Self-Envy, Grief, and Nostalgia
Event details
All are welcome to attend the talk in-person or online (Zoom link below). This talk is part of the project 'Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience', based in the Philosophy Department.
Envy is typically understood as a painful emotion experienced when we perceive ourselves to be lacking something that matters to us and which another person has. It arises out of negative social comparison and is typically deemed to be essentially other-directed. Envy is also associated with a range of other emotions that accompany, even mask, it - such as shame, anger, and love (e.g., Protasi 2021).
Louise Osler is interested in exploring two ways in which we might expand our discussions of envy. First, by suggesting that, contra popular definitions of envy, envy need not be directed at another person but can, in certain circumstances, be self-directed. She outlines three kinds of self-envy, directed at: (1) one's past self, (2) one's future self, and (3) counterfactual versions of one's self. Second, having argued for the notion of 'self-envy', she explores how this reveals envy's entanglement with other emotions such as grief and nostalgia.
About the speaker
Louise Osler
Lucy Osler is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University in the School of English, Communications and Philosophy. She specialises in phenomenological and 4E approaches to online sociality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, affectivity, and psychopathology.
She is currently exploring the various ways we encounter others online, social inclusion and exclusion in the online world, feelings of belonging and community online, and political emotions online. She is also researching loneliness, depression, and eating disorders.
Before starting at Cardiff University in September 2021, Lucy was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen on the FWF-funded project ‘Antagonistic Political Emotions’. This project investigated what it means to experience political emotions, provides detailed analyses of specifically antagonistic political emotions, clarifies their role in political identification and group formation, considers their normative functions and appropriateness conditions, and examine how they arise in face-to-face encounters, social movements, as well as online contexts.
Lucy was awarded her PhD in Philosophy by University of Exeter in January 2021. Her thesis is entitled ‘Interpersonal atmospheres: an empathetic account’ and involves a phenomenological analysis of how we experience individuals and groups as having atmopsheres through our feeling bodies. She did her MA in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind at the University of Copenhagen, writing her MA thesis on ‘Depression and the Erosion of We-Experiences’.
Venue details
Contact
Louise Richardson