I reconstruct the preliminary arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic, which provide the criteria of on which Kant’s central arguments will turn. Kant characterizes intuition as (i) object-giving, (ii) immediate, (iii) affection-dependent representation containing (iv) a matter of sensation that can be distinguished from (v) an a priori form. I explain Kant’s curiously teleological claim that all thought “aims at” intuition in terms of his “baseline conception” of intuition as providing nonintellectual grounds of truth: This is what it means for intuition to be object-giving. I then argue that Kant’s theory of discursive marks entails that object-giving representations must be immediate. Further, the intuition paired with a discursive intellect must be receptive (i.e. affection dependent). These claims can be justified via pure apperception. What cannot be is Kant’s characterization of intuition as sensible. But I show that Kant’s form/matter distinction and his subsequent arguments require only the receptivity of intuition, not its sensory embodiment. The chief doctrines of the Aesthetic can be justified via pure apperception, as part of a top-down approach to intuition.

I continue explicating my Stufenleiter by distinguishing receptivity from sensibility, which are often conflated in the literature. I argue that the preestablished harmony theories of Leibniz and Crusius, as well as the “hyperphysical influx” Kant ascribes to Plato, involve receptive but non-sensible modes of intuition. I identify significant and underappreciated puzzles afflicting Kant’s notion of sensible affection: Kant has no account of how material objects can affect an immaterial mind, nor any account of how an immaterial mind can sensibly affect itself. I conclude by observing that many of the distinctions I discuss, such as the receptivity/sensibility distinction, track different levels of abstraction and that this can have significant consequences for motivating interpretations. Emphasizing sensibility often motivates phenomenological interpretations (Parsons), whereas semantic or “logical” readings (Hintikka) typically emphasize receptivity. I illustrate the fruitfulness of this diagnosis by distinguishing three different conceptions of the singularity of intuition, each associated with a different level of abstraction: receptive, sensible, and human.

This chapter describes positive interpersonal processes: interactions between people that actively enhance their close relationships. It begins by describing the field’s shift toward studying positive processes and highlighting the utility of considering positive phenomena as unique from negative phenomena. Then, it reviews three interpersonal behaviors that have been shown to enhance relationships and describes the evidence supporting their benefits. First, spending time together (particularly spending time on novel and exciting activities) enhances relationships by enabling partners to meet their self-expansion needs in ongoing relationships. A second positive process is co-experiencing positive emotions, such as joy, amusement, and excitement, which augment and sustain positive experiences and facilitate interpersonal synchrony. Finally, this chapter reviews the benefits of communicating affection and the individual differences in how and how often people express affection.

Were Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron as fond of each other as their body language suggested when they remembered together the armistice of World War I in 2018? And what was the message conveyed by the ‘brotherly kiss’ exchanged by Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the GDR? Politicians undoubtedly like some colleagues more than others. Yet it is questionable whether personal feelings have any effect on political decision-making. This chapter examines what role national interests play in the realm of political friendship, in the Italo-German brotherhood in arms during National Socialism and Fascism or the much-vaunted German-Soviet Friendship imposed from above. When Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle pursued those interests and negotiated the Franco-German Elysée Treaty of Friendship in 1963, there was initially no sign of any affection between these two very different men. That evolved in the course of the talks and made the signing of the document much easier. Thanks to the treaty, the citizens of the formerly hostile states then had the chance to get to know one another better and build friendships through youth exchanges and twin-town programmes.

GC II 7 supports Aristotle’s elemental theory, according to which the four elements possess a common matter that enables their inter-transformation, over the superficially similar Empedoclean one, by arguing that the former theory, and it alone, can accommodate the formation of homogenous stuffs like flesh and bone from the four elements. According to the interpretation offered here, these stuffs are mixtures in the sense spelled out in GC II 10, and appear to be exhibit the kind of strong uniformity that some interpreters have denied to Aristotelian mixtures. Special attention is devoted to bringing out the significance of elemental mixture for Aristotle’s twin projects in GC: understanding the causes of generation and destruction and establishing a theory of the elements. Explaining the formation of elemental mixtures is a crucial step in showing how the generation of more complex substances is possible and how the four elements, as he conceives them, function as elements of more complex substances.

Aristotle represents many of his predecessors as having arrived at their views about psuchē from reflection on the fact that knowledge is of beings; it is this fact, together with the principle that knowledge is “like by like,” which led them to the view that psuchē is an amalgam of the elements of all beings. But though Aristotle thinks little of this view, he accepts the considerations (duly qualified) from which it is derived. Now, the principle that knowledge is “like by like” is an explanatory principle; it locates the “cause” of knowledge in an antecedent likeness between its subjects and objects. Moreover, analogous principles have been offered to explain analogous facts, and they too are principles which (duly qualified) Aristotle accepts. But though we might expect the qualifications to vary from case to case, still we might wonder whether there isn’t some point they all enforce. In this chapter I argue there is such a point: that the explanatory “likeness” between the parties in question is never just any likeness, such as obtains “as it happened” or by chance, but is always an antecedent likeness in some form common and natural to all parties involved.

According to Aristotle there is an important distinction between human beings and the rest of nature: while all other creatures develop as they do ‘necessarily or for the most part’, the development of human beings depends on their own efforts. This applies not only to their acquisition of technical and intellectual accomplishments, but to their character as well. Emotions or affections (pathē) play an important role in that development; they have an interesting ‘passive-cum-active’ character. Although their experience is not determined by choice, it is due to understanding and evaluating the particular situation. Reasoning is therefore in a way involved in the formation of human affections by habituation. The process of habituation determines not only how human beings act, but also how they feel. The affective part of the soul, though it is non-rational, is capable of ‘listening’ to reason more or less well and thereby the person acquires good or bad dispositions to act. Thus, in a human being, affections can be reasonable or unreasonable: The distinctive reason-responsiveness of the affections helps to explain why, despite certain natural predispositions, successful human development cannot simply be attributed to nature.

Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems just as the word ‘emotion’ was emerging into common currency. In its first usages, traceable back to the 1590s, the term referred to the general disturbance suggested by the Latin term emovere (to move out), and Shakespeare and his contemporaries indeed often described as motions the impulses that aroused the mind, body and soul. The introduction to Shakespeare and Emotion explains the rationale for giving serious and sustained attention to the emotions as a way of approaching Shakespeare’s works as art from the past, as well as the place of these works in the present. It offers a brief survey of Shakespeare’s classical and early modern sources for his understanding of affect, and an account of how the present-day surge of interest in emotional experience builds on earlier strands of Shakespearean scholarship from the early to mid-twentieth century. The Introduction concludes with a survey of the volume’s chapters, organised around the assumption that emotion offers a deeply promising (and often challenging) prospect for imagining and enacting change.

Chapter 4 seeks to resolve the apparent contradictions in Kant's account of the thing in itself and related terms by interpreting the relevant passages in light of his critique of Wolffian metaphysics. The chapter departs from both the two-aspect view defended by Allison and the two-object view that Guyer attributes to Kant. Moving beyond this opposition, the chapter dissociates Kant’s remarks on the objects that affect our senses from his use of the term ‘thing in itself’ and its cognates in the context of his critique of Wolffian and post-Wolffian metaphysics. In the latter context, it is argued, the term refers to things that can be thought but cannot constitute objects of cognition. The chapter shows that Kant’s account of the thing in itself in this sense and, hence, the distinction between phenomena and noumena allows him at once to limit the scope of former ontology to possible objects of experience and to affirm the ideas of the soul, the world as such, and God as noumena that can be thought but not known.

Close relationships are, at the same time, a source of risk and a resource that can mitigate risk, fear, and insecurity. Specifically, close relationships provide the potential for rejection and hurt, but a) close others can behave in ways that diminish these perceived relational risks to encourage deepening connection, and b) involvement in close relationships can mitigate risks external to relationships (i.e., risks in the physical and social environment) to facilitate personal thriving. This chapter will describe the relational risks individuals face when they form interdependent relationships as well as partner behaviors that demonstrate commitment and promote trust (e.g., sacrifice, affectionate touch) to reduce the perceived cost of interdependence. Although all people are subjected to risks when they form interdependent relationships, individuals differ in the extent to which they perceive risks and in the ways in which their partners might mitigate these risks. People with insecure attachment orientations (i.e., high levels of attachment anxiety and/or attachment avoidance) are especially concerned with relational risks, and they benefit when partners enact behaviors that are sensitive to their specific insecurities. In addition to relational risks, this chapter will also describe how partners regulate external risks that people face when they experience threats (e.g., stressors, health problems) or opportunities (e.g., goals, positive challenges). Research suggests that supportive and affectionate partner behaviors provide a sense of security to mitigate external risks and encourage exploration, which may be especially critical for individuals with insecure attachment orientations. Finally, this chapter will conclude with suggestions for future research.

In Neoplatonism, kosmos is the first ideal entity that human beings can emulate in their search for god-likeness. Kosmos displays perfection, harmony and completeness, all regulative of ideal selfhood. The chapter discusses cosmic activity as a human telos. It aims to contextualise human action within this ideal and to show the limits as such an ideal. First, human bodies are not totalities like the body of the universe or kosmos, nor perfect like the bodies of stars. Second, since human encounters are between parts, not totalities, human action is essentially different from the perfect and self-sufficient activities of cosmic entities. It involves either affecting or being affected in an encounter with something external to oneself. At 3.3.5.40-6, Plotinus offers a brief but telling glimpse at the challenges of human moral life. By using the example of the Trojan War, he outlines different kinds of encounters between virtuous and vicious people. Through situating the Homeric example in the Platonic framework of affecting and being affected, the text yields an opening for a theory of practical action and morality. Action emerges as ontologically relational, cosmologically situational and morally interpersonal. This human predicament is the inescapable framework of ethics for embodied human beings.