Emotional Experience: its Nature, its Rationality and its Epistemology

Abstract

[eng] Emotions are intrinsically and extrinsically interesting. On the one hand, they are intrinsically interesting because they are part of our mental economy standing in relations to other mental states (e.g., the belief that I am in danger and the emotion of fear, the satisfaction of a desire and the experience of joy, etc.) and actions (e.g., the emotion of admiration and emulative behaviour, the emotion of disgust and avoidance behaviour, etc.). As an important part of our psychological inventory, they play an explanatory role, at least a partial one, in explaining and justifying our mental and physical actions and behaviour. On the other hand, emotions are extrinsically interesting as evidenced by their appearance in many philosophical debates. In chapters 1 and 2, I contribute to give an answer to this question: what are the primitive, in the sense of being fundamental, types of mental experiences that constitute the human stream of consciousness? I do so by answering this particular sub-question: is emotional phenomenology a fundamental or derivative type of phenomenology? In chapter 3, I explore a new puzzle for the relation between emotion and rationality. Emotional phenomenology seems to be dogmatic, in a certain sense, and hypothetic, in a certain sense, at the same time. I explore whether this apparently contradictory feature of emotional phenomenology is compatible with rationality. In chapter 4 of this dissertation, I will explore the epistemic nature of emotion. Particularly, I propose a way out of the dialectical impasse between perceptualist and non- perceptualist, using Ernest Sosa’s idea of animal and reflective knowledge. I propose a similar distinction for the epistemic role of emotion.