This volume offers perspectives on the theme of surprise crossing philosophical, phenomenological, scientific, psycho-physiology, psychiatric, and linguistic boundaries. The main question it examines is whether surprise is an emotion. It uses two main theoretical frameworks to do so: psychology, in which surprise is commonly considered a primary emotion, and philosophy, in which surprise is related to passions as opposed to reason. The book explores whether these views on surprise are satisfying or sufficient. It looks at the extent to which surprise is also a cognitive phenomenon and primitively embedded in language, and the way in which surprise is connected to personhood, the interpersonal, and moral emotions.
Many philosophers of different traditions, a number of experimental studies conducted over the last decades, recent works in linguistics, and ancestral wisdom testimonies refer to surprise as a crucial experience of both rupture and openness in bodily and inner life. However, surprise is a theme that has not been dealt with directly and systematically in philosophy, in the sciences, in linguistics, or in spiritual traditions. This volume accomplishes just that.
Table of Content
Part 1. Surprise and the Heart.- Chapter 1. “Surprise as Emotion: Between Startle and Humility” (Anthony J. Steinbock).- Chapter 2. “Surprise, Valence, Emotion: The Multivectorial Integrative Cardio-Phenomenology of Surprise” (Natalie Depraz).-
Part 2.
Surprise and Depression.- Chapter 3.
“The Temporal Dynamic of Emotional Emergence, Surprise, and Depression” (Thomas Desmidt).- Chapter 4. “Animal and Human Models of Startle, Emotion, and Depression” (Bruno Brizard).-
Part 3. Surprise and the Body.- Chapter 5. “If The Body Is Part of Our Discourse, Why Not Let It Speak?: Five Critical Perspectives” (Maxine Sheets-Johnstone).- Chapter 6. “Glancing at the Surface of Surprise”(Edward S. Casey).-
Part 4. Surprise in Hermeneutics.- Chapter 7. “Call and Conversion on the Road to Damascus: An Exercise in the Hermeneutics of Surprise” Jeffery Bloechl).- Chapter 8. “Surprise, Meaning and Emotion” ( Claudia Serban).-
Part 5. Surprise in Linguistics.- Chapter 9. “Surprised? Why? The Expression of Surprise in French and in English: An Experimental Approach” (Pascale Goutéraux).- Chapter 10. “Describing and Expressing Surprise” ( Agnès Celle, et. al.).
About the author
Natalie Depraz is Professor of Philosophy, Rouen Normandy University and University Member at the Husserl Archives, ENS-CNRS, Paris. She works in phenomenology, psychology, Christianity and Buddhism, and its articulations with cognitive sciences and psychiatry and is involved in developing first person methodologies as crossed with third person experimental analysis in the general framework of microphenomenology. Book publications include for example Attention et vigilance. A la croisée de la phénoménologie et des sciences cognitives (PUF, Epiméthée, 2014, am. Transl. with Northwestern in prep.), On becoming aware: a pragmatics of experiencing (with P. Vermersch & F. J. Varela) (Benjamins Press, 2003), Lucidité du corps. De l’empirisme transcendantal en phénoménologie (Kluwer, 2001), Transcendance et incarnation. L’altérité à soi comme intersubjectivité chez E. Husserl (Vrin, 1995). She is Editor-in-Chief, Alter: Revue de Phénoménologie, Paris and co-edited Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2001-2006).
Anthony Steinbock is Professor of Philosophy and Interim Chair, Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Director, Phenomenology Research Center. He works in the areas of phenomenology, social ontology, aesthetics, and religious philosophy. Book publications include, It’s Not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving (Rowman & Littlefield Int., 2018), Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl (Rowman & Littlefield Int., 2017), Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Northwestern, 2014; 2015 Symposium Book Award), Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Indiana, 2007/2009; 2009 Edward Goodwin Ballard Book Prize in Phenomenology), Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Northwestern, 1995). He is the translator of Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (Kluwer, 2001). He serves as Editor-in-Chief, Continental Philosophy Review, and as General Editor, Northwestern University Press “SPEP” Series.
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