Cognitive, Feelings, and the Background Structures of Emotion

by David Robert

A traditional understanding of a cognitivist theory of emotion suggests that emotions are reducible to cognitive states, such as judgments. In this context, emotions have evaluative and intentional content. There has been a tendency within the cognitivist theories of emotion to assume as irreducible the intentional structures through which these theories operate. A consequence of this tendency often sees feeling as a residual component of the intentional structures of emotional experience and compartmentalized through internal and external distinctions, such as bodily feelings and world-directed feelings. The aim of this thesis is to call attention to some of the shortcomings of a cognitivist theory's incorporation of feeling into a philosophy of emotion. I focus specifically on one category of feeling, a background sense of belonging to a world. What often appears to be ignored is the notion that prior to all emotional experience we have already found ourselves belonging to a world, and attempts at a phenomenological understanding of feeling as a pre-intentional background sense of belonging to a world prior to an emotional experience become obscured or dismissed.

54 pages, Paperback

Published January 27, 2023

About the author

David Robert spent the better part of the past two years on an airplane while he crisscrossed the globe in an attempt to find his next adventure. Driven mostly by a hunger for exploration, David tries hard to balance the demands of running an international business with his insatiable curiosity about the world. When not traveling, David can be found at home in Providence, Rhode Island.