What contribution can the atmospherological approach make to the debate on collective feelings? In answering this question, the book provides a brief introduction to the so-called "atmospheric turn", examines the complex emotional "games" to which atmospheres give rise and the rest realist background underlying their inclusion in the unprecedented ontological category of quasi-things. It then investigates what the power of atmospheric feelings is and how there may be an "atmospheric competence" relating both to the intentional generation of atmospheres and to the ability not to be manipulated by them, thus also addressing the problem of whether collective feelings are atmospheres or moods. It finally explores what kind of "we" a collective atmosphere is based on and applies this perspective both to the notion of "well being" and two oppressive atmospheres like permanent emergency and the uncanny.

If 2019 was an "Adornian year" because of the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Theodor W. Adorno in August 1969, also 2020 has been an "Adornian year" because of the 50th anniversary of the posthumous publication of Adorno’s great but unfinished masterpiece Aesthetic Theory, first published in 1970. Adorno’s intellectual legacy is still alive today and indeed important for the conceptual tools as it still provides to develop a critical, active and negative (instead than acritical, passive and affirmative) relationship with the real. In the vast and complex corpus of Adorno’s entire philosophical oeuvre, his aesthetic theory deserves an especially close and renewed attention today for the variety of intellectual provocations that are still richly offered to us in order to critically understand our age.

Unanimously banned and condemned, torture has been used in many countries throughout the 20th century. Ruxandra Cesereanu’s essay aims to deepen this subject, showing the unimaginable dimensions that human cruelty can sometimes reach. The Armenian Genocide, the Nazi camps, the Gulag, the Military Juntas in Latin America, the totalitarian regimes in Africa and those in Islamic states are just a few examples of the tortures that man can inflict on his fellow men. From the description of the techniques, the motivations and the moments in which acts of savage violence take place to portraits of torturers and the victim, Ruxandra Cesereanu’s book gives us an overview of the phenomenon of torture, to refresh our collective memory.

Performance/Art explores the phenomenology of skilled performance, ranging from athletics to the performing arts, including music, dance and acting. Gallagher reviews a variety of studies concerning different degrees of mindful awareness operative in performance, and builds on the concept of a meshed architecture, suggesting ways to make it more complex and dynamic. He draws on ideas from enactivist embodied cognition about how different types of movement can be meaningful and intelligent and can scaffold learning and problem solving. He also explicates the notion of an empathic mindfulness in performance and develops the idea of a double attunement to explain aesthetic experience in performance, distinguishing the latter from aesthetic experience in the observer/ audience perspective.

Giovanni Hautmann (Florence, 1927-2017) was president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and trained generations of analysts. Together with numerous articles, he has published some fundamental texts, among which: La psicoanalisi tra arte e biologia (1999), Il mio debito con Bion (1999), Funzione analitica e Mente primitiva (2002). Despite the fact that during his presidency, he had promoted for the first time the bilingual (Italian-English) publication of the official journal of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, his books have never been published in other languages and therefore his thinking remains still little known abroad. Therefore, the aim of the volume is to bring attention back to his theoretical-clinical construction and to extend it, through the dialogue with other psychoanalytic cultures.

Today it is widely reported that the West is in crisis, with Europe at the forefront. There are plenty of arguments to sustain this claim. Franco La Cecla, however, warns us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as this unstoppable disenchantment is closing our eyes to the exception the West continues to represent. Despite capitalism, world wars, colonialism and neoliberalism (a list that could certainly be much extended), the West is in fact seen by the rest of the world as a place that is host to an enviable tolerance, in which the individual, women and children can exercise their own rights irrespective of any form of religious creed, ethnicity, clan, tribe or family; a place in which a form of citizenship is practiced that allows the establishing of free, revocable bonds, an idea founded in Pericles’ democracy and then reformulated in the light of concepts of fraternity and equality. It is this extraordinary exception that risks being thrown away, when instead we ought not only make claim to it, but re-take it for ourselves and radicalize it.

Fostering a dialogue enriched by contributions from both the analytic and the continental tradition (and drawing on authors such as Broch, Diderot, Levinson, and Wittgenstein), this volume delves into the complex relationship between aesthetics and values. Notably, it focuses on decisive aspects of the nature of aesthetic value and its multiple connections to other kinds of value. This concerns not only the issue of how it can be distinguished from artistic value, with which it is often associated and sometimes even confused, but also, as is becoming increasingly evident in the contemporary debate, the urgency of inquiring into how aesthetic and artistic values relate to moral, cognitive, and political values.

Experimental cinema, as well as experimental video practices, have always been art forms widely explored by women. Yet, while the field of cinema studies has devoted research - although only recently - to women involved in narrative and commercial films, as directors, actresses, screenwriters and in other roles of cinema industry, the history of women’s experimental audio-visual production is still little explored and would benefit from being retraced and framed in a wider historical and theoretical perspective. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie is therefore aimed at tracing women’s experimental practices at the intersection of cinema and the arts by intertwining a theoretical and historical approach through the analysis of cases studies from the mid-century up to the present time.

Images represent a fusion of creativity, imagination, and symbolism and are crucial to the human quest to discover, invent, and experiment with ever-new visions. Philosophy plays a vital role in interpreting change in an era of rapid and dramatic transformations and providesthe means to view the phenomenon of taste through the lenses of form, doing, and representing. Adopting a perspective that runs from antiquity to the future, the works in this volume analyze human work as expressed in the arts, poetics, and creative techniques in the light of a formative idea that cuts across cultures and epochs and within the framework of the history of Japanese, East Asian, and Western civilizations.

Since the beginning of the last century Weber argued the indissoluble link between sociology and history. His approach saw the relationship between history and sociology as based on (a) mutual and essential support, and (b) logical priority, according to which, paraphrasing sociologist Alessandro Cavalli, “sociology without history is blind, history without sociology is mute.” The lesson of the «Annales» definitively confirmed the indissoluble link between history and social sciences, on the basis of a strongly and strategically interdisciplinary analysis. However, at present sociology and history continue to cooperate all too rarely in the context of interdisciplinary research. There is no question that social conflict – and social ambiguities – is a common ground of research both for sociology and history. Through the analysis of social conflict this book aims at providing argumentative issues concerning the above link, and showing meaningful convergences between the two disciplines. This in order to offer innovative spaces of discourse around the theory and methodology of research, and some areas of yesterday and today social conflicts.

We want to move beyond thinking of architecture as an object. Architecture is not separate from us--it is not something to be judged merely by its formal properties, its satisfaction of programmatic concerns or its performance in terms of technical parameters. We are not dismissing the importance of these factors but wish to enrich them, to understand and articulate how architecture can capture and express unseen layers of meaning and purpose. We want to think of architecture as a verb, a mover, a shaper, an active agent in human flourishing. In order to appreciate the potential power of architecture we want to explore the experience of architecture, and the intimately related experience of making architecture. Turning our attention to experience requires that we listen to and consider knowledge from a full array of disciplines. Experience is multi-dimensional, multi-directional, irreducible. Experience always supercedes, flows over any boundary that attempts to circumscribe it.

A difficult relationship with food affects not only adolescents but also adults. It is often the symptom of a deep pain that rises from problems of control, low self-esteem, guilt and shame, which can derive from critical or traumatic events experienced in the course of life or at a young age. This book helps the reader to understand the difficult relationship with food and the original causes of the symptoms that maintain it. The author recommends the text as a basic tool kit with the essential elements to increase knowledge, awareness, motivation and shows the best path to find a definitive solution with EMDR psychotherapy. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapeutic treatment authenticated by several researches. Mostly used for treating trauma, EMDR is a complex and global approach not only to work on past traumas but also to improve individual resources and self-esteem.

In the first part of this book, I summarize the development of the standard account of counterfactuals, i.e. conditionals of the form ‘If A had been the case, then B would have been the case’. In the standard account, a counterfactual is true if the then-sentence is true in all closest worlds in which the if-sentence is tru

Furusato (home, hometown, and/or place of origin) is a revered and idealized concept in Japan. On an individual level, it plays a central role in personal identity; in a broader social and cultural milieu, it is constitutive of a sense of nostalgia for a romanticized and impossible past; and in the political and legal realms, it connects with ideas of Japaneseness and the construction of foreign others. While the specific forms it takes in context provide a Japanese veneer to the idea of furusato, it in fact finds close analogues in ideas of ‘home’ and ‘origin’ around the world. This volume collects essays exploring furusato and its cognates in other languages and regions. 14 scholars from Japan and Europe employ a diverse array of disciplinary tools, drawing from history, philosophy, literature, anthropology, religious studies, and art history, to map out the contours of home and elucidate the meanings contained within it.

The current study takes on the task of focussing on Habermas’ long and productive first phase in the 1960s and 1970s. The book begins with Habermas’ analyses of students’ political consciousness and of public opinion, before examining his close dialogue with Marcuse and the vanguard of the student movement. The study then focuses on Habermas’ works on the reality and contradictions of the late capitalist system: Knowledge and Human Interests, Legitimation Crisis and Theory and Practice. In doing so, the volume revisits important moments in the first three decades of Habermas’ research and teaching in order to reconstruct a theory that contributes to a praxis of fundamental, grass-roots change.

A special issue of Chiasmi, the A-class trilingual publication about Merlau-Ponty’s thought, that celebrates the 110th birthday of the French phenomenological philosopher by realising rare or unpublished dialogues and texts.