Abstracts

1.) Bennett Helm – “Bodily Feelings of Import”

As I understand them, emotions are "felt evaluations" in that they are felt responses to import impressing itself on one even while being commitments constitutive of that very import. This means that emotions have a distinctive intentionality that cannot be understood as either cognitive or conative or some combination of the two. The phenomenology of emotions is made intelligible in terms of that intentionality: as feelings of import impressing itself on one, they are ways of feeling good or bad – feeling pleasure or pain – in response to particular features of one’s circumstances.

Thus, the phenomenology of fear is a matter of being pained by danger. In this talk I want to think more about the role of the body in this, somewhat revising my earlier account so as to articulate more clearly how bodily feelings just are feelings of import.

2.) Jan Slaby – “Agency in Emotion”

I will argue for the claim that emotions constitutively involve an element of agency. I begin by discussing three different senses in which agency appears to play an important role in the vicinity of our emotions: we can be active (i) by way of our emotions, (ii) with respect to our emotions, or (iii) in the very having of our emotions. The third sense – agency in having emotions – will be my main concern in this talk. I will sketch elements of a conceptual framework for elucidating the agentive character of emotions, revolving around a notion of a “response” as recently developed by Jean Moritz Müller (2021). Müller’s account of the spontaneity of emotions serves as a touchstone for my reflections. It provides the minimalist base for what I think finds more robust expression in my proposal. To flesh this out, I draw on Richard Moran’s account of agentive self-constitution, and expand Moran’s approach by combining it with considerations that substantiate the notion of emotional spontaneity. While not my main concern, the relationship between the intentionality and phenomenality of emotion is touched upon as well, as the agency at the heart of emotional processes inextricably combines intentional directedness with felt qualities (not unlike what Peter Goldie has called ‘feeling towards’).

3.) Philipp Schmidt – “Evaluative Bases: Emotions and their Experiential Backgrounds”

In recent philosophy of emotion, questions concerning the phenomenology of emotion are increasingly attracting attention. Importantly, asking what it feels like to undergo an emotion, is not taken to be a separate endeavor from the projects of accounting for emotions’ intentional structure and general nature. Rather, the aim is to determine what is essential to emotional intentionality in light of the phenomenological structure of emotion. According to one camp in the field, referring back to authors of the phenomenological tradition, emotional feelings and their intentionality are best described as forms of position-takings directed at values. On this view, the position-taking view, emotions are responses based on the awareness of evaluative properties of given objects, situations or events - rather than ways of coming to know their evaluative properties. In my talk, I explore what kind of understanding of the background of emotional experience, i.e., the kind of experience out of which an emotion can arise in the first place, is implied by the position-taking view. I suggest that the position-taking view, if it is to give a phenomenologically adequate conception of emotional experience, must accept certain characterizations of peri- or pre-emotional consciousness, i.e., of experience as it precedes both logically and temporally emotional feelings. By inquiring into the character of the evaluative bases that emotions presuppose if they are to count as position-takings, I also pursue a more general goal: to illustrate some of the wider and more easily overlooked tasks that arise for any attempt to account for the phenomenal intentionality of emotional feelings.

4.) Rick A. Furtak – “Feelings of Being Overwhelmed as Sources of Axiological Insight”

Our affective feelings, particularly those that impact us most overwhelmingly, have a distinct epistemic role to play by virtue of their embodied-and-intentional nature. In this paper, I offer the suggestion that recalcitrant emotions, as they are often called, are better understood not as cases of cognition and feeling being distinct, but precisely as a kind of affective, reason-involving apprehension of what would be otherwise unavailable for us to know as significant.

5.) Angela Mendelovici – “Emotion as Reliable Misrepresentation”

It is not implausible to think of color experiences as reliably misrepresenting the world: They represent objects as having non-relational, non-dispositional, primitive colors, but these primitive color properties are not instantiated. Still, our misrepresentation is reliable, in that the same things tend to be misrepresented in the same ways on multiple occassions, making color experiences useful in guiding our behavior despite being systematically in error.

This talk proposes an analogous picture of experiences of emotion: Emotions reliably misrepresent the world around them as having primitive evaluative features. Nothing instantiates these primitive evaluative properties, but since emotions' misrepresentation is systematic, emotions are nonetheless useful for guiding our behavior.

In both the case of color experiences and experiences of emotion, there is room to say that while the most basic, fundamental, or original content of our experiences is systematically in error, our experiences at least sometimes derivatively represent additional contents that stand a chance of veridically representing the world.

6.) Uriah Kriegel – “The Phenomenal Intentionality of Moral and Aesthetic Emotions”

What distinguishes emotions which are inherently moral emotions, such as indignation and remorse, from ones that are not, like anger and regret? I argue that that there is a specific phenomenal-intentional feature, which I call "subject-independence" and try to bring out through phenomenal contrasts, that characterizes only the moral emotions. I then argue that an analogous feature distinguishes aesthetic emotions, such as disinterested delight and awe, from non-aesthetic emotions such as joy and excitement. I close by considering whether there is also a phenomenal-intentional feature that distinguishes the moral from the aesthetic emotions.

7.) Jonathan Mitchell – “Affective Experiences of Higher Values”

A certain strand in contemporary philosophy of emotion has tended to focus on the respect in which emotional experiences are experiences of value, with a range of competing views looking to theorize this aspect of emotion in different ways (e.g., Judgementalism, Perceptualism, Attitudinalism, sui generis approaches). Significantly less attention had been paid to the different kinds of value that emotions and cognate experiences are supposedly receptive or responsive to, with theorists drawing on the full range of (usually) determinate evaluative properties as those which respective emotions supposedly ‘represent’ (i.e., the dangerous, beautiful, comic, offensive, embarrassing, shameful etc.). In this paper, I explore a distinctive kind of emotional or affective experience which involves some kind of receptivity or responsiveness to higher values. I begin by drawing on interesting reflections provided by Max Scheler who provides criteria for distinguishing ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ values in the axiological realm, principally relating to values being ‘higher’ the more they exhibit (i) endurance (ii) absence of divisibility, (iii) independence from other values (iv) feelings of ‘satisfaction’ or contentment’ and (v) subject-independence. In the first part of the paper I explicate some of Scheler’s criteria for a value being ‘higher’, and suggest candidate values that plausibly meeting these criteria, the main ones being aesthetic values (broadly construed). The second part of the paper then explores the intentional structure of experiences that are receptive to such ‘higher values’. Drawing on some distinctive ideas from Husserl concerning evaluative horizons and ‘feeling-intentions’, I argue that the structure of such experiences would have to involve an implicit intentional component (an ‘inner horizon’) which refers beyond the current ‘now-phase’ of the experience to possible further exposures to the relevant ‘higher value’ where it could be ‘confirmed’ to have endured – what is therefore implicitly anticipated is further ‘confirming’ feelings towards to the relevant higher value in future affective experiences.

8.) Jean Moritz Müller - “Relational Phenomenal Character: The Case of Emotional Experience”

According to philosophical orthodoxy, the phenomenal character of conscious states is non-relational. (I call this view ‘Phenomenal Non-Relationalism’, or PN for short.) Critics of PN tend to focus on the case of conscious veridical perception. Defending naïve realism about conscious perception, they argue that its phenomenal character is constituted by a relation between the experiencing subject and external features of reality (e.g. Martin 1997, 2004; Campbell, 2002; Brewer 2011; Locatelli 2013).

In this paper I would like to look at a different putative case of relational phenomenal character, which has so far received much less attention: the felt character of emotional experience. I will first argue that emotional phenomenal character is essentially intentional or, in Peter Goldie’s terms, a case of feeling some way towards particular objects or events (Goldie 2000, 2002; cf. also Slaby 2008; Kriegel 2014; Müller 2019; Mitchell 2021). Building on prior work, I will then offer some reasons for thinking that emotional ‘feeling towards’ is essentially a response to (real or merely apparent) exemplifications of specific evaluative properties. In this context, for some way of feeling to be a response to x is tantamount to x providing a reason for which we feel that way, i.e. a motivating reason for the feeling. I will focus on what I call the ‘good case’, in which feeling towards is essentially a response to actual instances of a specific evaluative property. In this case, the evaluative properties to which emotional feeling is responsive also provides a corresponding normative reason. Drawing on recent developments in the theory of reasons, I will argue that responses to normative reasons cannot be factorized into distinct mental and non-mental components, but constitute relations between subjects and aspects of external reality. On this basis, I propose that, in the good case, the phenomenal character of emotion is relational. I will note some dialectical advantages of this way of arguing against PN as compared to the case made by naïve realists.