Ricerc@Sapienza

The article offers a first survey on the studies concerning imagination in an aesthetic and
cognitive perspective in Italy in the last two decades. From the aesthetic point of view, the
research is focused in particular on reconsidering the imaginative function of organizing the
sensible matter of perception, thus making it available to the subject’s experience – it is the
process Kant called “schematism”. The recent aesthetic studies in Italy make new forms of
schematism emerge, from the “free schematism” (Garroni), inspired by Kant’s aesthetic
judgment, to the “interactive schematism” (Montani), which accounts for the interactions both
the environ and the new technologies, up to the overlapping between schematism and
“attention styles” of the mind (Desideri). Though influenced by the Kantian heritage, the
Italian philosophy was able to confront with various traditions, from the English-speaking
philosophy, especially that inspired by Wittgenstein (Borutti), to the German and French
Phenomenology (Carbone, Franzini), up to the recent anthropological trends, resulting from
different lines of thought: Pragmatism, Neo-Kantism, visual studies, biology and so on
(Matteucci, Pinotti, Tedesco). The new field of research called Neuroaesthetics, emerging at
the intersection of psychological aesthetics, neuroscience and human evolution, has been
recently discussed and developed in Italy, especially regarding the implications of the
discovery of mirroring mechanisms and embodied simulation for empathetic responses to
images in general, and to works of visual art in particular (Gallese).