In this article a neo-Jamesian approach to the self is developed within a naturalistic, bottom-up, and systemic-relational framework. In this approach, consciousness of the body as one’s own body is a necessary precondition of self-consciousness as psychological self-awareness, and hence of a socially and historically situated narrative self. Thus we take on board the criticism of those accounts of the narrative self that pay little attention to embodiment, or go to the extreme of stating that the narrative self is abstract (...) and hence not embodied. But at the same time, we reject the idea that the embodiment of the narrative self is provided by a pre-reflective self-consciousness. By contrast, we view self-consciousness as a construction all the way down, which develops from automatic and pre-reflective processing of representations of objects (object-consciousness), through awareness and then self-awareness of the body, up to introspective self-awareness and then narrative identity. This form of constructivism is a naturalistic reinterpretation of the Hegelian idea that selfhood is socially constructed and self-experience intersubjectively mediated. However, it enables to move away from that blend of narrativism and epiphenomenism that characterizes some strands of the socio-constructivist approach to the narrative self. The storied Me that the selfing process makes is not “empty chatter”, but rather a causally efficacious layer of personality viewed as a self-unifying system. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

Drawing from empirical literature on ecological psychology, affective neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, this article describes a model of affect-as-motivation in the intentional bond between organism and environment. An epistemological justification for the motivating role of emotions is provided through articulating the perceptual context of emotions as embodied, situated, and functional, and positing perceptual salience as a biasing signal in an affordance competition model. The motivational role of affect is pragmatically integrated into discussions of action selection in the neurosciences.

After more than two millennia of theorizing, a unified view of how laughter works is still lacking. Over the years, philosophers have proposed three predominant hypotheses to explain this peculiar human behavior, based on a feeling of superiority, the appreciation of something that violates our expectations, or the release of nervous energy. Contemporary affective neuroscience inherited these frameworks, attempting to parcellate the brain regions involved in laughter production accordingly. In the present paper, I will discuss a fourth hypothesis, suggesting that (...) laughter is, first and foremost, a mean for social bonding and communication, evolved to change the behavior of others. Such ‘social-interaction hypothesis’, which links the emotional aspect of laughter to social action tendencies, is in line with a longstanding tradition that goes back to the early Dewey and Mead’s theories of emotion, and the best equipped to explain new evidence from affective neuroscience. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest an understanding of the self within the conceptual framework of situated affectivity, proposing the notion of an affectively extended self and arguing that the construction, diachronic re-shaping and maintenance of the self is mediated first by affective interactions. We initially consider the different variations on the conception of the extended self that have been already proposed in the literature. We then propose our alternative, contextualising it within the current debate on situated affectivity. While the idea (...) that we exploit the external environment in order to manage our affective life is now rather widespread among philosophers, its potential consequences for and connections with the debate on the self remain underexplored. Drawing on James’ intuition of the “material self”, which clearly connects the self and the emotions in agency, and broadly envisioning an extension of the self beyond its organismic boundaries, we propose our pragmatist conception of the self: an affectively extended self that relies on affective artifacts and practices to construct its identity extended beyond skin and skull. (shrink)