Emoties vooral op de cognitieve aspecten bezien
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Gisteren bracht de NDPR een bespreking door Matthew J. Kisner (University of South Carolina) van
Lisa Shapiro and Martin Pickavé (eds.), Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2012, 296pp., ISBN 9780199579914. [books.google
Waarin o.a. de hoofdstukken:Lisa Shapiro, "How We Experience the World: Passionate Perception in Descartes and Spinoza"
Lilli Alanen, "Spinoza on Passions and Self-Knowledge: The Case of Pride"
De reviewer noemt Susan James' Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, "perhaps the most systematic philosophical treatment of emotions during this period."
Emoties kunnen worden bekeken op hun motiverende/in beweging brengende en morele aspecten en op hun kennisaspecten. Dat laatste is tegenwoordig (zie b.v. Martha Nussbaum) meer in de aandacht, resp. in de mode. Ook bij Spinoza is veel over de kenniszijde van emoties te vinden, zij het dan vooral de inadequate ideeën die ze ons bezorgen.
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Ik haal de korte omschrijvingen van de twee genoemde hoofdstukken naar dit blog:
Lisa Shapiro, "How We Experience the World: Passionate Perception in Descartes and Spinoza": "Both Descartes and Spinoza, though in importantly distinct ways, provide us with a different model of our sensory experience of the world than the familiar one. On the familiar account, sensations inform us of the properties of things in the world, while emotions are responsive to that information and motivate us. Descartes and Spinoza reject this model to acknowledge an essentially affective dimension of sensory experience, For Descartes, emotions and sensations are both intentional states that refer to, or represent, the ways in which things benefit and harm us; they are distinguished by what they afford the cognizer awareness of, Spinoza conceives of our experience differently, taking imagination, rather than sensation as central. I argue that for him, our imagining the objects we do, our perceiving, or awareness of the objects we perceive, is explained in part by our affective response." [Cf. pdf of corrected page proofs & pdf of published version) Lisa Shapiro (more) papers
Lilli Alanen, "Spinoza on Passions and Self-Knowledge: The Case of Pride": "The questions of identity and self-knowledge are crucial to Spinoza's general project of emancipation through knowledge, but they have received little attention in the literature. Spinoza's ethical project is to free us — our individual selves — from bondage by passions that are fed by the imagination, the lowest level of cognition. Is the cognitive agent whose activity is supposed to free us from the passions the same individual self that suffers them? The latter, for Spinoza, is revealed to us through the passions, notably through the passions of pride and self-esteem whose object it is. This paper considers how the problem of the self and self-cognition comes up in Spinoza's account of the passions. Its main focus is on his account of pride [superbia] and how this passion, while making us aware of our individual self, at the same time obscures it from a proper cognitive grasp.
