Emotions

Cognitive science has shown that emotions are a sine qua non for cognition, and nowadays emotions are not anymore understood as irrational or “nonintellectual” feelings. The debate regarding the nature of emotions is still ongoing; however, it would be possible to provide a general definition of emotions as complex states of mind and body, which have an active power – they are not characterized only as receptivity – that impacts human’s intentionality towards the environment. The goal of this entry is to highlight the role of emotions in reasoning, focusing on their meaningfulness in learning environments and in those educational practices where emotions work together with rationality to enhance understanding and learning. Following the description of the three main ways to understand emotions in the contemporary philosophy of emotions, this entry will discuss the differences between the standard cognitivist approach and other approaches grounded in the embodied cognition in education.