Workshop, 7 July 2021, 1.30 - 6.15 pm (CET)

What role do emotions play in our experience of the world, ourselves, and others? In the past decades, this question, broadly construed, has increasingly drawn the attention of philosophers and thinkers. It has become a widely accepted view that feelings and emotions are essential to our experience of the world by disclosing our concrete situatedness in it: emotional feelings shape how we are directed at the world. Often this relationship is also described in terms of an intentional directedness at values. Typically, this view is cashed out by emphasizing that emotional feelings reveal and correspond to specific values – or the domain of values, more generally. What is less clear though is how we should understand the precise nature of such an intentional directedness at values: Are emotional feelings of a perceptual or cognitive kind in which a conscious subject receives or identifies a value? That is, does emotional feeling have primarily an epistemological or receptive character? Or do emotional feelings also involve more active aspects? Are we responsible for our emotions and to what extent does emotional feeling depend on how we, as conscious subjects, take position in the world? In his book The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling. On Affect and Intentionality (2019), Jean Moritz Müller addresses this question and related issues. He opts for a view that emphasizes the role of position-taking for emotional feeling. The aim of this workshop is to discuss his view and the broader implications it might have for the debate on the nature and structure of emotional intentionality.

The workshop will be held via Zoom. Everybody is welcome but please send an email to philipp.schmidt@uni-wuerzburg.de. 

Program

Organization: Philipp Schmidt (University of Würzburg)