Dina Mendonça

O presente artigo explora os elementos-chave necessários para adotar uma postura crítica em relação à transformação digital em curso na educação, focando como a metodologia Filosofia para Crianças (FcC) pode auxiliar uma transição saudável que promova o pensamento colaborativo e inclusivo. Para ilustrar essa proposição, o texto apresenta o projeto Erasmus+, denominado EACH, descrevendo seu desenvolvimento e seus resultados iniciais, que incluem a aplicação de materiais desenvolvidos em contextos de Educação Infantil. O trabalho desenvolvido no âmbito do projecto sugere que a educação sustentável beneficia ao tornar-se uma preocupação central dos processos de transformação digital, sobretudo na promoção de práticas pedagógicas de colaboração e de inclusão. Após delinear o projeto e destacar os seus principais objetivos na descrição dos primeiros documentos que resultaram da parceria internacional, descrevemos também algumas das conclusões da primeira implementação prática que teve lugar na Itália, Polônia e Portugal, simultaneamente. Isso permite reforçar a identificação de algumas áreas promissoras para futura investigação que visem fortalecer uma abordagem humanística à transformação digital.

The article explores how a new dimension of emotion – depth – is crucially important for a better understanding of emotion and its connection to rationality. It begins by identifying that depth is trapped in a circularity in which deep emotions are important because they refer to deep and important aspects of people’s lives. Following Danto’s discussion of deep interpretation (1981), it suggests that it is the contrast between deep and superficial that grants emotional perspective and the ability to identify levels of emotional depth. After arguing that the emotional perspective is grasped by the narrative structure of emotion, it raises several objections that provide the ground to establish a difference between deep and profound. Then the paper concludes that the meaning of emotional depth is only fully understood in the ongoing contrast with the superficial described before, and states how further research on depth of emotion may provide the key to understanding the ambivalent status of emotions regarding their link to rationality.

It is Dewey’s reconstruction of experience that stand as the background for Dewey’s critical take on James famous celebrated paper “What is an Emotion?” (1884). In this paper James argues for the thesis that “the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion” (James 1884, 189–190). James inverted the order of previous conceptions of emotion that assumed that the emotional mental state give rise to the bodily expression of emotion, arguing for a new proposal that clearly showed that a disembodied human emotion is an impossible entity (James 1884, 194). By giving priority to the bodily symptoms of a felt emotion, James wanted to show that mental life is intrinsically connected with the corporeal frame (James 1884, 201), and as long as we miss this point, we miss the very nature of mental life. Accordingly, James’s theory promised a theory that brought “bodily activity into psychology as a functional cause” (Garrison 2003, 411) because it tried to ground the analysis of emotion in an embodied understanding of emotional processes. It is precisely on this point that James’s proposal was praiseworthy according to Dewey.

The conception of the mind has wide implications from scientific inquiry in neuroscience and psychology, including medical application in psychiatry and in various therapeutic contexts, reaching as far as how we conceived education and school organization of subject matter and of pedagogical spaces. What and how we think about the mind format the way people make everyday decisions, how people take care of one’s mind by maintaining reading and logical abilities, and how exercise is considered a part of maintaining a healthy mind. Dewey writes how “[a]ll interest in philosophy will agree that the question “what is mind and the mental?” is an important one” (LW 15:27). Despite the crucial importance and the enormous amount of research dedicated to understanding the mind, there is little agreement on the nature of the mind and how to best understand how to discover it.

Education is the continual organization of experience, and philosophy has, among its tasks, the capacity to provide the criterion for such organization. The educational consequences of a philosophical reflection enable the distinction between philosophical proposals that are mere dilettante abstractions from those that amplify the meaning of experience. As Dewey explains, “[t]he educational point of view enables one to envisage the philosophical problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice” (MW 9:338). This means that it is when we trace the impact of philosophical conceptions in education that we best realize the gravity of philosophical misconceptions.

Using Dewey’s philosophical work to build a novel hypothesis for emotion inevitably means moving away from the description of emotions being described merely in terms of inner states or description of physically located within the individual. In a chapter intitled “Dewey’s Rejection of the Emotion/Expression Distinctions”, Kreuger shows how the early work of John Dewey which focuses specifically on the nature of emotion makes clear that emotions are also constituted by their bodily expressions (Kreuger 2014, 143). Though this early stage of Dewey’s philosophical work already shows how within his philosophical project it is possible to find a different interpretation of what is means to talk about emotional expression than the one found in current research on emotion theory (Kreuger 2014), it is a pity Dewey did not have the opportunity to return to this focus after his major works to update and publish the second part of the theory of emotion he had initially designed in 1895 as to also incorporate the reflection on emotion found in Art as Experience (1934). This would have made it easier to contrast his take with the current research an literature on emotion. The present chapter hopes to show some of the ways Dewey might establish a dialogue with the interdisciplinary work on emotion theory.

It may seem somewhat strange to suggest that emotions have a logic of their own, given how they have been considered for many centuries to be in opposition to reason. Though a reference to their logic can be found in general in Edmund Burke’s work (Dwan 2011) and more specifically in his “logic of Taste” (Dwan 2011, 584), in the more recent literature reference to how emotions have a logic appears with Robert Solomon, who wrote that “emotions have a logical structure that is no less fascinating and no less analyzable than the logical structures of “reason”” (Solomon 1977, 41). Solomon additionally thinks that it is the theories of emotion available that contribute to the lack of attempts to uncover the logic of emotion. According to him, theories of emotion can be found to belong to three categories that all inhibit the search for the logical structure of emotions. These happens because these theories can either (1) be taken close to physical sensations similar to the description found in common sense, and the way Descartes and Hume understood them; or (2) be taken to be a type of disturbance from an animal like aspect of humans, similar to the Medieval psychophysiology, or a Freudian interpretation, or even the James-Lang feeling theory proposal; or, finally (3) because emotions are taken under a third category that places them as behaviors and actions.

Once the notion of a pattern and that of a situation becomes key to localize emotional occurrences, it also becomes possible to more easily identify that emotions can happen in a layered fashion. When emotions are about emotions, they are layered instead of sequential (Pugmire 2005, 174). In fact, an important way to recognize that emotions are not as simple and compact as their names we have for them, is to appreciate the impact of meta-emotions upon the emotional landscape. For instance, when someone is sad about their jealousy, their sadness is a meta-emotion. Or, to give another example, when someone is happy about feeling happy, this person has a first-order emotion—joy about something that happened—and a second-order emotion—joy about feeling joy.

In order to better understand the proposed Layered Theory of emotions, one may benefit from understanding how Dewey’s concept of experience is what ultimately gives rise to a situated approach to emotions, which in turn enables raising the theoretical hypothesis put forward. The hope is that the Layered Theory of emotions does not depend on taking up Dewey’s philosophical work and that is can be sustained within other philosophical frameworks. Yet, for considering the hypothesis it is helpful to understand how Dewey’s philosophical work prompts it. This chapter will lay down some of the crucial elements of Dewey’s philosophical work with it reconstruction of experience and the following one will show how a situated approach to emotions arises from the reconceptualization of experience.

This book puts forward a layered theory of emotions, which argues that emotional processes are best understood as occurrences that happen within complex emotional situational scenarios that integrate different and interconnected layers. According to this theory, there is an underlying logic of emotions which is more akin to a creative endeavor than to a fixed and mechanical structure. The book is divided in three parts. The first part provides the Deweyan historical background and shows how it gives rise to the hypothetical suggestion of the Layered Theory of Emotions. After laying down the Layered Theory of Emotions, the following chapters show how Dewey’s philosophical work grounds the theoretical suggestion. The second part of the book presents various insights that spring from the proposed theory. Among other things, it will show the importance of some new distinctions, such as meta-emotions and emotional depth, and provide a different understanding of previous emotional categories, such emotional intentionality and emotional habits. Finally, the third part of the book concludes by drawing some consequences of the layered theory of emotions for philosophy of mind, and for the general philosophical task. The book hopes to raise thought provoking questions and point out possible future research directions to deepen Dewey’s insightful scholarship, and Emotion Theory.

The chapter argues that the contradiction of emotional experiences identified in schizophrenic patients is a part of everyone’s emotional life. Building on Ratcliffe’s idea of thinking of schizophrenia in relational terms and taking up the claim that the minimal self reflects a fundamental orientation to the world and the social world, the chapter looks into schizophrenic emotional life as a way to offer insights about emotions. The visibility of contradiction seen in schizophrenia patients brings to the surface some aspects of the complexity of emotional life, and reveals some of the processing of emotional experiences. Consequently, taking the contradiction of emotional experience in schizophrenia as familiar instead of strange, shows that emotional life entails experiences in which we can find inconsistencies between first order emotions, moods and the emotional episode, as well as experiences of conflict between first order emotions and meta-emotions. The chapter concludes by indicating that accepting the similarity of processing of layers of emotions and the recognition that the outcomes are different raises further issues for research questions to better understand schizophrenia.

This paper argues that the various approaches within P4C (Philosophy for Children) should purposefully integrate the exploration of questioning instead of only presenting children with prepared questions as starting points for inquiry. This is particularly relevant since P4C is one of the few educational settings that offers a space for children to question and explore the variation of their questions’ impact. The purposeful integration of questions does justice to the inheritance of the philosophical tradition, and reinforces questions as a privileged way for human beings to relate to the world. More than simply a methodological step in designing a P4C session, questions are an educational resource and are a central part of thinking and inquiry in a philosophical session. The paper proposes a new way to leverage these tools, arguing that defining philosophy as an obsession to overcome opacity and aim for transparency (Caeiro, 2015) can help participants identify questions that may empower dialogue in a philosophical way.

The paper proposes that taking the notion of “community of inquiry” as a regulative ideal is a valuable working tool for the refinement and improvement of the practice of Philosophy for Children (P4C). Reed (1996) and Sprod (1997) have already drawn attention to this, stating that the community of inquiry is more a regulative idea than a typical occurrence. Building on these claims, we will show that taking the notion of community of inquiry as such gives new light to many of the items and aspects of the description of what constitutes a community of inquiry. Consequently, it provides ways to identify important moments in the philosophical practice that consolidate the community of inquiry, and a working tool to grasp and handle some of the crucial moves that the facilitator, as well as other participants, do to install and strengthen the community in the sessions.

The localized commentary focuses on the way in which meta-emotions appear in the last chapter, and how reflexivity more generally is addressed. It shows how meta-emotions require a detailed explanation, which should capture their role and place within the interdisciplinary theoretical proposal in the already dense book. Though the commentary is limited to this specific issue, it is important to acknowledge and admire the proposal for its unity based on an interdisciplinary foundation. It highlights why every theory of emotion seems to capture something important about the nature of emotions. Nevertheless, Mun’s book would have been greatly improved with the connection of her own proposal to previous work done on meta-emotion. Though it is understandable it did not take place in the book, this commentary aims to point out possible future research directions which will connect the unifying hypothesis with reflexivity of emotions.

This paper follows a Deweyan suggestion and proposes a structure for emotional activity – pattern of sentiment –as a way to grasp emotional experience in its live occurrence by building upon Dewey’s crucial notion of situation. The first part outlines Dewey’s criticisms of James’s idea of emotion, and verifies the ways in which the recent developments of neuroscience overcome Dewey’s criticisms of James. Given that Dewey’s work is a propitious ground for continuing to renew the discourse about the activities of mind (Mendonça 2003), the second part of the paper outlines a pattern for emotional activity, setting up the first steps for a situational approach of Deweyan inspiration to the nature of emotion. I conclude by pointing out how such a pattern may be a unifying tool for the different emotion theories briefly describing some of the rich directions it provides for future research on philosophy of emotion.

This paper proposes that being able to feel self-pity is important to be resilient against injustices because it enables self-transformation. The suggestion for this reassessment of self-pity as a crucial self-conscious emotion for a more humanistic world aims to be an example of how philosophical reflection can be insightful for emotion research. The first part of the paper outlines a general introduction of philosophy of emotions and a description of how Hume’s analysis of pride changed its meaning and pertinently linked it to human agency. The second part of the paper is devoted to self-pity and aims to offer a modified interpretation of its experience, ultimately suggesting that it is a way to cultivate resistance and endure injustices in the world. It begins by putting forward the generally accepted take on self-pity and then suggests that dismissing self-pity may increase its duration, and ultimately work as a type of denial of the world’s injustices. After describing how self-pity can be seen as a tour de force where the self is in a relationship of pity with itself, it further elaborates how self-pity may be taken as a type of calibration similar to how sleep works for the functioning organism. This makes it possible to interpret self-pity as a way to resiliently resist injustices while not dismissing them and keeping up the struggle to make the world a better place. Finally, the concluding remarks point out some consequences for the education of emotions and possible future research directions to be explored. Analogously to the undeniable way by which Hume changed the meaning of the emotion of pride, the conclusion hopes that a new way to understand self-pity is available. The overall goal is to amplify the already existing psychological descriptions showing the complementary role of philosophical research for the development of emotion research in general.

The paper proposes a way to understand moral emotions in ethics building upon Bernard Williams' claim that feelings, emotions and sentiments are an integral part of rationality. Based upon Bernard Williams' analysis of shame we argue that the richness and thickness that it is attached to some emotions is the key to understand why some emotions have a distinct ethical resonance. The first part takes up Bernard Williams' philosophical assessment of the concept of shame establishing a general framework to show how recent developments in philosophy of emotions are in line with the far-reaching consequences of Bernard Williams' insights. Then we highlight the way in which there is both an historical relativity to emotions and an intemporal understanding of their ethical role, and use the concept of meta-emotion to reinforce the idea that what makes some emotions moral requires employing Williams' distinction between thick and thin concepts.

"Offering a complete guide to the philosophical implications of Predictive Processing, this volume's contributors come from disciplines including philosophy, neuroscience and psychology. Together they explore the many philosophical applications of Predictive Processing, including mental health, cognitive science and neuroscience. These approaches are brought together by an introduction that provides an outline of this topic suitable for newcomers to the field, identifying the nuances of the topic"--

Philosophy for Children has long been considered as crucial for children’s ethical and moral education and a decisive contribution for education for the democratic life. The book gathers contributions from experts in the field who reflect on fundamental issues on how childhood and ethics are interrelated within the P4C movement. The main interest of this volume is to offer an understanding of how different philosophical conceptions of childhood can be coordinated with different ethical and meta-ethical philosophical considerations in P4C addressing topics such as P4C and relativism, P4C and Virtue ethics, ethics and emotions in P4C, philosophical commitments and P4C application, and Socratic practice within a pragmatist framework. A thought-provoking collection about how assumptions of particular philosophical conceptions of childhood modify moral and ethical education and a testimony of the undeniable contribution of P4C for moral education and reconceptualization of childhood.

Commentary on Michael S. Brady’s book, Emotion: The Basics, indicating that it offers an overview of the field of philosophy of emotions while raising awareness about the intrinsic complexity of the issues in emotion research. This makes it possible to show how emotion research is inevitably tied to specific philosophical assumptions. Three illustrations are discussed that hopefully also testify that, as Brady states, the philosophy of emotion is inevitably tied to the question of what it means to do philosophy.

The chapter shows how the recognition of reflexivity of emotions is crucial for understanding the role of emotions in reasoning because it highlights the regulatory role of emotion in emotional experience. The chapter begins by showing that to attain a conception of rationality that incorporates feelings, emotions, and sentiments as parts of the reasoning processes requires capturing the emotional landscape in all its complexity, and that integrating the role of meta-emotions is a contribution in that direction. Then introducing the notion of meta-emotions and showing how emotional reflexivity modifies the nature of our emotional world, it is shown how emotions also have a regulatory mechanism that can either be maladaptive or at the center of emotional health. In addition, because meta-emotions provide a test for the more general assumptions of theories of emotions, the chapter ends by showing how adopting a Situated Approach to Emotions is well-suited for explaining the refinement and complexity of emotion regulation. The final reflection of the chapter explains why adopting such theoretical frame of work makes it possible to use the term situation in a technical manner, which then reveals that emotions sometimes are described as causes while other times as reasons in connection to their regulative mechanisms.