The contagious joy of a party, the solemn silence in a church, the
gloomy atmosphere of endless rows of identical houses in an ugly city.
Through a criticism of the reification and psychologization that goes
back to the very beginning of Western philosophy, Hermann Schmitz offers
a fundamentally new theory of embodiment and feelings based on
atmospheres, unstable but powerful phenomena that fill the "surfaceless
spaces" of lived experience. This collection of essays, selected by
Schmitz himself, offers a comprehensive portrait of his theory, both in
its fundamental outlines and later progress.
