The Boundaries of Affectivity (and a Coda on Extended Consciousness)

Abstract

In this contribution I will offer a rough guide through “situated affectivity”, a small galaxy of theories, ideas, intuitions which are recently growing at the boundaries between philosophy of emotion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science. In the last years, we are witnessing a real “affective turn” in the domain of analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and situated affectivity is an excellent example of what is going on in the field. In the first part, I will present the main versions of situated affectivity, distinguishing between the ideas of situated or scaffolded emotions (Griffi-ths, Scarantino 2009; Colombetti, Krueger 2015) and properly extended emotions (Carter et al. 2016; Colombetti, Roberts 2015), and showing their link to the corresponding idea of the mind: scaffolded, extended or otherwise. In the second part, I will further explore the connection between situated affectivity and the domain of extended mind: I will argue that, even if situated affectivity could be in principle evaluated independently from any particular theory about the mind, dealing with situated affectivity is, beside its independent interest, also a good way to tackle an unsettled problem in the literature on extended mind, namely extended consciousness.