ENSE AND SENSIBILIA
curated by Luigi Fassi & Chiara Nuzzi

artists: SABRINA BELOUAAR, JEANNE BERBINEAU AUBRY, GILLIAN BRETT, GAETANO CUNSOLO, EITAN EFRAT & SIRAH FOIGHEL BRUTMANN, HAROON GUNN-SALIE, HILARIO ISOLA, LITO KATTOU, MARZENA NOWAK, LUCA RESTA

Vernissage, 01.06.2018 19h
02.06. – 25.07.2018

Press release
Comunicato stampa
Pressemitteilung

In Sense and Sensibilia, a book published posthumously in 1962 which now represents a decisive chapter in the history of thought in the second half of the 20th century, British philosopher J. L.
Austin investigated the role of perception and the relationship between the data perceived by our senses and real objects. What do we really perceive? How can we verify the assumption of truth as predicated by our senses? What is the relationship between hallucinatory or imagined images generated by our mind and what we claim to be objective reality? Through philosophical analysis, Austin attempted to investigate these problems to distinguish what we think is reality from what is instead a subjective experience that claims to rise to the rank of truth. It is thus possible to sum up Austin’s reasoning on the philosophy of language as an attempt to discern between perception as an objective relationship with reality and perception as a merely subjective and culturally determined experience of the world.
It is not without irony (not least for the assonance between their surnames) that Austin chose to collect his reflections on the subject under the title, Sense and Sensibilia, which echoes that of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s celebrated novel of 1811. If the novelist adumbrated the possible contrast between sense seen as rational objectivity and sensibility as a more subjective, hence irrational dimension of human experience, in his formula the philosopher distinguishes between sense as a sensory perception and sensibilia as a more unpredictable dimension determined by the mutability of individual experience and its nuances in relation to the stimuli of the real.
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