Curious Emotions

Roots of consciousness and personality in motivated action

Author
Ralph D. Ellis | Clark Atlanta University
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027251978 (Eur) | EUR 99.00
ISBN 9781588116284 (USA) | USD 149.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027294555 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
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Emotion drives all cognitive processes, largely determining their qualitative feel, their structure, and in part even their content. Action-initiating centers deep in the emotional brain ground our understanding of the world by enabling us to imagine how we could act relative to it, based on endogenous motivations to engage certain levels of energy and complexity. Thus understanding personality, cognition, consciousness and action requires examining the workings of dynamical systems applied to emotional processes in living organisms. If an object's meaning depends on its action affordances, then understanding intentionality in emotion or cognition requires exploring why emotion is the bridge between action and representational processes such as thought or imagery; and this requires integrating phenomenology with neurophysiology. The resulting viewpoint, "enactivism," entails specific new predictions, and suggests that emotions are about the self-initiated actions of dynamical systems, not reactive "responses" to external events; consciousness is more about motivated anticipation than reaction to inputs. (Series A)
[Advances in Consciousness Research, 61] 2005.  viii, 238 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“This is an important book, a major contribution to the embodiment/self-organization paradigm in psychology/psychiatry. Ellis follows in the tradition of a set of culturally diverse thinkers ranging from Merleau-Ponty to the original Gestalt theorists to humanist psychologists such as Maslow, Rogers, and Gendlin. This work will become an inspiration for transforming many of the prevalent diminutive social policies which are based implicitly on a restricted concept of human identity. ”
“The key to this book is the notion of self-organizing system, already under serious development in biology, the cognitive and affective neurosciences, psychiatry, and psychology. Ellis juxtaposes experimental results from all these sciences alongside the deepest existential and humanist concerns, thereby reconciling reductionist and non-reductionist research. Recommended for scientists, philosophers, clinicians, and anyone else with interdisciplinary interests in the emotions, cognition, consciousness, and the ways that nature has interwoven them.”
“Ralph Ellis' new book develops an enactive account of emotions that makes room for 'higher' and even 'existential' ones. This view of the higher emotions puts them right at the centre of our most basic motivational structure. His book is unusually wide ranging, extending from the neurophysiology of how emotions are activated to discussing Maslow's 'self-actualization'.”
Cited by

Cited by 21 other publications

Bond, Karen E. & Susan W. Stinson
2007. ‘It’s work, work, work, work’: young people’s experiences of effort and engagement in dance1. Research in Dance Education 8:2  pp. 155 ff. DOI logo
Bond, Karen E. & Susan W. Stinson
2016. “It’s Work, Work, Work, Work”: Young People’s Experiences of Effort and Engagement in Dance (2007). In Embodied Curriculum Theory and Research in Arts Education [Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, 17],  pp. 269 ff. DOI logo
Bower, Matt
2015. Developing open intersubjectivity: On the interpersonal shaping of experience. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14:3  pp. 455 ff. DOI logo
Candiotto, Laura
2019. From Philosophy of Emotion to Epistemology: Some Questions About the Epistemic Relevance of Emotions. In The Value of Emotions for Knowledge,  pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Dempsey, Liam & Itay Shani
2009. Dynamical agents: Consciousness, causation, and two specters of epiphenomenalism. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8:2  pp. 225 ff. DOI logo
Dempsey, Liam P. & Itay Shani
2013. Stressing the Flesh: In Defense of Strong Embodied Cognition. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86:3  pp. 590 ff. DOI logo
Dempsey, Liam P. & Itay Shani
2015. Three misconceptions concerning strong embodiment. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14:4  pp. 827 ff. DOI logo
Draghi‐Lorenz, Riccardo
2010. Different Theoretical Differences and Contextual Influences. In Therapy and Beyond,  pp. 105 ff. DOI logo
Eder, Thomas
2012. Kognitive Literaturwissenschaft. In Handbuch Literatur und Philosophie,  pp. 311 ff. DOI logo
Ellis, Ralph D.
2006. Phenomenology-Friendly Neuroscience: The Return To Merleau-Ponty As Psychologist. Human Studies 29:1  pp. 33 ff. DOI logo
Ellis, Ralph D.
2013. Neuroscience as a Human Science: Integrating Phenomenology and Empiricism in the Study of Action and Consciousness. Human Studies 36:4  pp. 491 ff. DOI logo
Ellis, Ralph D.
2015. Reduction versus Emergence. In The Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology,  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Harvey, Charles W.
2007. Comments on Nicholas Georgalis's “First‐Person Methodologies: A View from Outside the Phenomenological Tradition”. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 45:S1  pp. 113 ff. DOI logo
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Miall, David S.
2011. Wordsworth’s “First-Born Affinities”: Intimations of Embodied Cognition. Poetics Today 32:4  pp. 693 ff. DOI logo
Miall, David S.
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Miall, David S.
2015. Temporal Aspects of Literary Reading. In Investigations Into the Phenomenology and the Ontology of the Work of Art [Contributions To Phenomenology, 81],  pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Miall, David S.
2015. The Experience of Literariness: Affective and Narrative Aspects. In Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy [Contributions To Phenomenology, 73],  pp. 175 ff. DOI logo
Northoff, Georg
2008. Are our emotional feelings relational? A neurophilosophical investigation of the James–Lange theory. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7:4  pp. 501 ff. DOI logo
Sasley, Brent E.
2010. Affective attachments and foreign policy: Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords. European Journal of International Relations 16:4  pp. 687 ff. DOI logo
Sundararajan, Louise
2008. The Plot Thickens—or Not: Protonarratives of Emotions and the Chinese Principle of Savoring. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 48:2  pp. 243 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Consciousness Research

Consciousness research

Philosophy

Philosophy

Main BIC Subject

JM: Psychology

Main BISAC Subject

PSY000000: PSYCHOLOGY / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2004062771 | Marc record