K O D I K A S / C O D E Volume 39 (2016) · No. 1 - 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Boundaries in Research on Emotion Introduction Robin Kurilla (Essen) During their meeting in Berkeley in 2013, the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) created a task force on interdisciplinarity in research on emotion that subsequently initiated a discussion via ISRE ’ s mailing list. The following compilation of articles unites some of the participants ’ stances on interdisciplinary research with broader considerations on culture and science as well as more concrete questions regarding research on emotion in individual disciplines. “ Boundaries ” is the comprehensive theme that links the contributions. The articles are arranged in a descending order. We start with the most general considerations on the relation of culture and science and end with an examination of an individual emotion from a particular viewpoint. Louise Sundararajan offers “ a semiotic perspective on the contested relationship between science and culture, and propose[s] a model of integration which is the inverse of Wilson ’ s (1998) consilience project. ” She puts forth an argument that aims at exploring “ the possibilities for an integration of science and culture in psychology ” . The notion of boundary is present in Sundararajan ’ s conception of a “ tension ” or a “ gap ” between life and language ” as being “ endemic to the sign ” and in her depiction of translation as a not always passable bridge that either connects or separates culture and science. In his contribution, Thomas Scheff voices his concerns regarding the role of “ Disciplines, Specialties and Journals ” in keeping apart sciences from humanities. Scheff traces back his thesis that “ the social sciences and the humanities badly need each other ” as far as to Blaise Pascal. Comparing Kepler to his teacher Brahe, Scheff makes a distinction between “ system ” and “ intuition ” to illustrate the complementary relationship of sciences and humanities in the production of knowledge, arguing for a separation through permeable boundaries in social institutions. Taking into account that every observation requires a blind spot, Rick Anthony Furtak proposes a Socratic, non-authoritarian, and thus communicatively cautious way of overcoming semantic and substantial issues of interdisciplinary research on emotion. From his point of view, unacknowledged or ‘ tacit ’ biases form the boundaries of interdisciplinary conversation. Furtak ’ s “ hope is that, by bringing each of these biases into the light, we can include them within our critical exchange, rather than allowing them to exert great power over us while at the same time escaping our notice. ” Instead of underlining the orientating function that everyday life and social practice can obtain in interdisciplinary research on emotion as Sundararajan and Furtak have done, my own contribution is rather exemplary. While focussing on historical sources of emotions, I introduce the Heideggerian distinction between presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand as an axis that can be employed to organize findings on emotion across disciplinary, cultural, and temporal boundaries. With her paper, Eunju Baehrisch targets the boundaries between nowadays ’ emotion cultures and a medieval understanding of emotion. Although Baehrisch mainly focuses on acedia, her paper provides insights in possible boundaries of translatability across time and culture. Baehrisch demonstrates how the analysis of narratives on social practices may assist in rendering foreign emotion worlds more comprehensible. 4 Robin Kurilla (Essen)