Feelings of Being Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality

by Ratcliffe, Matthew

• ISBN13: 9780199206469
• ISBN10: 0199206465
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-08-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, heightened existence, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Such feelings might be referred to as 'existential' because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world. Existential feelings have not been systematically explored until now, despite the important role that they play in our lives and the devastating effects that disturbances of existential feeling can have in psychiatric illness. Feelings of Being is the first ever philosophical account of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. In this book, Matthew Ratcliffe proposes that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. The book explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. It then explores the role of changed feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought. Written in a clear, non-technical style throughout, it will be valuable for philosophers, clinicians, students, and researchers working in a wide range of disciplines.

Author Biography

Matthew Ratcliffe is Reader in Philosophy at Durham University, UK. He works primarily on phenomenology, philosophical psychology and philosophy of psychiatry. He is author of Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and co-editor, with Daniel Hutto, of Folk Psychology Re-assessed (Springer, 2007).

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The neglect of existential feeling	p. 1
Phenomenology and the sense of reality	p. 4
Summary of the argument	p. 10
The structure of existential feeling
Emotions and bodily feelings	p. 17
The dismissal of 'mere affect'	p. 17
Solomon on emotion and the meaning of life	p. 21
Uniting cognition and affect	p. 26
Emotions as embodied appraisals	p. 28
Emotions as bodily judgements	p. 31
Bodily feelings and feelings towards	p. 33
Feeling is not 'mere affect'	p. 35
Existential feelings	p. 41
Heidegger on practical understanding	p. 42
Heidegger on mood	p. 47
Existential feeling as a phenomenological category	p. 52
The nonsense charge	p. 57
Existential feelings in autobiographical accounts of psychiatric illness	p. 61
Existential feelings in literature and everyday life	p. 65
Propositional attitudes and the sense of reality	p. 69
The phenomenology of touch	p. 77
Vision and touch	p. 77
Touch and proprioception	p. 79
Aspect shifts	p. 84
Boundaries	p. 90
Being in touch with the world	p. 93
Varieties of existential feeling in psychiatric illness
Body and world	p. 105
The feeling body	p. 106
The conspicuous body	p. 112
The phenomenology of sickness	p. 116
Existential feelings, bodily dispositions and possibilities	p. 121
Horizons	p. 130
Feeling and belief in the Capgras delusion	p. 139
Interpersonal relations	p. 139
The Capgras delusion	p. 143
The feeling of unfamiliarity	p. 147
Relatedness and recognition	p. 149
Perceiving the possible	p. 153
Experiencing people	p. 155
Experience and belief	p. 159
Feelings of deadness and depersonalization	p. 165
The Cotard delusion	p. 165
Against two-factor accounts	p. 170
Nothingness	p. 178
Depersonalization and double-counting	p. 180
Existential feeling in schizophrenia	p. 187
Early descriptions of schizophrenia	p. 187
Phenomenological accounts of schizophrenia	p. 191
Inconsistency	p. 196
Thought insertion	p. 198
Diagnoses and existential feelings	p. 205
Kinds of existential feeling	p. 211
Existential feeling and philosophical thought
What William James really said	p. 219
Physiology and philosophy	p. 220
The role of emotion in experience and thought	p. 224
Pragmatism	p. 230
Radical empiricism	p. 233
Stance, feeling and belief	p. 241
Feelings and philosophical positions	p. 241
Philosophical stances	p. 248
Stance, commitment and critique	p. 253
Feeling and epistemic disposition	p. 257
Authentic and inauthentic philosophies	p. 259
Conviction and doubt	p. 262
Pathologies of existential feeling	p. 269
The nature of religious experience	p. 269
Medical and existential perspectives	p. 276
Medical, epistemic and pragmatic pathologies	p. 279
Existential pathology	p. 284
The poverty of the mechanistic world	p. 289
References	p. 293
Index	p. 305
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