In explaining emotion, there are strong cognitive views, which reduce emotion to belief/thought or judgment. Misgivings about assimilating emotion to belief/thought/judgment have been a main reason for moving towards perceptual accounts for many authors. My aim in this paper is to defend a perceptual theory. To this end, I first argue against a crude version of cognitivism that views emotion essentially in terms of thought or belief. I then argue that doubts about the assimilation of emotion to belief explain the (...) appeal of ‘perception’ as the ‘cognitive element’ most appropriate to the analysis of emotion. Then I shall discuss why perception is the right category to fit emotional responses into by contrasting some considerations adduced by Sabine Döring and by Jesse Prinz. I shall show that Prinz ignores the perspective aspect of perception, while Döring fails to explain the indiscriminability in perceptual experience. For these reasons, both Prinz’s and Döring’s views are insufficient to explain emotional recalcitrance or unmerited emotional response. To explain emotional recalcitrance, I argue that we must appeal to a disjunctivist theory of visual experience. I shall demonstrate why we should prefer the explanation in terms of indiscriminability over one which appeals to a common element, such as a thought or representation of something as dangerous, for example. The present critical examination will afford an alternative view of the appropriateness of emotions. (shrink)

In this paper, we put forward the view that emotions have a legitimate and important role in health professional ethics education. This paper draws upon our experience of running a narrative ethics education programme for ethics educators from a range of healthcare disciplines. It describes the way in which emotions may be elicited in narrative ethics teaching and considers the appropriate role of emotions in ethics education for health professionals. We argue there is a need for a pedagogical framework to (...) productively incorporate the role of emotions in health professional ethics teaching. We suggest a theoretical basis for an ethics pedagogy that integrates health professional emotions in both the experience and the analysis of ethical practice, and identify a range of strategies to support the educator to incorporate emotion within their ethics teaching. (shrink)

In this tribute to the work of Robert Solomon, I address a topic that occupied him frequently in the last 20 years of his life, and about which he wrote a book and several articles: the relation(s) between the emotions and justice as a personal virtue. I hope to clarify Solomon’s views using three distinctions that seem implicit in his writings, among (1) justice as general virtue and justice as a particular virtue, (2) objective justice and justice as a virtue, (...) and (3) an emotion and a passion. Using these three distinctions and a fourfold schema of emotional objects that seems implied by the foregoing discussion, I argue that an account of emotions like Solomon’s, which construes emotions as in crucial ways like judgments, contains resources for grasping in some detail how particular emotions are related to the virtue of justice. Among these emotions, I pay special attention to compassion. (shrink)

A popular idea at present is that emotions are perceptions of values. Most defenders of this idea have interpreted it as the perceptual thesis that emotions present (rather than merely represent) evaluative states of affairs in the way sensory experiences present us with sensible aspects of the world. We argue against the perceptual thesis. We show that the phenomenology of emotions is compatible with the fact that the evaluative aspect of apparent emotional contents has been incorporated from outside. We then (...) deal with the only two views that can make sense of the perceptual thesis. On the response–dependence view, emotional experiences present evaluative responsedependent properties (being fearsome, being disgusting, etc.) in the way visual experiences present response-dependent properties such as colors. On the response–independence view, emotional experiences present evaluative response-independent properties (being dangerous, being indigestible, etc.), conceived as ‘Gestalten’ independent of emotional feelings themselves. We show that neither view can make plausible the idea that emotions present values as such, i.e., in an open and transparent way. If emotions have apparent evaluative contents, this is in fact due to evaluative enrichments of the non-evaluative presentational contents of emotions. (shrink)

I clarify some ambiguities in blame-talk and argue that blame's potential for irrationality and propensity to sting vitiates accounts of blame that identify it with consciously accessible, personal-level judgements or beliefs. Drawing on the cognitive psychology of emotion and appraisal theory, I develop an account of blame that accommodates these features. I suggest that blame consists in a range of hostile, negative first-order emotions, towards which the blamer has a specific, accompanying second-order attitude, namely, a feeling of entitlement—a feeling that (...) these hostile, negative first-order emotions are what the blamed object deserves. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an impure somatic theory of emotion, according to which emotions are constituted by the integration of bodily perceptions with representations of external objects, events, or states of affairs. We put forward our theory by contrasting it with Prinz's pure somatic theory, according to which emotions are entirely constituted by bodily perceptions. After illustrating Prinz's theory and discussing the evidence in its favor, we show that it is beset by serious problems—i.e., it gets the neural correlates (...) of emotion wrong, it isn't able to distinguish emotions from bodily perceptions that aren't emotions, it cannot account for emotions being directed towards particular objects, and it mischaracterizes emotion phenomenology. We argue that our theory accounts for the empirical evidence considered by Prinz and solves the problems faced by his theory. In particular, we maintain that our theory gives a unified and principled account of the relation between emotions and bodily perceptions, the intentionality of emotions, and emotion phenomenology. (shrink)

According to the old feeling theory of emotion, an emotion is just a feeling: a conscious experience with a characteristic phenomenal character. This theory is widely dismissed in contemporary discussions of emotion as hopelessly naïve. In particular, it is thought to suffer from two fatal drawbacks: its inability to account for the cognitive dimension of emotion (which is thought to go beyond the phenomenal dimension), and its inability to accommodate unconscious emotions (which, of course, lack any phenomenal character). In this (...) paper, I argue that the old feeling theory is in reality only a pair of modifications removed from a highly plausible account of the nature of emotion that retains the essential connection between emotion and feeling. These modifications are, moreover, motivated by recent developments in work on phenomenal consciousness. The first development is the rising recognition of a phenomenal character proper to cognition—so-called cognitive phenomenology. The second is the gathering momentum behind various ‘connection principles’ that specify some connection that a given state must bear to phenomenally conscious states in order to qualify as mental. These developments make it possible to formulate a new feeling theory of emotion, which would overcome the two fatal drawbacks of the old feeling theory. According to the new feeling theory, an emotion is a mental state that bears the right connection to conscious experiences with the right phenomenal character (involving, among other elements, a cognitive phenomenology). (shrink)

It is generally maintained that emotions consist of intentional states and /or bodily feelings. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of guilt in severe depression, in order to illustrate how such conceptions fail to adequately accommodate a way in which some emotional experiences are said to be deeper than others. Many emotions are intentional states. However, I propose that the deepest emotions are not intentional but pre-intentional, meaning that they determine which kinds of intentional state are possible. I go on (...) to suggest that pre-intentional emotions are at the same time feelings. In so doing, I reject the distinction that is often made between bodily feelings and the world-oriented aspects of emotion. (shrink)

Being a formal and general as well as the most widely accepted approach to practical rationality, rational decision theory should be crucial for justifying rational morals. In particular, acting morally should also be rational in decision theoretic terms. After defending this thesis, in the critical part of the paper two strategies to develop morals following this insight are criticized: game theoretical ethics of cooperation and ethical intuitionism. The central structural objections to ethics of cooperation are that they too directly aim (...) at the rationality of moral action and that they to do not encompass moral values or a moral desirability function. The constructive half of the paper takes up these criticisms by developing a two-part strategy to bring rationality and morals in line. The first part is to define ‘moral desirability’. This is done, using multi-attribute utility theory, by equating several adequate components of an individual’s comprehensive utility function with the moral desirability function. The second part is to introduce mechanisms, institutions, in particular socially valid moral norms, that provide further motivation for acting in accordance with morals. (shrink)

In both psychology and philosophy, cognitive theories of emotion have met with increasing opposition in recent years. However, this apparent controversy is not so much a gridlock between antithetical stances as a critical debate in which each side is being forced to qualify its position in order to accommodate the other side of the story. Here, I attempt to sort out some of the disagreements between cognitivism and its rivals, adjudicating some disputes while showing that others are merely superficial. Looking (...) at evidence from neuroscience and social psychology, as well as thought experiments and theoretical arguments, I conclude that it is necessary to acknowledge both that emotions have intentional content and that they involve somatic agitation. I also point out some of the more promising directions for future research in this area. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of emotion. Our thesis is that emotional experience is a type of perceptual experience. Agents perceive emotionally the world whose objects and situations present to them as being relevant to their well-being and they do it by means of practical relations towards their environment. Our proposal attempts to avoid, in this way, the problem of some classical theories of emotions such as James’s theory of emotions as feelings and cognitivist theories (...) of emotions (Deigh 2004). Moreover, contrary to what we call priopioceptive theories of emotions (Damasio1994, Prinz 2004), our theory is an ecological approach, according to which the world belongs to the conditions of individuation of emotional episodes. (shrink)

According to one of the most influential views in the philosophy of self-knowledge each person enjoys some special cognitive access to his or her own current mental states and episodes. This view faces two fundamental tasks. First, it must elucidate the general conceptual structure of apparent asymmetries between beliefs about one’s own mind and beliefs about other minds. Second, it must demarcate the mental territory for which first-person-special-access claims can plausibly be maintained. Traditional candidates include sensations, experiences (of various kinds), (...) thoughts, beliefs, desires, and also affective states such as emotions. I reconstruct five prominent privileged access claims that have traditionally been maintained for emotions and discuss logical relations among them. I then argue that none of these claims stands up to scrutiny. The truth is that we often suffer from affective ignorance, and that third-person ascriptions of emotional states should often be credited with more rather than less authority than corresponding self-ascriptions. I conclude by considering, and rejecting, five potential objections to my argument. (shrink)

Life comes from physical or biological survival. But the good life comes from what we care about, what we value, what we think truly important, as distinguished from what we think merely trivial. What we care about is the source of the criteria we use to evaluate ideas, ideals, persons, events, things, and their importance in our lives. And it is these criteria that determine the judgments we make in our everyday lives. In the second edition of Thinking in Education, (...) Matthew Lipman has indicated the importance of fostering critical, creative and caring thinking in children, if one is to prepare them to make better judgments and live qualitatively better lives. He tells us that caring thinking is appreciative thinking, active thinking, normative thinking, affective thinking and empathetic thinking and then goes on to list a number of mental acts under each of these categories. Maybe it is because ‘caring thinking’ is not as common a term as ‘critical thinking’ and ‘creative thinking’ in everyday educational language that we stop for pause when we hear it. However when we read what Lipman says about caring thinking, we find ourselves nodding and saying to ourselves, ‘Yes, that makes sense. To think caringly means to think ethically, affectively, normatively, appreciatively and to actively participate in society with a concern for the common good’. In a real sense what we care about is manifest in how we perform, participate, build, contribute and how we relate to others. It is thinking that reveals our ideals as well as what we think is valuable, what we are willing to fight and suffer for. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. (...) In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions regarding the status of emotion as a scientific domain usually get framed in terms of the question whether emotion is a natural kind. That approach to the issues is wrongheaded for two reasons. First, it has led to an intractable philosophical impasse that ultimately misconstrues the character of the relevant debate in emotion science. Second, and most important, it entirely ignores valence, a central feature of emotion experience, and probably the most promising criterion for demarcating emotion from cognition (...) and other related domains. An alternate philosophical hypothesis for addressing the issues is pro- posed. It is that emotion is a naturally occurring valenced phenomenon that is.. (shrink)

The experience of emotion is a fundamental part of human consciousness. Think, for example, of how different our conscious lives would be without such experiences as joy, anger, fear, disgust, pity, anxiety, and embarrassment. It is uncontroversial that these experiences typically have an intentional content. Anger, for example, is normally directed at someone or something. One may feel angry at one=s stock broker for provid- ing bad advice or angry with the cleaning lady for dropping the vase. But it is (...) not un- controversial that emotional experiences are always intentional. John Searle, for exam- ple, remarks, AMany conscious states are not Intentional, e.g., a sudden sense of elation...@. Moreover, many animals experience emotions and it is natural to sup- pose that such emotions lack the sophistication of beliefs or thoughts. When a dog ex- periences delight in seeing its master after an absence of several days, the suggestion that at least part of the dog=s experience of delight is a belief that its master has returned home seems to import into the experience something that at best is associ- ated with it and perhaps is not really a state to which the dog is subject at all. And even in the case of human beings, emotional experience often does not seem to involve thought. Consider the experience of disgust, to take one obvious example.1 Nor is a sali- ent belief required. One may have a strong fear of spiders and yet not believe that spi- ders typically pose any risk to humans. But if emotional experiences need not involve beliefs or thoughts, then just how are they intentional?2. (shrink)

This text addresses a problem that is not sufficiently dealt with in most of the recent literature on emotion and feeling. The problem is a general underestimation of the extent to which affective intentionality is essentially bodily. Affective intentionality is the sui generis type of world-directedness that most affective states – most clearly the emotions – display. Many theorists of emotion overlook the extent to which intentional feelings are essentially bodily feelings. The important but quite often overlooked fact is that (...) the bodily feelings in question are not the regularly treated, non-intentional bodily sensations (known from Jamesian accounts of emotion), but rather crucial carriers of world-directed intentionality. Consequently, most theories of human emotions and feelings recently advocated are deficient in terms of phenomenological adequacy. This text tries to make up for this deficit and develops a catalogue of five central features of intentional bodily feelings. In addition, Jesse Prinz’s embodied appraisal theory is criticized as an exemplary case of the misconstrual of the bodily nature of affective experience in naturalistic philosophy of mind. (shrink)

For many years emotion theory has been characterized by a dichotomy between the head and the body. In the golden years of cognitivism, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, emotion theory focused on the cognitive antecedents of emotion, the so-called “appraisal processes.” Bodily events were seen largely as byproducts of cognition, and as too unspecific to contribute to the variety of emotion experience. Cognition was conceptualized as an abstract, intellectual, “heady” process separate from bodily events. Although current emotion theory has moved (...) beyond this disembodied stance by conceiving of emotions as involving both cognitive processes (perception, attention, and evaluation) and bodily events (arousal, behavior, and facial expressions), the legacy of cognitivism persists in the tendency to treat cognitive and bodily events as separate constituents of emotion. Thus the cognitive aspects of emotion are supposedly distinct and separate from the bodily ones. This separation indicates that cognitivism’s disembodied conception of cognition continues to shape the way emotion theorists conceptualize emotion. (shrink)

This chapter describes a perspective on emotion, according to which emotions are: 1. Designed to function in a social context: an emotion is often an act of relationship reconfiguration brought about by delivering a social signal; 2. Forms of skillful engagement with the world which need not be mediated by conceptual thought; 3. Scaffolded by the environment, both synchronically in the unfolding of a particular emotional performance and diachronically, in the acquisition of an emotional repertoire; 4. Dynamically coupled to an (...) environment which both influences and is influenced by the unfolding of the emotion We draw heavily on ‘transactional’ accounts of emotion proposed by some contemporary psychologists. Although these authors do not, to our knowledge, conceive their work as a contribution to the ‘situationist’ literature that is the focus of this volume, we contend that their proposals constitute a fairly exact, affective parallel to situationist ideas about cognition. The primary aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that a situated approach to emotion already exists and is backed by a substantial experimental literature. (shrink)

Emotion theorists tend to separate “arousal” and other bodily events such as “actions” from the evaluative component of emotion known as “appraisal.” This separation, I argue, implies phenomenologically implausible accounts of emotion elicitation and personhood. As an alternative, I attempt a reconceptualization of the notion of appraisal within the so-called “enactive approach.” I argue that appraisal is constituted by arousal and action, and I show how this view relates to an embodied and affective notion of personhood.

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

I argue that the direct perception of emotion (DP) is best conceived in terms of event perception, rather than fact perception or object perception. On neither of these two traditional models can the perception of emotion be as direct as its counterpart in ordinary perception; the proponent of DP must either drop the ‘direct’ claim or embrace a part-whole model of emotion perception and its problems. But our best account of how we perceive events directly can be applied to emotion (...) perception without any loss in directness. Not only this but there are good reasons to think that such a conception better respects both empirical evidence and the phenomenology of emotion perception. (shrink)

According to componential theories of emotional experience, emotional experiences are phenomenally complex in that they consist of experiential parts, which may include cognitive appraisals, bodily feelings, and action tendencies. These componential theories face the problem of emotional unity: Despite their complexity, emotional experiences also seem to be phenomenologically unified. Componential theories have to give an account of this unity. We argue that existing accounts of emotional unity fail and that instead emotional unity is an instance of experienced causal‐temporal unity. We (...) propose that felt emotional unity arises from our experience of the temporal‐causal order of the world. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists sometimes categorize emotions like surprise and curiosity as specifically epistemic. Is there some reasonably unified and interesting class of emotions here? If so, what unifies it? This paper proposes and defends an evaluative account of epistemic emotions: What it is to be an epistemic emotion is to have fittingness conditions that distinctively involve some epistemic evaluation. We argue that this view has significant advantages over alternative proposals and is a promising way to identify a limited and interesting (...) class of emotions. (shrink)

In this paper, I give readers an idea of what some scholars are interested in, what I found interesting, and what may be of future interest in the philosophy of emotion. I begin with a brief overview of the general topics of interests in the philosophy of emotion. I then discuss what I believe to be some of the most interesting topics in the contemporary discourse, including questions about how philosophy can inform the science of emotion, responses to aspects of (...) the mind–body problem, and concerns about perception, cognition, and emotion, along with questions about the place of 4E approaches and meta-semantic pluralist(e) approaches in the embodied cognitive tradition. I also discuss the natural kind–social construction debate in the philosophy of emotion, the emerging field of cultural evolution, the import of a dual-inheritance theory in this emerging field, and I propose a possible way to integrate the frameworks of dual-inheritance theory and meta-semantic pluralism(e) to demonstrate at least one way in which the philosophy of emotion can contribute to the emerging field of cultural evolution. I conclude with a brief summary of this paper and note at least one significant implication of my proposal for the natural kind–social construction debate in the philosophy of emotion. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that emotions are evaluative. Moreover, many authors suppose that emotions are important or valuable as evaluations. According to the currently dominant version of cognitivism, emotions are evaluative insofar as they make us aware of value properties of their intentional objects. In attributing to emotions an epistemic role, this view conceives of them as epistemically valuable. In this paper, I argue that proponents of this account mischaracterize the evaluative character of emotions and, a fortiori, their value. Moreover, (...) I propose an alternative view of emotional evaluation, according to which emotions are practically rather than epistemically important. As I argue, emotions are ways of acknowledging their intentional objects as (dis)valuable. As such, they do not apprehend values but make them count. I elaborate this idea by drawing an analogy with legal and political sanctions. The resulting view has it that emotions are practically important in that they affirm the cares and concerns which serve as standards of emotional evaluation. (shrink)

Are emotions bodily feelings or evaluative cognitions? What is happiness, pain, or “being moved”? Are there basic emotions? In this chapter, I review extant empirical work concerning these and related questions in the philosophy of emotion. This will include both (1) studies investigating people’s emotional experiences and (2) studies investigating people’s use of emotion concepts in hypothetical cases. Overall, this review will show the potential of using empirical research methods to inform philosophical questions regarding emotion.

It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of OCD is located in the emotions that are (...) characteristic of OCD, such as anxiety or fear. In particular, we propose to understand the irrationality of OCD as a matter of harboring recalcitrant emotions. We argue that this account not only solves the puzzle about insight, but also makes better sense of how OCD sufferers experience and describe their condition and helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of compulsive behavior. (shrink)

In emotion research, both conceptual analyses and empirical studies commonly rely on emotion reports. But what do people mean when they say that they are angry, afraid, joyful, etc.? Building on extant theories of emotion, this paper presents four new studies (including a pre-registered replication) measuring the weight of cognitive evaluations, bodily changes, and action tendencies in people’s use of emotion concepts. The results of these studies suggest that the presence or absence of cognitive evaluations has the largest impact on (...) people’s emotion attributions, and that bodily changes and action tendencies are considered to depend on cognitive evaluations. Implications for theories of emotion (concepts) and the interpretation of emotion reports are discussed. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2022.

In this paper, we argue that knowledge of emotions essentially depends on introspecting the phenomenology of emotional experiences, and that introspection of emotional experiences is a process by stages, where the most fundamental stage is a non-classificatory introspective state, i.e., one that does not depend on the subject’s classifying the introspected emotion as an instance of any experience type. We call such a non-classificatory kind of introspection primitive introspection. Our main goal is to show that, although not sufficient, primitive introspection (...) is a necessary ground to acquire knowledge of emotions. Our main argument is phenomenological: by examining a variety of examples, we suggest that an accurate analysis of the introspective process through which one comes to know, or refines one’s knowledge of, one’s current emotion requires that one primitively introspects it. (shrink)

Philosophers are now wary of conflating the “fittingness” or accuracy of an emotion with any form of moral assessment of that emotion. Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, who originally cautioned against this “conflation”, also warned philosophers not to infer that an emotion is inaccurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally inappropriate, or that it is accurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally appropriate. Such inferences, they argue, risk committing “the moralistic fallacy”, a mistake they (...) claim is widespread throughout the work of contemporary and historical moral philosophers. I argue that many basic and familiar forms of moral assessment of the emotions are not subject to these arguments. I illustrate this by reconsidering the idea that to assess an emotion as “fitting” is to assess it as what a virtuous person would feel. After showing how assessments akin to this “virtue-theoretical” notion of fit may be prevalent even outside of the Aristotelian tradition, I suggest some more charitable and philosophically productive interpretations of the philosophical views of the emotions that D’Arms and Jacobson criticize, and argue that we cannot coherently theorize about the fittingness conditions of the emotions in a morally neutral way. (shrink)

This article develops a new way of understanding the integration of emotions in practical life and the practical appraisal of emotions, drawing on insights from both J-P. Sartre and R. G. Collingwo...

Dans le contexte épistémologique, deux questions ont une pertinence particulière : « les émotions sont-elles connues ? » et « une théorie uniforme des émotions est-elle nécessaire pour évaluer l'état épistémologique des émotions ? ». Une interprétation restrictive de la « connaissance » exige que les théories aient un contenu propositionnel. Dans un tel cas, les émotions sont généralement assimilées à des croyances ou à des jugements normatifs. Des interprétations plus libérales de la « connaissance » incluent également des théories (...) qui interprètent les émotions sur le modèle de perception. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16339.09762 . (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 307-325, March 2022.

It is a commonplace that emotions are characteristically passive. As we ordinarily think of them, emotions are ways in which we are acted upon, that is, moved or affected by aspects of our environment. Moreover, we have no voluntary control over whether we feel them. In this paper, I call attention to a much-neglected respect in which emotions are active, which is no less central to our pretheoretical concept of them. That is, in having emotions, we are engaged with the (...) world insofar as we respond to aspects of our environment. In this context, to say that an emotion is a response to x is tantamount to saying that x is a reason for which we have it. Elaborating this claim in light of a historically prominent conception of the active/passive distinction, I will argue that emotions are a form of spontaneity in virtue of their responsive character and contrast in this respect with perceptions, which are fundamentally receptive. While this proposal is prima facie opposed to the ordinary image of emotions as passive, I will show that it actually allows us to make proper sense of it. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the inherent temporal orientation of fear, a matter on which philosophers seem to have contrasting opinions. According to some, fear is inherently present-oriented; others instead maintain that it is inherently future-oriented or that it has no inherent temporal orientation at all. Despite the differences, however, all these views seem to understand fear’s temporal orientation as one-dimensional—that is, as uniquely determined by the represented temporal location of the intentional object of fear. By contrast, we present a (...) view that introduces a two-dimensional account of fear’s temporal orientation. On such a view, we can say that fear is inherently future-oriented, independently of its being about something in the present or in the future. (shrink)

Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson have argued that to evaluate the funniness of a joke based on the consideration of whether it is morally appropriate to feel amused commits the “moralistic fallacy.” We offer a new and empirically informed reply. We argue that there is a way to take morality into consideration without committing this fallacy, that is, it is legitimate to say that for some people, witty but immoral jokes can fail to be funny because they are immoral. In (...) our account, one has an intramural moral reason not to feel amused if one focuses on the moral feature itself of a joke rather than the moral consequence implied in one’s reaction to the joke. When one judges a joke as not funny because of the intramural moral reason, one is in a negative emotional state with high arousal, for example, moral disgust or anger. This state is psychologically incompatible with amusement. That one has an intramural reason not to feel amused thus implies that one does not have a reason to feel amused. Moral consideration thus plays an indirect and appropriate role in the evaluation of the funniness of a joke. (shrink)

Hope is often seen as at once valuable and dangerous: it can fuel our motivation in the face of challenges, but can also distract us from reality and lead us to irrationality. How can we learn to “hope well,” and what does “hoping well” involve? Contemporary philosophers disagree on such normative questions about hope and also on how to define hope as a mental state. This article explores recent philosophical debates surrounding the concept of hope and the norms governing hope. (...) It also underlies hope's significance for the philosophy of emotion and the ethics of interpersonal relations. (shrink)

Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justified whereas, mutatis mutandis, fear of a peanut rolling on the floor is not. But there is a difficulty in understanding why emotions are epistemically assessable. It is clear why beliefs, for instance, are epistemically assessable: epistemic assessability is, arguably, assessability with respect to likely truth, and belief is by its nature concerned with truth; truth is, we might say, belief’s “formal object.” Emotions, however, have formal objects (...) different from truth: the formal object of fear is danger, the formal object of indignation is injustice, and so on. Why, then, are emotions epistemically assessable too? Here we make a negative claim and a positive claim. On the negative side, we consider how cognitivist and perceptualist accounts of emotion may respond to this challenge, and argue against those responses. On the positive side, we develop an alternative picture of the domain of the epistemically evaluable, according to which any mental state which is constitutively evidence-responsive is epistemically assessable, regardless of whether its formal object is truth. (shrink)

L'émotion peut être différente d'autres constructions similaires telles que les sentiments (tous les sentiments n'incluent pas l'émotion ; les humeurs (elles durent beaucoup plus longtemps que les émotions, sont moins intenses et souvent dépourvues de stimulus contextuel) ou affect (expérience des sentiments ou des émotions). Au début de l'ère moderne, les émotions ont été abordées dans les œuvres des philosophes tels que René Descartes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes et David Hume. . Les émotions étaient considérées comme adaptatives et, (...) en sec. 18, ont été étudiés principalement dans une perspective psychiatrique empirique. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21498.93127. (shrink)

This article defends an account of collective hope that arises through solidarity in the pursuit of justice. I begin by reviewing recent literature on the nature of hope. I then explore the relationship between hope and solidarity to demonstrate the ways in which solidarity can give rise to hope. I suggest that the hope born of solidarity is collective when it is shared by at least some others, when it is caused or strengthened by activity in a collective action setting, (...) and when the reciprocal hopeful expressions of individual group members result in an emotional atmosphere of hope that extends across the group. In the context of social movements, collective hope emerges alongside the collective intentions and actions of the solidarity group; namely, in the pursuit of a form of social justice that inspires the movement. I then suggest that the object of collective hope born of solidarity is the guiding ideal of justice and reflect on what it might mean to hope well for justice. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a defence of Value Realism that relies on the unusual combination of Values Realism with Sentimentalism. What this account, which we call “Sentimental Realism”, holds, in a nutshell, is that what makes evaluative facts special is their relationship to emotions. More precisely, Sentimental Realism claims that evaluative facts are fully objective facts, but that such facts are picked out by concepts that are response-dependent, in the sense that they are essentially tied to emotions. Our plan (...) is as follows. We shall start with a presentation of Sentimental Realism and a discussion of its main virtues. On the basis of this, we shall discuss an objection to Value Realism that draws on evolutionary considerations, the Evolutionary Debunking Argument. We shall argue that Sentimental Realism safely escapes from this dilemma. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense (...) of being unable to realise oneself, in collaboration with others. (shrink)

Adherence to certain religious beliefs is often cited as both an efficient deterrent to immoral behavior and as an effective trigger of morally praiseworthy actions. I assume the truth of the externalist theory of motivation, emphasizing emotions as the most important non-cognitive elements that causally contribute to behavioral choices. While religious convictions may foster an array of complex emotions in a believer, three emotive states are singled out for a closer analysis: fear, guilt and gratitude. The results of recent empirical (...) studies are examined to evaluate the relative motivational efficiency of all three emotions, as well as the likely negative psychological side-effects of these affective states, such as aggres­sion and depression. While an action motivated by fear of punishment can be seen as a merely prudential strategy, the reparatory incentive of a guilty subject and a desire to reciprocate of the one blessed by undeserved favors are more plausible candidates for the class of genuine moral reactions. The available evidence, how­ever, does not warrant a conclusion that a sense of guilt before God or as a sense of gratefulness to wards God, may produce a statistically significant increase in the frequency of prosocial actions aimed at other humans. (shrink)