Book Forum on Estetica e natura umana: Questions by Simona Chiodo, Roberta Dreon, Shaun Gallagher, Tonino Griffero, Jerrold Levinson, Claudio Paolucci, Richard Shusterman: Replies by Giovanni Matteucci

Giovanni Matteucci’s recent book 'Estetica e natura umana. La mente estesa tra percezione, emozione ed espressione' (Carocci editore, Roma 2019) ambitiously aims to bring together on the same ground – namely, a study on human nature – the tenets of two fields of research, aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. The path outlined in the book 'Estetica e natura umana' and some recent articles by Matteucci is aimed at re-establishing the continuity that exists between various aspects and modalities connoting human experience: a continuity, the latter, that according to Matteucci has been undermined by a centuries-long dualistic philosophical attitude towards human nature as such. On this basis, we thought it stimulating for scholars of philosophy, for readers of “Meta” and for the author himself, to put his original philosophical conception to the test, so to speak, by planning and organizing a book forum with some questions asked by distinguished philosophers of our time working on both aesthetics and the philosophy of mind, and with the detailed replies provided by Matteucci. The complexity underlying Matteucci’s recent philosophical research is thus attested, beside his writings, by the wide-ranging questions raised by the discussants involved in this Forum: Simona Chiodo, Roberta Dreon, Shaun Gallagher, Tonino Griffero, Jerrold Levinson, Claudio Paolucci, Richard Shusterman. The topics and problems called into question by each of them, according to their specific competence, span from the relation to the traditions of pragmatism and phenomenology to enactivism, from the question of aesthetic properties to the role of the body in aesthetic experience, from the relation between perception and language to technology, just to mention a few of them. In our view, as editors of this book forum, the discussants’ questions and the replies provided by the author ultimately prove how flourishing, rich and full of potential, also for further discussion, this field of research currently is.