Alessandro Salice

Within emotion theory, envy is generally portrayed as an antisocial emotion because the relation between the envier and the rival is thought to be purely antagonistic. This paper resists this view by arguing that envy presupposes a sense of us. First, we claim that hostile envy is triggered by the envier's sense of impotence combined with her perception that an equality principle has been violated. Second, we introduce the notion of â hetero-induced self-conscious emotionsâ by focusing on the paradigmatic cases of being ashamed or proud of somebody else. We describe envy as a hetero-induced self-conscious emotion by arguing that the impotence felt by the subject grounds the emotion's self-reflexivity and that the rival impacts the subject's self-assessment because the rival is framed by the subject as an in-group member. Finally, we elaborate on the asset at stake in envy. We contend that this is esteem recognition: The envier covets the esteem that her reference group accords to the rival. Because, in envy, the subject conceives of herself as member of a group to which the other is also understood to belong, we conclude that envy is a social emotion insofar as it presupposes a sense of us.

Within social psychology, group identification refers to a mental process that leads an individual to conceive of herself as a group member. This phenomenon has recently attracted a great deal of attention in the debate about shared agency. In this debate, group identification is appealing to many because it appears to explain important forms of intentionally shared actions in a cognitively unsophisticated way. This paper argues that, unless important issues about group identification are not illuminated, the heuristic function ascribed to this notion for an understanding of shared agency remains dubious at best and unfulfilled at worst. This paper offers such a clarification by distinguishing and describing two different mental processes that constitute group identification: adoption of the group perspective and transformation in self-understanding. It is claimed that the latter process consists in the production of what Ruth Millikan labels “Pushmi-Pullyu representations” and that it is developmentally prior with respect to the ability of adopting the group perspective.

John Searle’s account of collective intentions in action appears to have all the theoretical pros of the non-reductivist view on collective intentionality without the metaphysical cons of committing to the existence of group minds. According to Searle, when we collectively intend to do something together, we intend to cooperate in order to reach a collective goal. Intentions in the first-person plural form therefore have a particular psychological form or mode, for the we-intender conceives of his or her intended actions as singular contributions by means of which – or: by way of which – a collective goal is pursued. Accordingly, we-intentions are held to have a psychological mode with a “collective goal by means of singular contribution” structure, which makes them primitive and irreducible to intentions in the I-form. It is further contended that, albeit primitive and irreducible, we-intentions are not the mental states of an alleged group mind but always of an individual’s mind. This paper targets Searle’s claim of irreducibility by developing an argument whose aim is to show that, pace Searle, it is possible to track the idea of intentions with a psychological mode structured in terms of “collective goal by means of singular contribution” back to the concept of intentions in the I-form. The argument mainly relies on the idea that Searle’s technical expressions “being a collective goal by means of singular contribution intention in action” or “being a collective goal by way of singular contribution intention in action” are susceptible to conceptual analysis. The upshot of this analysis is that we-intentions can be reduced to complex bundles of mental states, all of which come in the first-person singular form. If this argument is sound, Searlean we-intentions do not belong to a primitive kind of mental states

This paper pursues two main aims. First, it distinguishes two kinds of improvisation: expert and inexpert. Expert improvisation is a (usually artistic) practice that the agent consciously sets as their goal and is evaluated according to (usually artistic) standards of improvisation. Inexpert improvisation, by contrast, supports and structures the agent’s action as it moves them towards their (usually everyday life) goals and is evaluated on its success leading the agent to the achievement of those goals. The second aim is to describe inexpert improvisation as a robustly distributed affair, one that involves the ongoing integration of embodied practices with social and material resources within our surrounding environments. On the wide approach to improvisation fostered in this paper, inexpert improvisation is claimed to be our default way of inhabiting our world.

Volume XVII Part 1: Phenomenology, Idealism, and Intersubjectivity: A Festschrift in Celebration of Dermot Moran's Sixty-Fifth Birthday Part 2: The Imagination: Kant's Phenomenological Legacy Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Contributors: Andreea Smaranda Aldea, Lilian Alweiss, Timothy Burns, Steven Crowell, Maxime Doyon, Augustin Dumont, Richard Kearney, Mette Lebech, Samantha Matherne, Timothy Mooney, Thomas Nenon, Matthew Ratcliffe, Alessandro Salice, Daniele De Santis, Andrea Staiti, Anthony J. Steinbock, Michela Summa, Thomas Szanto, Emiliano Trizio, and Nicolas de Warren.