Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T14:58:47.296Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

IX. The Logic Of Emotions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Aaron Ben-Ze'ev
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The issue of whether emotions are rational (or intelligent) is at the centre of philosophical and psychological discussions. I believe that emotions are rational, but that they follow different principles to those of intellectual reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the unique logic of emotions. I begin by suggesting that we should conceive of emotions as a general mode of the mental system; other modes are the perceptual and intellectual modes. One feature distinguishing one mode from another is the logical principles underlying its information processing mechanism. Before describing these principles, I clarify the notion of ‘rationality,’ arguing that in an important sense emotions can be rational.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 52 , March 2003 , pp. 147 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ben-Ze'ev, A. 1993. The Perceptual System: A Philosophical and Psychological Perspective (New York: Peter Lang).Google Scholar
Ben-Ze'ev, A. 2000. The Subtlety of Smotions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ben-Ze'ev, A. (forthcoming). ‘Emotion as a subtle mental mode’. In Solomon, R. (ed.) Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar
Bergson, H. 1907. Creative Evolution(New York: Holt, 1911).Google Scholar
Frijda, N. H. 1988. ‘The laws of emotion’, American Psychologist, 43, 349–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Margolis, H. 1987. Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition: A Theory of Judgment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Nussbaum, M. C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Redding, P. 1999. The Logic of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Rock, I. 1983. The Logic of Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).Google Scholar
Smith, C. A. and Kirby, L. D. 2000. ‘Consequences require antecedents: Toward a process model of emotion elicitation’, In Forgas, J. (ed.), Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition (pp. 83–106) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Spinoza, B. (1677). Ethics. In Curley, E. (ed.), The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).Google Scholar