Philosophy of Emotion

What it asks

Fear has a felt quality, a bodily component, an object, and a kind of correctness - fear of something genuinely dangerous is FITTING in a way that fear of a shadow is not.

Any account has to hold those together. Purely bodily theories capture the feeling and cannot explain how an emotion can be about something or be unwarranted. Purely cognitive theories capture the aboutness and make emotion sound like a belief with no heat in it.

That an emotion can be assessed at all is the crucial datum. We say a fear is irrational, an anger disproportionate, a grief appropriate. Sensations do not work that way - a pain is never mistaken.

The recurring problems

Recalcitrant emotions. You believe the spider is harmless and remain afraid. If fear were a judgement of danger you would hold contradictory beliefs, and you do not - you simply remain afraid.

Whether the body comes first. James proposed that we do not tremble because we are afraid but are afraid because we tremble. The order matters for what an emotion IS, and the physiological evidence has been read both ways for over a century.

Are emotions rational? They can be assessed, so some standard applies. Whether that standard is the same as for belief, or a distinct kind of fittingness, is unsettled.

Which are basic. Whether there is a short list of universal emotions with distinct signatures, or whether emotional categories are substantially constructed by culture and language, is contested empirically and philosophically at once.

How it developed

The Stoics held that emotions are judgements - false ones, about things that are not really goods or evils - and that they can therefore be argued away. That is a cognitive theory in full form and it is two thousand years old.

Aristotle disagreed, treating emotions as trainable responses that a good person has in the right measure toward the right objects, which is nearer the modern consensus.

Descartes and Hume made them passions, states one undergoes. James and Lange in the 1880s made them perceptions of bodily change, and that account dominated psychology so thoroughly that philosophers largely stopped working on the topic.

The field returned in the 1980s and 1990s with cognitive theories, and Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought in 2001 argued at length that emotions are evaluative judgements about things outside our control that matter to us - which restores the Stoic structure while rejecting the Stoic conclusion that we would be better without them.

The positions within it

Feeling theories, cognitive or judgementalist theories, perceptual theories on which emotions perceive value as sight perceives colour, and hybrid accounts combining components. Social constructionism holds that emotional categories are substantially made rather than found. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Perceptual theories are the most discussed, largely because they handle the recalcitrance problem naturally - an illusion persists after you know it is one, and so does the fear.

The empirical side has been unsettled by constructionist findings that challenge the basic-emotions picture, and the philosophical work most in demand is on particular emotions with public stakes: grief, resentment, disgust in moral judgement, and whether an emotion can be a form of knowledge.