On Being Unmoved

On Being Unmoved offers a novel, systematic look at the relationship between our emotional lives and the world. It builds on a body of existing philosophical work on fitting emotions: work that seeks to identify conditions under which object-directed emotions-like anger, shame, and joy-are well-suited to their objects.James Fritz expands on this existing work to tell a more complete story. He does so by considering not onlyemotion, but also emotional neutrality. This neutrality is a pervasive element of human emotional life: for instance, when you look at the day's news, some headlines may evoke strong feelings, but many others will evoke no emotional response at all. A theory of a fitting emotional life should have something to say about the occasions when emotion goes missing. Fritz shows that the appraisal of emotion in terms of fit can, and should, take place alongside the appraisal of emotional neutrality in terms of fit. On Being Unmoved presents a powerful, unified, and sometimes surprising model of the relationship between our emotional lives and the values that surrounds us.