In this paper, I consider the role that epistemic familiarity plays in our empathetic perception and our feeling togetherness with others. To do this, I distinguish between what I have dubbed familiarity by acquaintance and familiarity by resemblance and explore their role in our empathetic experiences and various forms of feeling togetherness with others both offline and online. In particular, I resist the idea that we should caveat experiences of online empathy and online togetherness with the requirement of already being (...) familiar by acquaintance with the relevant person in the offline world. In contrast, familiarity by resemblance appears to play a crucial role in shaping our experiences of others, emphasising that what we experience as another’s expressive experience and how we experience that expressive experience is permeated by previous intersubjective encounters whether online or offline. (shrink)

Despite its long history of investigating sociality, phenomenology has, to date, said little about online sociality. The phenomenological tradition typically claims that empathy is the fundamental way in which we experience others and their experiences. While empathy is discussed almost exclusively in the context of face-to-face interaction, I claim that we can empathetically perceive others and their experiences in certain online situations. Drawing upon the phenomenological distinction between the physical, objective body and the expressive, lived body, I: (i) highlight that (...) empathy involves perceiving the other’s expressive, lived body, (ii) show that the lived body is not tied to the physical body and that empathy can take place outside of face-to-face interactions, and (iii) argue that the lived body can enter online space and is empathetically available to others there. I explore two ways in which the other’s lived body enters online space and can be empathetically perceived: first, in cases where our face-to-face encounter is technologically-mediated over video link and, second, by showing how the other’s texts, as speech, can form part of the other’s lived body. Investigating empathy online not only furthers our understanding of online encounters but also leads to a refined conception of empathy more generally. (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)

This paper presents and explicates the theory of empathy found in Edith Stein’s early philosophy, notably in the book On the Problem of Empathy, published in 1917, but also by proceeding from complementary thoughts on bodily intentionality and intersubjectivity found in Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities published in 1922. In these works Stein puts forward an innovative and detailed theory of empathy, which is developed in the framework of a philosophical anthropology involving questions of psychophysical causality, social ontology and (...) moral philosophy. Empathy, according to Stein, is a feeling-based experience of another person’s feeling that develops throughout three successive steps on two interrelated levels. The key to understanding the empathy process á la Stein is to explicate how the steps of empathy are attuned in nature, since the affective qualities provide the energy and logic by way of which the empathy process is not only inaugurated but also proceeds through the three steps and carries meaning on two different levels corresponding to two different types of empathy: sensual and emotional empathy. Stein’s theory has great potential for better understanding and moving beyond some major disagreements found in the contemporary empathy debate regarding, for instance, the relation between perception and simulation, the distinction between what is called low-level and high-level empathy, and the issue of how and in what sense it may be possible to share feelings in the empathy process. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for cooperation as a three-dimensional phenomenon lying on the continua of a cognitive, a behavioural, and an affective axis. Traditional accounts of joint action argue for cooperation as involving a shared intention. Developmental research has shown that such cooperation requires rather sophisticated social cognitive skills such as having a robust theory of mind - that is acquired not until age 4 to 5 in human ontogeny. However, also younger children are able to cooperate in various (...) ways. Moreover, the coordinated behaviours of the agents can be more or less complex. Finally, phenomenological considerations and findings from social psychology illustrate that affective states and agent-specificities may play a central role in cooperative activities. I end with discussing the implications of my analysis that speak in favour of a pluralist account of social cognition. (shrink)

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)

Traumatic experiences do not merely impact on the individual’s body and psyche, they alter the way we experience others, our interpersonal relationships, and how we make sense of the world. In my dissertation, I integrate work in phenomenology, psychopathology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and trauma studies, and draw on trauma testimonies ob- tained in an online questionnaire. I engage analytically with the question of what constitutes a trauma, whether psychological trauma is necessarily pathological, and what the causal and (...) im- plicatory relations between traumatising and post-traumatic experiences are. Informed by these preliminary elaborations, I focus on the intersubjective dimension of trauma, drawing on a qualitative study I conducted in 2020. I show that empathic abilities may be altered but are not necessarily diminished through traumatising experiences; I suggest a framework for under- standing feelings of alienation in the aftermath of trauma; and I demonstrate how feelings of belonging may be re-established. My dissertation is exemplary of how phenomenological frameworks can contribute to a better understanding of psychological trauma and that engaging with trauma can, in turn, inform and enrich philosophical thinking. (shrink)

The paper argues that the dynamics of personal and collective individuation could be interrelated and bear ethical significance thanks to an analysis of the Lifeworld and intersubjectivity that link together the genetic and the generative perspectives of phenomenology. The first section of the paper recalls the epistemological and ontological implications of Husserl's and Stein's analysis of personal individuation in relation to what Husserl would call, later, the “Lifeworld” and the intersubjective constitution of communities. The second section of the paper turns (...) to a phenomenology of the Lifeworld through an analysis of refugees' care and the intersubjective dynamics involved in the clinic of exile. Such an example will bring to light the importance of embodiment and intercorporeity to grasp the process through which the genetic constitution of the Lifeworld constitutes itself as a collective process of individuation trying to heal the scars of historicity. Consequently, individuation will appear as a personal and collective task, rather than a static and ego-centered achievement that would be forgetful of our fundamental interdependency. Finally, the last section argues that “healing the Lifeworld” does not amount to conceive of its “horizon” as being itself a predetermined “telos” of transcendental subjectivity, as if this open structure could be itself constituted. Rather, the varieties of the Lifeworld and its paradoxical movement of appropriation and differentiation point to a relational ontology that considers the becoming of a common and meaningful world as a _limit-problem_ of phenomenology and, perhaps, its ethical and critical promise. (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)

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)

This article investigates the relationship between for-me-ness and sociality. I start by pointing out some ambiguities in claims pursued by critics that have recently pressed on the relationship between the two notions. I next articulate a question concerning for-me-ness and sociality that builds on the idea that, occasionally at least, there is something it is like ‘for us’ to have an experience. This idea has been explored in recent literature on shared experiences and collective intentionality, and it gestures towards the (...) question of the extent to which some social interactions make a difference in the phenomenal character of their participants’ experiences. Finally, I present a construal of for-us-ness that complements the received understanding of for-me-ness, by drawing on Alfred Schutz’ concept of the we-relationship, and on the idea of second-personal awareness, i.e. awareness of a ‘you’. The current proposal provides a suitable account of some basic forms of phenomenally manifest social connectedness, in a way that is cognitively undemanding and without incurring the costs of a sui generis plural pre-reflective self-awareness. (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 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)

My aim in this paper is to make use of Edith Stein’s phenomenological analyses of empathy, emotion, and personhood to clarify and critically assess the recent suggestion by Axel Honneth that a basic form of recognition is affective in nature. I will begin by considering Honneth’s own presentation of this claim in his discussion of the role of affect in recognitive gestures, as well as in his notion of ‘elementary recognition,’ arguing that while his account contains much of value it (...) also generates problems. On the basis of this analysis, I will try to show that Stein’s account of empathy demarcates an elementary form of recognition in a less problematic fashion than does Honneth’s own treatment of this issue. I will then spell out the consequences of this move for the emotional recognition thesis, arguing that Stein’s treatment lends it further credence, before ending with some remarks on the connection between recognition and emotional personality. (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)

In this paper I aim to show with the aid of philosophers Edith Stein and Peter Goldie, how empathy and other social feelings are instantiated and developed in real life versus on the Internet. The examples of on-line communication show both how important the embodied aspects of empathy are and how empathy may be possible also in the cases of encountering personal stories rather than personal bodies. Since video meetings, social media, online gaming and other forms of interaction via digital (...) technologies are taking up an increasing part of our time, it is important to understand how such forms of social intercourse are different from in real life meetings and why they can accordingly foster not only new communal bonds but also hatred and misunderstanding. (shrink)

Edith Stein and Gerda Walther explain how community comes to be and how it is structured, but they do not develop significant accounts of how communities disintegrate or die, albeit they make passing allusions to how this may happen. I argue that what makes communities vulnerable to their possible demise, following both Stein’s and Walther’s social ontology, is the breakdown of the sense of the communal bond, that is, the failure of the community members’ ability to make sense of their (...) relationship to one another. Just as sense-making and sense-building can help give birth and meaning to communities, sense disintegration and the dying of the sense of a community bespeak a vulnerability that lies at the very core of all communities. In addition to the vulnerability of sense-making, I argue that the lived-body and habit also pose important challenges to the very possibility of community. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-42, January 2022. This paper distinguishes collective emotions from other phenomena pertaining to the social and interactive nature of emotion and proposes a taxonomy of different types of collective emotion. First, it emphasizes the distinction between collective emotions as affective experiences and underpinning mechanisms. Second, it elaborates on other types of affective experience, namely the social sharing of emotion, group-based emotions, and joint emotions. Then, it proposes a working definition of collective emotion via (...) a minimal threshold and four structural features. Finally, it develops a taxonomy of five types of collective emotion: emotional sharing, emotional contagion, emotional matching, emotional segregation, and emotional fusion. (shrink)

In this article, our focus is on the topic of engagement and possibility of empathy with future generations. We acknowledge that empathy for future generations is practically unattainable in its strictest sense due to the lack of access to their potential mental states and the absence of direct interaction. Additionally, we will draw upon the arguments presented by Goldie and Slaby to address concerns regarding the potential paternalization that may arise in empathic relations towards future generations. However, despite these limitations, (...) it is important to emphasize that we are still engaged with future generations. Instead of adopting a paternalizing approach where we impose expectations on how they should feel, our engagement exposes us to the anticipated but unknown judgments of future generations. Throughout this article, we will argue that engagement with future generations brings out our own social self-consciousness and provides a basis of our connectedness and responsibility towards future generations. (shrink)

This paper presents and explicates the theory of empathy found in Edith Stein’s early philosophy, notably in the book On the Problem of Empathy, published in 1917, but also by proceeding from complementary thoughts on bodily intentionality and intersubjectivity found in Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities published in 1922. In these works Stein puts forward an innovative and detailed theory of empathy, which is developed in the framework of a philosophical anthropology involving questions of psychophysical causality, social ontology and (...) moral philosophy. Empathy, according to Stein, is a feeling-based experience of another person’s feeling that develops throughout three successive steps on two interrelated levels. The key to understanding the empathy process á la Stein is to explicate how the steps of empathy are attuned in nature, since the affective qualities provide the energy and logic by way of which the empathy process is not only inaugurated but also proceeds through the three steps and carries meaning on two different levels corresponding to two different types of empathy: sensual and emotional empathy. Stein’s theory has great potential for better understanding and moving beyond some major disagreements found in the contemporary empathy debate regarding, for instance, the relation between perception and simulation, the distinction between what is called low-level and high-level empathy, and the issue of how and in what sense it may be possible to share feelings in the empathy process. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-42, January 2022. This paper distinguishes collective emotions from other phenomena pertaining to the social and interactive nature of emotion and proposes a taxonomy of different types of collective emotion. First, it emphasizes the distinction between collective emotions as affective experiences and underpinning mechanisms. Second, it elaborates on other types of affective experience, namely the social sharing of emotion, group-based emotions, and joint emotions. Then, it proposes a working definition of collective emotion via (...) a minimal threshold and four structural features. Finally, it develops a taxonomy of five types of collective emotion: emotional sharing, emotional contagion, emotional matching, emotional segregation, and emotional fusion. (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)

Resumen El presente estudio investiga la importancia de la “experiencia originaria” husserliana para la comprensión del conflicto de las ciencias exactas con el problema de Dios, que Edith Stein califica de “angustia inconsciente de encontrarse” con Él. A través de su controversia con la Psicología del siglo XIX, la discípula de Husserl muestra en su obra Causalidad Psíquica que hace falta un adecuado conocimiento de la índole propia de la ciencia para remontar con rigor metódico a la originariedad de la (...) experiencia humana y el Dios presente allí. Esto conducirá a la ciencia al descubrimiento de su propia identidad por la superación del bloqueo consciente o inconsciente ante la revelación de Dios en el alma humana. De ahí que el presente estudio ofrezca un aporte relevante para la dilucidación filosófica de una cuestión teológica candente hoy ―aporte logrado a través de un esfuerzo interdisciplinario arduo.The present study investigates the importance of the Husserlian “originary experience” for the understanding of the conflict of the exacts sciences with the problem of God, which Edith Stein describes as “unconscious anguish of being” with Him. Through her controversy with of the 19th century Psychology, the disciple of Husserl shows in her work Psychic Causality that it is necessary to have an adequate knowledge of the nature of science to trace with methodical rigor the originarity of the human experience and the God present in there. This will conduct science to a discovery of its own proper identity by the overcoming of the unconscious or conscious blocking before the revelation of God in the human soul Hence, the present study offers a relevant contribution to the philosophical elucidation of a burning theological question today -a contribution achieved through an arduous interdisciplinary effort. (shrink)

‘We’ is said in many ways. This paper investigates Kurt Stavenhagen’s neglected account of different kinds of ‘we’, which is maintained to be one of the most sophisticated within classical phenomen...