Cognition and emotion, a new approach

grantor: University of TorontoEmotions are more cognitively complex than philosophers have typically thought. That is the simple claim I argue for in this thesis. And while it is a simple point it has profound implications. Most importantly, it means that philosophy must expand its methodology beyond conceptual analysis--its favourite method of studying the emotions--and align itself with the flourishing empirical study of emotion. In the first chapter I offer a selective history of the philosophy of emotion intended to show how philosophy's current understanding of emotion has developed. The main character here is Aristotle. His complex understanding of the emotions prefigures much of the typical modern account. He saw, for example, how emotions are intimately tied to particular classes of belief and developed a detailed formal analysis of these ties. For all the power of Aristotle's analysis, however, it does have its problems. In the second chapter I identify a modern, distorted version of Aristotle's account that I call 'hypercognitivism.' The essence of hypercognitivism is a myopic focus on emotion's cognitive elements that is, strangely, coupled with an ignorance of the complexity and variability of those elements. This ignorance, I argue, stems largely from a misguided methodological reliance on conceptual analysis that has led many philosophers to ignore what the empirical sciences tell us about emotion. This is a particularly unhappy oversight because the empirical study of emotion is currently undergoing a long overdue boom. Most excitingly, the neurosciences have begun to study the neural foundations of emotion. In the third chapter I offer a brief sketch of the picture of emotion that is emerging as a result. In particular, I focus on evidence that suggests that many of our emotions are subserved in the brain by discrete 'emotion systems.' These systems possess a range of basic cognitive capacities that are capable of operating independently of higher brain systems that mediate more complex forms of cognition. In the fourth chapter I argue that philosophy should incorporate these insights into a unique form of description that captures the contribution of these basic forms of cognition to the production of emotion.Ph.D