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Some of the most interesting work in late-20th-century epistemology reintroduced, from ancient and medieval philosophy, the idea of an intellectual virtue and the related idea of proper epistemic function. But most of that work employed such concepts, with questionable success, in the interest of defining justification, warrant, or knowledge; and little or none of it offered detailed analyses of intellectual virtues. This book proposes and illustrates a different purpose for epistemology, one that we see in early modern thinkers, especially John Locke — namely that of guiding, refining, and informing the epistemic practices of the intellectual segment of the population. One important aspect of the project of such a ‘regulative epistemology’ is the intellectual character of the epistemic agent. For this purpose, fairly detailed sketches of particular intellectual virtues and of virtues' relations to epistemic goods, epistemic faculties, and epistemic practices, gain special importance. An underlying thesis is that a strict dichotomy between the intellectual virtues and the moral virtues is a mistake.

This book examines the biological underpinnings of religion. We can only experience, the book argues, what our bodies allow us to experience. As a consequence, religious thought and feeling are heavily influenced by our sensory organs, emotional programs, sexual sensibilities, and the neural structure of our brains. Studying “spirituality in the flesh” opens up new and exciting agendas for understanding the nature and value of human religiosity. This exploration of embodied spirituality establishes middle ground between the explanations of religion typically made by either scientists or humanists. The book takes most scientific interpreters to task for failing to understand the inherently cultural aspects of embodied experience, even as he chides most religion scholars for ignoring new knowledge about the biological substrates of human thought and behavior. Each chapter takes up a different facet of embodied experience and shows the ways it helps us understand just how and why humans reconstruct their worlds in religious ways. Emotional programs such as fear or wonder, altered consciousness, sexuality, pain, and spatial orientation to the environment provide critical categories that are used to interpret selected episodes in American religious history. Topics as diverse as apocalypticism, nature religion, Native American peyotism, and the sexual experimentalism found in 19th‐century communal societies illustrate how the study of spirituality in the flesh enriches our appreciation of religion.

This book is a study of Euripides' so-called ‘political plays’ (Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women). Still disdained as the anomalously patriotic or propagandistic works of a playwright elsewhere famous for his subversive, ironic, artistic ethos, the two works in question — notorious for their uncomfortable juxtaposition of political speeches and scenes of extreme feminine emotion — continue to be dismissed by scholars of tragedy as artistic failures unworthy of the author of Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae. This study makes use of recent insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender (in real life and on stage) and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the political plays are, in fact, intellectually subtle and structurally coherent exercises in political theorizing — works that use complex interactions between female and male characters to explore the advantages, and costs, of being a member of the polis.

The artworld is a complicated place. It contains acts of artistic creation, interpretation, evaluation, preservation, misunderstanding, and condemnation. The goal of this book is to turn a critical reflective eye upon various aspects of the artworld, and to articulate some of the problems, principles, and norms implicit in the actual practices of artistic creation, interpretation, evaluation, and commodification. Aesthetic theory is treated as a descriptive, rather than normative, enterprise: one that relates to artworld realities as a semantic theory relates to the fragments of natural language it seeks to describe. Sustained efforts are made to illuminate emotional expression, correct interpretation, and objectivity in the context of artworld practice; the relevance of jazz to aesthetic theory; the goals of ontology (artworld and otherwise); the relation(s) between art and language; and the relation(s) between artistic/critical practice and aesthetic theory.

The book contains a selection of essays on aesthetics, some of which have been revised or added to. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to solve a cluster of the most important issues in aesthetics which are not specific to particular art forms. These include the nature and proper scope of the aesthetic, the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements, the correct understanding of aesthetic judgements expressed through metaphors, aesthetic realism versus anti-realism, the character of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic value, the aim of art, and the artistic expression of emotion. Others are focussed on central issues in the aesthetics of particular art forms: two engage with the most fundamental issue in the aesthetics of music, the question of the correct conception of the phenomenology of the experience of listening to music with understanding; and two consider the nature of pictorial representation, one examining the well-known views of Ernst Gombich, Richard Wollheim, and Kendall Walton, the other articulating an alternative conception of seeing a picture as a depiction of a certain state of affairs. The final essay in the book is a comprehensive reconstruction and critical examination of Wittgenstein's aesthetics, both early and late.

This book is at once both a work of sociology and a work of ethical and religious philosophy. As a work of sociology, it contributes to the ongoing debate over secularization by documenting an alienation from the sacred at the level of emotion. Shows that even many religious Americans are emotionally estranged from the God they say they believe in, from any larger moral purpose, from the very meaning of life itself. As a work of moral and religious philosophy within a broad communitarian tradition, it calls our attention from moral procedure to moral purpose or moral idealism. Argues that moral purpose and coherent personal identity only return to us when we emotionally and defensibly reconnect with the cosmos at some sacred level. It accordingly makes an appeal for our reenchantment or resacralization of the world, for our self‐critical reorientation toward ultimate truth.

This book is about the world of parenting and parenthood in the Georgian era. It navigates recent ‘turns’ towards emotions, subjectivity, memory, the body and materiality. This approach reveals the profound emotions provoked by motherhood and fatherhood and the labour and hard work it entailed. Such parental investment meant that the experience was fundamental to the forging of national, family and personal identities. Society called upon parents to transmit prized values across generations and this study explores how this was achieved. All in all, raising children needed more than two parents. At all levels of society, household and kinship ties were drawn upon to lighten the labours of parenting and this book reveals how crucial grandparents, aunts, uncles and servants were to raising children. It also discusses the ways in which parenting adapted across the life‐course, changed by the transitions of ageing, marriage and family, adversity and crisis, and death and memory.

This book presents a unified approach to understanding memory, attention, and decision-making. It shows how these fundamental functions for cognitive neuroscience can be understood in a common and unifying computational neuroscience framework. This framework links empirical research on brain function from neurophysiology, functional neuroimaging, and the effects of brain damage, to a description of how neural networks in the brain implement these functions using a set of common principles. The book describes the principles of operation of these networks, and how they could implement such important functions as memory, attention, and decision-making. The book discusses the hippocampus and memory, reward- and punishment-related learning, emotion and motivation, invariant visual object recognition learning, short-term memory, attention, biased competition, probabilistic decision-making, action selection, and decision-making.

The book links the analysis of the brain mechanisms of emotion and motivation to the wider context of what emotions are, what their functions are, how emotions evolved, and the larger issue of why emotional and motivational feelings and consciousness might arise in a system organized like the brain. The topics in motivation covered are hunger, thirst, sexual behaviour, brain-stimulation reward, and addiction. The book proposes a theory of what emotions are, and an evolutionary, Darwinian, theory of the adaptive value of emotion, and then describes the brain mechanisms of emotion. The book examines how cognitive states can influence emotions, and in turn, how emotions can influence cognitive states. The book also examines emotion and decision-making, with links to the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics. The book describes the brain mechanisms that underlie both emotion and motivation in a scientific form that can be used by both students and scientists in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, biology, physiology, psychiatry, and medicine.

This is a book about how people change their minds and how mental health practitioners can help this process along. It addresses a gap in the literature on cognitive therapy that results from an almost exclusive focus on the constructed aspects of personal meaning, and a lack of attention to the ways in which information that we pick up from life circumstances also influences what we know, feel, and do. Conceptions that ignore the role that current life conditions and interpersonal events play in creating or revising meanings limit the utility of cognitive therapy approaches for clients whose lives are marked by ongoing deprivation, threat, and vulnerability. In laying out a broader perspective, a Cognitive-Integrative perspective, the book expands the internal focus of traditional cognitive therapies to take more account of the role of information generated by environmental events and conditions in impeding or promoting change. It contends that mind draws on organized memories of previous experiences as well as currently available information to generate cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses. The theoretical grounding for this perspective is drawn from a range of cognitive, neurological, social, psychological, and social work theories. Theoretical explanations are laid out. They are balanced with practice guidelines and grounded in an offering of clinical examples.

This book examines how major writers of the French Enlightenment discuss the social appropriateness of anger and gratitude in regulating social life. Defining the kinds of slight or favor that demand an angry or a grateful response became problematic in eighteenth-century France under the pressure of two contradictory developments which were both crucial to Enlightenment thinking about sociability. The first drew on the ideal of moral equality as it spread beyond the salons to the social world at large. Writers claimed for themselves an entitlement to anger at personal slight that had been hitherto reserved for aristocrats, and a respectful hearing for their indignation at public injustice despite their lack of official standing. The philosophes also argued their writing made them social benefactors in their own right, more deserving of their readers' gratitude than obliged to any patron. The second gave a new twist to longstanding philosophical notions about transcending emotional disturbance and dependence altogether. A personal ideal became a public goal as Enlightenment thinkers imagined a society where all significant social interaction was governed by the impersonal rule of law. Occasions for personal slight or obligation would disappear, and with them reasons for anger and gratitude. The same writers who justified their emotional claims also legitimized their cultural authority through displays of rationality and objectivity that indicated their own liberation from emotional bonds. Through analyses of works by Robert Challe, Marivaux, Rousseau, and Diderot, this book shows how the tension between these two rhetorics is crucial to the creativity of French Enlightenment writing.

Drawing on the role morality developed in previous applications of virtue ethics to professional practice, The Virtuous Psychiatrist shows that the ethical practice of psychiatry depends on the character of the practitioner. The book is built upon three key tenets: ethics is important to any professional practice, including psychiatry; the settings within which psychiatry is practiced impose ethical demands on its practitioners that are distinctive enough to warrant a separate analysis; and an emphasis on character and moral psychology in a virtue theory significantly augments our understanding of the ethical demands of psychiatric practice. In addition to the ethical guidelines imposed on every biomedical practice, the ethical practitioner should cultivate additional traits of character or virtues. These include gender sensitive virtues. Implicated in the normative presuppositions of psychiatric practice and lore, gender stands in for other such categories including race, class and ethnicity; it is also a factor at once unremittingly controversial, and inescapably tied to the self identity often at the heart of the therapeutic project. Virtues can and should be taught – that is, instilled, deepened and augmented. The setting where trainees are learning the ideals and responses of their particular professional role, it is emphasized, is where such virtues can be habituated, using pedagogical techniques associated with moral education, such as training in empathic emotions. Psychiatric training should address trainee's character alongside practice skills.

The heart is the most symbolic organ of the human body. Across cultures it is seen as the site of emotions, as well as the origin of life. We feel emotions in the heart, from the heart-stopping sensation of romantic love to the crushing sensation of despair. And yet since the nineteenth century the heart has been redefined in medical terms as a pump, an organ responsible for the circulation of the blood. Emotions have been removed from the heart as an active site of influence and towards the brain. It is the brain that is the organ most commonly associated with emotion in the modern West. So why, then, do the emotional meanings of the heart linger? Why do many transplantation patients believe that the heart, for instance, can transmit memories and emotions and why do we still refer to emotions as ‘heartfelt’? We cannot answer these questions without reference to the history of the heart as both physical organ and emotional symbol. Matters of the Heart traces the ways emotions have been understood between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as both physical entities and spiritual experiences. With reference to historical interpretations of such key concepts as gender, emotion, subjectivity, and the self, it also addresses the shifting relationship from heart to brain as competing centres of emotion in the West.

This book examines how emotions form a bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; we may also experience emotions towards, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. These experiences are philosophically puzzling, for their causes seem quite different from the causes of emotion in the rest of our lives. Using many literary, visual and musical examples, this book shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. It surveys various accounts of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defence of a controversial view about musical expression: that music expresses the emotions it causes its listeners to feel. Whilst this book engages with the work of contemporary theorists, it remains accessible to readers without philosophical training.

This book states that we live our lives through our emotions, and that it is our emotions which give our lives meaning. What interests or fascinates us, who we love, what angers us, what moves us, what bores us; all of this defines us, gives us character, constitutes who we are. This book illuminates the rich life of the emotions: why we don't really understand them, what they really are, and how they make us human and give meaning to life. The book provides a guide to cutting-edge scientific research, as well as to what philosophers and psychologists have said on the subject, but it also emphasizes the personal and ethical character of our emotions. The book shows that emotions are not something that happen to us, nor are they irrational in the literal sense; rather, they are judgments we make about the world, and they are strategies for living in it. Fear, anger, love, guilt, jealousy, compassion—they are all essential to our values, to living happily, healthily, and well.