Programme

The purpose of the course is to provide an introduction to some of the issues and problems debated in the field of a scientifically informed philosophy of emotions. The course will open by addressing the problem of defining what emotions are. To answer it, it will draw from the classificatory proposals of contemporary philosophy, and in particular from the tripartition between sentimentalist, evaluative, and motivational traditions proposed by Andrea Scarantino. This tripartition will then guide a historical reinterpretation of theories of emotions in philosophical thought. Next, two influential scientific theories of emotions will be subjected to philosophical scrutiny: basic emotion theory and constructed emotion theory. Topics such as categorical or dimensional classification of emotions, emotional ambivalence, facial expressions of emotions, and the emotion-reason dialectic will then be explored. Finally, ample space will be left to explore the recent debate on situated affectivity, that is, how the environment and material culture shape (or even co-construct?) our emotional life.

Core Documentation

Mandatory for everybody :
1) Pia Campeggiani, Introduzione alla filosofia delle emozioni, CLUEB, 2021.

Plus 2 of the following books/set of papers :

2) Jan Plamper, Storia delle emozioni, Il Mulino, 2018 (solo capp. 1-3)
3) Fausto Caruana e Marco Viola, Come funzionano le emozioni?, Il Mulino 2018
4) Guido Baggio, Fausto Caruana, Andrea Parravicini, Marco Viola (a cura di). Emozioni. Da Darwin al pragmatismo, Rosenberg & Sellier 2021
5) Marco Menin, Il fascino dell’emozione, Il Mulino 2019
6) Tre a scelta dei seguenti articoli sul tema Espressione:
a. Andrea Scarantino (2017). How to do things with emotional expressions: The theory of affective pragmatics, Psychological Inquiry, 28(2-3), 165-185.
b. Marco Viola (2021). Le espressioni facciali ei confini della semiotica, Lexia, 37-38, 51-67.
c. Trip Glazer (2022). Emotionshaping: a situated perspective on emotionreading, Biology & Philosophy, 37(2), 1-20.
d. Stark, L., & Hoey, J. (2021). The ethics of emotion in artificial intelligence systems. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 782-793).
e. Crivelli, C., & Fridlund, A. J. (2019). Inside-out: From basic emotions theory to the behavioral ecology view. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 43(2), 161-194.
f. Shariff, A. F., & Tracy, J. L. (2011). What are emotion expressions for?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(6), 395-399.
g. Fausto Caruana (2019). The integration of emotional expression and experience: a pragmatist review of recent evidence from brain stimulation. Emotion Review, 11(1), 27-38.
7) Tre a scelta dei seguenti articoli sul tema Affettività situata:
a. Joel Krueger, Thomas Szanto (2016). Extended emotions. Philosophy Compass, 11(12), 863-878.
b. Giovanna Colombetti (2020). A Taxonomy of Affective Material Scaffolds. The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts, 1-2, 215-235.
c. Giulia Piredda (2020). What is an affective artifact? A further development in situated affectivity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 19(3), 549-567.
d. Marco Viola (2021). Three varieties of affective artifacts: Feeling, evaluative and motivational artifacts. Phenomenology and Mind, (20), 228-242.
e. Marino, G. (2022). Dietro le faccine. Alle origini della scritturizzazione del volto nella comunicazione online. Wunderkammer 1, 123-139.
f. Marco Viola (in revisione). Seeing through the shades of situated affectivity. Sunglasses as a socio-affective artifact. (Fornito dal docente)
g. Marco Viola (2022). La nostra vita (sociale) con la mascherina, In Cronotopi del volto (a cura di Elsa Soro e Cristina Voto), Aracne.
h. Joel Krueger, Lucy Osler (2019) Engineering Affect: Emotion Regulation, the Internet, and the Techno-Social Niche. Philosophical Topics, 47(2), 205-232.
8) Tre a scelta dei seguenti articoli sul tema Valenza edonica:
a. Viola, M. (2021). Rappresentazioni scientifiche dell’emotività: dalle emozioni di base al core affect (… e oltre?). In Pensare l'affettività (a cura di Guido Baggio e Gabriele Quinzi), 151-176.
b. Giovanna Colombetti (2005), Appraising valence. Journal of consciousness studies, 12(8-9), 103-126.
c. Valentina Petrolini, Marco Viola (2020), Core affect dynamics: arousal as a modulator of valence. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(4), 783-801.
d. Oksana Itkes, Assaf Kron (2019). Affective and semantic representations of valence: A conceptual framework. Emotion Review, 11(4), 283-293.
e. Laura Sizer (2013). The two facets of pleasure. Philosophical Topics, 215-236.
f. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Eliza Bliss‐Moreau (2009). Affect as a psychological primitive. Advances in experimental social psychology, 41, 167-218.
g. Jeff Larsen (2017). Holes in the case for mixed emotions. Emotion Review, 9(2), 118-123.
h. Colin Klein (2014). The penumbral theory of masochistic pleasure. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5(1), 41-55.

Reference Bibliography

Scarantino, Andrea e Ronald de Sousa, "Emotion", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotion/ Barrett, L. F., Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of emotions (4th ed.). Guilford Publications. Barrett, L. F., & Russell, J. A. (Eds.) (2015). The psychological construction of emotion. Fernandez Dols, J. M., & Russell, J. A. (Eds.). (2017). The science of facial expression. Oxford University Press.

Type of delivery of the course

The course includes: - Frontal teaching; - Student presentations and discussion of lecture content in class; - At least one seminar pertaining to the topics covered in the course. In the case of an extension of the health emergency from COVID-19, all provisions regulating the mode of conducting teaching activities and student assessment, such as distance teaching through the University platforms; distance oral examinations through the Microsoft Teams platform will be implemented.

Type of evaluation

Verification of learning is through an oral test. The program consists of a compulsory part for all and two optional parts. The compulsory part for all corresponds to Campeggiani's textbook [1]. With regard to the choice part, each student may choose two of the following options: (a)the study of one of the books in the bibliography [2-5]*; (b)the study of a group of three articles [6-8]*; (c)the production of a written paper (min 3000 max 5000 words), to be sent to the lecturer at least 15 days before the date of the exam and to be discussed in the exam. *NB options (a) and (b) can be chosen twice: in other words, it is possible to submit two books or two sets of papers (in addition to Campeggiani's textbook) to the exam. In the case of an extension of the health emergency from COVID-19, all provisions regulating the mode of conducting teaching activities and student assessment, such as distance teaching through the University platforms; distance oral examinations through the Microsoft Teams platform will be implemented.