Emotion As Feeling Towards Value

Much of what we take to be meaningful and significant in life is inextricably linked with our capacity to experience emotions. Here, Jonathan Mitchell considers emotional experiences as sui generis states; not to be modelled after other mental states such as perceptions, judgements, or bodily feelings, but given their own analysis and place within our mental economy. More specifically, he proposes an original view of emotional experiences as feelings-towards-values. Central to this view is the notion that emotional experiences include (non-bodily) felt attitudes which represent evaluative properties of the particular objects of those experiences. After setting out a framework for theorising about experiences and their contents, Mitchell argues that the content of emotional experience is evaluative. He then explains the best way to marry this claim with the presence of specific kinds of valenced attitudinal components in emotional experience and critical aspects of emotional phenomenology. Building on this, he introduces a distinctive role for bodily feelings, by way of a somatic enrichment of the felt valenced attitudes involved in emotional experience. Finally, he considers issues pertaining to the intelligibility of emotions, and shows how the feelings-towards-values view can account for the way in which emotional experiences often make sense in a first-person way.

This major volume of original essays maps the place of emotion in human nature, through a discussion of the relation between consciousness and body; by analysing the importance of emotion for human agency by pointing to the ways in which practical rationality may be enhanced, as well as hindered, by emotions; and by exploring questions of value in making sense of emotions at a political, ethical and personal level. Leading researchers in the field reflect on the nature of human feelings, how and why we understand what other people feel, and the way in which our values become involved in specific emotional phenomena, such as guilt, fear, shame, amusement, or love. This collection addresses important questions in the philosophy of mind and comments on the implications of research in biology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory for the philosophical understanding of emotions.

This book engages with what are widely recognized as the two core dimensions of emotion. When we are afraid, glad or disappointed, we feel a certain way; moreover, our emotion is intentional or directed at something: we are afraid of something, glad or disappointed about something. Connecting with a vital strand of recent philosophical thinking, Müller conceives of these two aspects of emotion as unified. Examining different possible ways of developing the view that the feeling dimension of emotion is itself intentional, he argues against the currently popular view that it is a form of perception-like receptivity to value. Müller instead proposes that emotional feeling is a specific type of response to value, an affective ‘position-taking’. This alternative conceives of emotional feeling as intimately related to our cares and concerns. While situating itself within the analytic-philosophical debate on emotion, the discussion crucially draws on ideas from the early phenomenological tradition and thinks past the theoretical strictures of many contemporary approaches to this subject. The result is an innovative view of emotional feeling as a thoroughly personal form of engagement with value.

There is a large amount of scientific work on emotion in psychology, neuroscience, biology, physiology, and psychiatry, which assumes that it is possible to study emotions and other affective states, objectively. Emotion science of this sort is concerned primarily with 'facts' and not 'values', with 'description' not 'prescription'. The assumption behind this vision of emotion science is that it is possible to distinguish factual from evaluative aspects of affectivity and emotion, and study one without the other. But what really is the basis for distinguishing fact and value in emotion and affectivity? And can the distinction withstand careful scientific and philosophical scrutiny? The essays in this collection all suggest that the problems behind this vision of emotion science may be more complex than is commonly supposed.

The emotions present deep philosophical problems that have preoccupied philosophers such as Aristotle, David Hume and William James. This book is an ideal introduction to the philosophy of the emotions and will be of interest to those in related disciplines such as psychology and political theory.

This volume provides systematic, interdisciplinary, and intercultural impulses for a phenomenological pedagogy of emotions, feelings, and moods without subordinating them to the logocentric dualism of emotion and rationality. Starting from foundational and cultural perspectives on pedagogical relations of education, learning, and Bildung, specific emotions in individual studies, as well as different approaches of important representatives of phenomenological research on emotions are presented. The contributions include pedagogical, philosophical, and empirical approaches to feelings, emotions, and moods, highlighting their fundamental importance and productivity for learning, Bildung, and education in different pedagogical institutions and fields.

Should emotions play a role in our decisions, even if they are "just feelings" and not necessarily "imbued with reason" or cognitively penetrated? The author shows that such basic feelings as aversion and attraction can be important normative guides by disrupting engrained habits and beliefs, enabling us to reconsider our ways, which is important due to the ever-changing nature of ethical demands on us. Therefore, these feelings should guide our decisions, even if they are not cognitive. This book fi lls a gap in the philosophy of emotions, ethics, and virtue epistemology.

This volume brings together new work by leading philosophers on the topics of emotion and value, and explores issues at their intersection. Philosophers and psychologists working on the emotions have reached something of a consensus about the complex, inter-related nature of the affective and cognitive components of emotions, and have increasingly focussed on the important epistemological role that emotions play in giving us access to values. At the same time, an increasing number of philosophers have become attracted to analyses of value that give emotions a prominent place in evaluative judgements and experiences. The work undertaken in each of these areas has important implications for current research on topics such as the role that emotions play in practical rationality and moral psychology, the connection between imagination and emotion in the appreciation of fiction, and more generally with the ability of emotions to discern axiological saliences and to ground (or fail to ground) the objectivity of ethical or aesthetic value judgements. This volume makes a unique contribution to scholarship on emotion and value by bringing together top authors from these lines of research. In addition, the volume contains a number of contributions that explore various links between the emotions and self-understanding, touching on a range of themes that include depression, empathy, agency, guilt, and self-trust. All of these issues are approached from a number of different perspectives in order to present the reader with a wide view of this extremely rich terrain and to demonstrate how the latest thinking in a number of currently intensive areas of research is deeply interconnected.