British Academy Project - Emotions as Feelings Towards Values

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This research project will examine how emotions connect us with our environment. I will argue for a novel theory, according to which emotional experiences can be understood as feelings towards values, in that they present evaluative properties of their objects (e.g. the dangerousness of a dog) through attitudes of favour and disfavour. The project will therefore elucidate the important connection between emotions and evaluative properties of objects in our environment. Further, it will emphasize, in a way often overlooked by emotion theorists, the need for a substantive account not just of what emotions represent, but how they represent. The account will also be used to provide new perspectives on long-standing debates in philosophy of emotion, with connections to philosophy of mind. My approach is to treat emotions as sui generis states, not to be modelled on more familiar mental states, but given their own analysis within our mental economy.

Associated Publications
1. 'Emotional Intentionality and the Attitude-Content Distinction', forthcoming in Pacific Philosphical Quarterly, 2018
2. 'The Irreducibility of Emotional Phenomenology’ in Erkenntnis, 2018

Associated Works in Progress/Under Review (drafts available on request)
"The Psychosemantics of Emotional Experience"
"Pre-emotion value awareness and the Content-Priority view'

Conference / Workshop  2019
I will be co-organizing and hosting a one-day workshop at the University of Manchester (Summer 2019), on the theme of ‘Interdisciplinary approaches to Emotional Experience’.  Further information to follow....