ABSTRACT
The two first chapters dealt with some important traits of the emotions, distinguished emotions from other affective states, and examined some important distinctions within the emotional domain. Yet the task of understanding what emotions are still lies ahead of us. Remember that in the course of our discussion of basic and nonbasic emotions in the previous chapter we emphasized the important role of cognitive states, such as beliefs, while defending the unity of the category of emotion. In this chapter, we shall discuss in more detail the nature of the relationship between emotion and other cognitive states. This discussion will allow us to introduce and assess a first group of philosophical theories of the emotions, theories that precisely try to conceive of the emotions as partly or wholly constituted by cognitive states. We shall start by considering the connections between emotions and beliefs. This will lead us to examine an attempt to analyze the emotions in terms of beliefs and desires (the mixed theory). As we shall see, this approach faces a variety of important difficulties, which will lead us to consider a second and closely related account of the emotions. According to this account, emotions are not combinations of beliefs and desires, but rather representations of how our desires fare. We shall argue that this second theory faces no less serious difficulties. As a whole, this chapter tries to show that the fact that emotions motivate us in all sorts of ways does not support the idea that they should be understood in terms of desires.
