Playing appearances: On some aspects of Portmann’s contribution to philosophical aesthetics

Widely regarded as Adolf Portmann’s most important (and controversial) work, Animal Forms and Patterns has been the object of extensive analysis and criticism from many different perspectives, such as evolutionary and theoretical biology, psychology, philosophy, ethology, and environmental studies. Yet, very little attention has been paid so far to the significant differences between the first edition of the book, dating from 1948, and the second edition, which only appeared 12 years later, in 1960. After highlighting the crucial role that such differences assumed in the evolution of the Portmannian way of understanding the “spectacle” of nature and its meaning, I shall concentrate on the topicality of Portmann’s thought in the specific field of morphological aesthetics, particularly focussing on the notion of play as a possible bridging concept between science and art.