Emotion and Imagination

Adam Morton is visiting emeritus professor at the University of British Columbia.

• Preface viiPart I The range of emotionsRefined emotions 3Imagining in emotions 8Seeing as 17Emotions and thinking 22Keeping mood and emotion distinct 29Pressure 37Categories of emotion 44Part II Imagining vile emotionsImagining what we shouldn’t feel 53Imagining minds: emotions and perspectives 56Imagining a point of view 63Misimagination 74Imagining invented characters: fiction and philosophy 83Invisible everyday failures 88Imagining awful actions 94Sympathy versus empathy 101The tradeoff 108Part III MemotionsThe threat of irrelevance 117Retracting emotions 122Emotions with multiple points of view 128The variety of moral emotions 134Emotional learning 142Smugness 149Part IV Families of emotions The ideas and the questions 157Shame, regret, embarrassment, remorse 159Shame-like versus regret-like 164Ghosts 170Looking backward and looking inward 175Gaps in the pattern: shame versus guilt 180Two kinds of pride 184The smug family 189Dark humour, radical possibilities 194Shaping our emotions 198End: a virtue if imagination 206Notes 210References 219Index 229

"Friends of Adam Morton's work will find familiar strengths in this essay in moral psychology: detailed attention to the peculiarities of cases and a hostility to easy formulations, matched by lucid arguments that keep the general aim in view. He has surprising things to say about imagining; mice do it, apparently. But we, unlike mice, can use imagination to help to shape our own emotions, and hence to structure our own moral lives. All in all, this is a splendid attempt to think through the complex issue of what the imagination can and cannot do for us."Gregory Currie, University of Nottingham"Adam Morton is a pioneering and original thinker whose provocative and insightful work on emotion and imagination has pushed the field in important new directions. It's exciting to have a book-length treatment of these issues from such an interesting and creative mind."Tamar Gendler, Yale University"Morton takes us on a journey of the imagination into the imagination. His kaleidoscope of examples compels us to believe that emotions involve the imagination in sometimes unexpected, but always fascinating ways. A great read!"Heidi Maibom, Carleton University