Sound Sentiments seeks to open a new path in the philosophy of
emotion. The focus of most recent work on the philosophy of emotion
has been on the nature of emotion, with some attention also to the
relation of emotion to ethics. This book explores the idea that
emotions admit of valuation, of degrees of adequacy. We cannot just
decide what to think, or to desire, or to feel, as we can decide to
act, and these attitudes are integral to emotions. Nonetheless,
emotions can have normative characteristics that resemble virtues.
Philosophers are familiar with the notion that emotions are
valuational. But how well they serve that function determines the
value they themselves have. The book opens with an account of the
theory of emotion, reflecting recent work on that, and considers
the way in which emotions are valuational (with reference to the
contributions of writers such as de Sousa, Gibbard, and McDowell).
The worth of an emotional experience depends on the quality of the
valuation it itself achieves. Most of the book is then devoted to a
set of interconnected themes. Some of these concern properties that
emotions can have which can variously enhance or detract from them:
profundity, social leverage, narcissism, and sentimentality. Others
are attitudes with characteristic emotional loadings, and sometimes
motivations, that raise similar questions: cynicism, ambivalence,
and sophistication. David Pugmire's general approach is indirect
and negative: to analyse emotional foibles, which tend to elude us
as we succumb to them, and thereby to point to what soundness in
emotion would be. He also elicits connections amongst these aspects
of the emotional life. The most pervasive is the dimension of
profundity, which opens the discussion: each of the subsequent
problems amounts to a way in which emotion can be shallow and
slight and so amount to less than it seems; and accordingly, each
identifies a form of integrity in the emotions.
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