Interpreting the Personal

Sue Campbell reinstates the personal as an important dimension in analytic philosophy of mind. She argues that the category of feelings has a unique role in psychological explanation: the expression of feelings is the attempt to communicate personal significance. To develop a model for affective meaning, the author moves attention away from the classic emotions to feelings that are more personal, inchoate, and idiosyncratic. Drawing examples from such sources as Audre Lorde, Miriam Tlali, essayist Rick Bass, and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, Campbell argues, from a feminist perspective, that…