ABSTRACT
How should we understand the phenomenology of emotions? One standard way is to distinguish sharply between the intentionality and the phenomenology of emotions, understanding their phenomenology in terms of something like “bodily sensations”, which are simply added on to an independent account of their intentionality (cf. Goldie 2000, 40–41). Thus, according to cognitivist accounts of emotions, in feeling fear I am not only aware of the presence of a danger of some sort, but also have a certain sensation in my gut, where it is this bodily sensation that accounts for the phenomenological experience of fear. In an earlier paper (Helm 2011), I argued that this strategy fails, that we cannot separate out the intentionality from the phenomenology in this way. Rather, emotions are what I call “felt evaluations”: phenomenological feelings with evaluative content or, alternately, a distinctively affective form of intentionality. This chapter repeats those arguments and extends them to thinking about the reactive attitudes: emotions like gratitude, resentment, approbation, and guilt.
