Emotions as evaluative feelings

The phenomenology of emotions has traditionally been understood in terms of the bodily sensations they involve. This is a mistake. We should instead understand their phenomenology in terms of their distinctively evaluative intentionality. Emotions are essen-tially affective modes of response to the ways our circumstances come to matter to us, and so they are ways of being pleased or pained by those circumstances. Making sense of the intentionality and phenomenology of emotions in this way requires rejecting traditional understandings of intentionality and coming to see emotions as a distinctive and irreducible class of mental states lying at the intersection of intentionality, phenomenology, and motivation. Keywords emotions, evaluations, intentionality, phenomenology Until about 20 years ago, contemporary philosophers thinking about the emotions were drawn to reductive accounts, under-standing emotions in terms of independently intelligible kinds of mental states—typically beliefs, desires, and bodily sensa-tions. The tacit motivation was the thought that since we need an account of these kinds of mental states anyway and since we have a reasonable grasp on how to approach such an account, we can get the emotions for free, so to speak, by providing such a reductive account. Thus, many philosophers (e.g., Gordon