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)

This article will examine how the notion of emotional authenticity is intertwined with the notions of naturalness and artificiality in the context of the recent debates about ‘neuro-enhancement’ and ‘neuro-psychopharmacology.’ In the philosophy of mind, the concept of authenticity plays a key role in the discussion of the emotions. There is a widely held intuition that an artificial means will always lead to an inauthentic result. This article, however, proposes that artificial substances do not necessarily result in inauthentic emotions. The (...) literature provided by the philosophy of mind on this subject usually resorts to thought experiments. On the other hand, the recent literature in applied ethics on ‘enhancement’ provides good reasons to include real world examples. Such case studies reveal that some psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants actually cause people to undergo experiences of authenticity, making them feel ‘like themselves’ for the first time in their lives. Beginning with these accounts, this article suggests three non-naturalist standards for emotions: the authenticity standard, the rationality standard, and the coherence standard. It argues that the authenticity standard is not always the only valid one, but that the other two ways of assessing emotions are also valid, and that they can even have repercussions on the felt authenticity of emotions. In conclusion, it sketches some of the normative implications if not ethical intricacies that accompany the enhancement of emotions. (shrink)

We elaborate and defend the claim that human affective states are, among other things, self-disclosing. We will show why affective intentionality has to be considered in order to understand human self-consciousness. One specific class of affective states, so-called existential feelings, although often neglected in philosophical treatments of emotions, will prove central. These feelings importantly pre-structure affective and other intentional relations to the world. Our main thesis is that existential feelings are an important manifestation of self-consciousness and figure prominently in human (...) self-understanding. We offer an ordering of four levels of existential feelings and also give considerations in favour of the essential bodily nature of these feelings. (shrink)

This article argues against two theories that obscure our understanding of emotions whose objects are other emotions. The tripartite model of emotional intentionality holds that an emotion's relation to its object is necessarily mediated by an additional representational state; I argue that metaemotions are an exception to this claim. The hierarchical model positions metaemotions as stable, epistemically privileged higher-order appraisals of lower-level emotions; I argue that this clashes with various features of complex metaemotional experiences. The article therefore serves dual purposes, (...) offering metaemotions as a counterexample to an intuitive thesis about emotional intentionality, and examining their intentional structure in its own right. (shrink)

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment , Kant mentions transcendental and physiological judgments in their relationship to the sublime. He further mentions that for the best physiological treatment, one must look to Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . Whereas for Burke, the feeling of the sublime “is based on the impulse toward self-preservation and on fear,” for Kant it is the mind that “is not merely attracted by (...) the object, but is also always reciprocally repelled by it,” which provides the basis for the transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgements. How does a reading of Burke in which “we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before the almighty power,” on the one hand, and Kant’s view of relation and purposiveness in transcendental judgements, on the other hand, aid us in a deeper understanding of the fear of God? Furthermore, how might these two authors connect or interact with contemporary theories of emotion, specifically the discussion of ‘ambivalent emotions’? In this paper, I hope to both open a discussion of Burke and Kant in relation to their respective readings of the sublime and the fear of God as well as open a discussion of emotions regarding a ‘mighty object’ to whom my ambivalent emotion is directed. (shrink)

Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, published in 1869, is a novel about thwarted desires. My essay looks at some pathologies of desire the novel’s protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, may be said to exemplify in order to bring into view the conditions that make desire satisfaction possible. I take the tribulations of the protagonist not as mere consequences of his personal flaws but as significant clues about the mechanics of desire in general. I discuss the ways in which the style and form of the (...) novel mirror the predicament of the desire-driven character, and I conclude by questioning the view that Flaubert’s aestheticism amounts to a banishment of desire. (shrink)