Jean Moritz Müller

Actions expressive of emotion are widely thought to pose a problem for the view that actions admit of rational explanation. Supposing the standard, instrumentalist view of practical rationality, such actions seem not to admit of practical reasons. In this paper, I assess a distinctive line of response to this problem. As Helm (2001, 2016) and Bennett (2016, 2021) have proposed, we can make sense of expressive actions as rational since they are responses to a specific type of evaluative reason, which differs from paradigm instrumental reasons. Whilst sympathetic to this line of response, I argue that Helm and Bennett go awry in developing it since they rely on an inadequate view of the expressive character of expressive actions. As they suppose, emotions are at least in part a specific form of evaluation and expressive actions express this evaluation. This view, I propose, fails to make expressive actions intelligible as rational responses to evaluative reasons. I indicate an alternative way of developing the view, on which it lives up to its promise.

Emotions are significant to us in part in virtue of involving feeling. Moreover, on a currently widely held view, their significance derives from the fact that the feeling involved in emotions is inseparable from their world-directed aspect or intentionality. On this view—which I call intentionalism—, how we feel in being afraid of some object or event is inextricably intertwined with the way we are psychologically involved with this object or event. In this opening chapter, I introduce intentionalism and specify the main aim of this book. As the view is usually elaborated, emotional feelings constitute a form of perception-like apprehension of axiological properties or values. I call this the axiological receptivity view (AR). My goal is to show that AR is mistaken and to propose and defend a more adequate intentionalist account of emotional feeling.

I expand on the position-taking view (PT) by offering an account of the axiological awareness on which emotional feelings are based as responses to value. In doing so, my aim is to elaborate on a central aspect of PT which can seem controversial in light of a common concern about the possibility of value awareness. I initially introduce the view of pre-emotional value awareness which is defended by proponents of PT in the early phenomenological tradition. Rather than adopting their conception of this awareness as a sui generis type of acquaintance with value, I propose that the intuition driving this view can more plausibly be substantiated by thinking of this awareness as a specific form of aspect perception which is based on the concerns of the experiencing subject. This account invokes a familiar type of experience that is widely recognized as a genuine psychological phenomenon. I finally defend this proposal against two objections.

The axiological receptivity view (AR) is critically assessed in some detail. I start by laying out the phenomenological motivation for the view. As proponents of the view tend to suppose, ordinary experience supports AR in that emotional feelings are commonly experienced as a type of impression or presentation of value. I show that AR is wrong about ordinary experience. An adequate view of emotional phenomenology does not represent them as presentations or impressions, but as ‘feelings towards’. As I argue, feeling towards fundamentally differs from presentation in respect of its intentional features. I further explicate the relevant difference by noting that feeling towards is a response to certain aspects of its object. Expanding on this criticism, I show that emotional feelings are necessarily responsive to a specific value (their formal object) and can therefore not apprehend it since they already presuppose awareness of it. The chapter concludes by rejecting AR.

Based on my remarks on feeling towards in the foregoing chapter, I offer the position-taking view (PT) as more adequate intentionalist alternative to the axiological receptivity view (AR). On this view, emotional feelings constitute a (dis)favourable position taken towards something in response to its (dis)value. After a brief survey of the early phenomenological pedigree of PT and some appearances of the view and its close cognates in the contemporary literature PT is elaborated and shown to offer a substantive, rather than mere metaphorical account of emotional feeling. More specifically, I argue that the hedonic character of emotional feeling constitutes a felt satisfaction or frustration of specific concerns of the experiencing subject. This makes feeling towards intelligible as a form of (dis)approval and, thereby, as the taking of a (dis)favorable position. Finally PT is contrasted with a recent, apparently similar proposal, according to which emotional feelings are evaluative attitudes (Deonna and Teroni 2012, chapter 7; 2014; 2015).

This article surveys the state of the currently burgeoning debate on motivating reasons, which spans across theoretical and practical philosophy. I focus on the metaphysical project at the forefront of this debate, that is, the quest for an account of the nature of motivating reasons, which covers both reasons for which we act as well as reasons for which we hold attitudes. The discussion is organized around two questions at the heart of this project: (i) What kind of entity are motivating reasons? (ii) How are motivating reasons related to the actions or attitudes we perform or hold for them?

A prominent version of emotional cognitivism has it that emotions are preceded by awareness of value. Jonathan Mitchell [-@mitchell_jo:2019a] has recently attacked this view (which he calls the content-priority view) on the ground that extant suggestions for the relevant type of pre-emotional evaluative awareness are all problematic. Unless these problems can be overcome, he argues, the view does not represent a plausible competitor to rivalling cognitivist views. As Mitchell supposes, the content-priority view is not mandatory since its core motivations can be accommodated by competing views. I argue that Mitchell misconceives the view’s principal motivation. Properly reconstructed, this motivation provides a strong case for its indispensability to an adequate cognitivist treatment of emotion. Moreover, Mitchell’s survey of candidates for pre-emotional value awareness can be seen to rest on contestable assumptions.

In his The Nature of Sympathy, Max Scheler (2007 [1923]) offers an intriguing, if puzzling, account of empathy. According to this account, empathy is a specific kind of feeling through which we are immediately aware of others’ emotions but which is not itself an emotion and doesn’t require us to have those emotions ourselves. Moreover, qua immediate awareness of others’ emotions empathy is supposed to afford understanding why they feel those emotions. Although having echoes with ordinary discourse and experience, Scheler's proposal has met with some scepticism. In this chapter, the author defends Scheler's conception against two key objections, which target its coherence. According to the first, it is difficult to see how one could feel another's emotion without having her emotion oneself. The second objection focuses on the claim that feeling-after is a form of understanding. Since feeling-after is a direct awareness of another's emotion and, as such, does not seem to provide access to the reasons for which she feels it, it is hard to see how it could make her emotion intelligible to us. The author argues that these objections fail since they confuse different forms of feeling and do not appreciate the constitutive connection between emotions and reasons, respectively.

Many metaethicists endorse a cognitive constraint which links the reasons for which we act or hold attitudes (motivating reasons) to normative reasons (reasons that speak in favour of an action or attitude). As traditionally formulated, this constraint (known as the Taking Condition) requires that an agent’s motivating reasons are mentally represented by her as corresponding normative reasons. In response to the charge that the Taking Condition is overly demanding, Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan have proposed a reformulation which eschews the need for normative representation (Lord and Sylvan 2019 [“Prime Time (for the Basing Relation).” In Well-Founded Belief, edited by J. Adam Carter, and Patrick Bondy, 141–173. London and New York: Routledge]). As they argue, agents must treat their motivating reasons as normative reasons, where this notion picks out a specific set of dispositions rather than a representational state. I argue that this proposal seriously distorts our understanding of the relation between an action or attitude and the reasons for which we perform or hold it. On the plausible assumption that an account of motivating reasons should not stray too far from this understanding, this response to the over-demandingness charge thus fails. I also provide some directions on how friends of the Taking Condition should instead respond this charge.

It is widely assumed that emotions are evaluative. Moreover, many authors suppose that emotions are important or valuable as evaluations. According to the currently dominant version of cognitivism, emotions are evaluative insofar as they make us aware of value properties of their intentional objects. In attributing to emotions an epistemic role, this view conceives of them as epistemically valuable. In this paper, I argue that proponents of this account mischaracterize the evaluative character of emotions and, a fortiori, their value. Moreover, I propose an alternative view of emotional evaluation, according to which emotions are practically rather than epistemically important. As I argue, emotions are ways of acknowledging their intentional objects as (dis)valuable. As such, they do not apprehend values but make them count. I elaborate this idea by drawing an analogy with legal and political sanctions. The resulting view has it that emotions are practically important in that they affirm the cares and concerns which serve as standards of emotional evaluation.

According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the ‘principle of minimal rationality’ in de Sousa’s monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality.

According to a popular thought, sympathy is an epistemic phenomenon: in sympathizing with others we come to be aware of them as fellow sentient beings. This view–which I call the Epistemic View–effectively characterizes sympathy as a form of social cognition. In this paper, I will argue against the Epistemic View. As far as I can see, this view radically misconstrues the way sympathy is directed at others. I will at the same time provide some material for, and motivate, an alternative proposal according to which the primary significance of sympathy is practical rather than epistemic. On this account, sympathy is a form of interpersonal acknowledgment rather than interpersonal awareness.

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 4, Page 244-253, October 2022. This article is a précis of my 2019 monograph The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Affect and Intentionality. The book engages with a growing trend of philosophical thinking according to which the felt dimension and the intentionality of emotion are unified. While sympathetic to the general approach, I argue for a reconceptualization of the form of intentionality that emotional feelings are widely thought to possess and, accordingly, of the kind of role they play in our mental lives. More specifically, I argue that the way we feel in having an emotion is not a perception-like awareness of evaluative properties of its object, but instead constitutes the taking of a stand or position on this object in light of its evaluative properties.

It is a commonplace that emotions are characteristically passive. As we ordinarily think of them, emotions are ways in which we are acted upon, that is, moved or affected by aspects of our environment. Moreover, we have no voluntary control over whether we feel them. In this paper, I call attention to a much-neglected respect in which emotions are active, which is no less central to our pretheoretical concept of them. That is, in having emotions, we are engaged with the world insofar as we respond to aspects of our environment. In this context, to say that an emotion is a response to x is tantamount to saying that x is a reason for which we have it. Elaborating this claim in light of a historically prominent conception of the active/passive distinction, I will argue that emotions are a form of spontaneity in virtue of their responsive character and contrast in this respect with perceptions, which are fundamentally receptive. While this proposal is prima facie opposed to the ordinary image of emotions as passive, I will show that it actually allows us to make proper sense of it.

According to much recent work in metaethics, we have a perceptual access to normative properties and relations. On a common approach, this access has a presentational character. Here, ‘presentational’ specifies a characteristic feature of the way aspects of the environment are apprehended in sensory experience. While many authors have argued that we enjoy presentations of value properties, thus far comparatively less effort has been invested into developing a presentational view of the apprehension of normative reasons. Since it appears that this view would offer much the same theoretical benefits as presentational views of the apprehension of value, it seems worthwhile redressing this imbalance. My paper aims at doing so, focusing on concern-dependent practical reasons. After clarifying the central commitment of this view, I assess a recent proposal by Dancy :787-812, 2014) which provides a detailed characterization of the relevant type of cognition. I argue that Dancy ignores one of the central features of a presentational access to normative reasons and therefore misidentifies which actual psychological phenomena are apt to play this role. In this context, I also assess and reject further candidates that might seem fitting for this purpose. In the remainder of the paper, I then offer a more adequate account which specifies an actual form of presentational access to concern-dependent practical reasons and provide the contours of a more substantive account of its nature.

It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties like the fearsome or admirable (or so-called ‘affective properties’) is constituted by the corresponding emotion. I argue that this view is incompatible with a widely held meta-ethical view, according to which affective properties have deontic force. More specifically, I argue that this view cannot accommodate for the requirement that deontic entities provide guidance. If affective properties are to guide the formation of the corresponding emotion, our primary access to them cannot be provided by that same emotion.

This paper explores a currently popular view in the philosophy of emotion, according to which emotions constitute a specific form of evaluative aspect-perception (cf. esp. Roberts 2003, Döring 2004, Slaby 2008). On this view, adequate or fitting emotions play an important epistemic roe vis à vis evaluative knowledge. The paper specifically asks how to conceive of the adequacy or fittingness conditions of emotion. Considering the specific, relational nature of the evaluative properties disclosed by emotions, it is argued that a suitable standard of fittingness has both a world-involving and person-involving aspect: Fitting emotions require both a fundamentum in re as well as a fundamentum in persona.

This book engages with what are widely recognized as the two core dimensions of emotion. When we are afraid, glad or disappointed, we feel a certain way; moreover, our emotion is intentional or directed at something: we are afraid of something, glad or disappointed about something. Connecting with a vital strand of recent philosophical thinking, I conceive of these two aspects of emotion as unified. Examining different possible ways of developing the view that the feeling dimension of emotion is itself intentional, I argue against the currently popular view that it is a form of perception-like receptivity to value. I instead propose that emotional feeling is a specific type of response to value, an affective ‘position-taking’. This alternative conceives of emotional feeling as intimately related to our cares and concerns. While situating itself within the analytic-philosophical debate on emotion, the discussion crucially draws on ideas from the early phenomenological tradition in an attempt to think past the theoretical strictures of many contemporary approaches to this subject. The result is a new view of emotional feeling as a thoroughly personal form of engagement with value.

There is a wide range of things we do out of emotion. For example, we smile with pleasure, our voices drop when we are sad, we recoil in shock or jump for joy, we apologize to others out of remorse. It is uncontroversial that some of these behaviors are actions. Clearly, apologizing is an action if anything is. Things seem less clear in the case of other emotional behaviors. Intuitively, the drop in a sad person’s voice is something that happens to her, rather than something she actively performs. Perhaps more interestingly, even jumping for joy can seem a problematic case: although its execution involves the active performance of certain movements, it has been argued to contrast, e.g., with an act of apology, in that it is not performed in order to achieve some end, such as repairing a relationship. This can make this behavior seem considerably different from paradigm actions. Our central concern in this paper is with which emotional behaviors should be classed as actions and why...

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “the philosophy and psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays only a little more attention to the former.” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But there still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumenical approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work and draws crucially on Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by these authors. In this article, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject.

It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the level of intentional mode or attitude. I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non-epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non-epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values.

It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something.