Overview

Emotions are intrinsically linked to our forms of life—the unique, shared ways of being and acting that shape our identity. This book redefines emotions as embodied actions, rather than mere internal states. By taking an ontological approach, Daniel Rueda Garrido explores how fundamental emotions like joy, fear, love, and anger are woven into the fabric of our communities, influencing who we are and how we interact with one another. Moving beyond traditional psychology and naturalism, this approach reveals that these emotions are not just internal experiences, but essential expressions of our collective, self-imposed ways of living within a community. Rueda’s exploration offers a deeper understanding of self-consciousness and challenges traditional ways of thinking about emotional existence. It reveals the profound connection between feeling, action, and belonging.

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9781666974096

Table of Contents

Reviews

Emotions and Community offers a remarkably unified and original ontology of the emotions. Rueda Garrido brings together phenomenology, social ontology, and the history of emotions to argue that emotions are not inner episodes or mere bodily reactions, but the lived awareness of meaningful action within a shared form of life. The book develops a subtle account of ‘praxical images’, of emotional dispositions and of the constitutive role of communities in shaping what can be felt, by whom and towards what. It engages critically with naturalist, cognitivist and constructivist approaches while avoiding both reductionism and relativism. Philosophers of mind, scholars of affect, and historians of emotional communities will all find in this work a rigorous and thought-provoking framework that deserves wide attention. -- Ernesto Castro Córdoba * Autonomous University of Madrid * Emotions and Community: An Ontological Account offers a bold and lucid rethinking of what emotions are and what they do in human life. Drawing on phenomenological ontology and engaging with figures such as Wittgenstein, Scheler, and Sartre, Daniel Rueda Garrido contends that emotions are not inner states that merely accompany or cause behavior, but the very consciousness of meaningful action within a shared form of life. On this view, emotions are neither brute physiological reactions nor private mental episodes; they are ways in which a community’s implicit image of the human being is enacted and sustained. What distinguishes this book is its systematic development of ‘form of life’ as an ontological unit unifying principle and practice, subjectivity and community, affect and normativity. To understand one’s emotions, Rueda argues, is to uncover the form of life one has freely—and often unreflectively—made ‘necessary’ for oneself. This book deserves a central place in current debates on emotions, social ontology, and philosophical anthropology. -- Ricardo Parellada * Complutense University of Madrid *

Author Information

Daniel Rueda Garrido teaches philosophy at Colegio San José, Málaga, Spain.

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