Philosophy's Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking

Philosophy's Moods is a collection of original essays interrogating the inseparable bond between mood and philosophical thinking. What is the relationship between mood and thinking in philosophy? In what sense are we always already philosophizing from within a mood? What kinds of mood are central for shaping the space of philosophy? What is the philosophical imprint of Aristotle's wonder, Kant's melancholy, Kierkegaard's anxiety or Nietzsche's shamelessness? Philosophy's Moods invites its readers to explore the above questions through diverse methodological perspectives. The collection includes twenty-one contributions by internationally renowned scholars as well as younger and emerging voices. In pondering the place of the subjective and personal roots that thinking is typically called to overcome, the book challenges and articulates an alternative to a predominant tendency in philosophy to view the theoretical content and the affective side of thought as opposed to one another.

Hagi Kenaan teaches philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. In addition to studies in phenomenology, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, he is the author of The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics as an Optics (Tel-Aviv, 2008).

Ilit Ferber is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Tel-Aviv University. She has published articles on Benjamin, Freud, Brecht and Herder. She recently completed a book manuscript entitled Melancholy and Philosophy: Walter Benjamin's Early Writings , and her current research deals with the relationship between pain and theories of the origin of language in Rousseau, Herder, Freud, Benjamin and Wittgenstein.