Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain‐ and body‐bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis (ExE). In this article, we consider different ways of understanding ExE in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences. First, we outline the background of the debate and discuss different argumentative strategies for ExE. In particular, we distinguish ExE from cognate but more moderate claims about the embodied and situated nature of cognition and emotion (Section 1). We then dwell upon two dimensions of ExE: emotions extended by material culture and by the social factors (Section 2). We conclude by defending ExE against some objections (Section 3) and point to desiderata for future research (Section 4).
This article investigates the relationship between emotional sharing and the extended mind thesis. We argue that shared emotions are socially extended emotions that involve a specific type of constitutive integration between the participating individuals' emotional experiences. We start by distinguishing two claims, the Environmentally Extended Emotion Thesis and the Socially Extended Emotion Thesis (Section 1). We then critically discuss some recent influential proposals about the nature of shared emotions (Section 2). Finally, in Section 3, we motivate two conditions that an account of shared emotions ought to accommodate: (i) Reciprocal Other-awareness, and (ii) Integration. Consideration of (ii) and discussion of relational accounts of joint attention, lead us to the proposal that a construal of socially extended emotions in terms of a constitutive integration of the participating individuals' experiences is more promising than proposals that simply appeal to various forms of social situatedness, embeddedness, or scaffolding.
Recently, an increasing body of work from sociology, social psychology, and social ontology has been devoted to collective emotions. Rather curiously, however, pressing epistemological and especially normative issues have received almost no attention. In particular, there has been a strange silence on whether one can share emotions with individuals or groups who are not aware of such sharing, or how one may identify this, and eventually identify specific norms of emotional sharing. In this paper, I shall address this set of issues head-on. I will do so by drawing on one of the most elaborate, but rather neglected phenomenological accounts of sociality, namely Edith Stein's work on communal experiences and her theory of empathy. I wish to show that a suitably amended Steinian account affords us with an intriguing alternative to both phenomenalist and normativist construals of collective emotions. Moreover, I shall argue that it provides a more fine-grained account of the different types of emotional sharing than standard accounts, ranging from face-to-face, or shared, to more robust but less direct, or collective, emotions. Finally, I will propose a tentative answer to the above questions by pointing to non-dyadic or collective forms of empathy.
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Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types, and contents of intentions or representational states must be construed so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers, and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs, or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, this very issue has not received much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper, I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds.
Two issues have been at center stage in recent social philosophy, both in the analytic and the continental tradition: on the one hand, the nature of interpersonal understanding, or empathy; on the other hand, the possibility and nature of collective intentionality, shared emotions, and group agency. Indeed, there are not many who have investigated more thoroughly both these issues, and, even if not quite explicitly, their complex interrelation, than the philosopher Edith Stein . This special issue explores Edith Stein's social philosophy, especially as expounded in her phenomenological writings from the 1910s and 1920s. In particular, it will investigate the systematic links between Stein's pioneering work on empathy (Stein 1917), and her less known but certainly not less original theory of collective intentionality and community (Stein 1922).One of the main aims of this special issue is to re-describe, re-contextualize, and critically assess Stein's intriguing phenomenology of social reality in contemporary terms, and, specifically, in relation to the relevant current trends in the philosophy of (collective) emotions, social ontology, social cognition research, social psychology, and political philosophy.If we look at the contemporary philosophical landscape, the issue of empathy and collectivity are typically dealt with separately from one another. Moreover, in stark contrast to Stein-and many other early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Gurwitsch, Scheler, or Walther, who all worked in such diverse areas within social philosophy as social cognition, social ontology or social epistemology, and with a few notable contemporary exceptions (Butterfill 2013; Tomasello 2014; Zahavi & Thomas Szanto
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