Speaker: Prof. Giovanna Colombetti, Visiting Professor, Department of Philosophy

Date: 8 December 2023 (Friday)
Updated Venue: Institute of Chinese Studies Conference Room (2/F Art Museum East Wing) CUHK
https://cuhk.edu.hk/ics/clrc/english/directions.html 

Time: 4:30 – 6:00 pm

Please click here to reserve your seat.

About the lecture:

Recent debates on the nature of the emotions include what has been called the “situated perspective”. Its proponents criticize the general tendency, in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, to consider emotions only as states, or processes, of a person’s brain or body (a position also known as “individualism”), with little consideration for the role of environment. As a remedy, scholars suggest to regard emotions as scaffolded by the environment, both synchronically and diachronically. In this talk Prof. Colombetti will present this notion of “scaffolded emotions” in detail, explain why she thinks it is valuable, and suggest various ways in which it can be developed further.

About the speaker:

Prof. Giovanna Colombetti is a philosopher with a background in both philosophy and cognitive science. She works primarily on emotion and affectivity from the perspective of so-called ‘4E cognition’ (embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition). Since her PhD (Sussex, 2004) Prof. Colombetti has strived to reconceptualize various affective phenomena from a dynamical, embodied-enactive and, more recently, situated perspective. In both her teaching and research she draws quite liberally on phenomenology, analytic philosophy, as well as theoretical and experimental work in psychology and neuroscience. More recently Prof. Colombetti has become interested in the contribution that the social sciences and the field of material culture studies can make to our understanding of affectivity, in particular in the context of philosophical debates on the ‘scaffolded’ and perhaps even ‘extended’ nature of the mind.