Sofia Livi is a PhD student in Philosophy of Mind at Scuola Normale Superiore. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the relevance of the affective experience of smells in shaping the self. While she mainly adopts an analytic approach, she is open to other philosophical traditions and other disciplines (for instance, psychology or the cultural studies on the senses). For example, in the paper The Unpleasantness of Perception («Topoi», 2025) she makes use of neuroscientific literature and sources from the history of the senses to investigate how subjects can be biased in their affective olfactory perceptions, showing how perception should be seen as an activity of interpretation that is influenced by the culture of the subject, their memories, their preferences. Other publications include Breathing Postures («Phenomenology and Mind», forthcoming) and Ecological Plasticity («Philosophy Kitchen», 2025, co-authored with Emanuele Capozziello).
She has presented her work at many international venues, such as the Olfactory Philosophy Workshop (2025). Recently, she co-organized the interdisciplinary symposium Scents and Imagination (2025) in Cambridge.
At the moment, she is working on the following topics: unconscious affective scaffolding and smell (with Giulia Piredda); ambivalent smells; ASMR and multimodality; smell and existential feelings; the embodiment of non-anthropomorphic prostheses (collaborating with Cosyinc Lab, Sapienza).