This chapter introduces the philosophical rationale for investigating emotions in their dimensions of embodiment and existential vulnerability, drawing on phenomenology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy as complementary perspectives. Grounded in phenomenology and enactivism, it argues that emotions are essentially embodied, intersubjective phenomena through which we experience the world as meaningful in the first place. According to this approach, emotions cannot be adequately captured by cognitivist or appraisal-theoretic frameworks alone but must be explored in their embodied dimensions and intertwinement with existential vulnerability. This constitutive vulnerability is described as an ontological condition rooted in the lived body, its essential exposure to others and contingency. The Introduction surveys contemporary philosophy of emotion, mapping competing accounts across cognitive, perceptual, feeling-based, and motivational theories, before arguing that all tend to consider the richness of the lived body insufficiently. The volume’s three parts address the experiential richness of the lived body by moving from phenomenological analyses of emotional life and vulnerability, through psychopathological perspectives, to the transformative role of embodied emotions in psychotherapy. The Introduction thereby establishes embodiment as the conceptual bridge integrating emotion theory, psychopathology, and psychotherapy into a unified inquiry of emotions as a central aspect of human vulnerability.

Using phenomenology to develop Plantinga’s analogy of God and other minds, and in dialogue with Feuerbach’s critique of the God–world difference, this chapter articulates how the order inherent in a work makes manifest the cause of that work even when it remains unknown just how the cause brought about the order. To see the world as created amounts to seeing the world as an ordered work indicating its author amounts to seeing it as created; the world can serve as a kind of protreptic but one that is only understood by those who read it carefully. “That hidden other, whose agency causes the world and me to be, is ‘God’.”

Deductive languages afford many advantages in theory development. They ensure that different people with different biases can understand the logic; they ensure that the logic can be repeated, and they ensure that we can reason from empirical tests to the support or nonsupport for the theory. However, the deductive form also requires that the concepts used are precisely specified. A defining characteristic of such deductive arguments is that the premises enable us to reason to a conclusion that does not add any information beyond the premises. This can be compared to inductive arguments in which the conclusion amplifies or adds information to the premises and because of this does not provide the advantages of deduction.

Diagrams are essential for interpreting complex datasets and making discoveries. This chapter examines how diagrams in use make private thoughts, models, and phenomena accessible intersubjectively and complex datasets surveyable. When designed and used conventionally, diagrams are bearers of tradition and culture. This chapter shows that they can also be resources for scientific understanding, pruning and cultivating datasets, and achieving social accountability. Diagrams are the ground on which scientists can play and experiment with data: researchers suspend sequential courses of action for explorations in which they gain insights into possible interpretations and their work’s robustness as they decide which action among alternatives to make consequential. This chapter describes this play in the making of a discovery. As diagrams are standardized and used at many places, the resistance that their users experience can be ascribed to their efforts to be accountable to researchers elsewhere.

This chapter situates the study within a broader historical, political, and scholarly context, and presents the methodology upon which it draws. First, the chapter sketches the history of Gambella as a site of encounter between the Ethiopian state and Nuer society and examines the historical and anthropological scholarships on Ethiopia’s peripheries and on the eastern frontier of Nuerland. It then discusses my own encounter with Gambella, the context and political environment in which research took place, the local religious landscape and the place of Messianic Jews in it, and the ‘data collection’ methods and research approach deployed. The final sections of the chapter explore my positionality in Gambella, as a Jewish Israeli researcher among Messianic Jews, and the sort of intersubjective encounters that informed this study.

Chapter 3 explores the role of small group dynamics and collective emotions in facilitating group theorizing, provoking unconventional scientific thought, and facilitating the rise of new scientific movements. It describes RA’s idioculture, their context of theoretical discovery, and the socio-emotional practices Holling used to spark transformative scientific creativity – a process that he called “island time.” I show how holding short, energetic meetings on remote islands with group rituals, personality selectivity, social bonding, charismatic leadership, and inductions to a secret scientific society created what I call “hot spots and hot moments.” These are brief but intense bursts of collective emotion, intersubjectivity, group creativity, and exceptional scientific performance where transformative science is conducted and faith in the group and its ideas were generated. This highlights new aspects of theory group dynamics, including the bursty nature of creative production within them, and the role of collective emotional states, relationships, and evocative locations for producing innovative scientific knowledge that can support new scientific movements.

What Fichte found most inspiring in Kant’s critical philosophy was its Copernican focus on the transcendental conditions of conscious thought, its doctrine of the autonomy of reason, and, most especially, its fundamental commitment to freedom of the will. Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies of right are especially close in form and content. Both works treat the philosophy of right as a separate subject that is independent of ethical philosophy, and both ground their theories in a fundamental right of freedom from interference. We see, right at the outset, the importance of freedom in modern moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense. We begin, however, with Fichte’s ethics. Fichte’s ethics of autonomy or, as he usually prefers to say, “self-sufficiency” or “independence,” departs from Kant’s in several important ways. The most important structurally is that whereas autonomy is at the heart of grounding what Kant takes to be the fundamentally formal character of the moral law. Fichte holds, against “all of the authors who have treated ethics merely formally,” that self-sufficiency or independence is a “material” kind of freedom. Fichte’s ethics sets autonomous self-determination as a fundamental moral end, and is ultimately consequentialist.

This chapter focuses on digital collaboration when learning an additional language (L2), a specific type of learner–learner interaction. In CALL contexts, collaboration has almost exclusively been researched in connection with writing, which will be the focus of this chapter. The chapter first provides a definition of collaboration versus cooperation and then a literature review of digital collaboration, mainly in writing contexts. We conclude with a list of strategies for promoting collaboration and suggestions for future collaboration contexts and research.

Continuing the exploration of categories related to the attitudinal ones, yet going beyond them, this chapter focuses primarily on the concept of subjectivity, and secondarily on the related concept of mirativity. It revisits the distinction between subjective and objective modality as it is traditionally made in the literature. It offers an alternative analysis in terms of the concept of subjectivity vs. intersubjectivity. It also considers the relationship between (inter)subjectivity, as relevant for the attitudinal categories, and two other major notions of subjectivity, notably Traugott’s and Langacker’s. It argues that these different concepts concern different phenomena, although all of them are relevant for the domain of the attitudinal categories. The chapter moreover explores the status of (inter)subjectivity relative to the qualificational hierarchy. It thereby draws in mirativity, as a semantically similar dimension. And it reconsiders the status of experienced, hearsay and memory, as dimensions that share some relevant characteristics with (inter)subjectivity and mirativity.

Chapter 1 presents my “alternative fieldwork,” how I make sense of my predecessors’ fieldwork and fieldnotes. I introduce Xia Xizhou in its historical cultural context, including its colonial history and changing kinship, economy, and schooling system. I contextualize the multiple boundaries, identities, and relationships between the researched and the researchers and highlight children's agency. I recover the experience of native research assistants, not just as mediators between anthropologists and children, but as lively characters participating in children’s moral development journey. I expose the challenges of reconstructing this ethnography and the puzzles I encountered. I reveal the inherent ethical dimension of actions and interactions that made ethnographic knowledge possible. I also draw from my own experience and expertise to discern the voices, silences and voids in this archive. Throughout this chapter, I connect my discussion of reinterpreting historical fieldnotes to children's developing social cognition and moral sensibilities, which provides the foundation for intersubjectivity and communication in the original fieldwork and in the making of fieldnotes.

This chapter discusses the poetics of familiarity embodied in the Romantic essay. It locates the origins of that poetics in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ of 1800 and 1802 to Lyrical Ballads. Responding in turn to the famous preface, the three most notable ‘familiar’ essayists of the era, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, revise a manifesto for poetry into one for prose, a celebration of nature into a proclamation of the city. In their practice, the familiar essay becomes the exemplary form of urban expression in the Romantic era. The characteristic procedure of the essay is the slide from the familiar to the ideal and back again, by directly articulating the ideal bearing of the familiar subject, or by a range of other idealising (and essayistic) strategies.

This chapter provides an analysis of present theories and conceptualizations of intersubjectivity as well as psychological processes that have conceptual overlaps with intersubjectivity. The analysis shows how what counts as “intersubjective” behavior reflects the assumptions and analytic frames of each theorization and disciplinary focus. For example, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches define intersubjectivity as tied to language, whereas psychodynamic and cognitive science theories define intersubjectivity as primarily affective or embodied. A cultural critique is bolstered by findings from both cross-culture and within-culture studies of children’s interactions with adults and peers that show the predominance of nonverbal modes of interaction, such as mutual observation. These findings support a theory of intersubjectivity that allows for multiple forms and dimensions of interactive behavior, considers the cultural and historical context of the interaction, and recognizes how tools and tasks mediate shared activity

This chapter describes the development and validation of an observational measure of collaborative competence that can be used in naturalistic settings. The measure was initially developed and validated through in situ observations within an urban bilingual Head Start classroom. The details of the methods chosen derive from 13 principles for assessing intersubjectivity and collaboration according to the findings and arguments outlined in the previous chapters. These chapters argued for a culturally expansive, emergent, activity-based, and developmentally informed approach to defining collaborative competence. Each principle is elaborated with specific procedures and measures. The chapter discusses ethnographic details of data collection within five urban Head Start preschool centers over the course of a year. The chapter reports on coding of observational measures along with their psychometric properties.

This chapter reports on the results of the coding scheme designed to assess collaborative learning activities during early elementary school described in Chapter 7. The scheme measures dialogic, activity-based, and nonverbal intersubjectivity and collaborative engagement. Three video-recorded, teacher-facilitated pedagogical activities are used for the analysis. These activities reflect findings from the play-based pedagogy literature in that they involve a mixture of teacher and child contributions. Teachers scaffold the engagement and understanding of a small group while following the children’s lead. Each activity includes open-ended exploration of a material by the children. The findings show that two different videos with the same teacher used similar forms of exploratory talk most often, whereas the other teacher used other forms of dialogue most often. In addition, intersubjectivity and collaborative engagement among all three groups peaked during active shared engagement with the materials. These periods coincided with less dialogue and occurred in the middle of the activity.