Prof. Douglas Cairns (MA, PhD, FHEA, FRSE, FBA, MAE)
I have been interested in the emotions since beginning my PhD in 1983 and my current interests in wider aspects of cognition, including sense-perception, grew out of that. Emotions involve the senses in many respects: they are ways of perceiving the external world – including those elements of it that are constituted by other people and their (perceptible) emotions; and all ways of perceiving the external world are intrinsically affective. I am therefore interested in the ways in which perception and affectivity are mutually implicated, in the sense that perceptions are affectively charged and affectivity engages all the modalities through which we perceive the world. But I’m also interested in the fact that emotions are also ways of perceiving ourselves as perceivers of the world – at least in their occurrent form, they involve interoception, our sense of how the world (including others and their emotions) affects us. In my recent work, I have been especially interested in narrative understandings of mind, emotion, and the senses, narrative approaches to other-understanding (including the role in narrative of direct perception of others’ mental states), and the presentation of mind, emotion, and the senses in narrative. When not researching or writing, I try to forget about being a minor functionary in a vast totalitarian bureaucracy by playing double bass in Scotland’s number one bluegrass band, Longway.
