Ingo Günzler

Full member:  February 2007 -  December 2008
Associated memeber: January 2009 -  January 2010

Dissertation title: Moods and atmospheres as emotional background: A phenomenological investigation.
Abstract: Mood is an emotional dimension that always gives the background out of which the individual affects emerge. Their mostly inconspicious character is one reason why moods hardly becomes the object of scientific research. A mood is the emotional condition of a person, that interpenetrates all his affective, cognitive and voluntary expressions. The mood is the frame in which certain emotional intentions become possible, whereas others are excluded being out of tune. The concept of the „frame“ and the figuree-ground relation was discussed in several works of the Gestalt theory. However, the Gestaltists mostly restrict themselves to the exploration of the visual field of perception. It has to be investigated if and how the structure of figure-ground also organizes the emotional dimension and if this structure can clarify the relation of affects to attunement. Furthermore, apart from the problematic relation of affect and mood, I will discuss phenomena that are subsum ed under the concept atmospheres in the contemporary phenomenological debate. A landscape, for example, can have a characteristic atmosphere and we often say that a certain attunement emerges from it. Atmospherical attunements are not objective in the sense of existing independantenly of the observer, but are rather intersubjectively accessible and are not a private state of mind of the observer.

Principal investigators:

Karl Mertens
Karl-Heinz Lembeck

Current position:

Department of Philosophy II, Residenzplatz 2, 97070 Würzburg

https://www.philosophie.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/institut/allelehrsthlefrphilosophie/ingognzler/