ABSTRACT

The quotation begins by noting the primacy of emotional experience. Thought and action “depend” somehow on emotion. The study of emotional life, which has been curiously neglected by most modern philosophers, is introduced as a crucial domain of philosophical research. A introduction to the philosophy of emotions points out three fundamental features of emotions that any account should address: their phenomenology, intentionality, and epistemology. Noematic description highlights our receptivity to an infinite variety of value qualities belonging to things, capturing how things are experienced as, in a way, good or bad. Receptivity is the phenomenon of “being struck”, grounding emotional responses which are more or less appropriate and in principle correctible. Axiological positionality, which may be positive, negative, or neutral, is as much “under the jurisdiction of reason” as doxic positionality.