Emotions, Values, and Agency

Christine Tappolet is Full Professor at the Département de philosophie at the Université de Montréal. Her research interests lie mainly in ethics, moral psychology, and emotion theory. She has edited a number of volumes, including, with Sarah Stroud, Weakness of Will and Practical Rationality (Oxford, 2003), and is the author of a number of articles and chapters on themes such as values, normativity, weakness of will, procrastination, autonomy and emotions, as well as of two books, Émotions et valeurs (2000, Presses Universitaires de France), and with Ruwen Ogien, Les concepts de l'éthique. Faut-il être conséquentialiste? (Hermann, 2008).

• 1: Emotion and Perception 2: Emotion and Motivation 3: Emotion and Values 4: Emotion and Responsibility 5: Emotion and Agency

Tappolet's book is to be recommended, first of all, for the way in which it shows how her theory of emotion interlocks with plausible theories of value and agency, and how these interlocking theories mutually support each other. The project is ambitious, as it requires a grasp of the difficulties in different and vast fields of inquiry, but the book lives up to its ambition: it is rich, accessibly written, well-structured, and extremely well-informed. It is focused, in the sense that in many cases it provides just the right amount of information about the theories discussed... I recommend this book to anyone interested in emotions, motivation, values, moral responsibility, and agency. Tappolet has illuminating things to say about all of these matters and, in particular, about the ways in which they interconnect. Her ambitious project has succeeded.