Jesse Prinz

Jesse J. Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of philosophy and director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. He taught previously at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Washington University, St. Louis, with visiting positions at University College London, California Institute of Technology, and University of Maryland, College Park. He took his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under the direction of Murat Aydede, a philosopher of cognitive science now at the University of British Columbia.

Prinz works primarily in the philosophy of psychology and ethics and has authored several books and over 100 articles, addressing such topics as emotion, moral psychology, aesthetics and consciousness. Much of his work in these areas has been a defense of empiricism against psychological nativism, and he situates his work as in the naturalistic tradition of philosophy associated with David Hume. Prinz is also an advocate of experimental philosophy.

Jesse Prinz has offered a "natural kinds" theory of emotions. According to him, an emotional experience is a bodily change that indicates situations in our environment that should concern us. When we encounter a stimulus that affects our well-being we experience a set of bodily changes that represent things like dangers, losses, and offenses. These bodily changes are appropriate to the situation and are learned over time through association to specific instances we have encountered in the past. They are felt, but oftentimes these feelings are not in the foreground of phenomenal consciousness. When we do pay attention to the feeling it then becomes an actual emotion.

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