David Pugmire’s book is a lucid and carefully structured reflection on emotions, primarily intended to serve an audience of students both of philosophy and psychology but equally providing plenty of ‘food for thought’ for anyone interested in the issues concerning emotions. Pugmire’s style of writing is at once clear and enticing, and the book does a very good job of guiding the reader through the discussion without ever compromising on rigor and preciseness. Subjects covered in the book include the relations between thought and feeling, irrational emotions, affect, subjectivity consciousness, and the difficult topic of false emotions. The author’s detailed examination of current attempts to understand emotions and his evident breadth of scholarship makes this book also a valuable read for those concerned with broader controversies in Philosophy of Mind such as reductionism.

As the title of his book clearly states, Pugmire’s aim is to bring philosophical reflection on this topic back to what he takes to be the central problem regarding emotions: What is emotional about emotions? According to him, this is the problem left untouched by contemporary attempts to understand emotions within a cognitive framework. The main thrust of the cognitive approach is the conviction that certain thoughts are crucial to what an emotion is, such that the having of those thoughts determines which emotional states one is experiencing. Pugmire’s contention in his book is that cognitive emotivism not only fails to give a satisfactory account of what gives emotions their emotional quality, it effectively distorts the nature of what it is about them that grips the mind. One can usefully call this the negative argument in the book. On the positive side is the view that the notion of ’emotive feeling’ is particularly well suited to make sense of the emotive aspects of emotions. As Pugmire puts it: "The pervading aim of the present work is the restoration of emotional affect, or feeling, as a free-standing, working concept in understanding emotion" (p.4).

For those familiar with recent discussions in the Philosophy of Mind, and in particularly on consciousness, Pugmire’s book can be easily recognized as one more attempt to show that the feel of experience – in this case, emotional experience -eludes the Cognitive view now prevalent both in philosophy and psychology. But this is not just one more book appealing to the mysteries of experience in order to say that cognitivism, for all it explains, still leaves unexplained what is precisely emotional about emotions – their emotive feel. Throughout the book, Pugmire is particularly concerned in examining the relations between thought and emotional feel, and in establishing exactly where cognitive theories of emotion fail to get the connection between the two right. He presents a detailed and careful analysis of various attempts to bring emotions under the banner of cognition, going from the earlier attempts of seeing emotions as comprising beliefs and judgments to the more recent attempts to pin down emotions of evaluative-judgments . Although it is to be doubted that Pugmire has managed to find the ‘final’-argument against cognitivism, it must be granted that he pinpoints with rare accuracy where exactly the difficulties for Cognitive theories of emotion lie.

Another reason to think that this book is not just one more in a series of related moves is Pugmire’s care in pointing out the philosophical traps that await those who are all too eager to appeal to irreducible features of psychological phenomena. In particular, the author is well aware that the appeal to the subjective character of emotions to ground what is distinctively emotional about them needs to avert possible connotations of epistemological privacy and Dualism in order to carry any explanatory force. Unfortunately, Pugmire’s claim that we avail ourselves of the devices of metaphor to secure public understanding of each other’s emotional lives is not quite up to the task. For one thing, metaphors may be good enough to convey some idea to another of what one’s emotions may be at the moment, but at best they place the question about one’s emotional feelings at one remove since what grounds the content of one’s metaphorical characterizations remains unexplained. Second, it is highly unclear from Pugmire’s treatment of subjectivity that his thesis doesn’t amount to more than saying that we cannot actually understand the twists and turns of our emotional lives. After all, we have been living by and acting on a metaphorical understanding of our emotions for quite a long time, and it is manifestly clear that we have no great understanding of why such emotive metaphors are at points so eloquent.

Still, even if one is not entirely persuaded by Pugmire’s endeavours to put the emotional back into the emotions, this book is a genuine attempt to deal with emotions and the role they play in our lives. It does a very fine job at surveying the state of play in contemporary thinking about emotions, and it makes clear just how complex and difficult it is to think about emotions. Well worth the read.

Isabel Gois is a Ph.D. student at King’s College London working on Consciousness. Her research interest include Philosophy of Mind, Neuropsychology and Mental Disorder. She has articles published on emotions, computationalism, and consciousness.

Categories: Philosophical