Beyond ontology: Ideation, phenomenology and the cross cultural study of emotion

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27 (2&3):289–303 (1997)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In this essay, I want to raise certain questions about the nature of emotions, about the similarities and differences in human psychology , and about the relation of psychological inquiry to ethics . The core of my thesis, which I have argued now for almost twenty-five years, is that emotions are a form of cognition, a matter of “ideas”, or in the current lingo, ideation. David Hume, rather famously, analyzed several “passions”, notably pride, in terms of “impressions” and “ideas”. While he held onto the traditional view that emotions were essentially sensations , he also elaborated an account of emotions defined by a complex of idea, for example, the idea of self and of achievement in pride. Moreover, such ideas are relevant to ethics. For Hume, in particular, morals are a matter not of reason but of “sentiment”, thus bringing the understanding of emotions squarely into the arena of ethical discourse. Which opens the question whether different cultures with different ideas might have a very different conception and/or experience of pride as well as any number of different emotions. One might also ask, not very fruitfully, whether different cultures have different sensations, impressions or “affects”, but the promise of cross cultural emotions research clearly seems to lie on the side of “ideas”, in terms of different ways of seeing, different ways of conceiving, different ways of carving up and evaluating the world

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 102,546

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Emotions.Rainer Banse & Jasmin Khosravie - 2019 - In Ludger Kühnhardt & Tilman Mayer (eds.), The Bonn Handbook of Globality: Volume 1. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 161-169.
Remembering Emotions.Urim Retkoceri - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (5):1-26.
Shared emotions.Mikko Salmela - 2012 - Philosophical Explorations 15 (1):33-46.
Are all emotions social? Embracing a pluralistic understanding of social emotions.Gen Eickers - forthcoming - Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotion.
Emotions, Me, Myself and I.Fabrice Teroni - 2016 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (4):433-451.
Hume and the mechanics of mind : impressions, ideas, and association.David Owen - 1993 - In David Fate Norton & Jacqueline Taylor (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Hume. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Descartes y Wittgenstein sobre las emociones.Jorge Vicente Arregui - 1991 - Anuario Filosófico 24 (2):289-317.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
38 (#610,825)

6 months
7 (#624,929)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references