Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog
Sabine Döring interviewed by Nigel Warburton on emotion, for Philosophy Bites.
Döring gives an overview of the place of the emotions in philosophy and her version of the philosophy of emotions.
Döring regards emotions as directed towards something, so they are intentional. They represent things in the world. She relates that to a realist theory of moral value, that is she thinks moral values have a real existence outside subjective ideas of morality. Emotions are a way of perceiving the values out there, but not in isolation, rather as an aspect of a complex perception.
Döring notes resistance to emotion in philosophy, Warburton brought up Kant. The Stoics could have been mentioned, but weren’t, The point about Kant is that he thinks a moral action should ideally have a purely moral motive, with no emotional motivation. Döring’s response is that Kant has to refer to emotion, and does so when he refers to moral respect. Anything to do with morality must at some point refer to subjective preferences which are emotional in value. I’m not sure that is compatible with Döring’s value realism.
D¨ring implicitly compares emotional states as a perception of values with Locke’s ideas of secondary qualities, that is some kinds of perception including colour, are more to do with the state of the perceiver and environmental conditions, than the state of the object itself.
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