Familiarity and togetherness

Volume 10 (1)

edited bySonia Maria LiscoLinas TranasSimone Aurora(University of Padova)

The times of Covid lockdown and a further step in moving our social world online provide a great opportunity to think about and discuss the relationship between the senses of togetherness and familiarity. The sense of togetherness is a sense that it is us, we who live, act, or feel, as opposed to living, acting, or feeling personally, on one’s own. Phenomena of being, acting, and feeling together with others have attracted both early and contemporary phenomenologists (e.g., Scheler, Walther, Gurwitsch, Heidegger, Schütz, Zahavi, Szanto) and analytic philosophers (e.g., Searle, Bratman, Gilbert, Tuomela, Salmela). The sense of familiarity is a sense of having experienced something before, strictly connected to the fuency of a particular process and sometimes associated with a positive feeling of “warmth”. It has been the object of interest in phenomenology (Husserl, Schütz, Steinbock, Ratclife), analytic philosophy of perception (Wittgenstein, Baz), philosophical anthropology (Plessner) and contemporary investigations in psychology, sociology, and epistemology (Whittlesea & Williams, Fuchs, Teroni, Luhmann, Meylan).