Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Feelings and Emotion

This PDM project has two objectives. The first goal is to clarify how Edmund Husserl sharply distinguished feelings, such as pain and pleasure, from emotions, such as love, joy, and fear, by drawing from the insights of his contemporaries. I hope to demonstrate that Husserl’s understanding of feelings was influenced by Carl Stumpf’s theory of feeling-sensations and that his definition of emotions was directly inspired by Franz Brentano’s conception of love and hate. The second objective of the project is to critically engage with the contemporary analytic literature. In the analytic scholarship, it is generally agreed upon that emotions and feelings are similar to each other: Contemporary thinkers either equate feelings with emotions or they consider emotions to be stronger kinds of feelings. The project will defend Husserl’s conclusion, that the experiences of feelings and emotions are fundamentally different, and will work from and beyond his insights to reveal why contemporary scholars are misguided when they do not recognize the distinctions between those two experiences.