The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind
288
The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind
288eBook
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Overview
In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science—the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience.
In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262318426 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MIT Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2014 |
| Series: | The MIT Press |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 508 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
1 Primordial Affectivity 1
1.1 Reclaiming a Broader and Deeper Notion of Affectivity 1
1.2 Spinoza's Conatus: Striving as the Ground of All Affects 4
1.3 Enter the Lived Body: From Maine de Biran's Experience of Effort to Henry's "Interior Quivering" 7
1.4 Heidegger's Care and Moods, and Patocka's "Physiognomic Impressions" 11
1.5 Enactive Sense Making 15
1.6 Primordial Affectivity and Affective Science 20
1.7 Conclusion 24
2 The Emotions: Existing Accounts and Their Problems 25
2.1 Introduction 25
2.2 The Theory of Basic Emotions (BET) 26
2.3 Assessing Existing Criticisms of BET 29
2.4 The Arbitrariness of the Alleged Basic Emotions 36
2.5 The Problematic Unity/Disunity Debate 40
2.6 Alternatives to BET and Their Problems 46
2.7 Conclusion 52
3 Emotional Episodes as Dynamical Patterns 53
3.1 Introduction 53
3.2 Fundamental Concepts of Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) 54
3.3 Dynamical Affective Science 56
3.4 Implications for the Debate on the Nature of the Emotions 70
3.5 Discreteness and Boundaries 75
3.6 Moods 77
3.7 Conclusion 82
4 Reappraising Appraisal 83
4.1 Introduction 83
4.2 Beginnings 84
4.3 Downplaying the Body in the 1960s and 1970s 87
4.4 Appraisal Theory Today: The Body as a Mere Interactant 94
4.5 Eroding the Neural Boundaries between Cognition and Emotion 98
4.6 Enacting Appraisal 101
4.7 Phenomenological Connections 106
4.8 A (Brief) Comparison with Prinz's "Embodied Appraisal" 109
4.9 Conclusion 111
5 How the Body Feels in Emotion Experience 113
5.1 Introduction 113
5.2 A Taxonomy of Bodily Peeling 115
5.3 Conspicuous Bodily Feelings in Emotion Experience 118
5.4 The "Obscurely Felt" Body 122
5.5 Feeling Absorbed 128
5.6 Conclusion 132
6 Ideas for an Affective "Neuro-physio-phenomenology" 135
6.1 Introduction 135
6.2 Neurophenomenology in Theory and Practice 136
6.3 Neurophenomenology and the Study of Consciousness 139
6.4 Affective Neuroscience and Emotion Experience 143
6.5 Outline of an Affective Neuro-physio-phenomenological Method 148
6.6 Bodily Feelings and Emotion Experience 163
6.7 Conclusion 170
7 Feeling Others 171
7.1 Introduction 171
7.2 The Experience- of the Other as a Leib 173
7.3 Perceiving Emotion in Expression 176
7.4 Impressive Others 179
7.5 Feeling Close 181
7.6 Sympathy 184
7.7 Doing as Others Do 187
7.8 Do We Mimic Others to Read Their Minds? 190
7.9 Mimicry as a Mechanism for Social Bonding 194
7.10 Beyond Strict Mimicry 198
7.11 Conclusion 201
Epilogue 203
Notes 205
References 229
Index 261
What People are Saying About This
In this clearly written and engaging book, Colombetti draws from approaches as diverse as phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, cognitive science, and neuroscience to make important new contributions to the fields of enactive cognition and affective science. She enriches the enactivist perspective--which focuses on the dynamic meaning-making activity of an organism in its environment--by revealing the primordial role of affective dimensions of cognition in all of our embodied ways of making sense of, and engaging, our world. At the same time, she expands emotion theory by exploring the deep affective patterns by which we engage our world at a level that precedes and underlies our conscious emotional experiences. The impressive result is an excursion through the depths of sometimes hidden processes of directed response and feeling that lie at the heart of our ability to navigate meaningfully within our physical, interpersonal, and cultural surroundings.
In this clearly written and engaging book, Colombetti draws from approaches as diverse as phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, cognitive science, and neuroscience to make important new contributions to the fields of enactive cognition and affective science. She enriches the enactivist perspective—which focuses on the dynamic meaning-making activity of an organism in its environment—by revealing the primordial role of affective dimensions of cognition in all of our embodied ways of making sense of, and engaging, our world. At the same time, she expands emotion theory by exploring the deep affective patterns by which we engage our world at a level that precedes and underlies our conscious emotional experiences. The impressive result is an excursion through the depths of sometimes hidden processes of directed response and feeling that lie at the heart of our ability to navigate meaningfully within our physical, interpersonal, and cultural surroundings.
—Mark Johnson, Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon
Bodily affect, in a sense that goes deeper than basic emotions, has been underplayed in emotion theory and even in some of the most embodied approaches to cognition. Colombetti does a great service in exploring the dynamics of the affective life, gathering together empirical and theoretical perspectives to show that enactive theories need to be even more embodied than they are usually construed to be.
—Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy, University of MemphisIn this clearly written and engaging book, Colombetti draws from approaches as diverse as phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, cognitive science, and neuroscience to make important new contributions to the fields of enactive cognition and affective science. She enriches the enactivist perspective—which focuses on the dynamic meaning-making activity of an organism in its environment—by revealing the primordial role of affective dimensions of cognition in all of our embodied ways of making sense of, and engaging, our world. At the same time, she expands emotion theory by exploring the deep affective patterns by which we engage our world at a level that precedes and underlies our conscious emotional experiences. The impressive result is an excursion through the depths of sometimes hidden processes of directed response and feeling that lie at the heart of our ability to navigate meaningfully within our physical, interpersonal, and cultural surroundings.
—Mark Johnson, Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of OregonBodily affect, in a sense that goes deeper than basic emotions, has been underplayed in emotion theory and even in some of the most embodied approaches to cognition. Colombetti does a great service in exploring the dynamics of the affective life, gathering together empirical and theoretical perspectives to show that enactive theories need to be even more embodied than they are usually construed to be.