Pia Campeggiani

This paper presents experimental evidence that gender double standards significantly shape evaluative perceptions of men and women professors among philosophy students in Italian universities. Identical lecture passages, delivered either in written form (Study 1, N = 95) or orally (Study 2, N = 92) and attributed to authors with typically masculine or feminine names and voices, were used as stimuli. Participants were asked to respond to teaching evaluation questions. With regard to the written passages, the findings indicate that men participants’ evaluations are significantly influenced by what they believe to be the author’s gender, whereas women participants’ evaluations are not, with the exception of one single factor, namely engagement. In contrast, for orally delivered lectures, both men and women participants exhibit comparable gender biases.

‘Affective valence’ typically refers to the way an affective state feels, i.e. the quality of the (dis)pleasure we subjectively experience: fear usually feels unpleasant, while joy feels good. Yet sometimes affective experience feels ‘bittersweet’, i.e. good and bad at the same time, as when we enjoy being scared on the roller coaster or being sad when reading a heart-rending novel. In these situations, mixed affect is experienced as a blended state in which positive and negative aspects cannot be prised apart in any meaningful way. But mixed affect can also arise from conflicting emotions (e.g when we desire something that we also wish to avoid), from ambivalence (e.g. when we are of two minds about something), and more. Taking a cross-cultural and multidisciplinary perspective, this volume aims to enrich our understanding of the phenomenology of mixed affective experiences. It explores narrative representations of mixed emotions in historical and literary works in both Western and Eastern traditions, as well as the theorization of such experiences in these traditions. It will be of interest to students and scholars of literature (especially classical Chinese, Greek, Indian, and Latin), history of emotions, and philosophy.

This chapter discusses how people perceive and respond to facial expressions that display mixed emotions. The review of the literature suggests that, overall, people seem to prefer “pure” emotion expressions over mixed ones and also perceive individuals who show mixed emotions less positively. This preference might stem from the cognitive difficulty of processing and categorizing complex emotional signals. Notably, emotion knowledge is typically organized around discrete emotion prototypes. This makes mixed emotions cognitively less accessible, requiring more effort for the construction of meaning. In sum, mixed emotion expressions are complex social signals that people tend to simplify, preferring clear, easily categorizable emotional displays.

This chapter explores the intuition that affective dispositions are the building blocks of personality. We understand personality along Aristotelian lines as the unified set of one’s affective dispositions. We start with some recent data showing that affective dispositions such as character and personality traits are key determinants of the sense of who we are. At first sight, this goes against mainstream tendencies to approach the issue of personal identity by reference to other processes and capacities, such as memories and narratives. This appearance is in our opinion misleading and we use affective dispositions as a privileged vantage point to understand the relations between our sense of who we are, memory, and narrative competency. The drift of our argument is that the sense of who we are, which crucially builds on affective states, has a deep impact on how we remember and narrate our lives.

The place of emotions in aesthetic response has long been a topic in contemporary philosophical theorizing. One aspect of the debate in particular seems to have become a recalcitrant problem: when experiencing fiction, we experience emotional reactions towards what we know not to exist. Is this rational? In fact, is it even possible? This article deals with the so‐called “paradox of fiction” from the viewpoint of ancient poetics. In the first section, I survey some of the main arguments proposed to (dis)solve the paradox in analytic philosophy. In the second and the third sections, I address what I consider two problematic assumptions of existing analytic approaches: their prescriptive, “essentialist” attitude and their exclusive focus on matters of content. By offering a brief sketch of the ancient principles of “likelihood” and “vividness”, I argue that they provide a direct and cognitively realistic answer to the paradox insofar as they account for the neutralization of doxastic features in imaginative acts and ground affective responses to fiction in the phenomenon of “aesthetic immersion”, explained in experiential, rather than representational, terms.

Traditional interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of perception mainly focus on uncovering the underlying mechanisms that are at stake when perceivers are affected by sensible qualities. Investigating the nature of sense perception is one of Aristotle’s main worries and one that he explicitly relates to the question of its causes (e. g.Sens. 436a16–17, 436b9) and its ends (e. g.de An. 434a30 ff.). Therefore I suggest that, in order to fully explain Aristotle’s view of perceptual phenomena, the possibilities, the constraints, and the goals defined by the embodied and situated engagement of perceivers with the external world must be taken into account. Accordingly, in this paper, I provide an affective reading of Aristotle’s theory of perception. I shall ask what, in addition to functioning sense organs and appropriate response mechanisms, the perceiver contributes to perceptual content. Specifically, I propose to shed light on the significance of perceptual experience for the perceiver and I aim to show that, according to Aristotle, one’s biological and personal qualities are perceptually relevant, meaning that they underpin perception, rather than coming into play after perception has occurred and its objects have been discerned. The paper is divided into two parts, respectively dealing with sensory affections and more complex affective phenomena. As regards the domain of primal sense perception, I will focus on smell as a representative example: since Aristotle identifies it as the least developed of human sensory faculties, it will serve as a revealing illustration of how sense perception is informed and qualified by what, drawing on contemporary philosophical terminology, I will call ‘perceptual interests’, viz. the affective sense of what is at stake in the living being’s interaction with the environment. I will then proceed to consider the way more complex affective phenomena underpin perception by examining the case of emotions and that of virtues of character. By showing how perception is affectively inflected and how emotion is rooted in perception’s bodily nature, I aim to sketch out the general lines along which I believe that the Aristotelian theory of perception should be approached.

En el ensayo se propone una reflexión crítica sobre los presupuestos lógicos de la categoría de igualdad y sus ambivalencias. A una premisa teórica, que enmarca los términos de lo que se configura como un problema conceptual, seguirá una breve reconstrucción histórico-filosófica, que tiene el objetivo de arrojar luz sobre cómo podemos, leyendo a un clásico, repensar críticamente las premisas teóricas de la igualdad normativa a través de una recuperación de la valorización aristotélica de la dimensión cognitiva y moral de emociones como la cólera y la indignación.