Emotion


 * What do you feel when you feel something? **

Emotions play a powerful role in shaping thoughts, influencing behaviour, and steering the pursuit of knowledge. While emotions may be a key to self-understanding and to understanding the world, the extent to which they contribute to both can be explored through a discussion of questions like those that follow, probing the nature, value, and limits of emotion as a way of knowing.

· Can we ever know anything purely through emotions? How do emotions interact with reason, sense perception and language? · To what degree is emotion biological or “hard-wired”, and hence universal to all human beings? To what extent is it shaped by culture and hence displayed differently in different societies?

In the 19th century, the famous writer Oscar Wilde was sent to prison accussed of //gross indecency// (homosexuality and Victorian times didn´t make a good couple!). In the movie //Wilde//, film in 1997, there is a scene of the trial in which Oscar Wilde (Stephen Fry) talks about what is love, and his explanation puts into question the culture as a fact that can be conditioning what is understood by love.

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· What sorts of things count as emotions? Are emotions and feelings the same thing? · Can feelings have a rational basis? Is “emotional intelligence” an oxymoron? Robert Solomon says that emotions are “systems of judgments”, and that “virtually all of our experience is to some degree ‘affective’, and even our most dispassionate judgments…can be adequately understood only within some larger emotional context”. Is he correct in claiming that virtually all sense perception, and reasoning, must involve emotion? · Is it possible to experience an emotion, a feeling, an attitude or sensibility that cannot be expressed in language? Can an emotion, such as love or grief, have its origins in, or be shaped by, language? · Can emotions be trained? To what extent can we control our emotions, not in terms of how we act on them, but what we actually feel? Do cultures select emotions to foster and use? · Are concepts such as solidarity, patriotism and racism examples of collective emotions? · Is faith an emotion, a feeling, or neither?

· Does emotion reside in the realm of private knowledge in the sense that it cannot be verified by others? Can people be mistaken about their own emotions? Can others lead them to recognize previously unknown emotions? · Is there any kind of knowledge that can be attained solely through emotion? Is the answer to the question dependent on factors such as gender, age, culture, and/or socio-economic group? · Is emotion an essential ingredient of the pursuit or validation of scientific or artistic knowledge? Can there be creativity without emotion? · Why has emotion sometimes been seen as a less valuable way of knowing than, say, reason? Or does the value of emotion as a way of knowing depend on the kind of knowledge that is being pursued?  <span style="color: #008080; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">Try to answer this question above after watching the following video:

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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype','Book Antiqua',Palatino,serif; font-size: 140%;">· Susan Stebbing says, “I do not in the least wish to suggest that it is undesirable for us to be set on thinking by emotional considerations. On the contrary, nothing else will suffice to make us think to some purpose.” David Hume claims that, “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” Is it true that emotions are an essential driver of any purposeful activity?


 * <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 140%;">EMO Activity 1 **

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