Understanding Emotions: Mind and Morals (Ashgate Epistemology and Mind Series) (Ashgate Epistemology and Mind Series) (Ashgate Epistemology and Mind Series)

This title was first published in 2002: At the end of the 20th century, the emotions ceased to be a neglected topic for philosophical consideration. The editor suggests that this may, in part, be due to a change in the way the subject is approached. The emotions were characteristically thought of by philosophers as states which give rise to perturbation in what might roughly be called'right-thinking'. The basic idea was that practical reasoning, like theoretical reasoning, ought to be, and can be, dispassionate. This means that either the emotions interfere with'right-reasoning'in a way which is a proper object of study for the biological sciences but not for the science of the mind, or that the emotions become reducible to, and analyzable as, collections of propositional attitudes which are themselves assessable in terms of'right-reasoning'. The move away from this idea is taken as an improvement in our philosophical approach to the emotions by the authors. Following this, all of the papers in the volume contribute to this philosophical approach, each approaching the subject from a different angle. Understanding Emotions presents eight original essays on the emotions from leading contemporary philosophers in North America and the Simon Blackburn, Bill Brewer, Peter Goldie, Dan Hutto, Adam Morton, Michael Stocker, Barry Smith, and Finn Spicer. Goldie and Spicer's introductory chapter sets out the key themes of the ensuing surveying contemporary philosophical thinking about the emotions, and raising challenges to a number of prejudices that are sometimes brought to the topic from elsewhere in the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy. Brewer, Hutto, Goldie and Smith explore the conceptual and epistemological problems of other minds that the emotions raise, and how the emotions can be a source of knowledge of the world around us. The chapters by Stocker, Blackburn and Morton are broadly concerned with issues in Stocker argues for the traditional Aristotelian view that emotions reveal value and are constitutive of value; Blackburn, from a more Augustinian perspective, argues that the virtuous person, like the rest of us, will be emotional but he or she will have the right emotions towards the right objects; Morton questions the idea of emotions and narrative as sources of self-understanding. An extensive bibliography completes the book. Drawing together the arguments of leading contemporary philosophers, focusing on issues in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and moral philosophy, this book offers a wide and deep understanding of the emotions, and will be of interest across the philosophical spectrum to students and researchers of this fascinating and important topic. A collection of essays that give philosophical consideration to the subject of the emotions. Each piece of work moves away from the idea of "right-thinking" as central to the study of emotion, freeing the field for study from a variety of related philosophical angles.