Dear all, This Thursday (Oct 22) at the Serious Metaphysics Group we will have Philip Gerrans, visiting from Adelaide, presenting on A Processing Account of Emotion (abstract below). The talk will be at 1.00-2.30pm, at the Philosophy Faculty Board Room. You are also welcome to bring lunch, if you are arriving from another talk/lecture beforehand.
For the rest of the Michaelmas term card, please do have a look here: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG Best wishes, Li Li - Abstract Planning and decision making, social and moral cognition, reasoning, cognitive development and self-representation depend on emotional processes. Psychologists and neuroscientists in these fields draw on philosophical theories of emotion to interpret their results while, at the same time, the philosophy of emotion is now deeply intertwined with empirical work on emotions, ranging from molecular to psychological levels. Yet there is no established theoretical consensus about the nature of emotional processing and the relationship between emotions (and affective experience) and cognition. This paper attempts theoretical unification via a method advocated by Dominic Murphy "we arrive at a comprehensive set of positive facts about how the mind works, and then ask which of its products and breakdowns matter for our various projects". The approach is similar to the way in which philosophical theories of human motivation and the cognitive science of reward processing have mutually informed each other. I explain some specific puzzles about the nature of emotional phenomena: Depersonalisation Disorder, delays in effects of anti-depressant treatment on mood, Social Anxiety Disorder. I also explain how the processing account deals with general questions about the relationship between phenomenology and intentionality of emotional experience that motivate theoretical disagreement. The main competitors in the theory of emotion: Darwinian, Somatic, Feeling and Representational have all focused on a real and important aspect of emotion. Emotions are adaptations, they have bodily consequences and modes of expression, their felt aspect is essential to their role in human life, and they depend essentially on representational processes. Precisely how these aspects interact and which are causally primary in episodes of emotion cannot be understood in the absence of a processing account. Or so I claim! -- Li Li Tan PhD (Probationary) in Philosophy St Catharine's College _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
