Standard Theories of Emotion and the Concept of Intentionality

In traditional Western philosophy, it was widely accepted that emotions could be an obstacle to human rationality when it comes to attempting to gain objective knowledge and truth. One way of understanding emotions is that they may accidentally happen to us; they are a purely non-volitional form of a mental phenomenon. There is the question of whether the study of emotions needs to rely on scientific methods at all. Can emotions be investigated merely through conceptual analysis and introspection? Are emotions only accessed, felt, and even understood from the first-person perspective? If the answer is positive, it indicates that we should have to refute pieces of subpersonal empirical evidence regarding the neurophysiological activities of emotions. This paper concerns the philosophical debate on emotion. I argue that in the history of the philosophy of emotion, the competing theories place themselves either on "cognitive" or "bodily" grounds; both are responsible for the mind-body dichotomy and have their difficulties. The former is what I call the "Orthodox Feeling Theory," which cannot account for the structure of intentionality or the evaluative property of emotions; the latter is the "Strong Cognitive Theory," which ignores the role of the bodily and experiential aspects. Such standard theories are out of date

Democracy and Western imperialism: towards decolonizing religionism in Nigeria

The way allied Western nations protect their interests has been a major problem and factor in the demise of governance and democracy in the Nigerian state and other African nations. This has made Nigeria’s democracy, like that of other African countries, unstable since independence. Therefore, this article examined Western imperialism, which used religion as a tool and barrier to a strong, viable democracy in Nigeria. The article used critico-historical analysis as a method. The results showed that although Western imperialism and globalization, along with religion, have an expansionist and civilizing nature, they have also exhibited traits of dominance over other countries and systems of governance, thus making democracy weak and less rewarding. We argued that Nigeria’s democracy and religion must be independent and self-sufficient to avoid Western exploitation and imperialism and provide a context for religious inculturation. We concluded that for Nigeria and other African nations to thrive in true and strong democracies, religion should be decolonized through pulling down colonial religious presumptions, de-internationalization of religion, reorientation of religious education, restoration of indigenous languages, authentication of religious freedom, non-governmental funding of religion, and provision of theologically motivated research to a more legitimate position within religionism