Schools and other forms of education and have significant impacts on people's views about emotions and emotional experiences. It shows how we often take it for granted that certain emotions, such as happiness, are 'positive', while others are 'negative' and how personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, and race, can make an unfair difference when it comes to what emotions are expected or accepted. Written in an accessible format, the book encourages broad reflection on what emotions (...) are and why they matter, in relation to the aims of education, what it means to be a good person, and equality and social justice. (shrink)

Liz Jackson’s Emotions: Philosophy of Education in Practice is part of the Philosophy of Education in Practice series, which bridges philosophical exploration and practical engagement in education....

Our study explored the application of emotion philosophy in vocal music teaching. We utilized surveys, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions to gather data from a group of 18 students. The survey results revealed an average familiarity with emotion philosophy concepts but a strong agreement on the importance of understanding a song's emotions for effective singing. Students perceived their current vocal training to be somewhat helpful in understanding emotional background but felt it focused more on technical skills (...) than fostering emotional connection. Thematic analysis of interview data highlighted several key themes. Students emphasized the importance of imagination and storytelling techniques to connect with a song's emotions. Additionally, they valued understanding the historical context of a work and viewed developing emotional intelligence as beneficial. Integrating philosophical frameworks on emotional expression was seen as a way to gain a deeper understanding of vocal performance. In terms of vocal techniques, timbre variations were seen as a powerful tool for emotional expression. Nuances in dynamics and phrasing were viewed as ways to create specific emotions, and clear articulation was considered important for ensuring listeners grasped the lyrical message and connected with the song's emotional core. Overall, this study suggests that incorporating emotion philosophy concepts and techniques into vocal training has the potential to enhance students' understanding and expression of emotions in their singing. (shrink)

In “The Child’s Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty argues that certain early experiences are jointly owned in that they are numerically single experiences that are nevertheless given to more than one subject (e.g., the infant and caregiver). Call this the “joint ownership thesis” (JT). Drawing upon both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis, as well as studies of exogenous attention and mutual affect regulation in developmental psychology, I motivate the plausibility of JT. I argue that the phenomenological structure of some early infant–caregiver dyadic exchanges (...) is best described as involving joint subjects. From birth, some experiences are constitutively social in that certain phenomenal states, such as the positive emotions that arise within these early exchanges, are jointly owned. Along the way, I consider a possible objection. I conclude by considering the explanatory significance of adopting JT. (shrink)

This innovative new volume analyses the role of emotions in knowledge acquisition. It focuses on the field of philosophy of emotions at the exciting intersection between epistemology and philosophy of mind and cognitive science to bring us an in-depth analysis of the epistemological value of emotions in reasoning. With twelve chapters by leading and up-and-coming academics, this edited collection shows that emotions do count for our epistemic enterprise. Against scepticism about the possible positive role (...) emotions play in knowledge, the authors highlight the how and the why of this potential, lucidly exploring the key aspects of the functionality of emotions. This is explored in relation to: specific kinds of knowledge such as self-understanding, group-knowledge and wisdom; specific functions played by certain emotions in these cases, such as disorientation in enquiry and contempt in practical reason; the affective experience of the epistemic subjects and communities. (shrink)

The philosopher must inform himself of the relevant empirical investigation to arrive at a definition, and the scientist cannot afford to be naive about the..

Emotions are the focus of intense debate both in contemporary philosophy and psychology, and increasingly also in the history of ideas. Simo Knuuttila presents a comprehensive survey of philosophical theories of emotion from Plato to Renaissance times, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with careful historical reconstruction. The first part of the book covers the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism and, in addition, their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement (...) and Origen to Augustine and Cassian. Knuuttila then proceeds to a discussion of ancient themes in medieval thought, and of new medieval conceptions, codified in the so-called faculty psychology from Avicenna to Aquinas, in thirteenth century taxonomies, and in the voluntarist approach of Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and their followers. Philosophers, classicists, historians of philosophy, historians of psychology, and anyone interested in emotion will find much to stimulate them in this fascinating book. (shrink)

In “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson argues that the “profound opposition” between the objective and reactive stances is quite compatible with our rationally retaining the latter as important elements in a recognizably human life. Unless he can establish this, he has no hope of establishing his version of compatibilism in the free will debate. But, because objectivity is associated so intimately with the rationally conducted explanation of action, it is not clear how the opposition of these stances is compatible (...) with the rationality of the reactive attitudes. More to the point, it is not clear how an intellectual activity like shifting from the reactive to the objective stance can dispel reactive attitudes without thereby also rationally disqualifying them. I solve this puzzle by drawing on the idea that one cognitive component of emotions is the rationally optional “shift of attention.” a feature which in turn helps to explain a lot about the role reactive emotions can play in the fixation of belief. (shrink)

This volume presents new philosophical perspectives on environmental emotions. It explores the motivating nature of emotions such as anger, grief, and hope in relation to the current climate crisis. Many of our emotional responses to the climate crisis take a distressed form like anxiety, despair, or grief. However, these emotions almost always coexist with hope, drive toward action, or a strengthened sense of relationality and belonging. This book explores the different levels at which these tensions take place. (...) Part 1 discusses the conceptual and linguistic notions we use to make sense of our ecological predicament. Part 2 looks at the embedded dimension of our emotions: how we feel about the climate crisis as members of our communities and how our emotions are interconnected with what we do and how we work in and for our communities. Several chapters in this section explicitly discuss hope. Finally, Part 3 has a phenomenological and existential focus: it explores the nature of the rootedness and how it shapes our emotional experiences during the climate crisis. The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in environmental philosophy, philosophy of emotion, and environmental psychology. (shrink)

In discussions of the emotions, it is commonplace to wheel out examples of people who know that rollercoasters aren’t dangerous but who fear them anyway. Such cases are well known to have been troubling for cognitivists who hold the emotions are judgments or beliefs. But more recently, it has been argued that the very theories that emerged from the failure of cognitivism face trouble as well. One gets the sense that the theory that can accomplish this will win (...) a crucial point over its competitors. In the present paper I offer a new approach to making sense of the normative tension to which recalcitrant emotions give rise. Interestingly, the approach is one that can be adopted by anyone willing to grant that emotions are themselves governed by norms. (shrink)

Science and philosophy study well-being with different but complementary methods. Marry these methods and a new picture emerges: To have well-being is to be "stuck" in a positive cycle of emotions, attitudes, traits and success. This book unites the scientific and philosophical worldviews into a powerful new theory of well-being.

What role, if any, should emotions play in clinical reasoning and decision making? Traditionally, emotions have been excluded from clinical reasoning and decision making, but with recent advances in cognitive neuropsychology they are now considered an important component of them. Today, cognition is thought to be a set of complex processes relying on multiple types of intelligences. The role of mathematical logic or verbal linguistic intelligence in cognition, for example, is well documented and accepted; however, the role of (...) emotional intelligence has received less attention—especially because its nature and function are not well understood. In this paper, I argue for the inclusion of emotions in clinical reasoning and decision making. To that end, developments in contemporary cognitive neuropsychology are initially examined and analyzed, followed by a review of the medical literature discussing the role of emotions in clinical practice. Next, a published clinical case is reconstructed and used to illustrate the recognition and regulation of emotions played during a series of clinical consultations, which resulted in a positive medical outcome. The paper’s main thesis is that emotions, particularly in terms of emotional intelligence as a practical form of intelligence, afford clinical practitioners a robust cognitive resource for providing quality medical care. (shrink)

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer or Luiz Pessoa. Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. But our version (...) of functionalism is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions. (shrink)

인공 감정에 관한 철학적 탐구가 필요한 시점이다. 인간의 고유한 영역으로 간주되던 인지적 과제에서 기계의 추월을 염려하는 처지가 되자, 사람들은 이제 이성이 아니라 감정에서 인간의 고유성을 찾으려한다. 하지만 최근 인공지능 로봇에 감성을 불어넣는 작업이 새로운 화두로 떠오르고 있다. 이 글은 인공 감정의 실현가능성과 잠재적인 위험을 논의한다. 먼저, 감성 로봇의 개발 현황과 주요한 동기들을 개괄하고, 왜 로봇의 감정이 문제가 되는지 살펴본다. 진정한 감정-소유 로봇이 가능한지 검토하기 위해 감정을 선험적으로 정의하기보다는 감정이 수행하는 몇 가지 핵심 역할을 소개하고 이로부터 어떤 대상에 감정을 부여할 수 (...) 있는 기준들을 제안한다. 나는 이런 기준에 비추어 진정한 감정 로봇이 근미래에 실현될 가능성이 낮다고 주장한다. 그러나 감정-소유 로봇이 등장하기 이전이라도, 어느 정도의 자율성을 가진 로봇과 맺는 일방적 감정 소통은 잠재적으로 위험할 수 있으며, 이에 대비하는 것이 시급하다고 주장한다. (shrink)

Recalcitrant emotions are emotions that conflict with your evaluative judgements, e.g. fearing flying despite judging it to be safe. Drawing on the work of Greenspan and Helm, Brady argues these emotions raise a challenge for a theory of emotion: for any such theory to be adequate, it must be capable of explaining the sense in which subjects that have them are being irrational. This paper aims to raise scepticism with this endeavour of using the irrationality shrouding recalcitrant (...) episodes to inform a theory of emotion. I explain how ‘recalcitrant emotions’ pick out at least two phenomena, which come apart, and that there are different epistemic norms relevant to assessing whether, and if so how, subjects undergoing recalcitrant bouts are being irrational. I argue these factors result in differing accounts of the precise way these emotions make their bearers irrational, which in turn frustrates present efforts to adjudicate whether a given theory of emotion successfully meets this challenge. I end by briefly exploring two possible ways a philosophy of emotion might proceed in the face of such scepticism. (shrink)

This paper argues that Deonna and Teroni's attitudinal theory of emotions faces two serious problems. The first is that their master argument fails to establish the central tenet of the theory, namely, that the formal objects of emotions do not feature in the content of emotions. The second is that the attitudinal theory itself is vulnerable to a dilemma. By pointing out these problems, our paper provides indirect support to the main competitor of the attitudinal theory, namely, (...) the perceptual theory of emotions. (shrink)

In paradigmatic Confucian (Ruist) discourses, emotion (qing) has been depicted as co-arising with human nature (xing) and an irreducible constitutive source of human practices and their interpretation. The affects are concurrently naturally arising and alterable through how individuals react and respond to them and how they are or are not cultivated. That is, emotions are relationally mediated realities given in and transformed through how they are felt, understood, interpreted, and acted upon. Confucian discourses have elucidated the ethical character of (...) the emotions and sought to understand and cultivate emotional life as a hermeneutical and ethical task in establishing expectable patterns of human flourishing that orient virtues, roles, and relations. In this chapter, I explore the extent to which classical Ruist and Neo-Confucian discourses offer hermeneutical models for interpreting the complex interconnections between moral psychology and their mediations in the ethical life world. By examining a range of Confucian sources, the author argues that Confucian “moral psychologies” clarify affective dimensions of human existence within the interpersonal nexus of ethical life and indicate ways of cultivating affective awareness for relationally understanding and interpreting others, one’s world, and oneself. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a logical formalization of the emotion triggering process and of its relationship with mental attitudes, as described in Ortony, Clore, and Collins’s theory. We argue that modal logics are particularly adapted to represent agents’ mental attitudes and to reason about them, and use a specific modal logic that we call Logic of Emotions in order to provide logical definitions of all but two of their 22 emotions. While these definitions may be subject to (...) debate, we show that they allow to reason about emotions and to draw interesting conclusions from the theory. (shrink)

Distinguished philosopher Richard Wollheim's rich and thought-provoking account of the emotions considers what emotions are, how they arise in our lives, and how standard and "moral" emotions differ.

According to some, there is a problem concerning the emotions we feel toward fictional entities such as Anna Karenina, Werther and the like. We feel pity, fear, and sadness toward them, but how is that possible? “We are saddened, but how can we be? What are we sad about? How can we feel genuinely and involuntarily sad, and weep, as we do know that no one has suffered or died?” (Radford, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1975). This is (...) the paradox of fiction which is based on the assumption that emotions, to be genuine and rational, should be directed toward existent beings. But if beliefs about existence are necessary for us to be rationally moved by something, and such beliefs are lacking when we are moved by fiction (because we do not believe fictional characters and events to be real), then our capacity for an emotional response to fiction is irrational. Consequently, our emotional attitude toward future generations should be considered as irrational as well. But is this really the case? Are there good arguments to consider future and fictional entities as similar from this point of view? Or would it be better to distinguish the two? Is there such a thing as a paradox of the future? If so, how does it relate to the more famous paradox of fiction? (shrink)

What is the viewpoint regarding the emotional lives of sages in the Zhuangzi 莊子? There are two conflicting positions in current scholarship: sages have emotions, and sages are without emotions. In this essay, we introduce these positions with their corresponding textual support and show that they are not satisfactory accounts. Specifically, we point out that the conflict arises as scholars adopt a static model of emotions. Thus, we propose that a better way to understand the emotional lives (...) of sages is to adopt a dynamic model of emotions characterized by the process of forgetting. Through the discussion of such a dynamic process, we show how conflicting textual evidence can be integrated into this dynamic process and, at the same time, be read consistently. Ultimately, we argue that the ideal emotional lives of sages in the Zhuangzi adopt a dynamic model of emotions characterized by the vacillation of activity of the mind between the state with and without emotions. (shrink)

The present study subscribes to efforts undertaken by recent scholarship that focus on bringing out the connections between Song Neo-Confucian and Chan thoughts and practices. It proposes a new exploratory approach in the realm of philosophical ethics, namely a comparative hermeneutics of two Song-dynasty commentaries on the Confucian classic the Zhongyong. This study also puts forward a new Song-dynasty perspective on this text, a point of view common to both the Neo-Confucian and Chan schools, as I will demonstrate, which focuses (...) on emotions and what I call the “interdependent self.” The development of this theme also offers new insight into Neo-Confucian and Chan views of spirituality.Through a case study... (shrink)

Do victims’ emotions underlie preschoolers’ moral judgment abilities? Study 1 asked preschoolers (n = 72) to judge actions directed at characters who could and could not feel hurt and who did and did not cry. These judgments took into account only the nature of the action, not the nature of the victim. To further investigate how victims’ emotions might impact children’s moral judgments, Study 2 presented preschoolers (n = 37) with stories that varied in transgression type (Moral, Conventional, (...) or None) and victim’s reaction (Crying Present or Crying Absent). As in Study 1, children’s judgments were affected primarily by transgression type, and not by emotion. In an analogous task, judgments of children with autism spectrum disorders (Study 3; n = 12) were affected by both transgression type and crying. Typically developing children’s moral judgments are thus concerned primarily with action type, not with emotional displays, but the judgments of children with autism spectrum disorders can be swayed by victims’ emotions. (shrink)

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of (...) dynamic interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

In this article, I provide a phenomenological exploration of the role played by narrativity in shaping affective experience. I start by surveying and identifying different ways in which linguistic and narrative expression contribute to structure and regulate emotions, and I then expand on these insights by taking into consideration the phenomenology of borderline personality disorder. Disruptions of narrative abilities have been shown to be central to the illness, and I argue that these disruptions are at the origin of a (...) number of alterations of affective experience. In particular, I suggest that due to the narrative “fragmentation” characteristic of the disorder, the emotions experienced by borderline patients are less differentiated and have a predominantly bodily and unregulated character. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers have paid increasing attention to the empirical research on emotions that has blossomed in many areas of the social sciences. In this paper, I first sketch the common roots of science and philosophy in Ancient Greek thought. I illustrate the way that specific empirical sciences can be regarded as branching out from a central trunk of philosophical speculation. On the basis of seven informal characterizations of what is distinctive about philosophical thinking, I then draw attention to (...) the fact that scientific progress frequently requires one to make adjustments to the way its basic terms are conceptualized, and thus cannot avoid philosophical thought. The character of emotions requires attention from many disciplines, and the links among those disciplines inevitably require a broader philosophical perspective to be understood. Thus, emotion science, and indeed all of science, is inextricably committed to philosophical assumptions that demand scrutiny. (shrink)

The story of our lives is the story of our passions. We fall in love, we are gripped by scientific curiosity and religious fervor, we fear death and grieve for others, we humble ourselves in envy, jealousy, and resentment. In this remarkable book, Robert Solomon shares his fascination with the emotions and illuminates our passions in an exciting new way.

Sometimes emotions excuse. Fear and anger, for example, sometimes excuse under the headings of (respectively) duress and provocation. Although most legal systems draw the line at this point, the list of potentially excusatory emotions outside the law seems to be longer. One can readily imagine cases in which, for example, grief or despair could be cited as part of a case for relaxing or even eliminating our negative verdicts on those who performed admittedly unjustified wrongs. To be sure, (...) the availability of such excuses depends on what wrong one is trying to excuse. No excuse is available in respect of all wrongs. Some wrongs, indeed, are inexcusable. This throws up the interesting question of what makes a particular emotion apt to excuse a particular wrong. Why is fear, for example, more apt to excuse more serious wrongs than, say, pride or shame? This question leads naturally to another. Why are some emotions, such as lust, greed, and envy, apparently not apt to furnish any excuses at all? Can one not be overcome by them? Can they not drive one to wrongdoing as readily as fear and grief? Or is that not the point? (shrink)

_Philosophically explores the topic of emotional depth._.

This paper maintains that the concept of responsibility must be extended to beliefs and emotions. It argues that beliefs and emotions have their crucial link through the element of judgment. Judgment refers to relationships in contexts of ambiguity and uncertainty; developing good judgment in children involves the question of similarities and differences in varying situations and contexts. Both beliefs and emotions are crucial to this process. Educators interested in helping develop better judgment must look at the relevant (...) beliefs and emotions associated with the judgments we make. Just as children must be made aware of their responsibility for behaviour, so must they understand that they are responsible for their beliefs and emotions. (shrink)