Emotions

Catalog description

Emotions are an essential aspect of our mental lives. We make significant efforts to express them, or contain and suppress them when this seems the right thing to do. They lead us to make both mundane and life-changing decisions. For some of us, they define who we are. But what precisely is an emotion? Are emotions universal, experienced in the same way everywhere, or are they determined by culture and society? To what degree are they accessible to us, and can we choose which ones to have? How did people experience sentiments, such as love or shame, in other historical periods? And can we expect Artificial Intelligence to be able to feel the kind of emotions that humans do? Such questions will lie at the heart of this Core Colloquium, which will explore the nature and structure of emotions from various perspectives, based on theories from Western, Asian, and African philosophy, historical accounts, and observations from social psychology and sociology. Through this exploration, the colloquium pursues a richer understanding of human experience and aims to throw light on the challenges of living together in a global society and our attempts to bridge cultural differences.