Emotion as the animation of value

Frances Bottenberg

pp. 141-156

in: Simmons, James E. Hackett (eds), Phenomenology for the twenty-first century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

In this chapter, Frances Bottenberg argues that influential contemporary theories of emotion have yet to solve the classic puzzle of how the peculiar felt aspect of emotion is to be linked with its normative salience for particular action. This is in part due to how little mainstream attention has so far been paid to the role of the first-person body in emotional life. Building on recent and classic phenomenological insights, Bottenberg argues that emotional drive is best understood as an intelligent sensitivity played out not simply in but by the first-person body. In this so-called animationist reading of emotional valuing, emotional drive expresses the constant intracorporeal enactment of and adaptation to the fluctuating agent/world relationship.

Cited authors

Bottenberg Frances