Investigating Emotions Philosophically1

Among today's philosophers of emotion there are, on the one hand, those that do “conceptual analysis” and, on the other hand, those that oppose such an approach as empirically naïve, as sanctifying our ordinary use of words and as based on an analytic/synthetic distinction and an outmoded theory of meaning. This paper is an attempt to show why this critique is misplaced and to clarify how conceptual investigations of emotions relate to empirical investigations.