Emotions without Emotion: A Challenge for the Neurophilosophy and Neuroscience of Emotion
By Louis Charland Louis C. Charland is Professor in the Departments of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and the School of Health Studies, at Western University in London, Canada. He is also an International Partner Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at the University of Western Australia, in Perth, Australia. Many scholars of the affective domain now consider “emotion” to be the leading keyword of the philosophy of emotion and the affective sciences. Indeed, many major journals and books in the area refer directly to “emotion” in their titles: for example, Emotion Review , Cognition and Emotion , The Emotional Brain (Le Doux 1996), Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion (Lane & Nadel 2002), and The Emotional Life of your Brain (Davidson & Begley 2012). At times, “feeling,” “mood,” “affect,” and “sentiment” are argued to be close contenders, but such challenges are normally formulated by contrasting their explanator...