Affectivity

Il presente contributo, partendo dal concetto di zooantropologia, intesa come disciplina che si occupa di comprendere le specificità della rela-zione uomo-animale e la particolare tendenza di tale relazione a produrre nell'uomo effetti positivi, intende approfondire la dimensione di relazione relativa all'affettività. Emerge la necessità di at-tivare dei percorsi ad hoc volti a favorire l'educa-zione affettiva e l'acquisizione delle competenze in tale ambito, oltre alla necessità di focalizzare l'attenzione su come l'affettività viene espressa nei diversi momenti della vita quotidiana. Si propone un intervento intenzionale di educa-zione affettiva, all'interno del contesto scolastico, fondato sulla relazione uomo-animale, realizzata principalmente nella dimensione affettiva, con le diverse attività di pet-relationship che potrebbero catturare l'attenzione degli studenti e spostare il loro focus attentivo verso alterità animale e quindi Il cane è l'amico d'infanzia dell'umanità, la relazione con lui indica il livello di consapevolezza che abbiamo su ciò che siamo… Il cane è lì di fianco a noi, completamente dato e facilmente assimilabile al nostro mondo. " Marchesini Roberto 253

Cognitive science, until recently, has neglected affectivity and subjectivity which is partly due to dualistic conceptions of the cognizing subject. The present work aims to further expand the scope of the mind sciences with a phenomenological treatment of affectivity. More specifically, it discusses Daniel Stern’s notion of vitality affects (1985), employing an interdisciplinary approach with an emphasis on ontogenetic perspectives.

Formulating a critique on the current stance of embodied views, it is argued that they presuppose a dualist ontology, hence the “embodied” notion of affectivity lacks phenomenological depth and accuracy. Instead, the enactive approach is advocated that puts affectivity on central stage in explaining the “deep continuity of life and mind” (Thompson 2007 p. ix). Following Thompson and Sheets-Johnstone (2011b), I ground the concept of the body in the life–mind continuum, then following Aristotle and Colombetti (2014), I ground affectivity in the body–life–world continuum.

Stern’s model of the early organisation of the self helps to gain a more refined understanding of the developmental and clinical aspects of those cultural splits between body and mind that appear as a result of the Cartesian dualism. Along this developmental model focusing on vitality affects, two major ontogenetic events are identified in the infant’s
experience which I call body-mind splits – where an objectification of the self occurs. Describing the phenomenological nature of the splits, Ratcliffe’s & Colombetti’s taxonomy of bodily feelings is adopted (2012). In identifying the splits in the infants’ experience, I connect Stern’s theory with phenomenology (Husserl 1960; Merleau-Ponty 2010b; Vermes 2006), psychoanalytic views (Lacan 2001), and enactivism (Thompson 2007).

My hope is that this thesis is a step towards a mutually informed discussion on the fundamental role of vitality affects in intersubjectivity between enactive cognitive science, phenomenology, affective science, as well as developmental psychology. This step expectantly helps gaining a deeper understanding on the nature and genesis of various splits between body and mind, which can consequently facilitate the success of somatic psychotherapies.

In this paper, I join the so-called voluntarism debate on Descartes’s theory of will and judgment, arguing for an indirect doxastic voluntarism reading of Descartes, as opposed to a classic, or direct doxastic voluntarism. More specifically, I examine the question whether Descartes thinks the will can have a direct and full control over one’s suspension of judgment. Descartes was a doxastic voluntarist, maintaining that the will has some kind of control over one’s doxastic states, such as belief and doubt. According to a long-held reading, the control that the will has over doxastic states in Descartes’s theory is direct; the doxastic states are affected by the mere act of will. This reading is called direct doxastic voluntarism (DDV), or direct voluntarism (DV) for short, and it states that we are capable of assenting, rejecting and suspending a judgment based only on our will to do so. Thus, these actions would be utterly and merely volitional. DV can be divided into two further positions, direct positive voluntarism (+DV) and direct negative voluntarism (-DV). Direct positive voluntarism deals with the act of forming judgments, maintaining that one can accept or deny a proposition willfully and either merely believe or not believe something voluntarily. Direct negative voluntarism deals with the suspension of judgment, maintaining that it can likewise be accomplished by a simple act of will. However, I support an alternate account of Descartes’s voluntarism, which is called indirect doxastic voluntarism (IDV), or indirect voluntarism (IV) for short. By this account, the will is capable of affecting a doxastic state indirectly by making one concentrate on essential tasks for forming that state, such as gathering up and paying attention to strong reasons and evidence. IV is also possible to divide into indirect positive voluntarism (+IV) and indirect negative voluntarism (-IV). Per indirect positive voluntarism the will needs to pay attention to reasons for accepting or denying some proposition. Likewise, by indirect negative voluntarism, in order to suspend judgment the will needs to direct this attention to the reasons for doubt. By attending to these reasons, the will also comes face-to-face with its own freedom. This feeling of freedom can be described as affectivity of the reasons for belief (assent) and doubt (suspension)

The vocative is a still rather underexplored linguistic element which has justifiably been described as ‘peripheral’ in traditional systemic linguistics. Yet, it is of central relevance in the concrete linguistic interaction, where its functions are indispensable from a pragmatic as well as from a sociolinguistic perspective.
The first part of the thesis is dedicated to a basic characterization of the category ‘vocative’ which grounds on a functional definition as a nominal, free form of address. This implies firstly a comprehensive critical analysis of the existing literature from the most diverse linguistic approaches. The next step is the attempt of an alternative characterization of the vocative on sociolinguistic principles which focuses on the concept of affective stance. The vocative is understood as its manifestation in a twofold way: as an element of expressivity and of the relational work between the interactants. In both functions, processes of routinization and desemanticization can frequently be observed, the outcomes of which are discourse marking functions continuously gaining in relevance.
This theoretical framework is the basis for the subsequent empirical analysis of a corpus of spoken Spanish (C-ORAL-ROM) with a special focus on the distribution of vocatives in different kinds of contextes and their affinity to specific characteristics of conceptional orality in communication. Another feature of interest are gender-specific differences in vocative production and the routinization of certain generic vocative forms. Both aspects are finally revisited in the context of the existing literature and examined in view of their sociopragmatic indexicalities. Instead of ‘grammaticalization’ or ‘pragmaticalization’, the term ‘routinization’ is proposed for the development of pragmatic markers which are frequently based on vocatives.

In this paper I focus on a key site of experimentalism in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche cites a number of bold experimental thoughts within his work, such as the causal hypothesis of the world envisioned as will to power, and the question of how much truth one can incorporate. It is especially pronounced, however, in his revaluation of morality. Nietzsche orients himself against a negative brand of morality, hegemonised under what he calls the ‘Moral World Order’, and the lynchpin of this ‘order’ is its conception of free moral agency. Nietzsche attacks this from numerous angles, but fundamentally condemns it as a particularly acute instance of nihilism: the unconditional moral will stands apart from the sensuous body, tyrannising over it and recommending the extirpation of its passions and instincts. This is the basis of Nietzsche’s claim that Judaeo-Christian morality has ‘translated the human out of nature’. But it is also the departure point for his pursuit of a superior morality which inverts the relationship between body and will, and affirms ‘freedom of the will’ as an emergent affect that accompanies processes of mutual interpretation among bodily drives. This superior kind of morality turns on two principles. First, an effort to embrace the totality of one’s drives, such that the freest kind of will expresses the fullest economy of one’s self. Second, an experimental approach to organising this economy, requiring that one remain open to varying the internal hierarchy of one’s drives in order to experience the diverse affectivities of ‘free willing’ that novel arrangements generate. On this basis, I elaborate Nietzsche’s revaluated brand of morality by importing ideas from complexity theory, proposing that the experiment of becoming a superior moral agent involves making of oneself a non-linear system. To conclude, I use this cross-fertilisation to illuminate some key areas of Nietzsche’s naturalism.

Le statut de la théorisation en phénoménologie a fait l’objet de nombreuses dé nitions, de Husserl à Marc Richir, en passant par Fink, Heidegger ou Merleau-Ponty. Ré échir à ce statut implique une analyse critique du lieu depuis lequel est émise une théorisation, et de sa posture d’énonciation : qui parle, lorsque le/la phénoménologue ressaisit, dans un geste théorisateur, l’expérience de la réduction ou de la description eidétique, et quelle spéci cité distingue ce langage transcendantal du langage mondain ? Comment éviter que ce niveau, phénoménologique, ne retombe dans la «naïveté» psychologique de l’expérience mondaine ? Qu’est-ce qui, en retour, le garde contre la dogmatisation, menaçant toute perspective de théorisation trop soucieuse d’inscrire sa posture énonciative dans un surplomb de ce dont elle parle ?
Le propos ici sera de rendre compte de la position discursive propre à la théorisation phénoménologique, et plus particulièrement chez Merleau- Ponty, de manière à mettre en exergue l’a ectivité indissociable de la théorisation.

As we know, it was Nietzsche’s project to reconceptualize Kant’s “judgment.” His choice of force managed to elude the problem of units of quantity, opting instead for an early dynamics. Nietzsche’s dynamics introduced interpretation, accommodation, and domination into the biological model of his time, emphasizing structures of obedience and command in order to preserve the hierarchy intrinsic to value judgments. This simply means that certain organizations of cells, tissues, even living beings “work” better for their growth and flourishing than do others. The problem we noted of a common currency is temporarily suspended with the epochē on quantity—displacing for heuristic ends the primacy of quantity and its metaphysical recourse to units of measure. As a number of Husserl’s commentators have asked (Paul Ricoeur, among them): What are we to make of conscious life when we remove the phenomenological brackets? Could not a similar question be posed of the neuro-phenomenology flowing simultaneously out of Gilbert Simondon and Maurice Merleau-Ponty? To be sure. But what we would have, upon removing the brackets, simply breaks into the objects of psychology and biology, or again, comes down to human experience as the object of multiple sciences or regional ontologies.
Gilbert Simondon, like Andrieu and others since the publication of his work in the 1960s, attempted to demonstrate the possibility of a monism based on energetic interactions. His work resists summary because of its complexity and the plethora of new concepts he created. Some of these were the direct result of advances in chemistry and geophysics. The formation of crystalline structures provided one image of what he called “systems of potentials,” on the basis of which elementary schemas constitute “meta-stable fields.” The meta-stable field comes from the dynamics of liquids but should not be restricted to that domain. It could well be argued that the Nietzschean contribution to a psycho-physics lies in its similar refusal of statics and individual substances. And this strikingly anticipates the structural coupling and dynamic co-determination of organism and Urwelt in Thompson and von Uexküll. Without denying that beings “individuate” in transitional and ongoing ways, Nietzsche strove to keep his forces within a framework wherein becoming was not opposed to being. He might have found a real interest in the innovations of Simondon, Andrieu, Thompson, and Varella.
That does not mean that we can, or should, speak poetically of qualities, as though no difficulties arose in the absence of some theory of energy or energetics. But most of these theories shared the fate of socio-political environments through whose lens they were read and adjusted to the ideals of a given cultural politics. Those readings are, of course, as hazardous as Hans Driesch’s 1930’s vitalism in which the concept of organic totality and a governing principle slid deplorably into an aestheticized, politicized Führerprinzip. Such slippages may be unavoidable and an entire history of 19th and early 20th century misappropriations of vitalism and Lebensphilosophie could be written. Nevertheless, the imperative of bridging body-world and mind-body dualisms must be taken up by a biology in continuous dialogue with psychology and, today, with neuro-philosophy. I have argued throughout that that was the direction in which Husserl’s biology as the universal ontology was moving.

Many philosophers have understood the representational dimension of affective states along the model of sense-perceptual experiences, even claiming the relevant affective experiences are perceptual experiences. This paper argues affective experiences involve a kind of personal level affective representation disanalogous from the representational character of perceptual experiences. The positive thesis is that affective representation is a non-transparent, non-sensory form of evaluative representation, whereby a felt valenced attitude represents the object of the experience as minimally good or bad, and one experiences that evaluative standing as having the power to causally motivate the relevant attitude. I show this view can make sense of distinctive features of affective experiences, such as their valence and connection to value in a way which moves beyond current evaluativist views of affect.

In a 1967 article, A. C. Graham made the claim that 情 qing should never be translated as "emotions" in rendering early Chinese texts into English. Over time, sophisticated translators and interpreters have taken this advice to heart, and qing has come to be interpreted as "the facts" or "what is genuine in one." In these English terms all sense of interrelationality is gone, leaving us with a wooden, objective stasis. But we also know, again partly through the work of Graham, that interrelationality was of fundamental importance in the early Chinese cosmology and that qing, by later carrying the meaning of "emotions," expressed that interrelationality. I take as my project in this article the recovery of an emotional adumbration in the qing of early Chinese texts, notably the Mencius, from which Graham begins his discussion. With an eye to explicating qing in the Mencius, and with a sensitivity to an implied notion of interrelationality in early texts, I survey early literature from the Shu Jing to late commentaries on the Yi Jing. I find that usages of qing and contexts in which qing is used inevitably illuminate it as key term in the evocation of interrelationality, shading it with emotional overtones. Emotions, of course, are inherently interrelational, and even more so in a Chinese world in which the internal and the external are in constant communication by way of a cosmic interchange of arousal and response among all things. That qing, as a term which later comes to explicitly mean "emotions," should have a centuries old convention of emotional connotation prior to its explicit definition should come as no surprise. The corroboration of this supposition entails a complex investigation and analysis, however, and it is a preliminary step in this investigation and analysis that I undertake here.

Esta tesis tiene por objeto reconsiderar, desde una mirada socio-histórica, el lugar que ocupó la noción de representación dentro de la teoría psicogenética y epistemológica de Jean Piaget en lo que respecta a la conformación de los esquemas de conocimiento y la emergencia de la subjetividad.  Pensamiento deudor de los postulados de la Filosofía Moderna, esta noción se encuentra asociada a la emergencia de imágenes internalizadas del objeto ausente y a la consecuente formación de la función simbólica y actividad racional. Pero, no obstante, también resulta ser crítico y discontinuo, porque dentro de esa teoría se concibe al conocimiento como un producto práctico y dialéctico de la relación sujeto-objeto y porque se retoma –aunque sin abordar in extenso- el problema del inconsciente y  de la afectividad. Por ese motivo, resulta importante tensionar esa concepción con la sostenida por Cornelius Castoriadis, quien desde una mirada filosófica y psicoanalítica, desvincula a la noción de representación de la actividad racional y la define como «un flujo de deseos, intenciones y afectos» y como un producto de la imaginación radical. Esta puesta en tensión, permitiría pensar en otra vía para llegar a la formación de los esquemas de conocimiento dentro de la teoría piagetiana, ya no como partiendo de la acción y de los esquemas sensorio-motores -sin ningún tipo de actividad representativa en su haber- sino de la afectividad. Esta reconsideración, en consecuencia, abriría un terreno fértil para efectuar un aporte a la investigación en Ciencias Sociales y al campo de la Comunicación y Educación, al trastocar el eje desde el cual se piensan los procesos de génesis del conocimiento y de la subjetividad dentro de la Psicología y Ciencias Educativas. Puesto que la teoría de Piaget sigue estando vigente dentro de ese campo de saber. En consecuencia, se podrían desarrollar nuevas hipótesis sobre la posible incidencia de esta apertura teórica en las prácticas y dispositivos pedagógicos de enseñanza-aprendizaje.

To speak of "advancing age" instead of ageing is not, of course, a way of avoiding the negative effects of ageing . This term takes on its full meaning if we consider that ageing is not the only aspect to be taken into account in the way a person develops throughout his or her life. Associating ageing with the third age alone is also open to discussion.
When does this age start? At the age of 60? i.e. at the time of retirement? At a time when negotiations on the retirement age are underway, we can at least see that "age limits" are certainly important in the social division of our lives, but they are also fluctuating and problematic.  Are we going to appeal to a physiological milestone (such as the menopause or the andropause?!) or a psychological one (accepting solitude or achieving serenity?!). Moreover, when do we pass from the 3rd to the 4th age and what does this change of category imply, in positive and negative terms?
According to the United Nations, people are "old" from the age of 60! A WHO document notes, however, that 60 "may still seem young in the developed parts of the world and in developing countries where a significant increase in life expectancy has already been recorded. However, whatever age is used in various contexts, it is important to be aware that chronological age is not always the best indicator of the changes that accompany ageing. There are huge differences between the health status and activity levels and the degree of independence of people of the same age. These are considerations that policy makers need to take into account when designing policies and programmes for their "older" citizens. Adopting broad social policies based solely on chronological age can be discriminatory and may defeat the purpose of ensuring the well-being of older people" (WHO, 2002).
As many authors have shown, the important thing is to accept growing old, that is to say, to accept advancing age with all that it implies, but refusing to be 'old', whatever the categorisations, the qualifiers used to install this stigmatising identity. Of course,
as we shall see, it is always the others who 'catch the old age' from which they will have difficulty recovering! We, on the other hand, are immortal, even if, like Prometheus, an eagle is constantly there to 'devour our liver', symbolising all those events of daily life that devour our energy, all those little worries or those few major catastrophes that are part of our 'destiny'.
It is true that Prometheus, the Titan creator and defender of 'mortals', also symbolises the modern heroic struggle for equality, solidarity and diversity through the 'theft of fire' (of knowledge).
The hunger for knowledge (the quest for meaning, truth, understanding and explanation) is associated with, but not confused with, the hunger for food (to feed oneself in order to survive, but also to share the desires and pleasures of the table) and the hunger for sex (certainly to reproduce, but also to share the desires and pleasures of the encounter of bodies). These three hungers can be articulated, opposed or compensated for in different ways. But they constitute, in any case, the foundations of human energy, of the dynamics of the development of the person (personation) or of the group, family, social, etc. (syntalisation). (syntalisation). These three "hungers", hunger for food, tactile and sexual hunger, hunger for words and recognition (or recognition-meaning) are to be worked on as motivations, mobilisations, needs or desires and pleasures. They organise the person in his or her relationship with the other. They can determine three ways of depriving oneself or starving the other: food deprivation (anorexia, self-imposed or hetero-imposed diets); deprivation of caresses and/or sexual practices; deprivation of tender, comforting, loving, significant, prospective words (love through hope and project). But they can also be based on the anguish of loss or lack: bulimia, sexual addictiveness, logorrhea (a flow of words perceived as useless by the other person), for fear of being empty, isolated, broken down. We can therefore see that "sexual breakdowns" have multiple origins (physiological, physical, environmental, contextual, cultural), but also psychological or psycho-social (relational) (but of course neither solely nor systematically).

In order to explore how emotions contribute positively or negatively to understanding the meaning of complex socio-culturally specific phenomena, I argue that we must take into account the habitual dimension of emotions-i.e., the emotion repertoire that a feeling person acquires in the course of their affective biography. This brings to light a certain form of alignment in relation to affective intentionality that is key to comprehending why humans understand situations in the way they do and why it so often is especially hard to understand things differently. A crucial epistemic problem is that subjects often do not even enter a process of understanding, i.e., they do not even start to consider a specific object, theory, circumstance, other being, etc. in different ways than the familiar one. The epistemic problem at issue thus lies in an unquestioned faith in things being right the way they are taken to be. By acknowledging the habitual dimension of affective intentionality, I analyze reasons for this inability and suggest that being affectively disruptable and cultivating a pluralistic emotion repertoire are crucial abilities to overcome this epistemic problem.

The paper is a discussion of P. M. S. Hacker, The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (2018). After a general presentation of the book I mostly focus on its first part, which deals with categories and concepts essential to the philosophy of the emotions. Next I pass on to two subsequent parts of the book devoted to particular emotions. After a brief overview I say more, by way of exemplification, on the chapter on love. I end with a final assessment.

Fink hat in seiner 1930 publizierte Dissertation Vergegenwärtigung und Bild den Gedanken ausgearbeitet, was es heißt, in eine Welt zu versinken, um auf diese Weisedie Besonderheiten des Unwirklichen herauszuarbeiten. Das Phänomen des Versinkens in eine Welt lässt sich am geeignetsten am Traum verdeutlichen. Das Phänomen des Traums eröffnet einen theoretischen Horizont für die Infragestellung der Wirklichkeit der faktischen Welt, indem es die Denkbarkeit aufzeigt, dass die faktische Welt sich als Traum einer anderen Welt herausstellen könnte. Dank dieses „erkenntnistheoretischen“ Arguments zeigt Fink mit dem Hinweis auf den Traum einen denkbaren Übergang von der vorgegebenen Welt in eine andere Welt. Diese „Transweltbewegung“ ist nicht nur eine willkürliche Spekulation, wie es beispielsweise ein rundes Viereck wäre, sondern bedroht transzendental die Selbstvertrautheit des Menschen. Wir möchten die These formulieren, dass der Weltglaube durch die denkbare Unwirklichkeit unserer vorgegebenen Welt relativiert wird, und versuche in dieser Arbeit, die transzendentale Instabilität des Weltglaubens zu artikulieren. Da das Subjekt der Transweltbewegung weder ein Mensch ist, der in der vorgegebenen Welt lebt – denn dieser geht an die extreme Grenze der vorgegebene Welt –, noch das transzendentale Subjekt in seiner Reinheit – denn auch dieses befindet sich immer noch in einem weltlichen Zusammenhang –, schlagen wir eine Untersuchung vor, die zeigen soll, dass die Transweltbewegung bezüglich des Innerweltlichen und des Außerweltlichen auf ein drittes Subjekt verweist.

This paper deals with the presentation and evocation of emotion in performative face-to-face linguistic communication in Iran. Performance in linguistic communication is shown to involve the speaker's need to convey an impression of his or her own inner states. Since affectivity is one of the most difficult things to convey in face-to-face interaction, it is posited that a person employing successful linguistic performance skills must have a series
of strategies available for demonstrating that he or she is truly conveying a specific intended emotion. This involves a two-stage process in which the speaker first signals that a message conveys an emotion, then signals the nature of the emotion being conveyed. In order to accomplish this, culturally prescribed symbolic elements are presented by the speaker that must be
performed for others to ``read'' the emotional content of a communication. Added to the performative skills needed by the speaker is the requirement that the emotion conveyed be perceived as ``sincere.'' This paper continues earlier research (*Language, Status and Power in Iran*, Beeman 1986) demonstrating the e€effectiveness of speakers in Iran in creating the contexts for the interpretation of their own strategic communication.

Bergson’s "Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion" grant great importance to the role of affectivity and sensitiveness, that is, emotion in moral life. In this essay, I show that what is at stake is not only the reciprocal involvement of psychological and social life in Bergson’s theory of morality, but also the historical dimension of social life. As presented here, Bergson’s original contribution to the durkheimian social sciences is threefold: (1) Bergson views morality no more as a fact of Reason, but as a social fact, granting sensitiveness a vital role in its regulation; (2) this brings an original theorisation of institutions as functionally similar but morphologically distinct from instinct — being historically variable —,  raising the question to know what makes them truly historical or radically transformable. (3) I put the idea that the answer must be found in the idea of a creative emotion as both the source and the expression of a radical historical change, thus placing emphasis on the relation between moral life and history. In this way, Bergson’s theory of morality does not remain merely sociological but regains some critical power. It also echoes L. Febvre and H. Wallon’s contemporary attempt to consider emotion as an active power, likely to be usefully integrated in historiographical accounts (in French).

The "animal question" got into the agenda of contemporary philosophy during the emancipation era right after the 68 movements. As is known, the 68 movements were an appeal for freedom not only against the instruments of repression and control over the human body and soul, but also over the existence of Nature, Land, Earth and of all living beings on it. As a result, a brand new relationship as Heidegger says, is being formed between "Being" and being. The relation between Nature and the human being, Cosmos and Man, body and soul, tree and man, man and animal are treated once again in the shape of a problematisation as it is treated in gay movements, female liberation and feminism, during the strife for rights and freedom of ethnicities with colour and against rigid determinations of domains such as medicine, education, psychology and clinical psychiatry. The question of the animal is one of the zones inside these struggles for freedom that can be described as the "Thought of Otherness". Each one of the zones has significance in order to understand the experience of Otherness. The importance of the animal question here derives first from its affinity to the human-animal duality, thus to the notion of "Man" and the idea of "Humanity" which constitute the ground of the Modern Western Thought. Secondly, this was until the 21 st century, a marginal and undiscussed question, probably the last zone waiting to be treated intensively. 2 Since the quest of the human being to define his existence inside the Universe needed a claim of unity, opposition and comparison between himself and the animal as the closest of living beings to man, the animal question in philosophy must be as old as the beginning of thinking. For nomadic civilisations, Shamanism articulated the unity of Man and Nature, Man and Animal. As an historical rupture, the need for defining Nature and his own self in settled civilisations turned into a systematic battle against its threats. Doctrines of the Ancient East

ll buon senso − oltre che la psicologia − suggerisce che in una relazione importante ognuno di noi investa il meglio di sé. Ne avremo un ritorno in termini di gratificazione, per cui – come effetto – nella relazione ci sentiremo soddisfatti e presenti a noi stessi. Per quanto riguarda l'investimento delle energie affettive, si prospetta un obiettivo piuttosto alto. Possiamo coinvolgerci con un affetto che non si limita a essere il prodotto più evoluto delle nostre capacità naturali, ma che deriva dall'oggetto verso cui abbiamo deciso di coinvolgerci. Questa eccedenza affettiva si realizza in coinvolgimenti estremamente impegnativi dove, appunto, l'oggetto è talmente importante da «trasferire» in me (passivo) il suo modo di sentire, anziché essere io ad avvicinarmi (attivo) a esso con il mio modo di sentire. Un esempio di questa capacità di amare con il cuore altrui è l'amore di un genitore per suo figlio. Questa affettività ispirata dall'oggetto è l'eccedenza prospettata dai più alti impegni di vita. È proprio da questa affettività «da altrove» che si dovrebbero dedurre le decisioni pratiche, in sintonia con la natura dell'oggetto amato e, dunque, tutt'altro che personalistiche e legate ai temperamenti soggettivi di chi opera al momento. L'articolo individua questa eccedenza affettiva nell'esperienza dell'apostolo Paolo, così come trapela dalle sue lettere, proponendola come esemplare per il sentire di ogni apostolo autentico.

Bioethics has begun to see the revaluation of affects in medical practice, but not all of them, and not necessarily in the sense of affects as we know them. Empathy has been accepted as important for good medical practice, but only in a way that strips it of its affectivity and thus prevents other affects, like sympathy, from being accepted. As part of a larger project that aims at revaluing the importance of affectivity in medical practice, the purpose of this paper is to develop a clinical sympathy that can serve as a trainable skill for medical professionals. While everyday sympathy may be problematic as a professional skill for physicians, this does not imply that sympathy should be entirely rejected. As a natural part of our moral psychology, sympathy is an intersubjective affect that aids in our interactions with others and our decision-making abilities. I present here a theory of clinical sympathy as an affective response to patients, in which physicians are both attuned to their affective response and understand how their affects are influencing their beliefs and judgments. In this way, clinical sympathy serves as a trainable skill that can aid physicians in their interactions with their patients.

The aim of my memoir is to analyze and determine affectivity in Husserl’s phenomenology. My working hypothesis is that Husserl seems to have identified affectivity with its main dynamics. Husserlian and phenomenological studies made few mentions of affectivity, while Husserl in his posthumous writings seems to place great emphasis on it. The analysis of affectivity is problematic for several contemporary theories, due to their adherence to a mechanical conception of human organisms. Affectivity is the main theme of my memoir, but the determination conferred by Husserl’s phenomenology contains implications touching perception, emotions, feelings, and consciousness. This is why after having located affectivity in Husserlian phenomenology, I will be able to clarify the relationship between kinesthesia and the body, consciousness and intentionality, affectivity and feelings.

My investigation has historical and contemporary significance. It clarifies affectivity within Husserl’s philosophy, as well as offer a path or a proposition to the problem still effective to this day. I begin with perception which facilitates the transition to affectivity. Subsequently, my analysis focus on emotions and feelings. This organization of my investigation allows analyzing affectivity adequately, as well as to situate it in Husserlian phenomenology. Through my investigation, several links and parallels are made with contemporary theories. This bridges the gap between Husserl’s philosophy and theories of neurocognitive sciences and philosophy of mind.

Husserl and Henry both conceive affectivity as the way of access to the world. While Husserl poses an originary sensuousness (ursprüngliche Sensualität) as the origin of our intentionality towards the world, Henry proposes a non-intentional affective grounding conceived as a « feeling-of-oneself » or « sensing-of-oneself », i.e. as a reflexive movement internal to subjectivity. Both conceptions can be put into question : On the one hand, Husserl’s conception of an originary affection as the product of an intentional synthesis seems to be contradictory insofar as the last primal source from which every intentionality arises is itself characterised as intentional. On the other, Henry’s theory gives rise to the question of how this immanent feeling-of-oneself of the soul may gain a transcendent access to the world, given that he rejects Husserl’s conception of intentionality because it neglects the immanent movement of life. This paper claims that Husserl’s apparent contradiction may be solved by interrelating Husserl’s conceptions of first, a passive, bodily intentionality ruled by sensuous drives or forces and second, a community of drives (Triebgemeinschaft) within the sphere of the « passivity devoid of Ego », in which the I is immersed with others in life. The combination of these conceptions will allow us to postulate a mutual constitution of the I and the world, which relies on the living-with and fulfilling-with bodily driven intentional actions. This conception weakens Henry’s critique as it postulates an affective bodily experience, which precedes the subject/object distinction. Finally, some critical remarks to Henry’s conception will be made, and a possible solution be suggested.

Affectivity is central to the work of Emmanuel Levinas for being the starting point for ethics,the genetic moment of moral phenomenon in general and subjective ethical experience. But it can also be read as a comprehensive moment that opens the way to the deeper subjective structures —those that are fundamental to ethics as Levinas understands it—, allowing thus a reflection about human existence and, especially, about human transcendence to the otherness of the other man. This paper aims to explore this second phenomenological function of affection to discover new ways in which Levinas understands human subjectivity.

That early Christians all but universally held the doctrine of divine impassibility is uncontroversial. But, as Susan Wessel has recently argued, early Christians were also concerned to cultivate compassionate feelings and compassionate behavior toward the poorest and most vulnerable. How did this program for affective formation square with an understanding of God? In this article, I will explore the writings of Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376-d. 444), and specifically his Christology, with this question in mind. My thesis is that Cyril’s presentation of Christ’s impassibility is congruent with the early Christian formation of a compassionate, loving Christian affectivity. Indeed, Cyril’s Christology sets the trajectories for a more Christologically centered affective formation that we find in the writings of Maximus the Confessor.

Presentation at the annual ICNAP conference in Ramapo, 27 th May 2017

The aim of this presentation is to show the connection between mindfulness, attention and affectivity. I will draw mainly from two sources: from a description of attention, as we find it in the phenomenology of E. Husserl, and from the technique of refinement of mindfulness, as it is practiced in Buddhist meditation vipassana. I will attempt to grasp the meditation in phenomenological concepts and show how far they are applicable to it. The questions are: how much can mindfulness be accounted for by means of Husserlian phenomenology, and potentially what would Husserl have added, had he himself meditated? The presentation has three parts. The beginning of the investigation will be the so-called 'operational definition' of mindfulness, proposed by J. Kabat-Sinn. Firstly, I will comment on the definition of mindfulness and I will show that mindfulness is not an unequivocal term. Secondly, I will present the phenomenological model of attention, with special focus on the term " affection ". Thirdly, I will describe meditation vipassana in phenomenological terms and show the point that Husserl did not take into account.

The paper problematises two distinct approaches to contemporary hermeneutics which advocate its complete reconceptualisation. One, offered by Jacques Derrida, excoriates “hermeneutic somnambulism” that disregards the text’s sovereignty, and – by extension – the author’s intended meaning. Derrida criticises the prescriptivist mindset of an exegete who imposes their interpretation on a text in an attempt to classify, delimit, and appropriate its meaning. On the other hand, Roland Barthes, as one may read in The Pleasure of the Text and A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, praises the ultimate readerly and interpretative freedom; to read deeply is to achieve a sense of bliss (jouissance), a sensual pleasure which Barthes compares to that of a sexual climax. Both authors noticeably eroticise their language and employed imagery: partly to shock, and partly to make their reader aware of how much human corporeality, affectivity, and carnality have been disregarded in traditional hermeneutics. Both, too, propose exchanging scholarly hermeneutic paradigms (active interpretative stance) for the sheer readerly pleasure (passive receptive stance), by means of which reading – freed from its exegetic function – becomes a passionate act full of interpretative possibilities.

I advance a phenomenology of forgetting based on Husserl’s accounts of time-consciousness and passive synthesis. This theory of forgetting is crucial for understanding the transcendental constitution of the past. I argue that without forgetting, neither memory nor retention suffice for a consciousness of the past as past, since both are irreducibly connected to the Living Present. After an initial survey of the challenges that confront a phenomenology of forgetting (i.e. the “forgotten” is defined by its lack of phenomenality), I provide a descriptive analysis of forgetting as a complex process that integrates an accomplishment of retention that Husserl called “temporal contraction” with an accomplishment of passive synthesis that Husserl called “affective fusion.” Temporal contraction is the accomplishment that creates a qualitative (not quantitative) distinction between near-retentions and far-retentions. Affective fusion enables us to provide a positive (not privative) phenomenological description of the withdrawal of egoic investment in intentional experiences. Taken together, these two syntheses generate a double concealment in which consciousness both forgets its object and forgets that it has forgotten it, thereby constituting it as part of the truly absent past.