Giovanna Colombetti.
The Feeling Body: affective science meets the enactive mind.
MIT Press. 2014
In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from
the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years
in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them
for the first time to affective science—the study of emotions, moods, and feelings.
She focuses on long-debated issues in affective science,
including the notion of basic emotions,
the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal,
the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience,
the neurophysiological study of emotion experience,
and the bodily nature of our encounters with others.
Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory,
the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology,
and phenomenological accounts of empathy,
Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues
that does justice to their complexity.
She also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry,
one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach
in the philosophy of cognitive science.