Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions

Robert C. Solomon0195153170, 9780195153170

Philosophers since Aristotle have explored emotion, and the study of emotion has always been essential to the love of wisdom. In recent years Anglo-American philosophers have rediscovered and placed new emphasis on this very old discipline. The view that emotions are ripe for philosophical analysis has been supported by a considerable number of excellent publications. In this volume, Robert Solomon brings together some of the best Anglo-American philosophers now writing on the philosophy of emotion, with chapters from philosophers who have distinguished themselves in the field of emotion research and have interdisciplinary interests, particularly in the social and biological sciences. The reader will find a lively variety of positions on topics such as the nature of emotion, the category of ”emotion,” the rationality of emotions, the relationship between an emotion and its expression, the relationship between emotion, motivation, and action, the biological nature versus social construction of emotion, the role of the body in emotion, the extent of freedom and our control of emotions, the relationship between emotion and value, and the very nature and warrant of theories of emotion. In addition, this book acknowledges that it is impossible to study the emotions today without engaging with contemporary psychology and the neurosciences, and moreover engages them with zeal. Thus the essays included here should appeal to a broad spectrum of emotion researchers in the various theoretical, experimental, and clinical branches of psychology, in addition to theorists in philosophy, philosophical psychology, moral psychology, and cognitive science, the social sciences, and literary theory.

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Table of contents :
Contents……Page 8
Contributors……Page 10
Introduction……Page 14
Part I: Emotions, Physiology, and Intentionality……Page 18
1. Primitive Emotions……Page 20
2. Emotion: Biological Fact or Social Construction?……Page 39
3. Embodied Emotions……Page 55
Part II: Emotion, Appraisal, and Cognition……Page 70
4. Emotions: What I Know, What I’d Like to Think I Know, and What I’d Like to Think……Page 72
5. Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World……Page 87
Part III: Emotions and Feelings……Page 100
6. Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World……Page 102
7. Subjectivity and Emotion……Page 118
Part IV: Emotions and Rationality……Page 134
8. Emotions, Rationality, and Mind/Body……Page 136
9. Some Considerations about Intellectual Desire and Emotions……Page 146
Part V: Emotions, Action, and Freedom……Page 160
10. Emotion and Action……Page 162
11. Emotions and Freedom……Page 174
Part VI: Emotion and Value……Page 192
12. Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance……Page 194
13. Feelings That Matter……Page 211
14. Perturbations of Desire: Emotions Disarming Morality in the “Great Song” of The Mahābhārata……Page 225
Part VII: On Theories of Emotion……Page 242
15. Is Emotion a Natural Kind?……Page 244
16. Emotion as a Subtle Mental Mode……Page 261
17. Enough Already with “Theories of the Emotions”……Page 280
Bibliography……Page 290
C……Page 304
F……Page 305
L……Page 306
R……Page 307
Z……Page 308