| dc.description.abstract | What is an emotion? How should we understand the relationship between sensations, feelings, emotions, and other cognitive and conceptual capacities? What role do socially conditioned habits play in the constitution of emotions and in our emotional lives as such? The aim of the present study is to give a novel, critical reconstruction of G.W.F. Hegel’s answers to these questions in Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, the first part of the last volume in his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1832). It is argued that Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes – whose ambition it is to provide a unified, developmental, non-dualist account of human mindedness – offers what is known as a cognitive evaluative view of emotions. According to the cognitive evaluative view, emotions are intelligent judgments of value, or things that are important for one’s flourishing, accompanied by physiological arousals and an action tendency. Hegel bakes this view into the psychological part of his account of freedom in a way that makes affectivity and action compatible. The result is a notion of affective agency, outlined at the very end of this thesis. I develop my reading in dialogue with Paul Redding and Jason Howard’s interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy of emotion. Against Howard’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of emotion as being “proto-positivistic”, I suggest that Hegel sees emotions not as natural kinds, but as socio-historically developed parts of our second nature, and that their central component is the cognitive evaluative judgment, not their specific physiological arousal. Furthermore, I argue that Hegel’s account of practical feelings [prakische Gefühle] – his term for emotions – contradicts Redding’s claim that Hegel believes cognitive work must be done on feelings in order for them to play a determinate role in our minds. Drawing on John McDowell’s perceptual conceptualism, I show that for Hegel, conceptual cognition is made operative within, not on, practical feelings. Although I am positively inclined towards Hegel’s philosophy of emotion and present it as a viable alternative to the so-called feeling theories of Descartes, Hume, and James, it nonetheless criticizes its formalism charge against the emotions, and its tendency to make them dispensable in certain judgments of value. These moves commit Hegel to a set of implausible conclusions, which proves inconsistent with his own line of argument. The study hopes to show that Hegel’s complex concept of emotion in the Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes can shed new light on his system as a whole, and refute the view that the late Hegel neglected the sensuous, affective, and emotional dimensions of our being, which has been circulating since the time of Feuerbach and Kierkegaard. | nob |