Post-Gibson attempts to set out a definition of affordance generally agree that this notion can be understood as a property of the environment with salience for an organism’s behavior. According to this view, some scholars advocate the idea that affordances are dispositional properties of physical objects that, given suitable circumstances, necessarily actualize related actions. This paper aims at assessing this statement in light of a theory of affordance perception. After years of discontinuity between strands of empirical and theoretical research, the (...) time is ripe for addressing the question of whether the dispositional interpretation of affordance is in accordance with some recent evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. Following this line, I clarify that there are some cases of affordance-related effects that neither require the actualization of an action, nor the presence of an action-related property bearer in the environment, and that the identification of affordance with physical properties provides only a partial explanation of the wide range of affordance-related effects. Accordingly, I argue in favor of a more general account of affordance perception based on the ability to directly detect perceptual patterns in the environment. (shrink)

Hardly known twenty years ago, exclusion from public space has today become a standard tool of state intervention. Every year, tens of thousands of homeless individuals, drug addicts, teenagers, protesters and others are banned from parts of public space. The rise of exclusion measures is characteristic of two broader developments that have profoundly transformed public space in recent years: the privatisation of public space, and its increased control in the 'security society'. Despite the fundamental problems it raises, exclusion from public (...) space has received hardly any attention from legal scholars. This book addresses this gap and comprehensively explores the implications that this new form of intervention has for the constitutional essentials of liberal democracy: the rule of law, fundamental rights, and democracy. To do so, it analyses legal developments in three liberal democracies that have been at the forefront of promoting exclusion measures: the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland. (shrink)

Radical Enactivism holds that the best explanation of basic forms of cognition is provided without involving information of any sort. According to this view, the ability to perceive visual affordances should be accounted for in terms of extensional covariations between variables spanning the agent’s body and the environment. Contrary to Radical Enactivism, I argue that the intensional properties of cognition cannot be ignored, and that the way in which an agent represents the world has consequences on the explanation of basic (...) sensorimotor abilities. To support this claim, I show that the perception of visual affordances is not segregated from higher forms of cognition; rather, it is modulated by the agent’s ability to recognize the semantic identity of the visual target. Accordingly, since the semantic recognition of an object involves a way of representing it under a certain description, it can be inferred that the perception of visual affordances cannot be accounted for without considering the intensional properties of cognition. This poses an explanatory issue for Radical Enactivism. (shrink)

Antropologia do espaço, de Filomena Silvano, é umlivro comvocaçãomarcadamente didáctica, mas que constitui uma notável síntese (deveríamos dizer ummapa?) de uma disciplina (a antropologia) que tem vindo a ganhar (pelos motivos que Jameson enunciava) uma.

Devices of direct democracy are an important structural element in Switzerland's political system. In this article, institutions and functions of Switzerland's direct democracy will be presented. Then the author will pursue whether the direct democracy can be used as a device to prevent a dysfunctional parliamentary system of government. He comes to the conclusion that Switzerland's direct democracy is not an exportable good. We know from the Swiss experience that there is no single model that describes how initiatives and referendums (...) function in every state. (shrink)

This essay aims to show that the concept of landscape does not indicate something static or well-defined in the physical world but is rather the result of a process deriving from our being embodied in the world. Landscape is embodied cognition produced by our subjectivity, which, in turn, constantly hybridises the relationship between inside and outside. The key point, therefore, is to grasp and problematise the interaction between landscape and mindscape. However, this relationship would not be complete without also taking (...) into account the fact that we are integrated in an environment and analysing the fact that we live in an acted environment: our actions are decisive for understanding the environment beginning from the very perception we have of it. Indeed, this perception it itself a true founding act. The specific nature of the walkscape thus allows us to take this dynamic aspect of our relationship with the environment into account before grasping the last fundamental element for achieving a complete understanding of the problem: the currently ongoing transformation that brings us to be immersed not only in natural environments, but also in new digital environments. Taken together, therefore, the concepts of landscape, mindscape and walkscape allow us to clarify the theoretical implications of our being part of an integrated system together with the environment, be it natural or digital. (shrink)

In this article, we propose a new account concerning the interlock between intentions and motor representations (henceforth: MRs), showing that the interface problem is not as deep as previously proposed. Before discussing our view, in the first section we report the ideas developed in the literature by those who have tried to solve this puzzle before us. The article proceeds as follows. In Sections 2 and 3, we address the views by Butterfill and Sinigaglia, and Mylopoulos and Pacherie, respectively, and (...) argue that both solutions entail a translation between representational formats, which both accounts aim to avoid. In Section 4, we present our brand‐new claim, according to which intentions and MRs partially share the same motor format, inasmuch as executable action concepts are naturally represented in the agent's motor system together with the action's outcomes. Indeed, since intentions are constituted by executable action concepts and since there is evidence that action concepts are represented (and, thus, built) in the same motor format as action outcomes, the interlock between intentions and MRs no longer constitutes a problem. Then, in Section 5, we report empirical evidence in support of our claim, and before concluding, in Section 6 we briefly clarify our relations with two very recent accounts that criticized the proposals by Mylopoulos and Pacherie and Butterfill and Sinigaglia: Shepherd's and Burnston's. Finally, in Section 7, we offer some remarks about the philosophical idea defended here. The basic insight is that interface without translation is possible because action concepts are such stuff as MRs are made on. (shrink)

According to an influential view, the detection of action possibilities and the selection of a plan for action are two segregated steps throughout the processing of visual information. This classical approach is committed with the assumption that two independent types of processing underlie visual perception: the semantic one, which is at the service of the identification of visually presented objects, and the pragmatic one which serves the execution of actions directed to specific parts of the same objects. However, as our (...) knowledge of vision has improved over the years, this established view has turned out to be only an approximation. This paper sets out the details of a non-modularist approach to visual perception of action possibilities and explains how to resist the lure of cognitive segregation. (shrink)

The last years’ achievements in neuroscience are key for a philosophical analysis focused on the mind-body problem, such as the phenomenological approach.The digital evolution, on the one hand, faces us with the interaction between the world of reality and the world of possibility. This means more than a mere coexistence between these two dimensions. Rather, a concrete feedback occurs among them, and this brings out unprecedented and unavoidable issues with regard to perceptual processes. On the other hand, the digital evolution (...) allows for analyzing data and monitoring environmental systems, thus reasoning in a predictive way, anticipating problems, and checking ex ante their evolution and outcomes.Neuroscience, for its part, with the experiments of Libet and their subsequent interpretations, has highlighted a consciousness of the unconscious made of ballistic and automatic processes, which constitutes the starting phase of our decisions and actions. This further confirmed that sequential and linear thinking is unable to address the brain-environment relationship that is key in understanding any cognitive process.This analysis confirms the relevance of different aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology. There is, however, a “but,” which significantly reduces the extent of adherence to his point of view. Husserl assumed that an implicit horizon precedes or accompanies the acts of conscience. This is the material, impressional, passive, receptive, and, in some way, tacit dimension, strictly connected to the issue of genesis, i.e. the process of constitution of the analyzed entities. Thus, he drew a clear dividing line between this dimension and the phases of the self-controlling, vigilant conscience and its activity. In fact, his approach to the phenomenological problem is mainly oriented toward these phases. (shrink)