The rationality of emotions

Dialogue 18 (1):41-63 (1979)
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Abstract

Ira Brevis furor, said the Latins: anger is a brief bout of madness. There is a long tradition that views all emotions as threats to rationality. The crime passionnel belongs to that tradition: in law it is a kind of “brief-insanity defence.” We still say that “passion blinds us;” and in common parlance to be philosophical about life's trials is to be decently unemotional about them. Indeed many philosophers have espoused this view, demanding that Reason conquer Passion. Others — from Hume to the Emotivists — have appeared to reverse this hierarchy.” But those philosophers who refuse to join in the general denigration of emotion as irrational usually share the presupposition that the role of rationality is limited to the calculation of means. In so far as emotions are concerned with the determination of ends, they remain, on this view, beyond the pale of rationality. Modern decision theorists have worked out schemes to assess the rationality of desires, as well as actions, against the background of beliefs and other desires.1 But these schemes leave no room at all for emotions, except, by implication, as disrupters of the rational process.

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Author's Profile

Ronald De Sousa
University of Toronto, St. George Campus

Citations of this work

Explaining action by emotion.Sabine A. Döring - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):214-230.
Against Emotional Dogmatism.Brogaard Berit & Chudnoff Elijah - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):59-77.
Perspectives in imaginative engagement with fiction.Elisabeth Camp - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):73-102.

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References found in this work

Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 17 (2):278-279.
Intentional systems.Daniel C. Dennett - 1971 - Journal of Philosophy 68 (February):87-106.
How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?Donald Davidson - 1969 - In Joel Feinberg (ed.), Moral concepts. London,: Oxford University Press.
The Passions.David Sachs - 1978 - Philosophical Review 87 (3):472.
Explaining Emotions.Amélie Rorty (ed.) - 1980 - University of California Press.

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