It seems hard to comprehend how, during mood experience, the ‘inner’ meets the ‘outer’. The objective of this paper is to show that a currently popular attempt at providing a neat solution to that problem fails. The attempt comes under the heading of representationalism, according to which the phenomenal aspects of mood are exhausted by its representational content. I examine three accounts of intentionality developed within the representationalist camp, and I show that they incur phenomenological and metaphysical costs.

An alternative approach to emotion is presented here, which differs from that of Kagan and others. It orders emotion along a continuum of the embodiment of emotion, starting with a clear but rare case of pure emotion and at the other extreme discusses Damasio’s intelligent prefrontal patients who could not feel emotions critical to social life.

Almost all contemporary philosophers on the subject agree that emotions play an indispensable role in the justification (as opposed to the mere causation) of other mental states and actions. However, how this role is to be understood is still an open question. At the core of the debate is the phenomenon of conflict without contradiction: why is it that an emotion need not be revised in the light of better judgment and knowledge? Conflict without contradiction has been explained either by (...) difference in content between emotion and judgment, or by a difference in the respective attitude towards content. I argue that conflict without contradiction is due to both differences, where difference in content is prior to difference in attitude. (shrink)

Although trained in the Anglophone analytic tradition, the French education of his formative years seems to have left its mark on Ronnie de Sousa’s thinking and writing. He appeals to temperament as an explanation for fundamental attitudes to life: neither the quest for a source of meaning in God or nature, nor his own tendency to relish life’s meaninglessness can be grounded in reason. To show this, Ronnie has argued that there is no such thing as human nature, and that (...) appeals to evolution can neither guide us in choosing how to live, nor give us good reason to prefer the “normal” to the “deviant”. Instead, aesthetic reasons deserve to be given more weight than is granted by the alleged overriding character of morality. (shrink)