Abstract

Emotions are among the most fundamental human capacities. They help us to adequately and quickly respond to environmental affordances of all kinds. Being capable of emotional responses we are inextricably attached to our natural and social environment. These tight emotional bonds to the world we inhabit are immediately conspicuous when we find ourselves in the grip of strong feelings like fear, love, hate or disgust. They are also present in all other kinds of emotions, for instance, feelings of awe, compassion or artistic enthusiasm.

This volume tracks a variety of emotions in a phenomenological manner. It explores the intertwinement of cognitive content and feeling qualities of different emotions, their varying motivational and expressive qualities, their bodily manifestations, and social and moral implications. This focus on a phenomenology of emotion reveals the rich meaning of emotions that results from their embeddedness in our social and moral life. The authors describe the peculiar character of human emotions from the first- and second-person point of view of those subjects who undergo and regularly share these emotions.
Emotions are currently a topic of intense philosophical investigation, and Emotional Experiences demonstrates the indispensable contribution the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology is making to that investigation. Going beyond the psychology of emotions and a focus on their role in causal explanations, the essays provide eye-opening analyses of specific emotions, revealing the complex entanglement of self, others, and the world they entail.
Steven Crowell, Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Philosophy, Rice University
John J. Drummond is Robert Southwell, S.J. Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He is the author of Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object (1990) and A Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy (2007). He has edited or co-edited five collections of articles on phenomenology and has published over eighty articles.

Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Karl-Franzens University, Austria. She is the author of two books in German and has edited or co-edited five collections of essays. She is the European Editor of Husserl Studies.
"Emotional Experiences" is a truly original contribution in emotion studies, as it fully delivers on its promise to provide accurate descriptions that disclose the essential structure of several emotions. The essays not only offer illuminating accounts that are faithful to the phenomena, they also show how much philosophy of mind can learn from a robust phenomenological inquiry into the intentional, attitudinal, and evaluative aspects of affective experience.
Anthony Hatzimoysis, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Athens