Emotion

This introductory text gives readers a very good overview of academic work on emotion with vivid illustrations that can help readers relate the content to their own lives. The introduction sketches the book and immediately plunges the reader into the debate while defining emotional responses, episodes and attitudes. Four theories of emotion are explored initially: William James on emotions as bodily feelings, Robert Solomon on emotions as judgements, Peter Goldie on emotions as complex processes, and Jesse Prinz coming back to bodily feelings. Each of these views is discussed and contrasted, with limitations identified. This leads into a definition of emotion in terms of coherence and function and a deeper exploration of the nature of emotions. The next two chapters delve into emotional evaluations initiating our emotional responses, followed by a discussion of the relationship between emotion and rationality, and the manipulation of emotion. The author's own approach is 'teleosemantic', which states that facts about intentional content are ultimately about the causal properties of intentional states. At the end of the book, readers have a much better understanding of ways in which our emotional responses relate to our values, likes and needs and the extent to which these are authentic.