This contribution aims to highlight the presence of a performative paradigm underlying Hans-Georg Gadamer’s aesthetics. In line with Erika Fischer-Lichte’s performative aesthetics, in Gadamer’s reflection, art exists in its performance. The latter is based on the interaction between the artist and the audience, and displays a transformative and social character. On this basis, my contribution seeks to indicate the possible opening of Gadamer’s aesthetics to body and corporeality, using the hermeneutical concepts of “gesture” and “presence,” going beyond Gadamer himself. In particular, the first section is dedicated to showing how the performative paradigm of art is already present in Truth and Method, expressed through the two concepts of Darstellung (which has a broader performative sense) and Aufführung (which is restricted to the “performing arts” of drama and music). The second section shows how, in Gadamer’s subsequent writings, this performative paradigm is extended to the figurative arts and expressed through the concept of Vollzug. Finally, the third and fourth sections attempt to pave the way for a hermeneutical reflection on the body that brings together its corporeal and historical aspects, sketching the concept of gesture and the possible contribution of Gadamer’s notion of presence to the debates on Body Art.

Hegel’s psychology provides an account of cognition that is held together by the twofold activity of memory, involving Erinnerung (recollection) and Gedächtnis (memory proper). While Hegel’s account of cognition is often investigated in relation to conceptual and logical thinking, in this contribution I explore more closely the contribution of memory to the generation of semantic content. I argue that this view of memory sustains critical awareness about representations of facts and events, serving as the foundation for practical philosophy and ethics. To do justice to Hegel’s approach and understand its modus operandi, I reconstruct the dynamics of cognition through the model of sedimentation. This is the theoretical process that generates knowledge by retaining and understanding the content of experience. I proceed by positioning Hegel’s psychology and the role of the mind in its systematic context. Then, I introduce the model of sedimentation, and how this is connected to Hegel’s use of Erinnerung and Gedächtnis. Next, I distinguish between the sedimentation of images and that of signs, explaining the genesis of thought out of memory. Finally, I offer some reflections on the moral relevance of memory in the context of Hegel’s psychology.

This article analyzes the complex relationship between Georg Simmel’s philosophy and the philosophies of pragmatism and somaesthetics. Although his early theory of truth as grounded in utility was immediately recognized as essentially pragmatist in character, Simmel rejected the connection and sharply criticized pragmatist thought, while affirming a form of idealism against pragmatism’s more thorough naturalism. After analyzing other connections between Simmel’s thought and key pragmatist ideas (including that of meliorist self-cultivation), the essay compares Simmel’s analysis of the senses to the theories of somaesthetics. Simmel’s views on the senses, though insightful, are shown to be too limited in their scope and elitist in character, whereas somaesthetics offers a broader, more democratic view of the senses and embodiment and their role in melioristic self-cultivation.

This article is focused on the philosophy of Arnold Gehlen, one of the founders, with Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, of the important tradition of German philosophical anthropology in the twentieth century, especially thanks to his masterpiece Der Mensch (1940). After a short introductory section on the struggle of various twentieth century philosophers (mostly in the movements of phenomenology and pragmatism) to redeem embodiment from the oblivion in which Western philosophy and science had put it, and also on the recent contribution offered in this field by the development of enactive philosophies and so-called “4E Cognition” approaches, I offer a reconstruction and an interpretation of some fundamental concepts of Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology, with a particular focus on the question of embodiment in Der Mensch. Then, adopting a historico-philosophical perspective and a comparative methodology, I try to establish a conceptual comparison and connection between some aspects of Gehlen’s thinking (with a particular focus on his notions of second nature, environment, and world) and certain philosophical questions about human embodiment that have recently emerged in the context of the diverse variants of contemporary enactivism (sensorimotor, autopoietic, radical, etc.).

Based on Hegel’s teleology, this paper critically examines the organizational view’s attempt to integrate the etiological and dispositional perspectives on biological functions. It ultimately presents Hegel’s teleology as a genuine unification of these dual aspects. Firstly, the paper will demonstrate how Hegel’s discussion of the shape (Gestalt) of individual organisms resolves the issues of closure and differentiation that arise within the organizational view. Subsequently, it will establish that Hegel’s perspective on the relationship between organisms and their environment, which considers the internal constitution of organisms as the cause rather than the result of natural selection, can effectively account for the phenotypic plasticity proposed by the new theory of adaptation. This paper ultimately argues that Hegel’s teleology, based on the logic of the concept that derives the particular from the universal, can consistently explain shape, assimilation, and reproduction with a unified logic and normativity.

This paper investigates Heidegger’s question of affectivity and its essential connection to embodiment and the disclosedness of human existence. I will reconstruct the genesis of the ontological primacy Heidegger ascribes to situatedness (Befindlichkeit), which requires an exploration of the origin of Heidegger’s emphasis on the pre-theoretical sphere of existence and the profound relationship it manifests with respect to the bodily dimension of the human being. The first conceptualisation of the notion of Befindlichkeit may be traced back to Heidegger’s hermeneutical analysis of facticity in his 1920s lectures, where Heidegger confronts Aristotle’s treatment of pathos. In light of Heidegger’s account of affections as inseparable from corporeality, I will show how it offers fundamental insights into the disclosing function Heidegger assigns to affectivity in relation to the embodied thrownness of being-there in the context of his renewed formulation of the question concerning human being (Menschfrage).

This paper examines the central role of human bodily experience in the philosophical anthropology that Eugen Fink developed after the Second World War within the framework of his cosmological ontology. Interpreting human existence by means of the notion of “world” entails a non-Platonic conception of embodiment, which emerges from Fink’s analysis of various existential phenomena, such as power, work, eros, play, ethics, education, coexistence, fashion, and the relation to death. This account of embodiment constitutes a distinctive case within the phenomenological tradition, whose originality stems from the combination of at least three key aspects: the emphasis on the experiential significance of the corporeal and natural dimension of human existence, the interpretation of this dimension as a mode of openness to Being, and its articulation into anthropological structures that can be compared with the anthropological models of Western philosophical history.