Emotions: Feeling and Intentionality.

Mr Tristram Oliver-Skuse (University of Melbourne)

Christine Tappolet and Sabine Döring claim that emotions have representational content that can figure in justifications. Explaining how this could be so is a live philosophical task. I examine two very different pictures of how emotions get to have representational contents and argue that both fail to give perceptual theorists the resources they need for their account of emotions. 

  I then examine what lesson to learn from the two failures about how to build a theory that will satisfy the demands of a perceptual theory, and argue that the right lesson to learn is that such a theory should treat emotional feelings as intrinsically intentional. Finally I give some reasons to think that this is not a strange conclusion.