Abstract

It is Dewey’s reconstruction of experience that stand as the background for Dewey’s critical take on James famous celebrated paper “What is an Emotion?” (1884). In this paper James argues for the thesis that “the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion” (James 1884, 189–190). James inverted the order of previous conceptions of emotion that assumed that the emotional mental state give rise to the bodily expression of emotion, arguing for a new proposal that clearly showed that a disembodied human emotion is an impossible entity (James 1884, 194). By giving priority to the bodily symptoms of a felt emotion, James wanted to show that mental life is intrinsically connected with the corporeal frame (James 1884, 201), and as long as we miss this point, we miss the very nature of mental life. Accordingly, James’s theory promised a theory that brought “bodily activity into psychology as a functional cause” (Garrison 2003, 411) because it tried to ground the analysis of emotion in an embodied understanding of emotional processes. It is precisely on this point that James’s proposal was praiseworthy according to Dewey.