29 APhEx num 29, anno 2024

Since the 1990s, the concept of emergence has been prominent in many debates in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. Emergent phenomena are usually defined as entities that partially depend on lower-level goings-on while manifesting a certain autonomy and exhibiting some form of novelty. The general agreement on these features, however, goes hand in hand with an equally general disagreement on their precise meaning. The purpose of this contribution is therefore to introduce the debate on emergence by examining the criteria for describing fit and the various forms it seems to assume when analyzed from different perspectives or in different contexts.

Hannah Arendt (Linden 1906 – New York 1975) is a towering figure in the philosophical and intellectual landscape of the 20th century. The work we propose here offers an analysis of her major works with the aim of showing how her dramatic personal history and her intellectual life are inextricably intertwined, and how the breadth of the issues she addressed, the depth of her analyses, and the originality of her insights and theories constitute a new paradigm of philosophical and political thought. This paradigm is still relevant today and extremely fruitful, as it seeks to reconcile particularity and universality, and to create the conditions that will prevent the «new beginnings» from translating into new forms of suffering, injustice and deprivation, violence, and that will promote the exercise of freedom, the enjoyment of equality and the sense of dignity that each and every person must be able to have.

The term ‘internal perception’ typically indicates the experience humans have of what happens inside their bodies, i.e., their bodily states and changes. In the literature, these were mostly considered as parts of two main body monitoring systems, known as the interoceptive and proprioceptive systems. This paper explores the concept of internal perception and suggests that for the purposes of philosophical research, it can be considered as the product of a unified propriosensitive system that provides a constant, dynamic mapping of internal states and their changes. The study examines some positions contending that bodily signals do not constitute a proper form of perception and argues that, on the contrary, proprioceptivity is entirely analogous to exteroception in all significant aspects. This involves identifying criteria to establish under what conditions something can be defined as a form of perception and whether internal perception meets these criteria. The underlying idea of this essay is that internal perception plays a fundamental role in understanding human cognition, although it has traditionally been neglected by philosophy and – more generally – by cognitive research which have predominantly focused on exteroception, and particularly on vision, as the privileged sensory modality for knowledge acquisition. Lastly, the paper calls for a more rigorous examination of the propriosensitive system, suggesting that internal perception represents a largely untapped field in philosophical inquiry, with potential to reshape our understanding of the epistemological role of the body in knowledge acquisition.

This profile on Stanley Cavell comprises five sections. The first provides a brief overview of Cavell’s intellectual biography. The second addresses the themes of the ordinary and skepticism, concentrating on Cavell’s engagement with Wittgenstein, Austin, Freud, and Heidegger. The third section is devoted to Cavell’s theoretical reflections on the arts and modernism. The fourth section begins with an analysis of Cavell’s writings on the American Transcendentalists and the Comedies of Remarriage, and then explores how the introduction of the concept of Emersonian Perfectionism can be interpreted as an attempt by Cavell to synthesize his entire philosophical journey. The conclusion reflects on how best to situate Cavell within both the analytic tradition and the broader philosophical landscape.