How to Speak of Emotions? On De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de emoción by Andrea Melamed

Abstract

In De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de emoción, Andrea Melamed analyzes the main philosophical theories of emotion and argues that none of them alone explains the complexity of our emotional life. Instead, Melamed defends a pluralist metatheoretical proposal that advocates bringing together different theories of emotion to explain specific facets of what we call «emotion». In this critical note, I examine Melamed’s argument on two fronts. First, I compare Melamed’s taxonomy of philosophical theories of emotion with the taxonomy recently proposed by Michael Brady. In doing so, I propose a joint taxonomy that inherits the virtues of both divisions of the literature. Second, I compare Melamed’s metatheoretical proposal with Griffiths’s eliminativism and show the difficulties pluralist approaches face to avoid collapsing into eliminativism.