What explains people's propensity to ask existential questions that they have little hope of resolving, such as: Why are we here? What, if any, is our purpose? What is the structure of the universe? That humans engage in these endeavors has long puzzled evolutionary theorists, as they go beyond the immediate demands of fending for ourselves, seeking safety, finding food, and reproducing, which occupy the daily lives of other animals. In this book, philosopher Helen De Cruz draws on a wide (...) range of disciplines and thinkers, from Aristotle and 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl to Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel and science writer Rachel Carson, showing how awe and wonder lie at the heart of such existential questions. She argues that there is an emotional basis to this drive for inquiry, as wonder and awe are epistemic emotions that help us think about big-picture questions and that motivate the answers we provide to those questions. (shrink)

Munch-Jurisic’s account of perpetrator disgust raises important new questions concerning the complexity of emotions and their connection with moral actions. In this commentary, we discuss this account by applying some of the author’s ideas to the case of anger. We suggest that just as the relations between disgust and moral action are much more nuanced than previously thought, as Munch-Jurisic explains, analyses of anger can also profit from a more careful approach to such connections. Specifically, we propose that contextual factors (...) can affect the moral character of anger reactions, which in turn can provide them with moral value. We also argue that the contextual view deployed to study disgust reactions can also support distinctions between core forms and socio-moral forms of the same emotion, which in turn raises interesting questions concerning different forms of anger. Lastly, we extend the contextual approach to problems of emotion individuation and theories in emotion science, showing how current scientific emotion theories can learn from a detailed examination of disgust, anger, and other context-sensitive emotions. We aim to highlight some important contributions of Munch-Jurisic’s work to broader discussions on emotions, morality, and how to theorize about emotions overall. (shrink)

Anger is often an appropriate reaction to harms and injustices, but is it a politically beneficial one? Martha Nussbaum (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1), 41–56, 2015, Anger and Forgiveness. Oxford University Press, 2016) has argued that, although anger is useful in initially recruiting agents for action, anger is typically counterproductive to securing the political aims of those harmed. After the initial shockwave of outrage, Nussbaum argues that to be effective at enacting positive social change, groups and individuals (...) alike, must move quickly out of the state of anger. Feminist theorists (Frye, The Politics of Reality. Crossing Press, 1983; Lorde, 1997; Narayan, Hypatia 3 (2): 31–48, 1988) on the other hand have for long highlighted the efficacy of anger, as well as its moral and epistemic value, in fighting against the oppressive status quo. It might be thought therefore that for political action to be effective, a continued state of anger is preferable. Protestors must after all create and sustain a sense of moral obligation and justice. A main way of doing so is to promote successive moral shocks that trigger outrage (Jasper, Emotion Review 6 (3): 208–213, 2014). I present a novel, empirically informed defense of anger’s efficacy in political action. Nussbaum holds a traditional view on the nature of anger, inherited from Aristotle and the Stoics, which holds that anger constitutively involves a desire for retribution. The view that anger is counterproductive falls out of this and is dominant in academic work as well as in our personal and political lives. Based on work in social psychology, I argue that we need to reconsider this. In doing so, I highlight anger’s aim for recognition, rather than retribution, as key. Furthermore, I uncover conditions for anger’s political efficacy, as well as reasons for why the traditional view of anger has been so pervasive. (shrink)

In this chapter, we offer an account of fear and risk in anticipation of catastrophe. We draw on the narrative response to the Mount Enta volcano in medieval Sicily to frame an evaluation of how fear can be seen to impact the understanding of risk when the event of that risk is the catastrophic suffering of an entire community. We aim to demonstrate how an exploration of the philosophical questions surrounding the emotion of fear and the understanding of risk can (...) contribute to broader, interdisciplinary dialogue on the experience of the disastrous and deadly. (shrink)

This article analyses arguments and concerns about the emergence of feelings of anger amongst students, when issues of injustice are encountered in the study of the subject civic education. The aim is to determine the extent to which such concerns supply grounds for regulating anger as counterproductive. In particular, it is argued that to encourage students to forgo all feelings of anger that might be aroused by issues of injustice that students have encountered in civic education—in the name of positive (...) psychology and students’ well-being—not only constitutes a form of ‘affective injustice’, but also unfairly asks students to engage in harmful emotion regulation that reproduces existing exclusions. A crucial task for civic education is to provide learning spaces in which teachers and students can explore the affective complexities of political anger and its consequences. (shrink)

Drawing on recent research in the philosophy of the emotions and empirical evidence from social psychology, this paper argues that the concept of loss of self-control at common law mischaracterises the relationship between the emotions and their effects on action. Emotions do not undermine reason in the ways offenders describe ; nor do they compel people to act in ways they cannot control. As such, the idea of ‘loss of self-control’ is an inaccurate and misleading description of the psychological mechanisms (...) at play in cases of emotionally motivated killing, where there may not be any ‘loss of self-control’ as such. (shrink)

Cohen (2023) takes a fair and measured approach to the question of what ChatGPT means for bioethics. The hype cycles around AI often obscure the fact that ethicists have developed robust frameworks...

In this article I argue that characterizations of anger as a hostile emotion may be mistaken. My project is empirically informed and is partly descriptive, partly diagnostic. It is descriptive in that I am concerned with what anger is, and how it tends to manifest, rather than with what anger should be or how moral anger is manifested. The orthodox view on anger takes it to be, descriptively, an emotion that aims for retribution. This view fits well with anger being (...) a hostile emotion, as retribution is punitive. I will argue that a different view of anger deserves our attention. On this alternative view, anger aims for recognition of harms done, rather than for the punishment of those who have committed them. I argue that we have reason to favour a strong view that excludes retribution from anger’s main aims. In addition, I offer a diagnosis of the reasons that led the retributive view of anger to become, and remain, orthodoxy. This diagnosis provides indirect reason to give my descriptive proposal serious consideration, for it highlights that the orthodox view has dominated folk and philosophical conceptions of anger for reasons that do not speak in favour of the view’s veracity. The view that anger is a hostile emotion will therefore emerge as in need of serious scrutiny. (shrink)

The orthodox view of anger takes desires for revenge or retribution to be central to the emotion. In this paper, I develop an empirically informed challenge to the retributive view of anger. In so doing, I argue that a distinct desire is central to anger: a desire for recognition. Desires for recognition aim at the targets of anger acknowledging the wrong they have committed, as opposed to aiming for their suffering. In light of the centrality of this desire for recognition, (...) I argue that the retributive view of anger should be abandoned. I consider and dismiss two types of moves that can be made on the part of a proponent of the orthodox view in response to my argument. I propose that a pluralist view, which allows for both retribution and recognition in anger, is to be preferred. (shrink)

For a long time the dominant view on the nature of blame was that to blame someone is to have an emotion toward her, such as anger, resentment or indignation in the case of blaming someone else and guilt in the case of self-blame. Even though this view is still widely held, it has recently come under heavy attack. The aim of this paper is to elaborate the idea that to blame is to have an emotion and to defend the (...) resulting emotion account of blame. (shrink)

According to an influential objection, which Martha Nussbaum has powerfully restated, expressing anger in democratic public discourse is counterproductive from the standpoint of justice. To resist this challenge, this article articulates a crucial yet underappreciated sense in which angry discourse is epistemically productive. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, which emphasize the distinctive phenomenology of emotion, I argue that conveying anger to one’s listeners is epistemically valuable in two respects: first, it can direct listeners’ attention to elusive (...) morally relevant features of the situation; second, it enables them to register injustices that their existing evaluative categories are not yet suited to capturing. Thus, when employed skillfully, angry speech promotes a greater understanding of existing injustices. This epistemic role is indispensable in highly divided societies, where the injustices endured by some groups are often invisible to, or misunderstood by, other... (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper we explore the possibility of rethinking the concept of emotional intelligence within the context of education. By developing a pedagogical dialogue with Michel Henry’s phenomenology of incarnation, we try to move beyond existing models of emotional intelligence by shifting the emphasis from the intellectual significance of emotion to a more original incarnate affectivity within intelligence, understood as lived sense-making. We claim that this ontological and ontogenetic perspective on emotion puts it at the heart of education. Yet only (...) because it evokes an understanding of education which is expressly non-functionalist: a disruptive, even dreadful event that marks the threshold and tension between what Henry terms Life and World. More than simply learning us to manage our emotions or recognize the value of experiences, emotional intelligence is about the very making of World out of Life, a Life that is at once radically subjective and communal. (shrink)

In this paper I critically discuss what has come to be known as the consensus or standard view of interpersonal forgiveness noting some of the paradoxes it appears to generate, how its conceptual resources seem unable to help illuminate several other varieties of forgiveness that are either themselves instances of interpersonal forgiving or at least types of forgiveness that a theory of interpersonal forgiveness should be able to shed some light upon. In the final section I offer some remarks on (...) the nature of revenge, which has recently come to be seen by some philosophers as a morally acceptable alternative to forgiving wrongdoers, note some of the puzzles to which it gives rise, and conclude that while both types of responses to wrongdoers remain morally complex, there is good reason to think that forgiveness is the morally more appropriate response to having been wronged. (shrink)

I argue that there is an interesting and underexplored sense in which some negative reactive attitudes such as anger are often absurd. I explore implications of this absurdity, especially for our understanding of forgiveness.

People can be outraged over, say, mismanagement or fraud and motivated to address such problems; they can, however, also be angry and lash out against the innocent. In addition to such unpredictability, angry people can seem literally out of their mind. My aim is to render anger intelligible and productive from a social epistemological perspective: epistemological because I assume that anger involves value recognition and arouses reflection; social because I assume that the related values and inquiries involve questions of justice (...) and/or morality. I believe that value disagreements are set up at cross purposes if we disqualify the emotional reactions of those whom we judge too unpleasant to understand. However, I also believe that we should not take anger at face value. My proposal is pragmatic for two reasons. First, and in line with classical pragmatist tenets about the role of doubt and other emotions in reasoning, it is pragmatic because I think that anger results from moral and political uncertainty and leads to a failure to understand one another and, hence, to a failure to act together. Second, my proposal is more concerned with what could be made of anger rather than focussing on what anger essentially is. In sum, I suggest that communities can regulate and use the variety of angry experiences in situations of uncertainty and conflict about moral and political values; that would be “passionate disagreement.” I explain four pragmatic considerations that go along with it and address three problems one might raise in response. (shrink)

Crucially, blame can be addressed to its targets, as an implicit demand for recognition. But when we ask whether offenders would actually appreciate this demand, via a sound deliberative route from their existing motivations, we face a puzzle. If they would, their offense reflects a deliberative mistake, and blame’s hostility seems unnecessary. If they wouldn’t, addressing them is futile, and blame’s emotional engagement seems unwarranted. To resolve this puzzle, I develop an account of blame as a proleptic response to indeterminacy (...) in its target’s reasons, yielding attractive accounts of blame’s relation both to internal reasons claims and to free will. (shrink)

As Cohen (2023) describes, the discourse around ChatGPT has been focused on potential risks while AI-based chatbots could also positively empower patients. There are other potential benefits to Cha...

Simone Weil wrote that, “We do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident.” This is reminiscent of the suggestion in Plato’s Meno that knowledge is recollection. Although most of us would not take Plato at his word, we might charitably read him and Weil as suggesting that the solution to some problems depends not upon learning something new, but rather in (...) understanding how to apply what we have already learned, in knowing how to look at the problem in the right way, or how to ask the right question, so that the solution—the answer, the right course of action—becomes clear. Knowing how to apply ourselves, our skills, and our experiences, is what it means to have practical wisdom. It is traditionally assumed that the virtuous person is also the practically wise person, that there is no human virtue without such wisdom. Although this view that practical wisdom is internal to the virtues has been challenged on various grounds, here I will travel close to the traditional conception while also convinced that what I offer here identifies an important relationship between patience and practical wisdom regardless of whether we construe virtues in an Aristotelian fashion or otherwise. (shrink)