Abstract Recently, there has been a burgeoning interest in the so‐called group flow state both in positive psychology and in the phenomenology of collective agency. Group flow is a form of collective agency in which agents experience a sense of intensified efficacy coupled with diminished individual ownership of action and heightened shared ownership thereof. This state reveals an under‐theorized dimension of the sense of agency: an experience in which the source of one's agency is a sense of oneness rather than individual autonomy. However, its first‐person character remains poorly understood. I begin by revealing the lack of conceptual rigour and precision in key current psychological accounts of group flow. I then argue that phenomenology has the descriptive tools needed to generate a more precise description of the experiential character of group flow. Finally, drawing on Husserlian and Merleau‐Pontyian phenomenology, I give a novel phenomenological account of the intentional structures that jointly constitute group flow. This account explains how individual agents' sense of efficacy in action can be transformed by their sense of oneness with others.
This article focuses on Xunzi's perspective on the embodied dimension of moral cultivation, examining how ritual practice transforms desire by repatterning bodily life at levels of sensing, feeling, and aesthetic attunement. Through proper and beautiful patterns (wen (sic)) enacted in everyday routines alongside formal rites, perception, affect, and evaluative judgment are reshaped and brought into coordinated alignment. In this process, the sensorium is recalibrated, becoming the medium through which moral sensibility stabilizes as a durable mode of responsiveness and eventually matures into moral taste, a formed capacity to discern and experience propriety as fitting, resonant, and affectively satisfying. Close analysis of Xunzi's analogies, musical imagery, and physiological descriptions makes explicit how ritual reorganizes qi (sic) (vital energy), retraining bodily and sensory experience so that qing (sic) (affective dispositions) may be articulated, disciplined, and enriched through patterning. A focused analysis of mourning illustrates how natural sorrow (ai (sic)) is composed with reverent attending (jing (sic)) into a structured affective configuration through embodied participation that recalibrates intensity, duration, posture, and expression, rendering grief inhabitable and normatively intelligible. By foregrounding this somatic-aesthetic dimension, the study clarifies how ritual anchors moral life in the felt texture of ordinary conduct.
ABSTRACT One influential approach to the question of why addiction excuses focuses on the question of what addiction is and, more particularly, on what addiction turns out to be in the light of scientific inquiry, e.g. neurophysiological inquiry into the dopamine system. I note the tension between this approach and the apparent data‐point that lay folk, who have not performed the relevant inquiry, can know that addiction excuses. Given this data‐point, the moral psychology of addiction should work with the materials to be found in the shallows of the addicted mind.
Schopenhauer offers ‘nature is not divine but demonic’ as a direct rebuttal of Spinoza's pantheism, his identification of ‘nature’ with ‘God’. And so, one would think, he ought to have been immune to the ‘Spinozism’ that became, as Heine called it, ‘the unofficial religion’ of the age. In fact, I argue, Schopenhauer's Spinozism is at least as deep as that of any of his contemporaries: his debt to Spinoza, I claim, is deeper than his more obvious debt to Kant. From Spinoza, he absorbs into his own system: monism, ‘all is one’; double‐aspectism, the mental and the physical are aspects of the same thing ’; panpsychism, everything has a mental as well as a physical aspect; and ‘will’, ‘striving’ is the mental aspect of all things. Schopenhauer does criticize the pantheism that had made Spinoza so à la mode: the divinity of the One is ‘shipwrecked’ on the suffering and evil of the world. Ultimately, however, this criticism dissolves in the face of Schopenhauer's ‘better consciousness': though a world overwhelmed by suffering is something that ‘ought not to be’, Kant's idealism shows us that, in the end, not only this world but also the primordial will that is its source belong to the realm of mere appearance. Ultimately, Schopenhauer's primordial One turns out to be, like Spinoza's, ‘divine’.
This paper advances a novel interpretation of Heidegger's conception of idle talk (Gerede) in Being and Time, foregrounding a largely neglected yet central feature and explicating its normative dimensions. I argue that idle talk can be understood only in light of its connection to untruth and coveredness (Verdecktheit), and that this connection reveals a normative constraint governing the ontological commitments that sustain our relations to entities. Against Wrathall's forceful reading that construes idle talk in terms of a lack of skilful practical conversance with the entities talked about, I argue that it must instead be traced to flaws in the underlying ontological commitments. Idle talk occurs when operative understandings of being are not grounded in the entities they concern, such that entities are rendered in inappropriate ontological terms - a phenomenon I term ontological disguise (drawing on Heidegger's notion of Verstellung). This interpretation clarifies the connection between idle talk and untruth and explains why Heidegger treats them as pervasive both in everyday life and philosophy. The systematic upshot is that, for Heidegger, understandings of being ought to be answerable to entities and can fail to meet this demand, a conclusion that bears on debates concerning his alleged idealism.
One of the central questions in philosophy of mind concerns the intentionality of moods. While it is standard to take the intentional object of moods as either 'everything' or 'nothing', neither view seems to be explanatorily inadequate. Given this, this paper develops and motivates a positive account of the intentionality of moods, according to which moods are directed at atmospheres. We first analyze the elusiveness of mood experiences in terms of three aspects, intentional, phenomenological and normative, and also specify some core characteristics of atmospheres. We then motivate the atmosphere view of moods by arguing that the elusiveness of mood experiences can be well-explained in terms of the atmospheres at which they are directed.
According to a widely held view both within and outside philosophy, imagination is innocent in the sense that it does not influence what we think and do. Hence, we can let our imagination wander anywhere. There are two ways of pushing back against this 'innocence of imagination' claim. The less controversial one is to argue that imagination does in fact influence some of our other mental states. The defenders of the 'innocence of imagination' claim could accept this line of argument and still maintain that this does not mean the loss of innocence as imagination may still never be in a position to have any kind of (harmful) influence on our actions. I argue that imagination is not innocent even in this narrower sense as imagination can and does influence many of our actions.
This paper is about reasons to love people. I defend a "particularist" view: that the central reason to love someone is simply who she is. I begin with a framing question-"why do you love me?"-and a taxonomy of views of love's reasons (& sect;1). I argue that a particularist view is demanded by that framing question (& sect;2). But offering such a view requires saying something about who the beloved is-so I borrow an account of human nature from Edith Stein which, I hope to show, yields a compelling account of love's reasons (& sect;3). I conclude with an argument that the extent to which a view of love's reasons genuinely answers our framing question is the extent to which it becomes particularist (& sect;4).
In The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch argues that our moral thinking will be impoverished until it possesses a secular conception of original sin. Such a notion would need to remove unacceptable Christian baggage while retaining a genuine claim to be a descendant of the original Christian concept. Unfortunately, Murdoch does not tell a story of how this secularization is supposed to go. This paper picks up where Murdoch left off by offering such a story. It begins by unpacking the Christian conception of original sin via a genealogy of how the concept arose in Western theological thinking. This genealogy shows that original sin captures a cluster of interacting concepts: primal sin, original guilt, and fallenness. I argue that the best candidate for secularization is fallenness, understood primarily as a state of distorted vision and disordered desire. The Christian tradition further maintains we can grasp the depth of fallenness only insofar as we understand our thorough need for grace. A natural question is whether a secular descendent of original sin can preserve some notion of grace. I argue that a notion of grace can be preserved through encounters with beauty.
This article offers a novel account of Heidegger's long-debated discussion of a painting of shoes by Van Gogh in 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. I argue that the Van Gogh episode is best understood as a carefully staged textual enactment of Heidegger's conception of artistic experience, properly construed. On my reconstruction, such experience involves a transformative reconfiguration of the experiencer's context of disclosure - a dynamic I refer to as 'contextual displacement'. After laying out this conception, along with two further background assumptions that inform my approach (concerning the reliability of equipment and its 'fading away'), I present a fine-grained reconstruction of the Van Gogh episode, foregrounding its performative dimensions and complex internal structure. I then show how the contextually displacing character of artistic experience accounts for these features, making sense of why Heidegger constructs the episode as he does. I conclude by contrasting my approach with that of Stephen Mulhall, who highlights similar aspects of the episode but arrives at strikingly different conclusions.
Spinoza repeatedly suggests that humans are set apart from other animals by their rational and moral abilities. Yet he disparages the traditional definition of the human as a 'rational animal' and several of his other views suggest that these abilities are not sufficient by themselves to characterize human nature. This article tries to overcome this tension by developing a political interpretation of Spinoza's view of human nature. Spinoza expresses support for the idea that humans are 'social animals'. Interpreting these endorsements, the article argues that what sets humans apart from other animals is that they live under a distinctive social organization, characterized by him as 'sovereignty' (imperium). By showing that this organization imposes cognitive and moral demands on those subject to it and that it does not characterize communities of non-human animals, this political interpretation shows how the rational and moral capacities that characterize humans alone are for Spinoza necessarily embedded in a social context.
Immanent critique is often presented as a distinctive approach to political and social philosophy. But Rachel Fraser argues that immanent critique cannot satisfy three plausible criteria that characterise it as a distinctive approach: it cannot be normatively significant, social, and make no appeal to external standards. This paper develops a model of immanent critique that answers her challenge. I first argue that the normative significance of immanent critique should not be modelled on agent-based practical rationality. I then recast the problem of external standards as a problem of normative grounding, arguing that the force of critique derives from the practical interests of those situated within historically determinate social systems. On this basis, I then claim that immanent critique is best understood not as the application of principles to facts, but as the apt deployment of normatively charged terms to socially organised realities. Its distinctive telos is transformative: it aims to alter our perspective on social systems in ways that connect diagnosis to action.
David Katz was an empirical psychologist with a deep and abiding interest in phenomenology. This paper reconstructs his theory of colour and colour perception, central to which is a distinctive account of the perception of illumination and empty space. Katz's views were an important influence on both the Gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and have contemporary relevance to ongoing debates about the nature of colour and colour perception. Reflection on Katz's theory of colour and colour perception provides a way of understanding whether, and in what sense, Katz was a phenomenologist; it thereby provides a perspective on wider questions about the nature of phenomenology.
Various commentators have noted striking parallels between Wittgenstein's reflections on privacy and Sartre's discussions of the body in Being and Nothingness. Nevertheless, these aspects of Sartre's thought have seldom been explored in detail. This article therefore offers a reconstruction of what can be labelled 'Sartre's private language argument'. Sartre explores the primary ways in which subjects consciously relate to their own embodiment, where these include affective modes of bodily self-awareness that one would have to be the relevant experiencing subject to enjoy (or suffer). At the same time, he argues that these forms of self-awareness are not sufficient to ground cognitive attitudes to one's own psychophysical condition. Specifically, he thinks that objective thought about, reference to, and thus knowledge of one's own condition involve shareable concepts mediated through a public language. The immediate aim of the article is thus to make sense of Sartre's obscure idea that consciousness 'exists for itself as known by the Other'. More broadly, however, it works to correct views of Sartre as a thoroughly Cartesian 'philosopher of consciousness': whilst he understands embodiment in terms of first-personal bodily awareness, he maintains that our cognitive attitudes to our bodily condition are essentially sharable.
