Emotions are fundamentally embodied and intersubjective, not merely cognitive appraisals. Drawing on phenomenology and enactivism, this chapter argues that emotions constitute our experience of the world as meaningful and are inseparable from existential vulnerability—an ontological condition rooted in the lived body's exposure to others and contingency. The introduction surveys competing theories of emotion (cognitive, perceptual, feeling-based, motivational) and contends that all insufficiently address the lived body's richness. The volume's three parts move from phenomenological analyses of emotional life and vulnerability, through psychopathological perspectives, to the transformative role of embodied emotions in psychotherapy, establishing embodiment as the conceptual bridge integrating emotion theory, psychopathology, and psychotherapy.
Rational normativity can be integrated into nature without reduction or dualism by drawing on Thomas Nagel's critique of reductive naturalism and Husserl's refutation of psychologism. The paper develops this through the philosophy of life, focusing on Hans Jonas's conception of the organism and the enactive notion of operational closure. While enactivism offers a non-reductive account of living organization, it remains metaphysically underdetermined; its core commitments are best understood within an Aristotelian metaphysics of life, where substantial form and formal causation ground a realist ontology of life–mind continuity. This Aristotelian naturalism situates cognition and rationality within nature without eliminating their normative character, while phenomenological analysis remains indispensable for explicating the first-personal and normative dimensions of mind.