The department of philosophy is deligthed to welcome Hichem Naar (University of Duisburg-Essen) to the Higher Seminar in Practical Philosophy. He will give a self-contained talk titled

Ways of Being: The Metaphysics of Emotions

ABSTRACT
Emotion theorists are typically concerned with two issues: 

(1) what emotions involve and

(2) what emotions are fundamentally. 

Given the looseness of ‘involve’, the first question is rather straightforward to answer. The phenomenon of emotion involves both various psychological entities such as experience, evaluation, motivation, patterns of thought and attention, etc. and various behavioral/
physiological responses and actions (e.g., fleeing a situation). The second question, by contrast, is more difficult to answer confidently. Commonly, theorists have debated on whether one of the aspects – evaluation, motivation, perception, etc. – involved in emotions should be given priority and be declared emotions proper. At first sight, this is a curious methodology. A car involves many different things – wheels, windows, a trunk, seats, etc. But we are not tempted to ask if any of these particular things is the car, and how it relates to the other things from the list. We take the car to be some kind of unity that relates to the items of the list in some way (presumably composition) without being any of these items. The problem with emotion, however, is that we do not seem to have a vantage point from which emotions appear whole alongside any item we might put on a list of what the phenomenon involves. All we have, it seems, is a sense that in having an emotion, one is evaluating an object, one has certain experiences, one is motivated a certain way, and so on. What would support positing an emotion on top of these things? In this paper, I argue that considerations of this kind are not far to seek. Broadly metaphysical considerations suggest that emotions should be conceived as entities in their own right, rather than an element (or a collection of elements) in the list of things that they are commonly said to involve. It turns out that we do have a vantage point from which emotions appear as unified wholes. If I am right, we need a different account of emotions than the common reductive and component accounts.

NB: This event takes place on a Friday rather than on a Thursday which is the usual day for the Higher seminar.