Talks: Perspective in Imagination | Music for Thought Experiments

The PRISMA Lab and the FICTA ERC project (GA: 101221131) are pleased to invite you to the following talks:
 
Perspective in Imagination: Uses and Definition
Antonello Caravelli
(University of Genoa)
&
Music for Thought Experiments and Awareness Exercises
Thiago Leiros Costa
(Milano-Bicocca University)
 
Date and time: May 15th, 2026
• 11:00–12:30 (GMT+1) Antonello Caravelli, Perspective in Imagination: Uses and Definition
• 14:00–15:30 (GMT+1) Thiago Leiros Costa, Music for Thought Experiments and Awareness Exercises
 
Location: University of Parma, Sala della biblioteca, Via D’Azeglio 85, Parma (Italy)
 
This seminar will be held in hybrid format. If you wish to attend online (via Microsoft Teams) or require further information, please write to daniele.molinari@unipr.it.
 
Abstracts:
 
Music for Thought Experiments and Awareness Exercises
Thiago Leiros Costa, PhD – Milano-Bicocca University
I present an assessment of music’s potential as a tool for exploring attention, awareness and consciousness. Visiting works from composers like Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood and myself, I argue that different listening practices can resemble structured meditative practices, clinical psychology interventions and thought experiments. Based on a contemporary psychology and neuroscience background, I propose that such listening practices can concretely modulate attentional control systems, interoceptive awareness, and promote neuroplasticity. The underexplored potential of music as awareness exercise or meditation-like intervention can help us tackle some of our most urgent contemporary challenges (like attentional fragmentation or digital hyperstimulation).
 
Perspective in Imagination: Uses and Definition
Antonello Caravelli – University of Genoa
While imagination has been extensively studied in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the notion of “perspective” remains insufficiently defined, although it is widely employed in contemporary debates. This lack of clarity is particularly striking given that many influential accounts of imagination rely on the notion of perspective to characterize it – as the ability to represent perspectives other than one’s own, to adopt another’s perspective, or to project oneself into alternative points of view. This work-in-progress argues that this reliance is not incidental: the notion of perspective is in fact central to imagination and plays a key role in clarifying some of its core functions. Taking as its starting point the fact that both “imagination” and “perspective” function as umbrella concepts, thereby raising the risk of conceptual circularity, the analysis aims to prepare the ground for a theoretically adequate and shareable account of perspective by systematizing its uses in contemporary debates – an issue that has received surprisingly little direct attention – and by making explicit the assumptions guiding them, thereby constraining an adequate definition. A central claim guiding this work is that imagination – especially in its experiential forms – is intrinsically perspectival, insofar as even its most basic manifestations involve a situated mode of access to content, structured by a point of view and an experiential background. On this basis, perspective is treated not merely as a descriptive notion, but as a structural principle of imaginative experience.

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