Peter Goldie

Emotions, I will argue, involve two kinds of feeling: bodily feeling and feeling towards. Both are intentional, in the sense of being directed towards an object. Bodily feelings are directed towards the condition of one's body, although they can reveal truths about the world beyond the bounds of one's body – that, for example, there is something dangerous nearby. Feelings towards are directed towards the object of the emotion – a thing or a person, a state of affairs, an action or an event; such emotional feelings involve a special way of thinking of the object of the emotion, and I draw an analogy with Frank Jackson's well-known knowledge argument to show this. Finally, I try to show that, even if materialism is true, the phenomenology of emotional feelings, as described from a personal perspective, cannot be captured using only the theoretical concepts available for the impersonal stance of the sciences.

I argue that it is possible, in the right circumstances, to see what the kind thing is to do: in the right circumstances, we can, literally, see deontic facts, as well as facts about others’ emotional states, and evaluative facts. In arguing for this, I will deploy a notion of non‐inferential perceptual belief or judgement according to which the belief or judgement is arrived at non‐inferentially in the phenomenological sense and yet is inferential in the epistemic sense. The ability to arrive at these kinds of beliefs and judgements is part of virtue, and is also part of what it is to grasp thick ethical concepts in an engaged way. When we come to thinner evaluative and deontic facts and thinner ethical concepts, however, the requirements for non‐inferential perceptual belief and judgement are less easily met. Seeing what is the kind thing to do is one matter; seeing what is the right thing to do is another

Peter Goldie opens the path to a deeper understanding of our emotional lives through a lucid philosophical exploration of this surprisingly neglected topic. Drawing on philosophy, literature and science, Goldie considers the roles of culture and evolution in the development of our emotional capabilities. He examines the links between emotion, mood, and character, and places the emotions in the context of consciousness, thought, feeling, and imagination. He explains how it is that we are able to make sense of our own and other people's emotions, and how we can explain the very human things which emotions lead us to do. He argues that it is only from the personal point of view that thoughts, reasons, feelings, and actions come into view. This fascinating book gives an accessible but penetrating exploration of an important but mysterious subject. Any reader interested in emotion and its role in understanding our lives will find much to think about here.

Grief is not a kind of feeling, or a kind of judgement, or a kind of perception, or any kind of mental state or event the identity of which can be adequately captured at a moment in time. Instead, grief is a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, which unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any particular time. The pattern of a particular grieving is best understood and explained through a narrative account, and not merely through a causal account, for narrative accounts in such cases have powerful explanatory, revelatory, and expressive powers which causal accounts lack. Although I will not argue for it here, I believe that this view of grief can be generalised to other kinds of emotion. If this is so, then many philosophical accounts of emotion are at fault in identifying emotion with a kind of mental state or event

After many years of neglect, philosophers are increasingly turning their attention to the emotions, and recently we have seen a number of different accounts of emotion. In this article, we will first consider what facts an account of emotion needs to accommodate if it is going to be acceptable. Having done that, we will then consider some of the leading accounts and see how they fare in accommodating the facts. Two things in particular will emerge. First, an adequate account of emotion cannot be provided without taking into account a wide range of issues in philosophy of mind that extend beyond the emotions in particular. Secondly, the diversity of emotional phenomena makes it especially hard to provide anything like a comprehensive account of emotion; philosophers not only disagree over what are the essential properties of emotion, but also over what are central cases.

Empathy has for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people's minds, and predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do; and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is seen as having a central role in aesthetics, in the understanding of our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. A fuller understanding of empathy is now offered by the interaction of research in science and the humanities. This volume draws together nineteen original chapters by leading researchers across several disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. It offers the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this intriguing aspect of human life.

Some works of conceptual art require deception for their appreciation—deception of the viewer of the work. Some experiments in social psychology equally require deception— deception of the participants in the experiment. There are a number of close parallels between the two kinds of deception. And yet, in spite of these parallels, the art world, artists, and philosophers of art, do not seem to be troubled about the deception involved, whereas deception is a constant source of worry for social psychologists. Intuitively, each of these responses might seem appropriate for its sphere, but it is not easy to see what grounds these intuitions.

The question is how to explain expressions of emotion. It is argued that not all expressions of emotion are open to the same sort of explanation. Those expressions which are actions can be explained, like other sorts of action, by reference to a belief and a desire; however, no genuine expression of emotion is done as a means to some further end. Certain expressions of emotion which are actions can also be given a deeper explanation as being expressive of a wish. Expressions of emotion which are not actions cannot be given a belief-desire explanation: no belief is involved, and a desire is involved only in an honorific sense of 'desire'. The distinction amongst expressions of emotion between those which are actions and those which are not is not a precise one, and the paper concludes with some speculative remarks about borderline cases such as jumping for joy.

Abstract Narrative thinking has a very important role in our ordinary everyday lives?in our thinking about fiction, about the historical past, about how things might have been, and about our own past and our plans for the future. In this paper, which is part of a larger project, I will be focusing on just one kind of narrative thinking: the kind that we sometimes engage in when we think about, evaluate, and respond emotionally to, our own past lives from a perspective that is external to the remembered events. Being able to do this is an essential part of what it is to have a narrative sense of self. Sometimes, I will suggest, we fail to have such responses?we are not able to think and feel as we should about an episode in our lives. On such occasions, there is a gap in our narrative sense of self?a gap which opens up especially where the past is in some sense tragic or traumatic. The desire to close this gap is what I will call a desire for emotional closure

What is the point of art, and why does it matter to us human beings? The answer that I will give in this paper, following on from an earlier paper on the same subject, is that art matters because our being actively engaged with art, either in its production or in its appreciation, is part of what it is to live well. The focus in the paper will be on the dispositions—the virtues of art production and of art appreciation—that are necessary for this kind of active engagement with art. To begin with, I will argue that these dispositions really are virtues and not mere skills. Then I will show how the virtues of art, and their exercise in artistic activity, interweave with the other kinds of virtue which are exercised in ethical and contemplative activity. And finally, I will argue that artistic activity affords, in a special way, a certain kind of emotional sharing that binds us together with other human beings.

There is a view of the emotions (I might tendentiously call it ‘cognitivism’) that has at present a certain currency. This view is of the emotions as playing an essential role in our gaining evaluative knowledge of the world. When we are angry at an insult, or afraid of the burglar, our emotions involve evaluative perceptions and thoughts, which are directed towards the way something is in the world that impinges on our well-being, or on the well-being of those that matter to us. Without emotions, we would be worse off, prudentially and morally: we would not see things as they are, and accordingly we would not act as we should. Emotions are, according to this view a Good Thing. No wonder we have evolved as creatures capable of emotion.[1]

_In real life, emotions can distort practical reasoning, typically in ways that it is_ _difficult to realise at the time, or to envisage and plan for in advance. This fea-_ _ture of real life emotional experience raises difficulties for imagining such expe-_ _riences through centrally imagining, or imagining ‘from the inside’. I argue_ _instead for the important psychological role played by another kind of imagin-_ _ing: imagining from an external perspective. This external perspective can draw_ _on the dramatic irony involved in imagining these typical cases, where one_ _knows outside the scope of the imagining what one does not know as part of the_ _content of what one imagines: namely, that the imagined emotion is distorting_ _one’s reasoning. Moreover, imagining from an external perspective allows one_ _to evaluate the imagined events in a way that imagining from the inside does not._

In this paper I sketch a virtue theory of art, analogous to a virtue theory of ethics along Aristotelian lines. What this involves is looking beyond a parochial conception of art understood as work of art, as product, to include intentions, motives, skills, traits, and feelings, all of which can be expressed in artistic activity. The clusters of traits that go to make up the particular virtues of art production and of art appreciation are indeed virtues in part because, when they are expressed in artistic activity, that activity is chosen for its own sake, ‘under the concept of art’; and also they are virtues in part because, when they are so expressed, the activities are themselves partly constitutive of human well-being, along with other activities, including leading an ethical life, and what Aristotle called contemplation. With a virtue theory of art before us, we can begin to see the point of art, to see why art matters to us as human beings.

As part of the debate between theory‐theorists and simulation‐theorists in the philosophy of mind, there is the question of how we think about the emotions of other people. It is the aim of this paper to distinguish and clarify some of the ways in which we do this. In particular five notions are discussed: understanding and explaining others’ emotions, emotional contagion, empathy, in‐his‐shoes imagining, and sympathy. I argue that understanding and explanation cannot be achieved by any of the other four notions. So far as concerns prediction of other people’s emotional responses, I argue that simulationists have tended to concentrate on empathy and in‐his‐ shoes imagining to explain how this is done, and that more prominence should be given to other means of prediction through imagination which do not involve imagining events from the other’s point of view; roughly, imagining how she would feel need not involve imagining feeling how she would feel. But prediction in these other ways, like understanding and explanation, are achieved without losing sight of the fact that the other person has a point of view, and in this respect I argue that this approach is essentially distinct from the approach of the theory‐theorist of a functionalist persuasion.

This paper presents two ideas in connection with the notion of empathic access to one's past, where this notion is understood as consisting of memories of one's past from the inside, plus a fundamental sympathy for those remembered states. The first idea is that having empathic access is a necessary condition for one's personal identity and survival. I give reasons to reject this view, one such reason being that it in effect blocks off the possibility of profound personal progress through radical change. The second idea is that empathy with one's past should, as a matter of necessity, be modeled on empathy with another person. I reject this two-state model, arguing for the alternative possibility of a one-state model, according to which one's thoughts and memories of one's past can become infused with one's present thoughts about and attitudes toward one's past.

There is a frequently asked philosophical question about our ability to grasp and to predict the thoughts and feelings of other people, an ability that is these days sometimes given the unfortunate name of ‘mentalising’ or ‘mind-reading’–I say ‘unfortunate’ because it makes appear mysterious what is not mysterious. Some philosophers and psychologists argue that this ability is grounded in possession of some kind of theory or body of knowledge about how minds work. Others argue that it is grounded in our capacity to take on in imagination the perspective of others; sometimes called simulating or centrally imagining another person, we entertain in our minds what the other person is thinking about and feeling: if he is thinking ‘p’ and ‘if p then q’, then we think ‘p’ and ‘if p then q’, and if he is feeling angry with someone, then we imagine feeling angry with that person. We thus recreate as well as we can in our imagination his mental life as it is ‘from the inside’. We can do this in two different ways: I can put myself in the other's shoes, simply imagining what I would do were I in his situation, or I can empathise with him, imagining being him, taking on in imagination his relevant traits and other mental dispositions; I will from now on use the term perspective-shifting to cover both of these imaginative activities.

The idea that there is an important place in philosophical aesthetics for virtues of art is not new, but it is now undergoing a serious re‐examination. Why might this be? What are the principles behind virtue aesthetics? Are there any good arguments for the theory? (I will take virtue aesthetics to be the theory that there is a central place for virtues of art.) What problems does virtue aesthetics face? And what might the implications be of virtue aesthetics both in philosophy and in related disciplines?

What is the best model of emotion if we are to reach a good understanding of the role of emotion in religious life? I begin by setting out a simple model of emotion, based on a paradigm emotional experience of fear of an immediate threat in one’s environment. I argue that the simple model neglects many of the complexities of our emotional lives, including in particular the complexities that one finds with the intellectual emotions. I then discuss how our dispositions to have these kinds of emotions, which are part of what it is to be a virtuous intellectual enquirer, are subject to vicissitudes, in particular brought about by depression, apathy and other damaging changes to our psychic economy. These changes can flatten affect, so that one’s intellectual life goes cold on one. Finally, I commend the idea of applying this model of intellectual emotion onto religious emotion.