Theories of Emotion

Listening is not an incorporeal experience; we do not listen with our non-extended minds. We listen with all our body, and music can change completely our personal structure. It is through sound experience that we change and asset ourselves. Studies in the doctrine of affects often use sonorous metaphors and concepts such as Stimmung, resonance, consonance, that refer to sound experience. In this paper, I try first of all to show how listening is rooted in body experience. Then, I argue (...) for a new consideration of the notion of person that takes into account the fundamental sonorous basis – psycho-acoustic – of its constitution. Thanks to sounds we can reach a new conceptualization of emotional relations between persons which we attain through the person’s ordo amoris. Additionally, with the analysis of sounds we grasp some aspects of emotional experience related to the singular person (intra-personal). So, if sounds are profoundly related to corporeal experience, so strongly involving affects as to modify our personal structure and form a person’s constitution, and affects can really do that, their relationship need to be inquired where both sound experience and affection are rooted: corporeity. (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)

According to Tobias Grossmann, the high levels of cooperation seen in humans are the result of a “virtuous caring cycle” on which the increased care that more fearful children receive brings increased cooperate tendencies in those children. But this proposal overlooks an equally well supported alternative on which children’s anxiety—not a virtuous caring cycle—explains the cooperative tendencies of humans.

How does it feel to be in a crisis? Is the idea of the crisis itself bound to our affectivity in the sense that without the occurrence of specific emotions or a change in our affective lives at large we cannot even talk about a crisis properly speaking? In this paper, I explore these questions by analyzing the exemplary case of the corona crisis. In order to do so, I first explore the affective phenomenology of crises in general and the (...) corona crisis in particular, thereby paying attention to both individual (personal) and collective (socio-political) crises and crisis experiences. Then, I turn to the limits of the analogy between individual and collective crises. I reflect on how socio-political crises are not simply there but performed and procedurally constructed and show how, in the context of the corona pandemic, fears and hopes, feelings of solidarity and antagonistic emotions mirror political interests and values. While the phenomenological reflections in the first part help us to account for the fact that crises are not just objective facts but also subjective forms of experience, the political reflections in the second part help us to do justice to the inherently political nature of the language and experiences of (collective) crises. I conclude by pointing out a twofold relationship between (socio-political) crisis and critique. Thanks to their characteristic affective phenomenology, crises are tools of criticism; but due to their inherently political character, they also themselves have to be subjected to critique. (shrink)

In our everyday interactions we easily and effortlessly perceive emotions in others’ facial expressions and bodily behavior. How do we do that? Philosophers and psychologists have long argued about the fundamentals of emotion perception and the debate is far from settled. While some insist on the sufficiency of the morphological information contained in facial expressions, others construe the objects of emotion perception as more complex, comprising multimodal information such as touch, tone of voice, body postures, and so on. Others, in (...) turn, have gone so far as to deny that there is a pre-given object in emotion perception in the first place, so that processes of emotion perception must be conceptualized as emergent and co-constructed phenomena in contexts of social interaction. The purpose of this paper is to argue that John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of emotions can help us make significant theoretical advancements in the understanding of emotion perception, according to which emotions are coordinated modes of behavior that we enact with others in the contexts of social interactions. In this picture, perceiving emotions is a matter of participating in a joint activity of socio- affective coordination. This theory allows us to apprehend important insights about emotion perception that appear in these contemporary debates, while at the same time avoiding their pitfalls. (shrink)

In Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre highlights how emotions can transform our perspective on the world in ways that might make our situations more bearable when we cannot see an easy or happy way out. The point of this chapter is to spell out and discuss Sartre’s theory of emotion as presented in the Sketch with two aims in mind. The first is to show that although emotions have the power to transform our perspectives on the world (...) in ways described by Sartre, Sartre is mistaken to think emotions comprise the cognitive transformations in question. The second aim is to show why on one plausible way of thinking about the relationship holding between emotions and the cognitive transformations they help to bring about, emotions turn out to be the very sort of things that Sartre claims at the outset they are not, namely types of bodily feelings or sensations, a view of emotion that can be credited to William James. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that the claimed universal recognition of basic emotions corresponds to the recognition of conventionalized representations of emotions common in our culture. Section one presents some of the faces that people make in different circumstances, and argues that making faces is a form of action. Faces made function as narrative tools and as conversational tools. Section two compares and contrasts two conceptions of facial displays: basic emotion theories and the behavioral ecology view. The next section analyzes (...) and evaluates BET’s claim concerning the universal expression of emotions. Section four argues that the still pictures of posed emotions used by Ekman correspond to conventionalized iconographic representations of emotions in our culture. The last section asks whether present day social robots can make faces. They cannot for two reasons, I argue. First because of the dominance of BET in robotic research, second because robots do not need to enter into strategic negotiation with their human partners. The faces of robots simply reproduce conventionalized expressions of emotions, that they do paradoxically bear witness to the central relevance of the behavioral ecology view of facial displays. (shrink)

A common distinction in emotion theory is between ‘occurrent emotions’ and ‘dispositional emotions’, ‘emotional episodes’ and ‘emotional states’, ‘emotions’ and ‘sentiments’, or more neutrally between ‘short-term emotions’ and ‘long-term emotions’. While short-term emotions are, or necessarily comprise, experiences, long-term emotions are generally seen as states that can exist without experience. Given the theoretical importance of experience for emotion theorists, long-term emotions are often cast aside as of secondary importance, or at any rate as in need of separate treatment. In this (...) paper, I cast doubt on the distinction. I argue that the considerations that support a view of long-term emotions as non-experiential states equally support a view of short-term emotions as non-experiential states, and so long-term and short-term emotions are ultimately the same sort of thing. If I am right, the dominant experience-centered accounts of emotions are at best accounts, not of emotions per se, but of some closely related phenomenon. (shrink)

Sostengo que la controversia entre la teoría de las emociones básicas y el construccionismo psicológico yace en diferencias sobre el rol de los conceptos cotidianos de emoción en el ámbito científico. Para esto, analizo las discusiones en torno a la universalidad de las expresiones faciales y a la existencia de correspondencias neurofisiológicas para cada emoción. Muestro que en ambas discusiones estamos en un espacio de subdeterminación empírica, lo que impide saldar la controversia aludiendo a resultados experimentales. Finalizo con algunas sugerencias (...) sobre cómo podría saldarse la controversia. (shrink)

This pioneering book presents thirteen articles on the fascinating topic of emotions (jeong 情) in Korean philosophy and religion. Its introductory chapter comprehensively provides a textual, philosophical, ethical, and religious background on this topic in terms of emotions West and East, emotions in the Chinese and Buddhist traditions, and Korean perspectives. Chapters 2 to 5 of part I discuss key Korean Confucian thinkers, debates, and ideas. Chapters 6 to 8 of part II offer comparative thoughts from Confucian moral, political, and (...) social angles. Chapters 9 to 12 of part III deal with contemporary Buddhist and eco-feminist perspectives. The concluding chapter discusses ground-breaking insights into the diversity, dynamics, and distinctiveness of Korean emotions. -/- . (shrink)

This paper proposes and develops the feelings of goals hypothesis. It has two aims: first, to describe the evolutionary function of emotional feelings, and second, to describe the content and the format of EFs. According to FGH, the evolutionary function of EFs is to enable motoric flexibility. Specifically, EFs are a component of a psychological mechanism that permits differential motoric reactions to the same stimulus. Further, according to FGH, EF is a special type of mental representation with the content of (...) an action goal, and with a non-motoric, non-conceptual format. This paper thoroughly clarifies the assumptions underlying FGH and discusses its theoretical implications and empirical predictions. (shrink)

The proposed system for coping negative emotions arising during the learning process is considered as an embedded part of the complex intelligent learning system realized in a digital environment. By applying data-driven procedures on the current and retrospective data the main didactic-based stimuli provoking emotion generation are identified. They are examined as dominant negative emotions in the context of learning. Due to the presence of strong internal and output interconnections between teaching and emotional states, an intelligent decoupling multidimensional control scheme (...) is accepted to overcome the lack of sample effective independent control actions that separately affect the states of learning and emotions. To avoid existing drawbacks in emotion-focused partial control, an approach with integrating emotions with a low-dimensional representation is accepted. Two-stage procedure is proposed to compensate the negative impact of emotions on the learning process. (shrink)

This paper presents a detailed analysis of affective persistence and its significance – that is the persistence of affect in the face of countervailing or contradictory evaluative information. More specifically, it appeals to the phenomena of affective persistence to support the claim that a significant portion of the emotional experiences of adult humans involve a kind of normative phenomenology. Its central claim is that by appealing to a distinctive kind of normative phenomenology that emotions exhibit, we get a neat personal (...) level explanation of why affect persists. In doing so it introduces and explores an interesting claim that Ronald de Sousa makes concerning the distinctiveness of emotion, explicating it in terms of the idea of affective persistence. As such, the contribution of the paper is twofold: a thesis about emotional phenomenology qua its normative phenomenology is presented, and that thesis is used to explain something distinctive about our emotional experiences, namely that they often persist in the face of conflicting evaluative judgements and beliefs. (shrink)

Empathy is essential in story comprehension as it requires understanding of the emotions and intentions of the characters. We evaluated the sensitivity of an emotional perspective-taking task using Aesop’s Fables in relation to empathy. Participants (N = 301) were presented with 15 short fables and were asked to rate the intensity of the emotions they would feel (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, joy, trust, and anticipation) by adopting the perspective of one of the characters (offender, victim) or the observer’s perspective. (...) A data-driven approach revealed that participants’ responses were aligned with the characters’ intentions, suggesting successful emotional perspective-taking. Participants sympathized with the victim rather than the offender, demonstrating affective sharing processes. Further, participants with higher empathy scores exhibited stronger negative emotions from the victim’s perspective, independently of their level of distress. Our task was not influenced by gender effects. We suggest that the Aesop’s Fables task could provide an indirect instrument to study empathy. (shrink)

Las soluciones a la paradoja de la ficción propuestas por Kendall Walton y Gregory Currie, a pesar de diferir en puntos de detalle importantes, suponen dos movimientos conceptuales comunes para entender la situación de quien está inmerso en una obra de ficción, a través del recurso a la noción de “cuasi-emociones” y de la idea de construcción de escenarios imaginarios. Aquí propondré que sus propuestas fallan en sus dos puntos centrales, a partir de problemas que son, sin embargo, independientes. Por (...) un lado, sus ideas sobre las emociones que sentimos al estar atrapados por una obra de ficción fallan al suponer una versión inaceptable de la tesis cognitivista acerca de las emociones. Por otro, sus ideas sobre la construcción de mundos imaginarios por parte de los “consumidores de ficción” fallan al suponer una dicotomía entre mundos de ficción y realidad. Finalmente, discutiré brevemente el modo en que ambos tipos de problemas repercuten sobre la viabilidad del planteo de la paradoja misma. (shrink)

The current rise of populism is often associated with affects. However, the exact relationship between populism and affects is unclear. This article addresses the question of what is distinctive about populist (appeals to) affects. It does so against the backdrop of a Laclauian conception of populism as a political logic that appeals to a morally laden frontier between two homogenous groups, ‘the people’ and ‘those in power’, in order to establish a new hegemonic order. I argue that it is distinctive (...) of populism that it breaks with the dominating feeling rules by overtly appealing to affects and reclaiming them for the realm of the political. The article explores three groups of affective phenomena: discontent, anger, and fear; empathetic, sympathetic, group-based, and shared emotions; and collective passions of enthusiasm and love. It shows how an appeal to these affects relates to the political logic of populism itself by contributing to the concretization, collectivization, and unification of affects. (shrink)

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

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 paper investigates the emotive (or expressive) meaning of words commonly referred to as “loaded” or “emotive,” which include slurs, derogative or pejorative words, and ethical terms. We claim that emotive meaning can be reinterpreted from a pragmatic and argumentative perspective, which can account for distinct aspects of ethical terms, including the possibility of being modified and its cancellability. Emotive meaning is explained as a defeasible and automatic or automatized evaluative and intended inference commonly associated with the use of specific (...) terms, which can be represented and assessed considering its logical structure and its defeasibility conditions. This automatic inference is conceived as part of the connotation of an ethical term, and is not necessarily stable. By means of quasi-definitions, it is possible to modify the emotive meaning while maintaining the descriptive one, automaticizing the inferences drawn from an ethical word. Through examples drawn from the recent US presidential campaign, we show how re-contextualization and emotive contexts can affect emotive meaning. (shrink)

There are emotively powerful words that can modify our judgment, arouse our emotions, and influence our decisions. The purpose of this paper is to provide instruments for analyzing the structure of the reasoning underlying the inferences that they trigger, in order to investigate their reasonableness conditions and their persuasive effect. The analysis of the mechanism of persuasion triggered by such words involves the complex systematic relationship between values, decisions, and emotions, and the reasoning mechanisms that have been investigated under the (...) label of “heuristics.” On the one hand, arguing using ethical words is shown to sometimes involve value-based practical reasoning grounded on evaluative classifications stemming from hierarchies of values and maxims of experience. On the other hand, ethical words provide representations bound to the interlocutor’s experiences and judgments, which trigger specific emotions yielding a particular reaction. This chain of judgments and reactions and the potential fallaciousness thereof can be inquired into by examining the relationship between the heuristic processes of reasoning and the more complex argumentative structure that the use of such words involves. The analysis of the 2013 Italian political campaign and the ad hominem arguments used by the political candidates shows the different strategies and counterstrategies for the manipulation of emotions. (shrink)

Recent claims contrast relief experienced because a period of unpleasant uncertainty has ended and an outcome has materialized (temporal relief)—regardless of whether it is one’s preferred outcome—with relief experienced because a particular outcome has occurred, when the alternative was unpalatable (counterfactual relief). Two studies (N = 993), one run the day after the United Kingdom left the European Union and one the day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, confirmed these claims. “Leavers” and Biden voters experienced high levels of relief, and less (...) regret and disappointment than “Remainers” and Trump voters. “Remainers” and Trump voters showed an effect of precursor, experiencing little relief about the outcome that had occurred but stronger relief that a decision had been implemented. Only Trump voters who believed the election was over showed this precursor effect. Results suggest at least two different triggering conditions for relief and indicate a role for anticipated relief in voting behavior. (shrink)

I examine the significance of the Stoic theory of pathē for Kant’s moral psychology, arguing against the received view that systematic differences block the possibility of Kant’s drawing anything more than rhetoric from his Stoic sources. More particularly, I take on the chronically underexamined assumption that Kant is committed to a psychological dualism in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, positing distinct rational and nonrational elements of human mentality. By contrast, Stoics take the mentality of an adult human being to (...) be rational through and through, while recognising that this rationality is not normally in a state of health or excellence. I show how Kant’s account of affections—chiefly the “affects” and “passions” that he identifies as targets of a duty of apathy—draws substantive lessons from his Stoic sources, and how he accepts on his own terms the monistic principles of Stoic moral psychology. (shrink)

This chapter argues that emotion recognition is a skill. A skill perspective on emotion recognition draws attention to underappreciated features of this cornerstone of social cognition. Skills have a number of characteristic features. For example, they are improvable, practical, and flexible. Emotion recognition has these features as well. Leading theories of emotion recognition often draw inadequate attention to these features. The chapter advances a theory of emotion recognition that is better suited to this purpose. It proposes that emotion recognition involves (...) scripts. Emotion scripts describe how people are likely to behave in different emotional contexts. Scripts can be improved with the addition of richer social knowledge, they are practical in that they describe and guide social interaction, and they are flexible because they must accommodate the fact that emotions have different behavioral impact depending on the agents involved and the circumstances at play. Learning to recognize emotions through scripts qualifies as a skill. (shrink)

Some emotional representations seem to be unreliable. For instance, we are often afraid when there is no danger present. If emotions such as fear are so unreliable, what function do they have in our representational system? This is a problem for representationalist theories of emotion. I will argue that seemingly unreliable emotional representations are reliable after all. While many mental states strike an optimal balance between minimizing inaccurate representations and maximizing accurate representations, some emotional representations only aim at maximizing accuracy. (...) They detect important phenomena such as danger based on little evidence, which will lead to a lot of false alarms. When it matters, however, these emotional representations will detect danger and other important phenomena. Often, one is better scared (and wrong) than sorry. (shrink)

This chapter examines Else Voigtländer’s place within early phenomenology. The chapter starts by disclosing her relation to Lipps and to prominent phenomenologists of the Munich Circle, such as Pfänder, Scheler, Geiger, and Daubert. It proceeds to offer an analysis of her work as it is embedded within the phenomenological tradition. In particular, the chapter focuses on her original application of the phenomenological method, her contribution to the emotivist theory of self-consciousness, her analysis of the social dimension of the self, her (...) development of a concept of affectivity as intimately linked to value, and her study of specific phenomena, such as Ressentiment and erotic love. The chapter finishes with a discussion of the mechanisms that might have led to Voigtländer’s omission from the canon of phenomenology and an argument for the necessity of rewriting the history of the phenomenological movement to include her as a fully-fledged member. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I defend the view that, despite empathy’s susceptibility to problematic biases, we can and should cultivate empathy to aid our understanding of our own values and the values of others. I argue that empathy allows us to critically examine and potentially revise our values by considering concrete moral problems and our own moral views from the perspective of another person. Appropriately calibrated empathy helps us achieve a critical distance from our own moral perspective and is thus tied (...) to impartiality in moral inquiry. In defending this role for empathy in moral inquiry, I draw on empirical work from psychology and neuroscience to support a constructionist account of emotion, according to which we can develop more wide-ranging, fine-grained emotion concepts and empathetic capacities by seeking diverse experiences, communication, and engagement with art. I then defend the value of this effortful correction of empathy bias, arguing (1) that impartial moral inquiry ought to utilize empathy as a check on motivated reasoning and presumptions regarding what count as appropriate solutions to moral problems, and (2) that compassionate moral inquiry ought to involve empathy as a means of recognizing others as authentic moral agents that can make valuable contributions to moral debate. Lastly, I draw on insights from pragmatist philosophy to critique Adam Smith’s empathy-based account of the “impartial spectator” and defend a conception of impartiality grounded in fallibilistic, empathetic method. (shrink)

Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity (1993) was an influential early contribution to what has become a broader movement to rehabilitate shame as a moral emotion. But there is a tension in Williams’ discussion that presents an under-appreciated difficulty for efforts to rehabilitate shame. The tension arises between what Williams takes shame in its essence to be and what shame can do—the role that shame can be expected to play in ethical life. Williams can—and we argue, should—be read as avoiding the (...) difficulties stemming from this tension, but this requires a reevaluation of several of his central claims about shame’s role in ethical thought and experience. For instance, his broad claims that the “structures of shame” can “give a conception of one’s ethical identity” (93), and that shame “mediates … between ethical demands and the rest of life” (102), cannot be taken at face value. What emerges is a view that is in a sense less ambitious, but also more in tune with the spirit of Williams’ larger project. There may also, we suggest, be a more general lesson: We should be suspicious of the temptation to seek some special affinity between shame and ethical life, lest we distort our understanding of both. (shrink)

Feeling like doing something is not the same as deciding to do it. When you feel like doing something, you are still free to decide to do it or not. You are having an inclination to do it, but you are not thereby determined to do it. I call this the moment of drama. This book is about what you are faced with, in this moment. How should you relate to the inclinations you “have,” given that you are free to (...) “act on” them or not? To answer this question, we need an account of what sort of thing we are relating to, in this moment. But here we find a genuine philosophical problem. Our inclinations are forms of motivation, with respect to which we are distinctively passive. To be motivated is to be self-moved. But how can we be passive in relation to our own self-movement? Is our relation to our inclinations like that of rider to horse? Or is it like our relation to our own, spontaneous judgments or perceptions? I lay out three constraints on any theory of inclination, and I argue that familiar theories fail to meet them, because they make being inclined to φ‎ too similar or dissimilar to φ‎-ing. I then put forward the “inner animal” view, which holds that when you are merely inclined to act, the instinctive part of yourself is already active, while the rest of you is not. In this moment, your will is “at a crossroads.” You can humanize your inclination, or dehumanize yourself. (shrink)

The relationship between music and memory is mainly developed in Music and Its Lovers (1932), a book where Lee presents interesting psychological and philosophical insights from the analysis of the responses made by 150 people to a questionnaire about the “expressive and emotional powers of music”. In this short encyclopedic entry, I present Lee's analysis of the many different ways in which musical experience depends on memory.

The notion of affective memory was first introduced by Théodule Ribot (1894), giving rise to a debate about its existence at the beginning of the 20th century. Although Vernon Lee did not directly take part in this discussion, she conceptualized this notion in a quite precise way, mainly in her book Music and Its Lovers (1932), clarifying the sometimes obscure formulations made by previous authors. In this short encyclopedic entry, I present Lee's characterization of affective memory.

Functionalism as a philosophical position has been recently applied to the case of emotion research. However, a number of objections have been raised against applying such a view to scientific theorizing on emotions. In this article, I argue that functionalism is still a viable strategy for emotion research. To do this, I present functionalism in philosophy of mind and offer a sketch of its application to emotions. I then discuss three recent objections raised against it and respond to each of (...) them. These objections claim that functionalism is intractable because (i) it does not support a scientifically interesting taxonomy of emotions for experimental settings, (ii) it is inherently teleological, and (iii) it cannot be falsified. I argue that these objections either rely on a simplified version of functionalism as a philosophical position or they pose challenges that functionalists can readily address. Lastly, I conclude by drawing some lessons these objections suggest for a tractable functionalist account of emotions. (shrink)

il verbo latino «desiderare» deriva dal composto latino della particella de – che può indicare una mancanza oppure un’azione distruttiva – con il termine sidus, sideris, che significa "stella" e il plurale sidera che significa "stelle". Quindi il desiderio non ha a che fare con una singola stella, ma con un insieme di stelle. Perché? Gli antichi collegavano idealmente nel cielo le stelle fino a formare le costellazioni. e queste erano necessarie non solo per orientarsi ad es. nel mare, ma (...) anche a livello esistenziale (l’astrologia). Da qui il doppio senso della parola de-Sidera: 1) il sentimento di una «mancanza» di costellazioni, cioè di punti di orientamento; 2) il «de-costellare» nel senso del tentativo di distruggere (de- come nel caso di «de-costruire») la costellazione che imprigiona, come un destino, la mia esistenza attuale, negli affanni della routine quotidiana. (shrink)

According to several researchers, core affect lies at the foundation of our affective lives and may be characterized as a consciously accessible state combining arousal (activated-deactivated) and valence (pleasure-displeasure). The interaction between these two dimensions is still a matter of debate. In this paper we provide a novel hypothesis concerning their interaction, by arguing that subjective arousal levels modulate the experience of a stimulus’ affective quality. All things being equal, the higher the arousal, the more a given stimulus would be (...) experienced as pleasant (or unpleasant). While marshaling some preliminary evidence in favor of this hypothesis, we also show how it might be relevant in reframing our conception of depressive disorders (i.e., major and bipolar depression). (shrink)

It seems natural to think that emotional experiences associated with a memory of a past event are new and present emotional states triggered by the remembered event. This common conception has nonetheless been challenged at the beginning of the 20th century by intellectuals who considered that emotions can be encoded and retrieved, and that emotional aspects linked to memories of the personal past need not necessary to be new emotional responses caused by the act of recollection. They called this specific (...) kind of memories “affective memories” and defended their existence. My aim here is to expound the historical background of this debate as well as the characterization and development of the notion of affective memory since its first inception. I aim to show that although the debate was left unresolved and the term disappeared from academy around 1930, many of the characterizations of the nature of emotions and memory done by the advocates of affective memory have reappeared in the scientific agenda and been further developed during the last decades. (shrink)

Buddhist philosophical traditions share the Hellenistic orientation toward therapy, particularly with regard to therapeutic interventions in our emotional life. As Pierre Hadot and Martha Nussbaum have ably argued, for the Hellenistic philosophers, philosophy itself is a therapy of the emotions. In this paper, I shift the focus of the contemporary philosophical literature on therapies of the emotions, which investigates almost exclusively the Hellenistic philosophers, and instead draw on the therapies developed by Tibetan Buddhist philosophers and yogis, in particular Gampopa (1079–1153), (...) Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), and Patrul Rinpoche (1808–87). The texts I use are in the genre of Tibetan literature called lo jong (blo sbyong), or mind (blo)- training (sbyong). I argue that the philosophical analysis of the Tibetan Buddhist therapies gives us a model of moral improve- ment that is both novel and promising. This model focuses on the morally improving agent’s capacity for self-awareness and relaxation, her playful approach to emotional-ethical obstacles, and the cultivation of sophisticated, context-sensitive and appropriately flexible judgments about her emotional-ethical life. I also offer a rough taxonomy of Tibetan therapies of the emotions, which will serve as a vehicle to understanding the view of moral improvement described above. (shrink)

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

Most of those who hold that emotions involve appraisals also accept that the content of emotions is nonconceptual. The main motivation for nonconceptulism regarding emotions is that it accounts for the difference between emotions and evaluative judgements. This paper argues that if one assumes a broadly Fregean account of concepts, there are good reasons to accept that emotions have nonconceptual contents. All the main arguments for nonconceptualism regarding sensory perception easily transpose to the case of emotions. The paper ends by (...) responding to two important objections: firstly, that nonconceptualism rules out the possibility that emotions justify evaluative judgements and secondly, that nonconceptualism cannot account for the fact that some emotions have conceptually articulated cognitive bases. (shrink)

Emotion theory includes attempts to reduce or assimilate emotions to states such as bodily feelings, beliefs-desire combinations, and evaluative judgements. Resistance to such approaches is motivated by the claim that emotions possess a sui generis phenomenology. Uriah Kriegel defends a new form of emotion reductivism which avoids positing irreducible emotional phenomenology by specifying emotions’ phenomenal character in terms of a combination of other phenomenologies. This article argues Kriegel’s approach, and similar proposals, are unsuccessful, since typical emotional experiences are constituted by (...) sui generis feelings towards value. (shrink)

In the last decades there has been a great controversy about the scientific status of emotion categories. This controversy stems from the idea that emotions are heterogeneous phenomena, which precludes classifying them under a common kind. In this article, I analyze this claim—which I call the Variability Thesis—and argue that as it stands, it is problematically underdefined. To show this, I examine a recent formulation of the thesis as offered by Scarantino (2015). On one hand, I raise some issues regarding (...) the logical structure of the claim. On the other hand, and most importantly, I show that the Variability Thesis requires a consensus about what counts as a relevant pattern of response in different domains, a consensus that is lacking in the current literature. This makes it difficult to assess what counts as evidence for or against this thesis. As a result, arguments based on the Variability Thesis are unwarranted. This raises serious concerns about some current empirical theories of emotions, but also sheds light on the issue of the scientific status of emotion categories. (shrink)

Affective experiences motivate and rationalize behavior in virtue of feeling good or bad, or their valence. It has become popular to explain such phenomenal character with intentional content. Rejecting evaluativism and extending earlier imperativist accounts of pain, I argue that when experiences feel bad, they both represent things as being in a certain way and tell us to see to it that they will no longer be that way. Such commands have subjective authority by virtue of linking up with a (...) relevant background concern. The imperative content explains but doesn’t constitute world-directed motivation. It also rationalizes action indirectly, by giving rise to an affective seeming that represents the situation as calling for the authoritatively commanded behavior. One experience feels worse than another if its content tells us to bear a higher opportunity cost to comply with the command. Finally, experience-directed motivation is contingent on our being attitudinally (dis)pleased with the character of our experience. (shrink)

A very basic form of experience consists in feeling energetic, vital, alive, tired, dispirited, vigorous and so on. These feelings – which I call feelings of vitality or vital feelings – constitute the main concern of this paper. My aim is to argue that these feelings exhibit a distinctive form of affectivity which cannot be explained in terms of emotions, moods, background feelings or existential feelings and to explore different paths for their conceptualization. The paper proceeds as follows. After introducing (...) the topic (sect. 1), I show that these feelings cannot be subsumed under any of the current categories of the affective mind (sect. 2). Against this backdrop, I present and critically assess Scheler’s notion of vital feelings as an alternative model for capturing their distinctive nature (sect. 3). Next, I explore varieties of vital feelings by focusing on different levels of the bodily-felt experience (sect. 4) and analyze their specific form of self-involvement (sect. 5). Finally, I conclude by showing how the study of vital feelings might contribute to phenomenological bioethics (sect. 6). (shrink)

Review of Jean Moritz Müller, The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling.

The aim of this paper is to extract from Kant's writings an account of the nature of the emotions and their function – and to do so despite the fact that Kant neither uses the term ‘emotion’ nor offers a systematic treatment of it. Kant's position, as I interpret it, challenges the contemporary trends that define emotions in terms of other mental states and defines them instead first and foremost as ‘feelings’. Although Kant's views on the nature of feelings have (...) drawn surprisingly little attention, I argue that the faculty of feeling has the distinct role of making us aware of the way our faculties relate to each other and to the world. As I show, feelings are affective appraisals of our activity, and as such they play an indispensable orientational function in the Kantian mind. After spelling out Kant's distinction between feeling and desire, I turn to the distinction between feeling and cognition and show that while feelings are non-cognitive states, they have a form of derived-intentionality. §4 argues that what feelings are about, in this derived sense, is our relationship to ourselves and the world: they function as affective appraisals of the state of our agency. §5 shows that this function is necessary to the activity of the mind insofar as it is orientational. Finally, §6 discusses the examples of epistemic pleasure and moral contentment and argues that they manifest the conditions of cognitive and moral agency respectively. (shrink)

Commentators disagree about Kant’s view on the proper treatment of emotions. In contrast to a tendency in this literature to treat them uniformly, I argue that, according to Kant, feelings (but not affects) require cultivation, and inclinations – although they can and perhaps may be cultivated – generally require discipline. The appropriate treatment for emotions depends on their susceptibility to rational constraint and on the threat they pose to rational deliberation. Although I read Kant as recommending that we cultivate certain (...) emotions, I argue that my reading is not vulnerable to Thomason’s recent pertinent objections to such readings. (shrink)

This paper explores jealousy in Unamuno’s drama El otro. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of emotion, I will argue that for the Spanish author jealousy gives the subject a sense of self. The paper begins by embedding Unamuno’s philosophical anthropology in the context of contemporary emotion theory. It then presents the drama as an investigation into the affective dimension of self-identity. The third section offers an analysis of jealousy as an emotion of self-assessment. The final section discusses how this drama can (...) be regarded as a piece of philosophical work. (shrink)

I argue, contra traditional interpretations of James's emotion theory like Antonio Damasio and alternative interpretations like Phoebe Ellsworth and Lisa Barrett, that James is best classified as a functionalist regarding emotion categories. In arguing for this point, I will make four textual claims: (1) James was an important precursor to Basic Emotion Theory (BET) and his theory is best identified as a flavor of BET; (2) James's theory individuates emotion categories by their evolutionary, functional roles; (3) The only necessary condition (...) on something being an emotion is that it is a bodily feeling; and, (4) Contrary to Barrett and Ellsworth, James was loath to offer a definitive list of basic emotions not because he loathed taxonomy but rather because he thought psychology was not yet a natural science with well-defined theoretical categories. I close by arguing that a proper understanding of James's emotion theory defangs some critiques of BET and of Neo-Jamesian theory. (shrink)

This paper explores a currently popular view in the philosophy of emotion, according to which emotions constitute a specific form of evaluative aspect-perception (cf. esp. Roberts 2003, Döring 2004, Slaby 2008). On this view, adequate or fitting emotions play an important epistemic roe vis à vis evaluative knowledge. The paper specifically asks how to conceive of the adequacy or fittingness conditions of emotion. Considering the specific, relational nature of the evaluative properties disclosed by emotions, it is argued that a suitable (...) standard of fittingness has both a world-involving and person-involving aspect: Fitting emotions require both a fundamentum in re as well as a fundamentum in persona. (shrink)