2.28 Emotions

Category: Philosophy of Mind

Keywords: shame, affective, anger, angry, emotions, pains, emotion, pain, feels, feelings, emotional, pleasures, feel, fear, feeling

Number of Articles: 313
Percentage of Total: 1%
Rank: 45th

Weighted Number of Articles: 278
Percentage of Total: 0.9%
Rank: 57th

Mean Publication Year: 1964.5
Weighted Mean Publication Year: 1959.2
Median Publication Year: 1971
Modal Publication Year: 1969

Topic with Most Overlap: Ordinary Language (0.0819)
Topic this Overlaps Most With: Psychology (0.0279)
Topic with Least Overlap: Space and Time (0.00034)
Topic this Overlaps Least With: Quantum Physics (8e-05)

A scatterplot showing which proportion of articles each year are in the emotionstopic. The x-axis shows the year, the y-axis measures the proportion of articles each year in this topic. There is one dot per year. The highest value is in 1883 when 6.0% of articles were in this topic. The lowest value is in 2013 when 0.3% of articles were in this topic. The full table that provides the data for this graph is available in Table A.28 in Appendix A.

Figure 2.72: Emotions.

A set of twelve scatterplots showing the proportion of articles in each journal in each year that are in the Emotionstopic. There is one scatterplot for each of the twelve journals that are the focus of this book. In each scatterplot, the x-axis is the year, and the y-axis is the proportion of articles in that year in that journal in this topic. Here are the average values for each of the twelve scatterplots - these tell you on average how much of the journal is dedicated to this topic. Mind - 1.3%. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society - 1.3%. Ethics - 0.8%. Philosophical Review - 1.0%. Analysis - 0.9%. Philosophy and Public Affairs - 0.4%. Journal of Philosophy - 0.8%. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research - 1.2%. Philosophy of Science - 0.2%. Noûs - 0.6%. The Philosophical Quarterly - 1.0%. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science - 0.2%. The topic reaches its zenith in year 1883 when it makes up, on average across the journals, 6.0% of the articles. And it hits a minimum in year 2013 when it makes up, on average across the journals, 0.2% of the articles.

Figure 2.73: Emotions articles in each journal.

Table 2.63: Characteristic articles of the emotions topic.
Table 2.64: Highly cited articles in the emotions topic.

Comments

This is an important topic but one that’s a little hard to classify. A lot of the papers here are early psychology papers, which seem like philosophy of mind papers. A rather large part of what they cared about was the nature of emotions. In recent years it has been as much a topic in ethics as anything else. One can even see a little bump in Ethics in the 1990s. And that’s where the three highest cited papers come from. In between, it also ends up as a mind topic, but more connected to Rylean behaviorism than to traditional psychology. If we extended the study through the 2010s and into the 2020s, it would start to blend into recent social and political philosophy via work on the role of anger.

The effect is that the chronological ordering that I’ve been using for this breaks down a fair bit. It’s not like this topic should be centered on the time just after ordinary language philosophy. Rather, it draws on a bunch of somewhat connected papers from across the 138 years, and so it ends up centered around the center of those years.