The Feeling Body - 9780262019958

In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from theenactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mindand applies them for the first time to affective science -- the study of emotions, moods, andfeelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but alsointrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study ofemotion in psychology and neuroscience.

In the course of her discussion,Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basicemotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodilyfeelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodilynature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory,the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy,Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to theircomplexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, onethat has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy ofcognitive science.