Sense and Sensibility (Winter School and International Conference)
Winter School and International Conference
Sense and Sensibility. Empirical and Philosophical Investigations on the Five Senses
January 17-18, 2013
Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Via Olgettina, 58, Milano
The aim of this conference is to promote a thorough exploration of the world of senses and sensory experiences from both a phenomenological, a cognitive, and a neurobiological point of view. This conference will bring together researchers of different areas in order to stimulate a
constructive interdisciplinary dialogue on the issue of the nature and individuation of the senses. Some central questions which will be debated are the following: What is the nature of the senses? How do the different senses operate? In particular, can each sense modality be understood in isolation from any other such modality or in order to fully understand each sense modality we need to understand how that modality relates to the others? Are our perceptual experiences representational states? And in the positive case what and how do they represent? Moreover, what relation is there between the representational features of our sense experiences and their phenomenal qualities? Apart from modal experiences are there also “crossmodal” ones and, in the positive case, how do they differ from the modal ones? How to account for the multi-modality of sensory experience and how the information gathered from different sensory modalities is bound together in such a way as to account to the fact that our experiences are phenomenally unified? Answers to these questions are of intrinsic interest, but they have a wider significance too, both from a philosophical and a scientific point of view. We shall investigate these issues by focusing on different sense modalities: visual, tactual, auditory, olfactory and gustatory. Particular attention, in the field of human auditory experience, will be given to the musical experience which will be investigated from both a phenomenological and a neurological perspective (according to the “music and the brain” research project pursued in neuropsychology).
Invited Speakers:
Clotilde Calabi, State University of Milan
Maurizio Ferraris, University of Turin
Vittorio Gallese, University of Parma
Daniela Perani, San Raffaele University
Elisabetta Sacchi, San Raffaele University
Barry Smith, Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study
Claudio de’ Sperati, San Raffaele University
