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.