C. E. Price

Donald Gustafson has argued that grief centres on a combination of belief and desire:The belief that the subject has suffered an irreparable loss.The desire that this should not be the case.And yet, as Gustafson points out, if the belief is true, the desire cannot be satisfied. Gustafson takes this to show that grief inevitably implies an irrational conflict between belief and desire.I offer a partial defence of grief against Gustafson's charge of irrationality. My defence rests on two elements. First, I offer an alternative model of emotion, which presents emotions as complex episodes, initiated by emotional appraisals. Secondly, I appeal to John Bowlby's account of grief to argue that grief involves two forms of sadness (anguish and desolation) which Gustafson's analysis runs together. I concede that anguish does characteristically involve an element of irrationality. But the irrationality of anguish does not arise from an apparently gratuitous clash between belief and desire, but from a conflict between emotion and belief—a form of irrationality that is both familiar and easily explained. Moreover, desolation need not involve any irrationality.

Abstract Why should we love the people we do and why does love motivate us to act as it does? In this paper, I explore the idea that these questions can be answered by appealing to the idea that love has to do with close personal relationships (the relationship claim). Niko Kolodny (2003) has already developed a relationship theory of love: according to Kolodny, love centres on the belief that the subject shares a valuable personal relationship with the beloved. However, this account has some implausible consequences. I shall develop an alternative account, discarding the assumption that love centres on a belief, and beginning instead from a conception of love as an emotional attitude, which, I suggest, involves a form of evaluation that is not belief. As I explain, adopting this view allows us to interpret the relationship claim, not as a claim about the subject?s beliefs, but as a claim about the function of love. This approach allows us to answer the questions above, while avoiding the difficulties that confront Kolodny's account. I end by exploring a case that might be thought to raise some difficulties for my account

Emotion is at the centre of our personal and social lives. To love or to hate, to be frightened or grateful is not just a matter of how we feel on the inside: our emotional responses direct our thoughts and actions, unleash our imaginations, and structure our relationships with others. Yet the role of emotion in human life has long been disputed. Is emotion reason?s friend or its foe? From where do the emotions really arise? Why do we need them at all? In this accessible and carefully argued introduction, Carolyn Price focuses on some central questions about the nature and function of emotion. She explores the ways in which emotion contrasts with belief and considers how our emotional responses relate to our values, our likes and our needs. And she investigates some of the different ways in which emotional responses can be judged as fitting or misplaced, rational or irrational, authentic or inauthentic, sentimental or profound. Throughout, she develops a particular view of emotion as a complex and diverse phenomenon, which reflects both our common evolutionary past and our different cultural and personal histories. Engagingly written with lots of examples to illuminate our understanding, this book provides the ideal introduction to the topic for students and scholars and anyone interested in delving further into the intricate web of human emotion

A historical theory of rational norms claims that, if we are supposed to think rationally, this is because it is biologically normal for us to do so. The historical theorist is committed to the view that we are supposed to think rationally only if, in the past, adult humans sometimes thought rationally. I consider whether there is any plausible model of rational norms that can be adopted by the historical theorist that is compatible with the claim that adult human beings are subject to rational norms, given certain plausible empirical assumptions about our history and capabilities. I suggest that there is one such model: this model centres on the idea that a procedure is rational if it has been endorsed (or at least not rejected) by mechanisms that have the function to ensure that the subject learns to reason in a way that approaches a certain kind of optimality.

What does it mean to say that an emotional response fits the situation? This question cannot be answered simply by specifying the core relational theme (loss or risk, say) associated with each emotion: we must also explain what constitutes an emotionally significant loss or risk. It is sometimes suggested that emotionally significant situations are those that bear on the subject’s interests or concerns. I accept that this claim is plausible for some emotional responses, and I propose a particular way of interpreting it. I suggest that, for many emotions, emotional significance is determined by the subject’s likes and dislikes – that is, settled dispositions to find a certain situation pleasant or distressing. I contrast this account with other preference-based accounts and with an account that appeals to the subject’s interests. I argue that we should prefer the likes-based account to these rival views

This article considers a central question in the philosophy of emotion: what is an emotion? This is a highly controversial question, which has attracted numerous answers. I argue that a good answer to this question may prove very hard to find. The difficulty, I suggest, can be traced back to three features of emotional phenomena: their diversity, their complexity and their coherence. I end by suggesting that we should not be disturbed by this result, as we do not need to know what an instance of emotion is in order to investigate the topic of emotion