Andrej Démuth

The book delves into the analysis of anger as both a moral and amoral emotion. It investigates whether anger is indeed one of the basic emotions or if it is a social and linguistic construct, denoting a concept associated with the human mind. The author subjects the concept of anger to an analysis of its semantic domains, as well as a conceptual analysis regarding what it signi?es and means to us. Anger is analyzed from philosophical-phenomenological perspectives, as well as from the viewpoints of cognitive sciences, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology. The signi?cance of anger in both phylogenetic and ontogenetic development is explored. Through a deeper understanding thereof, avenues toward its better and more effective management are elucidated.

This collection delves into the conceptual and semantic dissection of aesthetic and moral emotions. It grapples with their definition, scope, function, and structure. Highlighting a range of semantic research methods, the authors also present interdisciplinary studies on emotions like anger, admiration, disgust, guilt, and feelings linked to beauty perception. This book serves as a thematic and methodological gateway to interdisciplinary human emotionality research.

The monograph presents psychological interpretations of the specific reactions of individuals within the perception of attractive human faces. It concentrates on exploring selected attributes of human face that increase its attractiveness. After introducing essential information on the specifics of facial perception and its brain correlates, the monograph presents findings on the effect of symmetry, averageness, proportions, sexually dimorphic features, personality characteristics, or the importance of specific parts of the face to its attractiveness. Based on the results of both foreign and own research, the authors formulate interpretations of why and how the identification and preference of examined characteristics have been developed and maintained by the evolution.

The monograph outlines the dual role of mathematics in relation to beauty. On one hand mathematics refers to an objective, through mathematical formulas expressible side of beauty. On the other hand, it points out that entirely abstract things like mathematical equations can be seen as beautiful, too. This refers to two aspects of beauty. 1. The biological, evolutionary: our brains react to certain aesthetic stimuli in scientifically adequately explainable way. 2. Philosophical spiritual: This shows a connection of beauty with goodness and being. To such a perception we can mature. Handed down wisdom can be mentioned as a hint: You cannot find beauty, if you don't carry it in yourself. Such an analysis can help us understand why we use the word beauty in so many different ways.

In the book, we shall attempt to focus attention on two basic factors of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. The first is the presentation of the fundamental historical concepts within the aesthetics of German idealism with some crucial concepts, ideas and constructs highlighted which are characteristic of its leading representatives. The second aim is discussions regarding the structure of sensuality and the sources of feelings of pleasure and its relationship to the higher cognitive functions in aesthetic judgements, the structure and nature of the neuronal correlates of aesthetic experience, the individual and socially conditioned creation of an ideal, but also the influence of various social beliefs on the formation of taste in recent cognitive-aesthetical research.

The text is structured in chronological and ideological order and presents nine basic types of the classical perception of the problem of knowledge through an analysis of the atomistic theory of perception, Platonism, Aristotle’s doctrine, scepticism, rationalism, sensualism, Kant’s theory, phenomenological-existential, pragmatic, and (post) analytical perceptions. The proposed work aspires to be an introduction (not a complete presentation, neither in the number of types, nor in a full interpretation) and a basis for the reader’s interpretations which is reflected in the structure of the text.