ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide an account of emotions as felt evaluations, an account in which we can recognize this implicit holism. It draws out the implications this account has for understanding the affective nature of emotional intentionality. The chapter shows the account of affective intentionality to the reactive attitudes, arguing that this account can make apparent commonly ignored aspects of the affectivity of the reactive attitudes, whereby they bind us together through our having shared values and communal norms. In feeling emotions, we implicitly evaluate the target in some way, though each emotion type involves a different evaluation that distinguishes it from other emotion types. The kind of evaluation characteristic of a given emotion type is an emotion’s formal object. Some cognitivist theories of emotions try to make sense of how emotions evaluate their objects by providing a reductive account of emotions in terms of beliefs and desires.
