Description
Book SynopsisRecent years have seen an enormous amount of philosophical research into the emotions and the imagination, but as yet little work has been done to connect the two.
Trade Review"Friends of Adam Morton's work will find familiar strengths in this essay in moral psychology: detailed attention to the peculiarities of cases and a hostility to easy formulations, matched by lucid arguments that keep the general aim in view. He has surprising things to say about imagining; mice do it, apparently. But we, unlike mice, can use imagination to help to shape our own emotions, and hence to structure our own moral lives. All in all, this is a splendid attempt to think through the complex issue of what the imagination can and cannot do for us."
Gregory Currie, University of Nottingham"Adam Morton is a pioneering and original thinker whose provocative and insightful work on emotion and imagination has pushed the field in important new directions. It's exciting to have a book-length treatment of these issues from such an interesting and creative mind."
Tamar Gendler, Yale University"Morton takes us on a journey of the imagination into the imagination. His kaleidoscope of examples compels us to believe that emotions involve the imagination in sometimes unexpected, but always fascinating ways. A great read!"
Heidi Maibom, Carleton UniversityTable of ContentsPreface vii
Part I The range of emotions
Refined emotions 3
Imagining in emotions 8
Seeing as 17
Emotions and thinking 22
Keeping mood and emotion distinct 29
Pressure 37
Categories of emotion 44
Part II Imagining vile emotions
Imagining what we shouldn’t feel 53
Imagining minds: emotions and perspectives 56
Imagining a point of view 63
Misimagination 74
Imagining invented characters: fiction and philosophy 83
Invisible everyday failures 88
Imagining awful actions 94
Sympathy versus empathy 101
The tradeoff 108
Part III Memotions
The threat of irrelevance 117
Retracting emotions 122
Emotions with multiple points of view 128
The variety of moral emotions 134
Emotional learning 142
Smugness 149
Part IV Families of emotions
The ideas and the questions 157
Shame, regret, embarrassment, remorse 159
Shame-like versus regret-like 164
Ghosts 170
Looking backward and looking inward 175
Gaps in the pattern: shame versus guilt 180
Two kinds of pride 184
The smug family 189
Dark humour, radical possibilities 194
Shaping our emotions 198
End: a virtue if imagination 206
Notes 210
References 219
Index 229
