Hobbes's political philosophy forwards the advance of modernity: human emancipation can be realized through an enthusiastic development of science and technology. But that project is driven by human curiosity emerging from a sense of anxiety driven by Hobbes's insight – sustained too by Vico – that human beings can know only what they make. Tossed into a world not of their own making, human beings are thereby subject to fear of the unknown. But is that fear all of a piece? Against the prevailing view that fear can only be understood as arising from some specified cause, that is to say in indexical terms, the paper delineates, through an examination of Hobbes's writings – particularly his Leviathan – three such conceptions of fear. They are the iconic, indexical and intellective. They can then be related to each other in order to show their relevance as the basis for an organizing principle in social life as well as to our own precarious, political situation in the contemporary world.

An architecture of fear: the relevance of Hobbes's tripartite contribution

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the author of the first French systematic work which displays the word “phenomenologie” in its main title, the Phenomenologie de la perception. This fact in itself establishes for him an important place in the annals of the Phenomenological Movement. But even apart from that, he has gone further than most other French philosophers, including Sartre, by identifying phenomenology with philosophy as such. This fact would seem to require the inclusion of his entire philosophy in the present account of the French phase. The only circumstance which can free me from such a vast assignment is the relative and, to some extent, intrinsic incompleteness and fluidity of his philosophy at this time.

The Phenomenological Philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

THE PAST DECADE has seen a tidal wave of publications on emotion. The topic has engaged the energy and the imagination of the professionals to whose fields it belongs, and some of these have delivered it to the reading public in a series of highly successful books. Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux are probably the best known (1) among those whose writings have displayed the topic and driven the interest in it. I intend to analyze several of their works in order to make some judgments about what can be considered an important contemporary trend. Damasio and LeDoux are neurobiologists, that is, brain scientists who work in the tradition begun by William James. I will introduce James from time to time (as do both Damasio and LeDoux) for his historical importance and also because of the valuable schematization of the issues which his relatively uncomplicated view of the human organism allows. James considered what he was doing to be psychology, while Damasio and LeDoux regard themselves as biologists. James was also committed to understanding emotion strictly as a function of the nervous system. (2) Brain science still does, though this focus is distressed by the need, faced by any theory of emotion, to deal with feeling. Feeling--or consciousness generally--is something that brain science is still struggling to accommodate. William James defined emotion as feeling "emotion is nothing but the feeling of the reflex bodily effects of what we call its object." (3) More famously he said: If we fancy some strong emotion, and try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find that we have nothing left behind, no "mind stuff" out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. (4) The emotions that he has in mind are those characterized by a "wave of bodily disturbance," (5) and he names surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, lust, greed, and others without suggesting that the list is exhaustive and without attempting to distinguish among the items listed. The bodily symptoms, apparently taken as common to all, are the intensified actions of the heart, the circulatory system, bladder, bowels, glands of the mouth, throat, skin and liver, (6) activities which are today recognized as controlled by the autonomic nervous system. The latter concept had not yet emerged when James wrote. Speaking of the body in which this is going on, he says, "every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is felt, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs." (7) Consciousness in emotion is not only the feeling of the body, it is also the perception of what we are emotional about; for example, the bear in the woods which frightens us. For James, that is a reflex, simply a trigger for the emotion into which it quickly disappears. His physiology of emotion, however, is more than an account of visceral and muscular stirrings. His starting point was not gut or sinew but brain, as he makes clear in the summary remark with which the article concludes: To return now to our starting point, the physiology of the brain. If we suppose its cortex to contain centers for the perception of changes in each special sense organ, in each portion of the skin, in each muscle each joint and each viscus, and to contain absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme perfectly capable of representing the process of the emotions. (8) Notice the simplicity of the patterns of location and connection. The later development of the discipline will reveal a nervous system far more complex than that indicated here. Later theorists will be challenged to do more than James did with the problem of how feeling, the consciousness of the body, combines with perception, the awareness of the triggering object. He was quite vague about this, saying only that the bodily changes, "apperceived like the original object in as many specific portions of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform it from an object-simply-apprehended to an object-emotionally-felt. …

Emotions and Biology: Remarks on the Contemporary Trend

IVIerleau-Ponty1 states his philosophical aim at the beginning of his first work: "Our purpose is to understand the relations of consciousness and of nature."0 His attempt to understand takes the form of a phenomenology of perception, the philosophical primacy of which is the keynote of his thought. As a phenomen ology, his work is situated in a newly established philosophical tradition which attempts to surpass Idealism and Intellectualism on the one hand, and Empiricism on the other, attitudes which accord primacy to either consciousness or nature.3 Phenomenology came to be when Husserl found these doctrines intolerably dis ordered and obscure: it was his effort to make philosophy a rigorous science. Its basic movement "back to the things them selves" was implemented in the intentional theory of consciousness and the descriptive method which have become its trademarks. The intentional consciousness is intuitive and dependent upon what appears to it. This should have provided a guarantee against the intrusion into phenomenology of the constitutive con

John F. Bannan

Papers

Emotions and Biology: Remarks on the Contemporary Trend

Philosophical Reflection and the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty