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Special issue of Discipline Filosofiche exploring phenomenological analyses of emotions, their intentionality, values, and ontological, metaphysical, moral, and social implications.
Over the past twenty years, scientific literature on emotions has grown enormously, and the same has occurred in philosophy. In light of the assumptions—often implicit—that guide scientific research programs, the wealth of their findings, and the explanatory hypotheses advanced on the basis of such observational and theoretical grounds, it is inevitable that philosophers ask what the specific contribution of philosophy to research on emotions might be.
This question is particularly significant given the intertwining of physiological, expressive, behavioral, cognitive, evaluative, normative, and motivational components that emotions involve, as well as their social relevance. In other words, what does philosophy have to say about emotions in relation to what the natural and social sciences already tell us about them?
The answers naturally vary depending on the conceptions one may hold of philosophy. However, there is a particular philosophical tradition that appears especially well suited to addressing phenomena such as emotions in their characteristic two-fold nature: as subjective, first-person experiences and, at the same time, as objective experiences that disclose aspects of the world. This two-fold structure is one that philosophical reflections on emotions have often sacrificed in favor of one aspect or the other.
This tradition is phenomenology, understood not generically as an empirical investigation of "what it is like to feel," but properly as the study of embodied consciousness in its directedness toward other subjects as well as toward objects, states of affairs, and events in the world.
With respect to the contemporary philosophy of emotions as a chapter of the philosophy of mind in its relation to the cognitive sciences, the phenomenological approach in fact claims a primacy that is, first of all, temporal.
Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emotions acquired centrality in philosophy primarily thanks to what Husserl described as an already existing method, of which Husserlian transcendental phenomenology conceived itself as "a certain radicalization" (HUA IX, 302). This was descriptive or phenomenological psychology, a philosophical research project on consciousness and its lived experiences that ran parallel to, and as an alternative to, the experimental psychology of the time.
Its main figures were Brentano, Stumpf, and Th. Lipps, and it was from this tradition that Husserl himself set out in his Logical Investigations.
Under the influence of Husserl, it was then Lipps's students and collaborators in Munich, and later Husserl's in Göttingen, who defended the idea of a distinctive affective intentionality irreducible to that of other mental states such as beliefs, judgments, or desires.
In their works, they developed extraordinarily detailed eidetic analyses of particular classes of emotional experiences, their contents, and the themes connected with them. In what is perhaps the most famous case—that of Max Scheler—these analyses culminated in a complex philosophical theory of emotional functions and acts, as well as of their objects, namely values.
In subsequent developments of phenomenological philosophy, the role accorded to affectivity remained central in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry, as well as later in Hermann Schmitz's "new phenomenology." Schmitz's approach conceives emotions as spatially extended atmospheres that transcend the mind/body distinction and the distinction between psychophysically separate individuals.
Affectivity also remained central in Waldenfels's "responsive phenomenology" and, finally, in the numerous studies of recent years at the intersection of phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, particularly those addressing classical phenomenological themes such as intersubjectivity, empathy, and the emotional forms of collective intentionality.
In this context, a renewed focus on emotions and values has been prompted by the publication, in 2020, of the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (HUA XLIII), which brings together analyses carried out by Husserl between 1909 and 1914 and subsequently during the first half of the 1920s.
Against this background, Discipline filosofiche intends to devote a special issue to phenomenological analyses of emotions, past and present, and invites authors to submit contributions addressing the following topics.