This innovative new volume analyses the role of emotions in knowledge acquisition. It focuses on the field of philosophy of emotions at the exciting intersection between epistemology and philosophy of mind and cognitive science to bring us an in-depth analysis of the epistemological value of emotions in reasoning. With twelve chapters by leading and up-and-coming academics, this edited collection shows that emotions do count for our epistemic enterprise. Against scepticism about the possible positive role emotions play in knowledge, the authors highlight the how and the why of this potential, lucidly exploring the key aspects of the functionality of emotions. This is explored in relation to: specific kinds of knowledge such as self-understanding, group-knowledge and wisdom; specific functions played by certain emotions in these cases, such as disorientation in enquiry and contempt in practical reason; the affective experience of the epistemic subjects and communities.
It has long been clear that the way in which people interpret the world affects our emotional reactions. What has been less clear is exactly how such different interpretations lead to different emotions. This is the central question addressed by The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Taking a cognitive science perspective, a systematic account is presented of the cognitive structures that underlie a wide range of different emotions. Detailed proposals about the factors that affect intensity are also offered. The authors propose three broad classes of emotions, each corresponding to a different attentional focus. One class consists of reactions to events, one of reactions to the actions of agents, and one of reactions to objects. By basing their analysis of the antecedents of emotions on an analysis of the perceived situational conditions that elicit them, the authors offer the prospect of accounting for variations in the emotions of different individuals, different cultures, and perhaps even different species.
The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of active inference, covering theory, applications, and cognitive domains. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The book emphasizes the implications of the free energy principle for understanding how the brain works. It first introduces active inference both conceptually and formally, contextualizing it within current theories of cognition. It then provides specific examples of computational models that use active inference to explain such cognitive phenomena as perception, attention, memory, and planning.
How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic system that carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musical representation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competent listeners. Nussbaum identifies three modes of musical representation, describes the basis of extramusical meaning, and analyzes musical works as created historical entities (performances of which are tokens or replicas). In addition, he explains how music gives rise to emotions and evokes states of mind that are religious in character. Nussbaum's argument proceeds from biology, psychology, and philosophy to music--and occasionally from music back to biology, psychology, and philosophy. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history; relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which we are hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. The biology, psychology, and philosophy of musical representation, he argues, have something to tell us about what we are, based on what we have been.
This collection investigates the social and cultural factors that shaped the representation of women’s emotions in the medieval and early modern periods and explores the consequences of this representation for women’s participation in public and private life. The essays focus on emotions such as sorrow, joy, love, anger, and shame as depicted in a range of texts, including devotional literature, drama, chanson de geste, lyric, theological treatises, and legal texts. As a central component of human behavior and social interaction, emotion is a fundamental catagory of analysis for understanding cultures of the past. Teachers and scholars of medieval history, religion, and literature will find the questions raised by these essays to be of great value in guiding students to understand medieval culture on its own terms while appreciating the ways in which it continues to influence us today. An introduction synthesizes the findings of the individual essays, demonstrating how the representation of women’s emotions is rooted in the medieval understanding of female embodiment, which means that emotions are virtually coded as sexual when they apply to women, although class and ethnicity are important factors that are shown to work in conjunction with gender in how emotions are represented. The introduction also lays out several helpful theoretical models of emotion used by anthropologists, psychologists, and social historians.
Emotions, Values, and the Law brings together ten of John Deigh's essays written over the past fifteen years. In the first five essays, Deigh ask questions about the nature of emotions and the relation of evaluative judgment to the intentionality of emotions, and critically examines the cognitivist theories of emotion that have dominated philosophy and psychology over the past thirty years. A central criticism of these theories is that they do not satisfactorily account for the emotions of babies or animals other than human beings. Drawing on this criticism, Deigh develops an alternative theory of the intentionality of emotions on which the education of emotions explains how human emotions, which innately contain no evaluative thought, come to have evaluative judgments as their principal cognitive component. The second group of five essays challenge the idea of the voluntary as essential to understanding moral responsibility, moral commitment, political obligation, and other moral and political phenomena that have traditionally been thought to depend on people's will. Each of these studies focuses on a different aspect of our common moral and political life and shows, contrary to conventional opinion, that it does not depend on voluntary action or the exercise of a will constituted solely by rational thought. Together, the essays in this collection represent an effort to shift our understanding of the phenomena traditionally studied in moral and political philosophy from that of their being products of reason and will, operating independently of feeling and sentiment to that of their being manifestations of the work of emotion. "Deigh's writing is clear and precise, his arguments are strong, and he uses a wide range of real world examples that give his essays a vibrant and very readable character." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "I believe that Deigh is as clear-headed and insightful a philosopher as is currently at work today in the areas of moral, political, and legal philosophy and moral psychology, and I believe these essays beautifully demonstrate his many virtues." - Herbert Morris, University of California, Low Angeles Law School "[John Deigh] has acquired a very good knowledge of a field which he has very much made his own. No one writes better or thinks more productively on that area of thought where the theory of the emotions, psychoanalysis, value theory, and the theory of law intersect. And if we closely connect the name Deigh with this particular concatenation of topics, I believe that very soon there will be a number of voices clamoring to be heard in this area." - Richard Wollheim, University of California, Berkeley
In this book, Rebekka Hufendiek explores emotions as embodied, action-oriented representations, providing a non-cognitivist theory of emotions that accounts for their normative dimensions. Embodied Emotions focuses not only on the bodily reactions involved in emotions, but also on the environment within which emotions are embedded and on the social character of this environment, its ontological constitution, and the way it scaffolds both the development of particular emotion types and the unfolding of individual emotional episodes. In addition, it provides a critical review and appraisal of current empirical studies, mainly in psychophysiology and developmental psychology, which are relevant to discussions about whether emotions are embodied as well as socially embedded. The theory that Hufendiek puts forward denies the distinction between basic and higher cognitive emotions: all emotions are embodied, action-oriented representations. This approach can account for the complex normative structure of emotions, and shares the advantages of cognitivist accounts of emotions without sharing their problems. Embodied Emotions makes an original contribution to ongoing debates on the normative aspects of emotions and will be of interest to philosophers working on emotions, embodied cognition and situated cognition, as well as neuroscientists or psychologists who study emotions and are interested in placing their own work within a broader theoretical framework.
After a long period of neglect, emotions have become an important topic within literary studies. This collection of essays stresses the complex link between aesthetic and non-aesthetic emotional components and discusses emotional patterns by focusing on the practice of writing as well as on the impact of such patterns on receptive processes. Readers interested in the topic will be presented with a concept of aesthetic emotions as formative both within the writing and the reading process. Essays, ranging in focus from the beginning of modern drama to digital formats and theoretical questions, examine examples from English, German, French, Russian and American literature. Contributors include Angela Locatelli, Vera Nünning, and Gesine Lenore Schiewer.
In Performing Emotions, Peta Tait's central argument is that performing emotions in realism is also performing gender identity. This study integrates scholarship on realist drama, theatre and approaches to acting, with interdisciplinary theories of emotion, phenomenology and gender theory. With chapters devoted to masculinity and femininity specifically, as well as to emotions generally, it investigates social beliefs about emotions through Chekhov's four major plays in translation, and English language commentaries on Constantin Stanislavski's direction (of the play's first productions) and his approaches to acting, and Olga Knipper's acting of the central women characters. Tait demonstrates how theatrical emotions are predicated on embodied social performances and create cultural spaces of emotions. Performing Emotions investigates how sexual difference impacts on the representations of emotions. The book develops an accumulative analysis of the meanings of emotions in twentieth century realist drama, theatre and acting.
