"Aesthetic Environments: Contemporary Italian Perspectives"

The shift from objects to experiences that has taken place in certain philosophical investigation as much as in specifically aesthetic-environmental studies is generally also at the center of the contributions included in this issue of “Aesthetica Preprint”. They represent another example of the pluralistic nature of aesthetics, being at least seven instances of different styles with which one common topic, that is to say “aesthetic environments”, can be addressed. Paolo Furia deals with this topic from the point of view of the relationship between geography and aesthetics. He intertwines a phenomenological notion of geographical experience with an analysis of some of the metaphorical underpinnings of the geographical notion of place and with an understanding of the geographical notion of landscape based on aesthetic appreciation. Alberto L. Siani puts at the center of his contribution the interpretation of art and nature of which he aims at providing a unified conception by adopting a consistent pragmatist framework. In order to do so he compares Emily Brady’s and Umberto Eco’s takes on interpretation. He emphasizes the several similarities between the two authors but at the same time suggests that Eco could provide some fruitful indications that would make some of Brady’s claims even more consistent, that is, avoiding not only a hedonistic relativism but also a form of naïve realism. Lisa Giombini proposes a revision of the notion of heritage site. By specifically locating her analysis in the scenario of the aftermath of an extreme natural event, she sug- gests that in the context of the reconstruction procedures of damaged sites, besides more technical elements, it is necessary to take into account and preserve the value people attach to certain sites, which makes them places of human significance. Marcello Barison intersects the discourse on Anthropocene with current philosophical research on architecture in the light of various shortcomings that can be found in each of these two fields and which he aims to overcome. In particular, he focuses on the general and unifying “philosophical-architectural” concept of world-formation. This focus allows, Barison says, both the disciplinary establishment of a philosophy of architecture and a better understanding of Anthropocene. Martino Feyles addresses environments in their augmented form phenomenologically. His thesis is that if it is true that what distinguishes human perception is its being intrinsically bound to language, it is always, in fact, of an augmented kind. He identifies what differentiates the kinds of perceptual activities at stake in the animal-environment and human-world exchanges in the relationship between pre-determination and openness of perceptual and operative possibilities, which is now partly reshaped in augmented environments. Stefano Marino puts forward an idea of “second-nature” as a chiefly aesthetic concept. By focusing in particular on the mimetic component of experience he aims at downsizing the almost exclusive and too narrow focus on rationality and language that has been generally put forward by certain philosophical views when providing accounts of the difference between animal ways of inhabiting the environment and human ways of shaping a world. Nicola Perullo, by retrieving some of the concepts recently addressed in Perullo (2020), lays the grounds for an ecological aesthetics based on a “haptic perception”. The “integral” ecological aesthetics he recommends follows a specifically participatory logic implying attention, intimacy and care, thus excluding any isolationist, predetermined attitude while emphasizing instead a relational and processual – a so-called “perceiving with”, haptic – model of experience.