Massimo Marraffa

• Professor
• Full Professor at University Roma Tre, Rome, Italy

Contemporary mind and brain sciences provide theories and data that seem to confirm a hypothesis about human nature that we might formulate as follows. Human life is conditioned by a need that is no less important than elementary biological needs (such as survival and reproduction) or universal forms of social competition: the need to build and, in...

Massimo Marraffa and Cristina Meini re-connect the psychology of identity with its philosophical roots in this study. They trace the contemporary problem of the self to John Locke and William James’ foundational theories on personal identity. By integrating the philosophy of identity with empirical and neuropsychological research, Marraffa and Mein...

Il volume nasce dai convegni cassinati, di cui raccoglie i contributi più significativi che sono anche i temi “caldi” della ricerca in Neuroetica (il libero arbitrio, il rapporto body–mind, la coscienza, il neurodiritto, la neuroeconomy, l’intelligenza artificiale, ecc.), temi sui quali si focalizzano pure le domande che gli uomini si pongono in al...

Table of Contents -Editorial: Self and Memory: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Rossella Guerini, Massimo Marraffa, Cristina Meini and Alfredo Paternoster) -The Persistence of the Self Over Time in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease (Lynette J. Tippett, Sally C. Prebble and Donna Rose Addis) -Using Self-Generated Cues to Facilitate Recall...

This article outlines a socio-constructivist view of the ontogeny of an early form of psychological self-consciousness: an affective bodily self-consciousness. In so doing, it aims at contributing to a larger anti-Cartesian agenda, which rejects the claim of the primary nature of the knowledge of one’s own mental states. This will be pursued by see...

The focus of our commentary will be on two of the four ways in which philosophy can contribute to psychiatry: (i) an analysis of issues of explanation, reduction and classification as these arise when we treat psychiatry as a special science; and (ii) the proposal and evaluation of models of mental disorders. Regarding the first point, we first exp...

Twenty years ago, Paul Griffiths (1997) published his well renown book What Emotions Really Are?, in which he claimed that the phenomena designated by the vernacular word «emotion» does not belong to a single natural kind, and therefore no single theory of emotion can account for all of them. In this article we assess if his claim is still valid, b...

In this chapter, we present and discuss models in the context of cognitive sciences, that is, the sciences of the mind. We will focus on computational models, which are the most popular models used in the disciplines of the mind. The chapter has three sections. In the first section, we explain what is a computational model, give a pair of examples...

In this article we explore the ethical import of a naturalistic form of narrative constructivism that distances itself from both the non-naturalistic and antirealist strands in theorizing on the self. Our criticism builds on William James' theory of the self. Against this Jamesian backdrop, the claim that we constitute ourselves as morally responsi...

The authors provide a critical discussion of the notion of unconscious, both in the cognitive-science sense and in the Freudian sense. The outcome of this discussion is that self-consciousness should be studied by integrating the subpersonal, bottom-up approach characteristic of cognitive sciences with recent developments in the psychodynamic frame...

In this article we explore the implications of a definition of self-consciousness as a process, by which we mean the self-representing of a multilevel system (the human organism). This sets the stage for a developmental story about how a narrative identity is progressively constructed from body awareness, which becomes bodily self-awareness between...

The authors reject the antirealist argument that infers, from the non-primary, derivative nature of the self, a view of it as an epiphenomenal by-product of neurobiological events or, alternatively, of social (or sociolinguistic) practices. The antirealists disregard the inherently defensive nature of identity self-construction. The need to constru...

The construction of the virtual inner space of the mind is the topic of this chapter, which works back and forth between theoretical psychology and the findings of empirical research. Within the framework of attachment theory, the authors draw on developmental, social and personality psychology to reconstruct the process through which, starting fro...

The authors argue that there is not a pre-reflective self-consciousness that accompanies every conscious state from birth. This is an empirically void construction, still reminiscent of the Kantian transcendentalism. The outcome of this discussion is that the most minimal form of self-consciousness is bodily self-consciousness, the capacity to cons...

An overview of the book is given. In this book, Di Francesco, Marraffa and Paternoster offer a theory of the self (which is at the same time a theory of self-consciousness) whose core ideas are that (1) the self is a process, the activity of self-representing of a psychobiological system, and (2) this process aims mainly at defending the self-consc...

In the last chapter, the presentation of our robust theory of the self came to an end. It is now time to take stock and try to locate our views within a wider context.

This book presents a theory of the self whose core principle is that the consciousness of the self is a process of self-representing that runs throughout our life. This process aims primarily at defending the self-conscious subject against the threat of its metaphysical inconsistence. In other words, the self is essentially a repertoire of psycholo...

Commentary on "Neuroscienze Forensi" (target article) by Giuseppe Sartori and Andrea Zangrossi

In this article I take a nativist-modularist perspective on mindreading, endorsing the hypothesis that a form of primary mindreading is not a developmental achievement, but an innate social-cognitive evolutionary adaptation implemented by neurocomputational mechanisms that come online during the first year of age. Moreover, I recommend a cognitive-...

In a life-span perspective, Baglio and Marchetti make the hypothesis of “the existence of multiple kinds of Theory of Mind” and urge the transition from a discrete to a dimensional approach in the study of mentalization (“ToM may vary along a quantitative and a qualitative continuum”). We resist such a plea and argue that we can stick to a discrete...

In a life-span perspective, Baglio and Marchetti make the hypothesis of “the existence of multiple kinds of Theory of Mind” and urge the transition from a discrete to a dimensional approach in the study of mentalization (“ToM may vary along a quantitative and a qualitative continuum”). We resist such a plea and argue that we can stick to a discrete...

The challenge of realism is one of the common features of current philosophical debates, across different cultural traditions, and in many areas of investigation (epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, theory of action, etc.). The implications of realism for political philosophy and political practice, though, are just starting to become an...

Bermudez (2005) termed “the interface problem” the question of clarifying how typical subpersonal explanations in cognitive sciences, whatever is their specific form, are related to folk psychology. In this opinion article we will approach the interface problem from a specific angle, i.e., the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious...

New Humanities is an international research and teaching project promoted by an interdisciplinary group of people from five different faculties and departments based at the University of Roma Tre. Initially set up as a forum for academic dialogue between the humanities and the sciences (including social sciences), the project became a transition sp...

Scopo di questo articolo è discutere se e in quali modi le scienze neurocognitive possano fornire teorie, metodi e dati utili per la psichiatria. Nella prima parte dell’articolo viene presentato il progetto della neuropsichiatria cognitiva sullo sfondo dei mutamenti intervenuti negli ultimi trent’anni nei rapporti fra scienze psicologiche e neurolo...

The paper addresses two issues that have been recently debated in the literature on free will, moral responsibility, and the theory of punishment. The first issue concerns the descriptive project, the second both the substantive and the prescriptive project. On theoretical, historical and empirical grounds, we claim that there is no rationale for f...

Ricevuto il 18 giugno 2013; accettato il 4 maggio 2014 █ Abstract In this article I argue that (1) introspective self-consciousness is an activity of narrative re-appropriation of the products of the cognitive unconscious; and (2) this activity has an essentially self-defensive character, being ruled by the primary and universal need to construct a...

Far from being a natural kind, 'emotion' turns out to be a conventional label that captures quite diverse phenomena; and such phenomena can no longer be relegated, as the ideology of passions suggested, to a 'lower' and 'primitive' psychic sphere, which threatens the nobility of 'the thinking thing'. They belong to the unlevelled universe to which...

The current philosophical discussion on the self and consciousness is characterized by a contrast or dilemma between the no-self (eliminativist) perspective, on the one hand, and the arguably naïve account that takes the self as a robust entity, on the other. in order to solve the dilemma, in this paper we suggest restoring a robust theory of the s...

The aim of this article is to draw sharp boundaries between the concepts of mindreading, introspection and metacognition in order to rectify some common misunderstandings in the clinical literature. To this aim, we begin with identifying two main approaches in the current philosophical and psychological debate on introspection: at one end of the sp...

In the late 1950s the psychiatrist Giovanni Jervis joined in Ernesto De Martino’s team study of the ecstatic healing cult of tarantism in the Salentine Peninsula of southern Italy. After that experience, Jervis repeatedly participated in debates on De Martino’s legacy, always expressing his deep debt of gratitude to the philosopher-ethnologist. And...

In the first part of the paper we describe the philosophical debate on the expansions of cognitive science into the brain and into the environment, take sides against the “revolutionary” positions on them and in favor of a “reformist” approach, and conclude that the most appropriate model for cognitive sciences is pluralistic. This is meant in a tw...

Building on Sigmund Freud, Ernesto de Martino and cognitive sciences, Giovanni Jervis has outlined a view of introspective consciousness as primarily an activity of narrative re-appropriation of the outputs of the unconscious cognitive processing, emphasizing that such an activity is ruled by the primary need to construct an identity that is valid...

In questo articolo ci proponiamo di svolgere alcune considerazioni in favore della tesi che la comprensione del “piacere” - o meglio di alcuni fenomeni che questo concetto del senso comune cerca di catturare – richiede una spiegazione su più livelli. Ciò sarà sostenuto con riferimento a due ambiti di ricerca interdisciplinari. Primo, considereremo...

La "filosofia sperimentale" č l'uso dei metodi delle scienze cognitive per dare risposta a questioni empiriche che sono rilevanti per alcuni dibattiti filosofici. L'articolo esamina alcuni importanti lavori in filosofia sperimentale e discute due differenti interpretazioni delle sue implicazioni metafilosofiche: secondo i "riformisti" i risultati o...

Giovanni Jervis (1933-2009) was a prominent figure in the Italian intellectual landscape of the last fifty years. A student of the philosopher-ethnologist Ernesto De Martino, the main focus of his research was on social psychiatry and psychology, the foundations of psychology (especially of the psycho-dynamic theories), and the psychological aspect...

In questo commento viene criticata l'interpretazione che Cavallaro (2010) propone del libro di Jervis (2002) Individualismo e cooperazione. Psicologia della politica, sostenendo tre tesi. Primo, il naturalismo darwiniano č un complesso orientamento metodologico di cui la sociobiologia e la psicologia evoluzionistica rappresentano solo due incarnazi...

In this commentary, the author criticizes Cavallaro's (2010) reading of Jervis' (2002) book Individualismo e cooperazione. Psicologia della politica [Individualism and Cooperation: Psychology of Politics] by arguing three claims. First, Darwinian naturalism is a complex methodological approach of which sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are o...

The present book is a collection of essays exploring some classical dimensions of mind both from the perspective of an empirically-informed philosophy and from the point of view of a philosophically-informed psychology. In the last three decades, the level of interaction between philosophy and psychology has increased dramatically. As a contributio...

Reviews historical trends and recent advances in cognitive science and scholarly psychiatry with emphasis on the coevolution and synthesis of these 2 disciplines as cognitive psychiatry. Naive psychology as the ability to interpret behavior in terms of mental states, the modular character as mental architecture, the development of cognitive models...

Este artículo se plantea una hipótesis de mantenimiento de los trastornos de personalidad. A fin de comprender el fenómeno de su estabilidad en el tiempo se descomponen en primer lugar en sus dimensiones mentales constitutivas, a saber: estados mentales dominantes; perfil de disfunciones metacognitivas; ciclos interpersonales típicos; modalidades d...