Dr. Jan Slaby

Over the next semesters, some of my teaching at the University of Marburg will be in the area of the philosophy of psychiatry. After an introductory course in the winter term of 2009/2010, I will focus on specific themes such as the nature of and discourse surrounding depressive illness, and also work on delusions and pathologies of background affect. In addition, I will be teaching introduction to logic, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger, and also on various core themes in theoretical philosophy. I also plan to continue teaching "Critical Neuroscience", probably in the format of a block seminar with Suparna Choudhury that we will teach repeatedly at various places. Other areas of interest: normativity in science, alternatives to representationalism, material culture, critical theory, themes from the early Heidegger.

In the past, I taught a lot of philosophy of mind, philosophy of emotion, and phenomenology.

Apart from that, my main philosophical work is the development of an account of how emotions and other feelings contribute to our experience of the world and of ourselves. I call this affective intentionality. Emotions are immensely important to a human life, in ways that are not yet fully appreciated, let alone understood. In my dissertation Gefühl und Weltbezug I spelled out the outline of such an account of affective intentionality.

Since finishing my book I worked on adding substance to the theory. For example, I now focus on what the British philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe calls existential feelings – affective background structures of experience that tacitly shape most or all of the meaningful relations to the world that a person entertains. Although quite important, these feelings have been utterly neglected by most theorists so far. A better understanding of these felt existential orientations can help shed light on central aspects of human existence.

I am also trying to extend work done in my dissertation to a social context. Human affectivity, as well as human intentionality overall, is essentially a social affair. To spell this out in a sane way is a non-trivial task, particularly given the fact that most contemporary approaches to the mind are still openly or tacitly Cartesian – that is, they assume as their starting point the individual mind and its monadic relations to the outer world. In general, I try to undo some of the damage scientific division of labour has done to philosophy of mind by explicitly including perspectives from various disciplines: Psychology, Neuroscience, Sociology, History, Cultural Studies – to name just the most important ones. My overall philosophical outlook is that of the historically and socially sensitive critical thinker, broadly in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, however with additional focus on the central methodological standards of analytical philosophy, on some insights of existential phenomenology, and with a more thorough interdisciplinary orientation.