255. Why Emotions are Key to Rationality feat. Ronald de Sousa

Mar 6, 2023

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Emotions play a pivotal role in shaping our lives. They contribute crucially to the rationality of life, making us unique in our ability to reason and make sense of the world.

Ronnie de Sousa is a Swiss-born Canadian philosopher, renowned for his outstanding contributions to the philosophy of emotion and biology, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and author of such books as The Rationality of Emotion (1987), Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind (2007) and Love: a Very Short Introduction (2015).

Ronald and Greg talk about how emotions enable us to create appropriate responses to situations we face in life and to what extent we can evaluate emotions themselves as being more or less rational. They also discuss the profound impact that language has on how we perceive and experience our emotions, and how our relationships are shaped by what we say about them and what others say about them.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Emotions contribute to the rationality of life

25:31: Emotions are just attitudes, and value in the world is just the projection of your attitude. The world is completely devoid of any objective real value. It's just chaos. And what makes life meaningful is that we are interested in this, that, and the other. That's what creates goals, and that's why our emotions help us to respond in ways that are relevant to those goals. And so emotions contribute crucially to the rationality of life.

06:24: An enormously important point about rationality is that it often escapes people because they tend to think that the only options are, well, you're either rational or irrational.

Teleology vs. rationality

08:05: Teleology is just something that has to do with the adaptation of a strategy to a goal. And, of course, in the context of evolutionary psychology, the goal is essentially just the trivial goal of propagating DNA, but rationality has to do with how we conceptualize the relationship between goal and means. And once again, with language, how we can debate about that, consider different strategies, invent new strategies, and innovate.

Why people shouldn't be so sure of themselves

47:22: If there's anything I want to convince people of is that they shouldn't be so sure of themselves and that moral fervor is not, in general, something that will achieve any of the reasonable goals that a moralist might want to achieve.

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