Emotional Intelligence: the Rapprochement of Reason and Emotion

Such are the ideas between David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Both Hume and Kant seek to understand the idea of how human can develop but they both take greatly different approaches. Hume felt that a person’s knowledge was solely restricted to their ideas or impressions, and arguing that a person’s mind was only a total sum product of the perceptions one accumulates over time. He also felt that God could not exist because God was only an idea of the mind of man. Thus God was not observable and therefore could not exist. Kant on the other hand felt that a man’s reason was the sole concept used to understand the world. But in doing so he challenged many philosophers of the time due to his idea that reason was not something that can be seen as having an unlimited scope to understand all matters in life. He felt that morality was what could be used to understand things and with morality there must be a set of laws and the human will. Kant viewed moral judgments as expressions of the practical versus theoretical reason. That practical reason or rational derives itself from the actions in human beings and our own rational nature. In this sense Kant would argue against Hume’s ethical theory based on the fact that feeling is not really a moral philosophy. But for Hume morality was more of a feeling than a judgment made aware by instincts or sympathy, and modulated in accordance with general rules and conventions of justice. In this way Hume made man the center of the universe and that man could only know his own ideas. Whereas Kant felt that one could learn ideas from experience and through morality and laws set forth by

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher known for being an empiricist and for being skeptical of religion. Like Hobbes, he was also a big influence on western philosophy. Among his many works, his major writing include, treatise of human nature and enquiry concerning the principles of morals. In an enquiry concerning the principles of morals, Hume introduces his fovarism towards the role of sentiment. He argued reason solely cannot be a motive of any action and that reason can never resist the motive of passion "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,"(pg 415). He explains that Moral distinctions are developed from the moral sentiments such as feelings of approval and disapproval felt by an action. Hume believes that pleasure and pain are the causes of the passions that drive our actions. According to Hume, it is the pleasure and pain that are the causes of the passions which drives our actions. He claims that it is the actual experience of the pain or pleasure, not the reason we adduce to their causes that drives us to act.” Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not

David Hume was an empiricist philosopher who revolutionized scientific argument and methodology with his skepticism. Hume was born in a time when there was a great deal of innovation going on, where new theories and ideas were just starting to surface. Hume’s idea of rationality contrasted with a lot of the rationalists that predated him, namely Descartes. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argued that reason did not influence action but rather guided our judgment by informing us about the causes and effects. He separated passions from reason by claiming that passions are not ideas, do not represent anything, are independent and therefore cannot conflict with truth or reason. By reading Hume, in particular reading about his theory of passions,

This assessment pertains to my personal emotional intelligence. This assessment aims to examine the four dimensions of my emotional ability and capacity based on Tapia’s emotional intelligence inventory chart. This assessment also aims to pinpoint the strong and weak points of my personal emotional behaviors especially in my daily encounter with the people inside and outside my organization.

Emotional intelligence was described formally by (Salovey & Mayer). They defined it as ‘the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions’. They also provided an initial empirical demonstration of how an aspect of emotional

What is an emotion? William James and Jean-Paul Sartre present two different arguments regarding what constitutes an emotion. This paper will explore William James' analysis of emotion as set out in his 1884 essay . It will attempt to discover the main points of his view, and then present Sartre's rebuttal of this view taken from his essay on emotions . Concluding with an explanation regarding why Sartre's account is flawed and James's argument is the stronger of the two, it will use outside examples to demonstrate the various weaknesses and strengths within the two perspectives.

Hume’s idea of judgment comes form the notion that such judgments arise within an organ, or rather the soul that is capable of both emotions and reason. Hume understands the organ to have sentiment- the idea of individual tastes, and judgment- that common sense in which all beauty is common and thus holds the true judgment or

19th century English philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that “deep thinking is attainable only by a person of deep feeling.” Coleridge claimed that emotions played a decisive role in using reason and attaining knowledge. However, I am often confronted with evidence contradicting his statement. Emotions cause me to make poor decisions, and the first example that comes to mind is the fact that I am currently working on this essay late at night while earlier I had wasted time reading articles on the Internet and watching football. Still, Coleridge believed that the positive effects of emotions outweighed the negative. This raises the question to what extent do emotions play a role in the pursuit of knowledge? And would our pursuit be better off without emotion? This essay will primarily analyze the relationship between reason and emotion, arriving at the conclusion that while emotion fuels the process of reasoning, it is reasoning that creates knowledge.

Freud and Thomas Hobbes disagree with Plato and Aristotle regarding the role of reason in human behavior, and all four of these disagree with Jean-Paul Sartre on the same question. Describe.

Chapter 1 explains the work of a Harvard psychologist named William James. William published the article “What is an Emotion?” in a philosophical journal entitled Mind in 1884. His paper is an argument for the primacy and necessity of bodily systems in producing emotional feelings. James-Lange theory states that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. A Harvard physiologist, Walter Cannon, roundly criticized James’ theory, claiming that, according to the Cannon Bard theory, physiological changes follow emotional expression.

“Evaluate the ways in which emotion might enhance and/or undermine reason as a Way of Knowing.”

The relation between passion and value in Hume's philosophy has been repeatedly discussed. (3) In contrast to some contemporary writers, Hume devoted a lot of effort and space to the theory of passion before presenting his, based on emotion moral theory, in Book III of the Treatise. (4)

In this paper I am going to discuss the importance of emotion and cognition, and how they affect one another. More importantly, I will answer the question of; do our emotions enhance cognition and can we have emotion without thinking? My argument is that indeed our emotions do enhance our cognition. How can we react to something if we don’t have any emotion about it? Also, I assert that we can indeed have emotion without rational thought.

In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume asserts, “Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates” (Hume 413). As far as Hume is concerned, this view that is held by most people is deeply erroneous; throughout Section III of A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seeks to demonstrate the fallacy of this philosophy through the employment of two key conclusions that he draws. First, Hume claims that reason alone cannot motivate an individual to perform an action. His second vindication holds that reason can never oppose passion. Without a doubt, the case Hume constructs

To some persons, emotional intelligence is defined as study which looks for human cognitive abilities beyond traditional academic intelligence, (Zeidner et al., 2004). Researchers have categorized their definition based on the either an ability model or mixed model. Based on the Mandell and Phewanti (2003)’s ability model, “emotional intelligence is defined as a set of abilities that involves perceiving and reasoning abstractly with information that emerges from feelings” (p. 389). Studies of John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey (1997) have supported this model stating that emotional intelligence is defined as “the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth” (p. 35). In addition, Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso (2004) gave the definition of the emotional intelligence as “the capacity to