Paolo Bozzi’s Experimental Phenomenology

Abstract

Paolo Bozzi (1930-2003), an Italian experimental psychologist and philosopher, was one of the most brilliant exponents of experimental phenomenology. His scientific and theoretical contributions to vision sciences, cognitive psychology and philosophy of perception are original and wide ranging. Moreover, his reflections and experimental findings are well expressed in an accessible and inspiring style, and can be attractive not only for academic readership but also for a wider one. Prior to this anthology, the majority of Paolo Bozzi's publications (about 100 articles, book chapters and monographs) had not been translated into English, except for a few papers, and he is still not as well-known internationally as he should be, except to the scholars who have met and appreciated him. This edited volume, conceived by Ivana Bianchi (University of Macerata, Italy) and Richard Davies (University of Bergamo, Italy), is therefore welcome, as it translates and introduces part of the work of Paolo Bozzi to a wider world.

Perceiving animacy from kinematics: visual specification of life-likeness in simple geometric patterns

“…By way of conclusion, the topic of animacy is rooted in Michotte's experimental phenomenology, that is systematic psychophysical manipulation of stimuli configurations combined with subjective reports (see Costall, 2014;Bianchi and Davies, 2019;Parovel, 2019), and it is triggering a growing corpus of research cutting across several disciplines, including visual perception, developmental psychology, animal cognition, social psychology, cognitive neurosciences and robotics. Animacy, thus, besides being fascinating in itself, represents also a fruitful and challenging subject for empirical intersections and theoretical dialogue among different areas in experimental psychology.…”