Abstract

Claims that emotions are or can be rational, and crucially enabling of rationality, are now fairly common, also outside of philosophy, but with considerable diversity both in their assumptions about emotions and their conceptions of rationality. Three main trends are worth picking out, both in themselves and for the potential tensions between them: accounts that defend a case for the rationality of emotions A) by assimilating emotions closely to beliefs or judgements; B) in terms of the very features that traditional views of emotions as irrational/a-rational emphasized; C) by arguing that emotions exhibit a more sui generis kind of rationality, often one based on a narrative or dramaturgic “inner logic”