Justifying Emotions

The two central emotions of pride and jealousy have long been held to have no role in moral judgements, and have been a source of controversy in both ethics and moral psychology. Kristjan Kristjansson challenges this common view and argues that emotions are central to moral excellence and that both pride and jealousy are indeed ingredients of a well-rounded virtuous life.

In Emotions and Reasons, Patricia Greenspan offers an evaluative theory of emotion that assigns emotion a role of its own in the justification of action. She analyzes emotions as states of object-directed affect with evaluative propositional content possibly falling short of belief and held in mind by generalized comfort or discomfort.

The two central emotions of pride and jealousy have long been held to have no role in moral judgements, and have been a source of controversy in both ethics and moral psychology. Kristjan Kristjansson challenges this common view and argues that emotions are central to moral excellence and that both pride and jealousy are indeed ingredients of a well-rounded virtuous life.

The emotions are at the centre of our lives and, for better or worse, imbue them with much of their significance. The philosophical problems stirred up by the existence of the emotions, over which many great philosophers of the past have laboured, revolve around attempts to understand what this significance amounts to. Are emotions feelings, thoughts, or experiences? If they are experiences, what are they experiences of? Are emotions rational? In what sense do emotions give meaning to what surrounds us? The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction introduces and explores these questions in a clear and accessible way. The authors discuss the following key topics: the diversity and unity of the emotions the relations between emotion, belief and desire the nature of values the relations between emotions and perceptions emotions viewed as evaluative attitudes the link between emotions and evaluative knowledge the nature of moods, sentiments, and character traits. Including chapter summaries and guides to further reading, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal starting point for any philosopher or student studying the emotions. It will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as psychology and the social sciences.

The clear message proposed in this book is that justice matters for morality and desert matters for justice - and that emotions matter for desert, justice and morality. Moreover, and no less importantly, justice education needs to take all those facts into consideration. Kristján Kristjánsson’s new book falls on the cutting edge of the latest developments in justice discourse, both in philosophy and in the social sciences. Written from a philosophical perspective, it gives an accessible but penetrating exploration of various interlocking and interdisciplinary themes relating to justice. Kristjánsson justifies the necessary interplay between philosophers and social scientists dealing with justice, probes the role of desert in justice and explains the rising interest in the emotionality of justice. He then analyses the main desert-based emotions, connects his discussion to recent trends in developmental and social psychology, offers a moral justification of desert and desert-based emotions, and concludes by applying all those ideas in a close study of how justice and desert should be handled in moral education at school. Kristjánsson deftly weaves together insights from disparate academic areas relevant for justice, in general, and desert, in particular. This is an engaging, eye-opening and provocative book that should excite anyone interested in justice discourse and help generate debate in different areas related to justice: philosophical, psychological and educational.

Emotions are the controlling factor in our society today. Have you ever wondered where your emotions come from? Are you able to recognize when your emotions are controlling you? Do you wonder why they have such a great impact on your daily decision-making? So many of the influences affecting us have targeted our emotions. If you want to be like Jesus, this practical, encouraging and challenging biblical insight will help you to use your emotions the way Jesus Christ used His. Whether it is a poor self image, medicating one's pain, fighting for your rights or dealing with people who justify their actions and manipulate others, God can help you discern how to live your life in control of your emotions. Either you control your emotions or your emotions will control you. RUSSELL SNYDER and his wife Bonnie founded Wholehearted Devotion to see people's lives changed by knowing, loving and experiencing God. For years, Russell has been asking God for an intimate relationship with Him in order to be like Jesus. Calling people to surrender their life wholeheartedly to God, not just a portion of their daily living.

The emotions present deep philosophical problems that have preoccupied philosophers such as Aristotle, David Hume and William James. This book is an ideal introduction to the philosophy of the emotions and will be of interest to those in related disciplines such as psychology and political theory.

Undoubtedly, emotions sometimes thwart our epistemic endeavours. But do they also contribute to epistemic success? The thesis that emotions 'skew the epistemic landscape', as Peter Goldie puts it in this volume, has long been discussed in epistemology. Recently, however, philosophers have called for a systematic reassessment of the epistemic relevance of emotions. The resulting debate at the interface between epistemology, theory of emotions and cognitive science examines emotions in a wide range of functions. These include motivating inquiry, establishing relevance, as well as providing access to facts, beliefs and non-propositional aspects of knowledge. This volume is the first collection focusing on the claim that we cannot but account for emotions if we are to understand the processes and evaluations related to empirical knowledge. All essays are specifically written for this collection by leading researchers in this relatively new and developing field, bringing together work from backgrounds such as pragmatism and scepticism, cognitive theories of emotions and cognitive science, Cartesian epistemology and virtue epistemology.

Many people are drawn towards virtue ethics because of the central place it gives to emotions in the good life. Yet it may seem odd to evaluate emotions as virtuous or non-virtuous, for how can we be held responsible for those powerful feelings that simply engulf us? And how can education help us to manage our emotional lives? The aim of this book is to offer readers a new Aristotelian analysis and moral justification of a number of emotions that Aristotle did not mention (awe, grief, and jealousy), or relegated, at best, to the level of the semi-virtuous (shame), or made disparaging remarks about (gratitude), or rejected explicitly (pity, understood as pain at another person's deserved bad fortune). Kristján Kristjánsson argues that there are good Aristotelian reasons for understanding those emotions either as virtuous or as indirectly conducive to virtue. Virtuous Emotions begins with an overview of Aristotle's ideas on the nature of emotions and of emotional value, and concludes with an account of Aristotelian emotion education.

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.