Emotion, philosophical issues about

Abstract

We start this overview by discussing the place of emotions within the broader affective domain-how different are emotions from moods, sensations, and affective dispositions? Next, we examine the way emotions relate to their objects, emphasizing in the process their intimate relations to values. We move from this inquiry into the nature of emotion to an inquiry into their epistemology. Do they provide reasons for evaluative judgments and, more generally, do they contribute to our knowledge of values? We then address the question of the social dimension of emotions, explaining how the traditional nature versus nurture contrast applies to them. We finish by exploring the relations between emotions, motivation and action, concluding this overview with a more specific focus on how these relations bear on some central ethical issues.

Emotions in scientific practice

“…One way or another, the agreement is that there is some intimate connection between occurrent emotions and evaluations they invite. In this way, feeling angry, we might appraise an object of our anger as offensive, while fear can suggest that the object is dangerous (Deonna, Tappolet, and Teroni 2015).…”

“…It is generally agreed that many if not all cases of emotions involve dispositions toward behaviours. In other words, emotions move us to act in certain ways (Deonna, Tappolet, and Teroni 2015). Anger correlates with aggression; fear often involves flight behaviour.…”

The Human Affectome

“…In contemporary philosophy of emotion, this definitional effort has primarily relied on tools of conceptual analysis (Jackson, 1998), which aim to give charitable interpretation of folk theory in an explicit, reasoned, and parsimonious manner, while adjusting those intuitions when they fail to be systematic (Farr and Ivanova, 2020). Often, this analytical approach has focused not only on distinguishing emotion from other affective kinds, but also providing ground to individuate emotion types (Deonna et al, 2015;Deonna and Teroni, 2012a;Goldie, 2000a;Scarantino and de Sousa, 2021;Teroni, 2017).…”

“…Another candidate for the essence of emotion is readiness for action (Dewey, 1895;Frijda, 1986;King, 2009). These theories define emotion as feeling one's body prepared for action as an evaluative attitude toward an object (Deonna et al, 2015;Deonna and Teroni, 2012a), or the change in potential for behavior itself, without the necessity for feeling (Scarantino, 2014(Scarantino, , 2015.…”

Normativity, Realism and Emotional Experience

“…18 Examples include romantic love, moral indignation, nostalgia, regret, envy, pride and jealousy. The expression of these emotions, and the associated patterns of action, can be culturally influenced (Griffiths and Scarantino 2005;Deonna et al 2015). They also frequently presuppose concepts of self and other.…”