Studi di estetica

Designing empathies

2026-09-09T14:38:04+00:00

This paper develops the notion of designing empathies in order to rethink architectural space between perception and operativity. Starting from Peter Zumthor’s Atmospheres (2006) and his claim that architectural quality lies in a building’s capacity to “move” us, the argument reframes being emotionally touched as the threshold between embodied reception and projectual intention. The first part reconstructs a genealogy from Einfühlung (Vischer, Lipps, Wölfflin) to twentieth-century pedagogies (Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus) and contemporary theories of embodied simulation (Gallese, Rizzolatti), showing how architecture is experienced through bodily mimicry, affective resonance, and sensory participation. The second part situates these insights within neo-phenomenology and atmospherology (Schmitz, Griffero, Böhme), where atmospheres appear as quasi-objective, spatialized feelings that seize the felt body and structure lived space beyond metric description. Through Zumthor’s design principles and further examples (Le Corbusier’s polychromy; Picon and Ratti’s sensory cartographies), the paper argues that atmospheres can be approached as operative design principles: not fully controllable effects, but staged conditions—light, materiality, sound, thresholds, rhythms—through which experience emerges without being predetermined.

The secret suffering of sexual abuse

2026-09-09T14:40:23+00:00

By understanding pathos as suffering, this contribution explores the possibility for the intrinsically secret suffering of sexual abuse to be shared and communicated to foster healing and promote safer common spaces. Referring to Herman’s reflections on trauma in dialogue with philosophical reflections on the social and political impact of shared emotions (Nussbaum; Lara), this article shows concrete cases of aesthetic practices that can give voice to the voiceless suffering of abuse.

What spaces do to us

2026-09-09T14:42:55+00:00

This paper explores the “pathic” dimension of architectural experience – how designed spaces affect us emotionally and corporeally. It posits that while spatial experience is often fluid, specific “architectural frames” can stabilize atmospheric conditions, making affective outcomes more predictable. Through choreographed movement, controlled thresholds, and sensory filtering, such frames orchestrate a visitor’s encounter, cultivating particular moods. The Brion Memorial by Carlo Scarpa serves as a primary case study, demonstrating how layered enclosures and meticulous sequencing guide the subject into a meditative, temporally suspended state. The analysis argues that this deliberate framing allows architecture to exert an authoritative influence on our felt experience, moving from fleeting atmospheres toward a more persistent emotional “climate”.

Pathos e stile in Erwin Panofsky

2026-09-09T14:45:01+00:00

In some of Panofsky’s studies, pathos is a basic energy in forming and understanding of the style, that marks art of an epoch, and the succession of different styles, together with the influence of shifts in philosophical thought. Warburg’s Pathosformel and Cassirer’s symbolic form have shaped his art-historical research. Some examples from the history of Aesthetics, known from Panofsky, attempt to demonstrate the role of pathos in cognitive processes.

Pathos for profit

2026-09-09T14:46:51+00:00

This paper argues that populism is a self-reinforcing system that transforms emotional intensity into political power and economic profit. Drawing on cybernetic theory, it develops affective recursivity to show how media, rhetoric, and embodied response generate feedback loops in which citizens actively reproduce and intensify their own affective capture. Trump’s immigration rhetoric serves as the central case study.

“The world is my provocation”

2026-09-09T14:49:22+00:00

This article explores the role of pathicity in Bachelard’s notion of reverie. Through the concept of provocation, four images from The Poetics of Space are investigated. “House, soul, and the corner” tackles the relationships between spaces and reveries. “The smell of raisins” highlights the active side of pathicity. “The hostility of the city” scrutinises how imagination can smooth urban sounds. “The ménage” is dedicated to engagement and care, where pathicity is embodied in daily tasks.

Training the “intranquillity”

2026-09-09T14:51:02+00:00

Drawing on Erwin Straus’ notion of pathicity, as well as an atmospherological perspectives, this article explores the role of the pathic and felt-bodily dimension in the acquisition of the expressive and interpretive capacities required of contemporary dancers. Through the analysis of case studies emerging from interviews conducted with professional dancers, and in dialogue with the somaesthetics of discomfort developed by Mark Tschaepe (2024), the article argues that dancers grow artistically by diversifying their responses to their surroundings through discomfort and playful complicity.

La legge del πάθει μάθος

2026-09-09T14:53:01+00:00

Can πάθος, beyond being understood as undergoing or suffering, also intrinsically contain the idea of acting? There is no doubt that its primordial movement must necessarily be regarded as a “pathic” moment; yet within it, if observed from a certain angle, the possibility of “agency” may also emerge. Such a perspective, and the consequences arising from it, may find an initial formulation in the supreme law of πάθει μάθος proclaimed by the Chorus in Agamemnon (vv. 160-83), to whom falls the task of communicating its severe discipline: Zeus leads mortals along the path of wisdom by decreeing the sovereign principle, “learning comes through suffering” (vv. 176-8). To those who have suffered, Dike grants understanding in return (vv. 250-1): one approaches sophrosynē, soundness of mind, by passing through suffering, pain, and disorientation. If, in light of this perspective, it is legitimate to attribute to πάθει μάθος a paideutic function, then it becomes inevitable to invoke, with all the implications that follow, individual action as well, since every pedagogical activity acquires meaning only if there is a mathētēs, a pupil, a disciple.