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

The concept of simultaneity and contemporaneity is fundamental to and the core of my artistic practice but it also fits perfectly with the theme of my research. Creating multimedia art and installations with the help of new media is one way to best express the concept of non-separation, as evidenced by language itself. In Italian the word confusione, from the Latin term cunfusionem (mixing, blending), and in English confusion, is often used as a synonym for noise. In English, commotion (...) is a synonym for blare, and it has been derived from the Latin word cum movere, which means moving together. Contemporary art and installation are both staticity and change intermingled in a single place and time. The study of crowd, and the emotion that emerges from the deep immersive experiencing of art, is also strongly linked to another concept developed by Bergson: intuition. By ‘intuition’, Bergson meant an elementary, indivisible experience of sympathy, through which a person is moved into the inner being of an object and can comprehend what is unique and indefinable in it. I hypothesize the presence and expression of emotion in the collective experience of installation art, and both my creative efforts and theoretical research are aimed at facilitating the audience’s understanding or intuition of this emotion in an immersive multisensory environment. Using a range of both technological and classical tools and means of expression in my work, but more generally, artists create a product that can mediate and unfold the complexity of the phenomenological event by rendering it in a new form accessible to all. (shrink)

The relevance of inner speech for human psychology, especially for higher-order cognitive functions, is widely recognized. However, the study of the phenomenology of inner speech, that is, what it is like for a subject to experience internally speaking his/her voice, has received much less attention. This study explores the subjective experience of inner speech through empathy for pain paradigm. To this end, an experimental phenomenological method was implemented. Sixteen healthy subjects were exposed to videos of sportswomen/sportsmen having (...) physical accidents practicing extreme sports. Immediately after the exposure to the stimuli, a phenomenological interview was conducted to gather data about bodily sensations, emotions, motivations, and inner speech of watching other people’s accidents. Participant’s inner speech expresses concern about the consequences the accident could generate to the sportswomen/sportsmen or about the participants themselves. Simultaneously, participants’ inner speech happened with negative emotional feelings, many sensations distributed throughout their bodies, and a felt knowledge coming from a meaningful but pre-reflective and pre-verbal bodily dimension. Our findings show that inner speech in empathy is not merely a psycholinguistic process or high-order cognitive function, but rather it is a complex experience that occurs deeply related to meaningful emotions, bodily sensations, and an implicit, somatically felt knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Playing the Dummy:Maugham, Smartphones, and the End of EleganceEric BronsonIOn the Russian Trans-Siberian train from Vladivostok to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), an American businessman won't stop talking for the entire ten-day journey. In his story, "A Chance Acquaintance," W. Somerset Maugham describes this 1917 meeting between Ashenden, a British character loosely based on himself, and the chatty American, named Harrington. The two passengers are blissfully unmoved by the revolution (...) unfolding all around them. Ashenden casually suggests the two of them try and find another pair to pass the time playing bridge. Harrington refuses. "It beats me how an intelligent man can waste his time card-playing," Harrington asserts, "and of all the unintellectual pursuits I have ever seen it seems to me that solitaire is the worst. It kills conversation. Man is a social animal and he exercises the highest part of his nature when he takes part in social intercourse."1 Ashenden doesn't understand the American's distaste for playing cards, especially bridge. "'There is a certain elegance in wasting time,' said Ashenden. … 'Besides,' he added with bitterness, 'you can still talk.'" [End Page 477]Like many of his fictional characters, Maugham enjoyed eloquent, "time-wasting" games like bridge. Unlike solitaire, bridge encourages social interaction. Once, when his confounded bridge partner confronted Maugham with evidence that his high-class opponents were cheating, Maugham was nonplussed. "They gave us double Martinis to start with," he noted, "a slap-up lunch with a particularly good bottle of white Burgundy and old brandy with our coffee."2 The dishonesty was irrelevant. For Maugham, a good bridge game, like the attendant conversation, should help temper one's moral outrage and skim over the unruly passions that so often plague our public and private lives. Elegance, for Maugham, meant presenting the appearance of calm and respectability, especially when such presentations conflicted with one's more turbulent emotions.In Maugham's short story "The Three Fat Women of Antibes," the women around the bridge table desperately try to keep up appearances, both physically and emotionally. When passionate arguments inevitably threaten to undo the air of genteel conversation, Lena, the newest addition to the table, states, "I think it's such a pity to quarrel over bridge. … After all, it's only a game."3 But while it might be true that bridge is "only a game," Maugham took games seriously. Parlor games like bridge were spaces to practice and perfect the social mores on which colonial hierarchies were solidified. In Maugham's England, the game of life required an elegant performance of the many roles the genteel class was expected to play. That performance was predicated on a relentless effort to keep up ordinary appearances by regulating emotional displays. As Maugham wrote in a 1944 article for Good Housekeeping, a good bridge game rewards people who are "truthful, clearheaded, and considerate," characteristics essential "for playing the more important game of life."4More than any other card game, bridge is built on conventions. Etiquette dictates how cards are shuffled, passed, and played. While there is always some room for surprise and risk, everyone around the table needs to know the bidding and playing conventions to ensure the best possible game. In every hand a silent partner, known as the dummy, lays their cards face up, thereby taking themself out of the action.The persistence of such conventions is a holdover from the game of whist, the predecessor of bridge. In an early-nineteenth-century story, "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," essayist Charles Lamb describes an elderly whist player who enjoys the elegant waste of time that such long card games encourage. While dances and parties help build social skills around untrustworthy passions, card games like whist, and later bridge, [End Page 478] were more like "a long meal; not like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships." This kind of congeniality mattered to serious people like Mrs. Battle, people who "despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things."5The game of bridge... (shrink)

Considerable experience as a teacher of ethics and an observer of human interaction on a small and a large scale has convinced me of an important truth. Our capacity to make good and just choices is limited by our chaotic moral and emotional lives. It is not as if our culture lacks the intellectual resources to address this problem. They have been available in outline at least since classical Greek antiquity. This article is an attempt to convey some of those (...) important ideas at a basic or introductory level. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore the role of two models of well-being in the prediction of psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, namely PERMA and mature happiness. According to PERMA, well-being is mainly composed of five elements: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning in life, and achievement. Instead, mature happiness is understood as a positive mental state characterized by inner harmony, calmness, acceptance, contentment, and satisfaction with life. Rooted in existential positive psychology, this harmony-based happiness represents the result of living (...) in balance between positive and negative aspects of one's life. We hypothesized that mature happiness would be a more prominent protective factor during the present pandemic than the PERMA composite. A total of 12,203 participants from 30 countries responded to an online survey including the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21), the PERMA-Profiler, and the Mature Happiness Scale-Revised (MHS-R). Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that PERMA and mature happiness were highly correlated, but nonetheless, they represented two separate factors. After controlling for demographic factors and country-level variables, both PERMA Well-being and MHS-R were negative predictors of psychological distress. Mature happiness was a better predictor of stress, anxiety, and general distress, while PERMA showed a higher prediction of depression. Mature happiness moderated the relation between the perceived noxious effects of the pandemic and all markers of distress (depression, anxiety, stress, and total DASS-21). Instead, PERMA acted as a moderator in the case of depression and stress. These findings indicate that inner harmony, according to the mature happiness theory, is an essential facet of well-being to be taken into consideration. The results of this study can also orient policies aimed to alleviate the negative effects of the pandemic on mental health through the promotion of well-being. (shrink)

Carl Jung paid a short visit to Taos, New Mexico, in January 1925. A brief account of his stay at the Pueblo appeared in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, edited by Aniela Jaffe in 1963. Remembering his conversations with Mountain Lake, Jung wrote of the confrontation between the “European consciousness,” or the “European thought,” with the Indian “unconscious.” My article provides a reading of Jung’s text as a meeting ground of the aesthetic, emotional, visionary and of the analytical, rational, explanatory. Like many (...) other European and Anglo-American visitors to Taos Pueblo, Jung rediscovers its capacity to mirror the inner needs of the visitor; he examines the significance of the encounter with the Southwestern landscape and with the Pueblo Indians’ religious views in terms of self-reflection and of the return to the mythical. As Carl Jung’s “inner comprehension” of the Pueblo Indian’s philosophy is mediated through language, aware both of its desire and its inability to become liberated from the European perspectives, Mountain Lake’s attitude towards his visitor from Switzerland remains ultimately unknown; Mountain Lake does, however, communicate his readiness to assume the archetypal role of a teacher and a spiritual guide whose insights reach beyond the confines and mystifications of language. According to Jung’s account, during this brief encounter of the two cultures, he and his Indian host experienced a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, the sources of which, as they both understood them in their own individual ways, resided in the comprehension of universal sharing. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine the embodied dimension of emotions, and of inner life more generally, according to Wittgenstein’s anti-subjectivistic account of expression. First of all, I will explore Wittgenstein’s critique of a Cartesian disembodied account of the inner life, and the related argument against the existence of a private language. Secondly, I will describe the constitution of inner life as the acquisition of embodied ways of expressing oneself and of responding to others within a shared (...) context, against the background of an inherited weave of cultural expressive practices. Here, I will analyze Wittgenstein’s embodied account of expression, the ‘modified concept of sensing’ and ‘seeing’ which is involved in seeing the emotions of others as their expressions, and consequently Wittgenstein’s critique of an epistemological account concerning our ‘knowledge’ of others’ minds. Finally, with reference to Cavell’s and Mulhall’s readings, I will reflect on the figure of the ‘aspect-blind’, one who ‘just knows’ the emotion of others but cannot acknowledge it, and accordingly is not able to see it as the embodied expression of the other’s inner life. In this way, I wish to argue that Wittgenstein not only calls into question a disembodied account of the inner life from a theoretical point of view, but also shows the ethical consequences of a disembodied account of self through the figure of the aspect-blind. (shrink)

Education, gender, family or professional responsibilities, and the abrupt nature of certain lived experiences, often push people to conceal their emotions. Suppression represents a self-preservation or survival strategy. In some cases, inhibition goes as far as completely blocking the bodily expression of emotion. Over the centuries, many philosophers and wise thinkers have seen emotion as an affliction of the inner soul, troubled by excessive and irrational proclivities that lead it to wander off the path of the good (...) life. The remedies are manifold but tend to a culture of the self that exalts impassibility and perfect peace of mind. Yet emotion is what motivates us and gears us up for action. It enables us to connect with and adapt to the outside world. Inspired by a holistic vision of cognition, this book invites the reader to explore, through philosophical texts, a cultivation of the self that neither minimizes nor negates emotion. (shrink)

This article is centred on the idea that from the analysis and interpretation of data from the crowd noise (at historical and engaging events) it is possible to define the manifestation of extroversion of people’s perceptions and emotions. What I seek to reveal in my artistic research is not the conjugation of perceptions and emotions for individual participants but rather the collective feeling, the energy that connects and refines the involvement of individuals and creates from it a new and indivisible (...) whole: a collective perception and sentiment that in the multilayering of noise finds its full manifestation. Crowd noise, therefore, represents the synthesis of this unique collective emotion, a psychological and physical synergic experience channelling its force, energy and form into a distinctive event that is noise itself. What I am investigating is the sum, neutralization, enrichment and suppression of the constitutive elements of the emotion experienced by participants in an event, and noise ‘as a register of the intensity of relationships’ between them. Showing and describing an event, its sensations and atmosphere, or the perceptions and emotions of a moment, is impossible. The questions, how emotions emerge, how mental and physical perceptions are stimulated by our senses or how consciousness develops, are unanswerable; what is possible to show as an artist is what happens in the middle, what lies between the lines, within the fabric of events, and what one grasps and realizes from the exploration of what is in the involuntary traces the experience itself leaves behind. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

The article is devoted to an anthropological study of psychotherapeutic discourse adaptation by religious specialists within the Catholic practice of spiritual exercises. Grounded in the therapeutic culture's notion that an individual's roots lie deeply within their family history and childhood experiences, this article examines how issues related to family relationships may surface during the development of psychotherapeutic techniques by religious groups. It also investigates the childhood images upon which these "syncretic" projects might be based. Considering the Catholic practice of spiritual (...) exercise allows us to explore the historical roots of the "personal relationship with God". This concept appears in various spiritual movements from the late Middle Ages and early Modern period, which emphasized emotional religiosity, meditation, and imaginative practices. In the present context, the interpretation of the relationship with God and other agents of divine nature in psychotherapeutic terms is based on a combination of traditional Jesuit spiritual direction practices with ideas from psychodynamic theories found in American spiritual direction manuals of the 1970s-1990s. From this angle, the image of God is interpreted as a projection of an authoritative adult image internalized in childhood, and problems in the "relationship with God" are seen as a consequence of unresolved issues with significant others. Using one of the most important therapeutic tropes of the "inner child" as the basis for meditation practice, spiritual directors invite participants to envision a scene where a child version of their personality receives unconditional love. However, unlike the therapeutic version of the practice of "inner child work,” in the Catholic paradigm, the individual should neither become the agent of their own healing nor reparent themselves. The logic of personal responsibility and "parenthood” as its metaphor is replaced by the logic of humility and surrendering oneself to the divine will, i.e., true childhood. The article highlights the need to closely examine imaginative techniques in religious cultures and psychotherapeutic contexts, and questions the commonality in their epistemological stance on the nature and function of imagination. (shrink)

This 1996 book is the result of a uniquely productive union of philosophy, psychoanalysis and anthropology, and explores the complexity and importance of emotions. Michael Stocker places emotions at the very centre of human identity, life and value. He lays bare how our culture's idealisation of rationality pervades the philosophical tradition and leads those who wrestle with serious ethical and philosophical problems into distortion and misunderstanding. Professor Stocker shows how important are the social and emotional contexts of ethical dilemmas and (...) inner conflicts, and he challenges philosophical theories that try to overgeneralise and over-simplify by leaving out the particulars of each situation. In offering a realistic account of emotions and an in-depth analysis of how psychological factors affect judgments of all kind, this book will interest a broad range of readers across the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

First, a couple of emotional dilemmas:I love bringing my six-year-old to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when we are in New York in the summer. On Thursdays, they have a special hour for children. A curator first talks with them about an artwork and then encourages them to draw pictures inspired by it. My son seems to enjoy it. Yet every time I tell him that we are about to go to the MET, he says that he doesn’t want to. (...) Don’t you remember, I plead with him, that you liked it last time? No, he says, he didn’t. I cajole and bribe, and keep hoping that a day will come when he will remember how he felt about it last week.During a dissertation defense, I ask a question, and, as the candidate begins to answer, I realize... (shrink)

This volume offers perspectives on the theme of surprise crossing philosophical, phenomenological, scientific, psycho-physiology, psychiatric, and linguistic boundaries. The main question it examines is whether surprise is an emotion. It uses two main theoretical frameworks to do so: psychology, in which surprise is commonly considered a primary emotion, and philosophy, in which surprise is related to passions as opposed to reason. The book explores whether these views on surprise are satisfying or sufficient. It looks at the extent to (...) which surprise is also a cognitive phenomenon and primitively embedded in language, and the way in which surprise is connected to personhood, the interpersonal, and moral emotions. Many philosophers of different traditions, a number of experimental studies conducted over the last decades, recent works in linguistics, and ancestral wisdom testimonies refer to surprise as a crucial experience of both rupture and openness in bodily and inner life. However, surprise is a theme that has not been dealt with directly and systematically in philosophy, in the sciences, in linguistics, or in spiritual traditions. This volume accomplishes just that. (shrink)

The reductionist/anti-reductionist debate about testimonial justification (and knowledge) can be taken to collapse into a controversy about two kinds of underlying monitoring mechanism. The nature and structure of this mechanism remains an enigma in the debate. We suggest that the underlying monitoring mechanism amounts to emotion-based stereotyping. Our main argument in favor of the stereotype hypothesis about testimonial monitoring is that the underlying psychological mechanism responsible for testimonial monitoring has several conditions to satisfy. Each of these conditions is satisfied (...) by our “hot” stereotypical capacities. Intergroup emotions play a key role here. Intergroup emotions inform the agent about which candidate stereotype is better suited to the current situation. Emotions serve as evidence that makes a certain stereotype and its particular profile of features more or less expected. (shrink)

Plusieurs commentateurs – incluant certains théoriciens des droits des animaux – ont soutenu que les animaux non humains ne peuvent pas être considérés comme des membres du dèmos parce qu’il leur manque les capacités critiques d’autonomie et d’agentivité morale qui seraient essentielles à la citoyenneté. Nous soutenons que cette inquiétude est fondée sur des idées erronées à propos de la citoyenneté, d’une part, et à propos des animaux, d’autre part. La citoyenneté requiert la maîtrise de soi et la sensibilité aux (...) normes partagées, mais ces capacités ne devraient pas être comprises en un sens indûment intellectualisé ou idéalisé. Des études récentes sur l’agentivité morale montrent que les relations civilisées entre les citoyens sont largement fondées, non pas dans la réflexion rationnelle et l’assentiment à des propositions morales, mais dans des comportements intuitifs, irréfléchis et habituels qui s’enracinent dans une gamme d’émotions prosociales (l’empathie, l’amour) et de dispositions prosociales (coopération, altruisme, réciprocité, résolution de conflits). Cinquante ans de recherches éthologiques ont démontré que plusieurs animaux sociaux – particulièrement les animaux domestiques – partagent le type de dispositions et de capacités rendant possible le civisme quotidien. Une fois que nous élargissons notre conception de la citoyenneté pour inclure une compréhension plus riche des bases des relations civiques, il devient évident que les animaux domestiques et les humains peuvent être les co-créateurs d’un monde moral et politique commun. Nous n’avons rien à craindre, et beaucoup à gagner, à les accueillir comme membres du dèmos. (shrink)

This article examines the productive capacity of emotion through the concept of emotional fundamentalism. Emotional fundamentalism combines several key concepts—fundamentalism, affective labor, biopolitics, and capitalism’s contradictions—developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth to describe the intensified attention to the body in education. I investigate the implications of the increased organizational and corporate interest in emotion using an ongoing socio-emotional learning study and the introduction of artificial intelligence aggression detectors in schools. Doing so demonstrates (...) the tendency of Empire to manage emotions in order to ensure viable production by educating the body as data and human capital. However, though Empire depends on emotions as a resource, these same emotions display a creative unruliness that exposes potential avenues to reproduce the common and enact multitude. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Working with Patience:An Insight into Dealing with Difficult EmotionsDavid VilanovaAs the most trusted professionals in the nation, nurses are expected to care for their patients with empathy and freedom from bias. The reality is that nurses are human, and some form of implicit bias is inevitable. In my own experience, this issue has reared its head on several occasions. My nursing background is prominently in cardiac and intensive care. (...) Seeing patients at their most vulnerable has become a regular part of my practice. Among some of the most challenging cases for me have been when I assume care of a patient withdrawing from alcohol. As an adult child with close alcoholic family members, many instances of abuse and pain stick with me today and these are brought to the surface when I care for patients with alcohol use disorder. In most cases, I easily find a healthy balance between remaining an understanding-and-empathetic provider and protecting my emotional and mental health as I navigate ethical and moral issues. However, with this patient population, walking that fine line is especially challenging. How do I navigate and manage intensely personal emotions and biases while providing the high-quality care I vowed to deliver regardless of my patient's life choices, addictions, and illnesses? How do I maintain an appropriate level of neutrality and clarity as this patient's behavior and attitude spark emotional triggers? In other words, how do I take care of someone I don't like?Mrs. H was a middle-aged Hispanic woman, barely coherent, but speaking clearly enough that I could understand her slurred speech. Immediate dread washed over me as I realized my assignment included a patient withdrawing from alcohol. The patient's affect, incoherence, and aggression were all too reminiscent of a traumatic past I still work to heal from. My coworkers couldn't understand her insults and obscenities and were therefore unphased except for noting her unruly and erratic behavior. On the other hand, I could understand much of what she was yelling at me and any other staff who bravely walked into her room. My immediate thoughts were that this woman clearly did not want our help. My every attempt to enter her room, speak with her, and provide care were met with an all too familiar rejection and denial that she even had a problem. Yet here she was in a hospital room, and I was her nurse. She verbalized denial of drinking too much when told that she was being treated for alcohol withdrawal. She stated this denial more to herself than to the health care providers in the room, and it was reminiscent of the denial I have seen in my loved ones. This was ironic, I always thought, as the need for such self-deception in and of itself points to the fact that something may be wrong and worth addressing.But denial or not, today, this patient—Mrs. H, was entrusted into my care. She refused treatments and medications, and this put me in a complex ethical predicament—treating a patient that I do not like for the personal issues she reminds me of, and the treatment of a patient against their refusal, as she was deemed incapable of making her own decisions. The latter of these two issues was easiest to put aside. Legally, this patient needed to be treated through her alcohol withdrawal. Once her mental status cleared up, she could sign out against medical advice or choose to remain until a safe discharge plan was in place. There was a protocol and legal guidelines for this situation. However, no guidelines [End Page 10] truly exist when it comes to the management of a patient that you simply do not like. The result can be a near-instantaneous dread each time you must answer that patient's bed alarm, call light, or most basic needs. A negative bias takes over, and it would be an understatement to say that this affects the quality of care. Patients in situations like this—with providers who judge them as I have been guilty of—can easily become subject to derogatory remarks, health inequities, and biased labeling... (shrink)

This article establishes a connection between the novel, as a cultural artefact which encourages the exploration of inner perceptions, literary reading, and recent research into interoception in cognitive psychology. Interoception is broadly conceived here, ranging from physical states (like pulse, breathing rate, etc.) to emotions and the conscious perception of these physical states. The article identifies relevant interoceptive mechanisms in literary reading and develops a research programme for their empirical study. It unfolds an account of the relationship between interoception (...) and exteroception, as well as critical concepts to capture how readers' interoception aligns with the embodied signature of the text ('interoceptive attunement') and how the text offers points of re-entry after readers' remindings ('interoceptive anchors'). The article closes with a discussion of the role of interoception in the investigation of mindfulness meditation, and how this might enable an empirical comparison between the two cultural practices of mindfulness meditation and literary reading. (shrink)

On a remarkably thin base of evidence – largely the spectral analysis of points of light – astronomers possess, or appear to possess, an abundance of knowledge about the structure and history of the universe. We likewise know more than might even have been imagined a few centuries ago about the nature of physical matter, about the mechanisms of life, about the ancient past. Enormous theoretical and methodological ingenuity has been required to obtain such knowledge; it does not invite easy (...) discovery by the untutored. It may seem odd, then, that we have so little scientific knowledge of what lies closest at hand, apparently ripe for easy discovery, and of greatest importance for our quality of life: our own conscious experience – our sensory experiences and pains, for example, our inner speech and imagery, our felt emotion. Scientists know quite a bit about human visual capacities and the brain processes involved in vision, much less about the subjective experience of seeing; a fair bit about the physiology of emotion, almost nothing about its phenomenology. Philosophers began in earnest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe and classify our patterns of conscious experience. John Locke, for instance, divided experienced “ideas” into those that arise from sensation and those that arise from reflection, and he began to classify them into. (shrink)

Expressive music, almost everyone agrees, evokes an emotional response of some kind in receptive listeners, at least some of the time, in at least some conditions of listening. But is such an emotional response distinctive of or unique to the music that evokes it? In other words, is there such a thing as music-specific emotion? This essay is devoted to an exploration of that question and others related to it. In the main part of the essay a sixpart component (...) model of a standard emotion is set out, and a case is made for the music-specificity of an emotional response to music of a mirroring sort, with respect to four of the six components of such emotion. In the latter part of the essay aspects of the phenomenology of the music-listening experience, and especially that of the inner sounding of music being heard, are explored further, and issues of the value, communicability, and degree of singularity of the emotional response to expressive music are addressed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment by Ulrich LehnerCarlos M. N. EireThe Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment. By Ulrich Lehner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 294. $37.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-762060-1.This marvelous book encapsulates the seismic shift in perspective that has taken place in the study of early (...) modern Catholicism in the past four decades, and, at the same time, it sharpens the historiographical cutting edge of this new approach. Instead of focusing on the Council of Trent, the papacy, the Inquisition, religious orders, institutional reforms, political issues, theological wrangling, heroic saintly figures, or any of the many other external features of reform that previously dominated scholarship on Catholic reform, Lehner dives deeply into sources that shed light on what many scholars have taken to calling “lived religion,” that is, on the myriad ways in which the lives of the Catholic faithful were transformed. As he puts it, his book focuses on “spiritual resources” and rediscovers “neglected perspectives by shedding light on the forms and methods early modern Catholics used to ‘reform’ themselves and achieve spiritual progress” (ix, 1).This is a detail-oriented book, a brilliant interweaving of cultural, intellectual, and social history reminiscent of the best histoire total produced by the Annales school. It is based on the premise that all assertions must be firmly grounded on evidence, a methodological principle to which Lehner adheres in exemplary fashion. Relying on a vast array of texts, he seeks to prove that the early modern Catholic concept of “church reform” was firmly centered on spiritual values, and that the chief aim behind every proposed or implemented change was “the conversion and sanctification of the sinful self” (2). [End Page 697]By focusing on the inner dimensions of Catholic reform, rather than the outward structural dimensions that have traditionally attracted attention, Lehner does not dismiss the significance of structural reforms. His approach to “lived religion” is reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s take on the role played by divine grace in the transformation of human beings: “grace does not destroy nature,” said St. Thomas, “but rather perfects it.” Lehner turns this theological dictum into a historiographical one. As he puts it: “Writing the history of transformative spiritual methods and actions of early modern Catholics does not deny these [other] dimensions and does not seek to replace them, but rather complements and elucidates them” (3).Lehner’s fact-driven examination of the myriad ways in which the inner transformation of individuals effected positive changes in the Church and society focuses on nine specific aspects of daily life. Beginning with an analysis of the general dynamics of reform, he proceeds to dissect reforms in nine key components of Catholic culture: the priesthood, sermons, catechesis, family life, lay associations, the sacraments of the Eucharist and confession, prayer, symbols and images, and devotion to Saints Mary and Joseph.Arguing that the spiritual side of reform, or “inner reform,” as he calls it, “represents core ideas and values of early modern Catholic identity, individually and collectively,” Lehner strives to show the ultimate value of his approach through a wealth of details, perhaps with potential critics in mind who might accuse him for valuing subjectivity over objectivity. But he vanquishes any such critics. Ultimately, his thousands of details support his claim that previous interpretations of early modern Catholic reforms that focused primarily on structural issues are not necessarily more “objective,” but actually perpetuate “a chimerical picture of a religion emptied of everything precious to contemporary believers” (158).Much of what Lehner highlights in this book relates to the emotions in one way or another, that is, to reforming impulses that affected the heart as much as the intellect, but he avoids reductionism, positing that much of the inner reform of Catholicism struck a careful yet tenuous balance between opposing dialectical poles. The Church, he insists, aimed at people’s hearts as much as their minds, and instilled fear of hell and purgatory as much as it stressed mercy and salvation. Sermons, he says, leaned toward preaching fear, but the... (shrink)

This paper presents an interpretation of Plato''s moral psychology in two books of the Republic that construes Plato as adopting a strong unity for the moral agent. Within this conception reason influences both emotion and action directly. This view is contrasted with the current prevailing interpretation according to which all three parts of the soul have their own reason, feeling, and desire. The latter construal is shown to be both philosophically weak, and less plausible as a historical reconstruction.

It may seem that when you have an emotional response to a perceived object or event that makes it seem to you that the perceived source of the emotion possesses some evaluative property, then you thereby have prima facie, immediate justification for believing that the object or event possesses the evaluative property. Call this view ‘dogmatism about emotional justification’. We defend a view of the structure of emotional awareness according to which the objects of emotional awareness are derived from (...) other experiences such as bodily sensation, inner awareness, sensory perception, memory, and imagination. On this basis, we argue that dogmatism about emotional justification is an untenable position, regardless of whether the special feature of an immediate justifier that makes it an immediate justifier is its presentational phenomenology or its evidence insensitivity. (shrink)

Our emotional states affect how we perceive the world. If I am stressed, annoyed, or irritated, I might experience the sound of children laughing and screaming as they play around the house in a negative manner — it is unpleasant, loud, piercing, and so on. Yet, if I’m in a relaxed, happy, loving mood, the very same sounds might be experienced as pleasant, playful, warm, and so on. The sounds being made by the children are the same in both cases, (...) but how they are experienced differs. The auditory experience is affected by the emotional state that I am in. I perceive the sounds differently depending on how I’m feeling. Although this might at first seem to be a trivial observation, it certainly is not. We take for granted that our perceptual experiences give rise to justified beliefs and knowledge. Thus, if my perceptual experience of an object can differ based on my emotional state, and I take my perceptual experience to justify my beliefs and even lead to knowledge, then we might have a problem. If emotions — which are not fixed and in large part uncontrolled — affect our ability to accurately perceive the world, then they may undermine the justified beliefs and knowledge gained on the basis of our perceptual experience of the world. My goal here is to explore this potential problem. -/- I consider how we might understand the effect that emotions have on the justification of our perceptual beliefs about the world, beliefs that we acquire from a variety of sensory modalities — audition, gustation olfaction, and so on. I take the problem to be associated with one of two forms of perceptual influence: penetration or multisensory integration. In any given perceptual moment there are multiple sensory modalities and mental states at play, each affecting the overall experience. Whether we understand the influence of emotion on perception as a form of non-perceptual penetration or a form of non-visual sensory perception of the inner body — interoception — the potential epistemological difficulties remain: how can we be said to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge on the basis of such influenced perceptual experience. As has been the norm, only the five exteroceptive senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taste and touch are typically discussed in the context of sensory perception. However, as I argue, there is strong reason to accept the claim that emotional experience is a form of interoception, and that interoception ought to be considered when discussing sensory perception. In this way, then, I propose that clarifying the role played by interoception in sense perception across modalities is necessary if we are to make progress on the epistemological problems at hand. (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)

Our emotional states affect how we perceive the world. If I am stressed, annoyed, or irritated, I might experience the sound of children laughing and screaming as they play around the house in a negative manner — it is unpleasant, loud, piercing, and so on. Yet, if I’m in a relaxed, happy, loving mood, the very same sounds might be experienced as pleasant, playful, warm, and so on. The sounds being made by the children are the same in both cases, (...) but how they are experienced differs. The auditory experience is affected by the emotional state that I am in. I perceive the sounds differently depending on how I’m feeling. Although this might at first seem to be a trivial observation, it certainly is not. We take for granted that our perceptual experiences give rise to justified beliefs and knowledge. Thus, if my perceptual experience of an object can differ based on my emotional state, and I take my perceptual experience to justify my beliefs and even lead to knowledge, then we might have a problem. If emotions — which are not fixed and in large part uncontrolled — affect our ability to accurately perceive the world, then they may undermine the justified beliefs and knowledge gained on the basis of our perceptual experience of the world. My goal here is to explore this potential problem. -/- I consider how we might understand the effect that emotions have on the justification of our perceptual beliefs about the world, beliefs that we acquire from a variety of sensory modalities — audition, gustation olfaction, and so on. I take the problem to be associated with one of two forms of perceptual influence: penetration or multisensory integration. In any given perceptual moment there are multiple sensory modalities and mental states at play, each affecting the overall experience. Whether we understand the influence of emotion on perception as a form of non-perceptual penetration or a form of non-visual sensory perception of the inner body — interoception — the potential epistemological difficulties remain: how can we be said to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge on the basis of such influenced perceptual experience. As has been the norm, only the five exteroceptive senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taste and touch are typically discussed in the context of sensory perception. However, as I argue, there is strong reason to accept the claim that emotional experience is a form of interoception, and that interoception ought to be considered when discussing sensory perception. In this way, then, I propose that clarifying the role played by interoception in sense perception across modalities is necessary if we are to make progress on the epistemological problems at hand. (shrink)

Given its simplicity and enormous unifying and explanatory power, the predictive mind approach to mental architecture (predictive processing) is becoming an increasingly attractive way of carrying out theoretical and experimental research in cognitive science. According to this view, the mind is constantly attempting to minimize the discrepancy between its expectations (or sensory predictions) and its actual incoming sensory signals. In the interoceptive inference view of emotion (IIE), the principles of the predictive mind have been extended to account for (...) class='Hi'>emotion. IIE holds that, in direct analogy to visual perception, emotions arise from interoceptive predictions of the causes of current interoceptive afferents. In this paper, I argue that this view is problematic, as there are arguably no regularities pertaining to emotion in the physiological inner milieu, from which the relevant interoceptive expectations could be learned. Therefore, it is unlikely that our expectations relative to emotion involve interoceptive expectations in the way required by IIE. The latter view should then be amended. In this respect, I suggest that emotions might arise via external interoceptive active inference: by sampling and modifying the external environment in order to change a valenced feeling. Thus, if the predictive mind approach is on track, emotions are not to be understood in direct analogy to perception (e.g., vision). Rather, I suggest that the view of emotion that emerges from the predictive mind is in line with motivational approaches to emotion. In the suggested view, (almost) just as drives (or ‘homeostatic motivations’), emotions are suited for the active regulation of the inner milieu by sampling the environment in order to finesse our emotion expectations. In this view, emotions are individuated, and differ from drives, in virtue of the distinctive sampling policies (‘actions’) characteristic of the high levels of the predictive hierarchy. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim at explaining the difference Kant makes between emotion, the beautiful and the sublime. I begin by explaining what an emotion is, showing that it refers to feelings that are related to desire. In contrast, I show that the feeling of beautiful and the sublime give us an inactive delight, that is not related to an interest in the object. The feeling of beautiful is related to the judgment of taste, and it has a (...) universal validity for everyone. I ask then if we can judge art without any emotion at all. According to Kant, not only one can, but one should, since pure judgment of taste is independent from charm and commotion. At the end, I ask if it is possible to enjoy music without emotion. For a lover of music, perhaps the emotion it provokes is the main reason to like it. I show that this is probably the reason why music is considered to have the last place in the beautiful arts for Kant. (shrink)

This paper shows why Kant's critique of empirical psychology should not be read as a scathing criticism of quantitative scientific psychology, but has valuable lessons to teach in support of it. By analysing Kant's alleged objections in the light of his critical theory of cognition, it provides a fresh look at the problem of quantifying first-person experiences, such as emotions and sense-perceptions. An in-depth discussion of applying the mathematical principles, which are defined in the Critique of Pure Reason as the (...) constitutive conditions for mathematical-numerical experience in general, to inner sense will demonstrate why it is in principle possible to justify a quantitative structure of psychological judgments on the grounds of Kant's critical thinking. In conclusion, it will propose how Kant's critique could be used in a constructive way to develop first steps towards a transcendental foundation of psychological knowledge. (shrink)

Our discussion should open with a story in the “Weizi” 微子 chapter of the Analects. Confucius, while traveling on a long journey, sent his disciple Zi Lu 子路 to ask two hermits, Chang Zu 長沮 and Jie Ni 桀溺, where a ferry could be found. Sneering at Confucius for canvassing around the country, they retorted: “Turbulent waves are sweeping away everything under Heaven. With whom, then, are you to change the world?” Zi Lu reported their words back to Confucius, who (...) said, “Since I cannot live among the birds and animals, if I do not live among these men, with whom should I live? If there were a Way under Heaven, I would not need to strive to change the world.”1What world was it that Confucius dreamed of? What vision did.. (shrink)

Passivity experiences in schizophrenia are thought to be due to a failure in a neurocognitive action self-monitoring system . Drawing on the assumption that inner speech is a form of action, a recent model of auditory verbal hallucinations has proposed that AVHs can be explained by a failure in the NASS. In this article, we offer an alternative application of the NASS to AVHs, with separate mechanisms creating the emotion of self-as-agent and other-as-agent. We defend the assumption that (...) inner speech can be considered as a form of action, and show how a number of previous criticisms of applying the NASS to AVHs can be refuted. This is achieved in part through taking a Vygotskian developmental perspective on inner speech. It is suggested that more research into the nature and development of inner speech is needed to further our understanding of AVHs. (shrink)

How do socially imposed rules develop into internalized pro-social codes? In the article “From Bodo Ethics to Distributive Justice”, Russell Hardin discusses one of the central themes of his work: How we “export” social order from a small, insular community to a large, anonymous society. In Bodo’s small village, everyone knows everyone else, interactions are face-to-face, and people live relatively isolated from other communities. In this context, the social norms developed by the community are easily enforceable. But what about large, (...) anonymous societies, where monitoring is difficult and costly and sanctioning transgressions carries a greater risk? When unobserved, only someone with an inner motivation to behave in a socially beneficial way will continue to obey the informal rules. How such an inner motivation develops is a topic of debate in moral philosophy and psychology, especially whether pro-social decisions are a matter of rationality or are driven by emotions. Supporters of the emotional drivers of pro-social behavior argue that anger and empathy play an essential role. In this chapter, we will focus on the role of these emotions in compensatory and sanctioning behavior. (shrink)

Manifesting in diverse forms, mental and emotional health problems within the contemporary society have proven challenging to current biomedical healing practice and thereby remain a significant threat to individuals’ welfare. Considering the complexity of human emotions, ailing members of the society remain susceptible to adverse health implications accountable to poor emotional wellbeing. Spawning across diverse cultures with further support from narrative and explorative philosophies, the presence of body, spirit, and mind remains acknowledged as a fundamental foundation of human beings. The (...) study adopts a theoretical approach to research and subjects base eligible base literature to the Creswell data spiral for addressing the primary research problems. Through a concrete inclusion criterion, a total of 46 studies and corporate reports are explicitly explored within the exploration. The organization of information under themes indicates the imperative role of a myriad of holistic healing approaches in appraising the emotional and psychological welfare of individuals. Findings indicate that the adoption of philosophical reasoning remains critical in capacitating of hurt individuals to use their natural body resources in healing. Philosophical perspective allows for inner integration, balance and synchrony with nature such that the healing process emanates from within and further accentuates to natural healing. In essence, the integration of the mind, body and spirit holds the capacity to appraise the natural healing process in the quest to improve an individual’s welfare. Future explorations should concern with the integration of the holistic approaches within the contemporary medical practice for proximal health benefits. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GOD, EMOTION, AND CORPOREALITY: A THOMIST PERSPECTIVE 1 MARCEL SAROT University of Utrecht Utrecht, The Netherlands I. Introduction WHEN WE TAKE" impassibility" to mean" immutbility with regard to one's feelings or the quality of ne's inner life," 2 the number of adherents to the doctrine of divine impassibility has continuously decreased during the present century. Slowly but surely the concept of an immutable and impassible God has (...) given way to the concept of a sensitive, emotional, passionate God. Before the Second World War this tendency was restricted to British theology,3 but since then it has spread to the rest of Europe, notably to France and Ger1 A first draft of this paper was presented at a meeting of the Aquinas Research Group of the Catholic Theological University of Utrecht (The Netherlands ) in May, 1990. I would like to thank the other participants for their useful comments. The paper also profited from the valuable comments of Prof. Dr. Vincent Brummer and Dr. Christoph Schwi:ibel. The writing of this paper forms part of a research project on divine passibility, supported by the Dutch Research Foundation for Theology and Religious Studies (STEGON), and funded by the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Research (NWO). 2 I have argued for this definition in my article " Patripassianism, Theopaschitism and the Suffering of God: Some Historical and Systematic Considerations," Religious Studies 26 (1990) : 363-375. a See A. van Egmond, De Lijdende God in de Britse Theologie van de Negentiende Eeuw: De Bijdrage van Newman, Maurice, McLeod Campbell en Gore aan de Christelijke Theopaschitische Traditie (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1986); J. Kenneth Mozley, The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), pp. 127-166; Doctrine in the Church of England: The Report of the Commission o·n Christian Doctrine Appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922 (London: SPCK, 1938), pp. 55-56. 61 62 MARCEL SAROT many, to the United States and to Asia.4 By now most of the theologians who explicitly state their views on divine impassibility hold that this doctrine is to a greater or lesser degree false, and Ronald Goetz rightly asserts "that the rejection of the ancient doctrine of divine impassibility has become a theological commonplace." 5 Nevertheless the debate on this issue is not yet closed. Recently Richard Creel published a thorough study in defense of divine impassibility,6 which, I expect, will prove quite influential. Other theologians who defend the doctrine can be cited as well.7 To a large extent, the arguments which these theologians put forward in favor of divine impassibility are taken from the classic Christian theological texts. Among these, the writings of Aquinas are not the least important and no one will be surprised to hear that he is frequently cited in this connection. However, what has surprised me in my study of the debate on the issue of divine impassibility is that one of the most important arguments Aquinas 4 On passibilist tendencies in modern theology, see Richard Bauckham, " ' Only the Suffering God Can Help ' : Divine Passibility in Modern Theology," Themelios 9 (1984) : 6-12; Warren McWilliams, The Passio1i of God: Divine Swffering in Contemporary Protestant Theology (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985); Van Egmond, De Lijdende God, pp. 28-31, and "Theopaschitische Tendenzen in de Na-Oorlogse Protestantse Theologie," Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 79 (1979): 161-177; Marcel Sarot, "De Passibilitas Dei in de Hedendaagse Westerse Theologie: Een Literatuuroverzicht," Kerk en Theologie 40-3 (1989) : 196-206. 5 Ronald Goetz, "The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy," The Christian Century 103 (1986): 385. Also see the literature cited in the preceding note. 6 Richard E. Creel, Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 7 See, for instance, Brian Davies, Thinking about God (London: Chapman, 1985), pp. 155-158; William J. Hill, "Does Divine Love Entail Suffering in God?," in: B. L. Clarke & E. T. Long, eds., God and Temporality (New York: Paragon House, 1984), pp. 55-71 ; id., " The Doctrine of God after Vatican II," The Thomist 51 (1987); pp. 412-414; Herbert McCabe, "The Involvement of God," New Blackfriars 66 (1985) : 464-476, reprinted in Herbert McCabe... (shrink)

A key to happiness lies in each person’s ability to know himself or herself. The consequences of going through life without self-knowledge are frequently self-obsession, false priorities, and unwarranted fears. This book explains the enlightening process of self-discovery and shows how it leads to self-sufficiency. The author offers guidance with inspiring true-life stories and practical advice that readers can apply to their own lives. Here is instruction on techniques for engaging in periods of solitude, with emphasis on making such times (...) enjoyable and spiritually enriching experiences. The author also discusses the relationships between solitude and human emotions, solitude and intelligence, methods of effective communication with others, and ways to create a state of mind that is based on self-sufficiency. Making solitude a source of spiritual enrichment entails creating a balance between the normal need for human relationships and the awareness of one’s self as an independent being. That balance invariably produces a sense of happiness and personal fulfillment. (shrink)

This wonderful and remarkable book by Wang Fengyi (1864-1937) is a true testament to the benefits of Daoist spiritual cultivation. At age thirty-five, having become aware of the repercussions and implications of emotions on his own health condition, Wang attained the Dao and began spreading his teachings. One of his most remarkable accomplishments was the founding of countless schools for young women, making education accessible to them on a large scale. Wang Fengyi's teachings are like a thoughtful and insightful poetry (...) that can allow one to transform oneself, one's body and one's Spirit. If you seek to help others or bring wellness to yourself, these teachings can be enormously beneficial, offering direction and great insights for one's well-being. As Daoist practitioners, Johan Hausen and Jonas Akers have done an excellent job in translating this valuable treatise, bringing additional authenticity to the transmission of this work and propagation of Wang Fengyi's teachings. (shrink)

This article investigates the emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November. I argue that one of the main characters of Jansson’s book is the autumn forest that surrounds the abandoned Moomin house. The decomposing forest is not just an emblem of the inner lives of the guests that gather in the house but is an active character itself: an ambiguous life form that creeps in the house and must be expelled from its living core. I further demonstrate that (...) the emotion of disgust has a crucial role in Jansson’s narrative, and that an adequate analysis of the intentional content of disgust allows us to see what is at issue in the relations between the characters. In my reading, the main insight of Tove Jansson’s last Moomin book is not about loss or sorrow but is about the human capacity to begin anew by composing novel wholes from scraps. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Bodyheartminding” (xin 心): Reconceiving the Inner Self and the Outer World in the Language of Holographic Focus and FieldRoger T. Amesin body consciousness: a philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics, Richard Shusterman expands upon a professional oeuvre in which his exploration of the phenomenon of “body consciousness” has effected nothing less than a somatic turn in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative.1 But his contribution does not end there. Over (...) the past two decades, the reach and influence of his “somaesthetics” has been extended to the gates of China. Indeed, it has become a theme engaged by scholars of China’s indigenous philosophical traditions, thus providing an opportunity for a further edifying conversation between the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.2 And it is this conversation, as it has been inspired by Shusterman’s work, that I propose to join in this short essay.In Body Consciousness, Shusterman tells the story of how John Dewey advances the pragmatic project of not only understanding the body better, but indeed of applying the Alexander Technique as his way of using his own body properly.3 Just as Dewey has been a prominent resource for Shusterman in his development of somaesthetics, for Dewey in turn, it was William James’s Principles of Psychology that was a self-confessed inspiration for the development of his own evolving interpretation of pragmatism.4 Indeed, one way of reading Dewey’s philosophical career and his thirty-seven-volume opus is that it is a sustained effort to take the radical “stream-of-consciousness” insights developed in James’s Principles to their logical, systematic conclusion. In pursuing this project, while appreciative, Dewey is at times impatient with James’s dualistic lapses in which he continues to separate individuals from community, mind from body, emotions from intellect, agents from actions, and theory from practice. Dewey takes these unfortunate reversions to old ways of thinking as serving only to confound James’s holistic doctrines of pure experience and radical empiricism. Given Dewey’s own postulate of [End Page 100] immediate and continuous empiricism, one way of tracking his journey from having been inspired by James’s biological naturalism to achieving his own philosophical coherence is to register his unrelenting aversion to dualism in any form.But Dewey himself was not always consistent in this respect. Shusterman gives an account of the early neo-Hegelian Dewey who, affirming the familiar transcendent conception of soul we associate with idealism, unsurprisingly embraces a clear soul and body dualism. And in spite of the philosophically mature Dewey’s best efforts to think “process,” he has no choice but to use both a language and a grammar freighted with substance ontology that resists his more holistic insights. On occasion, even while trying to remain consistent in his thinking, Dewey seems to fall victim to terminology that if not dualistic is at best ambiguous. Dewey’s struggle against this problem of equivocation is particularly apparent in some of the language he appeals to in attempting to put the Humpty Dumpty of mind and body together again. In his effort to register the irreducible continuity and inseparability of the nonanalytic abstractions we differentiate as body and mind—the ontological givenness or “hadness” of “bodyminding”—Dewey still at times invokes terms such as “combination,” “integration,” “unity,” and so on, that take as their suppressed premise “two things becoming one.” By way of contrast, in the correlative vocabulary of Chinese process cosmology, expressions such as yinyang 陰陽, the natural/cultural and the human (tianren 天人), and knowing and doing (zhixing 知行), primacy is given to vital relationality and the continuity it entails. It is not putting two things together that is referenced with these binomials, but the deepening of the horizon of constitutive, internal relationships that transforms the two aspects of the same phenomenon qualitatively into harmonics (he 和) for yinyang, sagacity (sheng 聖) for tianren, and acting wisely (zhi 智) for zhixing. In each instance, the two aspects themselves are simply conceptual abstractions from a complex relational process. The proper and effective measure (du 度) sought in this Confucian cosmology is not quantitatively more or less of two distinct things—taking mind and body as our example—but rather a qualitative and transformative change that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real HappinessJohn M. KollerInner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness. By Robert Thurman. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Pp. xiv + 322. $24.95.Can the Buddhist culture of Tibet—until the middle of the twentieth century a medieval theocracy almost completely isolated from the rest of the world—point the way to the fulfillment of the American dream? In (...) his extraordinary book, Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness, Robert Thurman, a distinguished Buddhist scholar, argues that it can.Inner Revolution is a significant reconstruction of the basic teachings of Buddhism from a Tibetan perspective that shows the important sociopolitical dimensions [End Page 138] of Buddhism, arguing convincingly that mental transformation based on deep understanding of self and reality is the basis for far-reaching peaceful social and political revolution. The energizing vision behind this book is summed up on page 221, in the concluding paragraph of chapter 7, "The World-taming Adepts":To finish building the free society dreamed of by Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, we must draw upon the resources of the enlightened imagination, which can be systematically developed by the spiritual sciences of India and Tibet. We have not yet tamed our own demons of racism, nationalism, sexism, and materialism. We have not yet made peace with a land we took by force and have only partly paid for. We are a teeming conglomeration of people from different tribes who have yet to embrace fully the humanness in one another. And none of us can be really free until all of us are.This is the vision of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness" announced in the book's title. The means to the realization of this vision, the "cool revolution" that Thurman describes, is captured in the first words of the title, "Inner Revolution." This inner revolution is a transformation of the mind, a transformation effected by the deep understanding praised as prajñā or insight in the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras of Mahāyāna Buddhism. It is the deep understanding to which Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha of our era, awakened, making him a Buddha. It is the understanding that the truth of existence, the Dharma, is that things exist in dynamic interdependence. Nothing—persons or things—exists permanently or separately. The fundamental insight of the Buddha, pratītyasamutpāda, is that, in the felicitous words of the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nat Hanh, things inter-are, in dynamic interdependence. It is because of the dynamic interbeing of things that genuine social and political freedoms are impossible without inner freedom. It was in his awakening to the truth of dynamic interbeing that, as Thurman describes it, "The Buddha found that inner freedom—freedom from our negative emotions and obsessive self-concern—is the essential precondition for goodness and social liberty" (p. 30).There is a tendency among Buddhist scholars to ignore or slight the social and political implications of wisdom and compassion. This is partly the result of reading modern Western individualism into Buddhist teaching and consequently focusing exclusively on how the individual person is transformed by wisdom and compassion, ignoring the social transformation inherent in the transformation of individuals. It is also partly the result of a failure to understand that compassionate action is as central to Buddhism as enlightened understanding. But Thurman clearly understands that the fundamental aim of Buddhist teaching and practice is to become a Buddha. And to become a Buddha, as Śāntideva says in the Bodhicaryāvatāra, a text that has inspired Tibetan Buddhists for over a thousand years, one takes the Bodhisattva vow to work tirelessly and unceasingly to bring happiness to all beings. In Śāntideva's own words: "As long as space abides and as long as the world abides, so long may I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world" (10.55). Compassion is inseparable from wisdom. When one awakens the mind of enlightenment (bodhicitta), compassion arises, leading one to take the Bodhisattva vow that Śāntideva expresses in 3.7 : [End Page 139] "I am medicine for the sick. May I be both the doctor and... (shrink)

Human faces are among the most important visual stimuli that we encounter at all ages. This importance partly stems from the face as a conveyer of information on the emotional state of other individuals. Previous research has demonstrated specific scanning patterns in response to threat-related compared to non-threat-related emotional expressions. This study investigated how visual scanning patterns toward faces which display different emotional expressions develop during infancy. The visual scanning patterns of 4-month-old and 7-month-old infants and adults when looking at (...) threat-related (i.e., angry and fearful) versus non-threat-related (i.e., happy, sad, and neutral) emotional faces were examined. We found that infants as well as adults displayed an avoidant looking pattern in response to threat-related emotional expressions with reduced dwell times and relatively less fixations to the inner features of the face. In addition, adults showed a pattern of eye contact avoidance when looking at threat-related emotional expressions that was not yet present in infants. Thus, whereas a general avoidant reaction to threat-related facial expressions appears to be present from very early in life, the avoidance of eye contact might be a learned response toward others' anger and fear that emerges later during development. (shrink)

Lit from Within offers sincere seekers a road map for awakening the inner life-an inner life that can become a nourishing vehicle for existing in a kinder, healthier, more attuned way. Awareness teachings are a way in, and a way out. They are a way in to the vivid but formless realms of our body and mind, as well as a way out of the emotional agony of disconnection and meaninglessness.

The first part of the text poses the question whether for Heidegger?s aesthetically relevant thought it is better to use older terms, such as?Heidegger?s Doctrine of Art? or?Heidegger?s Philosophy of Art?, or a more recent term?Heidegger aesthetics?? Does the term?Heidegger?s aesthetics? represent an?oxymoron? contrary to the intentions of Heidegger?s own philosophy, or does it signify a relevant aesthetic conception that has its own place in contemporary philosophical aesthetics? In order to answer these questions, the text considers Heidegger?s understanding of aesthetics (...) as a philosophical discipline and also the problems arising in connection with this designation. It argues that Heidegger?s concept of?overcoming aesthetics? represents the interpretation of his own philosophy of art developed in the essay The Origin of the Work of Art. The second part of the text follows the thesis that the Heidegger?s aesthetics contains the definitions of art and work of art, based on Heidegger?s analyses of freedom, basic moods, and emotions. This part of text follows a broader thesis, in which Heidegger?s philosophy as a whole can be understood as the phenomenology of freedom. Also, it discusses a special thesis that the concept of strife of Earth and world in The Origin of the Work of Art should be understood only on the background of the primordial struggle between concealment and unconcealment in the truth as the unconcealedness of beings. Further, the concept of strife is linked on a deeper level with the determination of finite human freedom and basic human moods. In light of that, Heidegger?s aesthetics is not only the heteronomous aesthetics of the work of art, but also the autonomous aesthetics of aesthetic experience articulated with respect to finite human freedom. The conclusion is that Heidegger?s aesthetics of truth understood as the philosophy of freedom, basic moods, and emotions, according to their inner intentions, is closer to the tradition of the aesthetics of sublime than the aesthetics of the beautiful. (shrink)

I am very sympathetic to Dan Hutto’s view that in our experience of the emotions of others “we do not neutrally observe the outward behaviour of another and infer coldly, but on less than certain grounds, that they are in such and such an inner state, as justified by analogy with our own case. Rather we react and feel as we do because it is natural for us to see and be moved by specific expressions of emotion in (...) others” (Hutto section 4). is seems to me to be a good starting point for any account of the ascription and epistemology of emotions, an excellent description of data that any theory of the emotions has to take into account. What I find puzzling is that Hutto seems to believe that this view is in opposition to certain widely accepted ... (shrink)

Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self – a self-experience – whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of (...) the fact that it is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called “mineness”, “for-me-ness”, “pre-reflective self-awareness” and “subjective character”, among others. This view, associated with historical figures such as William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, is attracting a new surge of attention at the crossroads of phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science, but also intense controversy. This book explores some of the questions running through the ongoing debate on the putative subjective dimension of experience: Does it exist?, the existence question; What is it?, the essence question; What is it for?, the function question; and What else does it explain?, the explanation question. The volume also surveys various domains of human experience, both normal and pathological, where a “sense of self” might be at play, including agency, bodily awareness, introspection, memory, emotions and values, and offers insights into the possible relations between the notions of subjective awareness involved. The first part of the book is devoted to more sceptical or deflationary views about self-experience, and the second, to more robust ones. (shrink)

Introspection, or looking inward to observe one's experience, is inherent in many methods used to study feelings, the experiential component of emotion. Challenges of introspection make faithful, high-fidelity descriptions of feelings difficult to attain. A method that (1) cleaves to a specific moment, (2) cleaves to pristine inner experience, (3) brackets presuppositions, and (4) utilizes an iterative process may be particularly well suited to this task. We review some contemporary introspective methods from the perspective of these four methodological (...) constraints, finding that Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) addresses the constraints most fully. We present DES findings on feelings to highlight the unique contributions careful introspective methods make to emotion science. High-fidelity descriptions of feelings are necessary for a complete understanding of emotion. (shrink)

Philosophers have almost always said something about emotions and passions whenever they have discussed human mental life. Many have asserted that it is some emotions or, more broadly, passions, that are to be primarily valued and sought. These valued passionate states of mind might include emotions, moods, desires, belief-like feelings of conviction and commitment, and romantic or erotic love, which are typically scarcely distinguished. Not only are these states of mind lumped together, but the reasons why they are valued may (...) likewise be various: they may be valued because of their intrinsic feeling (especially insofar as they are intense), through their long-term or deep effects on the rest of our practical and mental lives, through their effects on others’ lives, or even in the glimpse they give us of an object that transcends our mundane and superficial concerns, as in love, peak experiences, or intimations of God, Beauty, or Nature. Others have claimed that it is in the subduing or elimination of some or all of these passions that the ideal human life consists. Again, what precisely are the objectionable passions is typically not delineated, and why such mental states are objectionable may be diverse and even unspecified. One might resent their "disruptive" nature on our mental life, especially insofar as some of them stem from external, uncontrollable sources, and instead seek a calm state that is within one’s control and not subject to these whimsical externalities. Or one can see many or all passions as disruptive of control and success in our inner or outer life, or in the lives of others. We might call this latter group the anti-emotional Rationalists, and the former group the pro-emotional Romantics. (shrink)

Social researchers have long known that playing music to people can evoke memories of their pasts and bring people into a different relationship with themselves as the sounds move them to make connections with an earlier period in their lives. It has been discovered in patients with dementia that it could revive people to hear songs they have loved, which can help to bring them back from a state of inner withdrawal. Some researchers have given people portable music listening (...) devices so that they can listen to music that evokes memories from particular moments that they might be willing to share as part of an oral history or ethnographic project. This is to invoke processes that we can acknowledge ourselves as we realize the very special relationship we seem to have with music from our teenage years ‐ processes that have helped to shape a generational experience and sensibility. Hearing old tracks from the past can move us to make connections and can invoke emotions and feelings in us that we might not have felt for years. It can restore memories of times past as we feel the presence of the past through the mediation of the sounds. This article explores the significance of sound and voice memory for traumatic suffering in the form of an autoethnographic study of Amy Berg’s documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015), transgenerational trauma, sexual trauma, feminism, therapy and the truths of memory. (shrink)

Scheler developed the fundamentals of his theory of emotions and values wanting to overcome the common-sensical empiricist and the critical rationalist approaches to ethics. Both refused that there are laws of essence as regards the character, deployment, evolution, and interconnection/opposition of the emotions and their relatedness to values. Scheler distinguished between mere feeling states and the intentional feelings of something (principally of values). Moreover, he claimed that a normative inner organization of intentional emotive phenomena can be discovered. Thus, a (...) corresponding phenomenological ethics of values, based on the ‘rationality’ of the emotive life itself, appears possible for the first time. After a comprehensive elucidation of Scheler’s and phenomenology’s approach to the matter, I critically reconstruct in some detail Scheler’s analysis of emotions as intentional experiences. I examine the way in which Scheler understands intentionality and the way in which he silently applied it in the case of emotive experiences. He articulates three relevant proposals. Intentional feeling functions are turned toward feeling states as their intentional objects. He also suggests that, e.g., a snow-covered mountain, whose beauty has amazed someone, is also an intentional correlate of this amazement as intentional feeling. Scheler finally maintains his fundamental thesis that values are the intentional objects of intentional emotive phenomena. However, he does not develop a clear and coherent analysis of how the three candidates for the place of the intentional object of an emotion intermingle or are otherwise interconnected. In the end, I survey some other closely related problems, regarding his understanding of reduction and of the status of values, and attempt to trace them all back to Scheler’s phenomenological realism. This examination, however, shows that we can use the latter’s analyses as preparation for a demythologized, this time, concrete phenomenological theory of emotions and values, in the direction of a future critical transcendental and persuasive phenomenological praxeology. (shrink)