Research on this topic in Europe and North America has reached a new stage. Prior to 1970, historians told a story of progress in which modern individuals gradually gained mastery of emotions. After 1970 this older approach was put into doubt. Since 1990 research into the history of emotions has increasingly relied on a new methodology, based on the assumption that emotion is a domain of effort, and that it is possible to document variance between emotional standards, on the one (...) hand, and the greater or lesser success of individuals in conforming to them, on the other. Emotional standards are now assumed to display a history that is not progressive, but reflects distinctive features of each period. (shrink)

Building on the author's earlier work, this paper argues that language is a key issue in understanding human emotions and that treating English emotion terms as valid analytical tools continues to be a roadblock in the study of emotions. Further, it shows how the methodology developed by the author and colleagues, known as NSM (from Natural Semantic Metalanguage), allows us to break free of the “shackles” (Barrett, 2006) of English psychological terms and explore human emotions from a culture-independent perspective. The (...) use of NSM makes it possible to study human emotions from a genuinely cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, as well as a psychological, perspective and thus “opens up new possibilities for the scientific understanding of subjectivity and psychological experience” (Goddard, 2007). (shrink)

Une argumentation pour l'importance dualiste des émotions dans la société, individuellement et au niveau communautaire. La tendance actuelle à la prise de conscience et au contrôle des émotions grâce à l'intelligence émotionnelle a un effet bénéfique dans les affaires et pour le succès des activités sociales mais, si nous n'y prenons pas garde, elle peut conduire à une aliénation irréversible au niveau individuel et social. L'essai est composé de trois parties principales: Émotions (Modèles d'émotions, Le processus des émotions, La bonheur, (...) La philosophie des émotions, L'éthique des émotions), Intelligence émotionnelle (Modèles d'intelligence émotionnelle, L'intelligence émotionnelle dans la recherche et l'éducation, La philosophie d'intelligence émotionnelle, L'intelligence émotionnelle dans la philosophie orientale) et Intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations (Travail émotionnel, La philosophie de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations, La critique de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations, L'éthique de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations). Dans les Conclusions, je présente un résumé des déclarations contenues dans le document. SOMMAIRE: Abstract 1. Émotions 1.1 Modèles d'émotion 1.2 Traitement des émotions 1.3 Bonheur 1.4 La philosophie des émotions 1.5 L'éthique des émotions 2. Intelligence émotionnelle 2.1 Modèles d'intelligence émotionnelle 2.1.1 Modèle d'habilités de Mayer et Salovey 2.1.2 Le modèle mixte de Goleman 2.1.3 Le modèle mixte de Bar-On 2.1.4 Modèle de traits de Petrides 2.2 Intelligence émotionnelle dans la recherche et l'éducation 2.3 La philosophie de l'intelligence émotionnelle 2.3.1 L'intelligence émotionnelle dans la philosophie orientale 3. Intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations 3.1 Travail émotionnel 3.2 La philosophie de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations 3.3 Critique de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations 3.4 Éthique de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations Conclusions Bibliographie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28567.93600 . (shrink)

An argumentation for the dualistic importance of emotions in society, individually and at community level. The current tendency of awareness and control of emotions through emotional intelligence has a beneficial effect in business and for the success of social activities but, if we are not careful, it can lead to irreversible alienation at individual and social level. The paper consists of three main parts: Emotions (Emotional models, Emotional processing, Happiness, Philosophy of emotions, Ethics of emotions), Emotional intelligence (Models of emotional (...) intelligence, Emotional intelligence in research and education, Philosophy of emotional intelligence, Emotional intelligence in Eastern philosophy), Emotional intelligence in organizations (Emotional work, Philosophy of emotional intelligence in organizations, Criticism of emotional intelligence in organizations, Ethics of emotional intelligence in organizations). In the Conclusions I present a summary of the statements in the paper. CONTENTS: Abstract 1. Emotions 1.1 Models of emotion 1.2 Processing emotions 1.3 Happiness 1.4 The philosophy of emotions 1.5 The ethics of emotions 2. Emotional intelligence 2.1 Models of emotional intelligence 2.1.1 Model of abilities of Mayer and Salovey 2.1.2 Goleman's mixed model 2.1.3 The mixed model of Bar-On 2.1.4 Petrides' model of traits 2.2 Emotional intelligence in research and education 2.3 The philosophy of emotional intelligence 2.3.1 Emotional intelligence in Eastern philosophy 3. Emotional intelligence in organizations 3.1 Emotional labor 3.2 The philosophy of emotional intelligence in organizations 3.3 Critique of emotional intelligence in organizations 3.4 Ethics of emotional intelligence in organizations Conclusions Bibliography DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32802.79041 . (shrink)

Linguistic anthropologists have studied emotion in societies around the world for several decades. This article defines the discipline, introduces its general relevance to emotion theory, then presents five of the most important contributions linguistic anthropology has made to the study of emotion.

This commentary argues that the question of metalanguage is a key issue in emotion research. Izard (2010) ignores this issue (and all the earlier literature relating to it, including the debate in Emotion Review, 2009, 1[1]), and thus falls into the old traps of circularity, obscurity, and ethnocentrism. This commentary rejects Izard’s claim that “emotion” defies definition, and it offers a viable definition of “emotion” formulated in simple and universal human concepts, using the English version of the universal conceptual lingua (...) franca called Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Once again, this commentary draws attention to the centrality of the question of language in emotion research. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of emotion studies disregarded historical perspectives on translation and left out a substantial body of scientific research on feelings and emotions that was not published in English. Yet these texts were foundational in forging the scientific concept of emotion in experimental psychology in the 19th century. The current approach to emotion science overlooks that translation issues occurred between three languages, German, French, and English, as physiological psychologists at the time were reading each other in these languages all (...) the while writing about the same topics in their respective language. Historical perspectives are important to clarify the ambiguities of emotion terms and include non-Anglophone frameworks into current transdisciplinary debates. (shrink)

Norms are standards against which actions, dispositions of mind and character, states of affairs and so forth can be measured. They also govern our behaviour, make claims on us, bind us and provide reasons for action and thought that motivate us. J. L. Mackie argued that the intrinsic prescriptivity, or to-be-pursuedness, of moral norms would make them utterly unlike anything else that we know of. Therefore, we should favour an error theory of morality. Mackie thought that the to-be-pursuedness would have (...) to be built into mind-independent moral reality. One alternative, however, is that the to-be-pursuedness is built into our faculty of moral sensibility. There is a large body of empirical evidence demonstrating that the emotions play a central role in making moral judgments. I shall argue that this helps to explain how normative judgments are reliably and non-accidentally related to motivation. I shall also argue that emotional experience has the right structure and properties to provide us with a defeasible warrant for normative knowledge. The role of the emotions in our moral psychology does not obviously support anti-realism. Rather, emotional experience can be intentional, evaluative, evaluable, and quasi-perceptual. This makes emotional experience a plausible candidate for constituting a non-queer faculty of moral sensibility. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to give a general idea of how meanings of single emotion words, and configurations between words, change historically, reflecting changes in people’s understanding of emotions. The article provides a selective overview of linguistic research on the histories of a number of English words for emotions. It focuses on changes in the words emotion and mood as well as analyzing terms for the specific emotions of anger, fear, happiness, joy, love, pride, respect, and sorrow. This (...) article also suggests that it is possible to use linguistic data in order to recover some “psychological” information about emotions, such as information on people’s responses to them. (shrink)

Drawing on Latin treatises, letters, and autobiographical writings, this article outlines the changes in the—thoroughly somatic—learned medical understanding of the emotions (or “affectus/passiones...

Cognitively-oriented theories have dominated the recent history of the study of emotion. However, critics of this perspective suggest the role of the body in the experience of emotion is largely ignored by cognitive theorists. As an alternative to the cognitive perspective, critics are increasingly pointing to William James’ theory, which emphasized somatic aspects of emotions. This emerging emphasis on the embodiment of emotions is shared by those in the field of AI attempting to model human emotions. Behavior-based agents in AI (...) are attempts to model the role the body might play in the experiencing of emotions. Progress in creating such behavior-based models that function in their environments has been slow, suggesting some potential problems with Jamesian alternatives to cognitive perspectives of emotions. Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of embodiment are suggested as alternatives to James’ and as means for addressing the shortcomings of the cognitive perspective. (shrink)

I analyze the linguistic picture of the Portuguese emotion saudade, roughly “nostalgia,” in an attempt to show its cultural significance and contradict the view that nostalgia is a marginal feeling, deprived of any practical function.

While the impassibility debate has traditionally been construed in terms of whether God suffers, recent philosophy of religion has interpreted it in terms of whether God has emotions more generally. This article surveys the philosophical literature on divine im/passibility over the last 25 years, outlining major arguments for and against the idea that God has emotions. It argues that questions about the nature and value of emotions are at the heart of the im/passibility debate. More specifically, it suggests that presuppositions (...) about the dichotomy between emotions and reason (or the ‘heart and the head’) have negatively impacted the debate. It contends that the debate can only move forward in response to serious reflection on our affects as we experience them, aided by historical and anthropological as well as contemporary philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

In 1902, the Calabrian brigand Giuseppe Musolino was tried on several counts of murder and many crimes of lesser magnitude. While the tale of the brigand’s 1898 false conviction, imprisonment, escape and then revenge sparked a national debate about the political and cultural meaning of brigandage, the trial came to focus on Musolino’s emotional state at the time of his crimes. Was he a cold-blooded and calculating killer who manipulated southerners into believing he was a folk hero? Or was he (...) an angry, passionate and insane murderer victimized by his own feelings? Both jurists and scientists weighed in to determine his culpability. By turning a political question of banditry or brigandage into a psychological question of morbid or criminal emotions, the trial politicized the criminal character. This article examines the perspectives on emotions that shaped Musolino’s trial, and how psychiatric knowledge came to challenge legal notions of insanity and culpability. It argues that the determination of emotions as motives served to de-legitimize the rationale and political motives of the defendant, in turn politicizing his emotions and character. At the same time, the cause of Musolino’s crime and his culpability represented the failures of national unification and the ongoing tensions between the North and South of Italy. The introduction of psychiatric expertise into the criminal court pushed judgement and punishment to examine increasingly who a person was as opposed to what that person had done. The court’s definition of who a person ‘was’, was a matter of how that person felt. (shrink)

This paper is an initial effort preparatory for a more thorough “theology of joys.” I distinguish joys from other kinds of pleasure and argue that joy can be seen as the form of all the so-called positive emotions. So joy is properly treated in the plural: joys come in a variety of kinds. I distinguish canonical from non-canonical joys. The worthiness of joys is primarily a function of their objects—what the joys are about. I look at a few examples of (...) joys that appear in the New Testament and sketch the relation of joys to happiness. (shrink)

Although the topic of emotions was long ignored in British and American analytic philosophy and psychology, it remained a rich and exciting subject in Continental Philosophy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche celebrated the passionate life. In phenomenology Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, and Paul Ricoeur all made major contributions. Heidegger pursued a highly original thesis concerning the vital role of moods in human life, notably angst and boredom. Jean‐Paul Sartre added the tantalizing thesis that our (...) emotions are strategies to help us cope with the difficulties in life. Max Scheler gave us the stunning expression, “the emotional a priori,” the idea that emotions are basic structures of human existence. In this essay, I want to expand on the contributions of the classic phenomenologists and existentialists and do more of what they were doing by way of an “original” project of phenomenological investigation. (This follows publication of the first two volumes of a three‐part study of the emotions, Not Passion's Slave and In Defense of Sentimentality, both published by Oxford University Press.). (shrink)

The claim that mind is an epiphenomenon of the nervous system became academically respectable during the 19thcentury. The same period saw the establishment of an ideal of science as institutionalized endeavour conducted in laboratories. This article identifies three ways in which the ‘physiological psychology’ movement in Britain contributed to the latter process: first, via an appeal to the authority of difficult-to-access sites in the analysis of nerves; second, through the constitution of a discourse internal to it that privileged epistemology over (...) ontology; and third, in its articulation of a set of rhetorical tools that identified laboratories as economically productive institutions. Acknowledging the integral place of physiological psychology in the institution of science, it is claimed, has the potential to alter our understanding of the significance of current neurological science for historical scholarship. (shrink)

Aunque las emociones se encuentran en el núcleo de quienes somos, su naturaleza y estructura continúa siendo hoy en día un amplio campo de investigación para diferentes disciplinas científicas. No obstante, como muchos otros temas de investigación actual, las emociones tienen unos antecedentes, una historia que conviene tener presente para ubicar los conceptos, los debates y las diversas aproximaciones teóricas en el marco cultural y las tradiciones de pensamiento que les dieron origen. En este artículo, realizaremos un breve recorrido por (...) la historia de las emociones en la época antigua de tal manera que el lector pueda reconocer, a grandes rasgos, las interpretaciones y posturas originales que desencadenaron diversas comprensiones teóricas en torno a estos fenómenos físicos y mentales que conforman nuestra existencia. (shrink)

This article aims to determine to what extent photographic practices in psychology, psychiatry and physiology contributed to the definition of the external bodily signs of passions and emotions in the second half of the 19th century in France. Bridging the gap between recent research in the history of emotions and photographic history, the following analyses focus on the photographic production of scientists and photographers who made significant contributions to the study of expressions and gestures, namely Duchenne de Boulogne, Charles Darwin, (...) Paul Richer and Albert Londe. This article argues that photography became a key technology in their works due to the adequateness of the exposure time of different cameras to the duration of the bodily manifestations to be recorded, and that these uses constituted facial expressions and bodily gestures as particular objects for the scientific study. (shrink)

The term ur-emotion is proposed to replace basic emotion as a name for the aspects of emotion that underlie perceived similarities of emotion types across cultures and species. The ur- prefix is borrowed from the German on analogy to similar borrowings in textual criticism and musicology. The proposed term ur-emotion is less likely to be interpreted as referring to the entirety of an emotional state than is the term basic emotion. Ur-emotion avoids reductionism by indicating an abstract underlying structure that (...) accounts for similarities between emotions without implying that the differences are unimportant. This article is dedicated to the memory of Bob Solomon, and is framed in terms of his decades-long analysis and critique of the concept of basic emotions. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to open a dialogue between research in social sciences concerning collective emotion and historical investigation concerning a religious and political movement of the...

This article critically examines the views that psychology first came into existence as a discipline ca. 1879, that philosophy and psychology were estranged in the ensuing decades, that psychology finally became scientific through the influence of logical empiricism, and that it should now disappear in favor of cognitive science and neuroscience. It argues that psychology had a natural philosophical phase (from antiquity) that waxed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this psychology transformed into experimental psychology ca. 1900, that philosophers (...) and psychologists collaboratively discussed the subject matter and methods of psychology in the first two decades of the twentieth century, that the neobehaviorists were not substantively influenced by the Vienna Circle, that the study of perception and cognition in psychology did not disappear in the behaviorist period and so did not reemerge as a result of artificial intelligence, linguistics, and the computer analogy, that although some psychologists adopted the language-of-thought approach of traditional cognitive science, many did not, and that psychology will not go away because it contributes independently of cognitive science and neuroscience. (shrink)

This essay explores the phenomenological features of the passional response to evil that Aquinas calls ‘hatred of sin’ in Summa Thelogiae II-II Q34 A3 and I-II Q23 A1, among other places. Social justice concerns and philosophical objections, however, challenge the notion that one can feel hatred toward an agent’s vice or sin without it being the agent who is hated. I argue that a careful, contextual reading of these texts shows that Aquinas cannot be read as commending ‘hate’ in any (...) form. The texts under consideration offer no comfort to those who appeal to hatred of sin or vice to legitimate sentiments or actions that can be reasonably taken to express hatred of persons. (shrink)

This comment questions the logic and evidence base of Lakoff’s (2016) account of metaphor, embodiment, and the so-called neural theory of language. It calls for proper attention to linguistic and cultural diversity and opposes biophysical reductionism.

Augustine’s theory of first movements has provoked many controversies over the years. When discussing Augustine’s position in preliminary passions, some scholars maintain that he misunderstands the Stoics, whereas some others argue that he grasps their works rather well and his accounts are consistent with Stoic teaching. This article examines how Augustine transforms his predecessors’ conception of first movements into his own theory, with particular focus on whether Augustine misinterprets his predecessor’s doctrine in his approach. The first section introduces the recent (...) disputations on Augustine’s misunderstanding of the Stoic concept of the first movements. The second section compares Augustine’s opinions in his early, middle, and late writings to determine whether changes occur in his interpretation. Based on the above observations, this essay argues that Augustine is familiar with the Stoic doctrines, but in his later works, he ‘deliberately’ deviates from their concept of the first movements in order to refute their ‘pride’ and to defend his Christian position on the psychology of preliminary passions. These deliberate new changes of terms by Augustine do not derive from a misunderstanding, but rather follow from his attempt at constructing a new dynamic theological framework of addressing passions during his later thought. The article concludes with a third section that revisits the modern critiques and responds with a consideration of the significance of Augustine’s views on preliminary passions. (shrink)

The history of emotions is notably fraught with semantic anxiety, and a great deal of ink has been spilt in attempts to clarify emotion terminology, with respect to both historical and contemporary usage. Because the 16th century is both a momentous time of linguistic change for European languages, and often for some reason neglected by historians of emotion trying to tell a longer story about emotion terminology, this article provides an overview of how 16th-century lexicons and prominent humanist authors handle (...) the basic Latin emotion terms affectus and passio. It suggests further that 16th-century usage confounds Thomas Dixon’s assertion that “classical Christian” usage consists of a generally firm distinction between the two terms. (shrink)

An intractable problem that characterizes the contemporary philosophical discussion of emotion is whether emotions are fundamentally cognitive or noncognitive. In this article, I will establish tha...

Reasoning and judgement in health care entail complex responses to problems whose demands typically derive from several areas of specialism at once. We argue that current evidence- or value-based models of health care reasoning, despite their virtues, are insufficient to account for responses to such problems exhaustively. At the same time, we offer reasons for contending that health professionals in fact engage in forms of reasoning of a kind described for millennia under the concept of wisdom. Wisdom traditions refer to (...) forms of deliberation which combine knowledge, reflection and life experience with social, emotional and ethical capacities. Wisdom is key in dealing with problems which are vital to human affairs but lack prescribed solutions. Uncertainty and fluidity must be tolerated in seeking to resolve them. We illustrate the application of wisdom using cases in psychiatry, where non-technical aspects of problems are often prominent and require more systematic analysis than conventional approaches offer, but we argue that our thesis applies throughout the health care field. We argue for the relevance of a threefold model of reasoning to modern health care situations in which multifaceted teamwork and complex settings demand wise judgement. A model based on practical wisdom highlights a triadic process with features activating capacities of the self, other and aspects of the problem itself. Such a framework could be used to develop current approaches to health care based on case review and experiential learning. (shrink)

The target articles and commentaries reveal considerable support for the view that the term “emotion” names neither a natural kind nor a coherent psychological category. This brief response revisits a couple of historical points about the meanings of “emotion,” as well as the ancient debate between Stoicism and Christianity.

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

In this article I attempt to reconstruct David Hume's use of the label ?experimental? to characterise his method in the Treatise. Although its meaning may strike the present-day reader as unusual, such a reconstruction is possible from the background of eighteenth-century practices and concepts of natural inquiry. As I argue, Hume's inquiries into human nature are experimental not primarily because of the way the empirical data he uses are produced, but because of the way those data are theoretically processed. He (...) seems to follow a method of analysis and synthesis quite similar to the one advertised in Newton's Opticks, which profoundly influenced eighteenth-century natural and moral philosophy. This method brings him much closer to the methods of qualitative, chemical investigations than to mechanical approaches to both nature and human nature. (shrink)

Recent attempts by philosophers to revive William James’s theory of emotions rest on a basic misunderstanding of James’s theory. To see why, one needs to see how James’s theory completed the transformation of the study of emotions from a study in moral philosophy to a scientific study. This essay charts that transformation.

The philosophy of emotion has long been divided over the cognitive nature of emotion. In this paper I argue that this debate suffers from deep confusion over the meaning of “cognition” itself. This confusion has in turn obscured critical substantive agreement between the debate’s principal opponents. Capturing this agreement and remedying this confusion requires re-conceptualizing “the cognitive” as it functions in first-order theories of emotion. Correspondingly, a sketch for a new account of cognitivity is offered. However, I also argue that (...) this new account, despite tacit acceptance by all major theories of emotion, in fact rules out some of the most fundamental and controversial claims of one side of the nature-of-emotion debate, emotional cognitivism. (shrink)

Esencjalistycznie zorientowani teoretycy emocji uważają, że emocje mają swoją istotę. Nie istnieje jednak zgoda co do tego, czym ona jest. Dla jednych substancją emocji jest poznanie lub oceny, dla innych zmiany fizjologiczno-cielesne, a jeszcze dla innych zdarzenia w mózgu. W artykule prezentuję najważniejsze argumenty przeciwko tym teoriom, a następnie prezentuję wieloskładnikową i wielofunkcyjną koncepcję emocji.

Pragmatists have been eager to employ the method of science in philosophy, which meant, too, that they paid a great deal of attention to the attitudes that regulate the process of scientific or systematic inquiry. At the same time, they, at least in the nonstandard theories of emotion to be found in Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, espoused a cognitivist view of emotion, which resonates with some of the concerns that have been at the forefront of the contemporary philosophy (...) of emotion. In particular, they converge upon the view that something like ‘emotional understanding’ is very important. While COPE, especially in the case of Julien Deonna’s and Fabrice Teroni’s ‘attitudinal theory of emotion’ which has some pragmatist affinities, is focused on showing how emotional understanding is central to moral agency, it is my aim in this paper to offer a pragmatist account of emotional understanding as ‘passionate reasoning’ that goes one step further. By highlighting the way in which emotions ought to be interpreted even in the context of scientific or systematic inquiries it makes a case for moralizing science from within, i.e. without submitting it to values that are alien to inquiry. In particular, passionate reasoning helps addressing three problems of inquiry: the problem of the lack of context, the problem of the problem wrongly put, and the problem of my problem. (shrink)

Histories of dynamic psychotherapy in the late 19thcentury have focused on practitioners in continental Europe, and interest in psychological therapies within British asylum psychiatry has been largely overlooked. Yet Daniel Hack Tuke is acknowledged as one of the earliest authors to use the term ‘psycho-therapeutics’, including a chapter on the topic in his 1872 volume, Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease. But what did Tuke mean by this concept, and what impact did (...) his ideas have on the practice of asylum psychiatry? At present, there is little consensus on this topic. Through in-depth examination of what psycho-therapeutics meant to Tuke, this article argues that late-19th-century asylum psychiatry cannot be easily separated into somatic and psychological strands. Tuke’s understanding of psycho-therapeutics was extremely broad, encompassing the entire field of medical practice. The universal force that he adopted to explain psychological therapies, ‘the Imagination’, was purported to show the power of the mind over the body, implying that techniques like hypnotism and suggestion might have an effect on any kind of symptom or illness. Acknowledging this aspect of Tuke’s work, I conclude, can help us better understand late-19th-century psychiatry – and medicine more generally – by acknowledging the lack of distinction between psychological and somatic in ‘psychological’ therapies. (shrink)

The place of emotions in aesthetic response has long been a topic in contemporary philosophical theorizing. One aspect of the debate in particular seems to have become a recalcitrant problem: when experiencing fiction, we experience emotional reactions towards what we know not to exist. Is this rational? In fact, is it even possible? This article deals with the so‐called “paradox of fiction” from the viewpoint of ancient poetics. In the first section, I survey some of the main arguments proposed to (...) (dis)solve the paradox in analytic philosophy. In the second and the third sections, I address what I consider two problematic assumptions of existing analytic approaches: their prescriptive, “essentialist” attitude and their exclusive focus on matters of content. By offering a brief sketch of the ancient principles of “likelihood” and “vividness”, I argue that they provide a direct and cognitively realistic answer to the paradox insofar as they account for the neutralization of doxastic features in imaginative acts and ground affective responses to fiction in the phenomenon of “aesthetic immersion”, explained in experiential, rather than representational, terms. (shrink)

This article investigates how the turn to affect within the humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of (neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps characterizing the taking (...) up of scientific literature. While neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The article interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of the hold of habit and embodied history. (shrink)

One of the consequences of the public outcry over the 1929 St Valentine’s Day massacre was the establishment of a Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University. The photogenic ‘Lie Detector Man’, Leonarde Keeler, was the laboratory’s poster boy, and his instrument the jewel in the crown of forensic science. The press often depicted Keeler gazing at a female suspect attached to his ‘sweat box’, a galvanometer electrode in her hand, a sphygmomanometer cuff on her arm and a rubber pneumograph (...) tube strapped across her breasts. Keeler’s fascination with the deceptive charms of the female body was one he shared with his fellow lie detector pioneers, all of whom met their wives – and in William Marston’s case, his mistress too – through their engagement with the instrument. Marston employed his own ‘Love Meter’, as the press dubbed it, to prove that ‘brunettes react far more violently to amatory stimuli than blondes’. In this article, I draw on the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and pleasure to argue that the female body played a pivotal role in establishing the lie detector’s reputation as an infallible and benign mechanical technology of truth. (shrink)

Comparative research enriches semiotics and deepens its exchanges with other sciences. The work can also highlight inductive methods and socio-historically specific forms and practices, thereby helping to develop a general semiotics and a semiotics of cultures. This article compares the morphology by Vladimir Propp that inspired the Greimassian narrative schema to a small sample of narrative forms, then to Aristotle's Poetics and to a model of Hollywood films. Certain motifs and subgenres represent elementary schemas with two or three actants and (...) functions that rely on role reversal and emotions. A half dozen subgenres can be differentiated by the different affects that they aim to elicit. Greek tragedy is to evoke intense emotional states, and reveals a close interdependence between characteristics of the hero, modulations of the critical action, and the emotive effect produced. In the films, the variation of the affective intensity constitutes a key element of the narrative rhythm, and two main sequences supply opposing and complementary axiologies. A conclusion suggests the value of bringing together the semiotics of the passions, recent research on the history of the emotions, and comparative studies of how different cultures express feelings. (shrink)

The growing scholarly debate on emotions and the development of Pentecostal and Charismatic churches in the Global South are just two reasons that urge systematic theology to relate more concretely to faith experiences. Potkay and others present joy as a typical Christian emotion, but it is not a key theme in systematic theology, although it plays far more prominent a role in spiritual and practical theological works. In this paper, the author presents the understandings of joy from the perspectives of (...) Blaise Pascal, A.A. van Ruler and Pentecostals from Ecuador and explores the implications for theological anthropology. Based on the study of these three perspectives, the author defends the thesis that joy offers a new focus in the field of theological anthropology that places different traditional theological perspectives on the human being in a fresh relation to each other and lays a foundation for a theological contribution to emotion studies. (shrink)

This essay traces the development of the philosophical debates concerning active powers and human agency in eighteenth-century Scotland. I examine how and why Scottish philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull, David Hume, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, depart from John Locke’s and other traditional conceptions of the will and how Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart reinstate Locke’s distinction between volition and desire. Moreover, I examine what role desires, passions, and motives play in the writings of these and other Scottish (...) Enlightenment philosophers on human agency and draw attention to their underlying disputes concerning liberty and necessity. I end by reflecting on how classifications of principles of actions changed in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy. (shrink)