The German psychologist Theodor Waitz (1821-1864) was an important theorist of affectivity in the mid-19th century. This article aims to revisit Waitz's contribution to affective psychology at a crucial moment of its history. First, I elaborate the context in which Waitz's ideas were carried out by showing how affective sciences emerged as an autonomous field of investigation between about 1770 and 1910. Second, I discuss the principles of Waitz's model of affectivity and their contextual significance. Third, I deal with the first major category of affective states identified by Waitz, namely, "formal feelings," which are supposed to be involved in the appraisal of the relational properties between representations. Fourth, I investigate "qualitative feelings," the second major category of affective states identified by Waitz, which refer to affective processes that relate to specific representational contents, namely, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral feelings. In conclusion, I emphasize the genealogical link between Waitz's pioneering research on musical feelings and current research on emotion and expectation in music.

My aim is to revisit the psycholinguistic concept of “formal logical feeling” (logisches Formalgefühl), as it was elaborated by the Austrian philosopher Heinrich Gomperz in the early 20th century. This article is the continuation of some recent studies that have helped to reevaluate the place of “formal feeling” or “form-feeling” in language sciences. By “formal logical feelings”, Gomperz referred to affective processes by which means one apprehends the “form” of language, that is, its morphosyntactic properties. Here I propose a detailed analysis of his conception of the nature, function, origin, and taxonomy of this category of feelings, while placing his developments in their intellectual context and in a genealogical perspective.

In the present article, I compare Ernst Mach's and Heinrich Gomperz's contributions to the Germanspeaking positivist tradition by showing how, in trying to refound epistemology on the basis of one definite category of experiential element, namely, sensation (Empfindung) and feeling (Gefühl), respectively, they each epitomized one major trend of Immanenzpositivismus. I demonstrate that, besides Mach's "sensualist" conception of positivism in light of which historians have tended thus  far to interpret all German-speaking positivist research of that period there also existed an  "affectivist" conception of positivism, which originated in Avenarius's empiriocriticism and culminated in Gomperz's pathempiricism (Pathempirismus). Here I aim to provide a new perspective on the history of positivism by highlighting the role played in it by psychological concerns. First, I revisit the notion of Immanenzpositivismus, the form of positivism that prevailed in both Germany and Austria between the late 19th and early 20th centuries: in addition to addressing the definition of this philosophical school of thought, I discuss the issue of "pure experience", from which the positivists tried to reinterpret the foundations of knowledge. Second, I deal with Mach's sensation-based approach to Immanenzpositivismus by commenting on his ontological and typological analysis of the constitutive elements of experience and emphasizing the fact that his concept of Empfindung is a relatively ill-defined notion in light of contemporary psychological standards. Moreover, I show that, despite his pretense of confining his epistemological developments to the analysis of sensations, Mach did not deny the involvement of feelings in epistemology, as clearly evidenced by some passages of Erkenntnis und Irrtum. Third, I analyze Gomperz's feeling-based conception of Immanenzpositivismus, that is, pathempiricism, by highlighting how he strove to radically refound epistemology on the basis of the most recent advances of affective psychology. Focusing on the question of language sciences, I also discuss how he considered the role of feelings in the various forms of theoretical knowledge, the only field of investigation that he revisited in detail in his unfinished book, the Weltanschauungslehre. Fourth and last, I contrast Gomperz's with Mach's positivist model and argue that the former is more coherent and has a higher explanatory power than the latter. In conclusion, I insist on the importance of revisiting pathempiricism within the broader framework of affective epistemology.

Fechner remains virtually unknown for his psychological research on the unconscious. However, he was one of the most prominent theorists of unconscious cognition of the 19th century, in the context of the rise of scientific investigations on the unconscious in German psychology. In line with the models previously developed by Leibniz and Herbart, Fechner proposes an explanative system of unconscious phenomena based on a modular conception of the mind and on the idea of a functional dissociation between representational and attentional activity. For Fechner, the unconscious is a state of consciousness resulting from the isolation of representational activity from the rest of psychical life. Unconscious mental phenomena are unattended mental states that behave autonomously while remaining able to act on consciousness. This paper aims to revisit Fechner's contribution to the history of the unconscious, but also the theoretical significance of the Fechnerian unconscious vis-à-vis current research on the cognitive unconscious.

Le présent volume, qui regroupe les contributions de sept auteurs, est le premier ouvrage à proposer une réflexion d'ensemble sur les multiples aspects constitutifs de la pensée de Theodor Lipps (1851-1914). Figure majeure de la philosophie, de la psychologie et de l'esthétique allemandes de la fin du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe siècle, Lipps est l'auteur d'une œuvre étonnamment abondante et variée dont l'importance et la portée historiques apparaissent aujourd'hui singulièrement minorées. C'est donc non pas seulement au développement mais au renouvellement des études lippsiennes que le présent volume entend contribuer, son objectif étant ici d'offrir au lecteur une vision plus ample et plus diversifiée, plus personnelle aussi, de la pensée de Lipps, en s'intéressant à de nombreux pans de son œuvre restés jusqu'ici injustement négligés et s'efforçant de les reconsidérer à la lumière d'une grande variété de contextes.