After discussing de Sousa's view of emotion in akrasia, I suggest that emotions be viewed as nonconceptual perceptions of value (see Tappolet 2000). It follows that they can render intelligible actions which are contrary to one's better judgment. An emotion can make one's action intelligible even when that action is opposed by one's all-things-considered judgment. Moreover, an akratic action prompted by an emotion may be more rational than following one's better judgement, for it may be the judgement and not the (...) perception which is in error. By contrast, "cool" akrasia is genuinely puzzling; it is not clear whether it exists. (shrink)

“What is an emotion?” William James asked that question in the title of an essay he wrote in 1884, and his answer was that an emotion is a sensation brought about by bodily disturbance. Writing as a psychologist, he was concerned to help turn his discipline into a science. But as a philosopher writing about religious faith, by contrast, James argued that emotions must be understood in terms of such large and fuzzy issues as “the meaning of life.” The philosophy (...) of emotions and emotions research has since gone off in two quite different directions, one a broad-based perennial philosophical concern with the proper place of the emotions in ethics and living well, the other an increasingly sophisticated pursuit of the latest ammunition and theoretical weaponry in the biological and neurological sciences. (shrink)

Damasio, an eminent neuroscientist explores the science of human emotion and what the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza can teach of how and why we feel. Damasio shows how joy and sorrow, those most defining of human feelings, are in fact the cornerstones of our survival and culture.

Phenomenology has done more than any other school of thought for bringing emotions to the forefront of philosophical inquiry. The main reason for the interest shown by phenomenologists in the nature of emotions is perhaps not easily discernible. It might be thought that phenomenologists focus on emotions because the felt the quality of most emotional states renders them a privileged object of inquiry into the phenomenal properties of human experience. That view, in its turn, might lead one to think that (...) phenomenologists attend to emotional experience for its highly subjective character. On the contrary, it is the ability of emotions to engage with reality that makes them crucial for phenomenological analysis. Emotional experience is an opening to the salient features of a situation; undergoing an emotion is a way – and, for some phenomenologists, the principal way – in which the world manifests itself to us. The exact character of that manifestation will be the main topic of discussion in the present chapter. We look at the two major accounts of the way in which that manifestation is structured. The first account is due to Martin Heidegger, and the second is articulated in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

Michael S. Brady offers a new account of the role of emotions in our lives. He argues that emotional experiences do not give us information in the same way that perceptual experiences do. Instead, they serve our epistemic needs by capturing our attention and facilitating a reappraisal of the evaluative information that emotions themselves provide.

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

A perfectly matched layer (PML) absorbing material composed of a uniaxial anisotropic material is presented for the truncation of finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) lattices. It is shown that the uniaxial PML material formulation is mathematically equivalent to the perfectly matched layer method published by Berenger (see J. Computat. Phys., Oct. 1994). However, unlike Berenger's technique, the uniaxial PML absorbing medium presented in this paper is based on a Maxwellian formulation. Numerical examples demonstrate that the FDTD implementation of the uniaxial PML medium (...) is stable, equal in effectiveness as compared to Berenger's PML medium, while being more computationally efficient. (shrink)

Jon Elster has written a comprehensive, wide-ranging book on the emotions in which he considers the full range of theoretical approaches. Drawing on history, literature, philosophy and psychology, Elster presents a complete account of the role of the emotions in human behaviour. While acknowledging the importance of neurophysiology and laboratory experiment for the study of emotions, Elster argues that the serious student of the emotions can learn more from the great thinkers and writers of the past, from Aristotle to Jane (...) Austen. He attaches particular importance to the work of the French moralists, notably La Rochefoucauld, who demonstrated the way esteem and self-esteem shape human motivation. The book also maintains a running dialogue with economists and rational-choice theorists. Combining methodological and theoretical arguments with empirical case-studies and written with Elster's customary verve and economy, this book has great cross-disciplinary appeal. (shrink)

Existing scientific concepts of group or shared or collective emotion fail to appreciate several elements of collectivity in such emotions. Moreover, the idea of shared emotions is threatened by the individualism of emotions that comes in three forms: ontological, epistemological, and physical. The problem is whether or not we can provide a plausible account of ?straightforwardly shared? emotions without compromising our intuitions about the individualism of emotions. I discuss two philosophical accounts of shared emotions that explain the collectivity of emotions (...) in terms of their intentional structure: Margaret Gilbert's plural subject account, and Hans Bernhard Schmid's phenomenological account. I argue that Gilbert's view fails because it relegates affective experience into a contingent role in emotions and because a joint commitment to feel amounts to the creation of a feeling rule rather than to an emotion. The problems with Schmid's view are twofold: first, a phenomenological fusion of feelings is not necessary for shared emotions and second, Schmid is not sensitive enough to different forms of shared concerns. I then outline my own typology that distinguishes between weakly, moderately, and strongly shared emotions on the basis of the participants? shared concerns of different degree of collectivity, on the one hand, and the synchronization of their emotional responses, on the other hand. All kind of shared emotions in my typology are consistent with the individualism of emotions, while the question about ?straightforward sharing? is argued to be of secondary importance. (shrink)

There are at least three well-known accounts of value and evaluations which assign a central role to emotions. There is first of all the emotivist view, according to which evaluations express or manifest emotional states or attitudes but have no truth values. Second is the dispositionalist view, according to which to possess a value or axiological property is to be capable of provoking or to be likely to provoke emotional responses in subjects characterised in certain ways. Third, there is an (...) epistemology of values that is sometimes invoked by the naïve realist. If the naïve realist is one for whom evaluations are made true by the possession by objects of monadic, mind-independent axiological properties, then one natural question is: What sort of cognitive access do we have to such properties? These value properties, the realist may say, are properties we come to know of by virtue of our emotions. Emotions, he may say, present value properties to us. One variant of this view is the claim that values are the "formal objects" of emotions. Closely related to these claims is the view that our emotions are appropriate to value properties, or not. Indignation and injustice, it is sometimes said, are related in one or more of these three ways. (shrink)

Without separating off emotions as such, Plato and Aristotle alert us to their compositional intricacy, which involves body and mind, cognition and desire, perception and feeling. Even the differences of interpretation to which scholars are resigned focus our minds upon the complexity of the phenomena, and their resistance to over-unitary definitions. Emotions, after all, are things that we feel; at the same time, emotionally is how we often think. Discarding too simple a Socratic focus upon contents of thought, Plato and (...) Aristotle embrace the interconnections, within the emotions, of body and soul, and of perception, imagination, feeling, and thinking. (shrink)

This book reevaluates premodern, modern and contemporary conceptions of affects, passions and emotion by analyzing various historical manifestations of the discourse on emotion. Unlike most previous research, which? especially in the German tradition? often focused exclusively on the rise of the modern interiority without paying attention to the underlying dichotomy of interiority / exteriority, this study explores the historical preconditions, the internal logic and the possible shortcomings that inform our thinking of emotion.".