Introduction

The neo-Stoic view, as outlined in the previous chapter, is still too narrow to accommodate everything that a theory of emotions should include. At this point, it may seem as if the person or subject who has the emotion should be able to formulate or translate the phenomenon in linguistic terms. This implies that a satisfactory explanation of the emotional development of infants and young children, as well as the emotions of animals will not be possible.

Although the basic outlines of Nussbaum's developing theory can also be defended in the light of evidence concerning animals, the existing theory needs to undergo some major modifications to make it a more adequate one that will include both human and animal emotions. For this we need a philosophical and humanistic account of the emotions that is not reductionist, unscientific or insensitive to scientific evidence, and accommodates the complex object-directed intentionality of emotions.

The decline of reductionist theories of emotion

Experimental work necessitates modifications to the existing theory. We need to understand the impact of the experimental work on the theory, and how the theory should be modified, without making compromises to reductionism.

During the first half of the twentieth century and in the heyday of behaviourism, the inner world of experience was frequently regarded as a fuzzy and invisible phenomenon, which should preferably disappear from the scientific scene. Recently, however, a notably growing interest in the emotions has emerged, not only among psychologists, but also in other disciplines. Most of these people admit that emotions are cognitive phenomena, which are closely linked to an animal's way of perceiving and interpreting the world. The ‘new’ view, ironically, corresponds to Aristotle's idea as expressed in his Rhetoric. This ancient view held that intentionality should be regarded as an important part of any good theory of emotions. More recently, Schachter and Singer confirmed Aristotle's claim with their well-known set of experiments. They proved scientifically that a subject's emotional state is a result of the subject's evaluative appraisals of its situation. They also proved that these judgements are central to the identification of the emotion, and essential to the discrimination between emotions. People will, for instance, identify their emotion as anger when they are placed in a situation where they have reason to be angry, or identify their emotion as happiness when they have reason to think that ‘the world is great’.