Francesca Brencio

In this chapter, I will explore the idea of “normative imagery”, intended as a set of metaphors, images and visions aimed at explaining and making sense of the legal sensibility of a given civilization, with particular reference to the Western and the Islamic worlds. In these contexts, law is indeed a culture-specific phenomenon, whose conceptualization and categorization greatly vary depending on the cultural milieu in which it develops. Therefore, each civilization does not simply shape a determined legal order, but also proper intellectual instruments, like metaphors and images, to understand it and to explain its rationales and aims. This is particularly true for the Western civilization, with its Christian and Roman heritages in turn having established their own visions of reality, and for Islam, which gradually developed a complex and multifaceted order grounded on a divinely revealed normativity. By analyzing this usually underestimated aspect of law, it will be eventually possible to deepen our knowledge of legal phenomena going beyond the positivized dimension of rules and norms, and embracing an entire normative Weltanschauung.

Metaphors possess a fundamental and dynamic role in shaping human cognition, language, and experience, moving beyond their traditional understanding as mere linguistic ornaments. Drawing on the embodied cognition hypothesis, I argue that our bodies and interactions with the world form the basis for how we conceptualize and communicate ideas. This includes how embodied emotions give rise to bodily metaphors, creating a hermeneutical bridge between emotion and language. From this viewpoint knowledge is not purely abstract but grounded in bodily experiences, and meaning is tied to our bodily and imaginative structures. With the expression metaphors in action I aim to show how these conceptual mappings function as interpretive frameworks in real-world contexts, guiding perception, constraining reasoning, and influencing institutional practices, policy decisions, and individual choices.

I aim to show how experience is constructed through a process that can be called ‘metaphorical’. I will do this by beginning with Paul Natorp’s view of the problem of consciousness and some reflections on metaphor in Paul Ricoeur. I will go through some of the basic concepts of Natorp’s Allgemeine Psychologie and focus on the role that ‘re-presentation’ plays in determining how things appear to consciousness. In this way, and through Ricoeur’s remarks on metaphor, I will propose a parallel that aims to show how experience is constituted through the use of metaphor by consciousness.

The notion of metaphor undergoes a series of reconsiderations within the aesthetic works of Gaston Bachelard. In this study we will consider only a very small part of his broad production on rêverie (1938–1948). The aim of this contribution is to show how the function of the metaphor can’t in any way be limited to a rhetorical expedient. In fact, it represents a very powerful manifestation of the imaginative faculty. As proof of this thesis, we will consider Bachelard’s reflections on the active function of the metaphor, on the reversibility of the metaphor and on the relationship between metaphor and metamorphosis.

As a phenomenological challenge, we propose here to address the question of metaphor in an immersive exercise in its strange Logos, articulated through references (impulses) and attractions that transcend the everyday expectations of the consolidated world. In this sense, one could speak of a miracle of metaphor. Metaphor has its own anarchy, because it does not belong to the real, nor merely to the unreal, nor only to the fantastic. It undoubtedly requires the power of the imaginary, but above all an area that we could almost call ‘weightless,’ conducive to the transgressions that metaphor summons in its alchemy, with the aim of revealing and illuminating an exotic meaning, coming from afar and ‘from outside,’ beyond the triviality of the world (although some metaphors become trivial and, obviously, go unnoticed).

This chapter employs hypothetical reasoning to explore Peirce’s idea of metaphor, even though the author never systematically studied the topic and left only fleeting references on the matter. The chapter first aims to illustrate Peirce’s classification of hypoicons, which includes metaphors, images, and diagrams, and outlines metaphor as a symbol where the iconic component prevails. It then investigates the factor differentiating metaphors from images and diagrams, suggesting that it can be found in their abstractness, as metaphors represent the most mature iconic form of synthesis (Thirdness). The chapter also examines the cognitive function of metaphors, arguing that they are products of abductive reasoning. Furthermore, it emphasizes the relevance of cultural context in the creation and interpretation of metaphors, concluding that it is impossible to abstractly define the “concept of metaphor”. Finally, it discusses the relationship between metaphors and scientific knowledge, illustrating that both are produced by abductive reasoning, and highlights how metaphors can contribute to the development of scientific understanding.

The aim of this paper is to address the analysis of the metaphors that emerge from a deep, pre-linguistic dimension: the activity of dreaming. The work is divided into three main parts: in the first one, we will introduce the debate on metaphor and dreaming. In the second part, we will explore how, according to Hillman, the understanding of dream metaphors necessarily involves the activity of connecting the (rational and speculative) waking Ego with the characters that inhabit the so-called "underworld” in order to produce a reflexive integration able to add meaning to the psychic life. In parallel, we use Merleau-Ponty’s perspective to describe the relationship between dreaming and awake experiences in a new way, for which the waking world is present in the dreaming one as an expression of the same complexity. Finally, we contextualize these ideas in the psychotherapeutic field and argue for a hermetic value of metaphors that appear in dreams. According to this view, metaphors have a strong communicative value and can express the multilayered complexity of subjectivity.

The relationship between schizophrenia and metaphorical expression is a pivotal one for phenomenology, as it provides insight into both the nature of the schizophrenic experience as well underlying and fundamental structures of human meaning-making and language. In what follows, I will explore how alterations in metaphorical understanding and expression in schizophrenia illuminate broader questions about consciousness, intersubjectivity, and the lived experience of schizophrenia. Starting from the role played by embodied semantics, a neuroscientific theory that describes how the brain processes meaning and how word comprehension is intrinsically linked to sensory-motor experiences, I argue that what is left out is the lived body, known in phenomenology as the Leib. In accounts such as these, what remains is only the biological body, which becomes reduced to those sensory-motor capacities that influence specific brain regions and networks. Correspondingly, our ability to speak and use metaphors is itself reduced to a mere brain activity. In contrast to this perspective, I offer a phenomenologically grounded reading to address the relationship between our lived body and living subjectivity. Drawing upon theoretical resources from Minkowski, Binswanger, Jaspers, and Blankenburg, my aim is to show how metaphorical disturbance must be understood not as a mere linguistic impairment but as an opening onto the radical restructuring of consciousness itself, a transformation that reveals the distinctive mode of being-in-the-world proper to schizophrenic experience.

In the most classic definition, metaphor consists in transferring to an object a name that is proper to another. In this sense, metaphor is based on a principle of substitution. In substituting one element for another, however, metaphor rewrites reality, making us see it from another point of view. In this sense, then, metaphor becomes a tool of additive knowledge and not a substitute: if it merely replaced one conceptual entity with another that is similar to it, it would be redundant and tautological. In this recreation of reality, metaphor creates a violation of referential presuppositions that risks finding the epistemic vigilance of the receiver unprepared. This situation is particularly frequent in digital public debate, where the illusion of proximity and of democratic, horizontal participation obscures the social and sociolinguistic asymmetry of the participants. Metaphor, which in ideal dialogical contexts has the power to revitalise the knowledge process, becomes instead a tool for intentionally increasing the communicative asymmetry. In this contribution I intend to show, through the analysis of texts from the digital environment, the contexts in which metaphor is intentionally used in an abusive and manipulative manner, that is, contexts in which metaphor serves the exercise of power.

The interest of conducting this research with people suffering from terminal cancer lies in the fact that this type of diseases radically transforms people's experience. The meaning that is bred around these intimate experiences can be described by the anthropology of health, in order to contribute to research on the body and diseases as part of sociohistorical processes. The questions guiding this work are: How does terminal cancer affect people? What are the bodily transformations generated to face this new reality? In order to interpret the ethnographic findings, the concept of auratic expression from critical theory, Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony and the concept of fictional lines from North American feminism were used. The methodology employed was a performative ethnography that focuses on the description of the body and perception, also considering narrative production as an extended metaphor in order to question the materialization of experience in rituals, drawings, or performances.

My paper wants to analyze the relationship between metaphor and grief since the development of the so-called Digital Death. The term Digital Death is used to identify a group of interdisciplinary studies explaining the different ways in which our present-day digital technologies are changing the human relationship with death, grieving, memory and immortality. The technological metamorphoses of our relationship with death imply many important social, philosophical and linguistic changes in the field of funeral rites and grief: virtual cemeteries, collective cultural autobiographies and encyclopedias of the dead 2.0, digital ghosts of the dead, unprecedented forms of digital immortality, etc. My paper wants to underline the ways in which these concepts intercept the process of social and cultural removal of death and the ways in which the linguistic expressions used by people change. Specifically, my paper will analyze the relationship between Digital Death and Covid-19 to underline the new progress in our uses of metaphors in the field of Death Studies.

“It is as if I have a brick on my stomach”—our stomach aches and we need to use an ‘as if’ to explain others what our experience feels like. This metaphoric language is necessary for us to describe the quality of the pain we experience. The bioethicist Engelhardt reminds us how our body is often opaque to us (1973). The opacity and recalcitrance of the body is comparable to the opacity and autonomous life of the algorithms that we use to organize our society. As they are becoming more and more the body of our collective lives, committing to make an algorithm as translucent as possible might be as challenging as making human bodies as readable as possible. In the same way as we need to know why our stomach hurts if we want to cure it, so we need to read through the opacity of an algorithm if we want to fix the malfunctioning of certain technology in our lives. In this paper I will examine how phenomenology and its metaphorical language can help the digital language of decision-making algorithms, especially in medical humanities, to comply to the ethical commitment to transparency. Namely, I will use phenomenology to shed light on the co-constitutive triad of user-designer-system in decision-making algorithms.

Through a transdisciplinary lens, this book offers a unique description of how metaphors inform our conceptual system and shape our world accordingly. Metaphors in action means marking a break from conventional methodologies: observing metaphors as they operate reveals how conceptual mappings serve as interpretive tools, directing perception, limiting reasoning patterns, and either enabling or hindering comprehension in practical situations. This collection guides through an exploration of how metaphors exhibit consistency with the cultural contexts and value systems from which they emerge. We examine metaphor as a "semantic network", a framework that immediately suggests new pathways for generating alternative ontological possibilities. This book explores the role and significance of metaphors and the landscapes they shape in five disparate fields: philosophy, linguistics, law, health and digital technologies. This volume is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in philosophy, health sciences, psychology, and the digital humanities.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in phenomenology from the mental health sciences, especially from psychology and psychiatry. The legacy of its classic texts, combined with more recent intersections with other fields of knowledge (such as cognitive sciences and enactivism) has produced a rich literature on how to apply phenomenology in clinical practice. It is exactly the question of how to deploy the phenomenological method in an interdisciplinary field that this volume aims to explore. One of its main goals is to facilitate a dialogue between philosophers and mental health professionals, one which is central to the way we understand mental health and treat those who suffer from mental health conditions.

This book offers fundamental insights into three main fields of education and expertise: phenomenology, neuroscience, and clinical practice. The richness and pluralism of the contributions aim to overcome the reductionist and dualistic approach to mental health and shed new light on clinical practice. Designed as both an education tool for mental health professionals, and a theoretical investigation for philosophers on the use of phenomenology in clinical practice, this book highlights the need for a new direction on mental health, and more general, on human wellbeing. This volume aims to fill the gap between philosophers and mental health professionals on an educational level, in a space unique in its open and transdisciplinary approach. It appeals to students and researchers but also very much to professionals and clinicians in the field.

Through this contribution I aim to explore the horizons and limits of digital medicine in light of an embodied approach to the issue of care. I will sketch the historical background of digital medicine and show the contemporary status of this interdisciplinary field, as well as its applications and outcomes. Then, I will address a critique of the computational theory of mind (CTM) upon which many contemporary mental health apps are designed. This approach to the mind is inscribed into the modern trend of neuromania, which conceives the embodied, living human being as a mere series of data analyses and algorithms, with the brain as the seat of the person. Drawing on continental philosophy and classical phenomenology I will develop a notion of health conceived as a moral enterprise, showing how wellbeing and vitality are not reducible to a product made by technologies or doctors, but rather they are the results of an embodied encounter. As such, empathy and person-centered care cannot be achieved by digital medicine. They are the result of a journey into the regions of recognition, embodied presence and the aliveness constituting the person. Finally, I will show how the issue of care cannot be separated from an embodied encounter between people, especially in case of dementia.

_Abstract_: The overarching aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive account of melancholic depression from the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology. More specifically, we propose that this condition should be interpreted as an alteration in the intentional arc that affects corporeality, temporality, and spatiality, rather than as a mood disorder. In fact, classifying melancholic depression as a mood disorder seems a particularly poor choice; the mood disorder is not a cause but a consequence of a primary disturbance in operative intentionality. Our paper comprises four sections: (1) We provide a methodological and conceptual framework for our theoretical work, adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective on melancholic depression, and underlining the main differences between melancholia and depression. (2) We offer a detailed reconstruction of the different interpretations of melancholic depression and their relationships to the issue of temporality. (3) We analyze the disruption of intentionality in melancholic depression and how it affects corporeality and directionality. (4) We focus on the disruption of moods and affects in melancholic depression, observing how they shape subjective experience. The goal of this theoretical contribution is to underscore the role of operative intentionality and its disruptions in melancholic depression. We argue that taking elements such as intentionality, embodiment, and spatiality into consideration could help to direct therapies along more promising paths. _Keywords_: Melancholic Depression; Operative Intentionality; Corporeality; Directionality; Temporality; Mood Disorders _La depressione melancolica. Un’interpretazione fenomenologico-ermeneutica_ _Riassunto_: L’intento generale di questo contributo è di fornire un’interpretazione della depressione melancolica attraverso la fenomenologia ermeneutica. Più specificatamente, la nostra ipotesi è che questa condizione potrebbe essere interpretata come un’alterazione dell’arco intenzionale la quale impatta la corporeità, la temporalità e la spazialità, e non come un disordine dell’umore. Infatti, classificare la depressione melancolica come un disordine dell’umore ci sembra una scelta particolarmente limitata; il disordine dell’umore non è la causa ma la conseguenza di un disturbo a livello primario dell’intenzionalità operativa. Il nostro contributo si articola in quattro sezioni: nella prima, forniamo una cornice metodologica e concettuale finalizzata a chiarificare le fondamenta teoretiche del nostro lavoro, ad illustrare l’utilizzo della fenomenologia ermeneutica in riferimento alla depressione melancolica, e a sottolineare le differenze principali tra melancolia e depressione. Nella seconda sezione, ricostruiamo in modo dettagliato le diverse interpretazioni della depressione melancolica e la loro relazione con la temporalità. Nella terza sezione, analizziamo l’alterazione dell’intenzionalità nella depressione melancolica e come essa impatti sia la corporeità che la direzionalità. Infine, nell’ultima sezione ci concentriamo sull’alterazione degli stati umorali e della componente affettiva, osservando come questi elementi vadano a caratterizzare l’esperienza soggettiva. Il fine di questo contributo teoretico è di evidenziare il ruolo dell’intenzionalità operativa e delle sue alterazioni nella depressione melancolica. La nostra tesi è che prendere in considerazione alcuni elementi, come l’intenzionalità, l’embodiment e la spazialità, possa contribuire a delineare interventi terapeutici in modo più promettente. _Parole chiave_: Depressione melancolica; Intenzionalità operativa; Corporeità; Direzionalità; Temporalità; Disturbi dell’umore.