Emotion and Value

This volume brings together new work by leading philosophers on emotion and value. They address questions including the role of emotions in practical rationality and moral psychology, the connection between imagination and emotion, and the ability of emotions to ground ethical or aesthetic judgements.

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.