Understanding Emotions

This title was first published in 2002: At the end of the 20th century, the emotions ceased to be a neglected topic for philosophical consideration. The editor suggests that this may, in part, be due to a change in the way the subject is approached. The emotions were characteristically thought of by philosophers as states which give rise to perturbation in what might roughly be called "right-thinking". The basic idea was that practical reasoning, like theoretical reasoning, ought to be, and can be, dispassionate. This means that either the emotions interfere with "right-reasoning" in a way which is a proper object of study for the biological sciences but not for the science of the mind, or that the emotions become reducible to, and analyzable as, collections of propositional attitudes which are themselves assessable in terms of "right-reasoning". The move away from this idea is taken as an improvement in our philosophical approach to the emotions by the authors. Following this, all of the papers in the volume contribute to this philosophical approach, each approaching the subject from a different angle.