Emotion and Value

This volume brings together new work by leading philosophers on the topics of emotion and value, and explores issues at their intersection. Philosophers and psychologists working on the emotions have reached something of a consensus about the complex, inter-related nature of the affective and cognitive components of emotions, and have increasingly focussed on the important epistemological role that emotions play in giving us access to values. At the same time, an increasing number of philosophers have become attracted to analyses of value that give emotions a prominent place in evaluative judgements and experiences. The work undertaken in each of these areas has important implications for current research on topics such as the role that emotions play in practical rationality and moral psychology, the connection between imagination and emotion in the appreciation of fiction, and more generally with the ability of emotions to discern axiological saliences and to ground (or fail to ground) the objectivity of ethical or aesthetic value judgements. This volume makes a unique contribution to scholarship on emotion and value by bringing together top authors from these lines of research. In addition, the volume contains a number of contributions that explore various links between the emotions and self-understanding, touching on a range of themes that include depression, empathy, agency, guilt, and self-trust. All of these issues are approached from a number of different perspectives in order to present the reader with a wide view of this extremely rich terrain and to demonstrate how the latest thinking in a number of currently intensive areas of research is deeply interconnected.

Table of Contents:
1: Sabine Roeser and Cain Todd: Emotion and Value: Introduction Part I. Emotion and the Nature of Value 2: Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni: In what Sense are Emotions Evaluations? 3: Michelle Montague: Evaluative Phenomenology 4: Michael Brady: Emotion, Attention, and the Nature of Value 5: Jonathan Dancy: Emotions as Unitary States 6: Cain Todd: Relatively Fitting Emotions and Apparently Objective Values Part II. Emotion, Evaluation, and Justification 7: Adam Pelser: Emotion, Evaluative Perception, and Epistemic Justification 8: Sabine Döring: Why Recalcitrant Emotions Are Not Irrational 9: Adam Morton: Surprise 10: Greg Currie: Emotions Fit for Fictions Part III. Emotion, Value and the Self 11: Linda Zagzebski: Emotional Self-trust 12: Nancy Sherman: Self-empathy and Moral Repair 13: Michael Lacewing: Emotions and the Virtues of Self-understanding 14: Jan Slaby and Philipp Wüschner: Emotion and Agency 15: Matthew Ratcliffe: Evaluating Existential Despair

About the Author :
Sabine Roeser is professor of ethics at the Philosophy Department of the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands where she holds a distinguished Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Chair. She is head of a research group on 'Moral Emotions and Risk Politics'. Her research has been funded by several major grants from the Dutch science foundation NWO, and she publishes on ethics, emotions, and risk. She is author of the monograph Moral Emotions and Intuitions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Cain Todd has been Lecturer in Philosophy at Lancaster University since completing his PhD in philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2003. He has held visiting positions at the University of Geneva and the Institut Jean Nicod, and from 2011 to 2013 he was co-leader of the project 'Imagination, Emotion, and Value' funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His main research areas are aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and value theory, and in addition to publishing a number of articles in these areas he is the author of The Philosophy of Wine: a case of truth, beauty, and intoxication (Acumen Press, 2010).

Review :
... the essays in this book are of high quality and present original ideas about the nature of evaluative experiences and the role emotions play in evaluative experience and knowledge acquisition. Graduate students and researchers with interests in these topics will benefit from reading this book. Roeser and Todd have done a service to the discipline by assembling this volume. For those who do not work in the philosophy of the emotions, its contributions will illuminate both the inherent interest of the subject, and its manifold connections to other parts of philosophy. For those seeking to orient themselves in this part of philosophy, it will serve as a helpful survey of significant portions of the terrain. And for those already working in the area, its individual contributions will nourish thought and reward study. Recommended.