Feelings of Being is the first ever philosophical account of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. In this book, Matthew Ratcliffe proposes that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. The book explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. It then explores the role of changed feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.

Introduction Part I - The Structure of Existential Feeling 1. Emotions and bodily feelings 2. Existential feelings 3. The phenomenology of touch Part II - Varieties of Existential Feeling in Psychiatric Illness 4. Body and world 5. Feeling and belief in the Capgras delusion 6. Feelings of deadness and depersonalization 7. Existential feeling in schizophrenia Part III - Existential Feeling and Philosophical Thought 8. What William James really said 9. Stance, feeling and belief 10. Pathologies of existential feeling

Matthew Ratcliffe , Reader in philosophy, Durham University, UK