What are 'emotions'? This book offers a balanced survey of facts and theory.

This article shows the philosophical kinship between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on the subject of love. Though the two major 18th century thinkers are not traditionally brought into conversation with each other, Wollstonecraft and Smith share deep moral concerns about the emerging commercial society. As the new middle class continues to grow along with commerce, vanity becomes an ever more common vice among its members. But a vain person is preoccupied with appearance, status, and flattery—things that get in the (...) way of what Smith and Wollstonecraft regard as the deep human connection they variously describe as love, sympathy, and esteem. Commercial society encourages inequality, Smith argues, and Wollstonecraft points out that this inequality is particularly obvious in the relationships between men and women. Men are vain about their wealth, power and status; women about their appearance. Added to this is the fact that most middle class women are both uneducated and encouraged by the conduct literature of their day to be sentimental and irrational. The combined economic and moral considerations of Wollstonecraft and Smith show that there is very little room for love in commercial society as they conceived it. (shrink)

Why does the world look to us as it does? As Nico Orlandi argues, it is simply because of how the world is. This answer emerges from understanding vision as situated in a structured environment, and it contrasts with the view that visual perception involves an inference.

This paper begins from one of the most commonly found questions in phenomenology, “What is Phenomenlogy?”, to argue that phenomenology is a trans-disciplinary approach to engaging with the products of human culture. This approach is characterized by paying particular attention to the distinction between facticity and transcendence within “lived experience” so as to help us better articulate and evaluate the promises that animate every human institution. Such a task necessarily requires inter-disciplinary input and helps us engage in our lives—in our (...) shared cultural life—differently. (shrink)

There is a certain excitement in vision science concerning the idea of applying the tools of bayesian decision theory to explain our perceptual capacities. Bayesian models are thought to be needed to explain how the inverse problem of perception is solved, and to rescue a certain constructivist and Kantian way of understanding the perceptual process. Anticlimactically, I argue both that bayesian outlooks do not constitute good solutions to the inverse problem, and that they are not constructivist in nature. In explaining (...) how visual systems derive a single percept from underdetermined stimulation, orthodox versions of bayesian accounts encounter a problem. The problem shows that such accounts need to be grounded in Natural Scene Statistics (NSS), an approach that takes seriously the Gibsonian insight that studying perception involves studying the statistical regularities of the environment in which we are situated. Additionally, I argue that bayesian frameworks postulate structures that hardly rescue a constructivist way of understanding perception. Except for percepts, the posits of bayesian theory are not representational in nature. bayesian perceptual inferences are not genuine inferences. They are biased processes that operate over nonrepresentational states. (shrink)

Knowledge Societies offers both a critical examination of existing social theory, and a new synthesis of social theory with the actual study of knowledge relations in advanced economies. Some of the elements explored are scientization: the penetration not only of production but of most social action by scientific knowledge; the transformation of access to knowledge through higher education; the growth of experts (managers, accountants, advisors, and counselors) and of corresponding institutions based on the deployment of specialized knowledge; and a shift (...) in the nature of societal conflict from struggles about income and property to claims and conflicts about generalized human needs. Nico Stehr's argument amply demonstrates not only that all social theories now need to take into account the changing nature of social relations around knowledge, but also the parameters within which this analysis should take place. This book is essential reading for all those interested in social theory, sociology of knowledge and science, and the general issue of knowledge in the late 20th century. (shrink)

Shawn Loht's ground-breaking Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017) offers a detailed account of film experience as rooted in Martin Heidegger's existential structure of Dasein. Adapting Being and Time for a phenomenology of cinematic experience, Loht accurately describes how various existential structures of Dasein are “fostered” by the projected world of film: in Loht's account, being-in-the-world is extended in the film experience. Loht's project offers fertile ground for developing the phenomenological basis of film experience. Yet, (...) Loht anchors this account of film experience primarily in Heidegger's early philosophy; this leaves his adaptation not without challenges. First, if the structure of film experience is mapped too closely onto the notion of Dasein projecting itself into the filmworld, this theory presents the risk of taking the early Heidegger's “hands-on” approach too literally. Moreover, in its concern for Dasein's extensions into the world of film, Phenomenology of Film says little about the distinctly mediated character of filmworlds; this leaves ambiguous where the film experience effectively takes place. (shrink)

This article attempts to clarify the commitments of a predictive coding approach to perception. After summarizing predictive coding theory, the article addresses two questions. Is a predictive coding perceptual system also a Bayesian system? Is it a Kantian system? The article shows that the answer to these questions is negative.

Film theory and its emphasis on political and ideological readings of films dominated much of cinema studies in the '70s and '80s. Since then, in response to what some view as the shortcomings of theoretical approaches, a variety of other methods have emerged or reemerged. In many ways, as Nico Baumbach argues, "Anti-Grand Theory" has won the day but its victory is, in part, based on misreadings or simplifications of '70s film theory. In particular, Baumbach views contemporary critical approaches (...) to film as abandoning the crucial and productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. Baumbach does not advocate a return to the orthodoxies of the seventies but rather reads the work of Ranciere, Badiou, and Agamben as providing new ways of thinking about the history of film theory and how film creates its own way of thinking about politics. Moreover, at a time when digital technologies are asking us to think of film and the film image in new ways, the work of these thinkers once again asks, "What is Cinema?" but in a more expansive sense that can help us account for transformations in how moving images are produced, distributed, and exhibited in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Norms are essential in our society: they dictate how individuals should behave and interact within a community. They can be written down in laws or other written sources. Interpretations often differ; this is where formalisations offer a solution. They express an interpretation of a source of norms in a transparent manner. However, creating these interpretations is labour intensive. Natural language processing techniques can support this process. Previous work showed the potential of transformer-based models for Dutch law texts. In this paper, (...) we (1) introduce a dataset of 2335 English sentences annotated with legal semantic roles conform the Flint framework; (2) fine-tune a collection of language models on this dataset, and (3) query two non-fine-tuned generative large language models (LLMs). This allows us to compare performance of fine-tuned domain-specific, task-specific, and general language models with non-fine-tuned generative LLMs. The results show that models fine-tuned on our dataset have the best performance (accuracy around 0.88). Furthermore, domain-specific models perform better than general models, indicating that domain knowledge is of added value for this task. Finally, different methods of querying LLMs perform unsatisfactorily, with maximum accuracy scores around 0.6. This indicates that for specific tasks, such as this adaptation of semantic role labelling, the process of annotating data and fine-tuning a smaller language model is preferred over querying a generative LLM, especially when domain-specific models are available. (shrink)

Law is usually understood as an orderly, coherent system, but this volume shows that it is often better understood as an entangled web. Bringing together eminent contributors from law, political science, sociology, anthropology, history and political theory, it also suggests that entanglement has been characteristic of law for much of its history. The book shifts the focus to the ways in which actors create connections and distance between different legalities in domestic, transnational and international law. It examines a wide range (...) of issue areas, from the relationship of state and indigenous orders to the regulation of global financial markets, from corporate social responsibility to struggles over human rights. The book uses these empirical insights to inform new theoretical approaches to law, and by placing the entanglements between norms from different origins at the centre of the study of law, it opens up new avenues for future legal research. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Emotion experience reflects some of the outcomes of the mostly nonconscious processes that compose emotions. In my view, the major processes are appraisal, affect, action readiness, and autonomic arousal. The phenomenology of emotion experience varies according to mode of consciousness (nonreflective or reflective consciousness), and to direction and mode of attention. As a result, emotion experience may be either ineffable or articulate with respect to any or all of the underlying processes. In addition, emotion experience reflects the degree to which (...) the emotion processes control perception, thought, action and bodily arousal. (shrink)

As its title suggests, this anthology is a collection of papers presented at a conference on feelings and emotions held in Amsterdam in 2001. One of the symposium’s main goals was to draw some of the most prominent researchers in emotion research together and provide a multi-disciplinary ‘snap shot’ of the state of the art at the turn of the century. In that respect it is truly a cognitive science success story. There are articles from a wide range of fields, (...) encompassing, e.g., philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Another.. (shrink)

A naturalistic account of the strengths and limitations of cladistic practice is offered. The success of cladistics is claimed to be largely rooted in the parsimony-implementing congruence test. Cladists may use the congruence test to iteratively refine assessments of homology, and thereby increase the odds of reliable phylogenetic inference under parsimony. This explanation challenges alternative views which tend to ignore the effects of parsimony on the process of character individuation in systematics. In a related theme, the concept of homeostatic property (...) cluster natural kinds is used to explain why cladistics is well suited to provide a traditional, verbal reference system for the evolutionary properties of species and clades. The advantages of more explicitly probabilistic approaches to phylogenetic inference appear to manifest themselves in situations where evolutionary homeostasis has for the most part broken down, and predictive classifications are no longer possible. (shrink)

Cette étude fournit une analyse comparative des politiques liées à la position des personnes handicapées sur le marché du travail en Finlande et en Italie, deux pays où l’écart d’emploi entre les personnes handicapées et non handicapées est relativement faible. Cette étude examine les politiques visant à améliorer la position des personnes handicapées sur le marché du travail et se base sur la littérature existante et des entretiens avec des experts. L’analyse comparative montre que ces deux pays emploient des approches (...) politiques différentes. En Finlande, les compensations sont relativement élevées et les politiques mettent l’accent sur la prévention. Cependant, les mesures d’activation pour les bénéficiaires de compensations d’invalidité font défaut. En Italie, les politiques se concentrent sur l’activation. La loi italienne sur les quotas oblige les entreprises à embaucher des personnes handicapées. En outre, les coopératives sociales offrent des emplois aux personnes handicapées. Les résultats suggèrent que les efforts visant à garantir des mesures de compensation et d’activation adéquates, combinés à des processus créés pour construire une société inclusive, peuvent contribuer à améliorer la situation du marché du travail pour les personnes handicapées. (shrink)

This article sets out to replace the concept of basic emotions with the notion of “ur-emotions,” the functionally central underlying processes of action readiness, which are not emotions at all. We propose that what is basic and universal in emotions are not multicomponential syndromes, but states of action readiness, themselves variants of motive states to relate or not relate with the world and with oneself. Unlike emotions, ur-emotions can be held to be universal and biologically based.

Examines the conflict between modern and postmodern theories in sociology and attempts to bridge the divide between them.

Living in the digital world, we have little choice but to share our personal data with big tech companies. These companies use our data to direct our attention so that they can make money from advertising. In a so-called surveillance society, we stand in an asymmetrical power relationship to these companies (and sometimes governments) and have little to no control over what happens to our data. Our dependence on these asymmetrical relationships is increasing as “big tech” uses the information it (...) gathers about us to cater to our personal habits and desires. (shrink)

the question of objectivity in legal interpretation has emerged in recent years as an imprtant topic in contemporary jurisprudence. This book addresses the issue of how and in what sense legal interpretation can be objective. The author supports the possibility of objectivity in law and spells out the content of objectivity involved. He then provides a defence against the classical, as well as less well-known, objections to the possibility of objectivity in legal interpretation. The discussion is thoroughly grounded in metaphysics, (...) which sets the book apart from other similar discussions in jurisprudence. Stavropoulos identifies an important source of resistance to the acceptance of the possibility of objectivity in legal interpretation; a widely held but faulty semantic. He then develops an alternative semantic framework, drawing on influential theories in contemporary philosophy. The book shows that objectivism is a natural, common sensical position, and rejects the currently popular notion that objectivism requires extravagant or bizarre metaphysics. Furthermore, the discussion presents the opportunity to re-interpret major debates in jurisprudence and to show how influential theories, notably H.L.A. Hart's and Ronald Dworkin's, bear on that issue. (shrink)

the question of objectivity in legal interpretation has emerged in recent years as an imprtant topic in contemporary jurisprudence. This book addresses the issue of how and in what sense legal interpretation can be objective. The author supports the possibility of objectivity in law and spells out the content of objectivity involved. He then provides a defence against the classical, as well as less well-known, objections to the possibility of objectivity in legal interpretation. The discussion is thoroughly grounded in metaphysics, (...) which sets the book apart from other similar discussions in jurisprudence. Stavropoulos identifies an important source of resistance to the acceptance of the possibility of objectivity in legal interpretation; a widely held but faulty semantic. He then develops an alternative semantic framework, drawing on influential theories in contemporary philosophy. The book shows that objectivism is a natural, common sensical position, and rejects the currently popular notion that objectivism requires extravagant or bizarre metaphysics. Furthermore, the discussion presents the opportunity to re-interpret major debates in jurisprudence and to show how influential theories, notably H.L.A. Hart's and Ronald Dworkin's, bear on that issue. (shrink)

The concept of “appraisal” has been used in the literature in a dual way: to refer to the content of emotional experience, as well as to the cognitive antecedents of emotions. I argue that appraisal in the former sense is what is contained in information in self-reports and that this information is of limited use for making inferences on emotion antecedents. This is so because emotional experience may contain appraisals that are part of the emotional response rather than belonging to (...) its causes. They often result from elaboration of the experience after it has begun to be generated. Although in most or all emotions some cognitive appraisal processes are essential antecedents, these processes may be much simpler than self-reports (and the semantics of emotion words) may suggest. The appraisal processes that account for emotion elicitation can be assumed to be of a quite elementary kind. (shrink)

Au-delà d’une bataille écologique tenace pour l’abandon du projet d’aéroport, le bocage de Notre-Dame des Landes a constitué un terrain d’expérimentation pour transformer l’occupation militante en droit pérenne d’usage des terres. Les « zadistes » se sont battus pour devenir agriculteurs et exploiter collectivement la terre au service d’une agriculture « écolo et non Monsanto ». Ils ont parié sur le fait de mener une bataille sur le droit face à l’administration et, en échange de fiches de projets, ont obtenu (...) des baux ruraux individuels de neuf ans, comme les paysans résistants et les paysans cumulards, qui exploitaient les terres avant la préemption. Le rêve éveillé est devenu réalité, même si l’un des principes de base initiaux, « la terre en commun », a subi des altérations. (shrink)

By referring to mundane practices as well as to more systematic or theoretical discourses (those of Krishnamurti and Buber), this article shows the utility of focusing on the negatory, apophatic aspects of reflexivity, i.e. on attempts at removing obstacles (mainly thinking, decision-making processes) which prevent the spontaneous emergence of open-ended self—self and self—other relationships.

The end of the Sixties is considered a turning point in the long-term decline of the political project of American liberalism. That historical moment heralded the transition towards a conservative hegemony and, a decade later, to the affirmation of the neoliberal political economy that has characterised the United States for the last thirty years – even among the different political shades of the Administrations. However, analyzing this process from the vantage point of the “1968” in Detroit complicates a linear narrative (...) of liberalism decline. This article discusses the urban riots, the workers strikes and the emergence and demise of Black Power during Detroit’s “revolutionary moment”, casting them against a wider background and a long-term historical perspective. (shrink)

The theoretical underpinnings of public international law have taken the sovereign status of the nation-state for granted since the beginning of the modern era. After centuries of evolution in legal and political thought, the state's definition as a bounded territorial unit has been strictly codified. The legal development of the nation-state was an ideological project informed by extra-legal considerations. Additionally, the ever-narrowing scope of the juridical idea of sovereignty functioned as a boundary mechanism instrumental in colonising Africa and other regions. (...) While international law claims universal liberalism today, the current system based on sovereign nation-states represents not social inclusion but fierce and dangerous exclusion. -/- The central thesis of this book is that the development of legal sovereignty was, rather than part of the modernist progress narrative, a historically contingent evolutionary regression. While other social systems such as economics and science became globalised, politics and law counterintuitively became more territorialised. It is argued that the nation-state today is not only anachronistic but is dangerously ill-equipped for facing international problems such as the climate crisis or global pandemics. Finally, it also leaves African states and many other formerly-colonised territories at a particular disadvantage by regulating their political practices into a predefined mould. (shrink)

The term "emotion" is not precise. It refers to an assemblage of processes that contribute to how we relate to the social and physical world. We need to understand the functional bases of such processes, and one such basis is action readiness. Action readiness is the preparation for movement or action. Preparation for movement occurs in all animals. In more recently evolved species, such as birds and mammals, preparation for directed action is found as well. Action readiness is the basis (...) for the states we now call emotions, but its importance goes far beyond emotions: action readiness is an elementary aspect of the way autonomous living beings regulate their interactions with the world. (shrink)