Roberto Casati

University of Neuchâtel, École des Hautes Études en Santé Publique

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About

Roberto Casati is a leading philosopher and cognitive scientist whose work bridges the worlds of perception, spatial reasoning, and the metaphysics of everyday objects. His primary research areas include the philosophy of perception, the cognitive science of space, and the formal analysis of common-sense physics. Casati is best known for his foundational work on "naive physics," a project that explores how humans intuitively understand the physical world—a concept he helped formalize in his highly influential 1994 paper (71 citations). This work has been pivotal in artificial intelligence and robotics, informing how machines model common-sense reasoning. More recently, Casati has ventured into the cognitive science of material culture, co-authoring an interdisciplinary literature review on "The knowledge of knots" (2019), which examines how humans understand and manipulate flexible objects. His impact is measured not only in citations but in his ability to define entire subfields of inquiry. A director of research at the Institut Nicod in Paris, Casati is also a prolific author and editor, making complex ideas accessible without sacrificing rigor. For students and researchers, his career exemplifies how philosophy can drive empirical science.