Title: Surprise as Emotion: Between Startle and Humility
Lecturer: Anthony Steinbock (Professor of Philosophy and Interim Chair, Southern Illinois University; Carbondale and Director, Phenomenology Research Center)
Chairperson: LIU Liangjian (Professor, Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University)
Date: 3:30 pm, November 16th, 2018 (Friday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
The lecturer considers the experience of surprise within the context of my current work on the emotions. To do this, he examines surprise in terms of its belief structure, distinguishing it from a startle (1). The lecturer then suggests that surprise is a being caught off-guard that is related to being attentively turned toward something (2). As the latter, he qualifies surprise as an emotion in its being thrown back on an experience in a way that is different from affectively turning toward something (3). This constitutes surprise as a disequilibrium in distinction to a diremptive experience like we find in the moral emotions of shame or guilt (4). Finally, the lecturer distinguishes surprise from a gift, which is peculiar to the experience of humility. Surprise is an emotion while being neither an affect, like a startle-reflex, nor a moral emotion, like shame, guilt, or humility.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Anthony Steinbock is currently 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; Limit-Phenomena and Phenomenology in Husserl; Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart; Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience; Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. He is the translator of Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. He serves as Editor-in-Chief, Continental Philosophy Review, and as General Editor, Northwestern University Press “SPEP” Series.
