ART -- abstracts:
Richard Wollheim
After an initial consideration of the way in which
general aesthetics, which studies the nature of art as such, stands to
particular aesthetics, or the study of this or that art, I shall further
examine the claim that painting is an essentially visual art. Basically
this is a claim about how painting generates meaning: painting generates
meaning through its exploitation of certain characteristic visual abilities
and experiences. Since representation lies at the core of pictorial meaning,
this takes us back to "seeing-in". I want to make some corrections and
some additions to the conception of seeing-in that I have previously argued
for. I shall address the batch of "resemblance" theories of representation
that are currently in vogue.
Terry Smith
During the 1960s and in the early 1970s Richard Wollheim
wrote a series on essays on the visual arts that seemed then, as they do
now, to be contributions of extraordinary brilliance. They were triggered
by developments in contemporary art, such as Minimalism, by current art
historical books of importance, such as Gombrich’s Art and Illusion,
and by perennial problems in aesthetics, such as the nature of representation
and the concept of style. A demonstration of analytical philosophy at its
most inventive, their impact was a powerful one, especially when collected
in books such as On Art and the Mind and pursued in others, such as Art
and Its Objects. This paper will aim to define that contribution in
terms of its moment, and ask how does it look now, so many art theoretical
and philosophical light years later.
Emotion -- abstracts:
Richard Wollheim
Philosophers have neglected the topic of the emotions,
or else assimilated the emotions to either belief or desire. I shall establish
the uniqueness of emotion, and the related notion of an "attitude". In
any analysis attention must be paid to the phenomenology of emotion, to
the function of emotions in our lives, and to the circumstances in which
particular emotions arise. Emotions, I claim, are singularly related to
satisfied or frustrated desire.
Paul Redding
In On The Emotions, Richard Wollheim advocates
a "repsychologised" approach to the philosophy of emotion as opposed to
the generally "linguistic" approach popular in recent analytic philosophy.
Critical of the view that emotional states could be understood as mere
inarticulate "feelings", advocates of this latter type of approach had
attempted to capture the representational and cognitive dimensions of emotional
phenomena -- for example, their belief-like capacity of being directed
to worldly objects and states of affairs and their ability to interact
rationally with desires and beliefs. But as Wollheim points out, the linguistic
approach, typically reducing emotions to "propositional attitudes", results
in an excessively intellectualised or rationalistic picture of emotional
phenomena. In contrast, drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie
Klein, Wollheim stresses the centrality of pre-linguistic phantasy in emotional
dynamics. In this paper I suggest that the difficulty with such a view
is to hold on to the representational dimension of phantasy, and propose
an alternative which views emotions as cognitively interpreted affective
states, and treats affects as grounded in bodily-based pre-linguistic forms
of affective communication. On this view, affect is seen as a more fundamental
mental state than either belief or desire, and the positive or negative
affective charge of emotions is not grounded, as with Wollheim’s theory,
in the satisfaction or frustration of desire.
Paul Griffiths
Wollheim’s 1999 theory of emotions is a theory of
what psychologists call ‘emotion episodes’ - relatively extended sequences
of thought, feeling and behavior. Like Frijda, Mandler and many others,
Wollheim offers an account of the ‘typical’ or ‘predominant’ course of
such an episode. But emotion episodes are very different entities from
the most intensively studied emotions - the so-called ‘basic emotions’
of the Tomkins-Izard-Ekman tradition - which last five seconds at most.
No doubt Wollheim would not count these responses as emotions, but they
are the only emotional responses knowledge of which is empirically well-grounded
and concerning whose nature there is a strong consensus in the scientific
literature. This consensus emerged in the 1960s with the confirmation of
Darwin’s 1872 proposal that certain emotional behaviors are pan-cultural
and strongly homologous to behaviors in non-human primates. It has long
been thought that these emotional responses are realised by circuits in
the 'limbic brain' and that this is reflected in 'twin pathways' by which
stimulus information is routed separately to emotional and to perceptual/cognitive
systems. Recent advances in affective neuroscience have demonstrated this
beyond doubt for fear. In this paper I look at how one might try to build
on an understanding of these 'basic emotions' to model the complex emotions
that mediate human social interaction; the emotions that are of greatest
interest to Wollheim and to aestheticians and moral and social philosophers
more generally.
Currently, the most popular proposal to relate
the basic emotions to more complex emotional episodes is the revival of
the early C20 James/Lange theory by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
and his philosophical interpreters. These authors have argued that the
phenomenology that accompanies basic emotions is the perception of bodily
changes caused by the subcortical circuits that drive those responses.
They argue further that these 'somatic appraisals' play important functional
roles in cognition and action. More complex emotions involve subtly differentiated
somatic appraisals and cognitive activity realised in the neo-cortex that
accompanies some combination of basic emotions. This approach identifies
each emotion with one type of somatic appraisal and focuses on the functions
of emotions in the internal, cognitive economy of the organism. In this
paper, however, I consider a very different perspective on complex emotional
episodes, based on recent work by 'transactional' psychologists of emotion.
These theorists focus on the functions of emotion in interactions between
organisms. Emotions are moves we make as we negotiate how we will be treated
by other people and how we will think of ourselves and our situation in
life. Sulking, for example, in which we sabotage what would normally be
mutually rewarding interactions with a social or sexual partner and reject
attempts at reconciliation after conflict, can be seen as a strategy for
seeking a better global deal in that particular relationship. The subject
sulks because of what sulking will achieve, as much or more than because
of what has happened. These ideas have a certain resonance with Sartre’s
theory of the emotions, which Wollheim regards as a theory of malformed
or misdirected emotional responses. From a transactional perspective, Sartre
is describing normal, functional emotions and the apparently pathological
nature of the psychological processes he describes is merely the effect
of his indulging the French philosopher’s penchant for calling a spade
a conspiracy against the soil.
I argue that these transactional ideas can be
smoothly incorporated with basic emotions theory. Transactional views of
emotion have traditionally been linked to the idea that emotions are quasi-intentional
or quasi-voluntary and to the idea that they are less directly the products
of evolution than the basic emotions. These linkages are mistaken.
Drawing on the work of Robert Hinde and Alan
Fridlund and on standard literature on the evolution of animal signaling,
I point out that many emotional behaviors in animals are most scientifically
tractable when classified in terms of the role they play in mediating social
interactions. I argue that there is at least no reason to assume that the
emotion categories generated in this way correspond one-to-one to underlying
motivational states or to specific phenomenology. A particular motivational
state need not motivate the same 'move' in all contexts and different motivational
states may lead to the production of the same move in different contexts.
I argue that the distinction between the emotional behavior that is produced
and the 'real' emotion that is experienced is profoundly unhelpful for
understanding animal models and that it may be less generally applicable
to human emotions than is usually supposed. My conclusion is that basic
emotions are probably more social and ‘strategic’ in both their actual
performance and their biological function than has traditionally been supposed.
They will integrate smoothly into more extended emotion episodes when these
are themselves conceived as strategic social behavior. This smooth integration
will occur both when basic emotions are conceived as parts of emotion episodes
at the present time and when the basic emotions are conceived as the phylogenetic
precursors of extended emotion episodes in humans.
Psychoanalysis -- abstracts:
Richard Wollheim
I shall claim that, though philosophy was misguided
in its exclusive preoccupation with the epistemic status of psychoanalytic
claims, it would do well to concentrate on the kind of evidence that is
peculiar to psychoanalysis. In this regard, the transference, which has
been disregarded by philosophers, is of unique importance. In my talk I
shall examine the notions of transference and counter-transference interpretations,
and the material on which they are based: specifically, projective identification
with its unique structure. In studying such phenomena a philosophical consideration
of psychoanalysis will do what it can do best: bringing out the underlying
conception of the mind that psychoanalysis works with.
Russell Grigg: Crucial moments in analysis and what
we can learn from them
I will discuss some examples, taken mainly
from Freud's case histories, of the ways in which the analyst's interpretations
can have an impact upon the treatment. I want to distinguish between the
element of repetition in the transference and those features, always present
in an analysis, where, for better or worse, the analyst's intervention
plays a crucial role in the way in which the transference subsequently
unfolds. This second feature of the transference is obviously central to
the analytic relationship and raises questions about the type of evidence
that psychoanalysis gives.
Tamas Pataki: Wishfulfilment,
Phantasy, Agency.
'In several of his seminal writings on the
philosophy of psychoanalysis Richard Wollheim provides accounts of the
nature of wishfulfilment andphantasy which are at the heart of his Intentional
reconstruction ofpsychoanalytic metapsychology. I argue that these accounts
are, in various ways, inadequate. In particular, they are inadequate to
the understanding of some of the clinical phenomena which are mostly aptly
described in terms of internal object relations and which press for partitive
conceptions of the self.'