scholarly journals Understanding dualism through emotion: Descartes, Spinoza, Sartre

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (54) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel O’Shiel
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
First Person ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Human Emotion ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Theoretical Standpoint

This paper argues that a proper understanding of the epistemological and metaphysical issue of dualism can only be attained through a thoroughgoing analysis of human emotion. Indeed, it is no coincidence that three main thinkers on dualism, whether they were apparent proponents (Descartes), opponents (Spinoza), or had a somewhat ambiguous status (Sartre), were also heavily involved in understanding emotion. Ultimately, a proper comprehension of emotion shows the issue of dualism to be moot when it comes to our pre-reflective, everyday lives; dualism is a theoretical interest that shows how we must necessarily posit two essential realms – one of nature and one of consciousness – that are nevertheless always already entwined in pre-reflective and immediately lived experiences like emotion. In this manner, a proper understanding of emotion shows that dualism is not an issue on the everyday lived level, but certainly is on epistemological and metaphysical ones. On these levels, dualism is an essential tool that must be understood and used properly if one is to give a thoroughgoing account of human nature from a theoretical standpoint, where avoiding conflations between immediate and reflective experiences, as well as first-person and third-person standpoints, is crucial. Here, one needs to be aware not only of our dual nature of matter and mind, but also of our dual – which is to say scientific and phenomenological ways – of tackling theoretical problems. In short, one may give a proper, dynamic account of human emotion and simultaneously recognize the advantage of thinking in dual – but not “dualistic” – registers.

Housekeeping and the Phantom Ordinary

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-65
Author(s):  
Laura E. Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
First Person ◽  
Traumatic Grief ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
Maternal Presence

This chapter shifts focus away from the luminous images of Housekeeping to the lived experiences of traumatic grief those images often veil. The lyrical beauty of Housekeeping offers stylistic reinforcement of a first-person narrative that seeks consolation in immaterial forms. Critical focus on the transfigured ordinary and its aesthetic compensations tends to substantiate rather than interrogate the project of Ruth, focusing on the vibrancy and vitality of the images that she conjures rather than her terrifying expulsion from the everyday. Haunted by memories of maternal presence and incapable of resurrecting her mother, Robinson’s protagonist attempts to write herself out of the everyday world and into the spectral landscape in which her mother continues to exist; rendering her own embodied existence in ghostly terms, Ruth situates herself in a phantom ordinary. Housekeeping, I argue, subtly interrogates Ruth’s substitution of aesthetic images for ordinary presence in a way that anticipates the dramatic collapse of aesthetic consolation in Robinson’s later fiction.

scholarly journals Interpretation Theory and the First Person

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Moran
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Simulation Theory ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Daniel Dennett ◽  
The Core ◽  
Third Person

The “rationalizing interpretation” view of psychological discourse, associated with Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, has been widely influential as a reconstruction of our practices of ascribing attitudes to others, and as an account of the meaning of psychological terms. This perspective has lent support to a wider assumption in philosophy of mind, that we should think of our ordinary use of psychological terms as part of a “theory” to explain the behavior of those around us. This paper argues that given the differences in application of psychological terms in their first-person and third-person uses, the “theory-theory” is a bad picture of what gives sense to our ascriptive practices. A proper understanding of the self/other asymmetries in psychological discourse shows that they follow quite naturally from the core truth of the “rationalizing” perspective, and that this shows the conflict between “rationalizing interpretation” and “simulation theory” to be less than it appears.

First-Person Experiments in Thinking

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renatus Ziegler ◽  
Ulrich Weger
Keyword(s):  
Physiological Parameters ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Thinking Process ◽  
Mental Contents

Abstract. In psychology, thinking is typically studied in terms of a range of behavioral or physiological parameters, focusing, for instance, on the mental contents or the neuronal correlates of the thinking process proper. In the current article, by contrast, we seek to complement this approach with an exploration into the experiential or inner dimensions of thinking. These are subtle and elusive and hence easily escape a mode of inquiry that focuses on externally measurable outcomes. We illustrate how a sufficiently trained introspective approach can become a radar for facets of thinking that have found hardly any recognition in the literature so far. We consider this an important complement to third-person research because these introspective observations not only allow for new insights into the nature of thinking proper but also cast other psychological phenomena in a new light, for instance, attention and the self. We outline and discuss our findings and also present a roadmap for the reader interested in studying these phenomena in detail.

Effects of Light-Hearted and Serious Entertainment on Enjoyment of the First and Third Person

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Hofer
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Media Consumption ◽  
First Person ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Third Person Effect ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Perceived Enjoyment ◽  
The Third Person

Abstract. This was a study on the perceived enjoyment of different movie genres. In an online experiment, 176 students were randomly divided into two groups (n = 88) and asked to estimate how much they, their closest friends, and young people in general enjoyed either serious or light-hearted movies. These self–other differences in perceived enjoyment of serious or light-hearted movies were also assessed as a function of differing individual motivations underlying entertainment media consumption. The results showed a clear third-person effect for light-hearted movies and a first-person effect for serious movies. The third-person effect for light-hearted movies was moderated by level of hedonic motivation, as participants with high hedonic motivations did not perceive their own and others’ enjoyment of light-hearted films differently. However, eudaimonic motivations did not moderate first-person perceptions in the case of serious films.

Praxeology, Imperatives, and Shifts of View

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benj Hellie
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
First Person ◽  
Third Person ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Practical Metaphysics ◽  
The Way

Recent neo-Anscombean work in praxeology (aka ‘philosophy of practical reason’), salutarily, shifts focus from an alienated ‘third-person’ viewpoint on practical reason to an embedded ‘first-person’ view: for example, the ‘naive rationalizations’ of Michael Thompson, of form ‘I am A-ing because I am B-ing’, take up the agent’s view, in the thick of action. Less salutary, in its premature abandonment of the first-person view, is an interpretation of these naive rationalizations as asserting explanatory links between facts about organically structured agentive processes in progress, followed closely by an inflationary project in ‘practical metaphysics’. If, instead, praxeologists chase first-personalism all the way down, both fact and explanation vanish (and with them, the possibility of metaphysics): what is characteristically practical is endorsement of nonpropositional imperatival content, chained together not explanatorily, but through limits on intelligibility. A connection to agentive behavior must somehow be reestablished—but this can (and can only) be done ‘transcendentally’.

Seeming to Seem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Order Theory ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Higher Order Theory ◽  
The Third Person

Dennett’s account of consciousness starts from third-person considerations. I argue this is wise, since beginning with first-person access precludes accommodating the third-person access we have to others’ mental states. But Dennett’s first-person operationalism, which seeks to save the first person in third-person, operationalist terms, denies the occurrence of folk-psychological states that one doesn’t believe oneself to be in, and so the occurrence of folk-psychological states that aren’t conscious. This conflicts with Dennett’s intentional-stance approach to the mental, on which we discern others’ mental states independently of those states’ being conscious. We can avoid this conflict with a higher-order theory of consciousness, which saves the spirit of Dennett’s approach, but enables us to distinguish conscious folk-psychological states from nonconscious ones. The intentional stance by itself can’t do this, since it can’t discern a higher-order awareness of a psychological state. But we can supplement the intentional stance with the higher-order theoretical apparatus.

scholarly journals When the World Breaks Down: A 3-Stage Existential Model of Nihilism in Schizophrenia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Philipp Klar ◽  
Georg Northoff
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The World ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Pathological Development ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Intentional Structure

The existential crisis of nihilism in schizophrenia has been reported since the early days of psychiatry. Taking first-person accounts concerning nihilistic experiences of both the self and the world as vantage point, we aim to develop a dynamic existential model of the pathological development of existential nihilism. Since the phenomenology of such a crisis is intrinsically subjective, we especially take the immediate and pre-reflective first-person perspective’s (FPP) experience (instead of objectified symptoms and diagnoses) of schizophrenia into consideration. The hereby developed existential model consists of 3 conceptualized stages that are nested into each other, which defines what we mean by existential. At the same time, the model intrinsically converges with the phenomenological concept of the self-world structure notable inside our existential framework. Regarding the 3 individual stages, we suggest that the onset or first stage of nihilistic pathogenesis is reflected by phenomenological solipsism, that is, a general disruption of the FPP experience. Paradigmatically, this initial disruption contains the well-known crisis of common sense in schizophrenia. The following second stage of epistemological solipsism negatively affects all possible perspectives of experience, that is, the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives of subjectivity. Therefore, within the second stage, solipsism expands from a disruption of immediate and pre-reflective experience (first stage) to a disruption of reflective experience and principal knowledge (second stage), as mirrored in abnormal epistemological limitations of principal knowledge. Finally, the experience of the annihilation of healthy self-consciousness into the ultimate collapse of the individual’s existence defines the third stage. The schizophrenic individual consequently loses her/his vital experience since the intentional structure of consciousness including any sense of reality breaks down. Such a descriptive-interpretative existential model of nihilism in schizophrenia may ultimately serve as input for future psychopathological investigations of nihilism in general, including, for instance, its manifestation in depression.

scholarly journals The Everyday Life of Security: Capturing Space, Practice, and Affect

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonna Nyman
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Participatory Photography ◽  
High Politics ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Abstract Security shapes everyday life, but despite a growing literature on everyday security there is no consensus on the meaning of the “everyday.” At the same time, the research methods that dominate the field are designed to study elites and high politics. This paper does two things. First, it brings together and synthesizes the existing literature on everyday security to argue that we should think about the everyday life of security as constituted across three dimensions: space, practice, and affect. Thus, the paper adds conceptual clarity, demonstrating that the everyday life of security is multifaceted and exists in mundane spaces, routine practices, and affective/lived experiences. Second, it works through the methodological implications of a three-dimensional understanding of everyday security. In order to capture all three dimensions and the ways in which they interact, we need to explore different methods. The paper offers one such method, exploring the everyday life of security in contemporary China through a participatory photography project with six ordinary citizens in Beijing. The central contribution of the paper is capturing—conceptually and methodologically—all three dimensions, in order to develop our understanding of the everyday life of security.

Meeting of minds: Narratives as a tool to reduce prejudice toward stigmatized group members

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843022110127
Author(s):  
Nuri Kim ◽  
Cuimin Lim
Keyword(s):  
Social Presence ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
First Person ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
Intergroup Anxiety ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Perceived Social Presence ◽  
Group Members

This study investigates a mechanism of mediated intergroup contact effects that occurs through experiencing social presence of a stigmatized outgroup character. Conceiving narrative texts as a context for mediated intergroup contact, we experimentally test ( N = 505) the effects of narrative perspective (first vs. third person) and the photograph of the outgroup protagonist (present vs. absent) on perceived social presence of the outgroup character. We further test whether experiencing the outgroup protagonist as socially present affects intergroup outcomes (i.e., perspective-taking, intergroup anxiety, outgroup knowledge, and outgroup attitudes). Findings indicate that first-person narratives are more effective than third-person narratives in inducing social presence of the stigmatized outgroup character; photos, unexpectedly, did not have such an effect. Social presence, in turn, plays a key role in facilitating positive intergroup outcomes from reading online narrative texts. The implications of our findings are discussed.

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