Dr. Giulia Martina

I am a philosopher of perception and mind, currently working on the DFG project 'Naive realism under pressure'. The project, led by Eva Schmidt, Assaf Weksler, and Ori Beck, explores some new challenges to naive realist views of perceptual experience. Previously, I was a post-doc at the Universities of Salzburg, Turin, Tübingen, and Konstanz. I received my PhD from the University of Warwick in 2020.

I am interested in what we perceive, how we perceive it, and how we talk about that. A good chunck of my recent work has focused on olfaction. I have argued that, in spite of the variations in how things smell across contexts and subjects, smells are objective qualities. Moreover, I have argued that we can smell odorous things, like cookies, a cup of coffee, and cake burning, and not just their smells. Building on work in linguistics, I have advanced an answer to the question of how we manage to talk about smells, given their supposed ineffability. More broadly, I have been working on perceptual variation, illusions, and the metaphysics of perceivable entities. Check my webpage or email me if you're interested in any of my papers.