A Pragmatist View of Emotions: Tracing Its Significance for the Current Debate

Dreon, Roberta

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-15667-1_4

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 222 publications

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“…Against this background, emotions can and should be considered to be “emotional episodes” (Colombetti, 2014 , p. 25) within the continuity of affectively charged organic–environmental transactions. Basically, we wish to adopt a pragmatist view of emotions (Dreon, 2019 ). Emotions are not external expressions of an alleged interior state of mind, but emotive gestures of the human (inter)actions that are embedded in and responding to a specific environmental context characterized by a sharpened level of sociality.…”

Section: Affectivity Sensibility and The Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective Scaffoldings as Habits: A Pragmatist Approach

Candiotto

Dreon

2021

Front. Psychol.

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In this paper, we provide a pragmatist conceptualization of affective habits as relatively flexible ways of channeling affectivity. Our proposal, grounded in a conception of sensibility and habits derived from John Dewey, suggests understanding affective scaffoldings in a novel and broader sense by re-orienting the debate from objects to interactions. We claim that habits play a positive role in supporting and orienting human sensibility, allowing us to avoid any residue of dualism between internalist and externalist conceptions of affectivity. We provide pragmatist tools for understanding the environment's role in shaping our feelings, emotions, moods, and affective behaviors. However, we contend that in addition to environment, the continuous and recursive affective transaction between agent and environment (both natural and cultural) are also crucially involved. We claim that habits are transformative, which is especially evident when we consider that emotions are often the result of a crisis in habitual behavior and successively play a role in prompting changes of habits. The final upshot is a conceptualization of affective habits as pervasive tools for feelings that scaffold human conduct as well as key features in the transformation of behaviors.

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Section: Affectivity Sensibility and The Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective Scaffoldings as Habits: A Pragmatist Approach

Candiotto

Dreon

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…Dewey's ethical account acknowledges the crucial role of affective, qualitative, or aesthetic features in human conduct while avoiding moral emotivism as a form of reductionism, as well as moral subjectivism. This is possible because Dewey strongly opposed any methodologically individualistic and mentalistic approach to affectivity, emotion, and feeling, and considered them to be an integral part of human behavior in a naturally social environment (Dreon 2019a(Dreon , 2019b. At the same time, Dewey avoided any rigid opposition between qualitative experience and cognition, as well as any kind of foundational order governing the two.…”

Section: Roberta Dreonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dewey’s Fully Embedded Ethics

Dreon¹

2020

John Dewey’s Ethical Theory

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This book provides a wide-ranging, systematic, and comprehensive approach to the moral philosophy of John Dewey, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. It does so by focusing on his greatest achievement in this field: the Ethics he jointly published with James Hayden Tufts in 1908 and then republished in a heavily revised version in 1932.The chapters in this volume are divided into two distinct parts. The first features chapters that provide a running commentary on the chapters of the 1932 Ethics written by Dewey. Each chapter is introduced, situated within a historical perspective, and then its main achievements are highlighted and discussed. The second part of the book interprets the Ethics and demonstrates its contemporary relevance and vitality. The chapters in this part situate the Ethics in the broader interpretive frameworks of Dewey's philosophy, American pragmatism, and 20th-century moral theory at large. Taken together, these chapters show that, far from being a mere survey of moral theories, the 1932 Ethics presents the theoretical highpoint in Dewey's thinking about moral philosophy.This book features contributions by some of the most influential Dewey scholars from North America and Europe. It will be of keen interest to scholars and students of American pragmatism, ethics and moral philosophy, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.

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“…31 I believe that with regard to this point a convergence can be found with the notion of primordial affectivity developed by Colombetti (2014). On the topic of emotions and affective sensibility in classical pragmatism, see Dreon (2019b). because it primarily revolves around inner mental representations, but rather because the outcomes of previous reflective processes become entrenched as common practices and shared or idiosyncratic usages and habits of behaviour, action and thought that are nonetheless engaged out there, in the world-reconfiguring the very conditions of non-reflective experience through a shared cultural heritage.…”

Section: A Virtuous Circularitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing cognition: Dewey’s potential contributions to some enactivist issues

Dreon

2019

Synthese

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It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one's own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey's conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. It claims that Dewey's anti-substantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey-differently from enactivists-frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings' interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey's lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human-environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility. Keywords John Dewey • Enactivism • Cognition • Experience • Mind A lot of water has flowed under the bridge of philosophical debate since Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch presented their 'pragmatic' conception of embodied cognition as a defining feature of enactivism without ever referring B Roberta Dreon

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A Pragmatist View of Emotions: Tracing Its Significance for the Current Debate

Cited by 6 publications

References 222 publications

Affective Scaffoldings as Habits: A Pragmatist Approach

Affective Scaffoldings as Habits: A Pragmatist Approach

Dewey’s Fully Embedded Ethics

Framing cognition: Dewey’s potential contributions to some enactivist issues

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