PhD students cycles XXXVI

Title: The contagion of uncertainty. The experts’ discourse and the construction of the pandemic landscape

Abstract: The project investigates the relationship between the condition of epistemic-managerial uncertainty in the medical-scientific and health-political fields, and the televised communication of scientific experts during the Covid-19 emergency in Italy. Through an interdisciplinary approach, which brings together the epistemologies of semiotics, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science and conversational analysis, the research examines the ways in which the scientific community coped with the pandemic crisis, placing them in relation to the strategies and communicative forms implemented by the experts to provide opinions, explanations and forecasts on the emergency.

Drawing on the theories and methodologies of the various epistemologies employed, the research examines the operating logics of the two domains to which the research pays attention, those of science and generalist TV, then analysing the relational modalities through which these acted and retro-acted on each other during the emergency.

Thus, on the one hand, the practices that enable the management of scientific knowledge, first and foremost peer reviewing, are examined at a structural level, while at the same time investigating the theoretical and methodological criteria of disciplines that played a central role during the emergency, such as epidemiology and public health, and which enabled the formulation of explanations, forecasts and strategies of health policy intervention, examining their functioning during the pandemic emergency.

On the other hand, the research pays attention to the discursive regimes and genres that characterise generalist TV, especially the news talk show, in which the interventions of experts in interactions and dialogues with TV hosts and presenters took shape. The ways in which experts took on the condition of epistemic-managerial uncertainty and the role these languages and interactions played in the articulation of their discourses are examined.

Title: Studies on the medical tradition in ancient Lucania from archaic to medieval times (6th century B.C. - 9th century A.D.)

Abstract: The research aims to trace the history of medical traditions in ancient Lucania. The cities of Velia, Paestum, Salerno and the surrounding areas are in fact frequently mentioned in the sources as places of healing.

Evidence of the importance of local medical activities can be found in testimonies of different types and from various periods. One example is the discovery in Velia in the late 1960s of the bust of Parmenides depicted as Ouliades, together with that of three doctors named Oulis, appellations to be linked to Apollo Oulios, “Healer”. The discovery opened the debate on the existence of a local medical school run by priestly figures devoted to Apollo the Physician.

Excavations in Paestum have uncovered an ancient cippus dedicated to Chiron, a mythological figure connected to the art of medicine. The city is also known for its roses, from which essences and oils used in both medicine and cosmetics were extracted. Such roses are mentioned by Virgil, Martial, Columella, as well as several authors from the late period. A 9th-century monk, Walahphrid Strabo, mentions the ars pestana, which can be interpreted as a technique for cultivating medicinal plants. The examples of widespread medical traditions in the area do not end with the attestations on Velia and Paestum: an inscription from the Vallo di Diano recalls Menecrates, an oinodotes doctor, an expert in wine-based cures; Galen (2nd century A.D) describes the medicinal properties of the milk produced around Stabia, in an area that still retains the name 'Monti Lattari' and is also known to Simmachus (4th century AD) and Cassiodorus (6th century AD). The impression gained from comparing the evidence is that the entire area has preserved a therapeutic vocation over time; the investigation aims to follow the traces of this tradition to verify its evolution over the centuries

Project: The Role of Emotions in Husserl’s Phenomenology

Abstract: In my project, I delve into a relatively lesser-known aspect of Husserlian thought: his phenomenology of emotions. A prevalent misconception suggests that Husserl never paid particular attention to this subject. Moreover, most existing studies have explored his philosophy of emotions primarily from an ethical perspective. In contrast, my project demonstrates that the study of emotional consciousness held significance for Husserl. Furthermore, while serving as a necessary condition for ethics, emotions play a pivotal role in subjective experience, even from a psychological and morally neutral standpoint.

Drawing from the extensive analyses found in the Studien Zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, referred to by Husserl as studies in phenomenological psychology, I have attempted to reconstruct the foundational tenets of his phenomenology of emotions. This work has been framed in Husserl's philosophy in general and contextualized within contemporary issues in the philosophy of emotions. Indeed, the richness of his research has allowed the development of a sophisticated and innovative model of emotional experience. My work starts by focusing on the intentional structure of emotions, revealing them as inherently complex, intentional phenomena.

Within Husserl's phenomenology of emotions, we encounter themes such as the study of emotions comparatively with perceptual acts and the recognition that the embodied dimension of our emotional experience forms the basis for varying degrees of value constitution, ranging from empirical to absolute or abstract values. Emotional intentionality is, thus, the starting point for exploring a constellation of phenomena rooted in the passive dimension of sensory feelings, such as experiences of pain or pleasure. However, it also extends to the realm of the personal subject's free choices in their ethical life, involving engagement with ideal values.

CAREGIVING AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ORGANISM AND ENVIRONMENT. Impacts of the infant attunement on cross-cultural formation of the concept of the individual and processes of individuation of the Self

 Abstracts: The research investigates the intersubjective dimension of the development of the self in early childhood and the organism-environment relationship by connecting outcomes from developmental psychology field, enactivist theories, cognitive semiotics and anthropology.

By adopting an inter-cultural approach the thesis focuses on how different modalities of attunement between caregiver and infant detected by the linguistic socialization’s research in different cultural systems may in turn determine different modes of development of the individual’s concept which - far from corresponding inevitably to the perimeter of the biological organism and transitive agency - may manifest more complex and ergative patterns with the external environment.

The space in which the infant is placed, the use or non-use of accommodations by the caregivers, relational patterns (dyadic or multi-participants), attention to the infant's vocalizations and interpretation, inclusion or non-inclusion in daily activities, the degree of considering the infant as a subject of communication are socially and culturally organized and directly influencing the development of the self.

Participatory practices in infancy - governed by caregivers' expectations and beliefs - tend to confirm the determinant consequences of the ways of treating children as a “You" on the development of the Self (second-person approach) and - consequently - on the shaping of our enunciative potentials, our interpretive logics and the structural coupling between organism and environment.

The final proposal will demonstrate how the concept of “individual” underlies the establishment of the "cultural" threshold between organism and environment and how the latter provides new insights to the core of enactivist theories through the contribution of anthropological researches pertaining to the so-called ontological turn and interpersonal neurobiology.

Finally, it will be pointed out how these findings can influence the general theory of modes of existence in semiotics.

Spaces of Meaning: An Enactive Account of Bodily Space

Abstract: While the interdisciplinary field known as Enactive Cognitive Science (ECS) has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, the theme of spatiality has been notably absent in the relevant scholarship. This absence is especially puzzling when considering how deeply interconnected spatiality is with celebrated themes of ECS, such as embodiment, interaction and temporality. To address this lacuna in the current literature, I combine the resources of cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology and semiotics to showcase spatial consciousness from an enactive standpoint. First, I develop a theoretical account of lived space using phenomenological and semiotic literature, particularly that of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, von Uexkull and Peirce. Using this theoretical account as a baseline, I interpret a series of empirical studies through this lens, dividing the studies into those that investigate spatial interactions with both Objects and Others. This culminates in an interdisciplinary model of bodily space, in which I propose that human beings engage their spatial surroundings not as a geometric form or empty volume, but as a place of meaning.

Title: Adorno and the aesthetic. Genesis and development of a theoretical problem

Abstract: The core of the analysis of this doctoral dissertation lies in Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory, conceived, however, in its articulation far beyond the homonymous posthumous masterpiece. It rather encompasses all of Adorno’s reflection that contributes significantly to the becoming aesthetic of the theory itself. In the history of its reception, though, one interpretative tradition has proved more deep-rooted than others, namely that which sees Adorno primarily - if not exclusively - as a tireless critic of society and apologist for autonomous art. It is to the one-sidedness of such a perspective then that one usually traces the dense complexity of his posthumous masterpiece. On closer inspection, the resulting interpretative bias rests on the almost dogmatic acceptance of an equivalence between the artistic and the aesthetic. Appropriate in an idealistic context, such an assumption requires critical revision in Adorno’s case, instead. Since his Kierkegaard, it is possible to identify the traces of a constellative conception of the aesthetic, of which the artistic represents an essential moment, without however exhausting it.

The ultimate aim of this research is, therefore, to show how the aesthetic takes on a theoretical dimension that does not find any textually explicit thematisation, but which, on the contrary, is detected in the way an aesthetic theory operates. Consequently, the aesthetic does not imply an irrational rejection of the conceptual medium, but rather a mode of its application that differs significantly from that of traditional theory. Aesthetics is thus precisely that logic, other than the totalising logic, which is rooted in that experiential and material ground that constitutively eludes the concept, while nourishing it. Recognising a theoretically performative instance of the aesthetic means, then, being able to grasp in the thematism of aesthetic theory that dense fabric of mediations that is as logically stringent as it is refractory to any absolute identification and, therefore, always open to the possible and the non-identical.