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The "Altenberg Workshops in Theoretical Biology" address key questions of biological theories. Each workshop is organized by leading experts of a certain field who invite a group of international specialists to the KLI. The Altenberg Workshops aim to make conceptual progress and to generate initiatives of a distinctly interdisciplinary nature. 

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Interactions between Emotion and Cognition and their Evolutionary Roots
1999-06-17 0:00 - 1999-06-19 0:00
KLI for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria
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The biological roots of different emotional states (or affects, feelings, moods) and their interactions with all kind of cognitive processes (attention, perception, memory, thinking and "logic" in a wide sense) are currently becoming a significant focus in different fields of science. A new understanding of cognition and thinking, where affectivity is no longer excluded, seems to be emerging, with interesting interdisciplinary implications. Concerning cognition, naturalistic explanations related to elementary biology are already relatively advanced. Concerning emotion, in contrast, similar developments have hardly taken place so far, despite the fact that an adequate evolutionary understanding of mental phenomena seems only possible by an integration of both. - At the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, possible theoretic approaches to such an integration have mainly been discussed, during the last years, in relation with the Evolutionary Emotion Theory proposed by Manfred Wimmer, and the theory of fractal affect logic proposed by Luc Ciompi which postulates selfsimilar analogies of affective-cognitive interactions on the evolutionary and human, individual and collective level (see the included summaries). During the planned workshop, these two theoretical approaches shall therefore serve as a starting point for an interdisciplinary in-depth discussion of the problem of relations between emotion and cognition on different evolutionary and structural levels of complexity. Programm: G. MÜLLER (Vorstand des KLI) Biologisch evolutionäre Dimension M. WIMMER (Österreich) Zur Entwicklung von Denk- Fühlwelten/Psychische Dimension L. CIOMPI (Schweiz) Affektlogik: Die Rationalität der Gefühle/Soziokulturelle Dimension G. VESTER (Deutschland) Die Funktionen der Gefühle in sozialen Systemen W. BURKERT (Schweiz) Gefühl, Phantasie und Ritual