Are there normative reasons for love? More specifically, is it possible to rationally justify love? Or can we at best provide explanations for why we love? In Part I of this entry, I discuss the nature of love, theories of emotion, and what it takes to justify an attitude. In Part II, I provide an overview of the various positions one might take on the rational justification of love. I focus on the debate between defenders of the no-reasons view and (...) the reasons view. Along the way, I discuss the significance of falling in love, the problem of trading up, and the notion of irreplaceability. I evaluate attempts to justify love based on the intrinsic and the relational properties of the beloved. (shrink)

Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by philosophers who hold that the content of perception is object-like. I shall (...) argue for a view about the content of emotions and perceptual states which will enable us to hold both that emotional content is analogous to perceptual content and that both emotions and perceptual states can have propositional contents. This will involve arguing for a pluralist view of perceptual content, on which perceptual states can have both contents which are proposition-like and contents which are object-like. I shall also address two significant objections to the claim that emotions can have proposition-like contents. Meeting one of these objections will involve taking on a further commitment: the pluralist account of perceptual content will have to be one on which the contents of perception can be non-conceptual. (shrink)

We must rethink the status of Hume’s science of emotions. Contemporary philosophers typically dismiss Hume’s account on the grounds that he mistakenly identifies emotions with feelings. But the traditional objections to Hume’s feeling theory are not as strong as commonly thought. Hume makes several important contributions, moreover, to our understanding of the operations of the emotions. His claims about the causal antecedents of the indirect passions receive support from studies in appraisal theory, for example, and his suggestions concerning the social (...) dimensions of self-conscious emotions can help guide future research in this field. His dual-component hypothesis concerning the processing of emotions, furthermore, suggests a compromise solution to a recalcitrant debate in cognitive science. Finally, Hume’s proposals concerning the motivational influences of pride, and the conventional nature of emotional display rules, are vindicated by recent work in social psychology. (shrink)

La ética de la virtud es frecuentemente considerada una categoría singular de la teoría ética, y una rival del kantismo y del utilitarismo. Considero que es un error, puesto que tanto kantianos como utilitaristas pueden tener, y tienen, un interés en las virtudes y en la formación del carácter. Mas, aun si focalizamos el grupo de teóricos de la ética, comúnmente llamados "teóricos de la virtud", porque rechazan la dirección tanto del kantismo como del utilitarismo y se inspiran en la (...) ética griega antigua, hay poca unidad en este grupo. Aun cuando hay un delgado territorio común que vincula a todos los miembros del grupo -una preocupación por la formación del carácter, la naturaleza de las pasiones y por la elección sobre el transcurso entero de la vida- también hay diferencias cruciales entre ellos. (shrink)

Experiences—visual, emotional, or otherwise—play a role in providing us with justification to believe claims about the world. Some accounts of how experiences provide justification emphasize the role of the experiences’ distinctive phenomenology, i.e. ‘what it is like’ to have the experience. Other accounts emphasize the justificatory role to the experiences’ etiology. A number of authors have used cases of cognitively penetrated visual experience to raise an epistemic challenge for theories of perceptual justification that emphasize the justificatory role of phenomenology rather (...) than etiology. Proponents of the challenge argue that cognitively penetrated visual experiences can fail to provide the usual justification because they have improper etiologies. However, extant arguments for the challenge’s key claims are subject to formidable objections. In this paper, I present the challenge’s key claims, raise objections to previous attempts to establish them, and then offer a novel argument in support of the challenge. My argument relies on an analogy between cognitively penetrated visual and emotional experiences. I argue that some emotional experiences fail to provide the relevant justification because of their improper etiologies and conclude that analogous cognitively penetrated visual experiences fail to provide the relevant justification because of their etiologies, as well. (shrink)

It seems better to love virtue than vice, pleasure than pain, good than evil. Perhaps it's also better to love virtuous people than vicious people. But at the same time, it's repugnant to suggest that a mother should love her smarter, more athletic, better looking son than his dim, clumsy, ordinary brother. My task is to help sort out the conflicting intuitions about what we should love. In particular, I want to address a problem for the no-reasons view, the theory (...) that love cannot be rationally justified. Since it seems better to love good people rather than evil villains, it appears that there are indeed reasons for (or, at least, against) love. Is it coherent to talk this way and deny that love can be justified? I think so and will explain how. (shrink)

Are there normative reasons for love? More specifically, is it possible to rationally justify love? Or can we at best provide explanations for why we love? In Part I of this entry, I discuss the nature of love, theories of emotion, and what it takes to justify an attitude. In Part II, I provide an overview of the various positions one might take on the rational justification of love. I focus on the debate between defenders of the no-reasons view and (...) the reasons view. Along the way, I discuss the significance of falling in love, the problem of trading up, and the notion of irreplaceability. I evaluate attempts to justify love based on the intrinsic and the relational properties of the beloved. (shrink)

It has been widely held, and still is held to some extent, that emotion and reason tend to be incompatible, that if a person is influenced by emotion to hold the beliefs he does, or perform the actions he does, then they tend to that extent to be unreasonable. This opinion manifests itself in a variety of ways. For example, it is no coincidence that Sherlock Holmes, the archetypal person of reason, is emotionally cold and detached. In a recent philosophical (...) work, Robert Trigg has written of the emotions[They] overwhelm us; we do not choose to adopt them …. They have always been thought to be the enemy of reason rather than its adjunct. A man who acts in anger is acting as he feels he wants to because of something that has happened. He is not necessarily acting as he would think best if he reflected on the matter. His emotion may have clouded his judgment. (shrink)

It is received wisdom in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that individuals can be in emotional states but groups cannot. But why should we accept this view? In this paper, I argue that there is substantial philosophical and empirical support for the existence of collective emotions. Thus, while there is good reason to be skeptical about many ascriptions of collective emotion, I argue that some groups exhibit the computational complexity and informational integration required for being in genuinely emotional states.

Although we can try to explain why we love, we can never justify our love. Love is neither based on reasons, nor responsive to reasons, nor can it be assessed for normative reasons. Love can be odd, unfortunate, fortuitous, or even sadly lacking, but it can never be appropriate or inappropriate. We may have reasons to act on our love, but we cannot justify our loving feelings. Shakespeare's Bottom is right: "Reason and love keep little company together now-a-days." Indeed, they (...) keep none and they never kept any: there are no justifying reasons for love. (shrink)

Abstract: The ‘feeling theory of emotion’ holds that emotions are to be identified with feelings. An objection commonly made to that theory of emotion has it that emotions cannot be feelings only, as emotions have intentional objects. Jack does not just feel fear, but he feels fear-of-something. To explain this property of emotion we will have to ascribe to emotion a representational structure, and feelings do not have the sought after representational structure. In this paper I seek to defend the (...) feeling theory of emotion against the challenge from the object-directed emotions. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is standardly taught and discussed as a distinctive approach to the major questions of ethics, a third major position alongside Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. I argue that this taxonomy is a confusion. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism contain treatments of virtue, so virtue ethics cannot possibly be a separate approach contrasted with those approaches. There are, to be sure, quite a few contemporary philosophical writers about virtue who are neither Utilitarians nor Kantians; many of these find inspiration in ancient (...) Greek theories of virtue. But even here there is little unity. Although certain concerns do unite this disparate group (a concern for the role of motives and passions in good choice, a concern for character, and a concern for the whole course of an agent''s life), there are equally profound disagreements, especially concerning the role that reason should play in ethics. One group of modern virtue-theorists, I argue, are primarily anti-Utilitarians, concerned with the plurality of value and the susceptibility of passions to social cultivation. These theorists want to enlarge the place of reason in ethics. They hold that reason can deliberate about ends as well as means, and that reason can modify the passions themselves. Another group of virtue theorists are primarily anti-Kantians. They believe that reason plays too dominant a role in most philosophical accounts of ethics, and that a larger place should be given to sentiments and passions -- which they typically construe in a less reason-based way than does the first group. The paper investigates these differences, concluding that it is not helpful to speak of virtue ethics, and that we would be better off characterizing the substantive views of each thinker -- and then figuring out what we ourselves want to say. (shrink)

In one of the most frequently quoted passages in the history of emotion research, William James (1884: 189f) announces that emotions occur when the perception of an exciting fact causes a collection of bodily changes, and “our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” The same idea occurred to Carl Lange (1984) around the same time. These authors were not the first to draw a link between the emotions and the body. Indeed, this had been a (...) central theme of Descartes’ exquisite opus, The Passions of the Soul. But James and Lange wanted to push things farther than most, suggesting that emotions are exhausted by bodily changes or perceptions thereof. Other kinds of mental episodes might co-occur when we have an emotion state. For James, an emotion follows an exciting perception. But the exciting perception is not a part of the emotion it excited (Ellsworth, 1994, reads James differently, but see Reisenzein et al.’s 1995 convincing response). The majority of contemporary emotion researchers, especially those in philosophy, find this suggestion completely untenable. Surely, emotions involve something more. At their core, emotions are more like judgments or thoughts, than perceptions. They evaluate, assess, or appraise. Emotions are amendable to rational assessment; they report, correctly or incorrectly, on how we are faring in the world. Within this general consensus, there is a further debate about whether the body should figure into a theory of emotions at all. Perhaps James and Lange offer a theory that is not merely incomplete, but entirely off base. Where they view judgments as contingent and non-constitutive concomitants of emotions, it is actually bodily perceptions that deserve this demotion. Perhaps emotions can be, and often are, disembodied in some fundamental sense. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a defence of an affective account of emotion. I begin by outlining the case for thinking that emotions are just feelings. I also suggest that emotional feelings are not reducible to other kinds of feelings, but rather form a distinct class of feeling state. I then consider a number of common objections that have been raised against affective accounts of emotion, including: (1) the objection that emotion cannot always consist only of feeling because some emotions - for (...) example, indignation and regret - necessarily have a cognitive component (say, the perception of a lost opportunity in the case of regret); (2) the objection that emotion cannot consist only of feeling because in order to explain how emotions have intentional objects we will have to recognise that emotion consists of cognition; and (3) the objection that emotion cannot consist only of feeling because emotion, but not feeling, can be variously assessed or evaluated. However, I demonstrate how an affective account of emotion might be successfully defended against all of the objections that are cited. (shrink)

I argue that emotions are belief/desire sets characterized by strong desire.

Are feelings an essential part or aspect of emotion? Cases of unconscious emotion suggest that this is not the case. However, it has been claimed that unconscious emotions are better understood as either (a) emotions that are phenomenally conscious but not reflectively conscious, or (b) dispositions to have emotions rather than emotions proper. Here, I argue that these ways of accounting for unconscious emotions are inadequate, and propose a view of emotions as non-phenomenal attitudes that regard their contents as relevant (...) to one's motivations. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the metaphysics of emotion. It defends the claim that all emotional states, whether dormant or active, are dispositional, arguing against the prevailing view that dispositional emotional states are dispositions to go into actual emotional states. A clear distinction may be made between first-order and second-order emotional dispositions, where second-order emotional dispositions are dispositions of emotional sensitivity and first-order emotional dispositions are the emotional states themselves. Active emotional states are treated as dispositional emotional states in the (...) process of being manifested, not as different states altogether. Describing active states as occurrent states is misleading as it suggests an exclusive distinction between active/occurrent and dispositional, which is what is being questioned. The idea that dispositional states have no subjectivity is challenged, as is the argument that being flooded with a feeling as a result of an encounter with a frightening or aggravating situation cannot be the manifestation of a disposition. (shrink)

That emotions are especially valuable for our well-being has become a widely agreed upon claim. In this article, we argue that many of the ways in which the emotions are commonly considered to be prudentially valuable – hedonically, experientially, and adaptively – are not specific to the emotions: they are in fact shared by other affective reactions such as drives and sensory affects. This may suggest that emotions are not prudentially valuable in any distinctive manner. We challenge this suggestion by (...) arguing that, unlike other affective reactions, emotions provide unique contexts in which to refine our general sensibility to a wide variety of evaluative properties – and that in this sense they are prudentially valuable in a distinctive way. (shrink)

Emotions have long been of interest to philosophers and have deep historical roots going back to the Ancients. They have also become one of the most exciting areas of current research in philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and beyond. -/- This book explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the investigation around seven fundamental questions: What are emotions? Are emotions natural kinds? Do animals have emotions? Are emotions epistemically valuable? Are emotions the foundation for value and morality? Are emotions the basis (...) for responsibility? Do emotions make us better people? -/- In the course of exploring these questions, the book also discusses cutting-edge empirical research on emotion, feminist approaches to emotions and their value, and methodological questions on how to theorize about the emotions. The book also contains in-depth discussions of specific emotions like compassion, disgust, anxiety, and curiosity. It also highlights emerging trends in emotion research. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the question of what makes expressions meaningful according to the conception of meaning offered by Donald Davidson. It addresses this question by reflecting on Kathrin Glüer’s recent response to it. It argues that Glüer misconstrues both the evidence for meaning that the radical interpreter must rely on and the way in which the principle of charity must be deployed. The articulation of the correct construal of the evidence and the principle reveals the thoroughly non-reductionist aspect of Davidson’s (...) conception of meaning. This aspect becomes even clearer in his later work, through the articulation of the triangulation argument. I try to show how this argument, which is reconstructed in accordance with Claudine Verheggen’s interpretation of it, helps answer the initial question. The question whether the conception has the resources to account for the objectivity of meaning is briefly discussed. (shrink)

Hume is an experimental philosopher who attempts to understand why we think, feel, and act as we do. But how should we evaluate the adequacy of his proposals? This chapter examines Hume’s account from the perspective of interdisciplinary work in cognitive science.

Researchers who argue that moral judgment is based on emotions (`emotion-backers') and those who believe that it is based on reasoning and deliberation (`reasoning-backers') have both struggled to account for the notorious moral deviance of incarcerated psychopaths. Emotion-backers, such as Jonathan Haidt, focus on psychopaths' lack of a affect,or defciencies in particular emotions, such as sympathy. Reasoning-backers, such as Lawrence Kohlberg, focus instead on psychopaths' de cient reasoning. Both accounts offer separate descriptions of what goes wrong in the disorder, but (...) neither can fully explain psychopathic moral deviance. The moral account that I built, bridges these accounts in an attempt to better and more fully describe the empirical data available on psychopathic moral judgment. I argue that their judgment is best explained with a dual-process account of moral judgment that incorporates a large system of moral emotions as well as integrates multiple bases of morality, such as concerns of fairness, harm, and purity. It is only by focusing on both the reasoning and emotional de cits in psychopaths that we can begin to understand psychopaths' use of utilitarian reasoning, general population psychopaths, and psychopaths' di erential presence in the prison popu- lation. All of these issues are best described using a dual-process account of moral judgment that incorporates a larger system of moral emotions than other accounts of morality as well as a pluralistic conception of moral foundations. I used psychopaths because their moral deviance can teach us about morality more broadly. By understanding the cognitive processes implicated in the moral judgment of psychopaths, I better explain how moral judgment works in the general population more broadly. My account of moral judgment has both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretically, it o ers a new dual-process paradigm for describing moral behaviour which bridges reasoning-based and emotion-based accounts. This description can explain both the moral deviance of psychopaths as well as, more broadly, moral judgment in non-psychopaths. Additionally, my theory challenges accounts of moral emotion that narrowly focus on speci c emotions, such as guilt or empathy. It in- stead integrates all emotions, including disgust, fear, and sympathy, and links speci c emotions to moral judgments. Practically, my paradigm of moral judgment encourages the development of new moral judgment measurements such as new self-report questionnaires of moral reasoning. According to my research, in order for these tools to accurately measure morality, they need to account for both emotion-based and reasoning-based judgments. (shrink)

Emotions are Janus-faced: their focus may switch from how a person is feeling deep inside her, to the busy world of actions, words, or gestures whose perception currently affects her. The intimate relation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ seems to call for a redrawing of the traditional distinction of mental states between those that can look out to the world, and those that are, supposedly, irredeemably blind.

In current meta-ethical debates, many authors believe that there is a close relation between emotions and values. Some think emotions help to constitute moral and non-moral values. Others see emotions as epistemic devices to gain knowledge of values. Both views have roots reaching well back into the history of philosophy, and both can be developed to either support or undermine realistic and anti-realistic theories of value. The article aims to clarify a complicated dialectical situation. In addition, it makes a constructive (...) proposal towards a better understanding of the connection between emotions and values. Though anti-realistic in spirit, this proposal is designed to integrate some important realistic intuitions as well. (shrink)

Pour contrer le scepticisme au sujet de la connaissance des valeurs, la plupart soutiennent avec John Rawls qu’une croyance comme celle qu’une action est bonne est justifiée dans la mesure où elle appartient à un ensemble de croyances cohérent, ayant atteint un équilibre réfléchi. Christine Tappolet s’inspire des travaux de Max Scheler et d’Alexius von Meinong pour défendre une conception opposée au cohérentisme. La connaissance des valeurs est affirmée dépendre de nos émotions, ces dernières étant conçues comme des perceptions des (...) valeurs. (shrink)

Recent attempts by philosophers to revive William James’s theory of emotions rest on a basic misunderstanding of James’s theory. To see why, one needs to see how James’s theory completed the transformation of the study of emotions from a study in moral philosophy to a scientific study. This essay charts that transformation.

Arguments over whether emotions and moods are feelings have demonstrated confusion over the concept of a feeling and, in particular, what it is that feelings can—and cannot—do. I argue that the causal and explanatory roles we assign emotions and moods in our theories are inconsistent with their being feelings. Sidestepping debates over the natures of emotions and moods I frame my arguments primarily in terms of what it is emotions, moods and feelings do. I provide an analysis that clarifies the (...) role feelings can play in our psychology that is consistent with current psychological and neurological data. (shrink)

The paper defends a version of the perceptual account of bodily feelings, according to which having a feeling is feeling something about one’s body. But it rejects the idea, familiar in the work of William James, that what one feels when one has a feeling is something biological about one’s body. Instead it argues that to have a bodily feeling is to feel an apparent bodily indication of something – a bodily appearance. Being aware of what one’s body is apparently (...) indicating to one is being aware of something about one’s body, but the focus of attention is on what is apparently being indicated, which is not something about one’s body. This is one way of making sense of the idea in contemporary phenomenology that the body is conspicuous in feelings that do not take the body as an object of awareness. Bodily inclinations are apparent indications of what one is going to do, and it is argued that feeling one’s bodily inclinations constitutes an important class of bodily feelings – e.g. feeling like crying or feeling like being sick. Such inclinations are often felt through a process of resisting them. Bodily inclinations also have some intentionality, albeit quite limited, and this goes some way towards explaining Peter Goldie’s concept of feelings towards. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum has proposed an influential interpretation of the stoic theory of the passions, which will be challenged in this article. According to Nussbaum, the Stoics view the passions as judgments, rather than as intentional states caused by previous judgments. It will be argued that Nussbaum does not distinguish the passion, which is in fact an impulse of thehegemonikon, and the judgment that causes it. Such a distinction, however, is crucial to the Stoics, as it allows them to present the (...) passion as an intentional movement having evaluative, kinetic and affective properties, while at the same time analysing the judgment that causes it. It will also be argued that Nussbaum fails to mention the existence of a first quasi-impulse, prior to the passion, which Chrysippus, Cicero and Seneca took into account in their therapy of the passions. (shrink)

Speaking roughly, there are two competing accounts of the basis of love. First, the appraisal view: love is based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. Second, the bestowal view: love is not based in reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but love is based in the lover, who then bestows value onto the beloved. While both models deserve due attention, the bestowal model is of present concern. Despite numerous virtues, the bestowal model faces (...) trenchant objections. In this paper, I outline and defend a version of bestowal love, according to which bestowal love is based in the lover’s motivating reasons, and which preserves the virtues while overcoming the difficulties facing bestowal love. (shrink)

Consider the platitude, ?all people are basically (i.e. emotionally) the same?. How would we know? Observing people in a culture very different from our own, it would seem that we have to presuppose some such universality, just in order to understand them, but then we beg the very thesis in question. This essay considers one case study of other people's emotions, a study of Eskimos in Jean L. Briggs's Never in Anger. The problems surrounding the method of ?empathy? are discussed (...) and an alternative methodology suggested for cross?cultural observation of emotions which are not subject to these problems. (shrink)

I discuss two ways in which emotions explain actions: in the first, the explanation is expressive; in the second, the action is not only explained but also rationalized by the emotion's intentional content. The belief-desire model cannot satisfactorily account for either of these cases. My main purpose is to show that the emotions constitute an irreducible category in the explanation of action, to be understood by analogy with perception. Emotions are affective perceptions. Their affect gives them motivational force, and they (...) can rationalize actions because, like perception, they have a representational intentional content. Because of this, an emotion can non-inferentially justify a belief which in its turn justifies or rationalizes an action; so emotions may constitute a source of moral knowledge. (shrink)

According to a leading view, emotions such as admiration, contempt, pride, and shame are important vehicles of agential development. Through admiration and contempt, we establish models and countermodels against which to shape our character; through pride and shame, we get a sense of how we measure up to them. Critics of this view object that these emotions always deliver uncompromising evaluations: admiration casts people in a completely positive light, while contempt casts aspersion on them. Therefore, insofar as they lack the (...) capacity for nuance, these emotions are systematically unfitting and misleading. This paper discusses this objection as originally formulated by John Doris as well as Macalester Bell’s response. Drawing from research on emotional intentionality, it will be argued that Doris’ and Bell’s accounts are respectively misguided criticisms and inadequate defences of these emotions. Their mistake lies in an invalid transition from the claim that these emotions are intentionally directed towards persons to the claim that they deliver global evaluations of those towards whom they are directed. By rejecting this inference, it will be shown that these emotions can deliver nuanced and fitting evaluations in a way Doris’ objection overlooks and Bell’s response precludes us from articulating. (shrink)

We argue that the main objections against two central tenets of a Jamesian account of the emotions, i.e. that (1) different types of emotions are associated with specific types of bodily feelings (Specificity), and that (2) emotions are constituted by patterns of bodily feeling (Constitution), do not succeed. In the first part, we argue that several reasons adduced against Specifity, including one inspired by Schachter and Singer’s work, are unconvincing. In the second part, we argue that Constitution, too, can withstand (...) most of the objections raised against it, including the objection that bodily feelings cannot account for the outward-looking and evaluative nature of emotions. In both sections, we argue that the kinds of felt bodily changes posited by a Jamesian account of emotions are best understood in terms of felt states of action-readiness. (shrink)

In this paper I articulate the question of whether machines can have emotions. I then reject a common argument against why they cannot have emotions based on the lack of a capacity for feelings. The goal of this paper is not to decisively show that machines can have emotions, but to decisively show that the naïve argument for the conclusion that they cannot needs to be critically examined. I argue that machines that have artificial general intelligence can have emotions based (...) on having the capacity to make judgments that are essential and constitutive of certain emotions, such as anger. I argue against the view that phenomenological or physiological profiles are essential to anger on the basis of emotion regulation. I consider a long list of objections to the position that machines can have emotions. (shrink)

Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by philosophers who hold that the content of perception is object‐like. I shall (...) argue for a view about the content of emotions and perceptual states which will enable us to hold both that emotional content is analogous to perceptual content and that both emotions and perceptual states can have propositional contents. This will involve arguing for a pluralist view of perceptual content, on which perceptual states can have both contents which are proposition‐like and contents which are object‐like. I shall also address two significant objections to the claim that emotions can have proposition‐like contents. Meeting one of these objections will involve taking on a further commitment: the pluralist account of perceptual content will have to be one on which the contents of perception can be non‐conceptual. (shrink)

The philosophy of emotion has long been divided over the cognitive nature of emotion. In this paper I argue that this debate suffers from deep confusion over the meaning of “cognition” itself. This confusion has in turn obscured critical substantive agreement between the debate’s principal opponents. Capturing this agreement and remedying this confusion requires re-conceptualizing “the cognitive” as it functions in first-order theories of emotion. Correspondingly, a sketch for a new account of cognitivity is offered. However, I also argue that (...) this new account, despite tacit acceptance by all major theories of emotion, in fact rules out some of the most fundamental and controversial claims of one side of the nature-of-emotion debate, emotional cognitivism. (shrink)

Hume’s Dissertation on the Passions stands to Book 2 of his Treatise as the first and second Enquiries stand to Books 1 and 3 respectively. However, while the two Enquiries are evidently substantial reworkings of their Treatise ancestors, containing much that is different and new, the Dissertation appears to consist merely of superficially adapted excerpts from Treatise Book 2. I argue that this first impression is mistaken, by showing how Hume’s view of the indirect passions is modified in the later (...) work. In the Treatise, he views them as simple impressions; in the Dissertation, they are complex perceptions, part impression and part idea. I argue, furthermore, that Hume’s account of the origin of the indirect passions only works on this later view, and suggest that this is why he changed his mind. The Dissertation, I conclude, is an improvement on its Treatise forerunner, and not merely a précis of it. (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)

It is now a commonplace that emotions are not mere sensations but, rather, conceptually contentful states. In trying to expand on this insight, however, most theoretical approaches to emotions neglect central intuitions about what emotions are like. We therefore need a methodological shift in our thinking about emotions away from the standard accounts' attempts to reduce them to other mental states and toward an exploration of the distinctive work emotions do. I show that emotions' distinctive function is to engage us (...) with both objective and personal values. Attention to emotions' work reveals that it is precisely their “unruliness” that allows them to play meaningful roles in our lives. (shrink)

Le modèle évaluatif de l’amour est centré sur l’objet et basé sur les raisons : l’amour se fonde sur des raisons dérivées des propriétés appréciables de l’aimé. Le modèle attributif de l’amour est axé sur le sujet et non fondé sur les raisons : l’amour n’est pas basé sur des raisons dérivées des propriétés appréciables de l’aimé, mais provient plutôt de l’amant. Dans cet article, je mélange ces modèles opposés dans le but de préserver leurs vertus et de surmonter leurs (...) difficultés. Je propose un compte rendu de l’amour basé sur des motifs et axé sur le sujet : l’amour éclot chez l’amant mais, en lui, il repose sur les raisons qui motivent l’amant. (shrink)

There seem to be two kinds of emotion the rists in the world. Some work very hard to show that emotions are essentially cognitive states. Others resist this suggestion and insist that emotions are noncognitive. The debate has appeared in many forms in philosophy and psychology. It never seems to go away. The reason for this is simple. Emotions have properties that push in both directions, properties that make them seem quite smart and properties that make them seem quite dumb. (...) They exemplify the base impulses of our animal nature while simultaneously branching out into the most human and humane reaches of our mental repertoires. Depending on where one looks, emotions can emerge as our simplest instincts or our subtlest achievements. This double nature makes emotions captivating, but also confounding. Researchers find themselves picking one side at the expense of the other, or packaging seemingly disparate components into unstable unions. I will defend a more integrative approach. For a more thorough treatment, see Prinz (forthcoming). (shrink)