Could Emotions Be both Experiences and Attitudinal Responses To Reasons?

Abstract It is customary to construe emotions as feelings or experiences intentionally directed at aspects of the world. For many philosophers, indeed, emotional feeling or experience is the primary phenomenon that an adequate theory of emotion should capture (Deonna and Teroni 2012; Mitchell 2021; Müller 2019; Tappolet 2016). A recent trend is to cash out emotional feeling as some kind of attitude or stance one takes towards an object (see especially Deonna & Teroni, forthcoming, Mitchell, 2021, Müller 2019). The debate then concerns how we should characterize the kind of attitude constituting emotional feeling. No attention has been given to the prior question whether feelings/experiences can indeed be attitudes or stances, however. It is instead simply assumed that the same thing – e.g., an emotion – can belong to both categories – feeling and attitude/stance – at once, allowing us in turn to elucidate one aspect of emotion (feeling) in terms of the other (attitude). In this paper, I argue that this assumption is at best controversial, and at worst outright false. This then puts pressure on the advocate of the two claims to show where the argument goes wrong.