Heleen Pott, born in Ridderkerk, the Netherlands, in 1952. Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. Socrates-Professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and Assistant Professor at Maastricht University.
Fellow (1 September 2007 – 30 June 2008)
THE RETURN OF WILLIAM JAMES. REDISCOVERING THE BODY IN EMOTION, REASON, AND THE WILL
My research consisted of working on my book project with the provisional title: “The Return of William James. Rediscovering the Body in Emotion, Cognition and Rationality”. The central question is how biological, psychological and cultural perspectives on emotion can be integrated into a new conceptual synthesis. Discussing current notions of emotion, I try to point out entry points for future collaboration between the social sciences, the humanities and neuroscience in the field of emotion studies. During my year at NIAS I became more and more convinced that, firstly, the main challenge for emotion studies today is to submit clear criteria that determine which phenomena are emotions and which not; and secondly, that the recent popularity of William James and neo-Jamesian feeling theories (Damasio 1994, 1999, 2003; LeDoux 1998; Prinz 2004) offers the unique opportunity to clarify fundamental issues regarding embodied appraisals and affective intentionality, and to bring some order into the chaos of current emotion debates.