Séminaire “Emotions et Volitions”
Dans le cadre de l’ANR EMCO-Emphiline
Vendredi 25 octobre, 16h00-18h00, ENS, 45 rue d’Ulm, Salle Celan
Shaun GALLAGHER
(University of Memphis/Humboldt Foundation)
Bodily affect: Making enactive accounts even more embodied
Abstract:
Enactivists like Noë and O’Regan argue for an essential connection between perception and action, where action primarily means skillful bodily intervention in one’s surroundings. Analyses of sensory-motor contingencies thus become central to the enactive account (e.g., Noë 2004). This is an incomplete story, however, since it ignores other important contributories to an enactive account of perception and cognition, namely aspects that concern intersubjectivity and affectivity. For example, sensory-motor contingencies are of no avail to the perceiving agent without motivational pull in one direction or another or a sense of the pertinent affective contingencies. I’ll focus on the notion of embodied affect, a conception of low-level affects as a form of world-involving intentionality that modulates perception, action, and cognition more generally. I’ll show that bodily affect motivates a kind of perceptual interest or investment and significantly contributes to (either limiting or enabling) our perceptual contact with the world.