Atmospheres and the Felt Body : Resonating (or not) with the World

The book offers the first comprehensive account of how atmospheric feelings—those pervasive quasi-things that shape our lived spaces—are experienced in the perceiver’s felt body. Drawing on neo-phenomenology and pathic aesthetics, Tonino Griffero explores the still underexamined link between atmospheres and embodied resonance, moving beyond the notion of feelings as internal states to reveal their objective presence in the lived space that surrounds us. The book combines rigorous theoretical analysis with case studies on pathic experience, the power of images, aesthetic and artistic experience, immersivity and in-betweenness, embodied habits, decision-making, landscape, ruins, and cinema, thereby demonstrating the practical and diagnostic value of atmospherology. By reframing aesthetics as a philosophy of sensible knowledge and emphasizing “pathic experience” (how we passively undergo what happens to us), Griffero challenges cognitively centered paradigms and offers a new lens for understanding collective emotions, immersive art, and environmental affordances. This work is essential reading for scholars in philosophy, aesthetics, cultural and media studies, and architecture, as well as for professionals seeking to grasp the affective forces shaping human experience.