Introduction
It is often believed that emotions run counter to reason and rational thought and that they interfere with our ability to judge properly how things are. This belief, however, rests on the questionable assumption that emotions contain no information, or worse, false information. Rejecting this assumption and taking emotions to be representational states, and so as containing some truths about the world, entails rethinking the relation between emotions and reason as well as our conceptions of reason and rationality and to clarify just how the representations proper to emotions figure in knowledge claims. Recognizing that emotions do figure in our understanding and knowledge claims does not settle the issue, for there are many questions about what exactly accounts for the cognitive features of emotions: Are emotions simply judgments, as so-called cognitivist theories of the emotions maintain? Or are emotions cognitive because they stand in a causal relation to a particular kind of cognition? What constitutes their representational features? Do animals or infants have emotions? If so, how are these facts consistent with the account of the cognitive features of emotions? In addition, how we are we to account for the non-linguistic communication of emotions? These questions were already discussed in an interesting way in the medieval and early modern period. In our workshop we will explore these debates and consider how their results shape the understanding of reason, rationality, and knowledge in the period in question. Investigating how these issues were addressed in the past can shed light on their contemporary form.
Financial support for this workshop has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Simon Fraser University, and the Philosophy Departments at SFU and the University of Toronto.