Understanding Emotions

<p>This title was first published in 2002: At the end of the 20th century the emotions ceased to be a neglected topic for philosophical consideration. The editor suggests that this may in part be due to a change in the way the subject is approached. The emotions were characteristically thought of by philosophers as states which give rise to perturbation in what might roughly be called right-thinking. The basic idea was that practical reasoning like theoretical reasoning ought to be and can be dispassionate. This means that either the emotions interfere with right-reasoning in a way which is a proper object of study for the biological sciences but not for the science of the mind or that the emotions become reducible to and analyzable as collections of propositional attitudes which are themselves assessable in terms of right-reasoning. </p>