Some Considerations about Intellectual Desire and Emotions

Abstract

(from the chapter) In this chapter, I want to make some suggestions about the importance and value of emotions and desires for intellectual activity. In particular, I want to show how emotions and desires can be useful and beneficial for intellectual activity. To start on this, I think it important to suggest why we should reject two views, one about emotions and one about intellectual activity. The one about emotions is that they are somewhat special, somewhat rare events or event-like things; that they are momentous, describable as mountains and canyons in our everyday life. As concerns intellectual activity, this theme comes in different varieties, with the unifying feature of claiming that just as it is nonsense to think that numbers or number theory are emotional or can be improved by emotions, so too it is nonsense to think this of intellectual activity taken quite generally. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (chapter)