Une argumentation pour l'importance dualiste des émotions dans la société, individuellement et au niveau communautaire. La tendance actuelle à la prise de conscience et au contrôle des émotions grâce à l'intelligence émotionnelle a un effet bénéfique dans les affaires et pour le succès des activités sociales mais, si nous n'y prenons pas garde, elle peut conduire à une aliénation irréversible au niveau individuel et social. L'essai est composé de trois parties principales: Émotions (Modèles d'émotions, Le processus des émotions, La bonheur, (...) La philosophie des émotions, L'éthique des émotions), Intelligence émotionnelle (Modèles d'intelligence émotionnelle, L'intelligence émotionnelle dans la recherche et l'éducation, La philosophie d'intelligence émotionnelle, L'intelligence émotionnelle dans la philosophie orientale) et Intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations (Travail émotionnel, La philosophie de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations, La critique de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations, L'éthique de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations). Dans les Conclusions, je présente un résumé des déclarations contenues dans le document. SOMMAIRE: Abstract 1. Émotions 1.1 Modèles d'émotion 1.2 Traitement des émotions 1.3 Bonheur 1.4 La philosophie des émotions 1.5 L'éthique des émotions 2. Intelligence émotionnelle 2.1 Modèles d'intelligence émotionnelle 2.1.1 Modèle d'habilités de Mayer et Salovey 2.1.2 Le modèle mixte de Goleman 2.1.3 Le modèle mixte de Bar-On 2.1.4 Modèle de traits de Petrides 2.2 Intelligence émotionnelle dans la recherche et l'éducation 2.3 La philosophie de l'intelligence émotionnelle 2.3.1 L'intelligence émotionnelle dans la philosophie orientale 3. Intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations 3.1 Travail émotionnel 3.2 La philosophie de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations 3.3 Critique de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations 3.4 Éthique de l'intelligence émotionnelle dans les organisations Conclusions Bibliographie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28567.93600 . (shrink)

An argumentation for the dualistic importance of emotions in society, individually and at community level. The current tendency of awareness and control of emotions through emotional intelligence has a beneficial effect in business and for the success of social activities but, if we are not careful, it can lead to irreversible alienation at individual and social level. The paper consists of three main parts: Emotions (Emotional models, Emotional processing, Happiness, Philosophy of emotions, Ethics of emotions), Emotional intelligence (Models of emotional (...) intelligence, Emotional intelligence in research and education, Philosophy of emotional intelligence, Emotional intelligence in Eastern philosophy), Emotional intelligence in organizations (Emotional work, Philosophy of emotional intelligence in organizations, Criticism of emotional intelligence in organizations, Ethics of emotional intelligence in organizations). In the Conclusions I present a summary of the statements in the paper. CONTENTS: Abstract 1. Emotions 1.1 Models of emotion 1.2 Processing emotions 1.3 Happiness 1.4 The philosophy of emotions 1.5 The ethics of emotions 2. Emotional intelligence 2.1 Models of emotional intelligence 2.1.1 Model of abilities of Mayer and Salovey 2.1.2 Goleman's mixed model 2.1.3 The mixed model of Bar-On 2.1.4 Petrides' model of traits 2.2 Emotional intelligence in research and education 2.3 The philosophy of emotional intelligence 2.3.1 Emotional intelligence in Eastern philosophy 3. Emotional intelligence in organizations 3.1 Emotional labor 3.2 The philosophy of emotional intelligence in organizations 3.3 Critique of emotional intelligence in organizations 3.4 Ethics of emotional intelligence in organizations Conclusions Bibliography DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32802.79041 . (shrink)

O argumentare a importanței dualiste a emoțiilor în societate, individual și la nivel de comunitate. Tendința actuală de conștientizare și control al emoțiilor prin inteligența emoțională are un efect benefic în afaceri și pentru succesul activităților sociale dar, dacă nu suntem atenți, poate duce la o alienare ireversibilă la nivel individual și social. Lucrarea se compune din trei părți principale: Emoții (Modele ale emoțiilor, Procesarea emoțiilor, Fericirea, Filosofia emoțiilor, Etica emotiilor), Inteligența emoțională (Modele ale inteligenței emoționale, Inteligența emoțională în cercetare (...) și educație, Filosofia inteligenței emoționale, Inteligența emoțională în filosofia orientală) și Inteligența emoțională în organizații (Munca emoțională, Filosofia inteligenței emoționale în organizații, Critica inteligenței emoționale în organizații, Etica inteligenței emoționale în organizații). În Concluzii prezint un rezumat al afirmațiilor din lucrare. CUPRINS: Abstract 1. Emoții 1.1 Modele ale emoțiilor 1.2 Procesarea emoțiilor 1.3 Fericirea 1.4 Filosofia emoțiilor 1.5 Etica emoțiilor 2. Inteligența emoțională 2.1 Modele ale inteligenței emoționale 2.1.1 Modelul de abilități al lui Mayer și Salovey 2.1.2 Modelul mixt al lui Goleman 2.1.3 Modelul mixt al lui Bar-On 2.1.4 Modelul de trăsături al lui Petrides 2.2 Inteligența emoțională în cercetare și educație 2.3 Filosofia inteligenței emoționale 2.3.1 Inteligența emoțională în filosofia orientală 3. Inteligența emoțională în organizații 3.1 Munca emoțională 3.2 Filosofia inteligenței emoționale în organizații 3.3 Critica inteligenței emoționale în organizații 3.4 Etica inteligenței emoționale în organizații Concluzii Bibliografie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32991.20640. (shrink)

Although it is now commonplace to take emotions to be the sort of phenomena for which there are reasons, the question of how to cash out the reason- responsiveness of emotions remains to a large extent unanswered. I highlight two main ways of thinking about reason-responsiveness, one that takes agential capacities to engage in norm-guided deliberation to underlie reason-responsiveness, and another which instead takes there to be a basic reason-relation between facts and attitudes. I argue that the latter approach should (...) be preferred. Not only does a reasons-basic approach promise to fare better in accounting for cases that its opponent struggles to accommodate, but it promises also to uncover a sui generis relation between emotions and their reasons which is at best obscured and at worst denied by its opponent. (shrink)

Philosophical cognitivists have argued for more than four decades that emotions are special types of judgments. Anti-cognitivists have provided a series of counterexamples aiming to show that identifying emotions with judgments overintellectualizes the emotions. I provide a novel counterexample that makes the overintellectualization charge especially vivid. I discuss neurophysiological evidence to the effect that the fear system can be activated by stimuli the subject is unaware of seeing. To emphasize the analogy with blind sight , I call this phenomenon blind (...) fright . Cognitivists may reply that blindfright is nothing but an unconscious judgment subcortically elicited. This reply is in line with the strategy commonly employed by cognitivists against their critics. I call it the Elastic Strategy, because it consists of ‘stretching’ the notion of judgment in order to accommodate counterexamples. This strategy, I argue, turns cognitivism into a theory that is at worst unfalsifiable and at best trivially true. The final portion of my article aims to rescue cognitivism from the damage done by the Elastic Strategy. I distinguish three varieties of cognitivism, one concerned with what emotions essentially are (Constitutive Cognitivism), one concerned with what causes emotions (Etiological Cognitivism) and one concerned with what emotions represent (Representational Cognitivism). I conclude that what cognitivism has to offer to emotion theory are primarily insights concerning the causes and representational content of emotions. The constitutive identification of emotions with judgments, on the other hand, does more harm than good. (shrink)

I examine the nature of human-robot pet relations that appear to involve genuine affective responses on behalf of humans towards entities, such as robot pets, that, on the face of it, do not seem to be deserving of these responses. Such relations have often been thought to involve a certain degree of sentimentality, the morality of which has in turn been the object of critical attention. In this paper, I dispel the claim that sentimentality is involved in this type of (...) relations. My challenge draws on literature in the philosophy of art and in cognitive science that attempts to solve the so called paradox of fictional emotions, i.e., the seemingly paradoxical way in which we respond emotionally to fictional or imaginary characters and events. If sentimentality were not at issue, neither would its immorality. For the sake of argument, however, I assume in the remaining part of the paper that sentimentality is indeed at play and bring to the fore aspects of its badness or viciousness that have not yet been discussed in connection with robot pets. I conclude that not even these aspects of sentimentality are at issue here. Yet, I argue that there are other reasons to be worried about the wide-spread use of ersatz companionship technology that have to do with the potential loss of valuable, self-defining forms of life. (shrink)

Hili Razinsky, free downlad at link. ABSTRACT: Emotional perceptions are objectivist (objectivity-directed or cognitive) and conscious, both attributes suggesting they cannot be ambivalent. Yet perceptions, including emotional perceptions of value, allow for strictly objectivist ambivalence in which a person unitarily perceives the object in mutually undermining ways. Emotional perceptions became an explicandum of emotion for philosophers who are sensitive to the unique conscious character of emotion, impressed by the objectivist character of perceptions, and believe that the perceptual account solves a (...) worry about the possibility of a conflict between an emotion and a judgement. Back into the 1980s Greenspan has argued that emotional ambivalence is possible, her reasons implying that objectivist accounts of emotion are inconsistent with ambivalence. Tappolet has more recently replied that perceptual accounts allow for emotional ambivalence since the opposed values seen in ambivalence are good or bad in different senses. The present paper identifies strict objectivist ambivalence between judgements and between emotional perceptions by contrasting them with such ambivalence of separate values such as evoked by Tappolet. (shrink)

Past research has found that the value of a person's activities can affect observers' judgments about whether that person is experiencing certain emotions (e.g., people consider morally good agents happier than morally bad agents). One proposed explanation for this effect is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgments about fittingness (whether the emotion is merited). Another hypothesis is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgments about the agent's true self (whether the emotion reflects how the agent feels “deep down”). We (...) tested these hypotheses in six studies. After finding that people think a wide range of emotions can be fitting and reflect a person's true self (Study 1), we tested the predictions of these two hypotheses for attributions of happiness, love, sadness, and hatred. We manipulated the emotions' fittingness (Studies 2a-b and 4) and whether the emotions reflected an agent's true self (Studies 3 and 5), measuring emotion attributions as well as fittingness judgments and true self judgments. The fittingness manipulation only impacted emotion attributions in the cases where it also impacted true self judgments, whereas the true self manipulation impacted emotion attribution in all cases, including those where it did not impact fittingness judgments. These results cast serious doubt on the fittingness hypothesis and offer some support for the true self hypothesis, which could be developed further in future work. -/- . (shrink)

This paper proposes that being able to feel self-pity is important to be resilient against injustices because it enables self-transformation. The suggestion for this reassessment of self-pity as a crucial self-conscious emotion for a more humanistic world aims to be an example of how philosophical reflection can be insightful for emotion research. The first part of the paper outlines a general introduction of philosophy of emotions and a description of how Hume’s analysis of pride changed its meaning and pertinently linked (...) it to human agency. The second part of the paper is devoted to self-pity and aims to offer a modified interpretation of its experience, ultimately suggesting that it is a way to cultivate resistance and endure injustices in the world. It begins by putting forward the generally accepted take on self-pity and then suggests that dismissing self-pity may increase its duration, and ultimately work as a type of denial of the world’s injustices. After describing how self-pity can be seen as a tour de force where the self is in a relationship of pity with itself, it further elaborates how self-pity may be taken as a type of calibration similar to how sleep works for the functioning organism. This makes it possible to interpret self-pity as a way to resiliently resist injustices while not dismissing them and keeping up the struggle to make the world a better place. Finally, the concluding remarks point out some consequences for the education of emotions and possible future research directions to be explored. Analogously to the undeniable way by which Hume changed the meaning of the emotion of pride, the conclusion hopes that a new way to understand self-pity is available. The overall goal is to amplify the already existing psychological descriptions showing the complementary role of philosophical research for the development of emotion research in general. (shrink)

This article discusses the importance of metaemotions (emotions about emotions), showing their undeniable existence and how they are a critical and essential part of emotion life. The article begins by placing reflexivity of emotions within the general reflexivity of human beings. Then, the article presents the literature on metaemotion, showing some of the problems that surround them, which ultimately will lead to ask if the concept of metaemotion is really necessary. The second part of the article argues for the usefulness (...) of the concept, pointing out its role in establishing distinctions among emotional states as well as further clarifying the nature of emotion, and concludes on pointing out some of the directions for future research on metaemotions. (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)

In this paper, I argue against a perceptual model of moral epistemology. We should not reject the claim that there is a sense in which, on some occasions, emotions may be said to be perceptions of values or reasons. But going further than this, and taking perception as a model for moral epistemology is unhelpful and unilluminating. By focusing on the importance of the dispositions and structures of the self to moral knowledge, I bring out important disanalogies between moral epistemology (...) and typical cases of perceptual expertise. As a result, how we gain, or fail to gain, moral knowledge should not be understood in terms of the operation of a perceptual capacity. (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)

Some argue that emotions represent so-called core relational themes. A core relational theme describes a relation between a particular event and an organism’s well-being. For instance, the core relational theme of anger is ‘a demeaning offense against me and mine’. I argue that a core relational theme is a summary or generalization of a more complex mental content. Defenders of the Simple Core Relational Theme View reject the idea that emotional content is complex. Instead, they argue that the content of (...) emotion simply consists of a core relational theme. I argue that this view commits the linguistic fallacy: it confuses a theory of emotion categorization with a theory of emotional content. (shrink)

Summary of Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience.

This paper introduces a novel form of pragmatic encroachment: one that makes a difference to the status of emotion rather than the status of belief. I begin by isolating a distinctive standard in terms of which we can evaluate emotion – one sometimes called “subjective fittingness,” “epistemic justification,” or “warrant.” I then show how this standard for emotion could face a kind of pragmatic encroachment importantly similar to the more familiar encroachment on epistemic standards for belief. Encroachment on warranted emotion (...) is a striking proposal that deserves attention. In fact, there are good reasons to think that encroachment on warranted emotion deserves to be considered the default view for those who already accept pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic status of belief. I support this parity claim by arguing for a principle that establishes a limited coordination between the conditions that warrant emotion and the conditions that justify belief. (shrink)

The essay contributes to the philosophical literature on emotions by advancing a detailed analysis of jadedness and by investigating whether jadedness can be subject to the various standards that are often thought to apply to our emotional states. The essay argues that jadedness is the affective experience of weariness, lack of care, and mild disdain with some object, and that it crucially involves the realisation that such an object was previously, but is no longer, significant to us. On the basis (...) of such a characterisation, jadedness is shown to be an affective call to restructure our commitments and values in a manner that we no longer assign any kind of significance to its object. Precisely because of its potential to affect our lives in such a fashion, jadedness is shown to carry philosophical, psychological, and even social importance. -/- . (shrink)

The essay contributes to the philosophical literature on emotions by advancing a detailed analysis of jadedness and by investigating whether jadedness can be subject to the various standards that are often thought to apply to our emotional states. The essay argues that jadedness is the affective experience of weariness, lack of care, and mild disdain with some object, and that it crucially involves the realisation that such an object was previously, but is no longer, significant to us. On the basis (...) of such a characterisation, jadedness is shown to be an affective call to restructure our commitments and values in a manner that we no longer assign any kind of significance to its object. Precisely because of its potential to affect our lives in such a fashion, jadedness is shown to carry philosophical, psychological, and even social importance. (shrink)

Theories of emotional justification investigate the conditions under which emotions are epistemically justified or unjustified. I make three contributions to this research program. First, I show that we can generalize some familiar epistemological concepts and distinctions to emotional experiences. Second, I use these concepts and distinctions to display the limits of the ‘simple view’ of emotional justification. On this approach, the justification of emotions stems only from the contents of the mental states they are based on, also known as their (...) cognitive bases. The simple view faces the ‘gap problem’: If cognitive bases and emotions (re)present their objects and properties in different ways, then cognitive bases are not sufficient to justify emotions. Third, I offer a novel solution to the gap problem based on emotional dispositions. This solution (1) draws a line between the justification of basic and non-basic emotions, (2) preserves a broadly cognitivist view of emotions, (3) avoids a form of value skepticism that threatens inferentialist views of emotional justification, and (4) sheds new light on the structure of our epistemic access to evaluative properties. (shrink)

According to moral sentimentalism, there are close connections between moral truths and moral emotions. Emotions largely form our moral attitudes. They contribute to our answerability to moral obligations. We take them as authoritative in guiding moral judgement. This role is difficult to understand if one accepts a full-blown moral realism, according to which moral truths are completely independent of our emotional response to them. Hence it is tempting to claim that moral truths depend on our emotional responses. I outline a (...) problem for this view: we are adamant that, if our moral sentiments were different, things would be the same, morally speaking. Moral truth does not seem to counterfactually depend on moral sentiments. I show how this independence can be reconciled with the role of moral sentiments in guiding our moral outlook. I draw on Yablo’s distinction between response-dependent and response-enabled properties. I propose that moral truths are response-enabled: their supervenience base does not include anything about our emotions. Hence they do not counterfactually depend on changes in our emotional response. However, their factual supervenience base being naturally ineligible, it is ultimately our response that enables them to play their role as an independent moral compass. (shrink)

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

Internalism about normative reasons is the view that an agent’s normative reasons depend on her motivational constitution. On the assumption that there are reasons for emotion I argue that externalism about reasons for emotion entails that all rational agents have reasons to be morally motivated and internalism about reasons for emotion is implausible. If the arguments are sound we can conclude that all rational agents have reasons to be morally motivated. Resisting this conclusion requires either justifying internalism about reasons for (...) emotion in a way hitherto unarticulated or giving up on reasons for emotion altogether. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of forgiveness that is sensitive to recent work on anger. Like others, we claim anger involves an appraisal, namely that someone has done something wrong. But, we add, anger has two further functions. First, anger communicates to the wrongdoer that her act has been appraised as wrong and demands she feel guilty. This function enables us to explain why apologies make it reasonable to forgo anger and forgive. Second, anger sanctions the wrongdoer for what she (...) has done. This function allows us to explore the moral status of forgiveness, including why forgiveness is typically elective. (shrink)

In this essay I examine the conceptual relation between emotions and their corresponding evaluations, desires, behavior and goals. Such conceptual relation is of the utmost importance in order to account for the unity or oneness of emotion, for if the different aspects of emotion are linked conceptually, then to have one such aspect would imply having all the others. After I discuss how emotions are related to their corresponding evaluations, desires and behavior, I show how each aspect of emotion is (...) related to the others. Next, I argue that indeed there is such conceptual or quasi-conceptual relation between emotions, evaluations and conative or desiderative states. However, while intentional behavior in terms of actions is conceptually related to some emotions, other times the emotion-specific desires are either non-forward-looking, and thus do not give rise to intentional actions, or they may be overridden, and the resultant behavioral manifestations are not conceptually related to emotion. Next, I argue that emotions are eudaimonistic, in the sense that they are essentially concerned with important goals, concerns and attachments that comprise our conception of the good life and well-being. Finally, I examine the conceptual relation between emotions and their respective goals, and argue that while emotions logically presuppose such goals, the reverse is not the case. (shrink)

Although trained in the Anglophone analytic tradition, the French education of his formative years seems to have left its mark on Ronnie de Sousa’s thinking and writing. He appeals to temperament as an explanation for fundamental attitudes to life: neither the quest for a source of meaning in God or nature, nor his own tendency to relish life’s meaninglessness can be grounded in reason. To show this, Ronnie has argued that there is no such thing as human nature, and that (...) appeals to evolution can neither guide us in choosing how to live, nor give us good reason to prefer the “normal” to the “deviant”. Instead, aesthetic reasons deserve to be given more weight than is granted by the alleged overriding character of morality. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of the issues involved in recent debates about the epistemological relevance of emotions. We first survey some key issues in epistemology and the theory of emotions that inform various assessments of emotions’ potential significance in epistemology. We then distinguish five epistemic functions that have been claimed for emotions: motivational force, salience and relevance, access to facts and beliefs, non-propositional contributions to knowledge and understanding, and epistemic efficiency. We identify two core issues in the discussions about (...) such epistemic functions of emotions: First, even though it is plausible that emotions are involved in epistemic processes, it may be doubted whether they really matter for the normative question of what counts as knowledge or justified belief. Second, some of the epistemic functions claimed for emotions in general may only be attributed to some specifically epistemic emotions, which have been present all along in traditional epistemology, albeit under different labels such as ‘intuitions’. (shrink)

This article gives a short presentation of reflexive imperativism, the intentionalist theory of valence I developed with Max Khan Hayward. The theory says that mental states have valence in virtue of having reflexive imperative content. More precisely, mental states have positive valence (i.e., feel good) in virtue of issuing the command "More of me!", and they have negative valence (i.e., feel bad) in virtue of issuing the command "Less of me!" The article summarises the main arguments in favour of reflexive (...) imperativism and against other intentionalist treatments of valence. (shrink)

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 dissertation I discuss emotional rationality generally, and the fear of death specifically. I argue that the intentionality of emotion is one source of difficulty for philosophers who defend the view that the fear of death is irrational. I suggest that since there are several things we can fear when we fear death, the acceptability of some arguments will vary depending on the objects the arguments presuppose. I also argue that philosophers often employed inappropriate conceptions of emotional rationality. If (...) the conceptual framework in which these philosophers were working is unacceptable, then perhaps their arguments are unacceptable as well. I ultimately develop a view of emotional rationality that takes its inspiration from externalist accounts of belief justification. I try to show that, even if the fear of death is not a "true" emotion, it is nonetheless justified.^. (shrink)