Affective construals: what Aristotle’s moral psychology tells us about emotion

This paper sheds light on the implications that Aristotle's treatment of virtues of character in the Nicomachean Ethics has for his understanding of the nature and the role of emotion in human beings. A discussion of the notion of hexis and the way settled states of character are developed by means of affective habituation is followed by an examination of the relation between affective states and reasons, of that between affective states and actions, and of the role of environmental scaffolding and the hybrid nature of action possibilities as emerging from objective contextual features that are response-dependent at the same time. The main claim is that Aristotle's moral psychology is grounded in the view that emotions and affective states are not just reactions to the information that agents pick up from the external world, but operate as 'probes', i.e. goal-oriented means of exploring the material and the social environment.