Emotions As Original Existences

This book defends the much-disputed view that emotions are what Hume referred to as ‘original existences’: feeling states that have no intentional or representational properties of their own. In doing so, the book serves as a valuable counterbalance to the now mainstream view that emotions are representational mental states. Beginning with a defence of a feeling theory of emotion, Whiting opens up a whole new way of thinking about the role and centrality of emotion in our lives, showing how emotion is key to a proper understanding of human motivation and the self. Whiting establishes that emotions as types of bodily feelings serve as the categorical bases for our behavioural dispositions, including those associated with moral thought, virtue, and vice. The book concludes by advancing the idea that emotions make up our intrinsic nature - the characterisation of what we are like in and of ourselves, when considered apart from how we are disposed to behave. The conclusion additionally draws out the implications of the claims made throughout the book in relation to our understanding of mental illness and the treatment of emotional disorders.

One of the leading twentieth-century French existentialist philosophers examines how human emotions shape our existence. In The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre attempts to understand the role emotions play in the human psyche. Sartre analyzes fear, lust, anguish, and melancholy while asserting that human beings begin to develop emotional capabilities from a very early age, which helps them identify and understand the emotions’ names and qualities later in life. Helping to complete the circle of Sartre’s many theories on existentialism, this vital piece of literature is a must-have for the philosopher-in-training’s collection.

"The Psychology of the Emotions" by Th. Ribot. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

This volume explores emotion in medieval and early modern thought, and opens a contemporary debate on the way emotions figure in our cognitive lives. Thirteen original essays explore the key themes of emotion within the mind; the intentionality of emotions; emotions and action; and the role of emotion in self-understanding and social situations.

I should say first of all that the only emotions I propose expressly to consider here are those that have a distinct bodily expression. That there are feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and excitement, bound up with mental operations, but having no obvious bodily expression for their consequence, would, I suppose, be held true by most readers. Certain arrangements of sounds, of lines, of colours are agreeable, and others the reverse, without the degree of the feeling being sufficient to quicken the pulse or breathing, or to prompt to movements of either the body or the face. Certain sequences of ideas charm us as much as others tire us. It is a real intellectual delight to get a problem solved, and a real intellectual torment to have to leave it unfinished. The first set of examples, the sounds, lines, and colours, are either bodily sensations, or the images of such. The second set seem to depend on processes in the ideational centres exclusively. Taken together, they appear to prove that there are pleasures and pains inherent in certain forms of nerve-action as such, wherever that action occur. The case of these feelings we will at present leave entirely aside, and confine our attention to the more complicated cases in which a wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas. Surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like, become then the names of the mental states with which the person is possessed. The bodily disturbances are said to be the "manifestation" of these several emotions, their "expression" or "natural language;" and these emotions themselves, being so strongly characterized both from within and without, may be called the standard emotions. --William James

In this book, Cecilea Mun introduces an innovative meta-framework for conducting interdisciplinary research in the science of emotion, broadly construed, as well as a framework for a particular kind of theory of emotion. She provides new solutions and arguments in support of an embodied cognitive approach to resolving a wide range of problems, including those concerning skepticism, the place of ordinary intuitions for the science of emotion, intentionality, the rationality of emotions, naturalizing knowledge, and the debate between philosophical cognitive and noncognitive theories of emotion. Her solutions include a revolutionary, unifying, interdisciplinary taxonomy of theories of emotion, which allows one to understand the discourse in the science of emotion as a debate between four fundamental types of theories: realism, instrumentalism, eliminativism, and eliminative-realism. Her original proposal for a conception of intentionality that makes sense of our ordinary intuitions is also combined with her comprehensive account of rationality to articulate a groundbreaking understanding of the structure of human rationality. All of the contributions made herein, together, provide the foundations for a profound understanding of emotions, including as a kind of embodied language.

"An ambitious and meticulous foray into the nature of being." -- The Boston Globe A landmark exploration of the relationship between emotion and reason Since Descartes famously proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am," science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—"one of the world’s leading neurologists" (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.

Academic Paper from the year 2019 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), grade: 5.5, University of Bern (Institut für Philosophie), course: Emotion, language: English, abstract: The present study deals with the philosophy of emotions. In a brief discourse overview, the different positions are presented and their problems are examined. Subsequently, a new method is presented of how emotions can be investigated within the analytical tradition. In doing so, an attempt is made to build a bridge to the continental tradition and to integrate the latest findings from complexity research and the philosophy of language. Do human emotions exist and what is the nature of their existence? In view of these two questions, contemporary philosophical debates on human emotions attempt to provide different answers. Mostly we find two prominently represented positions, which, however, cannot produce satisfactory answers at all. The first position, as I will call it in this paper, is the one of the deductionists. These scientists, psychologists and philosophers bring out a positive answer to the two questions presented above. They claim that human emotions really exist, in one way or another, and that they have a specific nature so that we can decipher and analyze them. A very famous example of this is Ekman's basic emotion theory, which presents a categorized system of six to seven basic emotions and describes their bio-psychological function. In the focus of the nature of emotions (what makes something an emotion?) we find other relevant theories such as Nussbaum, James or Prinz. All of them claim in different ways what constitutes the essence of an emotion. For example, emotions could be cognitive judgments of values, or perceptions of bodily changes, or even perceptions of value attributes themselves. Despite of all the differences, all these theories share one thing in common. All of them believe that only one deducible theory of emotions is sufficient to explain their nature in all its complexity and precariousness. The fact that the deductionists face serious problems can be seen from the current philosophical discourse alone.