Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Social Significance

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.