Research

Publications and work in progress

• Stuck in a Moment: Presentism, Naive Realism and the Time-Lag Argument (by Daniele Cassaghi)
  
  Ergo, forthcoming

• Retentional Direct Realism (by Daniele Cassaghi)
  
  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2025

• Amodal completion in vision and audition. A relationship between perception and mental imagery (by Elvira Di Bona)
  
  Analysis, 2025

• Do sounds occupy a different temporal location than their sources? (by Elvira Di Bona)
  
  Locating a sound helps us locate its source (for example, I become aware that the smartphone I forgot somewhere is on the shelf because I hear the alarm coming from there). But it remains an open question whether the spatial location of the sound is, strictly speaking, coincident with that of its source, or whether sounds are just located close to their sources.

• Transparent Audio Reproduction (by Donald Oxtoby)

Transparent audio reproduction is the idea of reproduced sound that is qualitatively indistinguishable from its original recorded counterpart. In the context of contemporary recordings, as in music or film soundtracks, is transparent audio reproduction possible? If so, is transparent audio reproduction a defensible aesthetic aim?

• The specious present: in between memory and mental imagery (by Daniele Cassaghi)

According to the doctrine of the specious present, what we perceive as the present lasts for an interval, rather than a single instant. But the specious present is a phenomenological doctrine: it describes how things appear to us. A different question is what, at the subpersonal level, allows the specious present to be realized. Mental Imagery or memory? And what type?

• The (Dis)Unity of the specious present across different modalities (by Daniele Cassaghi - joint work with Niccolò Nanni)

What happens when we perceive a temporal succession, but the percepts belong to different senses? It seems to us that the experience of a thunderclap following lightning is unitary, as if both the visual stimulus (the lightning) and the auditory one (the thunder) were part of the same specious present. However, each sensory modality organizes its material differently, and the idea that there is a single specious present valid for all of them is not so straightforward.

• How do memory and judgment support perceptual learning? (by Donald Oxtoby)
  
  Perception enables us to recognize people, places, and objects. But perception alone is not enough. Recognition involves a complex interaction of perception, memory, and judgment. For example, recognizing a face depends upon how familiar it feels, key features we recall, contextual information, and judging when these factors are sufficient for recognition.
  
  (To be continued...)