In contemporary philosophy of emotions, it is often argued that moods facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart in that, unlike emotions, they never target specific objects. From a phenomenological...
moreIn contemporary philosophy of emotions, it is often argued that moods facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart in that, unlike emotions, they never target specific objects. From a phenomenological and existential angle, however, moods bring to light a specific element, namely the quality of one’s sense of reality. This chapter aims to further develop the analysis of moods by investigating whether they manifest attunement and sensitivity to intersubjective experience. Through a comparison of Martin Heidegger’s and David Foster Wallace’s respective approaches to boredom, this chapter explores how boredom is influenced by receptivity to other people’s states, an aspect that is crucially missing in Heidegger’s account of boredom.
