Wisdom in Love

Clarifying the philosophical meaning of emotion has been one of the more significant trends in moral theory for the past twenty-five years. Martha Nussbaum, Robert Solomon, Robert Roberts, and others have argued that, in contrast to dominant trends both in ancient thought (e.g., Stoicism) and in modern ethical theory (e.g., Kant), we are not duped by our emotions—at least not completely. Emotions disclose our being-in-the-world more reliably than the theoretical attitudes prized by the great Western rationalisms. Emotions key us into a stratum of normative value, so the argument goes, inaccessible to reflection alone. Not that emotions are strictly opposed to reflection; on the contrary, an important part of the argument of scholars like Nussbaum—and Furtak is included here as well—is that emotions are already cognitive engagements with reality, already forms of a richer type of rational judgment (Furtak calls them “perceptions of significance”), and therefore ought not to be simply opposed to theoretical insight. In effect, the emotions are enlisted in the service of overcoming the dualisms that have bedeviled Western thought between, for example, reason and passion, the intelligible and the sensible, and the theoretical and the practical.

Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Meaning (existential) · Normative · Passion · Perspective (graphical) · Psychoanalysis · Stoicism · Value (mathematics) · Infant Health and Development · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Social Psychology