ABSTRACT
Few philosophers set themselves the task to define the nature of emotion per se. From around the 1970s, however, there has been a remarkable surge of interest in emotion in philosophy, psychology, developmental psychology, psychiatry and neurobiology, and emotion now constitutes a distinct research area with a great scope for cross-disciplinary collaboration. One of the reasons why emotion had not enjoyed as much focused philosophical attention as it deserved until recently was a persistently assumed dichotomy between emotion and reason, with reason granted rarely disputed superiority over emotion. This meant, on the one hand, that emotion did not readily suggest itself as a subject of rational philosophical enquiry, or alternatively, that it was viewed as an irrational, even dangerous, aspect of our nature that must be controlled by reason. Curiously enough, when emotions did come into the philosophical spotlight in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it is the cognitive theory of emotions as judgements that gradually became the widely accepted and dominant view. This theory traces its origins back to the philosophy of emotion developed by the Stoics, whose analysis of emotions viewed as misguided judgements conducive to misery, was motivated by the practical concern with control of emotion. In a way, it represents a reduction of the dichotomy of emotion and reason to the latter, which in practice should result in a complete victory of reason and, in the Stoics’ aspiration, a complete eradication of emotion. However, having abandoned this ultimate goal of the Stoic programme as not only unrealistic but undesirable, neo-Stoics like Martha Nussbaum and Robert Solomon embrace and develop its main premise that emotions are evaluative judgements.
