Journal of Philosophy of Emotion Podcast · Journal of Philosophy of Emotion

JPE Book Symposium: Emotion: The Basics, Part 2

·1 hr 26 min·5 clips

Pervasive guilt can push a trauma survivor toward the very confabulation that abuse wants.

1. Journal of Philosophy of Emotion Podcast: JPE Book Symposium, Part 2 focuses on Alicia LaGuardia LoBianco's "Emotions Under Trauma" and Dina Mendonca's commentary on Michael S. Brady's Emotion, The Basics. 2. LaGuardia LoBianco writes as a commentator on Michael Brady's 2019 book, while Mendonca responds to Brady's 2019 account from a more methodological angle. 3. The episode asks whether Brady's theory of emotion can still work when the relevant agent lives through trauma, abuse, and other non-ideal conditions. 4. LaGuardia LoBianco says Brady treats emotions as central to human life, but his analysis assumes a safe world and an eager discoverer. 5. She focuses on trauma from acute attacks or prolonged abusive treatment, and she uses that case to question idealized pictures of emotional functioning. 6. Her central claim is that trauma changes what is salient, what motivates action, and what information emotions can provide. 7. She argues that hypervigilance, fear, distrust, and anger can be adaptive responses to real threat, even when they are also destructive. 8. She rejects the idea that trauma cases are merely pathological outliers and instead describes them as another way of being in the world. 9. She then applies Brady's view of emotion as motivation and reason-seeking to abuse, guilt, self-blame, and confabulation. 10. She uses Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues to discuss curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual hubris, and intellectual wisdom under trauma. 11. One memorable claim is that feelings normally treated as bad can be useful under abuse, because they help a survivor navigate danger. 12. Another is that guilt can become a trap, because the search for reasons may confirm the abuser's story. 13. The article treats closed-mindedness as a type 2 burdened virtue when curiosity itself is risky. 14. It treats intellectual humility as costly under gaslighting because it can intensify self-doubt and discredit a survivor's voice. 15. The commentary also says that intellectual wisdom may help a survivor know when to inquire and when to stop, but that this does not equal flourishing. 16. Mendonca shifts from trauma to theory by arguing that empirical evidence does not decide emotion debates on its own. 17. She invokes Amelie Rorty to say that theories of emotion are tied to different pictures of the mind and different historical assumptions. 18. Her tone is analytic and densely argumentative, with frequent references to Brady, Rorty, Hume, James, Goldie, Tessman, and Damasio. 19. Listeners interested in trauma, emotion theory, and philosophical psychology should find this episode useful. 20. Listeners wanting a light, low-density discussion of emotions probably should skip it.

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