ABSTRACT
This chapter presents three answers to the question: What are emotions? Each of the three answers prioritizes one of the following features of emotions: phenomenology, intentionality, and connection to motivation. The cognitivist account attempts to capture emotion’s intentionality by likening it to an evaluative state such as a belief or judgment. The second account presented is the perceptual account which takes emotions to be perceptions of some kind of value. Three different variations of a perceptual account are discussed. One likens emotions to conceptually laden perceptions, whereas the second equates emotions to non-conceptual perceptions, and the last one suggests emotions are perceptions of bodily states. The final account is the motivational theory, which argues that emotions are a kind of motivational state. Two flavors of motivational theory are presented. One takes emotions to be a kind of felt evaluation of bodily preparations for action. The second takes emotions to be a mechanism to promote a certain action in a certain context. The chapter concludes by examining some non-Western perspectives on the nature of emotion.
