Negative emotions like anger, spite, contempt, and envy are widely seen as obstacles to a good life. They are like the weeds in a garden that need to be pulled up before they choke out the nice plants. This book argues that bad feelings aren't the weeds; they are the worms. Many people are squeamish about them and would prefer to pretend they aren't there, but the presence of worms mean the garden it thriving. I draw on insights from the (...) history of philosophy to show what we've gotten wrong about bad feelings and to see how we can live better with them. The first half of the book argues that there is nothing wrong with negative emotions and that their bad reputation is undeserved. Philosophers have long argued that our emotions are part of how we value things and bad feelings are not different. Negative emotions are expressions of self-love-not egoism or selfishness, but the felt attachment to ourselves and our lives. We feel negative emotions because our lives matter to us. The second half of the book takes a detailed look at individual bad feelings: anger, envy and jealousy, spite and Schadenfreude, and contempt. I show how all our negative emotions are valuable parts of our attachment to our lives. We don't have to battle negative emotions or "channel" them into something productive. Bad feelings aren't obstacles to a good life; they are part of what makes life meaningful. (shrink)

Anger, far from being only a personal emotion, often signals a breakdown in existing societal structures like the justice system. This does not mean we should uncritically submit to our angry impulses, but it does mean that anger can reveal larger issues in the world worthy of attention. If we banish anger from the socio-political landscape, we risk losing its insights. To defend that claim, I turn to a range of sources from ancient China and Greece—philosophy, poetry, drama, and political (...) theory—that depict and analyze anger in a variety of situations and people. My basic claim is not that anger is simply “good” or “bad” but rather that it helps reveal and clarify our values, often pointing us towards real situations deserving of our ethical scrutiny. I situate the project amidst ongoing debates in analytic philosophy of emotions and feminist philosophy, joining the conceptual precision and clarity of the former with the latter’s attention to lived experience. Such cross-cultural, multidisciplinary conceptual analysis of anger parochializes Aristotelian understandings of anger by introducing different types and functions of anger. What role does anger play, for example, in a minister rebuking the king in an ancient Chinese court? How do Greek sources depict female anger differently than male anger, and why? By using ancient and comparative sources, I show how deeply anger is shaped by particular cultural and social structures, whilst remaining recognizably anger. (shrink)

According to Aristotle there may be times when the virtuous person is justified in taking revenge. Many commentators claim that revenge, on Aristotle’s account, aims at restoring the honor and reputation of the avenger, but I will show that this cannot be why the virtuous person seeks revenge. I argue, instead, that the virtuous person seeks revenge when she is slighted in order to prove her worth. Aristotle claims that we slight those we think are neither good nor bad nor (...) capable of producing good or bad things. Although the virtuous person will ignore most slights, Aristotle thinks there may be times when even a virtuous person will have to take revenge in order to prove her worth, not because she is insecure or requires honors, but because she cannot function to the best of her abilities within her society if those she interacts with fail to recognize her worth. (shrink)

This thesis poses the question ‘What is the critique of democracy in Plato’s Republic?’ It is not the first to do so. But contrary to standard readings, this thesis does not assume neither epistemological nor elitist explanations. Rather, it sees the Kallipolis, ‘the beautiful city in words’ as predicated on a particular anthropology. This theory of human nature, which claims that it is human to be greedy for wealth, sex, and power is contributed by Glaucon, Socrates’ main interlocutor in the (...) dialogue. Noting this, the argument of this thesis makes the following interpretational claims about the Republic: First, I claim that the Kallipolis should be read as an answer to the following question: What would a just city look like given the anthropology of Glaucon? The second claim informing this thesis is the following: Reading the Republic itself as challenging this anthropology, the function of the anthropology it provides is not so much a positive theory of human nature as it is revealing of what Glaucon, in most regards a paradigmatic Athenian citizen, thinks is human nature. His ideas and character are thus central to my reading of the Republic. What has this got to do with democracy? Glaucon’s beliefs, ideas, and his character can not be understood without reference to the society which has produced him, that is, the democratic polis of Ancient Athens. This premise is inserted by the city-soul analogy, a central tenet of the argument of the Republic. As this thesis argues, the tripartite soul provides an explanatory model which accounts for why and how the human soul is moldable and plastic. Furthermore, the thesis contributes to the issue of akrasia, by that it based on this interpretation becomes possible to say that cases of akrasia, – breakdowns of rationality – differ in its causes like the souls of humans differ in their internal constitutions: Humans, the Republic postulates, simply attribute different weight to different reasons, depending on what part of our soul rules, and hence, what the soul has set as its ‘good’. Building on this account of individual decision-making, this thesis offers a twofold analysis of how the interaction between regime and man is portrayed in the Republic, first with regard to the social institutions, secondly with regard to the political institutions. This analysis is based on the premise that the Kallipolis represents an implicit critique against democratic Athens, but rather than being an ideal to offset democratic shortcomings, I argue that the Kallipolis is the realization of democratic desires combined with a need for justice. If, and only if, Glaucon’s is the true anthropology of man, is Kallipolis the most just state. But, as this thesis will show, Glaucon’s anthropology is not universalizable, but is rather an expression of the particularly democratic anthropology. Ultimately, Socrates will show that if allowed to evolve unchecked, the natural culmination of the democracy is tyranny. In order to make this argument, the Republic mobilizes tropes related to tyranny which already abound within democratic and dissenting discourse, in order to posit the democratic value of ‘freedom’ as closely related to the tyrannical lust for power. Following this interpretation, the answer to the initial question is that the Republic criticizes democracy’s institutional practices, poetic tradition, and theoretical ideals showing how democracy instills in its citizens the kind of desires and values that will make them susceptible to the tyrannical coups which the Athenians of the fifth century seemed more than eager to avoid. In my reading of the Republic, the main threat was not outside forces, but their own desires and internal constitutions. Only through developing self-knowledge in the philosophical sense can the Athenian, represented by Glaucon, truly learn to guard himself against tyranny from within. (shrink)

In the present article, we attempt to elucidate the conceptual rela- tionship between censorship and emotional development. We employ a framework from emotion regulation studies in order to clarify how censorship works and to ex- plain why it cannot affect emotional development in the same way as the remaining types of emotional regulation. Nevertheless, we argue that, by focusing on Plato’s ac- count of censorship, and specifically of its sociocultural function, one can find that it is not a useless device (...) for emotional development. Censorship affects relevant variables in the dynamics of contraposed emotional processes that compete for dominance. (shrink)

Current discussions of hermeneutical injustice, I argue, poorly characterise the cognitive state of victims by failing to account for the communicative success that victims have when they describe their experience to other similarly situated persons. I argue that victims, especially when they suffer moral wrongs that are yet unnamed, are able (1) to grasp certain salient aspects of the wrong they experience and (2) to cultivate the ability to identify instances of the wrong in virtue of moral emotions. By moral (...) emotions I mean emotions like indignation that reflect an agent’s ethical commitments and bear on her ethical assessments. Further, I argue that victims can impart their partial understanding of the wrong they suffer to others who are not similarly situated by eliciting moral emotions such as pity that are tied to broad notions of justice and fairness. (shrink)

In Republic 4, Plato’s Socrates argues that there are three elements in the soul: the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive. This paper focuses on the argument distinguishing spirit from appetite in the story of Leontius. I shall argue that the rational element first opposes Leontius’ appetite and, when appetite overpowers reason, then Leontius’ spirited part opposes the appetitive. Consequently, there is a kind of disgust that would be appropriately characterized as rational; and, drawing on this consequence, I suggest that (...) the primary target of early ethical education is the rational element of the soul. (shrink)

Moira Howes and Catherine Hundleby ABSTRACT: While anger can derail argumentation, it can also help arguers and audiences to reason together in argumentation. Anger can provide information about premises, biases, goals, discussants, and depth of disagreement that people might otherwise fail to recognize or prematurely dismiss. Anger can also enhance the salience of certain premises...

Moods are usually taken to be pre-intentional affective states that tune our experience and cognition. Moreover, moods are sometimes considered to not only accompany cognitive acts, but to be understanding phenomena themselves. The following paper examines the assumption that moods represent a specific interpretative skill. Based upon that view, the semantic content of moods seems to be self-determining and to elude conceptual articulation. By contrast, I defend the thesis that the alleged inarticulable intelligibility of affective experiences is possible only due (...) to its belonging to a comprehensive theoretical horizon. For that purpose, I first analyze Heidegger’s influential account on moods in Being and Time, in order to clarify his claim that moods have their own understanding. Although Heidegger asserts that attuned understanding becomes itself when it is interpreted, he nevertheless rejects conceptual unfolding as a legitimate disclosure of the intelligible content of moods. I amend Heidegger’s account by engaging Hegel’s approach to this topic in his Philosophy of Mind. In this text, Hegel argues that feelings cannot give an account of their purport by feeling alone. Affective states not only manifest the need and urge to express themselves, but they reach their full extent when their meaning is disclosed within the entirety of the mind. It may be the case that affective states cannot always be fully clarified, but, even within a non-cognitivist account of moods, their intelligibility requires our acquaintance with articulated understanding. (shrink)

In recent decades, there has been a renewed attention to the emotions amongst scientists of different disciplines: psychology, psychiatry, neurobiology, cognitive science, computer science, sociology, economics, and many others. There are many research centers and scientific journals devoted to affective states already existing. However, studies of emotion have a very long history - especially in philosophy. Philosophers first raised many important questions about emotions and their contribution to the discovery of the nature of emotions is very important. The aim of (...) the article is the reconstruction of the views on emotions of particular thinkers in history of philosophy. (shrink)