What is the best model of emotion if we are to reach a good understanding of the role of emotion in religious life? I begin by setting out a simple model of emotion, based on a paradigm emotional experience of fear of an immediate threat in one’s environment. I argue that the simple model neglects many of the complexities of our emotional lives, including in particular the complexities that one finds with the intellectual emotions. I then discuss how (...) our dispositions to have these kinds of emotions, which are part of what it is to be a virtuous intellectual enquirer, are subject to vicissitudes, in particular brought about by depression, apathy and other damaging changes to our psychic economy. These changes can flatten affect, so that one’s intellectual life goes cold on one. Finally, I commend the idea of applying this model of intellectual emotion onto religious emotion. (shrink)

This article aims to explain the behaviour of public intellectuals, celebrities, and media audiences in the construction of anti-emotional narratives in the online culture wars. In the investigation of how these narratives are constructed on YouTube, the article focuses on the rhetorical juxtaposition of rationality and emotionality surrounding the viral argument between public intellectual Sam Harris and Hollywood star Ben Affleck on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, uploaded to YouTube. The video is an apt example of the positioning (...) dynamics on YouTube, where an increased integration of media content with its context of reception unsettles the positioning process by which the authority of both intellectuals and celebrities is negotiated and culture war narratives constructed. In conclusion, the article reflects on the relationship between the increasingly affective nature of online communication and the simultaneous emergence of a strict dichotomy between rationality and emotionality in anti-woke culture war narratives. (shrink)

Ben Spiecker; Indoctrination, Intellectual Virtues and Rational Emotions, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 261–266, ht.

Jerome Neu has been one of the most prominent voices in the philosophy of emotions for more than twenty years, that is, before the field was even a field. His Emotions, Thought, and Therapy (1977) was one of its most original and ground-breaking books. Neu is an uncompromising defender of what has been called the cognitive theory of emotions (as am I). But the ambiguity, controversy, and confusions own by the notion of a cognitive theory of emotion (...) is what I would like to focus on here. In so doing I will indicate some of the way sin which my own theory has developed. (shrink)

Is jealousy eliminable? If so, at what cost? What are the connections between pride the sin and the pride insisted on by identity politics? How can one question an individual's understanding of their own happiness or override a society's account of its own rituals? What makes a sexual desire "perverse," or particular sexual relations undesirable or even unthinkable? These and other questions about what sustains and threatens our identity are pursued using the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines. The (...) discussion throughout is informed and motivated by the Spinozist hope that understanding our lives can help change them, can help make us more free. (shrink)

Emotions are important for virtue, both moral and intellectual. This chapter aims to explain the significance of emotion for intellectual virtue along two dimensions. The first claim is that epistemic emotions can motivate intellectual inquiry, and thereby constitute ways of 'being for' intellectual goods. As a result, such emotions can constitute the motivational components of intellectual virtue. The second claim is that other emotions, rather than motivating intellectual inquiry and questioning, (...) instead play a vital role in the regulation and control of intellectual activities. Emotions are usually characterized, in philosophy and psychology, as having a number of components or elements. Thus emotions are held to involve elements of perception, appraisal, feeling, attention, valence, facial expression, and motivation. (shrink)

This study investigated the role of language-related abilities in emotion comprehension among young people with non-specific intellectual developmental disorders (NS-IDDs). Forty children and adolescents with NS-IDDs completed tasks assessing emotion comprehension, receptive vocabulary, verbal reasoning skills, and verbal working memory. Results showed that emotion comprehension was better predicted by comprehension of abstract words and verbal working memory, and that these two predictors were themselves predicted by verbal reasoning skills. These results therefore suggest a link between emotion understanding and verbal (...) reasoning, which could be mediated by abstract vocabulary and verbal working memory. These findings provide insight into the relationships between emotion comprehension and language-related abilities in NS-IDDs. (shrink)

오늘날 민주주의의 위기는 주체적 역량의 위기, 즉 데모스의 위기라고 할 수 있다. 현재의 신자유주의적 질서 속에서, 장기적인 불안정성과 경쟁에 직면한 개인들은 집합적 연대와 타자에 대한 공감 능력을 상실한 것으로 보인다. 이 글에서 언급하는 시민적 집단지성은 공포와 불안 등 집단정념의 원인을 현 사회적 관계에서 발견하고 이를 변화시키려는 지성적이고 합리적인 노력의 일환으로 이해될 수 있다. 그러나 이 글은 민주주의는 그러한 주체들의 지성적 역량을 요청한다는 점을 주장하면서도, 지성을 감성에 대립하는 능력이 아니라 공통의 감각적 틀을 형성할 수 있는 태도로 정의한다. 따라서 이러한 과정은 단순히 (...) 개인의 합리성에 의존하는 것이 아니라, 개인들이 정치적 실천에 참여하여 정치공동체의 공통감각을 형성함으로써 집단정념의 억압적 힘에 저항하는 방식으로 이루어질 수 있다. 따라서 집단지성의 주요 과제는 집단정념을 ‘공통감각’의 형성으로 전환하는 역량을 창출하는 것이다. (shrink)

For cognitivist accounts of aesthetic appreciation, appreciation requires an agent (1) to perceptually respond to the relevant aesthetic features of an object o on good evidential grounds, (2) to have an autonomous grasp of the reasons that make the claim about the aesthetic features of o true by pointing out the connection between non-aesthetic features and the aesthetic features of o, (3) to be able to provide an explanation of why those features contribute to the overall aesthetic value of o. (...) In this framework, aesthetic emotions have traditionally been confined to the level of aesthetic perception (1) and dismissed from the process of reason-giving (2, 3). I argue that this dismissal is due, firstly, to a questionable perceptual reading of the connection between emotional experience and value, and, secondly, to a narrow focus on the basic emotions. My argument will reveal that the non-standard or ‘intellectual’ emotions, the emotions which are in fact most important to appreciation, can play a significant epistemic role in our appreciative practices. They can do this because they (a) help us to deliberately focus our attention and (b) place the appreciator in a state of second-order awareness of their mental states. I conclude the paper by showing how these two epistemic tools (a, b) can help the appreciator to meet the explanatory/justificatory conditions (2) and (3). (shrink)

In the present work, I will review how Aristotle understood the connection between reason and emotion - particularly, angry actions - in order to demonstrate that it is due to the presence of intellectual factors that emotions become ethically relevant and not merely an uncontrolled reaction. Then, I will summarize Aristotle's repeated analogies between reason as the master and anger as the slave to explain their connection. My specific contribution to the topic will be to reverse this analogy (...) and, instead of using it as an example of the _lógos-thymós_ connection, make the latter an example of the _despótes-doûlos_ connection as described in Politics I. If my hypothesis is plausible, establishing the actions and virtues of a slave will help shed light on the type of morality inherent in angry actions. (shrink)

Two intellectual vices seem to always tempt us: arrogance and diffidence. Regarding the former, the world is permeated by dogmatism and table-thumping close-mindedness. From politics, to religion, to simple matters of taste, zealots and ideologues all too often define our disagreements, often making debate and dialogue completely intractable. But to the other extreme, given a world with so much pluralism and heated disagreement, intellectual apathy and a prevailing agnosticism can be simply all too alluring. So the need for (...) intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and a careful, humble commitment to the truth are apparent. In this book, Dr Church and Dr Samuelson explicate a robust and vibrant account of the philosophy and science of this most valuable virtue, and they highlight how it can be best applied and personally developed. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Emotions in the service of cognition Cognitive emotions.

In this article I will consider how loss of affect in our intellectual lives, through depression for example, can be as debilitating as loss of affect elsewhere in our lives. This will involve showing that there are such things as intellectual emotions, that their role in intellectual activity is not merely as an aid to the intellect, and that loss of affect changes not only one’s motivations, but also one’s overall evaluative take on the world.

John Cottingham, a contemporary English philosopher, believes that it is necessary to pay attention to the emotional aspect of faith in two ways: (1) the impact of the emotional aspect in human conversion and explanation of the problem of evil, and (2) attention to the language of religion and its function in philosophical issues. From his point of view, conversion is not a forced process but achieved through internal acceptance. This acceptance is not realized just by listening to rational arguments, (...) but it is a response from all the intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual aspects of a person. In Cottingham’s view, the problem of evil needs an emotional explanation that considers the world based on Divine providence and God’s love. He also believes that although religious beliefs have propositional and cognitive content, such content is expressed in layers of figurative and literary metaphors in the form of symbolic language. The discovery and extraction of content from these layers need a unique method, so, the literal analysis of these phrases results in misunderstanding. Paying attention to the emotional aspect of human conversion is a valuable point, but weakening the rational aspect in this field is not in favor of religion, and this is one of the important weaknesses of Cottingham's thought. Regarding the emotional explanation of the problem of evil, generalizing it to all human beings -especially the prophets- is not true. Also, not all religious content can be understood by symbolic language, rather, religion consists of different propositions, many of which have a literal meaning. (shrink)

The word “emotion” has named a psychological category and a subject for systematic enquiry only since the 19th century. Before then, relevant mental states were categorised variously as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” The word “emotion” has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French émotion, meaning a physical disturbance. It came into much wider use in 18th-century English, often to refer to mental experiences, becoming a fully fledged theoretical term in the following century, (...) especially through the influence of two Scottish philosopher-physicians, Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. This article relates this intellectual and semantic history to contemporary debates about the usefulness and meaning of “emotion” as a scientific term. (shrink)

This volume brings together philosophical essays on emotions by eleven leading thinkers in the field. The essays cover a variety of topics that relate emotions to humor, opera, theater, justice, war, death, our intellectual life, authenticity, personal identity, self-knowledge, and science.

Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure takes sociology in a new direction. It examines key aspects of social structure by using a fresh understanding of emotions categories. Through that synthesis emerge new perspectives on rationality, class structure, social action, conformity, basic rights, and social change. As well as giving an innovative view of social processes, J. M. Barbalet's study also reveals unappreciated aspects of emotions by considering fear, resentment, vengefulness, shame, and confidence in the context of social structure. (...) While much has been written on the social consequences of excessive or pathological emotions, this book demonstrates the centrality of emotions to routine operations of social interaction. Dr Barbalet also re-evaluates the nature of social theory, for once the importance of emotions to social processes becomes clear, the intellectual constitution of sociology, and therefore its history, must be rethought. (shrink)

The following text is the first ever translation into English of a writing by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (*1928). In it, Schmitz outlines and defends a non-mentalistic view of emotions as phenomena in interpersonal space in conjunction with a theory of the felt body’s constitutive involvement in human experience. In the first part of the text, Schmitz gives an overview covering some central pieces of his theory as developed, for the most part, in his massive System of Philosophy, published (...) in German in a series of volumes between 1964 and 1980. Schmitz’s System is centred on the claim that the contemporary view of the human subject is the result of a consequential historical process: A reductionist and ‘introjectionist’ objectification of lived experience culminating in the ‘invention’ of the mind (or ‘soul’) as a private, inner realm of subjective experience and in a corresponding ‘grinding down’ of the world of lived experienced to a meagre, value-neutral ‘objective reality’. To counter this intellectualist trend, Schmitz puts to use his approach to phenomenology with the aim of regaining a sensibility for the nuanced realities of lived experience—hoping to make up for what was lost during the development of Western intellectual culture. Since both this text and the overall style of Schmitz’s philosophising are in several ways unusual for a contemporary readership, a brief introduction is provided by philosophers Jan Slaby and Rudolf Owen Müllan, the latter of whom translated Schmitz’s text into English. The introduction emphasises aspects of Schmitz’s philosophy that are likely to be of relevance to contemporary scholars of phenomenological philosophy and to its potential applications in science and society. (shrink)

This essay develops a comparison between the Stoic and Daoist theories of emotions in order to provide a new interpretation of the emotional life of the wise person according to the Daoist classic Zhuangzi 莊子, and to shed light on larger divergences between the Greco-Roman and Chinese intellectual traditions. The core argument is that both Zhuangzi and the Stoics believed that there is a peculiar kind of emotional responses that emerge by themselves and are therefore wholly natural, since (...) they do not involve evaluative judgment and desire, and distinguished them sharply from emotions, or “passions,” that arise as a result of mistaken evaluative judgments and artificial additions to things as they are, as well as to self-emerging feelings themselves. It is argued that while both Zhuangzi and the Stoics acknowledged the natural and therefore normative status of self-emerging feelings, Zhuangzi assessed them more favorably than the Stoics. The final part of the essay suggests that this divergence can be ultimately traced to different dichotomies that structured the debates in both traditions: rational versus non-rational in the Greco-Roman tradition, and artificial versus natural in the Chinese. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to understand the intellectual origins of Albert Ellis' Rational Psychotherapy (now known as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy). In his therapeutic practice Ellis used a 'lumper' argument to replace the focus of change in psychoanalysis: not the lengthy uncovering and reworking of the individual's personal history, but the demands in self-talk through which the client is currently dis turbed. In constructing around this the persuasive (rhetorical) package that became his therapy, Ellis drew on a number (...) of popular intellectual movements, operationalism, General Semantics, the holistic theory of emotion, cognitive psychology, and psychoanalysis itself. (shrink)

Generally known for its advanced, often radical suggestions of reform in politics, religion, morality, and human behavior, the Greek Enlightenment has long been studied in terms of its doctrines and theories. To understand the environment in which the new ideas flourished and their impact, Friedrich Solmsen explores the novel intellectual methods that developed during the period. A variety of new modes of thought was introduced at this time or, if known before, was applied with delight in experimentation. Among those (...) that Friedrich Solmsen examines are new methods of argumentation: persuasion aimed at the control of man's emotions; Utopian speculation; experiments with language; and the emergence of a secular psychology and its use in the reconstruction of human motives and historical events. Concentrating on the work of nonphilosophical authors such as the historian Thucydides and the tragedian Euripides, the author presents a portrait of a restless and spirited age engaged in an adventure of reason. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Why is it that we respond emotionally to plays, movies, and novels and feel moved by characters and situations that we know do not exist? This question, which constitutes the kernel of the debate on »the paradox of fiction«, speaks to the perennial themes of philosophy, and remains of interest to this day. But does this question entail a paradox? A significant group of analytic philosophers have indeed thought so. Since the publication of Colin Radford's celebrated paper »How Can We (...) Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?« (1975), the number of proposals to solve, explain, reformulate, dismiss or even revitalize this apparent paradox has continued to proliferate. In line with recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, in this paper I will argue against the sustainability of the paradox, claiming that the only reasonable way to continue our discussions about it consists in using it as a heuristic tool to shed light on problems regarding our involvement with fiction. Against this background, I will then focus on one of the problems related to how our emotional responses to fiction contribute to our appreciation of it. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first section shows the parallel evolution of the paradox of fiction and the analytic philosophy of emotion. Here I claim that, although the paradox is epistemically flawed, since one of its premises is rooted in a limited view on the emotions typical of early cognitiv-ism, the discussions it provokes are still epistemically useful. As Robert Stecker (2011, 295), among others, has pointed out, the paradox was formulated during the heyday of cognitive theories of the emotions in which emotion necessarily requires belief. Today, however, only few authors would endorse this premise. If emotion does not always require belief (as the majority of authors in the contemporary debate admit), let alone belief about the existence of the object towards which it is directed, then there is no reason to speak of a paradox. From this first conclusion, however, it does not follow that the paradox is completely without use from the epistemic point of view. A glimpse at the topics touched on during the discussions about how to solve, reformulate, or negate the paradox reveals their value in shedding light on the interrelation between emotion and fiction. The second section elaborates a phenomenologically inspired cognitive account of the emotions by focusing on their cognitive bases, their influence on Emotion in the Appreciation of Fiction 205 cognitions, and their cognitive function. In this model, emotions are responsible for indicating values, for showing what matters to us, and for being appropriate to their objects. My claim is that this view applies not only to reality, but also to our involvement with fiction. In the final section I draw on this account to focus on one kind of appreciation of fiction which necessarily requires our emotional involvement. Following an idea put forward by Susan Feagin (1996, 1), I employ the concept of »appre-ciation« to refer to a set of abilities exercised with the aim of extracting value from the work. There is a long tradition in aesthetics that condemns any focus on the emotions in the appreciation of art and fiction, and defends the necessity of aesthetic appreciation without emotional influence. To refer to this negative attitude towards the emotions, I will borrow an expression coined by Susan Feagin (2013, 636), who refers to »the intellectualized view of appreciation«. Against this widespread view, I will argue that some aspects of the fiction can only be appreciated with the help of our emotions. The cognitive approach developed in the previous section can explain how the emotions might in fact play a significant role in the appreciation of art and fiction. Attention will be paid to three activities involved in appreciation, for all of which emotion is crucial: processing relevant information about the fictional world, understanding aspects of it, and becoming acquainted with the values it presents. My aim here is to argue that there are particular aspects of the fictional world that can only be appreciated if recipients have the appropriate emotions. (shrink)

Positive emotions are highly valued and frequently sought. Beyond just being pleasant, however, positive emotions may also lead to long-term benefits in important domains, including work, physical health, and interpersonal relationships. Research thus far has focused on the broader functions of positive emotions. According to the broaden-and-build theory, positive emotions expand people’s thought–action repertoires and allow them to build psychological, intellectual, and social resources. New evidence suggests that positive emotions—particularly gratitude—may also play a role (...) in motivating individuals to engage in positive behaviors leading to self-improvement. We propose and offer supportive evidence that expressing gratitude leads people to muster effort to improve themselves via increases in connectedness, elevation, humility, and specific negative states including indebtedness. (shrink)

In this article, I claim that emotions, as we understand the term today, have a more prominent role in the moral life described by Thomas Aquinas than has been traditionally thought. First, clarity is needed about what exactly the emotions are in Aquinas. Second, clarity is needed about true virtue: specifically, about the relationship of acquired virtue to infused, supernatural virtues. Given a fuller understanding of both these things, I claim that emotions are not only auxiliary to (...) the life of flourishing, specifically with regard to moral motivation and morally relevant knowledge. In fact, at the highest stage of moral development, emotions have a more prominent role than at lower stages. Pointing this out helps us to resist over-intellectualizing interpretations of Aquinas’s moral philosophy. (shrink)

Supporters of the Evaluative Judgment Theories of Emotion mainly explore emotions from the perspective of cognitive evaluation and advocate that emotions are evaluative judgments. The Perceptual Theories of Emotion have made some modifications to the evaluative judgment of emotions, attempting to propose better theories. The Perceptual Theories of Emotion advocate verifying the similarities between emotions and perceptions through analogical reasoning. However, the Perceptual Theories of Emotion also have their problems. Compared to the Evaluative Judgment Theories of (...) Emotion and the Perceptual Theories of Emotion, the Embodied Emotion Theory has significant advantages, mainly reflected in avoiding the drawbacks of over-intellectualize emotions by evaluative judgments; infants and animals can also understand emotions through non-conceptualized ways of self-awareness and understanding of social rules and norms; the core relational property of emotions revealed in the embodied emotion theory demonstrates the action orientation of emotions, connects the organism’s body and external environment, and integrates both biological and social aspects, further clarifying the complexity and diversity of emotions. (shrink)

The emotions play a crucial role in our apprehension of meaning, value, or significance — and their felt quality is intimately related to the sort of awareness they provide. This is exemplified most clearly by cases in which dispassionate cognition is cognitively insufficient, because we need to be emotionally agitated in order to grasp that something is true. In this type of affective experience, it is through a feeling of being moved that we recognize or apprehend that something is (...) the case. And that is why our emotions are epistemically indispensable: namely, because they give us access to significant truths. In this essay, I explain how the phenomenally felt character of an emotion is intimately linked with its intentionality. Intellectual activity divorced from affective feeling is profoundly lacking — not only in its qualitative feel, but also in its epistemic import, or its ability to inform us about matters of significance. A better appreciation of how the living body is involved in affective experience should help us to understand the distinctive kind of embodied cognition that emotional responses involve. It also ought to resolve confusions about phobic responses and other “recalcitrant” emotions, which are not divorced from cognition as many have claimed. (shrink)

In this article, I provide an analysis of the widespread, intellectually fascinating, and existentially challenging phenomenon of self-reflexive anxiety in which we feel threatened by what or who we are (or have been or will become). I focus on those cases in which we take an event or action whose possible occurrence we attribute to ourselves to be expressive or constitutive of our identity. As I argue, depending on the kind of event we are dealing with, our descriptive self-conception, our (...) self-esteem, or our evaluative self-conception are at stake. In all cases, we are confronted with a dialectic between self and other, activity and passivity inherent in our personhood or even in our agency. I demonstrate how my analysis is not only of intrinsic value, but it can also help us in achieving a better understanding of self-reflexive emotions in general and ‘traditional’ self-reflexive emotions like shame in particular. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.3 (2004) 73-90 [Access article in PDF] Intellectual Friendship in Architectural Education Yonca Hurol Introduction Limits are causes of repression, and it is usually accepted that repression affects creativity. There are two different approaches to the effects of limits on creativity. According to the first approach, creativity increases parallel to the increase of limits and repression. According to the second approach, any artificial (...) increase of limits produces passionate "locked in" mechanisms. A decrease of limits is necessary for an increase in creativity. Since it is never possible to eliminate some "natural" limits, it is not necessary to create some other "artificial" ones by introducing authoritarian attitudes. Creativity should be directed only toward the natural problems and limits.The aim of this essay is to develop a theoretical base for the following philosophical statement: "Decreasing authoritarian limits causes an increase in creativity in architectural design education." The concepts in such a philosophical statement must be operationalized in order to be applied to the practice of architectural education. The concepts of "limits" and "creativity" should be replaced with some other concepts (variables) which are observable so that they can be applied to the cases in practice.The essay is based on the poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically their understanding of the relation betweenthe body and the mind;1 even though other thinkers have related emotion and rationality, for example, Fredrich Nietzsche's nomadic thought, Gaston Bachelard's "childhood dreams," and Antonin Artaud's "theatre of cruelty."2 In this essay, Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is used more intensively over that of others, because of the clarity of the concepts it contains.The concept of creativity is operationalized by replacing it with the variable of the "design psychology of the student" which can, in turn, be replaced by the constants of "passionate mechanism" and "desire machine." [End Page 73] These psychological states and the their architectural indications are analyzed in the first section. The concept of limits is replaced by the "limiting role of the studio teacher," instead of the natural limits in architecture such aseconomy and technology. This role has two constants: the "role of the authority figure" and the "role of the intellectual friend."In architectural design courses students design buildings which combine the demands of strength, usefulness, and aesthetics. This process relates rationality (mind) to irrationality (body/feelings). Students learn about the rational aspects of architecture in their own ways, while designing the irrational aspects of their projects. They make contact with the studio teachers whenever they need advice or supportive criticism. This is a one-on-one relationship. The early approaches to design education depend on authoritarian "correction," while the new models propose "objective criticism."However, none of these concepts cover the existing power relations between teachers and students. Some teachers believe in the positive role of authority, while others do not. A conflict arises between the authority figures, and the friendly teachers.The formation of an intellectual friendship between students and teachers of architecture is not new. It has existed since postmodernism was first founded in architecture with the differing viewpoints about architecture. Sinan Omacan, was a student of architecture when he described the changing demands of education as follows: School is not simply a structure that is abstract. It is not only an institution of discipline that programs, deals with quantities, and evaluates. The name of it, the building of it, and the people in it, always give it a certain personality, and the strongest part of this story can only start with the relationship between these personalities. While this medium of personal relationships forms an unpredictable and unavoidable situation for the institution, it becomes exactly the right thing that students are looking for, because the most important aspect for students in a school is the possibility created by unprogrammed time and unplanned space.3This essay provides a theoretical explanation of these existing categories for the first time. The concepts which are analyzed in the first two parts are used as variables for comparative research. The third part contains comparative... (shrink)

Descartes argued that the passions of the soul were immediately felt in the body, as the animal spirits, affected by the movement of the pineal gland, spread through the body. In Leibniz the effect of emotions in the body is a different question as he did not allow the direct interaction between the mind and the body, although maintaining a psychophysical parallelism between them. -/- In general, he avoids discussing emotions in bodily terms, saying that general inclinations, passions, (...) pleasures and pains belong only to the mind or to the soul (NE II, xxi, §72). He is also keen to point out that our passions derive mostly from our bodies. However, like Spinoza (Ethics III, prop. XI, Scholium) he thought that some emotions such as joy can produce pleasures which can be described also in bodily terms. For example, in a short memoir Felicity he says that music can be a pleasure for the ears and symmetry can be a pleasure for the eyes. These more intellectual emotions are actions in the sense that they represent perfection emanating from their source, the absolutely perfect being, that is, God. The feeling of perfection may produce a state of well-being which concerns both the soul and the body. -/- In my paper I will trace instances of Leibniz’s remarks on how these kind of emotions affect the body. I will also discuss the different ways the body gives rise to passions in the soul. My primary source is Nouveaux essais, book II, chapter xx and xxi, but I will also discuss various other writings by Leibniz. (shrink)

Emotions are said to be moral, as opposed to non- moral, in virtue of their objects. They are also said to be moral, for example morally good, as opposed to immoral, for example morally bad or evil, in virtue of their objects, nature, motives, functions or effects. The definition and content of moral matters are even more contested and contestable than the nature of emotions and of other affective phenomena. At the very least we should distinguish moral norms, (...) moral obligations, moral right and wrong, moral values and moral virtues. And different accounts of morals and of morality understand norms, values and virtues and their interrelations in different ways. For example, such accounts disagree about the relation between moral and non- moral oughts, the relation between moral and non- moral values, and the relation between moral and intellectual virtues ; and about the moral weight to be attached to self-regarding attitudes and behaviour and other-regarding attitudes and behaviour. Thus we may expect the range of putative moral emotions to display a bewildering variety. (shrink)

Winner of the Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize.For cognitivist accounts of aesthetic appreciation, appreciation requires an agent (1) to perceptually respond to the relevant aesthetic features of an object o on good evidential grounds, (2) to have an autonomous grasp of the reasons that make the claim about the aesthetic features of o true by pointing out the connection between non-aesthetic features and the aesthetic features of o, (3) to be able to provide an explanation of why those features contribute (...) to the overall aesthetic value of o. In this framework, aesthetic emotions have traditionally been confined to the level of aesthetic perception (1) and dismissed from the process of reason-giving (2, 3). I argue that this dismissal is due, firstly, to a questionable perceptual reading of the connection between emotional experience and value, and, secondly, to a narrow focus on the basic emotions. My argument will reveal that the non-standard or ‘intellectual’ emotions, the emotions which are in fact most important to appreciation, can play a significant epistemic role in our appreciative practices. They can do this because they (a) help us to deliberately focus our attention and (b) place the appreciator in a state of second-order awareness of their mental states. I conclude the paper by showing how these two epistemic tools (a, b) can help the appreciator to meet the explanatory/justificatory conditions (2) and (3). (shrink)

Intellectual humility (IH) is often conceived as the recognition of, and appropriate response to, your own intellectual limitations. As far as we are aware, only a handful of studies look at interventions to increase IH – e.g. through journalling – and no study so far explores the extent to which having high or low IH can be predicted. This paper uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to develop a predictive model for IH and identify top terms (...) and features that indicate degrees of IH. We trained our classifier on the dataset from an existing psychological study on IH, where participants were asked to journal their experiences with handling social conflicts over 30 days. We used Logistic Regression (LR) to train a classifier and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionaries for feature selection, picking out a range of word categories relevant to interpersonal relationships. Our results show that people who differ on IH do in fact systematically express themselves in different ways, including through expression of emotions (i.e., positive, negative, and specifically anger, anxiety, sadness, as well as the use of swear words), use of pronouns (i.e., first person, second person, and third person) and time orientation (i.e., past, present, and future tenses). We discuss the importance of these findings for IH and the value of using such techniques for similar psychological studies, as well as some ethical concerns and limitations with the use of such semi-automated classifications. (shrink)

In this bold book, Samuel Wright traces a “new history for Sanskrit logic” via a deep and comprehensive study of almost 5,000 little-known Sanskrit manuscripts. His thesis is that the ear...

The long-standing debate between cognitive and feeling theories of emotion stems, in part, from the assumption that cognition and thought are abstract, intellectual, disembodied processes, and that bodily feelings are non-intentional and have no representational content. Working with this assumption has led many emotions theorists to neglect the way in which emotions are simultaneously bodily and cognitive-evaluative. Even hybrid theories, such as those set forth by Prinz and Barlassina and Newen, fail to account fully for how the (...) cognitive and bodily elements of emotion are integrated. As a result, such accounts are unable to provide an adequate characterization of the intentionality or phenomenology of emotions. I will argue that an enactive account of emotions, one which characterizes them as a way of engaging with and making sense of one’s surroundings, can help us to overcome this false dichotomy between cognitive and body elements. What I call ‘ affective framing’ is at the core of emotional experience. It is the way in which we engage with and appraise our surroundings in and through bodily feelings of caring, so that the bodily and cognitive elements of emotion necessarily are fused. The notion of affective framing not only helps to clarify the relationship between bodily and cognitive elements of emotion, but also offers a useful way to make sense of both the intentional directedness and phenomenal character of emotional experience. (shrink)

The historical-cultural theory of Intellectual Disability overcompensation/compensation is referenced in several studies, but little empirical evidence is presented to corroborate this thesis. In this work, 13 current studies were analysed about the behavioural profile of people with Down syndrome, a case of neurobiological ID, published in the last 15 years, in order to verify the possibility of dialogue with the theorizing about compensation. Despite contributing to an up to date understanding of DS, the results point to similarities between different (...) scientific traditions allowing discussions regarding methodologies, data interpretation, language comprehension, and the impact of the studies for school inclusion and the development of people with ID/DS. It is concluded that the theorization in question is pertinent to developmental studies, dialogues with other perspectives and that its progress depends on investigations directed to the affective motivators/emotions of the person with ID/DS by means of more interpretative methodologies. Keywords: Down syndrome, compensation, behavioural profile, Intellectual Disabilities Development. (shrink)

Cet article analyse la connexion entre genre et émotions à travers un corpus d’environ cent articles publiés dans les premières rubriques entièrement dédiées à la « question féminine » dans des journaux soudanais entre 1950 et 1956, juste avant l’indépendance du Soudan (1956). Les auteurs, à la fois hommes et femmes, cherchent à brosser un portrait de la « femme nouvelle », « moderne et heureuse », et la contrastent avec celle « arriérée », prise au piège des « coutumes (...) obsolètes ». Ces portraits contiennent des suggestions plus ou moins voilées à propos du régime émotionnel que la « femme moderne » devrait adopter. Cet article se propose de tracer la généalogie de ces régimes émotionnels genrés et des stratégies narratives contradictoires déployées pour « émouvoir » le public de lecteurs. (shrink)

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian’s intellectual-biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy’s concepts (...) of “emotive,” “emotional regime,” and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein’s “emotional community” and on Stearns’s “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian’s ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women’s history” in the 1970s. (shrink)

A recent skeptical challenge denies deliberation is essential to virtuous agency: what looks like genuine deliberation is just a post hoc rationalization of a decision already made by automatic mechanisms (Haidt 2001; Doris 2015). Annas’s account of virtue seems well-equipped to respond: by modeling virtue on skills, she can agree that virtuous actions are deliberation-free while insisting that their development requires significant thought. But Annas’s proposal is flawed: it over-intellectualizes deliberation’s developmental role and under-intellectualizes its significance once virtue is acquired. (...) Doing better requires paying attention to a distinctive form of anxiety—one that functions to engage deliberation in the face of decisions that automatic mechanisms alone cannot resolve. (shrink)

Three kinds of emotional consciousness are distinguished in this article: feeling awareness, intellectual awareness, and bare awareness. All are important to three moral properties that emotions may have: epistemic, practical, and relational. The bulk of this article is devoted to the third dimension of moral value, that emotions are constitutive of personal relationships such as friendship, enmity, good and bad parenthood, and collegiality. The conception of emotions as concern-based construals (Roberts, 2003) is put to work to (...) explain how felt and intellectually conscious emotions are constitutive of the qualities of such relationships. The relational value of emotions interacts with their epistemic and practical values. (shrink)

Mengzi maintained that both benevolence (ren 仁) and rightness (yi 義) are naturally-given in human nature. This view has occupied a dominant place in Confucian intellectual history. In Mencius 6A, Mengzi's interlocutor, Gaozi, contests this view, arguing that rightness is determined by (doing what is fitting, in line with) external circumstances. I discuss here some passages from the excavated Guodian texts, which lend weight to Gaozi's view. The texts reveal nuanced considerations of relational proximity and its limits, setting up (...) requirements for moral action in scenarios where relational ties do not play a motivational role. I set out yi's complexity in these discussions, highlighting its implications for (i) the nei-wai debate; (ii) the notion of yi as "rightness," or doing the right thing; and (iii) how we can understand the connection between virtue and right action in these early Confucian debates. This material from the excavated texts not only provides new perspectives on a longstanding investigation of human nature and morality, it also challenges prevailing views on Warring States Confucian intellectual history. In the well-known debate between Mengzi and Gaozi in Mencius 6A, Mengzi maintained that both ren and yi are naturally-given 1 in human nature. The figure 1 To say that ren and yi are naturally-given is not to say that they are fully-developed from the start. I use the phrase "naturally-given" throughout the paper to indicate where a particular capacity or resource (ren or yi) may be found, rather than its final polished state. (shrink)

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, (...) and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)