ABSTRACT
Affective experience broadly construed encompasses several related and interwoven, but non-identical, kinds of experiences and states. These different kinds overlap, mixing with one another in various ways. This chapter considers an emotion to be the compound of emotion-episodes and emotion-states. It construes the specifically dispositional character of an emotion as an affective trait, and distinguishes this, in turn, from a character trait. The chapter distinguishes sentiments from both affective and character traits and also from moods. There are two philosophical claims embedded in this description: Valuing an object involves intentional feelings or emotions, and this feeling or emotion is rooted in what Franz Brentano calls a “presentation” or what we might more generally call a cognitive state that grasps the object’s non-axiological features. Two kinds of affective experiences—sentiments and moods—have a broader scope than emotions and the affective and character traits associated with them.
