The concept of ‘neo-emotions’ is based on the idea that our emotional range changes over time and in context. Not only have the meanings of classic terms such as anger, happiness, or embarrassment been transformed, but new kinds of emotions have also emerged. This workshop brings together scholars from different disciplines to examine how feelings become established emotions, which conditions catalyse ‘inventing’ new emotions, and what role digital technologies and AI play in this context.
Recent work in the history, philosophy, and sociology of emotions has drawn attention to the concept of ‘neo-emotions’, the idea that our emotional range changes over time and in context. In a formative essay published in 2024, Marci D. Cottingham has suggested that neo-emotions occur when the relationship between our emotional vocabulary and our environment is disrupted, and that we must describe a feeling that hitherto had no name. Nostalgia, for example, became socially recognisable only in the late 17th century when it was first designated a mental illness suffered by war-shocked veterans. Ambivalence was often experienced, but was not named until 1910, when it was introduced as a specialised term to describe schizophrenia. Disgust, anger, happiness, and embarrassment all have long etymological histories, yet new meanings have emerged for these terms over time. This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of emotion scholars to grapple with the following and related questions:
Introductions and Overview
Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University (USA) & Senior Fellow, College for Social Sciences and Humanities
Eva Weber-Guskar, Ruhr University Bochum (Germany)
On Methodology: The Role of the Interdisciplines
Moderator: Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University (USA)
Neo-Emotions in Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Marci Cottingham, Kenyon College (USA)
Coffee break
Moderator: Mark Halawa-Sarholz, College for Social Sciences and Humanities (Germany)
Awe or Awe Emotions? New and Old Approaches to Large Feelings
Ciarán Kavanagh, Ghent University (Belgium)
The Invention of Ambivalence
Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University (USA)
Commentary and Discussion
Lunch break
Moderator: Eva Weber-Guskar, Ruhr University Bochum (Germany)
Between Settlement and Justice: Commercial Mediation as a Site of Neo-Emotions
Alessandra Minissale, Uppsala University (Sweden)
What if AI has Neo-Emotions? A Provocation for Emotion Studies
Andrew McStay, Bangor University (UK)
Commentary and Discussion
Coffee break
Invent Your Own Emotion
Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University (USA)
What Have We Learned? Where do We Go from Here?
Moderators: Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University (USA)
& Eva Weber-Guskar, Ruhr University Bochum (Germany)
Dinner
Prof. Kathryn Temple
Georgetown University (USA) | Law, Literary Studies
E-mail: kathryn.temple@college-uaruhr.de
Kathryn D. Temple is Professor of Law & Humanities at Georgetown University (USA) and a three-term former chair of the English Department. Her most recent book Loving Justice (NYU Press 2019) focused on legal emotions in 18th-century England while her current project, entitled Ambivalence: Law, Culture, and the Invention of a Modern Emotion, is under contract at NYU Press. She has published widely on the history of legal emotions with essays in Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, Law & Literature, and the Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities among others, and she was a co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021).
©
© Peter Rigaud
Prof. Eva Weber-Guskar
Ruhr-University Bochum | Ethics and Philosophy of Emotions
E-mail: eva.weber-guskar@rub.de
©
© Peter Rigaud
Prof. Eva Weber-Guskar
Ruhr-University Bochum | Ethics and Philosophy of Emotions
E-mail: eva.weber-guskar@rub.de
Eva Weber-Guskar is a professor of ethics and philosophy of emotions at the Institute of Philosophy I at Ruhr University Bochum. She is currently working on ethical aspects of theories of the good life, including the temporality of emotions. On the other hand, she works in the field of the philosophy of artificial intelligence, focusing on the ethics of affective computing. She is interested in a critical analysis of the understanding of emotions in AI contexts generally and investigates the possibility of appropriate emotional relationships with social chatbots and similar applications. She was a principal investigator (PI) in the interdisciplinary research group ‘INTERACT! New Forms of Social Interaction with Intelligent Systems’ from 2021 to 2024. Before taking up her position in Bochum in 2019, she held guest professorships in Berlin, Vienna (Austria), Zurich (Switzerland) and Erlangen (Germany), and was a visiting scholar at New York University (USA).
Recent publications include:
Weber-Guskar, Eva (2024): Gefühle der Zukunft. Wie wir mit emotionaler KI unser Leben verändern. Ullstein.
Weber-Guskar, Eva (2021): ‘How to feel about emotionalized artificial intelligence? When robot pets, holograms, and chatbots become affective partners’. Ethics and Information Technology 23(4), pp. 601−610.
Weber-Guskar, Eva (2023): ‘Temporal Textures. Time, Meaning, and the Good Life’. European Journal of Philosophy 31, 2023 (4), pp. 1091−1104.