Context: Affective neuroscience has not developed first-person methods for the generation of first-person data. This neglect is problematic, because emotion experience is a central dimension of affectivity. Problem: I propose that augmenting affective neuroscience with a neurophenomenological method can help address long-standing questions in emotion theory, such as: Do different emotions come with unique, distinctive patterns of brain and bodily activity? How do emotion experience, bodily feelings and brain and bodily activity relate to one another? Method: This paper is theoretical. It advances ideas for integrating neurophenomenology and affective neuroscience, and explains how this integration would allow progress on the above questions. Results: An integrated “affective neuro-physio-phenomenology” may help scientists understand whether discrete emotion categories come in different experiential varieties, which would in turn help interpret concomitant brain and bodily activity. It may also help investigate the bodily nature of emotion experience, including how experience relates to actual brain and bodily activity. Implications: If put into practice, the ideas advanced here would enrich the scientific study of emotion experience and more generally further our understanding of the relationship of consciousness and physical activity. The paper is speculative and its ideas need to be implemented to bear fruit. Constructivist content: This paper argues in favor of the neurophenomenological method, which is an offshoot of enactivism.

Key words: Emotion, experience, bodily feelings, neurophenomenology, affective neuroscience

In this paper I advance an enactive view of affectivity that does not imply that affectivity must stop at the boundaries of the organism. I first review the enactive notion of “sense-making”, and argue that it entails that cognition is inherently affective. Then I review the proposal, advanced by Di Paolo (Topoi 28:9–21, 2009), that the enactive approach allows living systems to “extend”. Drawing out the implications of this proposal, I argue that, if enactivism allows living systems to extend, then it must also allow sense-making, and thus cognition as well as affectivity, to extend – in the specific sense of allowing the physical processes (vehicles) underpinning these phenomena to include, as constitutive parts, non-organic environmental processes. Finally I suggest that enactivism might also allow specific human affective states, such as moods, to extend.

Key words: enactivism, extended mind, extended life, affectivity, emotion, mood.

Clear similarities may be found between enaction and Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. In this article, and in the wake of recent research in the field of enaction, I argue that Simondon’s work is relevant to our understanding of the articulation between life, subjectivity, and technics. In line with John Stewart, I define enaction as the dynamic relation whereby living organisms and their environment co-emerge, a process in which technics is revealed as “anthropologically constitutive.” I show that this process is truly enlightened by Simondon’s theory of imagination and invention.

Key words: life, subjectivity, technics, cultural integration, individuation, transduction, dialectic, co-emergence, imagination, invention, affectivity, enactivism, maurice merleau-ponty, gilbert simondon

Excerpt: The Feeling Body applies several ideas from the enactive approach to the field of affective science, with the aim of both developing enactivism as well as reconceptualizing various affective phenomena. The book is organized into six chapters that examine primordial affectivity (chapter 1), the nature of emotional episodes and moods (chapters 2 and 3), enactive appraisal (chapter 4), the bodily feelings associated with emotional experience (chapter 5), affective neuro-physio-phenomenology (chapter 6), and the affective dimension of intersubjectivity (chapter 7). Giovanna Colombetti’s discussion of these topics effectively integrates scientific research and phenomenological descriptions of lived experience. What results is an insightful and genuinely interdisciplinary discussion of emotion that will be of interest to affective scientists, emotion theorists, phenomenologists, and proponents of enactivism.

Following on from the philosophy of embodiment by Merleau-Ponty, Jonas and others, enactivism is a pivot point from which various areas of science can be brought into a fruitful dialogue about the nature of subjectivity. In this chapter we present the enactive conception of agency, which, in contrast to current mainstream theories of agency, is deeply and strongly embodied. In line with this thinking we argue that anything that ought to be considered a genuine agent is a biologically embodied (even if distributed) agent, and that this embodiment must be affectively lived. However, we also consider that such an affective agent is not necessarily also an agent imbued with an explicit sense of subjectivity. To support this contention we outline the interoceptive foundation of basic agency and argue that there is a qualitative difference in the phenomenology of agency when it is instantiated in organisms which, due to their complexity and size, require a nervous system to underpin their physiological and sensorimotor processes. We argue that this interoceptively grounded agency not only entails affectivity but also forms the necessary basis for subjectivity.