Month: April 2016

Alba Montes Sanchez / New Paper Out!

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Pride, Shame and Group Identification

CFS Blog - Alba and AlessandroWhat perfect timing for Alessandro Salice (University College Cork) to come back to the Center as a visiting researcher! It is with great pride and joy that both of us announce the publication of our most recent article on “Pride, Shame and Group Identification” in Frontiers in Psychology. This article is part of an exciting Research Topic on “Affectivity Beyond the Skin,” edited by Joel Krueger, Giovanna Colombetti and Tom Roberts. As a teaser, you can find the abstract below. You can read and download the full paper at the Frontiers website here.

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Hayden Kee / Pointing the Way to Speech: The Sources of Linguistic Intentionality

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Hayden KeeFor the past three months, it has been my great pleasure and honor to be a visiting researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research. During my time in Copenhagen, I have advanced work on my dissertation, Pointing the Way to Speech: The Sources of Linguistic Intentionality.

There is a puzzle concerning the intentionality of language. The statement “it’s a warm, clear day in Copenhagen” is in some sense directed towards the sunny state of affairs it conveys. Yet the graphic or acoustic string of linguistic symbols is by no means intrinsically intentional. It would not count as being directed towards its state of affairs if it weren’t for the social conventions that sustain its use and some underlying, intrinsic intentionality or intentionalities through which language users direct themselves to the correlated state of affairs. The puzzle, then, is to understand how the secondary intentionality of a linguistic utterance can be derived from the primary intentionality that underwrites it.

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Felipe León / Shared experiences and other minds

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Felipe_pictureA great deal of a human life normally happens in contact with other people, and as part of living together we often talk about ‘sharing’ a variety of experiences and attitudes with others. For example, we talk about ‘sharing’ emotions, beliefs, and intentions with other people. On occasions, sharing an intention to do something together, say to go to the movies, is a basis for going to the movies together. If two friends end up going accidentally to the movies at the same place and time, we wouldn’t normally say that they went to the movies together – at least not in the same sense in which we would say that if they had shared an intention to do so, and coordinated their actions in such a way that meeting at the movies results from a mutual agreement. While perhaps intuitively plausible, the idea that (some) mental phenomena could be shared in a robust (non metaphorical) way is likely to raise some eyebrows. What could sharing possibly mean in the context of mentality?

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Adrian Alsmith / Does looking at something huge make you feel tiny?

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Nearly everyone has experienced the awe of standing at the edge of a massive environment, like a mountain-scape – the experience is strikingly different when stuck in a cramped space, like an aeroplane seat, in which the spatial limits are all too apparent. But do you actually feel smaller when you are looking at something huge? And, conversely, do you actually feel bigger than you really are when you can see you don’t have much personal space?

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Thomas Szanto / SHARE: A New Marie-Curie Research Grant at the CFS

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Thomas Szanto, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CFS, has just started his research project

Thomas SzantoAfter two wonderful and productive years as a Postdoc at the CFS, where I have worked within the framework of the VELUX-Foundation project “Empathy and Interpersonal Understanding”, I am absolutely delighted that I could extend my stay at this excellent research environment—and, not least, in this truly amazing city that has become so dear to me!—for another two years. I have just started my new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship project SHARE: “Shared Emotions, Group Membership, and Empathy“. Let me briefly explain what SHARE is about:

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Liesbet De Kock, visiting researcher, February-March 2016

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Liesbet De Kock, visiting researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research

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Although a two-month visit is relatively brief, I had a very stimulating and inspiring stay at the Center for Subjectivity Research. As a master in Clinical Psychology and a post-doc in philosophy (Free University of Brussels), I found the interdisciplinary focus of the Center particularly appealing and I thoroughly enjoyed the weekly seminars. Although not all of them aligned with my specific area of research, the weekly gatherings broaden the horizon and open up new venues of thought.

During my research stay, I focussed on finishing a manuscript on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s transcendental approach to the body, entitled ‘Determination, Embodiment and Affect. The Epistemic Purport of J.G. Fichte’s Theory of the Body’. In the past decades, academic philosophy has witnessed an expanding ‘back-to-Fichte’ movement that seems to thrive mainly on the recovery of the valuable insights to be drawn from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s account of subjectivity in general, and of self-consciousness in particular.

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