Limited distribution phenomena related to negation and negative polarity are usually thought of in terms of affectivity where affective is understood as negative or downward entailing. In this paper I propose an analysis of affective contexts as nonveridical and treat negative polarity as a manifestation of the more general phenomenon of sensitivity to (non)veridicality (which is, I argue, what affective dependencies boil down to). Empirical support for this analysis will be provided by a detailed examination of affective dependencies in (...) Greek, but the distribution of any will also be shown to follow from (non)veridicality. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites—which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, and understanding (...) to individuals with AN—help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen’s work on epistemic “echo chambers”, along with Maria Lugones’ work on “worlds” and “ease”, to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance. (shrink)

E-Co-Affectivity is a philosophical investigation of affectivity in various forms of life: photosynthesis and growth in plants, touch and trauma in bird feathers, the ontogenesis of human life through the placenta, the bare interface of human skin, and the porous materiality of soil. Combining biology, phenomenology, Ancient Greek thought, new materialisms, environmental philosophy, and affect studies, Marjolein Oele thinks through concrete, living places that show the receptive, responsive power of living beings to be affected and to affect. She (...) focuses on these localized interfaces to explain how affectivity emerges in places that are always evolving, creative, porous, and fluid. Every interface is material, but is also "more" than its current materiality in co-creating place, time, and being. After extensively describing the effects of the milieu and community within which each example of affectivity takes place, in the final chapter Oele adds a prescriptive, ethical lens that formulates a new epoch beyond the Anthropocene, one that is sensitive to the larger ecological, communal concerns at stake. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the emotional dimensions involved in the phenomenon of interpersonal violence, identifying various modalizations of affectivity occurring in the architectonics of this phenomenon. I will first concentrate on symmetrical violence, namely, on the emergence of irritation, annoyance, anger, and fury leading to fierce confrontation. Next I will explore asymmetrical violence, where the passive pole experiences the imminence of the other’s violence in fear and in being terrified. I will then focus on the (...) experience of the third in the face of violence, showing that here the affectivity is differently constituted each time, depending on the various situations of symmetrical and asymmetrical violence that the third witnesses. Finally, I will contrast the experience of real violence with the experience of violence-as-image, and I will pose several questions regarding the modifications of the affective experience of the third in the face of depicted violence. (shrink)

In this article, we explore Beauvoir’s account of what she claims is an alienated relation to our ageing bodies. This body can inhibit an active engagement with the world, which marks our humanity. Her claims rest on the binary between the body-for-itself and the body-in-itself. She shares this binary with Sartre, but a perceptive phenomenology of the affective body can also be found, which works against this binary and allows her thought to be brought into conversation with Levinas. For Levinas, (...) the susceptibility of the body is constitutive of our subjectivity, rather than a source of alienation. If we develop Beauvoir’s thought in the direction of his, an ontological structure is suggested, distinct from Sartre – a structure which makes room for her pervasive attention to affectivity. (shrink)

The last half-century of religious studies scholarship has seen the diminishing importance of belief as a concept of analysis. The putative inaccessibility of beliefs and the concept’s Western Christian provenance has led many scholars of religion to reject the concept. Recent years have seen attempts to rehabilitate the concept of belief, including Kevin Schilbrack’s 2014 Philosophy and the Study of Religions. Schilbrack proposes that by engaging with contemporary philosophical reflection on belief—specifically dispositionalist and interpretationist theories—the traditional critiques of belief can (...) be overcome. The purpose of this paper is to further develop this approach by proposing an additional, currently overlooked, element of belief—its affectivity. This approach builds on current research from enactivist cognitive science and avoids the objections traditionally levelled at belief, while enabling a more sophisticated analysis of power dynamics in religion. (shrink)

I argue that, on Husserl's account, affectivity, along with the closely related phenomenon of association, follows a form of sui generis lawfulness belonging to the domain of what Husserl calls motivation, which must be distinguished both (1) from the causal structures through which we understand the body third-personally, as a material thing; and also (2) from the rational or inferential structures at the level of deliberative judgment traditionally understood to be the domain of epistemic import. In effect, in addition (...) to recognizing a “space of causes” and a “space of reasons,” Husserl’s account of affectivity and the epistemology of passive synthesis in which it is situated suggest that we should recognize a separate “space of motivations.” Within this space, on Husserl’s phenomenological picture, we can isolate two different sorts of epistemic import, one belonging directly to the passive-synthetic content of experience, as explained in Husserl’s account of association and his closely aligned notion of nonlinguistic sense, and a second—my primary focus—affectivity, which is still relevant for that content, albeit indirectly, and holds epistemic import in its determination not of what that content is but of how it comes to matter for us. (shrink)

The article examines some aspects of Scheler’s view on affectivity, especially his hierarchical approach which is useful in solving difficulties in analysis of affectivity and helps to avoid downwards as well as upwards reductionism in considering intricacy of emotions. After presenting how Scheler delineates the four levels of feelings, critical observations are made as to points which should be developed or refined so that Scheler’s model could more broadly contribute to current debate over emotions and advancement of the (...) theory of affectivity. (shrink)

Music and affects share a long history. In recent times, 4E cognitive sciences (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended), situated affectivity, and related ecological theoretical frameworks have been conceptualizing music as a case of a tool for feeling. Drawing on this debate, I propose to further theorize the role of music in situating our affectivity by analyzing how the very affective affordances of music are technologically situated. In other words, I propose to shift the attention from music as a (...) tool for feeling to the tools for feeling music. I argue that the experience of music as a tool for feeling may be altered, enhanced, or lessened depending on the tools for feeling music. I investigate the extent to which AI might be a case of a tool for feeling music and examine the influence it could exert over musical affectivity. I conclude that AI can be considered a tool for feeling music of curatorial type and that the limitations and/or biases of AI as a method risk lessening the power of musical affective affordances. (shrink)

[This paper is written in Czech.] The aim of this article is to briefly introduce and critically analyze the dialogue between phenomenology and contemporary theories of embodied cognition in relation to the study of affectivity. The author explains how these theoretical approaches interpret the dynamic relationship between affective experiences on the one hand and bodily behavior and intersubjectively observable processes taking place in the environment on the other. He first summarizes the positions of Joel Krueger and Giovanna Colombetti, who (...) draw on the theories of extended cognition and enactivism, and then compares them with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach. In this way, there are found to be inconsistencies in Krueger’s and Colombetti’s approaches, whose resolution, in the author’s opinion, requires the working out of a rigorously “relational” interpretation of affectivity. From this point of view, affectivity is not understood as an internal phenomenon causally linked to external material factors, but strictly as a dynamic relationship between a sense-making agent and his or her meaningful environment. (shrink)

Emotion is traditionally described as a phenomenon that dominates the subject because one does not choose to be angry, sad, or happy. However, would it be totally absurd to conceive emotion as behaviour and a manifestation of the spontaneity and liberty of consciousness? In his short text, Esquisse d''une theorie des émotions, Sartre proposes a phenomenological description of this psychological phenomenon. He distinguishes between constituted affectivity, which gives rise to emotions, and an original affectivity lacking intentionality, and tied (...) closely to bodily processes. It appears that emotion is first and foremost a magical attitude toward the world, an attitude freely adopted by the subject. Against what is often written, this thesis doesn''t mean that emotion would be a pure comedy but only that, in spite of appearances, this behaviour isn''t a matter of what Descartes calls soul''s passions. (shrink)

This chapter, which deals with the notions of affectivity and engagement, explores the internal connection between basic affects to get at the emergence of affectivity. Additionally, it presents a discussion of motivation and the interplay of affectivity and engagement. Basic affects consist of needs, wants, and desires. Needs and then wants involve a kind of circumspective seeing in which ‘felt’ values are as much a part of objects as their utility. Intentions-in-action are rooted in basic affects. The (...) basic types of affects are each triadically structured with the moments of each type being dyadically organised. The affectivity circuit usually begins with what is not yet a profile coming to prominence out of a dark background. The circuit of engagement is inducted by a bodily drive seeking resolution. (shrink)

Following Isabelle Stengers’s call that the anthropocene should make us feel and think differently, this paper focuses on the human task to shift its affective response. Since Stengers calls for a new “us” that seeks to participate in an entanglement, I propose to explore the material and ontogenetic functions of soil, and specifically soil pores, in reimagining a new form of e-co-affectivity. A new e-co-affective response would emphasize the usually hidden fluidity and diachronic time of pores, and, in doing (...) so, cultivate an epistemic and aesthetic sensitivity, deceleration, and percolation. (shrink)

This article offers critical and constructive perspectives essential to understanding living bodies, and, in effect, to showing that kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity matter because they are central to animate life. Critical perspectives focus on practices that distance us from the lived realities of animate nature, on insights into those realities, and on ways in which language is intimately related to those realities. Constructive perspectives focus on ontogenetic studies that empirically testify to our being animate organisms from the start. The (...) studies validate Husserl’s insight into the developmental progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’. On the basis of these perspectives, concluding observations focus on the mutual validation of empirical and phenomenological research, on the distinction between movement and objects in motion, on the distinction between perceiving and feeling one’s body, and on the distinction between having a body and being a body. (shrink)

When read alongside the great command of Deuteronomy, ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength,’ the Judeo-Christian directive to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is perhaps one of the most theologically and ethically charged phrases in the Bible. In these two mutually reliant commandments lies a meeting point between the divine and the human that has important implications for our understanding of the nexus between theological conceptions of love and philosophical engagement with worldly existence. This (...) point of intersection is explored in a particularly unique way in the thinking of Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Nancy. In this article, I conduct the first sustained comparative analysis of their respective philosophies, using an exploration of the role of love and affectivity in their work to better understand the philosophical opportunity represented by the commandment to love God and neighbour. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTo extend our understanding of the proximal etiology of personality pathology, this study examined the dynamic, in-the-moment relations between mindfulness and negative affectivity (NA; emo...

The main goal of this paper is to analyze Nicholas of Cusa’s reading on the dispute of Mystical Theology through Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness. To do this, first of all, we will address the analyses offered by Jean-Luc Marion on the problem of affectivity. Secondly, we examine Nicholas’ interpretation of Mystical Theology through the aenigma of the eicona dei in De visione dei. Thirdly, we present Jean-Luc Marion’s interpretation of Cusanus eicona dei as an antecedent of his phenomenological (...) conception of Icone as “saturated phenomenon.” Finally, we suggest that Cusanus eicona dei appears in Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology as a precedent of his strategy when approaching the field of affectivity. Both authors try to show an instance preceding the distinction between affectivity and rationality. (shrink)

The thesis of the extended mind (ExM) holds that the material underpinnings of an individual’s mental states and processes need not be restricted to those contained within biological boundaries: when conditions are right, material artefacts can be incorporated by the thinking subject in such a way as to become a component of her extended mind. Up to this point, the focus of this approach has been on phenomena of a distinctively cognitive nature, such as states of dispositional belief, and processes (...) of planning and calculation. In this paper, we aim to expand the scope of ExM by considering the case for extended affectivity. We begin by clarifying the central commitments of ExM, before investigating its applicability to a range of affective phenomena, both dispositional and occurrent. We argue that proponents of ExM should also accept that the vehicles of emotions, moods, sentiments, temperaments, and character traits can extend beyond skull and skin. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the concept of environmental scaffolding can contribute to a better understanding of our affective life and the complex manners in which it is shaped by environmental entities. In particular, the concept of environmental scaffolding offers a more comprehensive and less controversial framework than the notions of embeddedness and extendedness. We contribute to the literature on situated affectivity by embracing and systematizing the diversity of affective scaffolding. In doing so, we introduce several distinctions that (...) provide classifications of different types of environmentally scaffolded affectivity. Furthermore, we differentiate eight dimensions that allow us to evaluate the quality and effectivity of scaffolds in particular applications. On that basis, we develop a taxonomy using paradigmatic examples of affective scaffolding. This taxonomy enriches the current debate by emphasizing distinctions that are often conflated and by identifying fields of application that are commonly overlooked. (shrink)

Upshot: Douglas Robinson argues for a revision of the extended mind theory that incorporates intersubjectivity and qualia. Robinson argues that “material extendedness” is less important than accounting for the subjective experience of what he terms “body-becoming-mind,” and that this experience, rather than mere computational equivalence between intra- and transcranial cognition, is the strongest argument in favour of the EMT.

In this paper I would like to propose the notion of “affective artifact”, building on an analogy with theories of cognitive artifacts and referring to the development of a situated affective science. Affective artifacts are tentatively defined as objects that have the capacity to alter the affective condition of an agent, and that in some cases play an important role in defining that agent’s self. The notion of affective artifacts will be presented by means of examples supported by empirical findings, (...) by discussing a tentative definition and classification, and by considering several related but differing notions. Within the framework of situated affectivity, the notion of affective artifacts will represent a further step in the enterprise of understanding how the environment helps us scaffold our affective processes. I will conclude that affective artifacts play a key role in the philosophy of cognitive science, the philosophy of technology and in the debate about the self. (shrink)

ABSTRACTInattentional blindness occurs when observers fail to detect unexpected objects or events. Despite the adaptive importance of detecting unexpected threats, relatively little research has examined how stimulus threat influences IB. The current study was designed to explore the effects of stimulus threat on IB. Past research has also demonstrated that individuals with elevated negative affectivity have an attentional bias towards threat-related stimuli; therefore, the current study also examined whether state and trait levels of negative affectivity predicted IB for (...) threat-related stimuli. One hundred and eleven participants completed an IB task that included both threat-related and neutral unexpected stimuli, while their eye movements were tracked. Participants were significantly more likely to detect the threatening stimulus than the neutral stimulus p =.035, odds ratio = 4.0, 95% confidence interval OR [1.13, 14.17]. Neither state nor trait... (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition and the phenomenological tradition have in common a wide conception of ‘intentionality’. Within these frameworks, intentionality is understood as a general openness to the world. For classical phenomenologists, the most basic subjective structure that allows for such openness is time-consciousness. Some enactivists, while inspired by the phenomenological tradition, have nevertheless argued that affectivity is more basic, being that which gives rise to the temporal flow of consciousness. In this paper, I assess the relationship between (...) temporality and affectivity from both a phenomenological and an enactive perspective. I argue that, as opposed to the classical phenomenological view (which favours temporality), and to the enactive view (which favours affectivity), we must take affectivity and temporality as co-emergent. Jointly, affectivity and temporality constitute the basic structures of intentionality. Additionally, using examples from phenomenological psychopathology, I conclude that all intentionality is defined by an anticipatory and affective structure that gives rise to general feelings related to our bodily possibilities in the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I join the so-called voluntarism debate on Descartes’s theory of will and judgment, arguing for an indirect doxastic voluntarism reading of Descartes, as opposed to a classic, or direct doxastic voluntarism. More specifically, I examine the question whether Descartes thinks the will can have a direct and full control over one’s suspension of judgment. Descartes was a doxastic voluntarist, maintaining that the will has some kind of control over one’s doxastic states, such as belief and doubt. According (...) to a long-held reading, the control that the will has over doxastic states in Descartes’s theory is direct; the doxastic states are affected by the mere act of will. This reading is called direct doxastic voluntarism (DDV), or direct voluntarism (DV) for short, and it states that we are capable of assenting, rejecting and suspending a judgment based only on our will to do so. Thus, these actions would be utterly and merely volitional. DV can be divided into two further positions, direct positive voluntarism (+DV) and direct negative voluntarism (-DV). Direct positive voluntarism deals with the act of forming judgments, maintaining that one can accept or deny a proposition wilfully and either merely believe or not believe something voluntarily. Direct negative voluntarism deals with the suspension of judgment, maintaining that it can likewise be accomplished by a simple act of will. However, I support an alternate account of Descartes’s voluntarism, which is called indirect doxastic voluntarism (IDV), or indirect voluntarism (IV) for short. By this account, the will is capable of affecting a doxastic state indirectly by making one concentrate on essential tasks for forming that state, such as gathering up and paying attention to strong reasons and evidence. IV is also possible to divide into indirect positive voluntarism (+IV) and indirect negative voluntarism (-IV). Per indirect positive voluntarism the will needs to pay attention to reasons for accepting or denying some proposition. Likewise, by indirect negative voluntarism, in order to suspend judgment the will needs to direct this attention to the reasons for doubt. By attending to these reasons, the will also comes face-to-face with its own freedom. This feeling of freedom can be described as affectivity of the reasons for belief (assent) and doubt (suspension). (shrink)

In a world in which emotions and feelings occupy a dominant place in daily human life and especially in decision-making circumstances, it is important for us to ask ourselves whether it is possible to talk about “new” ethics or “renewed ethics.” Actually, we do not face a re-creation of principles and values, but rather we face a need for deepening our understanding of human anthropology. Thinkers such as Dietrich von Hildebrand have proposed that affectivity can shed light on ethics (...) comprehension. By means of a study of some of the works of this contemporary philosopher, we state that ethics is the result of a harmony between a clear objective comprehension of reality and a straight comprehension of that reality within the sphere of an educated, formed and well-known affectivity of the human person, which would lead us beyond the common place understanding of ethics as something rigid and full of rules and restrictions. -/- En un mundo en el que las emociones y los sentimientos ocupan un lugar preponderante en la vida cotidiana de las personas y especialmente en las decisiones que toman, cabe preguntarnos si podemos hablar de una nueva ética o de una ética renovada. En realidad no nos enfrentamos a una recreación de nuevos principios y valores, sino a una necesidad de ahondar en la antropología de la persona humana. En esta profundización se ha revalorado el importante papel que juega la afectividad en la vida humana. Pensadores como Dietrich von Hildebrand han propuesto que la afectividad puede dar luces en la comprensión de la ética. A partir de un estudio de algunas de las obras de este filósofo contemporáneo proponemos que la ética vendría siendo el resultado de una armonía entre la clara comprensión objetiva de la realidad y una recta comprensión de dicha realidad dentro de una esfera afectiva educada, formada, y ante todo conocida por la propia persona, lo cual nos conduce más allá de una ética entendida muchas veces como algo rígido lleno de normas y restricciones. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of what it terms the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” and develops an alternative ‘genealogical’ interpretation of it. It is argued that the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s text emphasises the ‘question of presentation’. By contrast, the concerns of the ‘genealogical’ interpretation of Kant’s sublime are affective and ‘libidinal’ in character. The underlying issue concerns the prioritisation of the orders of presentation and affectivity respectively and the balance between them in Kant’s text. (...) The paper begins with an appreciative overview of the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s sublime as found in texts by Derrida, Escoubas, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, Nancy and Sallis. In the ensuing sections the ‘genealogical’ alternative is developed. It is suggested that such a ‘Nietzschean’ reading has two phases, oppositional and immanent respectively. The first phase exposes the evaluative economy of Kant’s text and identifies themes within it which endorse the constitutive values of the ‘Platonic-Christian’ tradition. Kant’s sublime appears to be a ‘moral’ response to the a-symmetry between ‘raw nature’ and the transcendent aspirations of rational-moral humanity. However, due to its oppositional character, this form of ‘genealogical’ critique does not execute a sufficiently radical critique of Kant’s text. A second, immanent form, of ‘genealogical’ reading is required. This focuses on the theme of ‘negative pleasure’ in Kant’s text and argues that it has priority over that of ‘negative presentation’. Kant’s sublime no longer appears to be ‘moral’ in orientation but advocates passionately the pleasures of a specific, non-universalisable, ‘affective-libidinal’ economy. The task arising concerns the evaluative comparison of different aesthetic sensibilities, the ‘negative pleasure’ of Kant’s sublime and the Nietzschean alternative of a ‘tragic joy’ that affirms precisely the ‘contrapurposiveness’ of ‘raw nature’ from which Kant turns away. This is a contrast between a teleological and dysteleological sublime, ‘human’ and ‘post-human’ aesthetic sensibilities. (shrink)

This paper discusses the accounts given of the nature of religious affectivity by Nietzsche, Otto and Bataille and pursues their shared claim as to the primacy of the affective dimension of religion over its conceptual, doctrinal and moral elements and to the development of a religious critique of Christianity. The first section clarifies the nature of Nietzsche’s religiosity and reconstructs his critique of Christianity from this perspective. In subsequent sections Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is compared to both Otto’s critical (...) defence and Bataille’s ‘Nietzschean’ critique of it. Three themes are proposed as evaluative criteria for the comparative evaluation of the three thinkers undertaken. Firstly, the task of rethinking the nature of religious affectivity in ‘impersonalist’ or ‘a-subjective’ terms. Secondly, the role of the notion of ‘immanence’ in both the rethinking of transcendence given the demise of the transcendent and in a reconceiving of the critique of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, in non-oppositional terms. Thirdly, the question of the ‘autonomy of religion’ not only in relation to the ‘theoretical’, ‘moral’ and ‘aesthetic’ domains but also, ultimately, to the ‘human’ itself. In short, the thinkers considered are evaluated in terms of what they seek to formulate, namely, a radically non-anthropomorphic conception of religion. It is argued that only Bataille attains to both senses of ‘immanence’ identified in the paper in his development of a non-transcendent notion of transcendence and a critique of Christianity that finds suppressed ‘traces’ of the impersonal and a-moral force of the ‘sacred’ operative within it. (shrink)

Self-illness ambiguity involves difficulty distinguishing between patterns of thought, feeling, and action that are the ‘products’ of one's illness and those that are genuinely one's own. Bortolan maintains that the values, cares, and preferences that define someone’s personal identity are rooted in intentional emotions and non-intentional affects (i.e., existential feelings and moods). The uncertainty that comprises self-illness ambiguity results from the experience of moods or existential feelings that are in tension with ones that the patient experienced prior to the onset (...) of illness. Building on these ideas, I examine how the notion of ‘affordance’ can shed further light on the dynamics and phenomenology of self-illness ambiguity. In my view, such ambiguity results from a lack of diachronic continuity and stability in a subject’s field of affordances. (shrink)

Although considered often outdated or useless, Plato’s views on affectivity in general and on emotions in particular offer a great deal of observations recurring in subsequent theories of emotions. Without putting forward a claim about the character of these similarities – either influential or purely anticipating or simply coincidental – some examples are provided to illustrate them. If examples referred to are relevant to the current discussion, then Plato’s views are wrongly taken as valid only for historical research, or (...) worse, neglected completely. They should rather be considered helpful in disentangling aporias inherent to the debate over affectivity. A paper discusses the issue of taxonomy of feelings as well as the place of affectivity within mental states in Plato's work. (shrink)

I have been arguing, for almost thirty years now, that emotions have been unduly neglected in philosophy. Back in the seventies, it was an argument that attracted little sympathy. I have also been arguing that emotions are a ripe for philosophical analysis, a view that, as evidenced by the Manchester 2001 conference and a large number of excellent publications, has now become mainstream. My own analysis of emotion, first published in 1973, challenged the sharp divide between emotions and rationality, insisted (...) that we reject the established notion that the emotions are involuntary, and argued, in a brief slogan, that ‘ emotions are judgments.’ Since then, although the specific term ‘judgment’ has come under considerable fire and my voluntarist thesis continues to attract incredulousness the general approach I took to emotions has been widely accepted in both philosophy and the social sciences. When Paul Griffiths took on what he misleadingly characterized as ‘propositional attitude’ theories of emotion as the enemy of all that was true and scientifically worthy, I knew that we had made it. Such ferocious abuse is surely a sign that we had shifted, in Kuhnian terms, from being revolutionary to becoming the ‘normal’ paradigm. The current counter-revolution of affect programmes and neuro-reductionism says a lot about who we are and how far we have come. (shrink)

Michel Henry is regarded as one of the most important French philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Yet, he is still not widely cited as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Jean Paul Sartre are. His thought constitutes a philosophy of life, distancing itself not only from the phenomenology of the 20th century, but also from the science and technology inaugurated by Galileo Galilei and Rene Descartes. Furthermore, Leopold Sedar Senghor is an African philosopher whose philosophy (...) has often been misunderstood in both African as well as in most Western philosophical scholarly circles. Critiquing representation in Western thought only makes sense if it is made clear that it is entirely conceivable that this critique squanders its meaning elsewhere, in the East. It is inherent in it. However, very few academics have felt that this should be done. It is essential to make connections, because what Henry discovers puts him in an immediate proximity of the radical approach of Vedanta and the approach of Senghor’s Negritude theory of emotion. The objective of this article is to find significant points of convergence between absolute subjectivity, the idea of affectivity, and Negritude and Vedanta in Henry’s speculative thought. The reading of Henry, Indian philosophy (Vedanta) and Negritude (Senghor) allows for establishing a bridge between Indian philosophy (Vedanta) and phenomenology, most notably a bridge between Negritude and the phenomenology of life. (shrink)

Despite the considerable attention given to Spinoza’s account of affectivity, especially in recent years, scant attention has been paid to the distinction between action and passion, or to the problems which it presents internally and externally. This essay offers a clarification and defense of Spinoza’s account of action and passion. A second theme is the behavioristic nature of Spinoza’s account of human affectivity. Despite the bad press which behaviorism is receiving these days, I argue that the behavioristic aspects (...) of Spinoza’s account are defensible. (shrink)

Affective bonding to radical organizations is one of the most prominent features of a recruit’s personality. To better understand how affective bonding is established during the recruitment of youth for radicalization and how it is maintained afterward, it seems promising to adopt new insights and developments from the field of situated cognition and affectivity, particularly the concepts of Affective Scaffolding, Mind Invasion, and Self-Stimulatory Loops of Affectivity (SSLA). The three notions highlight both the intended structuring of the affective (...) bonding by the recruiting organizations and the immersive influence these settings have on the individuals. We will study the affective bonding between an individual and a radical group from two perspectives: first, from an organizational perspective, and second from a personal perspective. The first aims at understanding how extremist organizations “invade the mind” of young people, by providing carefully designed affective scaffolding: (a) during the recruitment process and (b) while being a full member of the organization. The second aims at identifying some of the affective loops which individuals who have joined the radical organization enter. (shrink)