ABSTRACT
While accounting for some important aspects of the emotions, the various theories we have considered up to now face serious difficulties, which essentially have to do with the fact that they remain almost completely silent on the nature of the felt aspect of emotions. After all, one of the most surprising aspects of the evaluative judgment theory discussed in the last chapter consists in its failure to come to grips with the fact that emotions are experiences, and as such cannot be assimilated to judgments. We have thus repeatedly underlined the importance of the felt aspect of emotions and have spoken of phenomenology, qualitative experience, hedonic quality, and feeling, while leaving open the question of the relation between emotion and feeling. The purpose of this chapter is then to gain a better grasp of the role feelings
play in an analysis of emotions and to specify their nature. The starting point for our discussion will be the theory put forward by William James, a theory that identifies emotions with distinctive kinds of feelings. We shall see that this theory proves unsatisfactory, precisely because it fails to account for the intimate links between emotions and evaluative properties. This will then lead us to consider and criticize two contemporary approaches to the emotions – conceptions according to which emotions are direct or indirect perceptions of evaluative properties – that emphasize both their phenomenological aspects and their intentional relations to evaluative properties.
