Abstract

The emotions play a crucial role in our apprehension of meaning, value, or significance — and their felt quality is intimately related to the sort of awareness they provide. This is exemplified most clearly by cases in which dispassionate cognition is cognitively insufficient, because we need to be emotionally agitated in order to grasp that something is true. In this type of affective experience, it is through a feeling of being moved that we recognize or apprehend that something is the case. And that is why our emotions are epistemically indispensable: namely, because they give us access to significant truths. In this essay, I explain how the phenomenally felt character of an emotion is intimately linked with its intentionality. Intellectual activity divorced from affective feeling is profoundly lacking — not only in its qualitative feel, but also in its epistemic import, or its ability to inform us about matters of significance. A better appreciation of how the living body is involved in affective experience should help us to understand the distinctive kind of embodied cognition that emotional responses involve. It also ought to resolve confusions about phobic responses and other “recalcitrant” emotions, which are not divorced from cognition as many have claimed.