Feeling without thinking: Lessons from the ancients on emotion and virtue-acquisition

Metaphilosophy 41 (1-2):132-151 (2010)
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Abstract

By briefly sketching some important ancient accounts of the connections between psychology and moral education, I hope to illuminate the significance of the contemporary debate on the nature of emotion and to reveal its stakes. I begin the essay with a brief discussion of intellectualism in Socrates and the Stoics, and Plato's and Posidonius's respective attacks against it. Next, I examine the two current leading philosophical accounts of emotion: the cognitive theory and the noncognitive theory. I maintain that the noncognitive theory better explains human behavior and experience and has more empirical support than the cognitive theory. In the third section of the essay I argue that recent empirical research on emotional contagion and mirroring processes provides important new evidence for the noncognitive theory. In the final section, I draw some preliminary conclusions about moral education and the acquisition of virtue.

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Amy Coplan
California State University, Fullerton

Citations of this work

Objectivity in Science: New Perspectives From Science and Technology Studies.Flavia Padovani, Alan Richardson & Jonathan Y. Tsou (eds.) - 2015 - Cham: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 310. Springer.
The Puzzle of Humility and Disparity.Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr & Daniel Howard-Snyder - 2021 - In Mark Alfano, Michael Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility. Routledge. pp. 72-83.

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