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'Cognitive Impenetrability' and the Complex Intentionality of the Emotions
Abstract
When a young boy playing in a wooded area, I tripped over exposed roots extending from the trunk of a tree. I threw my arms out in front of me to break my fall and disturbed a nest of bees. As I lay on the ground, I was repeatedly stung by bees until I could regain my feet and run away. Frightened and in a great deal of pain - that is what I remember most vividly - I walked home. My mother took me to the doctor, who undoubtedly gave me some sort of treatment and medication, but this has been lost to memory. The part of the visit to the doctor's office that I remember is his removing any stingers remaining in me; this too I remember for its pain. The doctor counted more than seventy stings. Although the exact number escapes memory, I believe it was seventy-one. In brief, the descriptive details of the day's experiences elude memory, but the affective dimension - the pain and fear - does not.
... 3 I cannot claim to be the first or sole proponent of a Husserlian perceptualist view of emotions. John Drummond has developed his perceptualist account in a number of papers: e.g., Drummond 1995Drummond , 2004Drummond , 2006Drummond , 2008Drummond , and 2009. I will make further remarks on Drummond's views in another footnote, but here I would note that Drummond has also offered a detailed discussion of recalcitrant emotions, viz., in Drummond 2004. ...
... John Drummond has developed his perceptualist account in a number of papers: e.g., Drummond 1995Drummond , 2004Drummond , 2006Drummond , 2008Drummond , and 2009. I will make further remarks on Drummond's views in another footnote, but here I would note that Drummond has also offered a detailed discussion of recalcitrant emotions, viz., in Drummond 2004. ...
In this paper, I sketch an account of emotion that is based on a close analogy with a Husserlian account of perception. I also make use of the approach that I have limned, viz., to articulate a view of the kind of “conflict without contradiction” (CWC) which may obtain between a recalcitrant emotion and a judgment. My main contention is that CWC can be accounted for by appeal to the rationality of perception and emotion, conceived as responsiveness to experiential evidence. The conflicts in question can be regarded as obtaining between different strands of evidence, and our perceptual and emotional experiences can be thus conflicted even among themselves, not only in the special case of a conflict with a judgment.
... Often deemed "irrational", these sorts of emotions are impervious to judgment, and are more aptly called "cognitively impenetrable" (cf. Goldie 2000; Drummond 2004). A subject's emotion is considered cognitively impenetrable if it cannot be affected by their relevant beliefs (cf. ...
... Particularly when it comes to cases where emotions are "cognitively impenetrable" (cf.,Drummond 2004) and also when they seem to occur beyond our conscious awareness. ...
This dissertation examines of the role of the body in emotional experience. I
argue that in the full story of emotions, one must recognize several key notions: passive
elements such as physiological responses, active elements such as action or behavioral
tokens, cognitive elements such as judgments, and others. I examine these features and
the capability of different emotion theories to successfully preserve them. Theories
currently on offer fail to capture one or more of these features. Given the failure of those
theories when construed as targeting whole emotion episodes, I aim to carve out a unified
and theoretically fruitful delineation of emotion in such a way as to capture all these
features. This motivates the search for a new theory. I turn to perception to help guide
emotion theory since perception has similar features. While modeling emotion on
perception is promising, the ‘perceptualist’ emotion theories that do so are still unable to
adequately account for the above features. I therefore look toward a theory of perception
that can successfully avoid these pitfalls, namely, one that relies heavily on the active and
embodied nature of perception—i.e., enactive perception. Given enactive theory’s ability
to accommodate the features, I then proceed to develop an account of emotion based on
enactive theory—constructing an enactive perceptual account of emotion. Lastly, I
revisit the key features and go on to answer objections that might be raised against my
view.
... Modern affective neuroscience backs up these claims (Anderson & Adolph, 2014;Pankseep, 1998) To structure this work towards dogs' known emotive states, the emotions that dogs do not appear to possess (guilt, pride and shame) are not used within this study (Coren, 2015). In comparison to humans, the emotions that dogs hold are suspected to be of denser but still intricate complexity (Coren, 2006;Drummond, 2004 ...
The ubiquity of technology has resulted in machinery occupying our homes, increasing the exposure and use of screen devices to dogs. Dogs have long viewed computer screens, yet the usability of, and the dog’s attention to, these screen devices remains under-researched. This research focuses on investigating a dog’s attention to screens and the human’s and researcher’s evaluation of this. The specific aim was to determine how to capture this attention through both technology devices and coded methods. The research contributes to the knowledge area of dogs’ screen interactions and dog-computer interaction (DCI) methods within animal-computer interaction (ACI). It adds literature in the novel field on dogs’ use of screens to watch media and explores method transference from human-computer interaction (HCI). This helps lay down the foundation for the DCI community and gives indications on the future directions of DCI research with screen interfaces.
The research is explored through four research questions: Can methods be developed that can capture a dog’s attention to single, multiple and dog-activated screens in a dog-centric manner? When different media are presented to dogs, do they show preferences, and do they follow preferred media as they move from one screen to another? In what ways can a dog’s attention to screens be quantified in a useful way from an owner, computer and researcher standpoint? and What effect does taking a dog-centric philosophy have on the study of dog-computer interaction?
This thesis is heavily embedded within the ethical philosophical stance of dog-centric research. This shapes the methods used and the technology created. It focuses on dog user requirements that allow for untrained interaction allowing the dog to explore the technology in a natural way. In this light, the role that dogs take within the method and evaluation process and the interaction between the modalities of human, dogs and computers are examined. This thesis shows that it is possible to capture a dog’s attention to screen interfaces from the researcher, the dog owner and the dog itself within the dog-centric philosophical approach. These findings are derived from three empirical studies and two research tools.
The two research tools presented deliver DCI enhanced interpretive feedback for DCI research in tool 1 and provide a way of modelling the dog user in tool 2. Tool 1 enhances, from a human standpoint, the analysis of a dog’s attention by facilitating the owner to be an informed observer through providing a Dog Information Sheet (DISH) on dog behaviour. Tool 2 uses information from the owners of 196 dogs to craft six role-based personas across different breeds, ages and home situations to aid researchers during the initial stages of research and design in DCI. This also provided a data storehouse of dog information.
The three empirical studies narrate a story across finding ways of automating the detection of a dog’s attention to TV like screens, to detecting a dog’s attention to media across multiple screens and then allowing the dog to trigger its own media on a screen. Study one used MATLAB to classify where a dog’s head is facing within three variables (left/centre and right) within a high accuracy of above 82%. The second study investigated a dog’s attention across multiple screens using video evidence, analysed by a researcher, to classify a dog’s attention. This indicated that dogs did not follow media content from one screen to another and showed that they preferred a favoured screen. In this study, it was found dogs prefer dog-based media and had short (under 3 seconds) attentive glances. The third study concluded the thesis using a specially designed screen device that was triggered by the dog’s proximity, to investigate a dog’s attention, over a two-week period, to a dog-activated screen system that plays media. This study demonstrated that dogs would attend to a screen device playing media and that proximity can be used as an activator of media content.
The work concluded by listing contributions regarding the design, methods and principles of screen systems for dogs. Initial findings are provided for the DCI field of low attention times with dogs and screens (approximately 3 seconds) and that the videos attended to by dogs were mainly of dog context. In this regard, short media clips should be used with dogs. Dogs throughout this thesis did not seem to attend much to screens preferring to watch nothing and often maintaining or keeping the same level of attention towards dog imitated machines.
One of the main contributions this thesis provides are empirical methods to provide some insight into how dog-centric methods can be used in DCI. These methods indicate the importance of the data gathered from the time spent on task with a device is as valuable as the time spent without the device. The tools provided form a contribution of ways to model the dog user and enhancing the feedback from the owner leading to the conclusion that the optimal dog-centric environment is with high dog autonomy and low human involvement during data collection. Within this, discussion is given on the tension within the dog-centric philosophy method approach between the dog and the data where the research philosophy reflected in the principles given were found to hindered data collection but do ensure the dogs welfare.
For the ACI field in DCI this thesis suggests that the researcher determines the pool of dogs that the researcher is considering before choosing the method and system advocating for getting to know your end user. This narrative is followed by an exploration of potential growth areas of interactive media technology for dogs, identifying regions of DCI that could be further studied such as multiuser systems, further exploring how the human impacts DCI research, the ACI to HCI transference, investing further into what is interactivity in ACI and dog-driven devices and lastly the continue to develop dog-centric methods for DCI research.
... He brings the following lively examples of bodily feelings: the feeling of the hairs going up on the back of one's neck, an agonizing pain in the elbow, one's hand feeling slippery with sweat against the surface of the gun that one has just picked up, and the way one's shirt feels against one's body (Goldie 2002: 235-236). He 3 While Drummond defends a perceptual view of the emotions (Drummond 1995(Drummond , 2004(Drummond , 2006(Drummond , 2008(Drummond , 2009, Anthony Steinbock has developed a Husserl-inspired view on which emotions (specifically, moral emotions) are regarded not as judgmental or perceptual, but as sui generis (Steinbock 2014). Steinbock's discussions of the different moral emotions have made me wary of the idea of generalizing a perceptual (or quasi-perceptual) account to cover all emotions, and I will not attempt to do so in this paper. ...
Peter Goldie has argued for the view that the intentionality of emotions is inseparable from their phenomenology (IPE), but certain criticisms have revealed his argument as problematic. I will argue that it is possible to address these problems, at least in the case of the emotion of fear, thereby vindicating IPE, by appeal to a Husserlian version of the perceptual account of emotions, centered on the idea that the contents of perceptual experiences are fulfillment conditions. Fulfillment means the achievement of a kind of immediate, or “full”, experience of an object or some of its aspects. In the case of visual perception, suppose you are looking at an apple. If you turn it around, you will find yourself in full view of its back side, which was previously anticipated “emptily”, fulfilling or disappointing (confirming or disconfirming) some of your anticipations in regard to it. On the Husserlian view, the success or failure of a visual perceptual experience consists in such fulfillments and disappointments. If we can provide an account of the intentionality of emotions along similar lines, it will necessarily involve the phenomenal contrast between fullness and emptiness, enabling us to support IPE.
... ''A story necessarily curtails and impoverishes the experience it is designed to express: by unifying and homogenizing its multifarious shreds of sense, it deprives it of its ever changing ambiguity'' (Ibid., 48). See alsoDrummond (2004, 119: ''narratives […] impose more unity than life itself has manifested.'' 16 This is what Tengelyi himself undertakes-inspired by authors like Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Richir-both in his The Wild Region in Life-History (2004) and subsequent Erfahrung und Ausdruck (2007). ...
Narrative identity theory in some of its influential variants (A. MacIntyre or P. Ricœur) makes three fundamental assumptions. First, it focuses on personal identity primarily in terms of selfhood. Second, it argues that personal identity is to be understood as the unity of one’s life as it develops over time. And finally, it states that the unity of a life is articulated, by the very person itself, in the form of a story, be it explicit or implicit. The article focuses on different contemporary phenomenological appraisals of the narrative account (in the works of David Carr, Dan Zahavi and László Tengelyi). The survey of this partly critical debate is followed by concluding observations concerning a possible phenomenological theory of personal identity.
... In order to structure this work towards dogs known emotive states, the emotions that dogs do not appear to possess (guilt, pride and shame) are not used within this study (Coren, 2015). In comparison to humans, the emotions that dogs hold are suspected to be of denser but still intricate complexity (Coren, 2006;Drummond, 2004). In ACI, dogs holding varying complex emotions have been widely reported Westerlaken & Gualin, 2014). ...
The study of non-human animals' interactions with technology is referred to as Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI). Data gathering with these non-human animal users typically relies on the owner as a proxy to gather requirements and feedback from the animal's behavioural reactions. These owners, however, may provide poor information, as they are habitually not knowledgeable in animal behaviour. To improve data gathering in Dog-Computer Interaction (DCI) research, we present a Dog Information Sheet (DISH) for owners which contains known dog physical behaviours and their potential cognitive reactions. This is used to create a more informed dog owner observer in order to improve feedback in ACI. DISH's effect on owner evaluations is assessed by gauging their own dog's behavioural reactions to persuasively designed media. The findings established that when using DISH, owners were better at identifying both the behaviour perceived and at reasoning behind their dogs' reactions. However, owners using the DISH were unable to recognize the different dogs' behavioral states unless they considered themselves experts at dog behaviour. Whilst this research is centred on collecting data on dogs to improve User Experience (UX) in a Dog-Computer Interaction (DCI) context, the method presented behind the DISH can be applied to both ACI and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field to help interpret behaviours during requirement gathering and evaluative practices for non-vocal and limited cognitive users.
... From a narrative perspective, students live in a storied world. Stories are a way to articulate identity (Kerby, 1991), and using stories to articulate identity presupposes an experiential, pre-reflective self-awareness 1 (Drummond, 2004;Zahavi, 2005). The reflective comprehension of life, that knowledge of the self that is made current in the act of reflection, originates from a prior awareness of self. ...
This article reports the findings of a project to reexamine
reflection from the student perspective that took place after a major curriculum
revision. The project used a hermeneutically inspired action research method that
involved interviewing 17 undergraduate theology students after a two-semester practicum
to ascertain the ways in which students understand and use reflection in practice and as
a means of establishing identity. The data revealed key themes that surround students?
understanding of reflection: (a) Students think and write about reflection in detached
ways, (b) there is a connection between reflection and self-understanding and
self-definition, and (c) crisis plays a role in reflection. The article concludes with
further discussions of these themes and with recommendations for pedagogical
practice.
... 31 Accordingly, the narrative explication of feelings and emotions is something retrospective and presupposes what we have called pre-reflective experience, in which specific emotions and feelings passively emerge. 32 Such experience is also grounded upon the threefold structure of inner time consciousness (presentation, retention, and protention), yet it also entails moments that are more closely related to our lived-body. ...
This paper develops a phenomenological analysis of the disturbances of self-experience in dementia. After considering the lack of conceptual clarity regarding the notions of self and person in current research on dementia, we develop a phenomenological theory of the structure of self-experience in the first section. Within this complex structure, we distinguish between the basic level of pre-reflective self-awareness, the episodic sense of self, and the narrative constitution of the self. In the second section, we focus on dementia and argue that, despite the impairment of narrative self-understanding, more basic moments of self-experience are preserved. In accordance with the theory developed in the first part, we argue that, at least until the final stages of the illness, these self-experience in dementia goes beyond the pure minimal self, and rather entail forms of self-reference and an episodic sense of self.
... 13 For other recent approaches which challenge the assumption that bodily feelings have a wholly 'internal' phenomenology, see Goldie (2000, 2002), Stocker (2004, Greenspan (2004) and Drummond (2004). ...
This article describes the phenomenological role of deep moods, and goes on to consider their nature. It argues that we experience the world through our feeling bodies, and that distinctions between internally directed bodily feelings and externally directed intentional states should be rejected. It distinguishes between intentional and preintentional feelings, suggesting that most of those phenomena referred to as "emotions" are comprised at least partly of the former, whereas those moods that constitute the experienced meaningfulness of the world consist entirely of pre-intentional feeling.
... Moreover, insofar as intentional experience in general discloses things in their significance for us, we can say that the presentational significance disclosing the merely descriptive or non-axiological properties of the thing or situation grounds an additional meaning-aspect disclosing the affective or valuable characteristics of the thing or situation (Drummond 2002a, 17-20;2002b, 175-89;2004). 6 We can illuminate this structure with an example. Suppose I am walking in my neighborhood. ...
... See also the papers in the present Special Issue bySzanto (2015) and Vendrell Ferran (2015), which deal with Stein's account of emotional rationality as well as the contribution by Taipale (2015a), who develops Stein's view that in empathy we typically take another person's emotions to be situated in a motivational context unique to that person. 16 SeeGoldie (2000: 12-16),Drummond (2004). 17 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to relate Stein's position to this distinction from the contemporary debate. ...
My aim in this paper is to make use of Edith Stein’s phenomenological analyses of empathy, emotion, and personhood to clarify and critically assess the recent suggestion by Axel Honneth that a basic form of recognition is affective in nature. I will begin by considering Honneth’s own presentation of this claim in his discussion of the role of affect in recognitive gestures, as well as in his notion of ‘elementary recognition,’ arguing that while his account contains much of value it also generates problems. On the basis of this analysis, I will try to show that Stein’s account of empathy demarcates an elementary form of recognition in a less problematic fashion than does Honneth’s own treatment of this issue. I will then spell out the consequences of this move for the emotional recognition thesis, arguing that Stein’s treatment lends it further credence, before ending with some remarks on the connection between recognition and emotional personality.
... In this sense, the narrative captures less than an individual's life, for not all of a life as prereflectively lived can be fitted into a narrative. . . . [W]e should not confuse the reflective, narrative grasp of a life with an account of the pre-reflective experience that makes up that life prior to that experience being organized into a narrative (Drummond 2004, 119, quoted in Zahavi 2005 In other words, the reflective grasp of life, that knowledge of the self that is made present in the act of reflection, comes about only on the basis of a prior familiarity of self. ...
The concept of multiplicity describes the fluid nature of identity and experience in the wake of postmodernity. Yet the question of how we negotiate and maintain our identities, despite our multiplicities, requires phenomenological clarification. I suggest that recognition of multiplicity needs to be combined with an acknowledgement of continuity, however minimal. I maintain that this continuity is evidenced in our pre-reflective self-awareness, embodiment and habitual activities. Our authorship of life narratives and our ability to deliberate and shape our identities takes place against the background of our lived, prereflective experience. I develop the notion of prereflective self-awareness using the work of Sartre, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. I suggest that prereflective self-awareness, embodiment and habitual activity are themselves shaped by our participation in sociocultural frameworks that give meaning to our lives.
This essay is motivated by the contention that an incomplete picture of Edmund Husserl's philosophy of feelings persists. While his standard account of feelings, as it is presented in his major works, has been extensively studied, there is another branch of his theory of feelings, which has received little attention. This other branch is Husserl's rigorous and distinct investigations of the feeling of approval. Simply stated, the goal of this essay is to outline the evolution of this secondary branch of Husserl's philosophy of feelings from 1896 to 1911. I highlight how Hus-serl's examinations of approval-as an intention that performs both an axiological and a seemingly cognitive function-lead him to extraordinary observations about the execution of feelings and the truth of judgments.
Dissolution experiences (DEs) are experiential episodes during which the perceived
boundaries between self and world (i.e., nonself) become fainter or less clear. This is usually accompanied by a sense of unity with the world or elements of it. Experiences
matching the definition of DEs are reported in different strands of literature, both academic and non-academic, across different traditions and disciplines. They are
described as occurring in a multitude of contexts such as art, nature, love and intimacy,
psychopathology, the use of psychedelic substances, and meditation. Different lines of
inquiry are generally carried out separately, and adopt a different terminology. Further
exploration is needed for a unified investigation of DEs. We present an empirical phenomenological investigation of DEs and of the experience of the self in DEs, as DEs offer a unique opportunity to investigate the nature of the self. We conducted a series of
29 indepth phenomenological interviews with eight co-researchers,
investigating eight randomly sampled daily life experiences and 10 DEs selected from the coresearchers’ past and that occurred in different contexts. The results, disclosing the diachronic and synchronic structures of DEs, show that the investigated DEs are often accompanied by the experience of letting go and trusting the world. The self, usually experienced as a complex multielements entity, is subject to a loss of internal coherence, and most of its elements disappear; often, only the sense of mineness remains. Our study contributes to a conceptual and phenomenological understanding of DEs, and it provides insights useful to the discussion on the metaphysical and experiential nature of the self.
Keywords: dissolution experiences, self, sense of boundaries, qualitative research, empirical phenomenology
The aim of this chapter will be to reconsider a central aspect of Husserl’s analysis of the experiencing subject that many subsequent phenomenologists have regarded as unfounded: namely, his claim that a non-mundane ego-structure can be ascertained as pervading the life of consciousness as it is thematised in phenomenological reflection. Drawing not only upon Husserl’s best known presentation of this view in Ideen I, but also the critical edition of Ideen II, as well as Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins and the recently published Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, I will argue that Husserl’s phenomenological account of the pure ego is supported and further articulated by the results of his concrete analyses of time-consciousness, attentive engagement, and emotional valuing. Beginning with the pure ego will not only enable us to make explicit the methodological context of Husserl’s analysis of empathy and the self. Getting a clear grip on the presence of the pure ego within conscious experience – and its intimate relationship to self-consciousness – will also allow us, in the chapters that follow, to elucidate the variety of foreign subjectivity manifest in various forms of empathy, as well as to ultimately appreciate the specificity of the personal self.
Whereas the sixth chapter was concerned with offering a solely first-personal account of personal selfhood, this (methodologically necessary) shortcoming is corrected in the seventh chapter, which considers together interpersonal empathy and the intersubjective dimensions of human personhood. Building upon the findings of the previous chapter, I begin by explicating the analyses of personal self-constitution found in Ideen II, arguing that Husserl allows us to distinguish between a range of levels of personal self-manifestation. While Husserl’s reflections, I contend, ultimately lead us towards the thought that narrative constitutes the most apt medium for personal self-understanding, he also argues that there are more primitive ways in which I am aware of myself as a subject of abiding personal character or style. I then develop Husserl’s claim that the person necessarily exists in a nexus of other persons, spelling out the roles of mutual recognition, the constitution of a common surrounding world, and the appropriation of others’ attitudes, in both pre-reflective personal agency and reflective, narrative-embedded, personal self-understanding. Later, I address the sense in which, as persons, we are empathetically acquainted with other personal selves, arguing that such interpersonal empathy both rests upon and transgresses the animate empathy discussed in the fifth chapter. In this regard, I first suggest that a minimal form of interpersonal empathy can be equated with what Axel Honneth has recently called ‘elementary recognition,’ where this designates a basic and perception-like recognition of another (embodied) personal self that grounds and is explicated by emotive and practical forms of interpersonal recognition. Revisiting the contrast of Husserl and Stein with Stueber, I then argue that interpersonal empathy can go beyond interpersonal recognition, and aim at an understanding of the ‘who’ of the other’s actions, emotions, and beliefs—of the personal self who ‘lives’ in them—an accomplishment which requires a sensitivity to (rather than a levelling over) the embeddedness of the person’s acts in her own personal history, and their intimate relation to her personal character.
This article explores the affinity between Axel Honneth's conception of elementary recognition and Edmund Husserl's work on empathy, with the aim of indicating one way in which phenomenological analysis might contribute to critical social theory. I begin by sketching the 'two-level' account of recognition developed by Honneth in recent writings, which distinguishes between 'elementary' and 'normatively substantial' forms of recognition. The remainder of the paper then seeks to offer a deeper account of elementary recognition by identifying it with Husserl's conception of empathetic perception. I begin by clarifying what Husserl means by 'the person,' before illuminating the sense in which empathy counts as a distinctive kind of perceptual recognition of other personal selves, and shedding phenomenological light on empathy as a sui generis mode of interpersonal intentionality. I then conclude with some preliminary remarks regarding the relationship between empathetic perception and other forms of interpersonal responsiveness and recognition.
This paper spells out Husserl’s account of the exercise of rationality and shows how it is tied to the capacity for critical reflection. I first discuss Husserl’s views on what rationally constrains our intentionality (section 1). Then I localize the exercise of rationality in the positing that characterizes attentive forms of intentionality and argue that, on Husserl’s account, when we are attentive to something we are also pre-reflectively aware of what speaks for and against our taking something to be a certain way (section 2). After discussing the conditions under which this pre-reflective awareness gives way to reflective deliberation (section 3), I contrast this account to a compelling Kantian-inspired account of the activity of reason that has recently been developed by Matthew Boyle (section 4). In particular, I argue that Husserl delimits the scope of the exercise of rationality differently than Boyle, and I show how this implies different accounts of the self.
This chapter discusses the relationship between memory and emotions from a phenomenological perspective. Starting with some remarks on Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”, the investigation focuses on the three following issues: (1) the overwhelming character of emotional memories; (2) the relationship between the past and the present emotion, and (3) the meaning of “tranquility” in emotional recollection. In order to discuss these issues, an analysis of the intentional structure of affective and emotional experiences is first developed. Thereby, it is shown how the self- and world-relatedness of emotional experience fundamentally structures our implicit and explicit awareness of past emotions. Subsequently, the analysis of the relation between emotions and the temporal structure of experience shall allow us to recognize in the irreversible nature of the temporal stream of consciousness the ultimate ground to understand the relationship between emotions and memory. Finally, discussing how irreversibility eminently comes to the fore in the experience of nostalgia, it is argued that the “tranquility” of emotional memories has a nostalgic note. Such nostalgic note conveys the awareness of one’s own being in a constant process of irreversible temporal becoming.
This chapter seeks to clarify the normative grounds and some of the contents of Nietzsche's evaluative commitments. It is argued that attempts to ground these commitments in the psychology of the will to power are incomplete, since, on the plausible assumption that the will to power is a type of second-order desire, it generates insufficient constraints with respect to first-order evaluation. Nietzsche, however, is clearly committed to evaluative distinctions among first-order ends and values, upon which, in his view, the value of specific instances of will to power partly depends. It is argued that Nietzsche's reasons for evaluative distinctions among first-order values are ultimately to be found in intentional affectivity, more specifically in essentially worldinvolving affective experiences which are best analysed as aesthetic in a broad, but clearly delimited sense. Nietzsche's ethics can therefore be said to be aestheticist. A number of typical examples from Nietzsche's texts are analysed in order to demonstrate the fecundity of this approach for understanding the contents of Nietzsche's own ethical and other evaluative commitments. The final sections of the chapter seek to show that and why the most significant positive and negative values are, for Nietzsche, essentially associated with human or relevantly similar subjectivity. While his ideas and arguments on this issue warrant the judgement that Nietzsche's ethics is humanist, his humanism differs from mainstream enlightenment humanism - say, of Kantian provenance - in important and illuminating ways.
Moral Emotions builds upon the philosophical theory of persons begun in Phenomenology and Mysticism and marks a new stage of phenomenology. Author Anthony J. Steinbock finds personhood analyzing key emotions, called moral emotions. Moral Emotions offers a systematic account of the moral emotions, described here as pride, shame, and guilt as emotions of self-givenness; repentance, hope, and despair as emotions of possibility; and trusting, loving, and humility as emotions of otherness. The author argues these reveal basic structures of interpersonal experience. By exhibiting their own kind of cognition and evidence, the moral emotions not only help to clarify the meaning of person, they reveal novel concepts of freedom, critique, and normativity. As such, they are able to engage our contemporary social imaginaries at the impasse of modernity and postmodernity.
Cognitive Theory (CT) is widely acknowledged framework used to understand the psychological processes involved in affective disorders and to conceptualize the adequate psychotherapy. The purpose of this paper is to assess the philosophical assumptions that CT rests upon. It will be argued that CT must be revised due to significant flaws in many of these philosophical assumptions. The last part of the paper will contain suggestions as to how these problems could be overcome in a manner that would secure philosophical coherence, while also providing an account that is better suited to explaining some of the cognitive, emotional and bodily manifestations of affective disorders.
One of the charges laid against the narrative approaches which argue for narrative self-constitution is that of the vicious circle. If a self is a story which someone could tell, and this self is author of its own tale, we are trapped in a circular argument. This article aims to evaluate the different answers to this problem given by the contemporary narrative approaches discussed, which are based on the search for a foundation for this narrative self external to the vicious circle.
Phenomenological resources can be used to develop a nonanthropocentric theory of ecological values that gives rise to an obligation for moral agents. There is logical space in Edmund Husserl'searly theory of value that is inclusive of nonhuman animals and vegetation as members of a life community (Lebensgemeinschaft) possessing ecological characteristics. Within this legal space is a characterization of ecological obligation that is not tied to any single moral law, as it is in deontological ethics and utilitarianism, but founded on the complex value nexus of a given ecological community. Rather than judging the "lightness" or "wrongness" of actions on the law-based and single-rule philosophical theories of normati vity found in modern humanism, this Husserlian inspired account locates a conception of ecological obligation that is immanent to the values operative in a given environing world. This particular experience of ecological obligation arises when the valuation of the goods of individual members of the ecological community conflict with one another and the weighing of these competing goods is appropriately accomplished in light of a communal good.
The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo-Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four-dimensionalist, temporal-parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self-reference and self-experience, on the other, can't be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves—which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity-constituting somewhat under-motivated.
In this paper, we draw on developmental findings to provide a nuanced understanding of background emotions, particularly those in depression. We demonstrate how they reflect our basic proximity (feeling of interpersonal connectedness) to others and defend both a phenomenological and a functional claim. First, we substantiate a conjecture by Fonagy & Target (International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88(4):917–937, 2007) that an important phenomenological aspect of depression is the experiential recreation of the infantile loss of proximity to significant others. Second, we argue that proximity has a particular cognitive function that allows individuals to morph into a cohesive dyadic system able to carry out distributed emotion regulation. We show that elevated levels of psychological suffering connected to depressive background emotions may be explained not only in terms of a psychological loss, but also as the felt inability to enter into dyadic regulatory relations with others—an experiential constraint that decreases the individual’s ability to adapt to demanding situations.
Cognitive theory (CT) is currently the most widely acknowledged framework used to describe the psychological processes in affective disorders like depression. The purpose of this paper is to assess the philosophical assumptions upon which CT rests. It is argued that CT must be revised due to significant flaws in many of these philosophical assumptions. The paper contains suggestions as to how these problems could be overcome in a manner that would secure philosophical accuracy, while also providing an account that is better suited to explaining some of the cognitive, emotional, and bodily manifestations of affective disorders.
Dennett’s contrast between auto- and hetero-phenomenology is badly drawn, primarily because Dennett identifies phenomenologists
as introspective psychologists. The contrast I draw between phenomenology and hetero-phenomenology is not in terms of the
difference between a first-person, introspective perspective and a third-person perspective but rather in terms of the difference
between two third-person accounts – a descriptive phenomenology and an explanatory psychology – both of which take the first-person perspective into account.
There has been much recent philosophical discussion concerning the relationship between emotion and feeling. However, everyday talk of 'feeling' is not restricted to emotional feeling and the current emphasis on emotions has led to a neglect of other kinds of feeling. These include feelings of homeliness, belonging, separation, unfamiliarity, power, control, being part of something, being at one with nature and 'being there'. Such feelings are perhaps not 'emotional'. However, I suggest here that they do form a distinctive group; all of them are ways of 'finding ourselves in the world'. Indeed, our sense that there is a world and that we are 'in it' is, I suggest, constituted by feeling. I offer an analysis of what such 'existential feelings' consist of, showing how they can be both 'bodily feelings' and, at the same time, part of the structure of intentionality.
Against the background of the recent revival of ethics, this handbook aims to show the great fertility of the phenomenological tradition for the study of ethics and moral philosophy by collecting a set of papers on the contributions to ethical thought by major phenomenological thinkers. Twenty-one chapters in the book are articles by experts who explore the thought of the major ethical thinkers in the first two generations of the phenomenological tradition and direct the reader toward the most relevant primary and secondary materials. The final three chapters of the book sketch more recent developments in various parts of the world, and the first three chapters investigate the relations between phenomenology and the dominant normative approaches in contemporary moral philosophy.
This volume collects Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action. Its overarching thesis is that the ordinary concept of causality we employ to render physical processes intelligible should also be employed in describing and explaining human action. In the first of three subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson uses causality to give novel analyses of acting for a reason, of intending, weakness of will, and freedom of will. The second section provides the formal and ontological framework for those analyses. In particular, the logical form and attending ontology of action sentences and causal statements is explored. To uphold the analyses, Davidson urges us to accept the existence of non‐recurrent particulars, events, along with that of persons and other objects. The final section employs this ontology of events to provide an anti‐reductionist answer to the mind/matter debate that Davidson labels ‘anomalous monism’. Events enter causal relations regardless of how we describe them but can, for the sake of different explanatory purposes, be subsumed under mutually irreducible descriptions, claims Davidson. Events qualify as mental if caused and rationalized by reasons, but can be so described only if we subsume them under considerations that are not amenable to codification into strict laws. We abandon those considerations, collectively labelled the ‘constitutive ideal of rationality’, if we want to explain the physical occurrence of those very same events; in which case we have to describe them as governed by strict laws. The impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between them. The mental and the physical would thus disintegrate were it not for causality, which is operative in both realms through a shared ontology of events.
Emotions, I will argue, involve two kinds of feeling: bodily feeling and feeling towards. Both are intentional, in the sense of being directed towards an object. Bodily feelings are directed towards the condition of one's body, although they can reveal truths about the world beyond the bounds of one's body – that, for example, there is something dangerous nearby. Feelings towards are directed towards the object of the emotion – a thing or a person, a state of affairs, an action or an event; such emotional feelings involve a special way of thinking of the object of the emotion, and I draw an analogy with Frank Jackson's well-known knowledge argument to show this. Finally, I try to show that, even if materialism is true, the phenomenology of emotional feelings, as described from a personal perspective, cannot be captured using only the theoretical concepts available for the impersonal stance of the sciences.
Life is not literature
- W D Blattner
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- J Brough
Brough, J. (1991), 'Translator's introduction', in Husserl (1991).
Complicating the emotions' (in Spanish translation by M. Oyata), Areté: Revista de Filosofía
- J J Drummond
Drummond, J.J. (2002b), 'Complicating the emotions' (in Spanish translation by M. Oyata),
Areté: Revista de Filosofía, 14, pp. 175-89.
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Husserl, E. (1952), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie,
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- E Husserl
Husserl, E. (1966), Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs-und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918-1926, ed. M. Fleischer, Husserliana 11 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff).
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Teil: 1929-1935, ed. I. Kern, Husserliana 15 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff).
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Husserl, E. (1976), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie,
erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. K. Schuhmann,
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Husserl, E. (1984), Logische Untersuchungen, zweiter Band, erster Teil: Untersuchungen zur
Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer, Husserliana 19/1 (The Hague:
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Ihre ethische und rechtliche Bedeutung
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