Although some still advance reductive accounts of emotions—according to which they fall under a more familiar type of mental state—contemporary philosophers tend to agree that emotions probably constitute their own kind of mental state. Agreeing with this claim, however, is compatible with attempting to find commonalities between emotions and better understood things. According to the advocates of the so-called ‘perceptual analogy’, thinking of emotion in terms of perception can fruitfully advance our understanding even though emotion may not be reducible to (...) ordinary perception. In this paper, I spell out and motivate a different analogy—that between emotion and action—an analogy which I think can do some important theoretical work. In particular, it constitutes a theoretically fruitful way to think about core aspects of emotions and might in fact be employed to provide a better account of certain aspects of emotions than the one based on the perceptual analogy. Emotions might not be a matter of seeing the world a certain way, but a matter of behaving internally in response to it. In a slogan form: Emotion is the inward counterpart of bodily movement. (shrink)

Müller proposes a position-taking theory to account for the manifest image of emotional feelings as “feelings towards”. He reduces the process of position-taking to goal-based construal, which is akin to the stimulus-goal comparison process central in appraisal theories. Although this reduction can account for the heat of emotional feelings and the intuition that non-linguistic organisms can also have feelings, it may fail to keep the position-taking aspect on board. Moreover, the image of emotional feelings as active position-takings may itself be (...) questioned and replaced with a passive image. I end by acknowledging that a passive image is still compatible with an active underlying mechanism as is the case in appraisal theories but even more so in the goal-directed theory. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the (...) level of intentional mode or attitude. I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non-epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non-epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values. (shrink)

In this paper, we contrast the different ways in which the representationalist and the attitudinalist in the theory of emotions account for the fact that emotions have evaluative correctness conditions. We argue that the attitudinalist has the resources to defend her view against recent attacks from the representationalist. To this end, we elaborate on the idea that emotional attitudes have a rich profile and explain how it supports the claim that these attitudes generate the wished-for evaluative correctness conditions. Our argument (...) rests on the idea that emotional attitudes manifest a sensitivity to evaluative evidence and that this sensitivity secures the kind of normativity we expect of the emotions. We bring our discussion to a close by assessing whether the psychological underpinnings of this sensitivity to evaluative evidence are such as to threaten the foundation of attitudinalism: the idea that emotions do not represent values. Given the available models of how we might access values prior to emotional experience, we conclude that the attitudinalist is still in the game. (shrink)

In pursuit of a theory of expressive reasons, I focus on the practical rationality of actions such as welcoming, thanking, congratulating, saluting – I label them ‘expressive actions.’ How should w...

Dieser Forschungsbericht gibt einen Überblick über die aktuelle Debatte über motivierende Gründe in der Handlungs- und Erkenntnistheorie. Folgende drei Fragen werden schwerpunktmäßig behandelt: a) Was für eine Art von Entität sind motivierende Gründe? b) Welche Beziehung besteht zwischen einer Handlung oder Einstellung und ihren motivierenden Gründen? c) Welche kognitiven Bedingungen gelten für die Zuschreibung motivierender Gründe?

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “the philosophy and psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays only a little more attention to the former.” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But there (...) still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumenical approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work and draws crucially on Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by these authors. In this article, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject. (shrink)