Emotion, Cognition, and the Virtue of Flexibility

Introduction

Should we let ourselves be guided by our emotions in our ethical and epistemic considerations? In this book, I will give a positive answer to this question. This is not a new proposal. However, this book lays out a novel argument, one that involves positing a kind of mental state that has so far not been attended to in this debate. I will argue that there is a kind of emotion that is not cognitive, and nevertheless object-directed. If I am right, the question of normative guidance must revise its philosophy of mind. In other words, when we ask ourselves which mental states can play roles in normative guidance, we are starting from an account of what mental states there are; if there are more and different mental states than we ...