The aim of this chapter is to discuss the relevance that emotions can play in our epistemic life considering the state of the art of the philosophical debate on emotions. The strategy is the one of focusing on the three main models on emotions as evaluative judgements, bodily feelings, and perceptions, following the fil rouge of emotion intentionality for rising questions about their epistemic functions. From this examination, a major challenge to mainstream epistemology arises, the one that (...) asks to provide prominence to the epistemic agent and to her affects. This chapter discusses these implications, also providing an overview of the many alternatives available nowadays in epistemology, arguing for an open, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary approach to emotions in knowledge. (shrink)

Are emotions bodily feelings or evaluative cognitions? What is happiness, pain, or “being moved”? Are there basic emotions? In this chapter, I review extant empirical work concerning these and related questions in the philosophy of emotion. This will include both (1) studies investigating people’s emotional experiences and (2) studies investigating people’s use of emotion concepts in hypothetical cases. Overall, this review will show the potential of using empirical research methods to inform philosophical questions regarding emotion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosophy of Emotion in Buddhist Philosophy (and a Close Look at Remorse and Regret)Maria HeimIt is an honor to guest-edit a special issue for the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy for its inaugural issue, and even more to be invited to write a somewhat longer article than is typically the privilege of the guest editor. It was thought that something of a broader statement of the (...) state of the field in this emerging subfield of philosophy might itself be useful in situating current work and aspirations for future endeavors.That the study of emotions in Buddhist philosophy is still in its infancy is somewhat surprising given that Buddhist texts offer 2,500 years of exceedingly fine-grained analyses and reflections on experience.1 It could be that scholars have been thrown off by the word "emotion" itself, given that the English term does not map easily onto Buddhist categories. No single term in any Buddhist language does exactly what "emotion" does. Of course, "emotion" does not map precisely onto premodern Western categories of experience (affections, passions, sentiments, and so on) either, and has a notably shallow history even in European contexts, dating in something like its current usage only to the early nineteenth century (see Dixon 2003 for this history). And if "emotion" fits only awkwardly with Buddhist categories, it should occasion no surprise that many of the debates and dichotomies preoccupying Western philosophy on emotions—is emotion affective or cognitive? Physical or mental? Socially constructed or universal? Are emotions feelings? Evaluations? Motivations?—ill fit the debates and discussions that Buddhist texts offer about experience. The modern [End Page 2] Western categories and terms of the discussion may well inhibit Buddhist philosophical participation in these debates.I have found that this predicament is best met by calling into question the putative universalism of the English term and the assumption that "emotion" names a natural or ontological category. Increasingly, philosophers and neuroscientists are casting doubt on the notion that emotion is a natural kind (Rorty 2004; Griffiths 2004; Barrett 2006, 2017). That emotion is not easy to distinguish from feelings, motives, moods, and propositional attitudes, and that lists of emotions, when elaborated, seem hardly to fall into a generic family of phenomena, suggesting that its boundaries and borders are not carved in nature. This has implications for how "emotions" are to be studied in the lab, as Lisa Feldman Barrett suggests; the natural-kind view "underlies the major questions, the experimental designs, and the interpretation of empirical findings that characterize emotion research as a domain of scientific inquiry," even while the empirical evidence increasingly suggests that this view is the "result of an error of arbitrary aggregation" (Barrett 2006). For reasons piling up in the empirical literature, it is coming to look less and less likely that the English term emotion carves nature at the joints.2This situation can help us shake free of "emotion" early on, even if we may not be able to part entirely with it. A special issue on "the philosophy of emotion" gestures toward the kinds of phenomena these papers take up, even if they vary in the extent to which they find "emotion" to be analytically useful when interpreting Buddhist texts. Indeed, stepping away from assumptions of English-language universalism clears the deck for looking at very different, but no less meticulous and reflective, ways of carving up experiences of the very sort we do get in Buddhist texts. The way forward, in my view, is to permit English words like emotion, affect, and feeling to open the door to the kinds of phenomena we might want to investigate. We can at the same time resist tightly defining what these English terms mean, defending the borders around them, or closely tethering Buddhist conceptions to them. Working with Buddhist categories and meta-categories suggests ways to treat experiences that are, from the ground up, different than the modern West. These in turn can interrupt its supposed universalism and offer fresh questions and interventions.For example, Emily McRae's paper in this issue on kleśas—dysfunctional mental states—offers a Buddhist intervention for how philosophers might reconfigure and aggregate experience differently... (shrink)

Cognitivism in the philosophy of emotion is the view that judgments are essential to any adequate understanding of the emotions. Non-cognitivists attempt to explain emotions independently of judgment. Against non-cognitivism, I deploy Peter Strawson's distinction between the "participant" and "objective" attitudes to show that the stark distinction non-cognitivists draw between emotions and triggering judgments cannot be maintained. I also counter efforts by non-cognitivists to dismiss cognitivism as mere "folk psychology" or methodologically suspect "conceptual analysis.".

What are emotions? What role do they play in our lives? Are emotions irrational responses or essential to theoretical and practical reasoning? Do they help us achieve goals? How do emotions feel? Because emotions occupy such a central place in our lives they have increasingly come under philosophical scrutiny. Today a complex body of thought exists on emotion, offering competing accounts of the interrelation between emotion, cognition, and feeling. The Philosophy of Emotion opens with a (...) clear overview of theories of emotion from Darwin and Freud to contemporary analysis in philosophy of mind and moral psychology. The book goes on to examine why emotions matter to us, exploring the connections with thought, judgment, sensation, moral value, aesthetic value, action, and the question of our responsibility for our emotions. The Philosophy of Emotion presents a comprehensive introduction to philosophical approaches to the emotions and the search to explain how and why emotions are valuable. (shrink)

Emotions punctuate almost all significant events in our lives, but their nature, causes, and consequences are among the least well understood aspects of human experience. It is easier to express emotions than to describe them and even harder to analyse and explain them. Despite their apparent familiarity, emotions are an extremely subtle and complex topic. Unfortunately, the topic was neglected by philosophers and scientists in the past. In recent decades, however, interest in the emotions has grown (...) considerably among scholars and students from many disciplines, as well as among the public at large. If there is to be any progress in this theoretically and practically important field, not only is a broad philosophical examination of basic concepts and issues essential, but also an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophical analysis with other types of scientific research. The clarification of basic emotional concepts as well as the unification of linguistic usages across disciplines and natural languages are necessary for integrating the growing body of interdisciplinary emotional research. The contemporary philosophy of emotions is equipped for this integrative task. It can provide us with a better and more comprehensive picture of the nature of emotions. (shrink)

Although generally philosophers have put a high valuation on reason, increasingly the role of emotions in motivating action is being recognized. The essays in this volume explore the emotions from a variety of perspectives, ranging from Aristotelian views of the passions to the new findings of cognitive science, and from such diverse starting points as medieval literature and psychological studies.

This Handbook presents thirty-one state-of-the-art contributions from the most notable writers on philosophy of emotion today. Anyone working on the nature of emotion, its history, or its relation to reason, self, value, or art, whether at the level of research or advanced study, will find the book an unrivalled resource and a fascinating read.

Volume 32, Issue 6, August 2019, Page 992-999.

본 논문에서는 도가 계열에 속하는 열자의 감정 수양론에서 제시하는 정서적 평정심과 행복에 이르는 방법에 대해 느낌과 인지의 측면에서 분석한다. 첫째, 열자의 감정 수양론은 인간 감정이 무위자연의 천기(天機) 혹은 자연의 이치와 조화를 이루어야 한다는 도가적 관점을 전제로 하여 전개된다. 천기와 이상적으로 감응해 정서적 평안 상태에 도달한 사람을 가리켜 지인, 진인, 신인이라고 부른다. 한편 천기에 어긋나는 유위적 요인들에 의해 정서적 혼란이 발생한다. 열자는 유위적 요인들을 제거하는 과정에서 무심(無心), 심허(心虛), 심재(心齋) 등과 같은 해체적인 방법을 사용한다. 둘째, 열자의 감응론은 감각기관이 외물에 얼마나 조화롭게 반응하는지에 (...) 따라 정서적 혼란과 안정 상태를 구별한다는 점에서 신체에서 활성화되는 느낌의 적절성을 중시한다. 천기는 귀, 눈, 코, 입, 피부 등과 같은 감각기관(所)을 감각기관이도록 만드는(所以) 발생론적 근원이라는 점에서 신체적 느낌의 적절성을 판별하는 기준 역할을 한다. 바꾸어 말하면 적절성을 얻지 못한 과불급 상태의 신체적 느낌은 자연의 이치에 상응하지 못함으로써 생겨난다. 셋째, 열자의 감정 수양론은 미혹된 인지(惑)가 정서적 혼란을 일으키는 주요 원인이므로 이를 해체해야 한다고 주장한다는 점에서 인지와 감정 간 긴밀한 연계성을 가정한다. 미혹된 인지란 어떤 사물이나 사태에 대한 잘못된 견해나 믿음을 가리킨다. 열자는 한편으로는 불필요한 인지에 대해 잊음(忘), 알지 못함(不知), 앎이 없음(無知) 등과 같은 해체적 메타 인지를 구성하고 다른 한편으로는 세계의 실질(實)과 자신의 운명(命)에 대해 제대로 통찰함으로써 정서적 안정을 얻고자 한다. 넷째, 열자는 참된 인지에 기초한 긍정적 감정의 실현을 통해 적극적으로 행복을 추구한다. ｢양주｣편을 중심으로 나타나는 쾌락주의적 행복론은 열자철학이 도가 계열에 속하면서도 장자나 노자의 사상과 구별되는 특성을 잘 보여준다. (shrink)

Philosophers who discuss the emotions have usually treated amusement as a non-emotional mental state. Two prominent philosophers making this claim are Henri Bergson and John Morreall, who maintain that amusement is too abstract and intellectual to qualify as an emotion. Here, the merit of this claim is assessed. Through recent work in neuroanatomy there is reason to doubt the legitimacy of dichotomies that separate emotion and the intellect. Findings suggest that the neuroanatomical structure of amusement is similar to other (...) commonly recognized emotion states. On the basis of these it is argued that amusement should be considered an emotion. (shrink)

현대 감정철학에서 데카르트의 감정이론은 윌리엄 제임스(William James)의 감정이론과 함께 감정은 신체적 변화의 결과로서 발생할 뿐인, 어떤 인지적 요소도 갖지 않는 비인지주의(non-cognitivism)로 분류된다. 실제로 데카르트와 제임스는 감정이 신체적 변화에 대한 반응 혹은 신체적 변화에 대한 지각이라는 주장을 한다. 즉 신체의 변화가 먼저 있고 그 다음에 감정이 발생한다고 주장하는 신체가 우선하는(body first) 이론이다. 하지만 이 논문에서는 데카르트와 제임스의 감정이론이 가진 공통점에도 불구하고 두 사람의 감정이론은 근본적으로 다르다는 것을 보여줄 것이다. 제임스의 감정이론에서 상황에 대한 ‘평가(appraisal)’는 감정의 요소가 아니지만, 반면 데카르트의 감정은 정신과 육체의 (...) 연합체의 안녕(well-being)에 도움이 되는 것과 해가 되는 것을 ‘지각(perceive)’ 혹은 ‘표상(represent)’하고 ‘평가’한다. 또한 데카르트의 감정은 우리 의지에 영향을 준다는 측면에서 ‘동기적인(motivational) 힘’도 가지고 있다. 이러한 주장을 통해서 데카르트는 현대 감정철학자들이 주장하듯이 비인지주의자가 아니며, 데카르트의 감정은 인지주의적인 요소를 가지고 있다는 것을 보여줄 것이다. 다만 이러한 인지주의적인 요소는 인지주의자들이 말하는 평가적 판단(evaluative judgment)이 아니며, 오히려 프린츠(J. Prinz)가 주장하는 ‘체화된 평가 이론(embodied appraisal theory)’에 가깝다는 점을 보여줄 것이다. (shrink)

This booklet consists of a letter I wrote to Dr. Robert Solomon, a world-renowned philosopher of emotions. I used the evolutionary scheme of Ken Wilber as a context for critiquing much of Dr. Solomon's work on emotions...

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Examining the significance of the General’s enlightenment in the Platform Sutra, this article clarifies the fundamental role that emotions play in the development of one’s spiritual understanding. In order to do so, this article emphasizes that the way to enlightenment implicit in the story of the General and the Master involves first granting negative emotions a means for productive expression. By acting as a preparatory measure for calming the mind and surrendering control over it, human passions become a (...) necessary, antecedent condition to wisdom—a conclusion that this article argues is a major, and sometimes underappreciated, lesson embedded in the teachings of the Sixth Patriarch. (shrink)

This edition of The Forefront of Research interviews Cecilea Mun about the recently created Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion. Cecilea Mun is the founding Director of the Society for the Philosophy of Emotion. She specializes in mind and emotion, epistemology, philosophy of science, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology.

Experimental methods and conceptual confusion : philosophy, science, and what emotions really are -- To 'make our voices resonate' or 'to be silent'? : shame as fundamental ontology -- Emotion, cognition, and world -- Shame and world.

In contemporary psychology and philosophy, influential theories approach the emotions via their relations to values and evaluations. My aim is to contribute to our understanding of how these evaluative theories in psychology and philosophy relate to one another. I first explain why this presupposes that we make up our minds about the relations between “molecular” and “molar” properties. The rest of my discussion explores some ways of understanding the relation between the molar and the molecular: as a (...) relation of epistemological support, of identity or of the determinable-determinates type. (shrink)

This book defines political ideology as a structural force that combines ideas, emotion, and people for the purpose of transforming political discourse. It advances a theoretical proposition concerning the creation of alternative modes of governance and proposes a general theory explains the reasons for the creation of political ideologies as an escape from perceived injustice. The theory also explains democracy's success and the failure of Communism and the Fascism. The purpose of any political ideology, whether Democracy, Fascism (and its varieties), (...) or Communism, is to escape human suffering by combining ideas, emotion, and people in the production of fundamental societal change. Ideologies must possess these three variables to attain the necessary power to succeed as a political force. Power gives the ideology the structural ability to transform society, trapping the once free individual into the ideology. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on fundamental trends in the philosophy of emotion since the publication of William James’ seminal and contentious view. James is famous for his claim that undergoing an emotion comes down to feeling (psychological mode) specific changes within the body (content). Philosophers writing after him have also attempted to analyse emotional modes in terms of other psychological modes (believing, desiring, and perceiving) and to adjust their contents accordingly. The discussion is organized around a series of contrasts that (...) have played fundamental roles in shaping these approaches to the emotions. These contrasts are those between emotions and feelings, between specific and unspecific phenomenology, and between dependent and independent modes. Focus on these contrasts enables a review of some dramatic turning points in the recent history of theorizing about the emotions; it also serves to bring to light fundamental constraints bearing on emotion theory. (shrink)

This study addresses two desiderata of historical emotion research: reflecting on the interdependence of textual functions and the representation of emotions, and acknowledging the interdependence of studies on the premodern and modern periods in the history of emotion. Contemporary research on the history of emotion is characterised by a proliferation of studies on very different eras, authors, themes, texts, and aspects. The enthusiasm and confidence with which situations, actions, and interactions involving emotions in history are discovered, however, has (...) led to overly direct attempts to access the represented objects (emotions/feelings/affects); as a result, too little attention has been paid to the conditions and functions of their representations. That is why this study engages with the emotion research of historians from an unashamedly philological perspective. Such an approach provides, among other things, insights into the varied, often contradictory, observations that can be made about the history of emotion in modernity and premodernity. (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)

This paper argues that the view of the emotions put forward by Brentano, and the modifications and refinements of his claims undertaken by his followers, led to the birth of new paradigm in the philosophy of emotion. The paper is structured in four main sections. The first section presents the context in which Brentano’s theory emerged. Section 2 is devoted to Brentano’s three main claims on the emotions, focusing on their intentionality, their dependency on cognitions, and their (...) relation to values. Section 3 offers an overview of the main debates surrounding these claims among the authors belonging to Brentano’s school. The paper concludes by underlining the parallels between views on the emotions put forward by Brentano and his followers and similar claims defended in contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter examines two premises of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) - that emotions are caused by beliefs and that those beliefs are represented in the mind as words or images. Being a philosophical examination, the chapter also seeks to demonstrate that these two premises essentially are philosophical premises. The chapter begins with a brief methodological suggestion of how to properly evaluate the theory of CBT. From there it works it way from examining the therapeutic practice of capturing the mental representations (...) that supposedly elicit emotional reactions to examining the assumption that emotions are caused by beliefs. The chapter ends by briefly pointing to some consequences of what has been said to the practice of CBT. (shrink)

Editorial introducing the Journal of Philosophy of Emotion, and the contents of its inaugural issue.

The Structure of Emotions argues that emotion concepts should have a much more important role in the social and behavioural sciences than they now enjoy, and shows that certain influential psychological theories of emotions overlook the explanatory power of our emotion concepts. Professor Gordon also outlines a new account of the nature of commonsense (or ‘folk’) psychology in general.

Over recent decades pain has received increasing attention as philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists try to answer deep and difficult questions about it. What is pain? What makes pain unpleasant? How is pain related to the emotions? This volume provides a rich and wide-ranging exploration of these questions and important new insights into the philosophy of pain. Divided into three clear sections - pain and motivation; pain and emotion; and deviant pain - the collection covers fundamental topics in the (...) philosophy and psychology of pain. These include pain and sensory affect, the neuroscience of pain, pain and rationality, placebos, and pain and consciousness. Philosophy of Pain: Unpleasantness, Emotion, and Devianceis essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, cognitive and behavioral psychology as well as those in health and medicine researching conceptual issues in pain. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of emotion focuses on challenging dualistic conceptualizations. Three of the most obvious dualisms are the following: 1. emotion opposes reason; 2. emotion is subjective, while reason is objective; 3. emotion lies internal to the subject, while reason is external. With challenges to these dualisms, one of the more interesting questions that has surfaced is the idea of emotional appropriateness in a particular context. Here, consider a widely held belief in the United States associates racialized (...) groups with specific emotions—most notably African American women with anger. Clearly these emotional attributions are essentialistic--and hence racist. But this response is too easy. The acknowledgement that emotion lies both internally in the subject and externally in the world opens the possibility of attributing an emotional temperament to a population group. Yet if an identity group has an emotional temperament, can they be accountable for emotionally appropriate behavior? (shrink)

Traditional views concerning musical meaning, in the field of philosophy, quite often oscillate around the discussion of whether music can transfer meaning (and if so if it happens by a means similar to language). Philosophers have provided a wide range of views – according to some, music has no meaning whatsoever, or if there is any meaning involved, it is only of a formal/structural significance. According to the opposing views, music can contain meaning similarly to language and what is (...) more, sometimes it can be even richer than language, as in music we are – arguably – able to encode “emotional meanings”. In recent years, several approaches – also speculative – to the old philosophical question have been proposed by evolutionary psychologists, one of the most controversial views being that of Stephen Pinker’s famous metaphor for music as “auditory cheesecake”. This anti-adaptationist view has been challenged f. ex. by Geoffrey Miller or Ian Cross. In this chapter, I enlist some main philosophical views on the titular problem and investigate some evolutionary-paradigm-based propositions for its solution, to examine whether – both from explanatory and methodological standpoints – the philosophy of music could gain something from recent developments in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)