We elaborate and defend the claim that human affective states are, among other things, self-disclosing. We will show why affective intentionality has to be considered in order to understand human self-consciousness. One specific class of affective states, so-called existential feelings, although often neglected in philosophical treatments of emotions, will prove central. These feelings importantly pre-structure affective and other intentional relations to the world. Our main thesis is that existential feelings are an important manifestation of self-consciousness and figure prominently in human (...) self-understanding. We offer an ordering of four levels of existential feelings and also give considerations in favour of the essential bodily nature of these feelings. (shrink)

Quasi things come and go and we cannot wonder where they've been (starting from the wind) -- Quasi-things assault and resist us: feelings as atmospheres -- Quasi things are felt (though not localized): the isles of the felt-body -- Quasi-things are proofs of existence: pain as the genesis of the subject -- Quasi-things affect us (also indirectly): vicarious shame -- Quasi-things communicate with us: from the gaze to the portrait (and back) -- Quasi-things are the more effective the vaguer they (...) are: twilightness. (shrink)

Situated approaches to affectivity overcome an outdated individualistic perspective on emotions by emphasizing the role embodiment and environment play in affective dynamics. Yet, accounts which provide the conceptual toolbox for analyses in the philosophy of emotions do not go far enough. Their focus falls (a) on the present situation, abstracting from the broader historico-cultural context, and (b) on adopting a largely functionalist approach by conceiving of emotions and the environment as resources to be regulated or scaffolds to be used. In (...) this paper, I argue that we need totake situatedness seriously: We need (a) to acknowledge that emotions are not situated in undetermined “contexts” but in concrete socio-culturally specific practices referring to forms of living; and (b) to agree that not only are context and emotionsusedfor the sake of something else but also that the meaning-disclosive dimension of affective intentionality is structured by situatedness as well. To do so, I offer a multidimensional approach to situatedness that integrates the biographical and cultural dimensions of contextualization within the analysis of situated affective dynamics. This approach suggests that humans affectively disclose meaning (together) which is at once product and producer of specific forms of living – and these are always already subjects of (politically relevant) critique. (shrink)

Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable. (shrink)

Emotions are one of the topics that have caught the attention of analytical philosophy during the past years, and philosophers have developed different theories in this field. In this article, I shall present the main lines of investigation in the current debate on emotions and explain the arguments in favour and against each of them in order to build up my own position on the one hand, and, present the historical developments previous to the analytical theories, showing that the history (...) of philosophy has always had an interest in emotions as a topic on the other hand. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the thesis that emotions are conceptual phenomena. It is assumed that the capacity to acquire a language and thereby the capacity to possess concepts in an exacting sense fundamentally changes the human mind and, ultimately, the human being as a whole, including in relation to its physical condition. Although emotions do not presuppose language, the capacity to use and understand a language can nonetheless change their content. In recent discussions on affective intentionality, emotions are conceived (...) primarily as modes of qualitative awareness of something. In an emotion, one is connected sufficiently to a section of the world that one can feel this relation. With regard to the question of whether emotions are conceptual phenomena, a distinction between a conceptuality thesis and a propositionality thesis is made. In essence, the considerations speak in favour of the conceptual character of emotions without viewing them as linguistically or propositionally structured phenomena. Three understandings of the view that emotions are conceptual are elucidated. The view is defended that registering the content of emotions presupposes concepts, though these emotions are not therefore made up of concepts. Bei diesem Beitrag handelt es sich um eine nur geringfügig veränderte deutsche Fassung des ursprünglich in englischer Sprache erschienenen Textes Demmerling (2021). Dem Verlag Routledge ist für die Genehmigung eines Abdrucks in deutscher Sprache zu danken. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to clarify the notion of shared emotion. After contextualizing this notion within the broader research landscape on collective affective intentionality, I suggest that we reserve the term shared emotion to an affective experience that is phenomenologically and functionally ours: we experience it together as our emotion, and it is also constitutively not mine and yours, but ours. I focus on the three approaches that have dominated the philosophical discussion on shared emotions: cognitivist accounts, concern-based (...) accounts, and phenomenological fusion accounts. After identifying strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and summarizing the elements that a multifaceted theory of shared emotions requires, I turn to the work of the early phenomenologist Edith Stein to further advance an approach to shared emotions that combines the main strengths of Helm and Salmela’s concern-based accounts and Schmid’s phenomenological fusion account. According to this proposal, the sharedness of a shared emotion cannot be located in one element, but rather consists in a complex of interrelated features. (shrink)

In this paper I consider emotions as the ability to grasp meaningfulness, understood as an essential component of (social) reality, which is necessary for a rational discourse and which cannot be apprehended by means of a supposedly “sober” approach. I explicitly take into account the socio-cultural situatedness of feeling subjects and put epistemically relevant emotional abilities into perspective. This approach reveals that emotions can also contribute to questioning one’s own world view and to being able to correct it if necessary. (...) The ability tobe affectively disrupted, as I call it, enables one to see the contingency of one’s emotion repertoire and habitualised schemata of grasping meaningfulness. Further, a severe affective disruption can bring about a transformation of one’s emotion repertoire and habitualised schemata, thus permanently altering the subject’s epistemic position and epistemic practice. (shrink)

Collective moods are ubiquitous in social life. People may experience the sharing of a mood at a large sporting event, a concert or a religious ceremony, but also at a small family celebration or as part of a tour group. However, in philosophical discussions, collective moods are often framed as experiences of ecstasy, intoxication or even disinhibition at mass events without examining other aspects. Yet we practice and cultivate the sharing of moods in quite varied forms. In this paper I (...) intend to offer a differentiating suggestion as to the levels and forms of the sharing of moods, drawing on discussions of shared feelings, work on the phenomenology of social understanding, and social theory. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the ontological meaning of mood in Heidegger’s conception of Attunement, in order to relate this notion of Stimmung specifically to our “attunement” to a form of life, as conceived in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. It claims that moods spell out the constitutive impossibility to grasp and found the human experience as such. However, this impossibility is not a lack of human knowledge, but rather corresponds to the necessary opacity, indeterminability and groundlessness of every human experience, which make (...) it possible as such. The paper argues that the ontological mood of anxiety in Heidegger’s thought cannot be understood as a dark feeling, since it points to a constitutive sense of disorientation, which involves the impossibility to found and ensure the very familiarity of our ordinary experience. Moreover, the paper claims that the same impossibility is also involved in our “attunement” to language and to a form of life, as described by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. By analyzing the mood of trust sketched out by Wittgenstein in On Certainty, the paper suggests that the ontological mood of trust, as the groundless certainty of our praxis, points to the very impossibility to found and ensure every human experience. From this perspective, moods reveal the groundlessness of human experience and make us acknowledge it. (shrink)