Proceedings of the XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 42, 2008

Philosophy of Mind

Emotion, self-deception and conceptual/nonconceptual content

First the rationalist tradition and then the cognitive revolution put limits on the philosophy and social sciences with regard to the analysis of emotion, of irrationality in mental events and actions, to the reduction of our representations to conceptual elements, and so on. This fact caused an increasing interest in these topics. In this paper, we intend to claim the significant relations among these three issues: emotion, selfdeception and non-conceptual content, with two aims: i) to analyse the relation between non-conceptual content of emotion and the phenomenon of self-deception; and ii) to explain how self-deception can be overcome by the conceptualization of some non-conceptual elements of emotion.