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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/20/2018, SPi
Virtuous Emotions
Virtuous Emotions
Kristján Kristjánsson
1
3
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© Kristján Kristjánsson 2018
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To Nora and Hlér, for being there

Contents
Preface ix
1. Introduction: Developing an Aristotelian Account

of Virtuous Emotions 1
1.1 Why Aristotle? 1
1.2 What an Emotion Is: A Componential View 4
1.3 Character and Virtue: Where Do Emotions Fit In? 14
1.4 ‘Virtuous Emotions’: What Does It Mean? 18
1.5 Emotion Education: The Preliminaries 26
1.6 A Roadmap of Subsequent Chapters 27
2. Emotions and Moral Value 31
2.1 Emotions and Value Epistemology 31
2.2 Four Competing Epistemologies 33
2.3 Complexities regarding Moral Motivation and a Critique
of Soft Sentimentalism 39
2.4 Hard Sentimentalism Revisited 46
2.5 Implications for Emotion Education 48
3. Gratitude 51
3.1 Introduction 51
3.2 Current Discourses on Gratitude 53
3.3 Putting the Aristotelian Pieces Together 57
3.4 Reappraising Aristotle on Megalopsychia and Gratitude 61
3.5 Gratitude and Poetic Justice 65
4. Pity 70
4.1 Introduction 70
4.2 Aristotle on the Desert-Based Emotions 72
4.3 The Conceptual Parish of Fellow-Feelings 75
4.4 Possible Defences of Pity 81
4.5 Concluding Remarks 85
5. Shame 87
5.1 Introduction 87
5.2 Four Discourses on Shame: The Mainstream Interpretation 88
5.3 Critiquing the Canon: The Heterodox Interpretation 93
5.4 Whence Those Contrasting Interpretations?
Conceptual Analyses across Disciplines 99
viii Contents
6. Jealousy 102
6.1 Introduction 102
6.2 Philosophical and Historical Background 103
6.3 Recent Work on Jealousy in Psychology 108
6.4 Recent Work on Jealousy in Philosophy 113
7. Grief 122
7.2 What Grief Is 124
7.3 The Rationality of Grief 130
7.4 A Moral Justification of Grief 133
8. Awe 142
8.2 The Concept of Awe 144
8.3 Towards an Aristotelian Justification 151
8.4 A Presumed Link to Humility—and Is It Fatal
to an Aristotelian Analysis of Awe? 154
9. Educating Emotions 161
9.2 Concepts and Categories 163
9.3 The Seven Discourses Analysed 167
9.4 Strategies of Emotion Education 175
10. Conclusions and Afterthoughts 185
10.1 Some Afterthoughts on the Virtuousness of Emotions 185
10.2 Aristotelian Naturalism: Some Methodological Afterthoughts 191
10.3 Further Afterthoughts on the Methodological Complexities
of Crossover Work on Virtuous Emotions 194
10.4 Some Afterthoughts on the Development and Education
of Emotions 199
10.5 Very Final Words 201
Bibliography 203
Index 221
Preface
I have been thinking about the topic of this book for a long time, indeed ever since
I completed my work on Justifying Emotions (Routledge, 2002). However, most of
the research and writing for the present book was done between 2012 and 2016
while working as Professor of Character Education and Virtue Ethics in the Jubilee
Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham.
I am grateful to my colleagues at the Jubilee Centre for their advice, support, and
comments on earlier drafts of many of the following chapters. I would especially like
to single out David Carr, Randall Curren, Liz Gulliford, Blaire Morgan, Robert C.
Roberts, and—obviously—the Centre’s director James Arthur. Various other scholars
have offered constructive comments on sections of the present book. I am particularly
grateful to Blaine Fowers who offered extensive comments on Chapters 1 and 10, and
Bruce Maxwell for his incisive comments on Chapter 9. I am indebted to the John
Templeton Foundation for funding the work of the Jubilee Centre. Peter Momtchiloff
at Oxford University Press deserves thanks for being unreservedly supportive of the
book project throughout its gestation. His two anonymous reviewers provided generously
extended criticisms of the initial proposal and later of a final draft, prompting me to
rewrite large chunks of Chapters 1 and 2. Kristian Guttesen provided invaluable
editorial assistance with the Index towards the end.
I have received helpful feedback from audiences at conferences organized by
the University of Munich (2007), University of Geneva (Summer School in Affective
Sciences, 2013), University of Tübingen (2014), Philosophy of Education Society of
Great Britain (Birmingham, 2014; Oxford, 2014), Universities of Chicago and South
Carolina (Columbia, South Carolina, 2015), and the Open University (London, 2016).
Chapter 8, on awe, was written under the auspices of the Virtue, Happiness and
Meaning of Life Project, University of Chicago; I am grateful to Candace Vogler for her
support and invitation.
I thankfully acknowledge permissions to recycle material from the following
articles: ‘Emotion Education Without Ontological Commitment?’, Studies in Philosophy
and Education, 29(3), 2010; ‘Is Shame an Ugly Emotion? Four Discourses – Two
Contrasting Interpretations for Moral Education’, Studies in Philosophy and Education,
33(5), 2014; ‘Pity: A Mitigated Defence’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 44(3–4),
2014; ‘An Aristotelian Virtue of Gratitude’, Topoi, 34(2), 2015; ‘Grief: An Aristotelian
Justification of an Emotional Virtue’, Res Philosophica, 92(4), 2015; ‘Jealousy Revisited:
Recent Philosophical Work on a Maligned Emotion’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,
19(3), 2016; ‘A Philosophical Critique of Psychological Studies of Emotion: The
Example of Jealousy’, Philosophical Explorations, 19(3), 2016; ‘Awe: An Aristotelian
Analysis of a Non-Aristotelian Virtuous Emotion’, Philosophia, 45(1), 2017.
1
Introduction
Developing an Aristotelian Account
of Virtuous Emotions
1.1 Why Aristotle?

One of the most conspicuous and significant developments in latter-day humanities
and social sciences has been the rise of the emotions as a unique object of study. Not
only scholars are interested in emotions; they are also widely discussed in popular
books and among the general public. Academic explorations often take Aristotle as
their starting point: the first Western theorist who paid systematic attention to the
salience of our emotions for lives well lived. Indeed, Aristotle has a lot to say about
commonly discussed emotions such as compassion or anger. He analyses them and
explains if and when they are morally justified. However, with respect to some other
common emotions he remains eerily silent or surprisingly dismissive.
The aim of this book is to offer a revised ‘Aristotelian’ analysis and moral justification
of a number of emotions that Aristotle either did not mention (such as awe, grief,
and jealousy), relegated, at best, to the level of the semi-virtuous (such as shame), made
disparaging remarks about (such as gratitude), or rejected explicitly (such as pity,
understood as pain at another person’s deserved bad fortune). I will argue that there
are good ‘Aristotelian’ reasons for understanding those emotions either as virtuous or
as indirectly conducive to virtue. The book begins, in the present chapter, with an
overview of Aristotle’s ideas about the nature of emotions and of emotional moral value,
set in the context of current concerns and conceptualizations. The book’s argument
culminates, in the penultimate Chapter 9, with a comparison of Aristotelian emotion
education and other forms of such education—as educational concerns are, for
Aristotle, an integral part of all useful moral theorizing.
There is a reason why I have put ‘Aristotelian’ in scare quotes above. It is because the
analyses and justifications offered are often not Aristotle’s own. But then the question
arises of why I propose to couch the aims in Aristotelian terms at all. A curt answer
might be this. No one has thought more clearly about virtuous emotions than Aristotle.
There is no substitute for clear thinking. Which is why, when we want to think clearly
about virtuous emotions, there is no substitute for Aristotle. The discerning reader,
2 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions
however, deserves something more than this curt answer, and I proceed to flesh it out
in this opening section.
I mentioned at the outset the increased academic interest in emotions. In moral
philosophy, for example, the upsurge of virtue ethics has brought the moral role of
emotions firmly into prominence. Thus, on a widely held current assumption, morally
proper emotions form part of the good life and are implicated in morality at all levels of
engagement—an assumption far removed from the Kantian contention that ‘no moral
principle is based [. . .] on any feeling whatsoever’ (Kant, 1964, p. 33). Moreover, not
being viewed any more as dangerous interlopers in the realms of upbringing and
schooling, emotions have now been invited as guests of honour into those realms as
essential to the development of human beings as morally developing agents. Although
some of the recent enthusiasm for the emotions has been motivated by a ‘hard’ form of
sentimentalism, harking back to David Hume (see e.g. Haidt, 2001), it is fair to say that
most recent emotion theories in moral philosophy and moral education have drawn
inspiration—directly or obliquely—from Aristotle’s ‘soft’ (emotion-imbued) rational-
ist stance. I elaborate upon those different stances in Chapter 2.
There are, in my view, three main reasons why it may be considered wise to rely
upon an Aristotelian account of virtuous emotions. The most general reason is that
many successful latter-day explorations of emotions have been couched in those very
terms (e.g. Nussbaum, 2001, on grief and compassion). Second, the recent surge of
interest in the moral value of emotions, at least within philosophical circles, can most
helpfully be traced to the renaissance of (Aristotle-inspired) virtue ethics. Indeed, there
is reason to believe that many people are drawn towards virtue ethics primarily because
of its facility to make sense of the moral salience of our emotional lives. Third, by offering
an Aristotelian account of a potentially virtuous emotion, one brings it into the fold of
a respectable moral theory, a theory which can explain, inter alia, why—if a proper form
of an emotion is virtuous—not feeling it when the occasion calls for it is evidence of
moral failings. All in all, then, armed with conceptual and moral weaponry from
Aristotle’s arsenal, we can make advances in the understanding of people’s emotional
lives that would otherwise be closed to us—or at least constitute arduous uphill battles.
That said, one can at best be respectful of a general Aristotelian approach to emo-
tions rather than deferential to all its details, since there is often no specific text by
Aristotle to be deferential to. As I explain presently, Aristotle’s account of individual
emotions is at times truncated or flawed—even by his own lights—if not simply miss-
ing. Rather than adding to the already abundant literature on the emotions that
Aristotle explores in most detail, such as anger (orgē) and poetic justice (nemesis)—
literature to which I have contributed in the past (Kristjánsson, 2006; 2007)—I find it
salutary to focus the Aristotelian lens this time on various emotions that Aristotle
either ignored or viewed askance, for different reasons, and to offer reconstructive
analyses of those, faithful to his general approach but informed by recent social sci-
entific findings. I consider this method in line with Aristotle’s own naturalistic
approach, according to which all moral theorizing must pay heed to empirical data.
Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 3
This also means that my exploration throughout the book will be unapologetically
transdisciplinary—drawing on insights from contemporary psychology as well as
from philosophy, old and new. For each of the six emotions to be studied, the variables
that I fasten on in the course of the discussion will be the emotion’s source/cause, inten-
tional object, valence, immediate target, goal-directed activity, and moral value. I explain
these variables one by one in the present chapter. The success of this book depends
largely on how persuasively it succeeds in ‘populating’ these variables in ways that are
reasonably faithful to a general Aristotelian approach.
The aim of this introductory chapter is to set the scene for the exploration to follow
by saying something about my take on emotions in general and an Aristotelian account
of emotions in particular. For the sake of intellectual honesty I want to be forthright
about the dilemma facing me when I pondered what to include in this chapter. I envis-
age the potential readership of this book to fall into two broad categories. On the one
hand, there will be readers interested in the conceptual and moral nuances of the
specific emotions under scrutiny here—and their educational ramifications—but with
a minimal interest in Aristotelian theory. On the other hand, there will be Aristotle
aficionados interested in (or possibly sceptical about) the viability of extending an
‘Aristotelian’ account of virtuous emotions to areas that Aristotle himself bypassed.
Pitching an introductory chapter at these two audiences is a challenge, requiring
compromises on both sides.
To the second group I want to say that I am not an Aristotelian exegete, either by
training or calling. I am a philosopher with an interest in issues that lie at the border-
line between moral philosophy, moral psychology (empirical as well as conceptual),
and moral education. While I would obviously resent being labelled as an Aristotelian
vulgarizer, my aim is neither to root for the historical Aristotle nor to offer novel textual
interpretations of his writings. Rather, my work is motivated by the belief that by pro-
viding generous helpings of Aristotle’s overall approach, and synthesizing those with
contemporary emotion scholarship, one can offer a discerning and persuasive account
of the nature and value of virtuous emotions. With respect to the first group, who come
to this book without a ready-made Aristotelian philosophy in their pockets, I ask them
to bear with me and not to skip those sections of the introductory chapter that deal
specifically with the nuts and bolts of Aristotle’s account; for I aim to lay out here (and
in Chapter 2) various general assumptions that underpin my account of individual
emotions in following chapters. The present chapter thus serves as a platform from
which all subsequent arguments will be launched.
All books are personal odysseys, and this one is no exception. I propose to take readers
with me on a journey motivated by personal insights and academic considerations
they may not share; yet I hope they will come to understand—after reading this opening
chapter—what my destination is and persevere with me, however critically and sceptically,
as I try to approach it.
Here is the first rub. Although Aristotle mentions emotion at various junctures in
his corpus, the first standard port of call is his Rhetoric (2007) which offers a fairly
substantial section on individual emotions (pathē). The list on offer there, however,
seems haphazard and almost arbitrary; it could easily have been longer or shorter (see
Rorty, 1992, p. 84). If one comes to the Rhetoric hoping for the last word on Aristotle’s
account of emotions, one’s hopes will be dashed. There is a simple reason for this: the
Rhetoric was not written predominantly as a treatise on emotions but, rather, as a text-
book teaching orators methods to persuade an audience. Although Aristotle did con-
sider emotions invaluable in that process, and therefore explores them in this book, he
seems to have been highly selective of the sort of emotions he chose to foreground
there, as having persuasive power.
Sometimes, however, the possible explanation of an emotion having been left out
because it does not have enough emotional appeal in rhetorical debates does not quite
wash. It would be difficult to imagine an emotion having more emotional force than
awe, for example. There might even be good (in this case Platonic) reasons to think that
awe possesses strong epiphanic powers of moral conversion (see e.g. Jonas, 2015). Yet
Aristotle has no time for it; and in that case, as I argue later, I think his reasons are
substantive (with respect to his emotion theory) rather than practical (with respect to
the remit of the Rhetoric). Nevertheless, I am generally sympathetic to Fortenbaugh’s
conjecture (2002, p. 106) that in the Rhetoric Aristotle may simply have lifted a few
examples of emotions from a more systematic treatise, known to be lost (perhaps
Diaireseis or On Emotions, Anger), in order to illustrate his points about the persuasive
power of emotions.
All that said, I also agree with Knuuttila (2004, p. 27) that while the survey of
emotions in the Rhetoric is meant to be merely illustrative and to serve the purposes
of a rhetorician, this work can be taken as a source of information about Aristotle’s con-
sidered general account of the conceptual contours and moral nature of emotions. The
Rhetoric thus offers us a broad canvas, but one on which only the general outlines and a
few individual dots have been provided. It gives free rein to someone like the present
author to fill in the missing dots and to touch up, or link up, some of those that are there
already. It is exactly at those places where we find ourselves dissatisfied with the incom-
pleteness and evasiveness of Aristotle’s account that our restoration work encounters its
most crucial trials. Yet, admittedly, respecting the broad outlines already on the canvas
is a prerequisite for any such reconstructions to deserve the label ‘Aristotelian’.
1.2 What an Emotion Is: A Componential View

Contemporary theories on what emotion ‘is’ are too various to be adequately placed by
reference to any single gross distinction (for a clear overview, see e.g. Deonna &
Teroni, 2012); indeed, one theorist identified more than ninety different definitions of
emotion (Plutchik, 2001). Yet, at the risk of undue simplification, one could argue that
two broad and contrasting paradigms, both with distinguished pedigrees, inform
the field of emotion theory, harking back to the trailblazing figures of Darwin and
Aristotle, respectively. According to a Darwinian perspective, emotions are understood
as natural kinds, residing in the hardware of our nervous system. More specifically, they
are conceptualized as bodily feelings of physiological changes, constituted by certain
unique modes of corporeal attention, sensation, and expression (especially through
characteristic facial features; see Ekman, 1989). From an Aristotelian perspective, in
contrast, emotions are viewed primarily as cognitions (of value) although feelings and
other components are also involved.
This physiological–cognitive boundary can be fuzzy and tenuous at times. For example,
some neo-Darwinians limit their theory to so-called ‘basic emotions’ (such as fear)
and acknowledge the existence of other, cognitively layered, emotions (such as shame).
However, the very idea of ‘basicness’ is itself a contested one in emotion theory
(Solomon, 2002). The main challenge for physiological theories is to make sense of the
generally acknowledged fact that emotions are not mere feelings (such as a toothache),
but rather have representational content and involve epistemic discrimination and
discernment. These theories must be able to explain the epistemic role emotions play
in the formation of evaluative reasons (Brady, 2013), as well as how changed beliefs
about the world often change emotion. Neo-Darwinians have come up with various
ingenious ways of meeting those demands (see e.g. Prinz, 2007), but I will bail out
of that discourse here, as the present work is grounded in an Aristotelian cognitive
paradigm. Hence, what matters for present purposes is primarily the discourse on
cognitive theories and their problematics.
Early on during the resurgence of cognitive theories of emotion in the 1960s and
1970s, the standard view was that the cognitive consort that set an emotion apart
was a full-blown belief: for instance, in fear, the belief that you are faced with danger.
However, this view had a hard time explaining frequent cases of ‘recalcitrant emotions’:
emotions such as fear of common spiders felt in default of a belief that common spiders
are harmful. There are two avenues of escape from this difficulty. One is the bullet-
biting one, which I foolhardily adopted in an earlier work (Kristjánsson, 2002), of
insisting that even in the case of recalcitrant emotions, a belief is at work, albeit a
subconscious (or at least a non-self-consciously endorsed) one. However, post-Freud,
a reference to subconscious beliefs is considered a somewhat desperate last-ditch
resort. The other avenue is to grant that emotions do not require belief as their cognitive
component but simply a judgement, which can be a snap one, not endorsed by the agent.
We often jump to judgements about x without really believing x, at least not deep down
or on second thoughts. Yet even talk of ‘judgements’ strikes many theorists as too
psychologically ‘dynamic’: judgements are typically passed by us rather than happening
to us, whereas the latter seems to be the case in some genuine emotional experiences.
This has led some cognitivists to revise their conception of ‘cognition’ from that of a
full-blown belief or even judgement, endorsed and/or passed by the agent, to a more
free-floating thought (Greenspan, 1988). In some cases of fear, for example, a vague
thought of impending danger may simply occur to me and latch itself onto a painful
feeling, thus eliciting the relevant emotion, without any judgement being passed or
belief being harboured.
I explore those issues—which continue to pose threats to those beholden to an

Aristotelian account—in the context of Aristotle’s own texts presently. It suffices to
mention for now that some permissive cognitive theories are willing to relinquish
altogether the requirement that the evaluative content of emotions contains any
propositional content—articulated or in principle articulable—via belief, judgement,
or thought, and make do with a perceptualist account of ‘cognition’, according to which
the cognitive component simply constitutes the affective representation, in perception,
of evaluative content. It is hard, however, to understand cognitions as literal ‘perceptual’
experiences (Brady, 2013, p. 63), because the representational content of a standard
perception typically falls short of the sort of complex evaluative processing that we
see in even the most ‘basic’ of emotions. To be sure, there are ‘doxastic’ accounts of
perception in existence, according to which sense perceptions are essentially beliefs, as
indicated by the idiom ‘seeing is believing’ (see e.g. Heil, 1982). However, this is not the
standard fare in perceptualist accounts of emotion, as those tend to make do without
attributing any propositional content to the evaluative content of emotion, let alone
that of beliefs. To complicate matters, some of the most popular and advanced percep-
tualist accounts of cognitions employ language that is slightly vague or that builds
potential bridges to propositional content; witness Robert C. Roberts’s account of
emotions as ‘concern-based construals’ (2003). Construal (‘seeing something as
something’) is not a simple perception but is taken to include elements of perception,
imagination, and thought (Roberts, 2003; Brady, 2013, p. 62). Moreover, if the evalu-
ative element still seems under-accounted-for, it is added through the ‘concern’ part of
Roberts’s specification. Somewhat ironically, then, the cognitive account that many
people consider the most sophisticated one, and to accord best with our intuitions
about what an emotional cognition really involves (namely Roberts’s), appears to be
somewhat ambivalent about whether to characterize the cognition as more of a
thought or a perception or something in between.
For readers who are mainly interested in moral evaluations of emotions and their
educational implications, this internal debate in the cognitive camp about the nature
of emotion may appear to be a hue and cry about a non-issue. We see in Chapter 9, for
instance, that debates about emotion education rarely invoke questions of the exact
nature of the cognitive content of emotions (whether it is more judgement-like or
perception-like) as a salient consideration for how to cultivate them, although most
emotion educators seem to be at least implicit cognitivists. Perhaps this says more about
the lack of sophistication in that discourse, however, than about the specification of
‘cognition’ being a non-issue for educational purposes. There might be hidden mines
left in the soil here although peace seems to have been declared. In any case, even if
most of what I have to say later about the analysis of individual emotions could proceed,
for practical (moral and educational) purposes, without considering whether their
cognitive component involves a belief, judgement, thought, construal, or perception,
there are certain boundary issues where this controversy does matter. For example,
those who refuse to take the radical perceptualist route (and I argue later that Aristotle
was one of them)—insisting, rather, that the relevant cognition must have propositional
content—will be hard put to impute emotions to infants and animals, except in a
derivative or metaphorical sense.
There is unfortunately no way in which to speak ex cathedra with respect to
Aristotle’s own version of a cognitive account. Different conceptualizations have been
wrenched from his texts by different interpreters. Although I am eager to steer clear as
much as possible from mere exegesis in this book, there is no avoiding some engagement
with this issue in his own writings if one wants to develop an account that is reasonably
faithful to the historical Aristotle, while removing discrepancies and ambiguities where
needed. It is beyond controversy that Aristotle proposes a componential or compos-
itional theory of emotion, with a cognitive component at its core, but that is basically
the point at which the consensus ends.
‘The emotions are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come
to differ in their judgements [kriseis], and are accompanied by pain and pleasure’,
Aristotle says (2007, pp. 112–13 [1378a20–21])—a specification which, at first sight at
least, seems to place him in the judgementalist, rather than the perceptualist, camp. He
also refers repeatedly to cognitions, understood in this way, as the efficient causes of
emotion, with reference to his famous architectonic of the ‘four causes’. There is no pity,
for example, which does not involve judgement about another’s deserved misfortune.
That cognition is, precisely, what distinguishes the emotion of pity from the emotion of
compassion (eleos), pain at another’s undeserved misfortune.
Notably, Aristotle does not use the word ‘belief ’ (doxa) for the cognition, but rather
krisis (judgement), which carries connotations of discernment and logical discrimination
rather than endorsement and persuasion. We do not know whether this means that he
anticipated latter-day worries about a necessary belief-component of emotion; at least
he defines ‘belief ’ as presupposing conviction (pistis)—having been persuaded by a
discourse of reason (1941c, p. 588 [428a19–24])—which for us moderns would entail
misgivings about making doxa a constituent of emotion. Aristotle is far from being
consistent here, however, for when it comes to characterizing individual emotions,
he typically circumvents the word krisis and relies rather on the verb phainesthai (‘to
appear’), or its cognate noun, phantasia (‘appearance’). It seems, then, that to experi-
ence, say, compassion, one does not need to judge another person as having suffered
undeserved misfortune but only perceive of such misfortune as having happened.
Nieuwenburg (2002) makes a strong case for a perceptualist reading of Aristotle’s
cognitivism. His case is textual; he observes that in the overwhelming majority of
cases in the Rhetoric, Aristotle avails himself of perceptualist language. Fortenbaugh
strongly objects to this move, however, for it would open up the possibility of animals
experiencing emotions in the same sense as humans, but that is a recognizably
un-Aristotelian position (2002, p. 94). Fortenbaugh explains Aristotle’s use of phantasia
as referring not to the relevant cognition of the person experiencing the emotion but
to the fact that the object of the emotion is conspicuous and observable by others
(2002, pp. 96–8).
Knuuttila also inveighs against perceptualism and produces various textual and
philosophical considerations in favour of a judgementalist reading (2004, pp. 36–40).
He points out, for example, that Aristotle did not believe we could think without
imagination; this fact may have induced Aristotle to use phantasia rather than krisis
when describing individual emotions, for the former word carries connotations of the
mind imagining and mulling over the implications of the emotion-inducing event,
rather than just passing a judgement about something having happened or being about
to happen. Yet the actual judgement is necessary for the emotion to be elicited. Rorty
(1992) suggests that the whole perceptualist–judgementalist debate about Aristotle
may be based on a misreading of phantasia, as understood via post-Enlightenment
theories of perception and imagination. Aristotle’s use of the term obviously predated
those understandings, and it was not very systematic either, being situated (much
like today’s term ‘construal’) somewhere between the meanings of belief (doxa) and
perception (aesthēsis).
There often comes a point where the consistent Aristotelian needs to depart from
the historic Aristotle, and I see no alternative in this case other than trying to carve out
a position that is reasonably Aristotelian, in trying to preserve as much of his general
approach as possible, but that disambiguates the heterogeneous textual material. I wonder
why Aristotle did not make use of his model of the four causes:
• efficient cause,
• formal cause,
• final cause,
• material cause,
and make a distinction between the (1) efficient cause (that we could call ‘the source’)
of an emotion, and its (2) formal cause (latching onto its formal object, such as ‘the
shameful’ in shame). It would seem agreeably Aristotelian to hold that the source (qua
Aristotle’s efficient cause) of an episode of jealousy is, for example, the perception of
a teacher attending more carefully to a fellow student than to me: something appears
to me, given who, what, and where I am (cf. Rorty, 1992, p. 89), as a relative disfavour-
ing of me. This perception then causes a krisis, in the sense of an evaluative thought
(Knuuttila, 2004, p. 38) rather than a full-blown judgement (at least on a modern
understanding, which is stronger than that of krisis), about undeserved differential
treatment: a thought that draws the mind to the ‘formal cause’ (via the formal object)
of the emotion of jealousy, and is then accompanied by (3) the final cause of the emotion,
its goal-directed activity (to which I turn later, along with (4) the material cause).
Understanding evaluative thought as the cognitive core of an emotion may seem to
make the motivational link to acting (e.g. in a jealous way) mysterious, but as Aristotle
was, in an important sense (explained more fully in Chapter 2), a ‘Humean’ about
motivation—arguing that ‘thought by itself [. . .] moves nothing’ (1985, p. 150
[1139a36–37]) unless driven by a goal-directed desire—this understanding seems to
be in accord with his general motivational theory.
This reworking of the cognitive component of emotion has four advantages in my

view. First, it makes use of Aristotle’s own model of the four causes; second, it allocates
a role both to perception and evaluative thought in the specification of emotion
and thus offers a conciliatory move with respect to the above-mentioned differing
interpretations of Aristotle; third, it retains the assumption of emotions as possessing
propositional content, which helps distinguish (at least some of) them from animal
feelings; and fourth, it tallies with the insight of some well-known contemporary
cognitive accounts, according to which evaluative thoughts occur between the perceived
stimulus and the response, rather than being treated as part of the stimulus (cf. Lyons,
1980; Greenspan, 1988).
It must be admitted that this reworking of Aristotle’s componential view of emotion,
in line with his theory of the four causes, is slightly rhapsodic with regard to his own
text. As a matter of fact, for most of the purposes of the present book it does not make
much of a difference whether we construe Aristotle’s cognitive theory as a perceptualist
or a judgementalist one, for even if it were categorized as the former, it could accom-
modate the claim that emotions have cognitive bases although those do not comprise
the actual evaluative content of the emotions. Notably, it must be readily admitted that
Aristotle does not avail himself of the concept of the formal object of an emotion as its
general evaluative property; the very term ‘formal object’ is a modern invention, albeit
a helpful one. What Aristotle is interested in, when explaining an emotion, is a more
specific object—what would nowadays be called its ‘intentional object’: the specific
bearer of the property which the given emotion is about. For example, in shame,
whereas ‘the shameful’ is its formal object, what Aristotle focuses on is the (cognized)
disgracefulness of one’s own (re)actions as the bearer of the property of the shameful.
When I explore the six emotions in question in Chapters 3–8, I distinguish, therefore,
between their source, as the perception eliciting them, and their ‘aboutness’ as their
intentional object. I also invoke the notion of their ‘immediate target’, for want of a
better term. ‘Target’ is often used synonymously with ‘intentional object’ in current
emotion theory, but I use it here to designate the broad ontological object at which the
emotion is primarily directed. Is it myself as a person (as in shame), another person (as
in gratitude), or a transpersonal ideal (as in awe)?
When one looks at the emotions that Aristotle actually describes in the Rhetoric
(2007), those fall broadly into three categories with respect to their targets:
• emotions directed at oneself (like pride),
• emotions directed at other people (like compassion), or
• emotions directed at external events (like fear).
Notably missing from this list are emotions directed at transpersonal (non-self-or-
selves-directed) ideals or idealizations, such as beauty, truth, and goodness. There is no
awe—either inspired by a heightened sense of beauty in art/nature, the immensity of
the universe, or the goodness of an ideal of self-sacrifice. Knuuttila makes this point
bluntly when he says that ‘Aristotle was not inclined to seek the meaning and end of life
outside it, as Plato did, and correspondingly he did not think that detachment from
appreciating contingent things and from associated emotions is what philosophy
should teach people’ (2004, p. 25). Obviously the point is not that Aristotle did not
embrace self-transcendence, understood in the simple (‘horizontal’) sense of accom-
modating other people into one’s sphere of emotional and moral considerations.
Given his foregrounding of compassion and friendship, he is the self-transcendent
moralist par excellence. However, Aristotle was a ‘people person’ (as explained well
in Vogler, 2017), and arguably did not accommodate self-transcendence in a more
complex (‘vertical’) sense, as attraction to ‘higher’ transpersonal ideals. I explore some
implications of this lacuna in Chapter 8 and offer correctives. More specifically,
I argue that understanding where and why Aristotle missed the boat on awe and
other transpersonally targeted emotions may help us appreciate what would have
been gained had he not.
While I am not shy in suggesting the above proposal of a fourfold componential
model as a contribution to ‘neo-Aristotelian’ scholarship (although not representing
the view of the historical Aristotle), I cannot help returning once again to the con-
sideration that the whole debate about the nature of the cognitive component is,
for present purposes at least, slightly tangential. Philosophers sometimes live inside
a bubble. As I happen, in my current job, to engage with social scientists and practi-
tioners interested in emotions on a more regular basis than with fellow philosophers,
I know all about the effort it takes to persuade some of them of the insights that
emotions are
• reason-responsive,
• morally evaluable,
• educable and worthy of education in the sense of nurture and development
rather than suppression, and
• potentially constitutive of moral selfhood and identity.
If I succeed in getting those Aristotelian points across, I consider myself victorious;
persuading them further of the exact nature of the cognitive component of emotion
would in most cases be surplus to requirements.
This point was also brought home forcefully to me recently when reading Deborah
Achtenberg’s wonderful book, Cognition and Value in Aristotle’s Ethics (2002). I have
yet to come across a richer and more nuanced account of the role of emotions as
cognitions of value, on an Aristotelian account. Achtenberg argues that, for Aristotle,
emotions are cognitions of value in the sense of constituting rational awareness of
and orientations to the world. More specifically, she explains in detail how emotions
represent the evaluative properties of recurring relationships between particulars
(2002, pp. 2, 9). I found myself agreeing with almost everything Achtenberg says in this
book; yet she understands Aristotelian cognitions as perceptions or appearances of
particulars without any necessary propositional content (2002, p. 28). As indicated
above, I beg to differ on this particular point. I find it more rewarding to think of
an emotion such as jealousy as starting with a direct perception or an imaginative

construction, which is then elaborated upon and interpreted, through an evaluative
thought, in light of a value such as desert. The subject does not directly perceive lack of
desert but rather comes to evaluate the situation propositionally as involving this value
(or lack thereof). It is in order to convey this particular sense of emotions as cognitions
of value that I have aspired to reconstruct Aristotle’s account. Yet I am eager not to
overplay this nuance as somehow essential for making sense of Aristotle’s view of how
emotions grasp ethical salience.
On my reconstructed ‘Aristotelian’ account, then, the cognitive component of emotion
requires more than mere perception or phantasia, although the latter is essentially
involved in the elicitation of emotion. Yet even if we add the evaluative thought, this is
still only half the story, for we have not yet accounted for the ‘and-are-accompanied-
by-pain-and-pleasure’ part of the original characterization of emotion. This part makes
it explicit that Aristotle was not a ‘pure’ cognitive theorist, believing that emotions are
exclusively made up of cognitions (a view later initiated by the Stoics and taken up by
Nussbaum, 2001). Rather, he took it that, in emotion—to put it metaphorically—one
feels one’s thoughts and thinks one’s feelings. While this assumption seems to resonate
with current ideas about emotional ‘valence’, a note of warning should be struck about
any direct comparisons with modern conceptualizations.
It is standard practice in contemporary psychology to refer to emotions simply as
‘positive’ (meaning ‘pleasant’) or ‘negative’ (meaning ‘painful’) with respect to their
phenomenological valence (yet, for misgivings, see Solomon & Stone, 2002). This often
confuses newcomers to the field—for in ordinary language, ‘positive’ emotion seems
closer to the meaning of ‘positively evaluated’ or even ‘morally justifiable’ emotion.
In my experience, it can take months before students get used to referring to, say, the
highly praised emotion of compassion as ‘negative’ and the much-maligned emotion
of Schadenfreude (pleasure at another’s undeserved misfortune) as ‘positive’. To avoid this
clash with linguistic intuitions, I will talk about ‘positively valenced’ and ‘negatively
valenced’ emotions when referring to the pain–pleasure dichotomy in the remainder
of the book.
To be sure, Aristotle was interested in the development of what we could call ‘positive
emotions’, but he understood those as emotions that are morally positive, irrespective
of valence. For instance, the two emotions that he connects most intimately to the
developmental trajectory of the moral learner, shame and emulation, are both negatively
valenced overall—and the emotion that, by modern lights at least, will count as Aristotle’s
paradigmatic moral one, namely compassion (eleos), is of course the negatively felt
emotion par excellence. The foregrounding of positivity, in terms of positive affect, in
modern psychology has come under heavy polemical fire in recent years, both generally
(Ehrenreich, 2009) and with respect to particular theories of psycho-moral cultivation
that incorporate a hedonic view of optimal human functioning (e.g. Kristjánsson, 2007,
chap. 6; Tamir & Gross, 2011; Kristjánsson, 2013, chap. 8). Yet its appeal seems to
linger on, aided by some trendy sloganeering about the ‘broadening-and-building’
effects of feel-good emotions (Fredrickson, 2009). What emerges, then, is a striking

disharmony between contemporary accounts of emotional regulation and Aristotle’s
account on how to negotiate negativity. Whereas the former are all about downplaying,
eliding, or bypassing negativity, Aristotle’s account embraces negative emotional
valence head-on.
There is a deeper conceptual difference still between ‘emotional valence’ as commonly
understood in contemporary psychology, on the one hand, and by Aristotle, on the
other. Many psychologists seem to assume that emotions can be divided somewhat
unproblematically into the categories of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ with regard to valence.
This does not mean that psychologists deny the existence of phenomenological
emotional ambivalence, but they typically understand such ambivalence as having
to do with the complex interrelationship between co-existing emotions rather than as
happening internally with regard to the same emotion. In contrast, whereas Aristotle does
characterize each emotion as overall ‘painful’ or ‘pleasant’, he seems to have understood
most, if not all, emotions to be of mixed valence: namely, to incorporate a mixture of
pains/disturbance/frustration and pleasure/restoration/gratification (see Frede, 1996;
cf. Konstan, 2006, pp. 33–4). This feature is conspicuously brought out in a discussion
of two emotions to which Aristotle devotes considerable space in the Rhetoric (2007):
anger and emulation. While both emotions are overall of negative valence, the pain in
anger is partly offset by the pleasant anticipation of possible retaliation; the pain in
emulation, at one’s inferiority vis-à-vis an admired exemplar, is partly offset by one’s
pleasure in cherishing the admired qualities of the exemplar. In following chapters, I will
make use of the Aristotelian mixed-valence assumption to explain, for example, that
while grief is overall painful and awe overall pleasant, both emotions are mixed with
contrary phenomenological elements.
Neo-Darwinians sometimes complain about lack of attention to the phenomenological
aspect of emotions in contemporary cognitive theories, with the ‘feel’ of an emotion
being, at worst, disregarded or, at best, considered something of a fortuitous add-on
to the essential cognitive component. Such complaints do not hit at Aristotle, for it is
pellucid—and here, for once, the different interpreters agree—that he considered the link
between emotion and its accompanying pleasure and pain to be a necessary conceptual
one (Leighton, 1982, pp. 156, 159; Knuuttila, 2004, p. 35). More specifically, emotion is
not contingently connected to pleasure and pain; those sensations are part of emotion.
Some controversy—textual and exegetical—remains, however, with regard to the
question of whether the pleasure in pleasant emotions (and the pain in painful ones)
differs between different emotions. Aristotle is standardly taken to say about virtue
that a pleasure peculiar to each virtuous activity will supervene and complete that
activity once it has been successfully accomplished (see e.g. Roberts, 1989, p. 301). It is
tempting to hypothesize that he held the same view with regard to emotions: namely,
that a sensation peculiar to each emotion accompanies that emotion. Leighton (1982,
pp. 155–7) subscribes to this view, taking his cue from Aristotle’s general remarks
in the Nicomachean Ethics about how different activities require different pleasures
to complete them (1985, pp. 277–8 [1175a22–28]; cf. also Nussbaum, 2001, p. 64).
Fortenbaugh, however, disagrees. He finds no traces of this assumption in the Rhetoric;
for example Aristotle does not try to distinguish between the overall negatively
valenced emotions of fear and anger on grounds of different accompanying feelings
(Fortenbaugh, 1969, pp. 167, 185). In the Rhetoric, pleasure and pain are regarded as
mere sensations, not as intentional states with cognitive content. To be sure, different
pleasant emotions are experienced differently, but that is because of their different
cognitive consorts and goal-directed activities (see below), not because the pleasant
sensations accompanying them vary in kind (Fortenbaugh, 2002, p. 111). The jury is
still out on Aristotle’s considered view on this issue. At all events, from the point
of view of a contemporary updated Aristotelianism, Fortenbaugh’s parsimonious
interpretation not only has Ockham’s razor on its side but also famous psychological
experiments from the 1960s which indicated that the induction of uniform physio-
logical arousal can elicit radically different emotions, depending solely on different
cognitions (Schachter & Singer, 1966).
Although Aristotle’s cognitive component tends to be foregrounded, he was also
deeply interested in the physiological substratum of emotion, which he identifies
as their material cause. It goes without saying that most of Aristotle’s biological explan-
ations for why emotions feel the way they do to us, and how they are physiologically
generated, are outdated (see various examples in Fortenbaugh, 2002, pp. 112–13), to
the point of being most charitably passed over in silence. Yet the invocation of the
necessary ‘material cause’ is worth mentioning here to remind readers again of how
encompassing Aristotle’s componential account of emotion is—how far removed from
a ‘pure’ cognitive account such as Nussbaum’s (2001)—and how, through his multiple-
entry bookkeeping of the components, he was able to see emotion as necessarily
embodied and concretized in the flesh. In a way, then, Aristotelian cognitivism includes
some of the essential elements of a (Darwinian-style) physiological theory about the
nature of emotion, although it does not see emotions as uniquely identifiable through
physiological, facial, or phenomenological markers.
The fourth Aristotelian ‘cause’—the so-called final one—comes to the fore in
Aristotle’s assumption that in addition to the perception, thought, and feeling, emotion
also essentially involves disposition to goal-directed activity (see Fortenbaugh, 1969,
pp. 165–7). Knuuttila describes this component as ‘a behavioural suggestion, a spon-
taneous impulse towards action’ (2004, p. 32). We must make sure, however, to present
the goal-directed component in a way that does not cede too much territory to behav-
iourism. Take compassion: a person who feels compassion towards the undeserved
misfortune of another person will, ipso facto, be drawn towards the goal of doing
something about it—for instance, to offer help. However, sometimes the activity
impulse generated by an emotion is merely internal. For instance, shame of the fact
that I am considering a disgraceful act may motivate me to stop considering it. The
goal-directed activity in that example is simply to silence a consideration, rather than

to motivate ‘behaviour’ in an everyday sense. The explanation in this case may be that
shame is a self-directed (aka ‘self-conscious’) emotion.
However, even in the case of an other-directed emotion, such as compassion, I may
be incapacitated for various reasons from engaging in any goal-directed activity. I may,
for example, be paralysed in a wheelchair and not able to do anything about the plight
of victims of a famine that I see on TV except to feel their pain. Aristotelians might
continue to say that compassion in this case is still goal-orientated; it just so happens
that the goal is beyond my reach (cf. Crisp, 2008, p. 241). Indeed, I take that to be the
coherent Aristotelian view. But then we begin to understand why it is often difficult
to separate Aristotelian emotional dispositions from full-blown virtues, as I discuss
further in Sections 1.3 and 1.4, although Aristotle himself was eager to preserve the
distinction between the two. Virtues are typically considered to comprise a number of
different components, such as perception, understanding, emotion, motivation, and
behaviour. However, emotion on an Aristotelian understanding already seems to include
the other relevant virtue components, even a tendency towards acting in a certain way.
Saying that virtue includes both emotion and behaviour thus smacks of double count-
ing. In any case, the relevant valence and goal-directed activity are discussed for each
particular emotion in Chapters 3–8, in addition to the previously explained components
(summarized in Table 10.1 in Chapter 10). For instance, I argue that the source of grief
is the perceived irrevocable loss of personhood; the intentional object of pity is the
cognized deserved misfortune of another person; the valence of awe (albeit mixed) is
more pleasant than painful; and that the goal-directed activity of gratitude is the
acknowledgement and return of a benefit.
All in all, I consider Aristotle to have offered a nuanced and persuasive answer to
the question of what an emotion ‘is’. Yet he may have committed a number of missteps
along the way; it would be odd if after 2,300 years no missteps would need to be
corrected. I believe that such corrections can be done while remaining faithful to a
general Aristotelian approach: essentially cognitive but also componential.
1.3 Character and Virtue: Where Do Emotions Fit In?

An Aristotelian analysis of emotion would be seriously incomplete if it did not include
moral evaluation: indeed one of the columns in Table 10.1 summarizes the moral value
of the emotions that I will, by then, have scrutinized in Chapters 3–8. The present book
is about virtuous emotions, with a strong accent falling on the word ‘virtuous’. In this
section and the following one, I pave the way for the specific arguments presented in
subsequent chapters by saying something general about character, virtue, and virtuous
emotions, understood along Aristotelian lines.
So much has been written of late about Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics—an ethics
concerned with the nature and cultivation of virtuous character—that one more take
on it here would be superfluous. For the uninitiated reader, a good introductory

text, such as Annas’s Intelligent Virtue (2011), will suffice. ‘Character’ and ‘character
education’ have also become buzzwords in the more practical areas of moral learning
and educational policy. Although quite a lot of that literature understands ‘character’
in an amoral, instrumentalist—and, from an Aristotelian perspective, impoverished—
sense (see e.g. popular books by Tough, 2013, and Duckworth, 2016), there is also a
prominent strand of research and practical work that does apply an Aristotelian lens to
character (e.g. Sanderse, 2012; Kristjánsson, 2015), and where character education is
understood predominantly, in its early stages at least, to involve emotional sensitization.
The nuances of an Aristotelian position on those issues set up traps for the unwary,
however. For present purposes, the briefest of rehearsals of some of the Aristotelian
conceptualizations will have to do.
People have constitutional traits that make up what nowadays is called their personality.
Those traits are only malleable to a limited extent; for example, no amount of education
will turn an introvert into an extravert. Aristotle also seems to have considered some
age-dependent and social-position-related traits to be ill-amenable to, if not alteration
in general, then at least quick fixes: for example, the characteristic impulsiveness of
youth only lets go gradually with age (see Rorty, 1992, pp. 77–80). However, personality
has a subset called character, referring to traits that are educable and morally evaluable
and provide a person with moral worth (or lack thereof). Character education is, as
the name suggests, concerned with the gradual honing of character—a process that is
originally (in early childhood) the responsibility of educators, later a joint responsibility
shared by them and the morally developing person, and finally the person’s own
responsibility (along with that of her closest ‘character friends’) as she develops
phronesis: the intellectual capacity to make reflective choices between alternatives (see
further in Kristjánsson, 2015, chap. 4).
However, the constitution of good character continues to be highly relative with
respect to individual temperament, personal needs, and social position. Thus, two
people with equally good moral characters may possess quite different character traits.
Different people have different needs and tendencies, and hence the proper (medial)
state of character ‘is not the same for everyone’ and ‘in the object’, but rather ‘relative to us’.
For instance, what is moderation in eating for me is not the same for Milo the athlete
(Aristotle, 1985, pp. 42–3 [1106a30–b5]). Hitting the golden mean of Aristotelian
character is all about learning to steer clear of what, in each case, is the more contrary
extreme, by dragging ourselves off in the opposite direction ‘as they do in straightening
bent wood’ (1985, p. 52 [1109b6–7]). For example, in the case of grief, since some people
may have a tendency to grieve too much, and others too little, the ideal learning curve
will be essentially person-relative.
Positive traits of character, which enable people to respond morally well and
successfully to challenges in life by choosing what is valuable, are called virtues; their
opposites, qua excesses or deficiencies, are called vices. More specifically, virtues
and vices are, in Aristotle’s theory, taken to be settled (stable and consistent) states of
character (hexeis in Greek), concerned with morally praiseworthy or blameworthy

responses in significant and distinguishable spheres of human life. Each character
trait of this sort typically comprises a unique set of knowledge, attention, emotion,
desire/motivation, and behaviour, but also a certain comportment or style of expres-
sion, applicable in the relevant sphere. The compassionate and caring person thus
understands the meaning and value of compassion, notices easily and attends to
situations in which the lot of others has been undeservedly compromised, feels for
the needs of those who have suffered this undeserved misfortune, desires that their
misfortune be reversed, acts (if possible) for the relevant (ethical) reasons in ways
conducive to that goal, and exudes an outward aura of empathy and care. So, just
as for emotion, Aristotle has a componential view of virtue (and the above list is
not necessarily exhaustive; see e.g. Curzer, 2016, for a fuller list). Rorty offers this
succinct specification:
Virtue (arete) is that sort of active disposition (hexis) which sets a person to act or react in a
mean, in situations involving choice (prohairesis), following reason (logos) as the person of
practical wisdom (phronimos) does in matters concerning pathe and actions. (1984, p. 535)
Curzer (2012, chap. 15) makes a stab at defining various discrete levels of virtue
development, ranging from that of the many (hoí polloí) and the generous-minded
(eleutherios) to the incontinent, continent, those with natural (habituated but non-
phronesis-infused) virtue, to the properly virtuous and, above them, to those with
superhuman or heroic virtue. Notice that Curzer is not saying that everyone needs to
progress through those levels in the same order, Kohlberg-style, without skipping
any of them, or that most people’s moral functioning can be ‘operationalized’ so as to
fall overall within a given level; nevertheless being aware of those milestones may
help us get a handle on the normal trajectory of moral development. However, in a
more recent work, Curzer (2016) has himself problematized a stage-theory inter-
pretation of Aristotle and now seems to consider his previous descriptions of moral
levels as shorthand idealizations rather than accurate depictions of the statuses of
real people. On this anti-idealization reading, given that virtue comprises various
different components, individuals can be strong on one (say, on proper emotion) but
weaker on another (say, on putting emotion into action). Rarely will all those components
align in perfect harmony in a person; thus the multi-component view seems to cast
doubt on the usefulness of a stage-theory model. Curzer considers emotion to kick in
as a significant component of virtue at the level where mere self-control morphs into
habituated virtue—and it continues to have pride of place in phronetic virtue also. Curzer’s
meticulous analysis of all the possible components of virtue in general, as well as their
sub-components (centi-virtues) and sub-sub-components (deci-virtues), identifies no
less than 6,000 possible failure (or success) modes for virtue.
In Section 1.4, I explore in more detail the different ways in which emotions feature
in virtues. I will end this section, however, with a quick comment on a distinction
made by Fortenbaugh that seems to me to muddy the conceptual waters. Fortenbaugh

(2002, pp. 80–2) distinguishes between Aristotelian emotions that are more ‘practical’
from others that are less so in involving a goal for which to act. He mentions fear and
anger as examples of the former; without the relevant activity we would question the
existence of those emotions. He mentions shame and indignation, however, as emotions
that are compatible with inaction. A person may decide not to do anything about them,
as an addition to experiencing them as cognitions and feelings, without undermining
the intelligibility of claim that she was truly ashamed or indignant.
Now, it may well be true that emotions vary by degrees in their propensity to issue in
direct action, but I do not consider that a good enough ground to make a distinction
between practical and impractical (or less practical) emotions. If the shame and indig-
nation of the ashamed or indignant person do not involve tendencies to goal-directed
activity, it seems to me invalid to say that the persons are really experiencing those
emotions, any more than a person who only sheds the odd tear about another’s
undeserved misfortune, but is not moved to helping action, would be experiencing
genuine compassion (cf. Roberts, 1989, pp. 297–8). To be sure, there are often good
reasons why shame and indignation are best kept to oneself rather than expressed in
action. But there may also be reasons for not acting on one’s fear or anger. Both fear
and anger are, therefore, in Fortenbaugh’s sense but pace Fortenbaugh’s own analysis,
logically compatible with inaction.
‘Olympic prizes are not for the finest and strongest, but for contestants, since it is
only these who win; so also in life [only] the fine and good people who act correctly
win the prize’, Aristotle says (1985, p. 20 [1099a1–7]). The implication of those words
seems to be that full-blown virtue requires explicit changes in conduct. Perhaps
we should, then, understand the difference between the ‘emotional component of
virtue’ and ‘full-blown virtue’ such that whereas the former is, without exception,
‘practical’ by involving (through conceptual necessity) propensities towards goal-
directed activity, those can be overridden by various considerations and incapacities.
In contrast, a full-blown virtue necessarily involves a behavioural element. This move
seems to be misguided, however. There are various cases where virtues conflict, and
a fundamental role of phronesis is to adjudicate and orchestrate those conflicts. So
even if someone decides, in the wake of a phronetic reflection, to divulge a painful
truth to a friend, despite a strong sense of compassion for the shock that it will
cause, this does not mean that the virtue of compassion has not been powerfully
drawn upon. It may be there, in full force, although it happens to be overridden in
this particular case and not lead to compassion-looking behaviour. The relative
roles of reason (logos), emotion, and action in Aristotelian virtue, mentioned in
Rorty’s characterization above, thus continue to defy any simple analysis. We clearly
need to delve deeper into what the notion of a ‘virtuous emotion’ implies. Absent
clarity on that point, talk of the role of emotions in moral character obfuscates rather
than enlightens.
1.4 ‘Virtuous Emotions’: What Does It Mean?

Rather than starting with Aristotle, we may be best served by looking first at the
various ways in which emotions are evaluated in contemporary cognitive theories.
Current theorists use different psychological and normative standards—partly
overlapping and partly hierarchical—to evaluate emotions. Let us review those briefly
in an ascending order of complexity and demandingness.
The first standard is sincerity. An emotion can be either sincere or insincere; it is
sincere if we admit to ourselves that we are, in fact, experiencing it. Trilling (1972)
adds another condition to emotional sincerity: that we also admit to others that we are
experiencing the emotion. I consider that condition too demanding. I may be fully
cognizant of the fact that I am righteously indignant, but have good reason for wanting
to hide it from others. I take it that it is sufficient for me to be cognizant of the emotion
for it to count as sincere. In general, the question of whether an emotion should be
expressed openly or acted upon is extrinsic to the evaluation of the emotion as such.
Suppose my righteous indignation is sincere. It does not mean that it is rational. An
emotion fails to be rational if the reasons for experiencing it involve disregard for facts,
negligent and hasty judgements, or purposeful self-deceptions. Perhaps my colleague
really deserved her promotion, but I purposefully misconstrue the evidence in her
disfavour because I was vying for the same position and lost out. Some theorists may
want to say that an emotion is rational if a person’s reasons for experiencing it are based
on internally consistent reasoning. That would be a purely internalist standard of
rationality, perhaps more felicitously described as reasonableness. My emotion could
be reasonable but still irrational in an externalist sense, however; my colleague received
her promotion, let us assume, for good reasons—for reasons that I would have acknow-
ledged had I been aware of them—but for reasons that were not accessible to me at
the time. An emotion is often not counted as fully rational unless it satisfies both
an internalist and externalist standard of rationality. A less demanding condition
would be that an emotion counts as fully rational if I have done the best I possibly
can to ground it in sound facts and good reason. Another—if related—way in which an
emotion can arguably fail to meet an evaluative standard is if it is ‘representationally
unfitting’ (D’Arms & Jacobson, 2000b), meaning that it does not capture the correct
formal object of the emotion: for example, by shame directed at something that is
not shameful.
Whatever our ultimate criteria for irrationality or unfittingness are, the very idea
that emotions can satisfy standards of rationality signals a break with a long trad-
ition of seeing emotions as extra-rational enchantments—and Aristotle must count
as the historic progenitor of this break (see Fortenbaugh, 2002, p. 18). At the same
time, however, Aristotle reminded us of how tempting it is to evaluate emotions
simply with regard to the pleasure they yield, rather than to how rational they are,
as ‘pleasure grows up with all of us from infancy’ and is ‘dyed into our lives’ (1985,
p. 38 [1105a1–3]).
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2. Placoid Scale.[45]
3. Ctenoid Scale; as sole or

perch.[46]
4. Cycloid Scale; as herring.[47]
1. Heterocercal.
The heterocercal fish, it will be seen, are unequally lobed, that is,
the spinal vertebræ are prolonged into the upper lobe of the tail, as
seen in the shark, and of which our own dog-fish is an example;
while the homocercal fish are equally lobed, and the spine does not
extend into either.
The fossil fish of the old red sandstone belong almost, if not
entirely, to the classes of fish that have ganoid or placoid scales, and
heterocercal tails; and of these fish we will now say a few words of
the four most remarkable specimens of the one thousand and
upwards fossil species that have been discovered, and which can only
be known familiarly by accomplished geologists in the ichthyolite
department.
1. Here is a drawing of the Cephalaspis,[48] or buckler-headed fish.
What an extraordinary looking creature this is! Like the crescent
shape of a saddler’s knife without
the handle—broad and flat, with
points on each side running
down, ever fixed in warlike
attitude against its enemies—it
reminds one of an extinct
trilobite, and of a living sole or
ray, at the same time; and one
can easily fancy how hard it must
have been for its ancient foes to
swallow down so singular and so
knife-like looking a creature. This
is one of the curious organisms of
old life discovered in Cromarty,
Herefordshire, and in Russia, the
original of which, restored in the
2. Homocercal. drawing, seldom if ever exceeded
seven inches.
Let us look now at another
curiosity from the same quarter.
2. Here is a drawing of the
Coccosteus,[49] or berry-boned
fish. This creature is equally
singular with his long extinct
neighbour. Hugh Miller’s
description is the best, and as he
was its discoverer, let us give it.
“The figure of the Coccosteus I
would compare to a boy’s kite;
there is a rounded head, a
triangular body, a long tail 3. Homocercal.
attached to the apex of the
triangle, and arms thin and
rounded where they attach to the body, and spreading out towards
their termination, like the ancient one-sided shovel which we see
sculptured on old tombstones, or the rudder of an ancient galley. A
ring of plates, like the ring-stones of an arch, runs along what we
may call the hoop of the kite. The form of the key-stone plate is
perfect; the shapes of the others
are elegantly varied, as if for
ornament; and what would be
otherwise the opening of the arch
is filled up with one large plate of
an outline singularly elegant.”[50]
3. Above is the Pterichthys,[51] or winged fish. We have here a fish
more strikingly different to any existing species than either of the
other two just passed under review. “Imagine,” says Miller, “the
figure of a man rudely drawn in black on a grey ground; the head cut
off by the shoulders; the arms spread at full, as in the attitude of
swimming; the body rather long than otherwise, and narrowing from
the chest downwards; one of the legs cut away at the hip-joint; the
other, as if to preserve the balance, placed directly in the centre of
the figure, which it seems to support. Such, at the first glance, is the
appearance of the fossil.”[52]
We will now turn to the fourth and last of the singular fishes of this
formation.
4. The Osteolepis,[53] or bony scaled fish. Here we have in the old
red sandstone the first perfect specimen of a fish with pectoral,
abdominal, and caudal fins, ending as the others do in the
heterocercal tail. The vertebral column seems to have run on to well-
nigh the extremity of the caudal fin, which we find developed chiefly
on the under side. The tail was a one-sided tail. Take into account
with these peculiarities such as the naked skull, jaws, and operculum,
[54]
the naked and thickly set rays, and the unequally lobed condition
of tail, a body covered with scales that glitter like sheets of mica, and
assume, according to their position, the parallelogramical,
rhomboidal, angular, or polygonal form, a lateral line raised, not
depressed, a raised bar on the inner or bony side of the scales, which,
like the doubled up end of a tile, seems to have served the purpose of
fastening them in their places, a general clustering of alternate fins
towards the tail—and the tout ensemble must surely impart to the
reader the idea of a very singular little fish.[55]
Most hasty and superficial is this glance through the wonders of
the old red sandstone. On the economic uses of this formation, as
tile-stones and paving-stones, we need not dwell; apart from this,
these singular inhabitants of the seas of past ages, the mud of which,
elevated and hardened, has become solid rock, tell us stories of that
long since ancient time to which no poetry could do justice. Carried
away from the present into those remote eras, our minds revel in the
realization of scenery and inhabitants, of which now we possess only
the fossil pictures. At the British Museum, we gaze with feelings
approaching to repulsion on the stiff and unnatural forms of
Egyptian mummies, but with what feelings of profound wonder do
we look on these small fishes, so numerous that the relics of them,
found in the Orkneys, may be carried away by cartloads! No number
of creations can exhaust God, for in Him all fulness dwelleth. The
God in whom we now live, and move, and have our being, is the same
God who gave to these pre-Adamite fish their marvellous structures,
minutely but fearfully and wonderfully made, and who, when their
joy of life and functions of life had ceased, consigned them to a calm
and peaceful grave. He is the same God who now upholds all things
by the word of his power, and whom we desire to honour by the
attentive and reverent perusal of his manifold works. We are
tautologists; we say and do the same thing over and over again. God
never repeats himself: each successive creation—and how many,
extending through countless ages, does geology disclose!—only
reveals some new aspect of wisdom, love, and beneficence. To the
mind that cannot repose in God, we say, Study God, in his works and
in his word; yea, come back to this remote sandstone era and ask of
the “fishes, and they shall declare unto thee” the might and majesty,
the skill and contrivance of the Almighty; and though you and I were
not there, nor had Adam yet trod this blessed earth,—
“Think not, though men were none,
That heaven could want spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual creatures walked the earth,
And these with ceaseless praise His works beheld.”
CHAPTER VI.
THE CARBONIFEROUS SYSTEM.
“As for the earth, out of it cometh bread, and under it is turned up as it were
fire.”—Job.
Suppose this lump of coal could speak, what would it say? Would it
not say something like this: “To get me up out of the earth involves
dirt, danger, slush, and much tallow-candle; but now you have me,
let me tell you my story, for though black I am comely, and but for
me—but I anticipate. Now and then I make a dust in your libraries,
and inadvertently shoot out sparks and firestones, but nevertheless I
am of more use to man than the old granite or the proudest Parian
marble; you may get a long way in philosophy, but you will never get
beyond coal. I am the real Koh-i-noor of the British empire; and
though I can’t, like my namesake, put on a white dress, I am
nevertheless worth the soiling of your whitest gloves. Chemistry
makes no discoveries without me: I light the fire of the laboratory,
and furnish man with the means of every crucial test. Civilization
wants me every day on land and sea, and though in one sense my
labours end in smoke, in another they end in commerce, progress,
national brotherhood, and interchanging productions of every clime.
The poor student needs me, for I light his lamp, warm his feet, and
cook his food while he is doing sweat-of-brain work for others. And
best of all, the poor man is a rich man when he has me; he knows
that next of kin to good food is good fuel, and man by my help is
making such progress, that the day will come when every man will sit
by his own blazing fire, instead of seeking joy elsewhere amidst false
and pernicious excitements.”
Something like this our friend Coal would be sure to say; and that
Coal may not complain of any aloofness on our parts, let us proceed
to an examination of the carboniferous system.
“’Tis very pregnant,
The jewel that we find, we stoop and take it,
Because we see it; but what we do not see,
We tread upon, and never think of it.”
Measure for Measure.
The carboniferous system is not all coal; underlying, and often

overlying, the coal measures, for the most part, is the mountain
limestone, a formation pre-eminently rich in marine fossils. During
the tremendous convulsions experienced by the earth immediately
after the deposition of the old red sandstone, a vast sea of lime, thick,
muddy, and hot, seems to have been poured out over a large portion
of the British islands and elsewhere. This flow of liquid lime covered
and encased many then existing animals, and we now find it full of
fossils of the crinoidean family, a few molluscs, and traces of fish. We
shall not, however, stay to examine these now, as we shall meet with
them again in the Oolite; our attention will be limited to that part of
the carboniferous system which includes only the coal measures,
properly so called.
Coal is a vegetable that, by chemical change and by mechanical
pressure, has become a bituminous mineral; and this will render it
needful to say a word or two on the ancient vegetable kingdom. The
vast quantities[56] of remains of leaves, ferns, and stems of trees,
found in the coal measures, are not in themselves evidence sufficient
of the vegetable origin of coal; we arrive at that conclusion in
consequence of the researches of modern philosophers, who having
applied the powers of the microscope to the internal structure of
coal, have discovered the cellular and reticular construction of
vegetable life beautifully preserved, and thus previous convictions
have become certainties. The examination of the ancient vegetable
kingdom is, however, attended with much difficulty, in consequence
of the total destruction in most cases of the stems and trunks of the
plants, and the entire absence, in consequence of pressure, of all
fructification on the fronds of the ferns. If we take an existing species
of fern, say the rare and delicate “maiden-hair fern,”[57] one of the
smallest and most elegant ferns of England, we find the fructification
very distinct on the under side, and the different methods in which
this fructification is arranged is now the principal guide in the
classification of ferns. But if we take a fossil fern, say the pecopteris,
found in the coal measures, we shall see that there has been so much
dislocation and crushing, that all appearance of seed-vessels has
disappeared. The following sketch will explain this.
EXTINCT FERN, AND MAIDEN-HAIR FERN.
“Nothing,” says Professor Ansted, “however, is more certain than

that all coal was once vegetable; for in most cases the woody
structure may be detected under the microscope, and this, if not in
the coal in its ordinary state, at least in the burnt ashes which remain
after it has been exposed to the action of heat, and has lost its
bituminous and semi-crystalline character. This has been too well
and too frequently proved by actual experiment to require more than
the mere statement of the fact.” And here let us say a few words,
which to a few perhaps may have the charm of novelty, about the
economic history of coal; for as Cowper says that the first curse,
“labour,” has, by God’s blessing on it, been “softened into mercy,” so
do we add also, in his words, heartily subscribing to their truth,—
“Thus studied, used, and consecrated thus,
On earth what is, seems formed indeed for us;
Not as the plaything of a froward child,
Fretful unless diverted and beguiled;
But as scale, by which the soul ascends
From mighty means to more important ends;
Securely, though by steps but rarely trod,
Mounts from inferior beings up to God;
And sees, by no fallacious light or dim,
Earth made for man, and man himself for Him.”
How long coal has been known and used, we cannot certainly tell,
but a writer in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia states that the first
mention of coal is in the pages of one Theophrastus, who was, it
seems, a pupil of Aristotle. He says, “Those fossil substances that are
called coals,” (Greek, ἄνθραξ) “and are broken for use, are earthy;
they kindle, however, and burn like wood coals; they are found in
Liguria and in the way to Olympias over the mountains, and are used
by the smiths.” Cæsar, although he speaks of the metals of the British
isles, does not once mention its coal; but it seems more than likely
that it was both known and used by the Romans during their
occupation of Britain. Horsley, in his “Britannia Romana,” says of
Benwell, a village near Newcastle-on-Tyne, “There was a coalry not
far from this place, which is judged by those who are best skilled in
such affairs to have been wrought by the Romans; and, in digging up
the foundations of one of the Roman walled cities, coal cinders very
large were dug up, which glowed in the fire like other coal cinders,
and were not to be known from them when taken up.”
During the time of the Saxons, we find ourselves on less doubtful
ground. In a grant made to the monks of Peterborough Abbey for one
night’s annual entertainment, those good old souls had, we find, “ten
vessels of Welsh ale, two vessels of common ale, sixty cartloads of
wood, and twelve cartloads of fossil coal,” (carbonum fossilium.)
The Danes had so much fighting on hand, that they troubled
themselves neither with coal nor civilization; and we know little of
our English diamond until we come to Henry the Third’s reign,
when, in 1239, a charter was granted to the inhabitants of Newcastle-
on-Tyne to dig coals, and we find the coal called for the first time
“carbo maris,” or sea-coal, a term retained through all the
succeeding centuries. About this time chimneys came into fashion.
As long as people burnt wood they scarcely needed chimneys, but
coal introduced chimneys, to say nothing of steamboats and
railroads. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who at that time used to
reside alternately at Croydon and at Lambeth, had by royal
permission thirty cartloads of “sea-borne coal” annually delivered at
his archiepiscopal palace, because, says the historian, “for his own
private use in his own chamber he now had the convenience of
chimneys.”
The smoke nuisance of that day deserves a passing notice. Smoke
was then with many a grand luxury. Old Hollingshed says, “Now we
have many chimneys, yet our tenderlings do complain of rheums,
and catarrhs, and poses. Once we had nought but rere-doses,[58] and
our heads did never ake. For the smoke of those days was a good
hardening for the house, and a far better medicine to keep the good
man and his family from the quack or the pose, with which then very
few were acquainted. There are old men yet dwelling in the village
where I remain, who have noted how the multitude of chimneys do
increase, whereas in their young days, there was not above two or
three, if so many, in some uplandish towns of the realm, and
peradventure in the manor places of some great lords; but each one
made his fire against a rere-dose in the hall, where he dined and
dressed his meat. But when our houses were built of willow, then we
had oaken men; but now that our houses are made of oak, our men
are not only become willow, but a great many altogether men of
straw, which is a sore alteration.”
Leaving this digression, let us try and get a bird’s-eye view of the
coal-fields of the British Isles. If we commence in Devonshire, we
find there the Devonian culms, or Bovey Tracey coal, lying near the
surface of the ground, and of little except local use. Crossing over the
Bristol Channel, we come into Pembrokeshire, to the Welsh basin,
remarkable because thence we mostly get our anthracite coal. Thence
we pass on to the Derbyshire coal-fields, that go with little
interruption into Scotland, averaging 200 miles in length, and about
40 in width,—once mighty tropical swamps, jungles, and forests, now
become chief minerals of commerce. Included in this last immense
field is the great Newcastle coal district, the most celebrated of any,
supplying almost all the south of England, and nearly all London,
with their best coals; and the Scotch carboniferous system,
celebrated for its numerous fossils, and for its general base of old red
sandstone. In addition to which there is the Irish carboniferous
system, occupying as much as 1,000 square miles, but of an inferior
quality, and not likely to be of any great economical importance.
In the words of Professor Ansted, we add: “This account of the
coal-beds gives a very imperfect notion of the quantity of vegetable
matter required to form them; and, on the other hand, the rate of
increase of vegetables, and the quantity annually brought down by
some great rivers both of the eastern and western continents, is
beyond all measure greater than is the case in our drier and colder
climates. Certain kinds of trees which contributed largely to the
formation of the coal, seem to have been almost entirely succulent,[59]
and capable of being squeezed into a small compass during partial
decomposition. This squeezing process must have been conducted on
a grand scale, and each bed in succession was probably soon covered
up by muddy and sandy accumulations, now alternating with the
coal in the form of shale and gritstone. Sometimes the trunks of trees
caught in the mud would be retained in a slanting or nearly vertical
position, while the sands were accumulating around them;
sometimes the whole would be quietly buried, and soon cease to
exhibit any external marks of vegetable origin.”[60]
There are various kinds of coal on which we may bestow a few
words. There is anthracite, or non-bituminous coal, and which,
therefore, burns without flame or smoke, and is extensively used in
malting; and sea-coal, which is highly bituminous, and which gives
forth so much flame and smoke, that in the good old times of 1306,
Parliament forbad its use in London by fine and by demolition of all
furnaces in which it was burnt, because “this coal did corrupt the air
with its great smoke and stink;” and cannel-coal, the etymology of
which, they say, is firm the word candle, because in many parts of
Lancashire the poor use it in place of oil or tallow for lights; and jet,
sometimes called black amber, which in France employs about 1,200
men in one district, in making earrings, rosaries, and other
ornaments; and last of all, there is wood passing into coal called
lignite, found only in the Devonshire culms.
Having thus glanced at the natural history and varieties of coal, we
may here try and realize the flora of the carboniferous era. An
examination of the fossils of this period enables us to come to
undoubted conclusions concerning the trees and plants of that era,
so that it is no mere dream to look upon a picture like the following,
and see in it a landscape of the coal-forming time of the British
islands.
FLORA OF THE COAL MEASURES RESTORED.
The sun then poured down his golden beams of heat and light, and
a tropical climate prevailed in our now cold and humid England. The
mountain tops were gilded with his rays; a vast ocean studded with
islands, and these crowned with gigantic palms and ferns, then
covered our northern hemisphere. In that ocean but few fish were to
be found, though many rare molluscous animals swam to and fro,
enjoying their brief term of life, and discharging all their appropriate
functions. Mountain streams discharged their muddy waters into
this ocean, leaving along their margin course broken trees,
vegetables, grasses and ferns. The giant Lepidodendron looked like a
monarch of the ancient world, while around him smaller ferns, vying
with each other in beauty and grace, grew, “first the blade” and then
the ripened frond, until, in obedience to the great law of organic life,
they died and decayed, and became material for the coming man’s
future use. But amidst all this prodigal luxuriousness of the vegetable
world, there appears to have been neither bird nor beast to break the
monotony of the scene; all was silent as the grave—rank, moist
verdure below; magnificent ferns and palms above, and the stillness
of death on every side.[61]
Let us, however, glance at the principal ferns, whose fossil remains
we have often found at the mouth of many a coalpit thrown out
among the waste. The uncouth names given to them, uncouth only in
appearance, must not deter the reader from his acquaintance with
their peculiarities; for are not the names of botanical science almost,
if not quite, as repellent at first? This star-shaped beauty, (1) the
asterophyllite, (from aster, a star, and phyllon, a leaf,) was a
common one; this (2) is the sphenopteris (from sphēn, a wedge, and
pteron, a wing), so named from a fancied resemblance of the petals
of the frond to a wedge; the next (3) is the pecopteris (from pekos, a
comb, and pteron, a wing), from a resemblance of the frond to the
teeth of a comb; the next (4) is the odontopteris (from odous, a
tooth, and pteron, a wing), and in this the frond is something like the
jaws of a shark bound together by a central stem, from which they
diverge; and the last (5), our favourite, is the neuropteris (from
neuros, a nerve, and pteron, a wing), on account of the exquisite
beauty with which the fibres, like nerves, distribute themselves.
“Besides the ferns, then growing to a great size, there were other
plants whose modern representatives are uniformly small; but as the
resemblance in this case is simply one of general form, and the great
majority of other trees seem to possess no living type to which they
can be referred, it is by no means impossible that these also may be
completely lost. One example of them is seen in a plant, fragments of
which are extremely common in the coal measures, and which has
been called calamite.[62] The remains of calamites consist of jointed
fragments, which were originally cylindrical, but are now almost
always crushed and flattened. They resemble very closely in general
appearance the common jointed reed, growing in marshes, and
called equisetum, or mare’s tail; but instead of being confined to a
small size, they would seem to have formed trees, having a stem
more than a foot in diameter, and jointed branches and leaves of
similar gigantic proportions. They were evidently soft and succulent,
and very easily crushed. They seem to have grown in great
multitudes near the place where the coal is now accumulated; and
though often broken, they seldom bear marks of having being
transported from a distance.”[63] The fossils of the carboniferous
system here figured we found not long since in the neighbourhood of
Stockport.
CALAMITES.
CALAMITE.
STIGMARIA FICOIDES.
This chapter on the carboniferous system must not be further

lengthened. We do not aspire to teach the science of geology; we aim
only to impart such a taste for it as shall lead the reader to consult
our master works on this subject, and if we succeed in this humble
but useful aim, our purpose will be fully answered. Only in reference
to the economic uses of coal, we will quote the following, copied, we
believe, from the “Athenæum” some time since, but unfortunately
copied without reference to its original; a lesson for common-place-
book keepers. The writer in speaking of coal-gas says: “The
consumption of gas is enormous. The following statistics give us an
insight into the extent which this branch of industry has attained. In
England 6,000,000 tons of coals are annually employed for the

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1. Introduction: Developing an Aristotelian Account

1.1 Why Aristotle?

2 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 3

4 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

1.2 What an Emotion Is: A Componential View

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 5

6 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

I explore those issues—which continue to pose threats to those beholden to an

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 7

8 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 9

This reworking of the cognitive component of emotion has four advantages in my

10 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 11

an emotion such as jealousy as starting with a direct perception or an imaginative

12 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

effects of feel-good emotions (Fredrickson, 2009). What emerges, then, is a striking

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 13

14 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

goal-directed activity in that example is simply to silence a consideration, rather than

1.3 Character and Virtue: Where Do Emotions Fit In?

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 15

on it here would be superfluous. For the uninitiated reader, a good introductory

16 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

character (hexeis in Greek), concerned with morally praiseworthy or blameworthy

Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions 17

made by Fortenbaugh that seems to me to muddy the conceptual waters. Fortenbaugh

18 Developing an Aristotelian Account of Virtuous Emotions

1.4 ‘Virtuous Emotions’: What Does It Mean?

3. Ctenoid Scale; as sole or

The carboniferous system is not all coal; underlying, and often

EXTINCT FERN, AND MAIDEN-HAIR FERN.

“Nothing,” says Professor Ansted, “however, is more certain than

FLORA OF THE COAL MEASURES RESTORED.

This chapter on the carboniferous system must not be further

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