Paolo Bozzi’s Experimental Phenomenology

Paolo Bozzi (1930-2003) was one of the most fully-rounded and subtle thinkers in Italian experimental psychology, who, in addition to his laboratory work, was a philosopher, a violinist, a musical composer and an essayist. After graduating in Philosophy from the University of Trieste, Paolo Bozzi began as an assistant to the leading Italian Gestalt psychologist Gaetano Kanisza (1913-1993) in the Institute of Psychology at Trieste. For some years he taught at the universities of Padua and Trento, before taking up the chair of Methodology of the Behavioural Sciences at Trieste, from which he retired in 1990. Throughout his career, he kept up close ties with the laboratory at Trieste in a series of experiments that were the first outings in what later came to be known as “naive physics”, beginning in the late 1950s, with studies of the perception of pendular motion and of bodies in free fall. In collaboration with his friend and colleague Giovanni Bruno Vicario (1932- ), Bozzi published a seminal paper in 1960 on auditory streaming and on factors for the unification of musical notes. In the early 1960s, he isolated the function of directionality as a factor in the unification of visual events. In the 1970s, he proposed and defended the method of interobservation as a methodological approach to the study of vision, and in the following decades, he continued to bring to light interesting perceptual behaviours, such as achromatic transparency using dotted lines and the dynamic behaviour of coloured after-images. In parallel with this rich range of experimental discoveries concerning sight and hearing, of which we reproduce some of the leading results below, Bozzi was continuously engaged in a elaborating a theoretical programme for his research. The resulting anti-metaphysical and anti-psychophysical stance underpinned an experimental phenomenology iuxta propria principia: as a point of methodology, his approach was to view his experimentation as an ethology of objects and events, and, as a point of epistemology, he regarded his results as a branch of natural science, of a piece with and a foundation for a naturalistic conception of knowledge. In what we might think of as an extreme version of Bozzi’s view, for all that it is balanced and thoroughly argued for, experimental phenomenology is neither a science of the perceptual process nor indeed a sceince of the appearances, but is rather a science of how things are. In Bozzi’s writings, descriptions of phenomena are intertwined with descriptions of methodological matters and with theoretical elaborations of those very descriptions. Likewise, the observations that he made “in the laboratory” are intertwined with the observations that he made in the natural laboratory that is the world outside the laboratory, for Paolo Bozzi was an experimental phenomenologist in life as lived outside the walls of academe. As we gather from his writings, he was an acute observer of the passing scene, an attentive reader of the classics and a day-to-day experimenter so that a characteristic move in his writing and in his theoretical thought is a recurrent back-and-forth between laboratory observations and observations of everyday life. Out of Bozzi’s output of about one hundred articles, book chapters and monographs, the present anthology presents a selection of 18 items aimed at giving a taste of the complexity and richness of his thought. Only two of the papers have previously appeared in English, and are here presented in slightly revised form. Some of the others have appeared in various versions in Italian, in journals and in anthologies, or as re-worked by Bozzi himself in his most accessibile and wideranging statement of his overall position in Fisica ingenua (Garzanti, Milan, 1990), a work that brings together, as its subtitle says, ‘studies in the psychology of perception’, with many more personal musings on Bozzi’s practical and theoretical engagements with music. In his lifetime, Bozzi was reluctant about having his works translated out of the supple and trenchant Italian that is so noteworthy a feature of his performances – and so rare a feature of academic writing, not only in Italian –, but the editors hope that the inevitable loss of some literary merit will be redeemed by making his thought accessible to a wider readership.