Roberta DREON

Roberta Dreon is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Venice University, Ca’ Foscari since December 2014. In July 2017 she obtained the National Scientific Qualification for Full Professorship in the scientific area 11/C4, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Languages. At present, she teaches Aesthetics, within the degree courses of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, as well as in the degree course in Economy and Management of Cultural Production. Since 2011 she is a member of the International Ph.D. board of Philosophy and Pedagogy at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. Since 2021 she is a member of the Teachers’ Assembly of the National Ph.D. Programme in Sustainability and Climate Change. Since October 2020, she has been appointed the Delegate for the Research in the Humanities by the Dean of Ca' Foscari.

She is a member of the editorial and scientific boards of "Mind, Language and the Arts", “Ermeneutica letteraria”, and she is co-editor in chief of the “European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy” since June 2019. Since 2007 she is a member of the Società Italiana di Estetica and of “Pragma” association. 

Her main research areas are classical pragmatism, in particular the philosophy of John Dewey - but she has also written on James, Mead, as well as on contemporary pragmatists, particularly Joseph Margolis' philosophy -, the contemporary debate in philosophical aesthetics (pragmatist aesthetics, evolutionary aesthetics, environmental aesthetics), some conceptual categories of classical aesthetics (the notions of autonomy/heteronomy of art, the concepts of genius, aesthetic experience, aesthetic disinterest), and a philosophical anthropology grounded on the Pragmatists’ legacy. On this topic, she recently published a book, Human Landscapes. Contributions to a Pragmatist Anthropology (Suny Press 2022), focusing on sensibility, habits, and the idea of 'enlanguaged experience'. She has published articles on the conception of sensibility, viewed both from a perceptual and an affective angle, on the theory of emotions, on theories of habits and the concept of affective habits, on the intertwining of language and sensibility in the human environment, and on the relations between experience and cognition. She has developed pragmatist arguments on these subjects, often in dialogue with the current debate on embodied and enacted theories of the mind. In the past, she worked on phenomenology and hermeneutics, with a book on the concepts of time and experience in early Heidegger's philosophy (Franco Angeli 2003). She later investigated the relationship between sensibility and language, in a volume published by Mimesis in 2007. Later, she published a monograph on Dewey's aesthetics (Marietti 2012) translated into French at Questions Theoriques in 2017.