively difficult to say what is not, the task to explain it becomes extremely arduous if we try to define what it is. The more developed and known field of the neuroscience is in fact the one that studies the phenomenon of the conscience and the sense of himself on the pathological depositor, when as a result of cerebral lesions, degenerative diseases and/or incidents events some part of the brain, as a result of the damage, become inactive, creating a structural change of the cerebral functions, the emotional management and the identity. The study of the conscience and emerging of Self has always implied a “reduction”: the identity, is reduced to an artifact semantic linguistic/or a function of self monitoring. In this article some of the most credited theories about the emerging of the self awareness in early childhood and its neurobiological basis are brought back, in order to succeed to define in which way these theories have influenced the way we conceive the psycopathogenesis and the modalities of treatment tied to psychic disorders.

The essay explores the notion of ‘unconscious cerebration’ elaborated by British physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter in the first half of the nineteenth century, foregrounding its hybrid genealogy and its afterlife in both science and magic, as well as its transnational impact on the arts and psychology as an already available alternative to the Freudian unconscious. Carpenter’s idea of a corporeal unconscious is traced to the intersections of (occult) science, literature and visual culture, but also comparatively as it rippled off into European, American and Russian cultures, offering a shared notion of a bodily, physiological nonconscious that the Freudian tradition in psychoanalysis has long eclipsed and obscured. Italian Futurism is taken as a test case of the rich, and still underexplored, potentials of Carpenter’s intuition for an archeology both of ‘the unconscious’ and of contemporary returns in the humanities to materiality and embodiment.

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.

The article aims at enhancing the clinical usefulness of the bodily dimension in the session, and the coherence of this analytical attitude with some epistemological intuitions of Jung and Bion. The psyche will be considered as a complex mind/body unity, endowed with many levels of functioning (subsystems) that can be grouped into three large areas: bodily, affective, and thought. Each of these areas expresses itself with a different language and only the work of synchronic integration of the subsystems creates the feeling of possessing a cohesive Self. The analytic session can therefore be seen as an encounter between two mutually activating systems, which creates a multidimensional transference field. There are no hidden meanings that the patient would unconsciously try to conceal, but just non-integrated levels of experience. The article ends with a clinical vignette, showing a process of parallel and synchronic integration of sub-symbolic elements, a process that involves both analyst and patient. This integration broadens the relational and self-knowledge perspectives of both subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

È convinzione diffusa che la realtà aumentata e la realtà virtuale abbiano trovato nel campo dell’educazione un’area in cui dispiegare compiutamente il proprio potenziale. L’efficacia degli ambienti VR e AR nel contesto educativo sarebbe legata principalmente all’idea di simulazione. L’idea di simulazione coinvolge una ridefinizione della natura della rappresentazione; questo lavoro affronta il tema della corporeità, o meglio dell’embodiment, come elemento chiave del passaggio dalla rappresentazione all’immersione. In un contesto in cui la ricerca in ambito educativo sembra essersi riappropriata della dimensione embodied dell’apprendimento, appare opportuno iniziare una riflessione, in ambito didattico-pedagogico, sul ruolo del corpo e della corporeità nel contesto virtuale o aumentato: nel momento in cui, come accade negli ambienti VR e AR, l’intero corpo diviene protagonista dell’interazione, si passa dal dominio della rappresentazione a quello dell’embodiment.

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]

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The present contribution is mainly intended to illustrate how some recent discoveries in the field of neurosciences have revolutionized our ideas about perception, action and cognition, and how these new neuro-scientific perspectives can shed light on the human relationship to art and aesthetics, in the frame of an approach known as "experimental aesthetics". Experimental aesthetics addresses the problem of artistic images by investigating the brain-body physiological correlates of the aesthetic experience and human creativity, providing a perspective that is complementary, and not in opposition, to the humanistic one on the arts and the aesthetic.

In this article I will show that the problem of embodiment goes back to the question of the mind-body split, as this has been established and discussed by the philosophical tradition. With the digital turn and the advent of ubiquitous computing the problem of embodiment has taken new (and far more complicated) forms that have led scholars to introduce the notion of a “new digital Cartesianism.” Subjectivation processes within digital culture have mostly been explained by resorting to what I will call the “E-D-R scheme,” (embodiment-disembodiment-reembodiment scheme) which assumes that a real detachment between the body and the mind really occurs in digital processes. Since—as I will show—this is not actually the case, I will suggest replacing this epistemological scheme with a new one, which I will call the “double-embodiment scheme,” in order to acquire a more fitting epistemological account of the underlying digital ontology. Finally, I will discuss the distinction between bodily extension and the incorporation of non-bodily objects introduced by Helena De Preester in order to show that, in the digital realm, this distinction is much more blurred and complex than she acknowledges: digital interaction requires both bodily extension and the incorporation of objects as complementary processes.

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.

I focus on empathy from an eidetic perspective, that provided by Edith Stein in her work On the Problem of Empathy (1917) and which I call eidetics of empathy. I suggest that the eidetics of empathy allows us to inquire efficaciously into the structure of empathy, and therefore into the relation between empathy on the one hand, and embodied personal identity and intersubjectivity on the other. I argue that the eidetics of empathy sheds light on the complexity, heterogeneity and also fragility of the acts of empathy that we perform in our everyday life with respect to others, and provides us with the conceptual tools to address crucial questions such as: What is the specific and distinctive structure of empathy? What are the conditions of possibility of the performance of acts of empathy? Are there different fulfilment degrees of empathy? What role do living bodies play in the performance of acts of empathy? How is it possible to prevent and correct mistakes of empathy? I deal with these issues in making three points on the eidetics of empathy. My first point is that the eidetics of empathy allows us to understand empathy as one type of acts of perceiving others and their experiences directly and as a whole that is subject to variations of its parts – the limits of possible co-variations of its parts correspond to the essential structure of empathy. Secondly, I focus on the eidetic issue of the possible co-variations of parts of the empathy-type: the content and the degree of fulfilment and accomplishment of empathy acts, the layer of the person they address, the varieties of living beings with whom we can empathize. Thirdly, I argue that the eidetics of empathy exemplifies very well the ontologically qualitative issue of degrees of existence of any entity in relation to its eidetic paradigm, and it is a prime example of how phenomenological eidetics can be a qualitative ontology dealing with qualitative issues that are crucial in our everyday life.

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Experimental research confirms that using social robots with pre-school children as tutors for their learning has important positive effects in terms of children's learning and emotional involvement. In particular, the use of social robots for language learning (L1 and L2) leads to more learned words and a better memory of them. However, many technological limitations prevent from fully implementing the concept of embodiment, a distinctive feature of robotic technology compared to other computer-based technologies, and especially of gestures. In order to contribute to solve the problem, in a preliminary psychological test with Italian children learning English as L2, it was shown that appropriate modifications of the learning environment combined with a more limited use of gestures allow to achieve better results in terms of learning than a larger use of gestures in a less structured environment. If experimentally verified, these results would suggest the development of learning architectures which offer more affordances with respect to the task at hand, while implementing more limited forms of embodiment that are in line with current technological limitations. Robot sociali e insegnamento di L2 ai bambini: uno studio preliminare sull’embodiment della gestualità Le ricerche sperimentali confermano che l’utilizzo di robot sociali in funzione di tutor per l’apprendimento di bambini nella fascia di età prescolare ha importanti effetti positivi in termini di apprendimento e di coinvolgimento emotivo dei bambini. In particolare, l’uso di robot in supporto all’apprendimento linguistico (L1 e L2) si traduce in un numero maggiore di parole apprese e in un migliore ricordo delle stesse. Numerosi limitazioni tecnologiche impediscono tuttavia la piena realizzazione nei robot sociali del concetto di embodiment, in particolare per quanto riguarda la gestualità. Proprio per contribuire a dare una soluzione al problema, in una prova psicologica preliminare con bambini italiani che apprendono la lingua inglese come L2 si dimostra che in un ambiente di apprendimento opportunamente strutturato una gestualità più limitata permette di conseguire migliori risultati di apprendimento e ricordo delle parole apprese rispetto a un uso maggiore della gestualità in un ambiente meno organizzato. Se sperimentalmente verificati, tali risultati indirizzerebbero verso lo sviluppo di architetture dell’ambiente di apprendimento più ricche di affordance rispetto al compito che consentano conseguentemente di implementare forme di embodiment più limitate in linea con le limitazioni tecnologiche attuali.

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The problem of intersubjectivity has undergone multifold discussions in the philosophical, neuroscientific and psychological fields. Currently, the predominant theories in this ongoing debate contend that simulation or explicit reasoning must ground other-understanding. Yet this contention confines the subject to solipsistic self-projection without actual communication. I will provide an analysis suggesting that the roots of the concept of “empathy” reveal not only a dualistic inner-outer distinction but also an emerging reference to the bodily dimension. I claim that, by examining the verifiable-in-experience ideas of expressivity and dynamical value-based perception, the limits of the Theory Theory (TT) and of the Simulation Theory (ST) are resolved by means of a direct perceptual encounter that implies a unitary and never-isolated subject. I aim at showing that perception-based empathy provides an adequate basis for considering social dimensions from intersubjectivity to shared agency, since it allows for both direct embodied communication in cooperation and for the autonomy of agents involved in a collective domain.

Narrative Medicine is a clinical practice, a scholarly field, and a site of intensive research worldwide. This essay describes the inauguration of the field of narrative medicine in 2000 at Columbia University in New York, NY, USA and the principles and practices that have devolved from the initiating work. Clinical implications of narrative concepts of health care as learned from actual medical practice are described. The three movements of narrative medicine—attention, representation, and affiliation—are explored as means of engaging participants in creative acts of discovery and relation. Examples are provided of narratively-informed teaching and health care practice. Conceptual frameworks from aesthetic theory, phenomenology, literary and narrative theories, and cognitive sciences are advanced to portray the integrated study of individuals-in-the-world made possible by contemporary narrative medicine thought. Emerging concepts of enchantment, embodiment, and enactivism suggest future directions for the field.

This article explores the hypervisibility of women’s gendered bodies circulating within modernist print culture. How are these bodies imaged and imagined? How are these bodies mystified and gendered? What kinds of violence do these constructions of feminine embodiment do to authorial bodies? I argue that the print circulation of several prominent modernist female editors and authors underscores the gendered marketing of modernism and the unsettling embodiment of these women within advertisements of their work. Many of these cases construct an uncanny doubleness in the authorial image: at once a heightened embodiment and an increased abstraction. I argue that the marketing of these women authors often leads to haunted and ghostly effects through this double edge that positions the female modernist as simultaneously mythical and manifest, concrete and spectral, material and abstract.