Among philosophers of the emotions, it is common to view emotional content as purely descriptive – that is, belief-like or perception-like. I argue that this is a mistake. The intentionality of the emotions cannot be understood in isolation from their motivational character, and emotional content is also inherently directive – that is, desire-like. This view’s strength is its ability to explain a class of emotional behaviors that I argue, the common view fails to explain adequately. I claim that it is already implicit in leading theories of emotion elicitation in cognitive psychology – “appraisal theories.” The result is a deeper understanding of emotional intentionality. Employing Peter Goldie’s “Feeling Theory” of the emotions as an example of the common view, I suggest that emotional feelings, too, should be understood on this model: emotional feelings toward items in the world cannot be disentangled from felt motivation.

This dissertation is an empirically responsive philosophical exploration into the incorporation of technological tools within a framework comprising the structures of experience laid out in the early phenomenological tradition and an analysis of agency drawing from the analytical tradition. Technological tools have become so deeply integrated in our lives that they function like a part of us, transforming what we feel we can do and even who we are. Although new spaces of autonomous agency have been opened up, since the inner workings of technological tools can remain invisible, we risk diminishing our own capacities. Since we are fundamentally embedded in the world, we cannot understand ourselves without reference to the world and we cannot understand the world without reference to the way we are. The uniqueness involved in our use of technological tools grows out of a more primordial uniqueness that makes technological tool use possible and sets us apart from our closest evolutionary relatives. Several animals extend their physical influence on the environment by means of tools. We humans, however, use tools to extend our cognitive abilities as well. And since the computer is the most universal human tool, which can be put to sensorimotor and cognitive purposes alike, we take the computer to be...