The Case for the Reactive View of Emotion

Abstract According to the reactive view of emotion (reactivism, for short), an emotion is a reaction—or, as some prefer, a response—to something that appears to be (dis)valuable. In this context, the term ‘response’ is not used in a purely causal sense, but specifies a reason for which we have a certain emotion (a motivating reason, in common philosophical parlance). Reactivism has been attracting an increasing attention in the recent debate on emotion, not least since it opposes the currently dominant emotion-theoretic paradigm, according to which emotions are forms of value awareness. In this paper, we consider recent attempts by proponents of this paradigm to push back against reactivism. Specifically, we address a set of objections targeted at the central considerations offered by reactivists in support of their view. These objections purport to show either that these considerations are mistaken (Díaz & Tappolet, 2025), or that they can be accommodated within a more refined epistemicist framework (Mitchell, 2021, chapter 4; Yip, 2025). We will argue that neither strategy is successful.