Frédéric Minner

Fri. 04.11, 15:15-16:15
Floor 2: Speaker Lounge

Frédéric Minner is a Phd student at the Institute of Sociological Research (ISR) and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA) of the University of Geneva. Thanks to a grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), he visited the Institute of Sociology of the Freie Universität Berlin from September 2014 to February 2016. He writes a dissertation about the role that emotions play in the emergence of social norms and in particular the role that indignation and related emotions (contempt, pity, resentment, envy, gratitude, etc.) play in the establishment of norms of justice. Empirically, he studies the emergence of the institutions of the political collective Occupy Geneva, and shows that these institutions resulted from the collective emotions of the activists and from their conceptions of justice. The central theoretical claim of his work is that social norms have emotional foundations. Indeed, emotions seem to provide causal and grounding explanations of the emergence of norms. Emotions explain causally this emergence as the result of collective actions that they motivated; and they provide grounding explanations in the sense that types of emotions (indignation, contempt, fear) give to types of norms (punishment, exclusion, protection) their forms and contents. More broadly, he is interested in the ontology of social collective, the relationships between emotions, values and norms, and the epistemology of social sciences.