The concept of instinct has fallen into disrepute, due to a number of problems with the way it had been conceived, mostly related to the concept of innateness. Yet the legacy of instincts survives in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, in the form of an emphasis on the genetic determinants of behavior. Through a consideration of the two main theories of instinct and the objections that have been raised against them, it becomes clear that existing theories of instinct founder because of (...) their inability to reconcile the psychic and physiological “faces” of instinct. Merleau-Ponty's notion of “being-in-the-world” as a third term linking the psychic and the physiological makes possible a new conception of instinct which escapes these criticisms. At the same time, it opens up a new way of understanding how instincts may operate in human beings. (shrink)

In this paper, I embark upon a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of the emotion of grief, based upon three experiences of grief I witnessed over the preceding year. I find that grief is best construed not as an emotion akin to sadness or anger, but as an affective-behavioural complex resulting from a discord between the world that we affectively inhabit and the world in which we currently find ourselves. I therefore conceive the process of getting over grief, or grieving, as an (...) active process of readjusting our affective and behavioural habits on both a thematic and a pre-thematic level. (shrink)

Nietzsche's critical stance toward morality appears to support some version of moral relativism. Yet he praises some actions and attributes while condemning others. Are these evaluations expressions of his moral prejudices, or is there a basis for them in his thought? Through a close reading of key passages from ThusSpokeZarathustra, I attempt to demonstrate that morality for Nietzsche is the historically situated working-out of will to power and therefore subject to critique on that basis.

This dissertation is a phenomenology of emotion, situated within the school of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As such, it is concerned not only with the philosophy of emotion, but also with continuing the project commenced by Merleau-Ponty, the articulation of our primary and mute bodily contact with the world. ;Of the three chapters, the first introduces the theoretical background, describes the methodology used, and examines the existing phenomenological work on emotion. The remaining chapters present the phenomenological research and the (...) theoretical conclusions drawn from it. Chapter two introduces a psychotherapeutic technique called "Focusing" and shows that it can be a useful "tool" to aid us in doing phenomenology. This chapter is concerned largely with attempting to understand the body's role in constructing an emotional situation and applies Merleau-Ponty's concept of habit to emotion. Chapter three is devoted to the phenomenological analyses of four emotions: anger, fear, sadness and happiness. Here both Focusing and emotionally valent artworks are employed as aids in framing the emotions for phenomenological analysis. ;On the basis of this research, the dissertation concludes that emotions are best understood as organizational structures that inform our movement, perception, and thought. These structures consist in the adopting of a certain whole-bodily attitude to a situation, which organizes it in terms of a meaning specific to the emotion itself, such as "threat" or "betrayal." This meaning is not a cognitive or conceptual meaning, however, and need not be present in consciousness in any clear or articulate way. Rather, it consists in a certain "style" informing our gestures and the way we perceive and think of the situation. Emotions are centred in the affective region of the body and possess its "logic," which consists in a global sense of "how we are doing" with respect to our interests and values. Emotions are distinguished by a mobilization of the body as a whole, and a pressing toward action of a form very loosely specified by the emotion itself. (shrink)

Recently much attention has been paid to the concept of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and its role in his theories of language, art, history, and truth. However, most authors have considered expression only as a mode of language. This paper attempts to show that a full understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expression, and in particular the problem of how new meanings can be created out of existing language, is possible only by considering the role of emotional gesture in expression. It (...) does so by interpreting Merleau-Ponty’s writings on emotion and expression through a phenomenology of a particular emotion, specifically joy. (shrink)