Hi there! I'm a professor of Philosophy at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Brazil, where I'm also a permanent member of the Graduate Program in Philosophy and a permanent member of the Graduate Program in Teaching, Philosophy and History of Science. My research is about radically embodied cognition, focusing on enactivism (sometimes I deal with traditional epistemology as well, especially know-how, normativity, and rationality). Since August 2025, I have held a CNPq funding for my research on AI from the standpoint of embodied cognition. You might find me in the gym lifting heavy weights.
Publications
From Life to Higher Cognition: Autonomy, Know-How and the Radical Turn
Giovanni Rolla, Manoel de Abreu Fernandes, Alexandre de Oliveira Lohmann
Topoi, 2025
Participatory sense-making and knowing-in-connection in VR
Nara Figueiredo, Giovanni Rolla, Guilherme Nunes de Vasconcelos
Language Sciences, vol. 108, 2025
Self-Knowledge from Resistance Training
Giovanni Rolla
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2024
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Projects
Artificial Intelligence: a critique from the standpoint of Radically Embodied Cognition
This project investigates the limits of artificial intelligence as a tool for the scientific understanding of human cognition and as a possible genuine source of cognitive processes, thus contributing to the theoretical debates about the future of AI ...
Information in the Ecological-Enactive Approach
We try to combine central theses to the ecological-enactive approach to cognition—namely, the priority of action in the explanation of cognition and the claim that not all cognition is representational—with the more traditional view that cognition nec...
Posts
Reflexões filosóficas sobre a força
Há uma confusão acerca das diferenças entre força e hipertrofia. Essa confusão nasce no senso comum, em virtude da falta de delimitação do predicado 'ser forte' na linguagem não técnica—uma confusão que afeta até mesmo os frequentadores assíduos de aca...
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Untitled
Às vezes eu sofro de uma ansiedade um pouco diferente da usual. Não é uma angústia sobre o futuro, sobre alguma coisa que poderia vir a ocorrer, é uma angústia sobre o passado—mais precisamente, sobre a inexistência dele. O passado já não existe mais, ...
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Experiências de um powerlifter amador tardio
Quando fiz 30, achava tacitamente que eu já tinha adquirido autoconhecimento suficiente. Conhecimento sobre o que eu gostava de fazer como lazer, sobre o que eu achava interessante nas outras pessoas, sobre quais as músicas me agradavam, sobre que hora...
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