Feelings of Believing

In Feelings of Believing: Psychology, History, Phenomenology, Ryan Hickerson demonstrates that philosophers as diverse as Hume, Descartes, Husserl, and William James all treated believing as feeling. He argues that doxastic sentimentalism, thereby, is considerably more central to modern epistemology than has standardly been recognized. When the empirical psychology of overconfidence and attention is brought to bear on the history of philosophy and the phenomenology of believing, all point toward belief as fundamentally affective. Understanding believing as feeling has the potential to make us better believers, both by encouraging suspicion of unexamined certainties and by focusing attention on credulity. Hickerson argues that believing is typically felt but not given attention by the believer, and he suggests that virtuous believers are those who pay careful attention to their own sentiments-- who attempt to raise their beliefs to the level of judgments.

"Hickerson's Feelings of Believing is an ambitious work, and fulfills these ambitions. It is historically sensitive, but with a modernising eye, while also being empirically informed. It will appeal to a wide variety of scholars.", "This groundbreaking book sets out to assess the prospects for doxastic sentimentalism – epistemologically, psychologically, phenomenologically, and historically. Nuanced, subtle and trenchantly argued, Hickerson’s book breaks new ground in exploring the rich and complex nexus of relationships between cognition and sentiment."

Ryan Hickerson, PhD, teaches philosophy at Western Oregon University.