Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis. In this article, we consider different ways of understanding ExE in philosophy, psychology, and the (...) cognitive sciences. First, we outline the background of the debate and discuss different argumentative strategies for ExE. In particular, we distinguish ExE from cognate but more moderate claims about the embodied and situated nature of cognition and emotion. We then dwell upon two dimensions of ExE: emotions extended by material culture and by the social factors. We conclude by defending ExE against some objections and point to desiderata for future research. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between emotional sharing and the extended mind thesis. We argue that shared emotions are socially extended emotions that involve a specific type of constitutive integration between the participating individuals’ emotional experiences. We start by distinguishing two claims, the Environmentally Extended Emotion Thesis and the Socially Extended Emotion Thesis. We then critically discuss some recent influential proposals about the nature of shared emotions. Finally, in Sect. 3, we motivate two conditions that an account of shared emotions (...) ought to accommodate: Reciprocal Other-awareness and Integration. Consideration of and discussion of relational accounts of joint attention lead us to the proposal that a construal of socially extended emotions in terms of a constitutive integration of the participating individuals’ experiences is more promising than proposals that simply appeal to various forms of social situatedness, embeddedness, or scaffolding. (shrink)

In the face of longstanding philosophical debates on the nature of hatred and an ever-growing interest in the underlying social-psychological function of group-directed or genocidal hatred, the peculiar affective intentionality of hatred is still very little understood. By drawing on resources from classical phenomenology, recent social-scientific research and analytic philosophy of emotions, I shall argue that the affective intentionality of hatred is distinctive in three interrelated ways: it has an overgeneralizing, indeterminate affective focus, which typically leads to a form of (...) collectivization of the target; short of a determinate affective focus, haters derive the indeed extreme affective powers of the attitude not in reaction to any specific features or actions of the targets or from some phenomenological properties of the attitude but, rather, from the commitment to the attitude itself; finally, in sharing this commitment to hate with others, hatred involves a certain negative social dialectics, robustly reinforces itself and becomes entrenched as a shared habitus. (shrink)

Recently, an increasing body of work from sociology, social psychology, and social ontology has been devoted to collective emotions. Rather curiously, however, pressing epistemological and especially normative issues have received almost no attention. In particular, there has been a strange silence on whether one can share emotions with individuals or groups who are not aware of such sharing, or how one may identify this, and eventually identify specific norms of emotional sharing. In this paper, I shall address this set of (...) issues head-on. I will do so by drawing on one of the most elaborate, but rather neglected phenomenological accounts of sociality, namely Edith Stein’s work on communal experiences and her theory of empathy. I wish to show that a suitably amended Steinian account affords us with an intriguing alternative to both phenomenalist and normativist construals of collective emotions. Moreover, I shall argue that it provides a more fine-grained account of the different types of emotional sharing than standard accounts, ranging from face-to-face, or shared, to more robust but less direct, or collective, emotions. Finally, I will propose a tentative answer to the above questions by pointing to non-dyadic or collective forms of empathy. (shrink)

In the face of longstanding philosophical debates on the nature of hatred and an ever-growing interest in the underlying social-psychological function of group-directed or genocidal hatred, the peculiar affective intentionality of hatred is still very little understood. By drawing on resources from classical phenomenology, recent social-scientific research and analytic philosophy of emotions, I shall argue that the affective intentionality of hatred is distinctive in three interrelated ways: it has an overgeneralizing, indeterminate affective focus, which typically leads to a form of (...) collectivization of the target; short of a determinate affective focus, haters derive the indeed extreme affective powers of the attitude not in reaction to any specific features or actions of the targets or from some phenomenological properties of the attitude but, rather, from the commitment to the attitude itself; finally, in sharing this commitment to hate with others, hatred involves a certain negative social dialectics, robustly reinforces itself and becomes entrenched as a shared habitus. (shrink)

Phenomenological accounts of sociality in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Scheler, Schütz, Stein and many others offer powerful lines of arguments to recast current, predominantly analytic, discussions on collective intentionality and social cognition. Against this background, the aim of this volume is to reevaluate, critically and in contemporary terms, the rich phenomenological resources regarding social reality: the interpersonal, collective and communal aspects of the life-world. Specifically, the book pursues three interrelated objectives: it aims 1.) to systematically explore the key phenomenological aspects (...) of social reality; 2.) to offer novel, state-of-the-art assessments of both central and lesser-known proponents of the phenomenology of sociality, and 3.) to contextualize this elaborate body of work in light of contemporary social cognition research, the growing literature in analytic social ontology, and current trends in moral psychology, moral phenomenology, and social and political philosophy. The collection brings together original articles by a host of prominent scholars and upcoming young talents to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of the topic. It will be essential reading for those studying phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, empathy, and community, including analytic, social, moral and political philosophers, and will also be of interest for social scientists and social psychologists. (shrink)

The emotions occupy a fundamental place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, the phenomenology of the emotions has until recently remained a relatively neglected topic. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion is an outstanding guide and reference source to this important and fascinating topic. Comprising forty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook covers the following topics: historical perspectives, including Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, Levinas and Arendt; contemporary debates, including existential feelings, emotion, affectivity, art and morality; self-directed (...) and individual emotions, including happiness, grief, self-esteem and shame; social emotions, including sympathy, collective emotions, political emotions and aggressive emotions; borderline cases of emotion, including solidarity, trust, pain, and forgiveness and revenge. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy studying phenomenology, ethics and moral psychology and philosophy of psychology, The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as Religion, Sociology and Anthropology. (shrink)

Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types, and contents of intentions or representational states must be construed so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers, and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs, or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, (...) this very issue has not received much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper, I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds. (shrink)

Until now, a systematic new evaluation of transcendental phenomenology that gives due attention to the analytic philosophy of mind has been lacking, despite several recent studies in this area. With an emphasis on Husserl’s anti-representationalist theory of the intentionality of consciousness, the present study demonstrates phenomenology’s descriptive and explanatory potential and presents it as a serious interlocutor not only for the philosophy of mind and cognition but also for contemporary language philosophy and epistemology.

To get an initial grip of what is and, in particular, what is not at stake in the Phenomenology of SE, it is helpful to distinguish four dimensions of the sociality of emotions. As we shall see, the Phenomenology of emotions, in the sense in which I will [aut]Walther, Gerda’s account, is primarily, though certainly not exclusively, concerned with the fourth dimension. Roughly, the three first layers or levels in which social relations and facts come into play in the affective (...) life of individuals and groups are i) the interpersonal, ii) the Group and intergroup, and iii) the sociological and sociocultural dimensions. Whereas most phenomenologists, and [aut]Walther, Gerda, touch upon the interpersonal and Group-level dimensions and analyzing various collective and GroupPhenomena), the intergroup and sociological and sociocultural levels have been mined extensively by sociologists, as well as cross-cultural and social psychologists. Here is how the social [aut]Parkinson, Brian, [aut]Fischer, Agneta[aut]Manstead, Antony S. R. concisely delineate these dimensions. (shrink)

The emotions occupy a fundamental place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, the phenomenology of the emotions has until recently remained a relatively neglected topic. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion is an outstanding guide and reference source to this important and fascinating topic. Comprising forty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook covers the following topics: historical perspectives, including Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, Levinas and Arendt; contemporary debates, including existential feelings, emotion, affectivity, art and morality; self-directed (...) and individual emotions, including happiness, grief, self-esteem and shame; social emotions, including sympathy, collective emotions, political emotions and aggressive emotions; borderline cases of emotion, including solidarity, trust, pain, and forgiveness and revenge. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy studying phenomenology, ethics and moral psychology and philosophy of psychology, The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as Religion, Sociology and Anthropology. (shrink)

In the past few decades, a growing number of philosophers have tried to explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance, or why readers often resist the invitation of authors to imagine morally deviant fictional scenarios. In this paper, I critically assess a recent proposal to explain IR in terms of a failure of empathy, and present a novel explanation. I do so by drawing on Peter Goldie’s narrative account of empathic perspective-taking, which curiously has so far been neglected in the IR-literature. (...) I argue that, in some cases, IR is due to a partial confusion of two kinds of imaginative perspective-taking towards a fictional character: an internal, genuinely empathic, perspective-taking, on the one hand, and an external, crypto-empathic, stance that can be characterized as in-her-shoes-imagining, on the other. I argue that, in the cases at issue, IR is not so much a resistance to imagining but, rather, to empathically enacting an evildoer’s moral and phenomenal first-person perspective. I conclude by considering some more general lessons that follow from my account for what has recently been called sadistic empathy and point to an unresolved issue for future thinking about IR. (shrink)

Volume XVII Part 1: Phenomenology, Idealism, and Intersubjectivity: A Festschrift in Celebration of Dermot Moran's Sixty-Fifth Birthday Part 2: The Imagination: Kant's Phenomenological Legacy Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Contributors: Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Lilian Alweiss, Timothy Burns, Steven Crowell, Maxime Doyon, Augustin Dumont, (...) Richard Kearney, Mette Lebech, Samantha Matherne, Timothy Mooney, Thomas Nenon, Matthew Ratcliffe, Alessandro Salice, Daniele De Santis, Andrea Staiti, Anthony J. Steinbock, Michela Summa, Thomas Szanto, Emiliano Trizio, and Nicolas de Warren. Submissions: Manuscripts, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to the Editors ([email protected] and [email protected]) electronically via e-mail attachments. (shrink)

The present paper proposes an integrative account of social forms of practical irrationality and corresponding disruptions of individual and group-level emotion regulation. I will especially focus on disruptions in emotion regulation by means of collaborative agential and doxastic akrasia. I begin by distinguishing mutual, communal and collaborative forms of akrasia. Such a taxonomy seems all the more needed as, rather surprisingly, in the face of huge philosophical interest in analysing the possibility, structure and mechanisms of individual practical irrationality, with very (...) little exception, there are no comparable accounts of social and collaborative cases. However, I believe that, if it is true that individual akrasia is, in the long run, harmful for those who entertain it, this is even more so in social contexts. I will illustrate this point by drawing on various small group settings, and explore a number of socio-psychological mechanisms underlying collaborative irrationality, in particular groupthink. Specifically, I suggest that in collaborative cases there is what I call a spiralling of practical irrationality at play. I will argue that this is typically correlated and indeed partly due to biases in individual members' affect control and eventually the group's with whom the members identify. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel conceptualization of a type of untruthful speech that is of eminent political relevance but has hitherto been unrecognized: epistemically exploitative bullshit (EEB). Speakers engaging in EEB are bullshitting: they deceive their addressee regarding their unconcern for the very difference between truth and falsity. At the same time, they exploit their discursive victims: they oblige their counterparts to perform unacknowledged and emotionally draining epistemic work to educate the speakers about the addressees' oppression, only to discredit their (...) epistemic trustworthiness. I argue that EEB is irreducible to various recently discussed untruthful speech, and in particular to Frankfurtian bullshit, as well as to epistemic exploitation or other epistemic injustices. Taking inspiration from Sartre's analysis of anti-Semitic discourse, where bullshitting and epistemic exploitation are essentially interlinked, I instead suggest that recognizing the distinctiveness of EEB allows for a more refined conceptualization of these discursive phenomena. Specifically, I show how bad faith and the ensuing collective diffusion and delegation of epistemic responsibility play a so far neglected but key role here. I ultimately demonstrate that with Sartre's help, we can grasp how the existential, interpersonal and institutional dimensions involved in the negotiation of truth seamlessly intersect better than we would with the lens of analytic or critical epistemology alone. (shrink)

What could a political phenomenology look like? Recent attempts to address this question under the rubric “critical phenomenology” have centered primarily around important issues such as the lived experience of marginalization and oppression or the ways in which power asymmetries or structural biases are internalized, habitualized, and embodied. In this paper, I will take a different route and test the impact of Husserl’s account of the state against the background of key classical and contemporary political theories. I aim to show (...) that Husserl indeed provides some conceptual requisites for an original phenomenological social ontology of the state. By furnishing analyses of the social formation that constitutes the stately body politic, Husserl helps us see the limitations of the standard, broadly Weberian, conception of the state underlying much of contemporary political theorizing. Moreover, Husserl provides an interesting alternative to both naturalistic and social contract theories of the state. However, against more optimistic readings, I argue that Husserl’s idealistic conception of the state, which is implicitly modelled on his notion of the “love community,” ultimately fails as a political theory, particularly when it comes to accounting for the struggle of recognition and the agonistic nature of politics. (shrink)

What exactly is wrong with hating others? However deep-seated the intuition, when it comes to spelling out the reasons for why hatred is inappropriate, the literature is rather meager and confusing. In this paper, I attempt to be more precise by distinguishing two senses in which hatred is inappropriate, a moral and a non-moral one. First, I critically discuss the central current proposals defending the possibility of morally appropriate hatred in the face of serious wrongs or evil perpetrators and show (...) that they are all based on a problematic assumption, which I call the?reality of evil agents assumption?. I then turn to the issue of non-moral emotional appropriateness and sketch a novel, focus-based account of fittingness. Next, I outline the distinctive affective intentionality of hatred, suggesting that hatred, unlike most other antagonistic emotions, has an overgeneralizing and indeterminate affective focus. Against this background, I argue that hatred cannot be fitting. Due to the indeterminacy of its focus, hatred fails to pick out those evaluative features of the intentional object that would really matter to the emoters. I close with some tentative remarks on the possibility of appropriate hatred towards corporate or group agents. (shrink)

In the past few years, social and cultural theorists have pointed to the dynamic and performative character of forms of disparagement such as public shaming, humiliation, invective or hate speech. In this paper, I endorse a different route and focus on the distinctive affective and dialectical nature of what might be called the ‘politics of disparagement’. I will do so by elaborating on the affective intentionality of hatred, which can be seen as an affective attitude that paradigmatically encapsulates the dialectical (...) antagonism at play in the politics of disparagement. I argue that the affective intentionality of hatred is distinctive in three interrelated ways: First, it has an overgeneralising, indeterminate affective focus, which typically leads to a certain collectivisation of its target. Secondly, short of a determinate affective focus, haters derive the indeed extreme affective powers of the attitude not in reaction to any specific features or actions of the targets or from some phenomenological properties of the attitude but, rather, from the sheer commitment to the attitude itself. Finally, in sharing this commitment to hate with others, hatred involves a certain negative dialectics and becomes entrenched as a shared habitus. Ultimately, I suggest that we can only counteract the politics of disparagement if we understand how a shared commitment to disparagement and hatred establishes its own normative logic, which not only concerns their victims but also, dialectically, sanctions their enactors. (shrink)

Dass Husserl auch im Hundert-Jahres-Jubiläum der Ideen I tatsächlich „aktuell“ und für eine Reihe gegenwärtiger philosophischer Trends höchst anschlussfähig ist, das verspricht nicht nur der Titel, dies belegen auch eindrücklich die zwölf Aufsätze des vorliegenden Bandes. Das Buch stellt nicht nur eine hervorragende Ergänzung zu dem thematisch stärker fokussierten rezenten Sammelband Husserl und die Philosophie des Geistes (Frank and Weidtmann 2010) dar, zumal auch hier der Anti- bzw. Non-Naturalismus Husserls einen der Leitfäden des Buches bildet; insgesamt handelt es sich dabei (...) in Breite und Tiefe, aber auch was die Qualität der Mehrzahl der Beiträge betrifft, vielmehr um eines der gelungensten der neueren, und nicht nur der deutschsprachigen, Kompendien zu Husserl (vgl. etwa Ierna et al. 2010; Centrone 2013; Embree and Nenon 2013).Entlang einer klugen editorischen Organisation fügen sich die Beiträge gut in die drei Teile Ontologie, Sprachphilosophie & Philosophie des Geistes und Ha. (shrink)

By the time of the Prolegomena , Husserl took phenomenology to be a philosophical method that stands in opposition to naturalism, of which psychologism was supposed to be a particularly pernicious instance. Husserl was not the only philosopher at the turn of the century to oppose psychologism. Among his fellow campaigners one finds Frege, who played a decisive role in the development of so-called analytic philosophy, and Dilthey, who stands at the roots of contemporary hermeneutics. When it comes to issues (...) concerning the origins of phenomenology, as opposed to other traditions, anti-psychologism in particular, and anti-naturalism in general, cannot be used as discriminative criteria. One would need to determine what is specific to the phenomenological brand of anti-naturalism.Consider some of the claims shared by most anti-naturalists in Husserl’s time. Judgments have a specific kind of content, called “proposition,” “state of affairs” or “thought.” Contents of that kind are orig .. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

A single Sanskrit commentary exists for the Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇatantra—the Padmāvatī of Mahāsukhavajra—the only palm-leaf witness of which is preserved in a late thirteenth-century manuscript in Kathmandu. The tantra is relatively late, unmentioned outside Nepal, and the only in-depth study to date examines only the first eight of its twenty five chapters. No study or edition of the Padmāvatī exists. Here we present the first edition and translation of a complete chapter, the sixth paṭala, a section dealing mainly with transgressive sexual practices. (...) Some of the ideas and pragmatic details presented by the author, Mahāsukhavajra, are unique in Vajrayāna literature. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

This paper is an exposition and evaluation of the Agustín Rayo's views about the epistemology and metaphysics of mathematics, as they are presented in his book The Construction of Logical Space.

This volume is a study of the influence of Timaeus on the development of Western cosmology in three axial periods of European culture: Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Vitalism has been given different definitions and diverse figures have been labelled as vitalists throughout the history of ideas. Concentrating on the seventeenth century, we find that scholars identify as vitalists authors who endorse notions that are in diametrical opposition with each other. I briefly present the ideas of dualist vitalists and monist vitalists and the philosophical and theological considerations informing their thought. In all these varied forms of vitalism the identifiable common motives are the essential irreducibility of life and (...) the universality of life. (shrink)

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. (...) Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Thomas Hill, a leading figure in the recent development of Kantian moral philosophy, presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth-the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political, and social philosophers just how valuable moral (...) theory can be in addressing practical matters. (shrink)

Arthur Danto had just published an essay about Neuhaus in The Nation, where he famously held the art‐critic post formerly occupied by Clement Greenberg. In a characteristic switching of gears from “mere” criticism to something deeper and more profound, he described Neuhaus's sound sculpture as “a portable tabernacle, a bubble of sacral space encapsulated in midtown life, which flows unheedingly around it, save for those attracted as a momentary congregation”. Times Square was precisely the kind of art Arthur relished thinking (...) about. It was about boundaries: between the traditional and the modern, the familiar and the transcendent, the aesthetic and the everyday. Art criticism was for Arthur largely a way of practicing philosophy by other means, but it grew into something more. (shrink)