HUMAN NATURE AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF EMOTIONAL CORRESPONDENCE

Abstract

This paper considers how a careful, reflective phenomenological awareness of particular emotional events can help us to understand the nature of emotions and how they correspond or fail to correspond to things in the world. First, I will approach this from the negative side of things, by considering clear cases in which emotional responses do not seem to fit that which gives rise to them. I claim that it is possible to see that our emotions sometimes correspond and sometimes do not correspond to the things which they are about. Second, the nature of the relata in the relation will be analyzed. I consider the "object" of emotions and consider what properties such an object might require such that an emotion could correspond to it. Finally, I will argue that the relation of emotional correspondence is plausible if the objects in the emotional correspondence relation have real natures.