Thinking about feeling : contemporary philosophers on emotions

The essays in this collection represent a variety of positions on a number of topics: the nature of emotion, the category of emotion, the rationality of emotions, the relationship between an emotion and its expression, the relationship between emotion, motivation, and action, the biological nature versus social construction of emotion, the role of the body in emotion, the extent of freedom and our ?control? of emotions, the relationship between emotion and value, and the very nature and warrant of ?theories? of emotion. Since I have my own say in the book (and elsewhere), I will not preempt my contributors by commenting on these various topics here. I will simply say that these are all lively and very current issues of considerable interest and importance to a wide variety of theorists in the various theoretical, experimental, and clinical branches of psychology, philosophy, philosophical psychology, and moral psychology, as well as cognitive science, the social sciences, and literary theory, and I hope that the controversies that become evident in this volume will contribute to the cross-fertilization of these disciplines. As in any ?collection,? there will be questions about choices?who was invited to contribute, who was not. To answer these potentially embarrassing questions as quickly and straightforwardly as possible, I have tried to solicit chapters from those theorists who have already established solid reputations in the field of emotion research and are presently (still) working on the emotions. There are a substantial number of younger scholars and researchers who are not represented here, I am sorry to say, and there are several well-known figures in the field who are no longer working on emotions but have moved on to other interests. I have also restricted my attention (for the purposes of this volume) to philosophers, although I have profound difficulties with the often artificial distinctions between that ?queen of the sciences? and its kin: psychology and the other social sciences, history, and literature.