Description
Book SynopsisIn Feelings of Believing: Psychology, History, Phenomenology, Ryan Hickerson demonstrates that philosophers as diverse as Hume, Descartes, Husserl, and William James all treated believing as feeling. He argues that doxastic sentimentalism, thereby, is considerably more central to modern epistemology than has standardly been recognized. When the empirical psychology of overconfidence and attention is brought to bear on the history of philosophy and the phenomenology of believing, all point toward belief as fundamentally affective. Understanding believing as feeling has the potential to make us better believers, both by encouraging suspicion of unexamined certainties and by focusing attention on credulity. Hickerson argues that believing is typically felt but not given attention by the believer, and he suggests that virtuous believers are those who pay careful attention to their own sentiments-- who attempt to raise their beliefs to the level of judgments.
Trade Review"Hickerson's Feelings of Believing is an ambitious work, and fulfills these ambitions. It is historically sensitive, but with a modernising eye, while also being empirically informed. It will appeal to a wide variety of scholars." -- Hsueh Qu, National University of Singapore
"This groundbreaking book sets out to assess the prospects for doxastic sentimentalism – epistemologically, psychologically, phenomenologically, and historically. Nuanced, subtle and trenchantly argued, Hickerson’s book breaks new ground in exploring the rich and complex nexus of relationships between cognition and sentiment." -- Wayne Martin, University of Essex
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Recovering Sentimentalism
Chapter One: Feeling Disbelief: Hume’s Doxastic Sentimentalism
Chapter Two: Feeling Certain and The Circle: A Sentimental Interpretation of Cartesian Clarity
Chapter Three: The Psychology of Overconfidence
Chapter Four: The Feeling of Self-Evidence: Husserlian Evidenz as Gefühlsindex
Appendix to Chapter Four: Straw Men in Dark Times
Chapter Five: Doxasticity as Electricity: William James and the Live Hypothesis
Chapter Six: Attention and Feeling Noticed: Phenomenology and Psychology
Conclusion: Beliefy Feelings, Whence and Whither
Bibliography
