The Phenomenology of Encounters with Value

Sophie Grace Chappell’s Epiphanies: The Ethics of Experience characterizes encounters with value as passive experiences similar to perceptual experience, with a special focus on epiphanies as significant encounters with value that may revolutionize our worldview. This lends itself to an attractive value epistemology that assimilates some knowledge of value into a model provided by perceptual knowledge. In opposition to Chappell, I argue that some encounters with value are active: sometimes, we experience value as a creation of our own agency. In my view of encounters with value, value is not always given to us through experience as if it were from the external world. I develop a sketch of how this view expands upon Chappell’s value epistemology and understanding of epiphanies.