Abstract

The problem of perception in a virtual environment could be reformulated as: what can we learn in the philosophy of perception from a theory of “perception in virtual environments”, given the specific nature of that environment? It is obvious that the discourse goes in circles, because it is always from theories elaborated in the field of the so-called “real” that we develop the difference, but it is a process typically philosophical, which, on the other hand, can make sense only if it can be shown that the virtual is an existent being that has (is) an ontological structure of its own. It is thus distinguished by asking the elementary question: what are the elements that make it possible for one to perceive a virtual environment? How are difference and the subject-object relation constituted in virtual environments? What does it mean, in short, to perceive a virtual object? The answer to these simple questions may emerge from a phenomenology of the virtual body. In my paper, after having indicated the direction in which to think of the body endowed with technological prostheses, I can rethink it in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.