Markel Kortabarria

Emotions are taken by some authors as a kind of mental state epistemically akin to perception. However, unlike perceptual phenomenology, which allows being treated dogmatically, emotional phenomenology is puzzling in the following respect. When you feel an emotion, you feel an urge to act, you feel, among other things, your body’s action readiness. On the other hand, at least sometimes, you are aware that an emotion by itself is not a sufficient reason to justify an evaluative judgment and/or an action, not even prima facie. How can a single mental state, emotion, seem to be dogmatic and hypothetic at the same time? It seems that emotions alone fall short of the justifying role in which their guiding role would be grounded. If this is true, then emotional experience cannot be epistemically akin to perception. Unless we are willing to claim that emotions cause action blindly (i.e., not rationally), we need an account of the distinctive epistemic role of emotional experience that renders its guidance role rational. In this paper I outline this new problem and its consequences for the metaphysics and epistemology of emotional experience. I also try to offer the sketch of a plausible solution.

ABSTRACT There is an important debate in the philosophy of mind that has roots in the phenomenological tradition, namely: what are the primitive forms of consciousness, that is, what are the fundamental ingredients or aspects of consciousness. This paper wants to contribute to partially answering this general question by providing an answer to a required sub-question within this question: is emotional phenomenology fundamental? I will answer in the affirmative and will offer an argument focused on contemplative emotions elicited by fiction. Another type of contemplative emotions, namely, esthetic emotions, have been invoked in the literature but I will argue that the phenomenology of emotions elicited by fiction, given their continuity and sameness in kind with the phenomenology of garden variety emotions, are more dialectically efficient vis-à-vis the debate on the irreducibility of emotional phenomenology.

The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we believe that there is a hard problem of consciousness. A solution to the former promises to take us one step closer to solving the latter. While many hope for a physicalist realist solution to the meta-problem, I argue that the two prominent physicalist realist positions in the literature, orthodox Russellian and type-B physicalism, cannot deliver a solution. I then introduce a posteriori Russellian physicalism, a Russellian version of the phenomenal concept strategy, and show that it can overcome the difficulties of traditional Russellian and type-B physicalism. If successful, the paper shows that physicalists need not turn to illusionism because the prospects for a physicalist realist answer to the meta-problem are bright.

Russellian physicalism is becoming increasingly popular because it promises to deliver what everybody wants, realism and physicalism about consciousness. But Russellian physicalists are not the first to swear on “the promise”, standard Type-B physicalism is a less fanciful view that also claims to give everything and take nothing. In this paper, I argue that our hopes should not be placed on Russellian physicalism because, unlike Type-B physicalism, it cannot explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal the nature of phenomenal properties without weakening its physicalist credentials. The revelation challenge shows that Russellian physicalism is either committed to an anti-realist and self-defeating view of phenomenal concepts or it is physically unacceptable.

The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we think there is a hard problem of consciousness. The meta-problem promises to help us solve the hard problem. The Phenomenal Concept Strategy promises to solve both problems at once while allowing for a metaphysics of mind that avoids dualism, which is hard to defend, and illusionism which is hard to accept. I argue that the strategy fails to fulfil this promise. Standard accounts of the PCS cannot provide an adequate response to the meta-problem because the cognitive isolation of phenomenal concepts is not the basis of our problem intuitions.