2018 Cover TheMoralPsychologyOfC

2018

Even though curiosity is generally seen as a valuable trait that motivates inquiry and investigation, it is also possible to see that thinkers have some

ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY SUPPLEMENT: 52, 2003

Looking inside oneself for the springs of such passion might make a nice case of soul-searching, but is not necessarily the best means for advancing philosophical inquiry. The papers in this volume arise from an international symposium on emotions, and provide material for a continuing dialogue among researchers with different philosophical itineraries. Each essay addresses, in varying detail, the nature of emotions, their rationality, and their relation to value. Chapters I to VIII map the place of emotion in human nature, through a discussion of the intricate relation between consciousness and the body. Chapters IX to XI analyse the importance of emotion for human agency by pointing to the ways in which practical rationality may be enhanced, as well as hindered, by powerful or persistent emotions. Chapters XII to XIV explore questions of normativity and value in making sense of emotions at a personal, ethical, and political level.

Ethics, 2006

an article entitled "What an Emotion Is: A Sketch." This book offers the full-size version of Roberts's account of emotions. This is already a lengthy book, and a second one about the relation of emotions to morality, and in particular about emotions and virtues, is announced as forthcoming. The present book is divided into four chapters of unequal length. The first one is mainly methodological; it argues in favor of conceptual analysis as crucial to the understanding of emotions and criticizes the claim that the states we usually count as emotions do not form a unified category. The second chapter presents and defends Roberts's theory of emotions as concern-based construals, while the third one, which is almost a book on its own given its 122 pages, consists in the study of a great many emotion types, ranging from the standard cases of fear, anger, guilt, or shame to more exotic and culturally rather parochial ones, such as agape, a form of love in which we think of someone as personifying Jesus Christ. The last chapter, which is comparatively very short, offers an account of emotional feelings.

2001

Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions and on that of their objectivity as revealers of value: emotions are neither simply natural nor socially constructed, and they apprehend objective values, but those values are multi-dimensional and relative to human realities. The "axiological" position I defend jettisons the usual foundations for ethical judgments, and grounds these judgments instead on a rationally informed reflective equilibrium of comprehensive emotional attitudes, tempered with a dose of irony.

WIREs Cognitive Science, 2015

We start this overview by discussing the place of emotions within the broader affective domain – how different are emotions from moods, sensations and affective dispositions? Next, we examine the way emotions relate to their objects, emphasizing in the process their intimate relations to values. We move from this inquiry into the nature of emotion to an inquiry into their epistemology. Do they provide reasons for evaluative judgements and, more generally, do they contribute to our knowledge of values? We then address the question of the social dimension of emotions, explaining how the traditional nature vs. nurture contrast applies to the emotions. We finish by exploring the relations between emotions, motivation and action, concluding this overview with a more specific focus on how these relations bear on some central ethical issues.

Humana.mente. Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2019

Introduction to "Humana.mente. Journal of Philosophical Studies" issue (12.35/2019) on "Emotions. From Cases to Theories", edited by Matteo Galletti and Ariele Niccoli. Open access Journal: http://www.humanamente.eu/index.php/HM/issue/view/36

Emotion Review, 2011

In recent years, moral psychology has undergone a renaissance characterized by two dramatic changes . First, the scientific study of morality has become a broad, interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing on insights and methods from philosophy, neuroscience, economics, anthropology, biology, and all quarters of psychology. Second, emotion now plays a central role in moral psychology research. This special section on Emotion and Morality is a testament to the ingenuity, openmindedness, and energy that has infused this field.

The Incarnate Word Journal, 2011

The volume is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in philosophy, psychology, political theory, and religion, which were delivered at the 2005-2006 John Henry Cardinal Newman Lecture Series at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences (IPS) (Arlington, VA). It has been edited by Craig Steven Titus, a research professor at IPS and the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

2018

No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume—had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain sorts of events of concern to a subject, triggering bodily changes and typically motivating characteristic behavior. What is surprising is that in much of the twentieth-century philosophers of mind and psychologists tended to neglect them—perhaps because the sheer variety of phenomena covered by the word " emotion " and its closest neighbors tends to discourage tidy theory. In recent years, however, emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy, as well as in other branches of cognitive science. In view of the proliferation of increasingly fruitful exchanges between researchers of different stripes, it is no longer useful to speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from the approaches of other disciplines, particularly psychology, neurology, evolutionary biology, and even economics. While it is quite impossible to do justice to those approaches here, some sidelong glances in their direction will aim to suggest their philosophical importance. I begin by outlining some of the ways that philosophers have conceived of the place of emotions in the topography of the mind, particularly in their relation to bodily states, to motivation, and to beliefs and desires, as well as some of the ways in which they have envisaged the relation between different emotions. Most emotions have an intentional structure: we shall need to say something about what that means. Psychology and more recently evolutionary biology have offered a number of theories of emotions, stressing their function in the conduct of life. Philosophers have been especially partial to cognitivist theories, emphasizing analogies either with propositional judgments or with perception. But different theories implicitly posit different ontologies of emotion, and there has been some dispute about what emotions really are, and indeed whether they are any kind of thing at all. Emotions also raise normative questions: about the extent to which they can be said to be rational, or can contribute to rationality. In that regard the question of our knowledge of our own emotions is especially problematic, as it seems they are both the object of our most immediate awareness and the most powerful source of our capacity for self-deception. This results in a particularly ambivalent relation between emotions and morality. I will conclude with a brief survey of some recent trends, particularly as they affect and are influenced by the neighboring disciplines in which the study of emotions has become increasingly prominent.