Humboldt University, Berlin
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2012
Munich, Bayern, Germany
  •  897
    The Body and the Experience of Presence
    In Jörg Fingerhut & Sabine Marienberg (eds.), Feelings of Being Alive, De Gruyter. pp. 8--167. 2012.
    We experience our encounters with the world and others in different degrees of intensity – the presence of things and others is gradual. I introduce this kind of presence as a ubiquitous feature of every phenomenally conscious experience, as well as a key ingredient of our ‘feeling of being alive’, and distinguish explanatory agendas that might be relevant with regard to this phenomenon (1 – 3). My focus will be the role of the body-brain nexus in realizing these experiences and its treatment in…Read more
  •  660
    How it Feels to Be Alive: Moods, Background Orientations, and Existential Feelings
    with Sabine Marienberg
    In Jörg Fingerhut & Sabine Marienberg (eds.), Feelings of Being Alive, De Gruyter. pp. 1-20. 2012.
  •  314
    The condition of ‘genuine perceptual synaesthesia’ has been a focus of attention in research in psychology and neuroscience over the last decades. For subjects in this condition stimulation in one modality automatically and consistently over the subject’s lifespan triggers a percept in another modality. In hearing→colour synaesthesia, for example, a specific sound experience evokes a perception of a specific colour. In this paper, I discuss questions and challenges that the phenomenon of syn…Read more
  •  246
    Synaesthesia and Kinaesthetics
    with Sabine Flach and Jan Söffner
    Peter Lang. 2011.
    A myriad of sensations inform and direct us when we engage with the environment. To understand their influence on the development of our habitus it is important to focus on unifying processes in sensing. This approach allows us to include phenomena that elude a rather narrow view that focuses on each of the five discrete senses in isolation. One of the central questions addressed in this volume is whether there is something like a sensual habitus, and if there is, how it can be defined. This is …Read more
  •  126
    Aesthetic Emotions Reconsidered
    The Monist 103 (2): 223-239. 2020.
    We define aesthetic emotions as emotions that underlie the evaluative assessment of artworks. They are separated from the wider class of art-elicited emotions. Aesthetic emotions historically have been characterized as calm, as lacking specific patterns of embodiment, and as being a sui generis kind of pleasure. We reject those views and argue that there is a plurality of aesthetic emotions contributing to praise. After presenting a general account of the nature of emotions, we analyze twelve po…Read more
  •  110
    Beim Stichwort ”Kognition“ denken die meisten an das Gehirn, Computermodelle oder Informationsverarbeitung. In der realen Welt treffen wir aber immer nur auf Wesen mit Körpern, die in eine Umwelt eingebunden und in ihr aktiv sind. Kognition findet nicht im Kopf statt, sondern in der Welt. So lautet der Grundgedanke der Philosophie der Verkörperung. Die Hinwendung zu Körper und Umwelt stellt eine der vielleicht weitreichendsten Neuorientierungen der modernen Kognitionswissenschaft und Philosophie…Read more
  •  87
    To what extent do aesthetic taste and our interest in the arts constitute who we are? In this paper, we present a series of empirical findings that suggest an Aesthetic Self Effect supporting the claim that our aesthetic engagements are a central component of our identity. Counterfactual changes in aesthetic preferences, for example, moving from liking classical music to liking pop, are perceived as altering us as a person. The Aesthetic Self Effect is as strong as the impact of moral changes, s…Read more
  •  55
    Feelings of Being Alive (edited book)
    with Jörg Fingerhut and Sabine Marienberg
    De Gruyter. 2012.
    The question of what characterizes feelings of being alive is a puzzling and controversial one. Are we dealing with a unique affective phenomenon or can it be integrated into existing classifications of emotions and moods? What might be the natural basis for such feelings? What could be considered their specifically human dimension? These issues are addressed by researchers from various disciplines, including philosophy of mind and emotions, psychology, and history of art. This volume contains o…Read more
  •  12
    Verkörperung
    In Pablo Schneider & Marion Lauschke (eds.), 23 Manifeste Zu Bildakt Und Verkörperung, De Gruyter. pp. 183-190. 2017.
  •  10
    This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media h…Read more
  •  9
    Repeating patterns: Predictive processing suggests an aesthetic learning role of the basal ganglia in repetitive stereotyped behaviors
    with Blanca T. M. Spee, Ronald Sladky, Alice Laciny, Christoph Kraus, Sidney Carls-Diamante, Christof Brücke, Matthew Pelowski, and Marco Treven
    Frontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.
    Recurrent, unvarying, and seemingly purposeless patterns of action and cognition are part of normal development, but also feature prominently in several neuropsychiatric conditions. Repetitive stereotyped behaviors can be viewed as exaggerated forms of learned habits and frequently correlate with alterations in motor, limbic, and associative basal ganglia circuits. However, it is still unclear how altered basal ganglia feedback signals actually relate to the phenomenological variability of RSBs.…Read more
  •  6
    This paper introduces pictures more generally into the discussion of cognition and mind. I will argue that pictures play a decisive role in shaping our mental lives because they have changed (and constantly keep changing) the ways we access the world. Focusing on pictures will therefore also shed new light on various claims within the field of embodied cognition. In the first half of this paper I address the question of whether, and in what possible ways, pictures might be considered to be part …Read more