It is perhaps no more than a commonplace that moral education is in part at least an education of the emotions. Yet moral philoso- phers have often taken this to mean merely that w
Recent moral philosophy in Britain has not had much to say about the emotions. Its descriptions of the moral agent, its analyses of moral choice and moral judgement, have made free
Among philosophers who have discussed the role of emotion in morality there is much disagreement. At one extreme there is a tradition of ethical thinkers, represented by David Hume
This article discusses several interrelated questions that philosophers, theologians, and psychologists address about religious emotions. Do they have some essence? Is there one em
No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than the emotions. They are what make life worth living and sometimes worth ending.
One of the many uses of the Greek word pathos in ancient philosophy referred, roughly speaking, to what we call emotions. The corresponding Latin terms were passio, affectus or aff
Indeed, God is visible in a number of ways. In the love-story recounted by the Bible, he comes towards us, he seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the pierci
"Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of p
The word ‘emotion’ derives from terms meaning disturbance, excitement and movement, and it retains some of these connotations but now in relation to psychological responses. It has been common to contrast the emotional with the rational, presenting the former as subjective and the latter as objective, but as a general account this is mistaken. To respond emotionally is to have a positive or negative felt attitude towards something real or imagined. In this respect emotions are different from moods. Someone may be irascible or melancholic, that is have a general disposition to become angry or to be sad, but an emotion itself such as anger or grief is directed towards something. Like thoughts, emotions have ‘objects’ – things, conditions, situations, states of affairs. This feature makes them like judgements and thereby opens them to assessment as appropriate, proportionate, reasonable, warranted and so on. If someone says they are angry it is always relevant (though not necessarily wise) to ask them a) about what? and b) why? Confronted with direct evidence of child neglect or abuse it is common to feel angry: the object of this response is the neglect or abuse, and the reason for the anger is the felt wrongness of the behaviour. By contrast, if someone said they were angry at or about a glass of water or a passing cloud we would struggle to make sense of this without some intelligible explanation such as that the cloud threatened rain which would spoil an outdoor event, and even then it would unreasonable to blame a cloud. The fact that emotions express implicit judgements of value makes them relevant to the domains of ethics, politics and aesthetics and to education and reasoning in these fields. Particularly in the tradition of deriving from Plato and Aristotle and developed by Aquinas that emphasises virtue and vice the issue of emotion is important as a dimension of ethical character, judgement and behaviour.