Immaginazione, schematismo e prestazione estetica. Linee di ricerca in Italia tra filosofia e neuroscienze

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).