This paper aims to frame a discussion on the philosophy of the city within the context of cognitive sciences. In the first part of the paper, we will outline the double shift from a linguistic and ocularcentric account towards a sensorimotor one; then we will defend the idea that the less you refer to language and ocularcentrism in handling the urban dimension, the better phenomena can be understood and described. More generally, we argue that the most intriguing conceptual contaminations between (...) cognitive sciences and urban philosophies, as well as the best approach in designing and planning cities, have become attainable because of the marginalisation of language-inspired models of cognition and ocular imperialism in favour of other aspects of our phenomenal consciousness, like emotions, habits, and sensorimotor attitudes. (shrink)

The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, it aims at a refutation of a modern topic in philosophical literature about the supposed value of blindness as a kind of sight, deeper than the physical one, a kind of direct, intuitive and spiritual wisdom. This idea, in the last two centuries, has nourished not only an aesthetic mythology but also a specific kind of Metaphysics that we could summarize as the epistemological denigration of the Appearance, since the (...) truth would always be behind the phenomena, in the darkness of the indeterminate, where only a few would have access: this is the tyranny of blindness as a cultural paradigm. Thus, the systematic hermeneutical distortion of the Greek texts has been introduced into everyday language, slowly deforming our entire conception of the theoretical value of the visual and at the same time of the Greek legacy. For this reason, by dismantling the argumentation for this construct, the second aim of the article will be to offer an alternative reading of Greek visual culture, in this case especially through the work of Sophocles “Oedipus Rex”, where the majority of these topics pretend to be grounded. (shrink)