Tuesday,
17 January 2006
Emotion, Action, and Reason
Craig Delancey, Dept. of Philosophy, State U. of New York, Oswego
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract: One of the attractions of the popular
cognitivist view of emotions is that it seems to cohere well with
a view of human action as directed by conscious mental states under
rational control. I raise two doubts about this way of thinking
about some emotions. First, it is plausible that we need to
refer to the normal action of a kind of emotion in order to identify
the normal representational content of that emotion. Second,
and more important, some emotions may have important tasks which
they cannot accomplish if they were essentially cognitive states
under rational control.
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