A GENEALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF PASSIVITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF EMOTION

(1957 – 2016)

Olivia S. Mendoza

Master of Arts (M.A.) in Philosophy

Department of Philosophy
College of Social Sciences and Philosophy
University of the Philippines
Diliman, Quezon City

July 202o
 University of the Philippines

A GENEALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF PASSIVITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF EMOTION

(1957 – 2016)

Olivia S. Mendoza
Master of Arts in Philosophy

Adviser:
Karen Connie Abalos-Orendain, Ph.D.
Department of Philosophy
University of the Philippines Diliman

July 2020

Thesis Classification:
P
This thesis is not available to the public. Please ask the library for assistance.

Student’s Signature:

Adviser’s Signature:

i
 UNIVERSITY PERMISSION

I hereby grant the University of the Philippines a non-exclusive worldwide, royalty-free

license to reproduce, publish and publicly distribute copies of this thesis or dissertation in
whatever form subject to the provisions of applicable laws, the provisions of the UP IPR
policy and any contractual obligations. as well as more specific permission marking the
Title Page

Specifically, I grant the following rights to the University:

a) To upload a copy of the work in the theses database of the college/school/
institute/department and in any other databases available on the public internet:
b) To publish the in the college/school/institute/department journal, both in print and
electronic or digital format and online; and
c) To give open access to above-mentioned work, thus allowing “fair use” of the work
in accordance with the provision of the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines
(Republic Act No. 8293), especially for teaching, scholarly or research purposes.

OLIVIA S. MENDOZA
12 August 2020

ii
 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that this thesis titled “A GENEALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF PASSIVITY IN

PHILOSOPHY OF EMOTION (1957 – 2016)” has been written by me in its entirety. I attest
that this is my original work not previously submitted for any degree or diploma program
in any other university.

I further attest that I have acknowledged all sources I have used in this thesis.

OLIVIA S. MENDOZA
12 August 2020

iii
 APPROVAL SHEET

This thesis titled “A Genealogical Analysis of Passivity in Philosophy of Emotion (1957 –

2016)”, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (M.A.) in
Philosophy, is hereby accepted.

KAREN CONNIE ABALOS-ORENDAIN, Ph.D.

Adviser

Accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (M.A.)
in Philosophy.

RUTH R. LUSTERIO-RICO, Ph.D.

Officer-in-charge, Dean’s Office

iv
Noted:

Mary Ann G. Bacolod, PhD

Cooridnator, CSSP Graduate Program

Noted by:

Maria Bernadette L. Abrera, PhD

Dean

v
vi
Attach “Resulta ng depensa ng tesis/disertasyon” (OGP Form)

vii
 Abstract

This thesis aims to show that passivity persists as a problem in the philosophy of
emotion by proving that passivity powers criticisms on the dominant theory of
cognitivism.
Currently, the philosophy of emotion is caught in entanglements on whether
emotions are different from our active and cognitive evaluations, on the reasons why
emotions assail us, and on why emotions’ meaning/s often elude us. These are
overlapping ways of understanding passivity at the beginning of the study on the
philosophy of emotion. Back then it was considered a central problem. But there is
little to no significant discussions about it in subsequent years for various reasons.
Research focused on cognition. Passivity was thought to have been explained away
by achievements of the cognitive theory, and there was a general skepticism toward
umbrella categories like emotion and passivity.
Contrary to sidelining or shying away from passivity in discussions, I argue
that we must probe deeper into it. Especially because persisting problems in the
philosophy of emotion today, which involve dominant theories of emotion and key
criticisms leveled against these theories, are powered by the problem of passivity.
This thesis offers a conceptual genealogy of passivity where the concept is
historicized. Through this method, this research hopes to clear the ground for the
discourse to move forward. This genealogy culminates in examining Martha
Nussbaum’s cognitive/evaluative theory of emotion—a major emotion theory
unexamined systematically in the literature—but proves to be a fertile ground for
solutions to the passivity problem. This work shows that passivity is a polysemous
concept. It meant many different things to various authors in the history of the
philosophy of emotion. Passivity fuels philosophical disputes involving theories of
emotion precisely because of its breadth of scope or the various meanings it invites.
Philosophy of emotion, therefore, needs to reconsider passivity and the space it gives
to it in present discussions, especially in the account of its fundamental nature, if we
are to advance in our understanding of emotion.

Keywords: emotion, Nussbaum, passivity, philosophy

viii
 Abstrak

Layunin ng tesis na ito na ipakita ang pagpapatuloy ng passivity bilang isang

problema sa pilosopiya ng emosyon sa pamamagitan ng pagpapatunay na ang
passivity ang nagpapaigting ng mga puna sa nangingibabaw na teorya ng
kognitibismo.
Sa kasalukuyan, ang pilosopiya ng emosyon ay nahaharap sa mga suliranin
kung ang emosyon ay naiiba sa ating aktibo at kognitibong pagsusuri, dahilan kung
bakit nadadala tayo ng ating mga emosyon at kung bakit ang kahulugan ng ating mga
emosyon ay madalas tayong takasan. Ito ang mga magkakapatong na pamamaraan
upang maunawaan ang passivity sa panimula ng pag-aaral ng pilosopiya ng emosyon.
Ito ay itinuturing na pangunahing problema noon pa man. Subalit sa kasalukuyan,
panaka-naka lamang o walang gaanong pagtalakay sa passivity sa sumunod na mga
taon, dahil sa iba't ibang mga kadahilanan. Ang pag-aaral ay nakatuon sa kognisyon.
Pinaniniwalaang ang passivity ay ipinaliwanag sa pamamagitan ng mga nakamit ng
teorya ng kognitibismo, at ang paglitaw ng pangkalahatang pag-aalinlangan sa mga
malawak na konsepto tulad ng emosyon at passivity.
Salungat sa pagsasantabi o pag-iwas mula sa paksa ng passivity sa mga
talakayan, dapat pa nga natin itong suriing mabuti. Lalo na dahil sa nagpapatuloy na
mga suliranin sa pilosopiya ng emosyon sa kasalukuyan, na nagsasangkot sa
nangingibabaw na mga teorya ng emosyon at pangunahing mga puna na ipinupukol
sa mga teoryang ito, na naiimpluwensyahan ng suliranin sa passivity.
Ang tesis na ito ay naghahain ng isang conceptual genealogy ng passivity kung
saan ang nasabing konspeto ay isinakasaysayan. Sa pamamagitan ng nasabing
metodo, layunin ng tesis na mabigay ng mga paglilinaw upang umunlad ang dikurso.
Nagtatapos ang genealogy na ito sa pagsusuri ng cognitive/evaluative na teorya ng
emosyon ni Martha Nussbaum – isang pangunahing teorya ng emosyon na hindi pa
lubusang nasisiyasat ng mga literatura, at itinuturing na mayamang batis para sa
mga solusyon sa problema ng passivity sa emosyon. Nilalagom ng tesis na ipakita na
ang konsepto ng passivity ay polysemous na konsepto. Ito ay may maraming
pagpapakahulugan na magkakaibang ginamit at ginagamit ng iba’t ibang awtor sa
kasaysayan ng pilosopiya ng emosyon. Pinaiigting ng passivity ang hidwaang
pilosopikal na kinasasangkutan ng mga teorya ng emosyon sa kadahilanang malawak
ang saklaw nito at dahil sa iba’t ibang kahulugan na nakapaloob dito. Samakatwid,
kailangang muling isaalang-alang ng pilosopiya ng emosyon ang pag-aaral ng
passivity at ang espasyong ibinibigay nito hindi lamang sa kasalukuyang mga
talakayan, kundi higit pa sa pagtalakay ng pangunahing kalikasan ng emosyon.

Susing salita: emosyon, Nussbaum, passivity, pilosopiya

ix
 Acknowledgment
The UP Baguio Fellowship and UP Faculty, REPS, and Admin Development Program (FRASDP)
granted me full financial support for two and a half years of full-time study leave. UP Baguio also
generously gave me another research load when I finally got back to active teaching service in
January 2019. This work is also supported by the CHED Thesis Grant for Humanities and Social
Science disciplines.

I thank Dr. KC Abalos-Orendain for graciously accepting my request for her to serve as my adviser.
Despite her very busy schedule and the thesis already being at the final stage, she still generously
took me in. Dr. KC’s sharp eye for passive prose and stylistic mistakes has greatly improved the
manuscript. Her patience and responsiveness as an adviser are things I am thankful for.

I thank Dr. Zosimo Lee for his invaluable guidance throughout the writing of this essay. More than
being a very patient mentor, the professor taught me to keep within the boundaries of philosophical
rigor while I seek to maintain my love for other fields of inquiry. The professor also allowed me to
join his Ph.D. graduate seminar on Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions in the last semester of
my graduate studies. This graduate seminar gave me an invaluable forum for ventilating ideas and
served as an avenue to draft arguments in writing. I would not have completed the Nussbaum
chapter of this essay had it not been for that opportunity.

I am deeply thankful for my colleagues in the College of Social Sciences in UP Baguio, especially
the esteemed ‘Balaysians,’ for intellectual conversations during meal times and walking sessions.
Grappling with the challenges of graduate work would not have been possible, and worthwhile,
without them. My colleagues in UP Baguio’s Philosophy discipline have given me insightful
comments, especially during the final stages of writing. Vlad most especially saved me from many
errors; those that remain are all mine. Professor Julius Mendoza, our dear mentor, has constantly
encouraged me to work hard and do well.

My family has always been very supportive of academic life. I thank my siblings for taking on my
responsibilities while I was away. I wrote the final chapters of this essay at home, where my parents
saw my struggles in juggling teaching and research writing. The subtlest yet strongest
encouragements have always been my parents’ simple reminders to finish well.

I thank the friends I met in Diliman and Victory. Marga is my go-to friend when seeking somebody
who will understand the difficulties of managing family time with research work. I thank the Rectos
for constant encouragements, and for the late-night coffee dates to keep our sanity amidst
deadlines. Finally, Windol is confrere I never expected to meet. The philosopher’s pure wonder
before the world is something he embodies, even as a scientist. His love for argumentation,
readiness to listen, and deep respect for philosophy are behind every idea I was able to tease out.
There is not a line in this essay that he did not review. He is also the one who worked on the
technical aesthetics of the typesetting of this essay—something I admittedly never had to time nor
patience to do.

If there is any merit that this work might have, I should not like it to be thought separately from
those above.

x
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgment i

Abstract ii

Abstrak iii

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Chapter 2 Passivity in Subsequent Years: Sidelined, Solved, and Shunned? 17

Chapter 3 Passivity Problem Persists 40

Chapter 4 Martha Nussbaum: Passivity at the Heart of a Cognitive Theory 65

Conclusion 114

Appendix A: Topic Outline of Major Chapters v

Appendix B: Passivity of Emotion: Continuities and Changes vii

Appendix C: Conceptual Genealogy of Passivity ix

Appendix D: Major Works in the Philosophy of Emotion xi

References xiv

xi
 Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

The predominant scholarly attitude toward the emotions in the last five decades is one of
loving restoration.1 This attitude is to be found in the larger context of philosophers becoming
aware of the major interest in epistemology. Kenny (1963) writes about how from the Renaissance
until recent times, “[r]esearch has been centred on the contemplative rather than the active, on the
intellectual rather than the emotional and voluntary aspects of human life. Knowledge rather than
action, belief rather than emotion, the intellect rather than the will have been the central topics of
philosophical concern.”2 At the same time, dissatisfaction with affective conceptions of emotions,
which was ‘a fixture of early modern philosophy,’ and so the ‘staple of British empiricism’ for a long
time was increasingly felt, along with dissatisfaction with behaviorist programs that dominated
psychology and philosophy.3
More specifically, in the philosophy of emotion, this attitude of restoration meant that
‘lending emotions respectability’4 from centuries of being treated negatively became the chief task.
This task is two-pronged: a critique of theories that portrayed the emotions negatively and
constructing theories that capture more adequately what emotions are. I call these the negative
task, and the positive task, respectively. The negative task entailed reviewing and refuting theories
which centered on the emotions’ passivity and which portrayed such pejoratively: as states that
happen to us, and not states that we actively induce; as experiences we undergo, and not
experiences we choose; as something that surprises, torments or even paralyzes us, and not
something we fully control. Unlike calm and steady reason, emotions are brute and myopic. The
positive task, on the other hand, meant constructing theories that include other equally important
aspects of emotions that have been neglected, such as their cognitive content and intentionality.

1
See Dixon, “Revolting Passions,” 2011, 298; and Robert Solomon, Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on
Emotions, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3-5. See also Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1-18. Henceforth cited as UT.
2
See Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and the Will, (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1963), 1. This book was also published
with a new preface in 2003 by Routledge.
3
See John Deigh, “Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions,” in Ethics 104 (July 1994), 824. These contexts will become more
apparent as I discuss the cognitive theory in this section.
4
This is a term borrowed from Sophie Rietti, “Being Good with Feeling: Some Problems about the Place of Emotion in Moral
Agency,” PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2003, Edinburgh Research Archive.

1
Bernard Williams (1973) metaphorically describes this two-pronged task in the following lines: “not
to rebuild the pagan temple, but to put its ruins to holier purpose.”5
Indeed, it is precisely this two-pronged task, leading to the restoration of the emotions that
defined the birth of the field of philosophy of emotion. The field is quite young. Solomon (2004)
tells us that in the Anglo-American tradition,
[T]he subject of emotion was for a considerable period disreputable, typically dismissed as ‘mere
subjectivity’ or worse, nothing but physiology plus dumb sensation … It was only with occasional pieces by
Princeton philosopher George Pitcher and Edinburgh philosopher Errol Bedford and then a book by
Anthony Kenny that the subject started to become noticed at all, although it was several years more before
it began to attract an audience and deserve recognition as a ‘field’ (Pitcher 1965, Bedford 1953, Kenny 1963).6

To this list of early works that lead to the development of the field, some other works are added:
R. S. Peters and C. A. Mace’s “Emotions and the Category of Passivity” (1962), Irving Thalberg’s
“Emotion and Thought” (1964), Magda Arnold’s (ed) Feelings and Emotions (1970), Robert
Solomon’s “Emotion and Choice” (1973), Bernard William’s “Morality and the emotions” (1973),
Amelie Rorty’s (ed) Explaining Emotions (1980), and William Lyons’ Emotion (1980).7
The aim of RS Peter and CA Mace (1962), for instance, was “to get clearer about the concept
of ‘emotion’” and “to provide critique of psychological theories of emotion” and with this in mind:
“to suggest concepts appropriate for the development of a more satisfactory theory.”8 The same task
of critiquing, to reinstate the emotions, is also seen in Williams (1973) who further examined
emotivism and a Kantian view of morality which looks down on emotions as things that have to be
purged away in our pursuit of good actions. This general attitude on restoration was also explicit in

5
See Bernard Williams, “Morality and the emotions,” in Problems of Self: Philosophical Papers 1956-1972, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973), 209. In this passage he was particularly talking about the refutation of emotivism as a theory that
contributed to the neglect of emotions in contemporary moral philosophy in Britain.
6
See Solomon, “Introduction” to Thinking about Feeling, 2004, 3. Many scholars would share this understanding. Peter Goldie
(2010) writes the following: “only a relatively short while ago philosophical interest in the emotions was really quite sparse; a browse
through a typical handbook of philosophy of mind in the 1960s might well reveal little or nothing in the index under ‘emotion’, let alone
anything so grand as an entry on its own.” See his introduction to a work he also edited: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion,
(Oxford University Press, 2010,), 1.
Thomas Dixon, writing in 2003 on the history of passions and emotions, referred the 1970’s through 2000’s when speaking of
the explosion of emotion studies not only in philosophy, but in many other fields such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, literary
history, anthropology and history. It is around this time that the ‘emotion industry’ thrived vigorously. Dixon quotes historian William
Reddy in saying that this explosion of books and articles about the emotions constitutes a veritable ‘revolution’. See Thomas Dixon, From
Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. See also:
William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For
the more specific case, Simo Knuuttila writes that the revolution took place in philosophy of mind during the 1980’s. Before then, the
field was analytically oriented. See Knuuttlia’s introduction to Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 2004, 1.
In psychology, Keith Oatley would describe the years preceding the 1970’s (or even much earlier, before the 1950’s) as a ‘lull’
whereby research on emotion was dominated, at least in America, by the theory of William James. After these years, we see a progression
from scattered publications, infrequent conferences, and occasional edited books to journals, international societies, full blown books,
textbooks and handbooks, among others. Indeed, these are then years when emotion became a ‘hot topic’. See: See Keith Oatley’s
Foreword to the Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, edited by Tim Dalgleish and Mick J. Power, (West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons,
1999), xvii-xviii.
7
See Appendix D for this list and succeeding works that followed.
8
See Peters and Mace, “Category of Passivity,” 1962, 117.

2
Rorty (1980), and it was the take-off point of Explaining Emotions, one of the earliest collection of
works of philosophers writing on the emotions:
All the essays (in this anthology) presuppose the rehabilitation of the emotions. They take it for granted
that emotions are not irrational feelings, disturbances, or responses to disturbances. They also take it
for granted that emotions are not merely proprioceptive states, identified and individuated by
introspective insight or by a physiological description. The authors assume that emotions play an
important part in our lives, that having an emotion can not only be functional but also informative.9

Thus, the beginning of the philosophy of emotion was marked by this defining feature: the focus
on rehabilitating the emotions from concerns primarily arising from passivity. In the case of Rorty
(1980) passivity means: emotions seem importantly different from active and cognitive evaluations
(emotions as irrational feelings, identified with physiology); and, emotions can passively assail the
person, as ways of being acted on (emotions are ‘disturbances or responses to disturbances’).
The preeminence of the cognitive theory of emotion. At the center of the restorative
work in the philosophy of emotions is the eminence of the cognitive theory, known today as the
‘standard view’ on the emotions.10 Foremost in the various accomplishments of the cognitive theory
is its clarification of the cognitive nature of the emotions, their intentionality, and their important
role in our evaluations of self, others, and the world. Emotions are no longer seen as irrational and
irruptive states that take over the personality: against or regardless of our will, clouding and
distorting judgment. Rather, they are intelligent and intentional appraisals that inform us about
the world, ourselves, and others. Emotions are no longer understood as non-reasoning movements
that move a person obtusely but are judgments that are suffused with discernment and that have
close connection to our beliefs and values. In staunchly defending the intentionality and cognitive
content of the emotions, the cognitive theory became the harbinger of hope in finally restoring the
emotions from abuse.

9
See Rorty, “Introduction” to Explaining Emotions, 1980, 4-5. Emphases are mine.
10
See Dixon, “Revolting Passions,” 2011, 298. See also Peter Goldie, “Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World,” in Robert
Solomon, Thinking About Feeling, 2004, 91, in saying that ‘cognitivism’ has gained a certain currency in debates concerning what
emotions really are. In this same collection of works in philosophy of emotions edited by Solomon, Jenefer Robinson refers to the
cognitive theory as ‘the most widely favored theory of emotion among philosophers’ (p.28), although she was referring to a more specific
species of cognitivism: the ‘judgment theory of emotion’. Solomon also used the Kuhnian term ‘normal paradigm’ to refer to the status
of the cognitive theory in philosophizing about the emotions. See his “Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What is a ‘Cognitive Theory’ of
the Emotions and Does it Neglect Affectivity?” in Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed.), Philosophy and the Emotions, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 1. This perceived dominance and ascendancy of cognitivism is felt in the philosophical study of the emotions in
general, and the philosophy of mind in particular. See John Deigh, “Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions,” in Ethics 104 (July 1994),
824.
Even in psychology and psychiatry, the eminence of the cognitive theory is recognized. See Keith Oatley, Foreword, Handbook
of Cognition and Emotion, 1999, xvii-xviii. Furthermore, Ronald Alan Nash, in another article, speaks of the ‘widespread agreement’ in
philosophy that an adequate theory of emotion must be a cognitive theory. He is also quick to add that there is less agreement, however,
on the general form such a theory should take. See his article, “Cognitive Theories of Emotion,” in Nous, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Sep., 1989), pp.
481 - 504.

3
 However, after enjoying many decades of success (and to a certain extent it still does today),
the cognitive theory was under fire for the very same reasons for which it was thought to have
cleared the emotions from charges: the cognitive theory failed to account for passivity.11 Critics
say that the cognitive theory is ‘too cognitive’: it leaves out what is messy and ungovernable in the
life of the passions.12 Goldie (2000), for instance, states that the cognitive theory over-
intellectualized the emotions and neglected the centrality of feelings. De Sousa (1987) argued that
emotions are very much somatic, or more specifically, genetic, and behaviorally learned. He located
the emotions’ meaning/s in paradigm scenarios. The motivation behind such criticisms being the
emotions’ passive aspect, in the sense of being more closely associated with the body – a recipient
of feelings, sensations, and events from outside.
The emergence of the subfield of the history of emotion. In more general debates, a
distinct development was happening. The young sub-field of history of emotions began informing
participants of emotion debates: the historical origins, and/or divorce of the emotions with the
earlier category of the passions (among other mental attitudes and processes) needs urgent
attention. The term ‘emotion,’ says historian Thomas Dixon, is a ‘keyword in crisis’:13 it is an
ambiguous, wide term. It lacks a clear definition that would guide researchers into what exactly
they are examining, or which mental phenomena they are referring to when discussing ‘emotions’.
This is because this new category encapsulated previously disaggregated phenomena such as
passions, affects, sentiments. The concern for whether there lurk major problems in saying that we
remain, in specific ways, passive to emotions, has just been resurrected. But was it ever gone?
The story is intriguing. Both participants and spectators to the debates ask: what happened
to passivity in the intervening years? To this there are many possibilities: was passivity thought to
be successfully solved? Or was it (regretfully) sidelined? Could it have simply been forgotten? What
do these questions mean for the philosophical pursuit of understanding emotions?

1.2 Statement of the Problem

It is against such a background that the present research is born. Deep philosophical
disputes over passivity haunt the philosophy of emotion. Such disputes are happening amidst

11
See Roland Alan Nash, “Cognitive Theories of Emotion,” in Nous, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Sep., 1989), 481.
12
Nussbaum, for instance, acknowledge the presence of this criticism in the UT, 2001, 16. See her footnote 11, where she identifies
Blackburn, 1998, 89, for having held this charge against the cognitive theory.
13
See Thomas Dixon, ‘“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review 4 (2012): 338–44; “Revolting Passions,” in
Modern Theology, 27:2 April 2011, 298-312; From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).

4
heightened concerns over the ambiguity of ‘emotion’, a supposedly modern term. Against this
background of philosophical entanglements over the passivity of emotion, this thesis asks:

How is philosophy of emotion going to advance in its understanding of

emotion in general and passivity in particular?

I break this down to three more specific research questions:

(1) What happened to passivity in the intervening years of the cognitive theory’s
assessment of it?
(2) How can we find a way out of philosophical disputes on the fundamental nature of
emotion, which involves cognitive theories and its critics?
(3) Is the criticism of failing to account for passivity a fair complaint against all cognitive
theories of emotion?
These questions build on three major weaknesses in the literature: first, the fragmentation
of literature in the philosophy of emotion that deals directly with the passivity of emotions;14
second, previously ahistorical approaches to the study of emotion;15 and third, specific to the fourth
chapter of the thesis, the lack of studies that systematically dealt with Martha Nussbaum’s theory
of emotion, a major representative of the cognitive theory of emotion.16 I explain each in turn.
What happened to passivity in the intervening years? For the first question to be
meaningfully asked, we must first have sufficient knowledge of the concept of passivity. The
problem is, very few works in the philosophy of emotion directly discussed passivity, and most of
these were written during the early years of the philosophy of emotion.17 There is a lack of a
systematic understanding of passivity in works in the philosophy of emotion. This specific question
of the research, then, looks for answers and explanations as to passivity’s whereabouts in
intervening years. It also hopes to clarify what are passivity, emotion, and their relation.

14
Sophie Rietti (2003) for instance wrote a few remarks on passivity when she was discussing Nussbaum’s theory. However
sporadic, I think that Rietti’s account is nonetheless well-aimed and undeniably clear. See Chapter 3 of Rietti, “Being Good with Feeling:
Some Problems about the Place of Emotion in Moral Agency,” PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2003, Edinburgh Research
Archive.
De Sousa (1987) also briefly discussed the issue of passivity and activity in the first chapter of The Rationality of Emotion. A
yet more sporadic treatment is seen in John Elster’s Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and Emotions (1999).
15
Philosophers have very recently acknowledged this explicitly and have responded by entire works on philosophical histories
of emotion. A very good example to this would be: Alix Cohen and Robert Stern (eds.), Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical
History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
16
Or at least, those who examined her theory in light of its setting, and its accommodation of feelings despite being a
cognitivist, among other things. I consider these immensely important, if we are to understand her contribution to understanding
problems better, as I will try to show.
17
These are the following: R. S. Peters and C. A. Mace’s “Emotions and the Category of Passivity” (1962), Robert Solomon’s
“Emotion and Choice” (1973), Robert M. Gordon’s “The Passivity of Emotions” (1986), and Robert Solomon’s “On the Passivity of the
Passions” (2004), and Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought (2001). A portion of the first chapter of Ronald De Sousa’s The Rationality
of Emotion (1987) briefly discussed passivity and activity. Save for these works, more forthright discussions of passivity were hard to
come by.

5
 How can we find a way out of the debate on the fundamental nature of emotion, which involves
cognitive theories and its critics? Philosophy of emotion dealt with problems the traditional way: in
abstraction, teasing out arguments, and progressively working towards clarifying terms. As its
contribution, this thesis responds to previously ahistorical approaches to the study of emotion by
historicizing the concept of passivity. This is also a response to the history of emotions’ bid to look
closely into ‘emotions’, a supposedly modern term. This contribution champions the importance of
the history of concepts and the significance of being reflexive of the terms in which one tries to
examine and explain concepts throughout different periods of thought. Without the history of
philosophical work on the emotions, there is little hope of progress in understanding emotion, in
general, or in specific varieties.
Is the criticism of failing to account for passivity a fair complaint against all cognitive
theories? The criticism of failing to account for passivity often talks about cognitivism as a whole,
risking undifferentiated and potentially unfair treatment of the various types of cognitive theories.
There are weaker and stronger forms of cognitive theories,18 as this thesis will show in succeeding
chapters. There is also a need to interrogate the presumption that because a theory is cognitive, it
immediately has no regard for the felt experience of emotions. The thesis will respond to these gaps
in the literature.

1.2.1 Thesis Statement

How can we understand emotions better? In the context of this research, this question means
finding answers to passivity’s whereabouts in intervening years, launching a historically grounded
account of the concept of passivity, and a close examination of a major cognitive theory with a focus
on passivity. Through these efforts, the thesis endeavors to have a more nuanced view of passivity,
and consequently of emotions. Through these efforts, the thesis hopes to substantiate its main
argument, stated as follows:
Progress in the philosophy of emotion, i.e. significant advance in our
understanding of emotion, will not be possible without a more adequate
account of the passivity of emotion.

18
See Chapter 3 of Sophie Rietti, “Being Good with Feeling: Some Problems about the Place of Emotion in Moral Agency,” PhD
dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2003, Edinburgh Research Archive, for a review of these.

6
1.3 Objectives
The main objective of this thesis is to show that passivity persists as a problem in the
philosophy of emotion by proving that it powers criticisms to the dominant theory of cognitivism.
This is further explained in the following objectives:
1) To underscore the importance of passivity in the discourse of emotions;
2) To criticize the history and progress of the philosophy of emotion with special focus on
passivity; and,
3) To show that Martha Nussbaum’s emotion theory is a significant step towards a more
robust appreciation of emotions in general, and passivity in particular.

Emphasizing the importance of passivity in the discourse of emotions means recognizing

the problems it fuels in debates concerning the fundamental nature of emotion, as expressed in
exchanges between the cognitive theory and its critics. For this reason, this thesis is not only after
explaining a specific concept but rather after criticizing the entire philosophical tradition of how
Passivity and Emotion have taken a back seat to concepts such as Cognition and Judgment in the
dominant discourse of emotions. As already mentioned earlier, and will be explained in more detail
in the sections below, this thesis aims to criticize previously ahistorical writings on passivity and
emotion, by locating these concepts in key periods of the history of the philosophy of emotion. In
doing this, various reinterpretations and changes to the concepts, and ensuing problems, shall be
brought to light.
Recognizing the importance of passivity also means exploring the effects it has on specific
theories which are being criticized on its account, such as Nussbaum’s emotion theory. This thesis
aims to review Nussbaum’s theory and show that contrary to critics’ claim of failing to account for
passivity, her theory of emotions is a significant step towards a more robust appreciation of
emotions in general, and in passivity in particular. This requires an analysis of the theory, not only
with its claims, settings, and updates in mind but again in the context of a whole history of concepts
liable to historical changes and reinterpretations.

1.4 Significance of the Study

A lot is at stake in this thesis’s aim of historicizing passivity and examining how Nussbaum
grappled with this problem. Confronting the problem of passivity means clarifying entanglements
involving the dominant cognitive theory and criticisms.

7
 There are at least two contexts in which this thesis reviewed Nussbaum’s theory: first, the
claim that criticisms to cognitivism are powered by the problem of passivity; and, second, to address
a gap in the literature. As far as I know, no one has reviewed her emotion theory within the context
of her earlier works like the Fragility of Goodness and as substantiated by later works like Political
Emotions. In this review of Nussbaum, I showed how she addressed some of the criticisms directed
at her. My review not only shows her valuable contributions to the passivity problem but also
deficiencies in her theory on account of passivity. She stands wanting in crucial aspects of the
passivity problem, more specifically in clarifying the extent to which her account of passivity
responded to issues related to voluntarism and the historical links with earlier categories of the
passions. In this sense, my review of Nussbaum details, substantiates, and gives evidence, to my
claims in examining major debates in the philosophy of emotion, i.e., existing problems in the
discourse are powered by passivity. Therefore, without probing at passivity in Nussbaum’s, and
showing defects in her theory, we will not be able to contribute to disentanglements in the issues.
Philosophy of emotion will not be able to progress in its effort to better understand emotions.

1.5 Scope and Limitations

This thesis is both a work on the general theory of emotion and philosophical history. As
such, it deals with emotion theories in specific historical periods. Its focus is select major
philosophical works in the philosophy of emotion of the Anglo-American tradition from 1957 to
2016.19 More specifically, it deals with cognitive theories and their critics because these theories are
more directly involved in passivity. For the former, the thesis discusses Robert Solomon (1973, 2001)
initially. For a closer examination, the thesis looks at Martha Nussbaum’s emotion theory, as it was
developed and defended in the Upheavals of Thought (2001), given context by Fragility of Goodness:
Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986, 2001), instantiated by Political Emotions:
Why Love Matters for Justice (2013). These four works contain Nussbaum’s more direct
contributions to the general theory of emotion, especially her defense of the necessary and
sufficient conditions for the definition of emotion.
There are other invaluable reviews of some other aspects of Nussbaum’s theory, such as her
account of compassion and other individual emotions. These are not included in the thesis for the

19
In the succeeding chapters, however, the thesis briefly discusses Aristotle and the original Greek Stoics. This is because most
cognitive theories of emotion trace their roots on the works of these thinkers. The thesis does not give detailed discussions of these
thinkers, but only to the extent that they were referred to by the cognitive theories under examination.

8
reason that my argument concerns her arguments which discuss the nature of emotion in general.
This does not mean that her concepts of individual emotions have no relation whatsoever with her
general theory, but rather, that her writings on such emotions have dealt more with clarifying the
content of each emotion, in response to other views of the emotion in question. Often, these
writings branch into other topics. For instance, in Love’s Knowledge (1990), love was discussed in
the context of the relationship between philosophy and literature; in Hiding from Humanity (2004),
disgust and shame were discussed in the context of the law; in Anger and Forgiveness (2013), anger
was discussed with Greek and Roman tragedy and political culture. Political Emotions (2016), which
discussed patriotic love’s significance for the pursuit of justice, is an exception because it discussed
emotions’ susceptibility to regulation and education in more direct ways than the other books.
Emotions’ susceptibility to regulation and education is one of the cognitive theory’s more direct
responses to the issue of passivity, making PE (2016) a suitable work for this thesis. It is in PE (2016)
that Nussbaum extended her general theory of emotion from more personal emotions to more
public or political ones.
For critics of the cognitive theory, this thesis focuses on De Sousa (1987) and Goldie (2000),
with few remarks on Damasio (1993) and LeDoux (1996). These philosophers by and large share the
same criticisms toward the cognitive theory: neglect of feeling and the body, and the role of biology
and culture – supposedly elements that highlight the emotions’ passive aspect.

1.6 Methodology
As a work on philosophical history, this thesis employs the philosophical methodology of
conceptual genealogy. Philosopher of logic, mathematics, and social epistemology Catarina Dutilh
Novaes (2015) explains what conceptual genealogy is:
[O]ne of the key aspects of typical genealogical approaches (as is clear in particular with Nietzsche) is an
emphasis on the contingent nature of (philosophical) concepts and phenomena as products of long and
winding historical developments. Moreover, conceptual genealogy produces narratives whose protagonists
are concepts, issues, arguments, not authors; it operates predominantly on philosophical texts, but textual
authorship is not the main focus. It focuses on how philosophical concepts are reinterpreted and
transformed through their historical developments, while maintaining traces of their previous
instantiations.

This methodology was employed by various philosophers in the history of thought. For
instance, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (2007) and Bernard
Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (2002) traced the genealogy of the
concepts of morality and truth, respectively. Both concepts can be studied in abstraction, and many
philosophers do that. But both Nietzsche and Williams’s examination of such concepts

9
undoubtedly yielded deep insights into the nature of such concepts which would not have been
known had they stuck with pure abstraction. Recently this methodology has gained traction even
in philosophical logic, or more generally, analytic philosophy. For instance, Novaes (2008, 2011, 2012,
2015) argued that analytic philosophers too must take seriously the idea that philosophical concepts
may be historical products rather than a-temporal natural kinds or essences, and that they bring
along with them traces of their historical development as well as broader cultural contexts.20
In employing this method, this thesis critically assesses pertinent works in the philosophy of
emotion from 1957 through 2016 to trace the development of the concept of passivity as it is applied
to emotion. These years reflect nodal points in the history of philosophy of emotion, with a focus
on passivity: 1957 saw the publication of Errol Bedford’s article “Emotions,” the earliest of the four
seminal works normally cited as precursors for the development of the field.21 Meanwhile, 2016
marked the release of Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions (2016), where she extended her
general theory of emotion to the public sphere. This timeline is divided into three periods:
Passivity was central in debates: 1957 – 1973. These years record the early years of the
philosophy of emotion as a field of inquiry, which is replete with works whose main intention was to
unpack passivity and belie prevalent views on emotions as inner forces and turbulent commotions that
move the person obtusely.
Diminution of passivity in debates: 1973 – 2000. These years marked the emergence and
eventual preeminence of the cognitive theory of emotion, and consequently, the demise of feeling-
centered views which associated emotions with more somatic elements such as feelings and bodily
states (the first sense of passivity which will be discussed in detail shortly). The first defender of the
cognitive view produced his seminal work on the topic during these years: Robert Solomon’s “Emotions
and Choice” (1973). Followed by other cognitive theorists: William Lyons (1980), Robert Gordon (1987),
O. H. Green (1992), and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000). There was little to no discussion of passivity. Passivity
has taken a backseat to concepts such as cognition and judgment.
But critics challenged the cognitive theory’s ascendancy. Ronald De Sousa (1987), Antonio
Damasio (1993), Joseph LeDoux (1996), and Peter Goldie (2000) insisted on the centrality of feeling,
biology, and culture in emotion, and argued that the cognitive theory for a long time has lost touch of
the passive elements of emotion.
Passivity problem persists: 2001 – 2016. Martha Nussbaum brought back passivity in debates,
by putting it at the heart of the cognitive theory. She defended her cognitive theory of emotion in
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), and extended it in later works, most
especially Political Emotions (2016). But she was criticized for the same reason her emotion theory was
thought as valuable and successful: her account of the passivity of emotions insofar as emotions are
experiences of heat, urgency, and intensity. The problem of passivity continues to haunt the philosophy
of emotion, despite Nussbaum’s valuable contributions.

20
There are at least two kinds of genealogical analysis: vindicatory and subversive. Vindicatory genealogies are “closer in spirit
to the commonsensical notion of genealogy whereby tracing a person’s pedigree serves to legitimate and/or increase her social standing.
Subversive genealogies, in contrast, turn the commonsensical notion of genealogy upside down; they seek to decrease or question the
legitimacy of a given practice or concept by exposing its ‘shameful origins’.” See Novaes, 2015, pp. 24 – 25.
21
The other three being Anthony Kenny’s Action, Emotion and Will (1963), Irving Thalberg’s “Emotion and Thought (1964),”
and George Pitcher’s “Emotion” (1965).] See Errol Bedford, “Emotions” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1957; reprinted in Essays
in Philosophical Psychology, ed. D. Gustafson, (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1963); Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and the Will, (New
York: Humanities Press Inc., 1963); Irving Thalberg, “Emotion and Thought,” in American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 1,
January 1964, 45-55; and, George Pitcher, “Emotion,” in Mind, New Series, Vol. 74, No. 295 (Jul., 1965), pp. 326-346.

10
 In employing conceptual genealogy, the thesis can examine the concept of passivity as a
product of historical developments in the philosophy of emotion. The thesis will show how the
concept of passivity underwent reinterpretations and transformations in the span of sixty-one long
years, complicating issues and fueling debates in the philosophy of emotion, making the
understanding of the nature of emotion seemingly an elusive aim. This is particularly true even in
the examination of just one cognitive theory (e.g. Nussbaum’s). Through conceptual genealogy,
Nussbaum’s contributions were contextualized in historical developments, and seen from another
light, effectively resulting in a deeper appreciation of passivity and emotion.
It must be clarified that this thesis is concerned with genealogical analysis only. It is not a
work on conceptual engineering, which is primarily concerned with modifying (‘engineering’) or
replacing inconsistent and polysemous concepts with better, consistent, and clearer concepts, given
specific goals or projects. For instance, Rudolf Carnap’s method of explication and Sally Haslanger’s
ameliorative analysis can be viewed as examples of this methodological approach. In contrast,
conceptual genealogy investigates the different stages of development of particular concepts. To
this extent, a genealogical analysis may be seen as an ally of conceptual engineering, since it can
identify which concepts are inconsistent, polysemous, and/or broad and is therefore in need of
‘engineering’ in its focus on aspects of continuity and change of concepts.22

1.7 Conceptual and Theoretical Framework

22
See David Chalmers, “What is Conceptual Engineering and What Should it Be?” in Herman Cappelen, David
Plunkett & Alexis Burgess (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2019. See also David
Plunkett, “Conceptual History, Conceptual Ethics, and the Aims of Inquiry: A Framework for Thinking About the Relevance of
History/Genealogy of Concepts to Normative Inquiry,” in Ergo, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2016, pp. 27 – 64.

11
 The conceptual framework above shows that this research treats three senses of passivity
(which I will explain in detail shortly) as its main pegs in substantiating its claim that the philosophy
of emotion has an entangled relationship with passivity. More specifically, passivity fuels much of
the existing issues and debates, most especially those that involve the cognitive theory and its
critics.
In this conceptual genealogy of passivity, Martha Nussbaum is featured as a major cognitive
theorist, who is an easy target for the criticism of failing to account for passivity, given that her
theory is a purely cognitive one. Despite these criticisms, this thesis aims to show that Nussbaum’s
theory is a significant step towards a more robust treatment of emotions and passivity.
Overall, by the end of the research, a more nuanced view of passivity will emerge. The hope
of this thesis is for this to contribute to a better view and appreciation of emotions.

1.7.1 Three ways of understanding passivity of emotion

In this section, I explain what I mean when I refer to passivity in the present research. Fairly
ordinary experience of emotions suggests that emotions—in their heat, urgency, and force—are
states that overcome us. They may strike us with surprise and terror, torment us mentally, or
devastate us, sometimes leaving us seemingly helpless, passive, and impotent. We speak, for
example, of being ‘swept away by love,’ ‘in the grip of (or driven by) anger,’ ‘overwhelmed by grief,’
‘paralyzed by fear,’ or ‘struck by jealousy’. In this sense, emotions, like the weather, come over us,
as if against or regardless of our will.23 It is for this reason that emotions are thought to have the
ability to cloud and distort judgment, preventing the person experiencing them from exercising
notions of proportion and reasonable restraint.
This aspect of the emotions—the so-called passive aspect—has been a central topic of
interest since the beginning of the philosophy of emotion as a field,24 and indeed since the writing
of the earliest philosophical works on the emotions, dating as far back as the ancient Greeks.25

23
See R.S. Peters, “Emotions and the Category of Passivity,” in Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, January 1962, p. 119, for the
use of this metaphor. Other metaphors used to describe experiences of emotions will be identified in this chapter.
24
Refer to Appendix D for major works in the philosophy of emotions, which are commonly cited in the literature.
25
Indeed, today, there is a surge of works revisiting classical works from ancient through medieval times, since it was realized
that many of the questions have already been discussed in earlier periods of thought. See Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and
Medieval Philosophy, (New York: Oxford University, 2004) for this. Thomas Dixon, historian of emotion, for instance, emphasizes that
there is a need to reread canonical works to trace the forerunners of ideas being revived today, such as the nature of the close connection
between feeling and thinking and the metaphysical systems that ground these. See his “Revolting Passions,” in Modern Theology, 27:2
April 2011, 298-312. Very fine discussions concerning the ancient Greek thinkers’ contributions is found in John T. Fitzgerald, (ed.),
Passion and Progress in Greco-Roman Thought (New York: Routledge, 2008). A very good representative of an equally illuminating work
which focuses on medieval and early modern thinkers is Dominik Perler’s Feelings Transformed Philosophical Theories of the Emotions
1270 – 1670, Translated from the German by Tony Crawford, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

12
Today, in the philosophy of emotion, there are at least three ways in which we can speak of the
passivity of emotions. All of which is interlaced with various problems in the philosophy of emotion,
such as the problem of the nature, structure, and unity of emotion, the problem of ascription, and
the problem of imputation,26 among many others.

(1) Experientially, emotions seem importantly different from our active, cognitive evaluations of the world,
ourselves and others;
(2) We often seem to be passively assailed by emotions; and,
(3) We are often not in full possession of an emotion’s meaning but rather seem to be carried away by
something that eludes our grasp.27

The first way of speaking about emotions—that they seem different from our active and
cognitive evaluations reflects what appears to be a pervasive and persistent dichotomy not only in
ordinary experiences but even among academic discussions: the dichotomy between reason and
emotion, cognition and affect, thinking and feeling, or mind and heart. Emotion, according to this
dichotomy, is unlike reason, in the sense that the former is unruly, irruptive, and even irrational,
whereas the latter is calm, cool, and calculated. As a result, emotions are typically seen as
shortsighted or myopic, while reason, by contrast, is farsighted.28 Or, if not myopic, emotions are
seen as completely devoid of thought: they are brute sensations or non-reasoning movements. This
suggests that emotions come from an “animal” part of our nature and that they are “bodily” rather
than “mental”.29 It is precisely by this understanding that emotions have been likened to various
metaphors such as fire, currents of the sea, fierce gales, intruding forces, wild horses, gusts of wind,
disturbances, and upheavals, and even women!30
Secondly, that we often seem to be passively assailed by emotions, refer to experiences
where emotions seem to possess us. Emotions are things we suffer, and which we cannot fully
control.31 Emotions are things that happen to us, and not things we bring into being.32 It is counter-
intuitive, for instance, to say that we choose our emotions, or that we will them. Contrary to this,

26
For a very good discussion of these problems in the philosophical approach to emotion, see Perler, Feelings Transformed,
2018, pp. 1 – 21.
27
See Kym Maclaren, “Emotional clichés and authentic passions: A phenomenological revision of a cognitive theory of
emotion,” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2011) 10, p. 48.
28
See John Elster, “Emotions and Rationality,” in Anthony R.S. Manstead et. al., Feelings and Emotions The Amsterdam
Symposium, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31-32.
29
See Nussbaum, UT, 2001, 24-33.
30
Ibid., 26. See also Nussbaum’s Chapter 12 “Serpents in the Soul: A Reading of Seneca’s Medea” of her Therapy of Desire:
Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 439-483. And: R.S. Peters, “Emotions
and the Category of Passivity,” in Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, January 1962, pp. 119-120.
31
See Robert Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” in The Review of Metaphysics, XVII, i (Sept 1973), reprinted in Amelie Rorty,
Explaining Emotions, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980), 251-281, and in Robert Solomon, Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and
Choice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Solomon’s “On the Passivity of the Passions,” in Anthony S. R. Manstead,
Nico Frijda, and Agneta Fischer (eds.), Feelings and Emotions The Amsterdam Symposium, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 11-29.
32
See Robert Gordon, “The Passivity of Emotions,” in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 371-373.

13
emotional experiences show how emotions can surprise, torment, overwhelm, and even paralyze
us. Emotion, in this sense, is involuntary and often has an all-consuming nature. In the words of
Seneca (I.xvi), emotions ‘await no man’s gesture and are not possessed, but possess.’33
This, together with the two other ways of speaking about passivity, is consistent with
understanding emotions as passions (Greek pathe, pathos, paskein, and Latin passio and patior).
The verb paschein means to suffer or to be affected (by something). Ostwald (1962) in his Glossary
of Greek Technical Terms, tells us that, “in its most rudimentary sense, pathos is the opposite of
praxis, ‘action,’ and denotes anything which befalls a person or which he experiences.”34 Following
this, passivity, in general, refers to things that we suffer, such as death, or for that matter, the human
condition of finitude, facticity, and natality.35 Before these, we are passive. They are things that just
happen to us. Or, for that matter, things we undergo.36 Thus passivity of emotions consists of what
it means for emotions to be passions: they are ways, or product of ways, of “being acted on”.37 That
is, being acted on, or ‘impinged upon’38 by something.
Finally, we are often not in full possession of an emotion’s meaning, which eludes our grasp.
Following the second sense of passivity: emotions, as passions, do not belong to the category of
things we bring into being somehow and are therefore not under our full control. Emotion
‘overleaps reason and sweeps it away’ (II.iii). They are ‘geological upheavals’39 which, in their heat
and urgency, often leave the person experiencing them confused, if not uncertain, about their
source and meaning. Being experiences of things ‘impinging on us’, emotions interrupt and change
the course of thought, clouding judgment.40 They are like ‘mists in our mental widescreen’ that
blind us. Indeed, as Bedford (1957) and Peters (1962) have observed, “if we say that a judgment is an
expression of emotion, we are suggesting that it is a pretty poor sort of judgment… [n]either need

33
Seneca as cited by Elster in “Emotions and Rationality,” 2004, 31.
34
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated with introduction and notes by Martin Ostwald, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1962), 311. See also Anthony Preus, Historical Dictionary of Greek Philosophy, (The Scarecrow Press, 2007), 196-197; and F.E. Peters, Greek
Philosophical Terms A Historical Lexicon, (New York University Press, 1967), 151-153.
35
See, for instance, how Robert Barsky (2000) refer to passion as the sign of ‘contingency in man’: “It is the sign of the
contingency in man, that is to say, what he wishes to master. By being the place where temporality and the reversion of all truth into its
contrary converge, passion upsets, destabilises and disorients by reproducing the uncertainty of the world and the course of events. It is
in fact the other in us, without which we would not exist, but with which it is difficult and dangerous to be.” See ‘Translator’s Introduction’
in Michael Meyers, Philosophy and Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature, Translation, Preface, Introduction and Bibliography by
Robert F. Barsky, (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), xxvi.
36
Christine Korsgaard, for instance, in her work on agency, tells of this contrast: “In the philosophical tradition, reason refers
to the active rather than the passive or receptive aspect of the mind. Reason in this sense is opposed to perception, sensation, and
perhaps emotion, which are forms of, or at least involve, undergoing.” See her The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason
and Moral Psychology, (Oxford University Press, 2008), 207.
37
See Gordon, “The Passivity of Emotions,” 1986, 371.
38
See Amelie Rorty, “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments,” in Philosophy 57, 1982, p. 163.
39
Marcel Proust as quoted by Martha Nussbaum in UT, 1-2.
40
This is precisely how Descartes would describe the emotions, especially with his account of the cogito. See Rorty, “From
Passions,” 1982, pp. 163-164.

14
emotions function as explanations or as interpretations of behavior, because we often speak of
emotions when people are unable to act—e.g., when they are paralyzed by emotion, and people
sweat and shiver with emotion, which is not behavior in a strict sense at all.”41 This is why De Sousa
(1980) reminds us, we still say in common parlance, that to be philosophical about life’s trials is to
be decently unemotional about them.42
Each of these three ways of understanding passivity could be gleaned from the history of the
philosophy of emotions’ attempt to grapple with passivity. The thesis endeavors to be clear about
passivity by using these three senses of passivity as my main pegs,43 always explicit about which
particular sense of passivity among the three senses is under examination or use.

1.8 Outline and Chapter Contents

In pursuit of an account that will unpack and give clarity to the perplexity concerning the
nature of passivity and its place in emotions, the thesis starts, in Chapter One, by framing the
problem of the whole thesis. Passivity is introduced and contextualized in the entirety of the
research. Chapter One also explained how the thesis will employ the philosophical methodology of
conceptual genealogy in criticizing the history and progress of the philosophy of emotion with a
focus on passivity. Chapter Two launches the conceptual genealogy that the thesis offers by
narrating in further detail how passivity took center stage during the incipient years of the
philosophy of emotion. And by showing that in subsequent years passivity decreased in
significance.
In Chapter Three, the thesis criticizes the history and progress of the philosophy of
emotion by arguing that passivity remains a problem, as it persists in various forms in the general
theory of emotion. Passivity powers criticisms against cognitive theories, whose claims are
presumed to have explained away passivity. Some of these criticisms include worries on the
identity-claim of cognitive theories; the neglect of affectivity and feeling in the explanation of
emotions; and arguments from Neo-Jamesians, which, among others, assert that more than
(cognitive) content, it seems that behavioral training since infancy can explain emotion more
sufficiently. Moreover, passivity remains a problem as it is seen in the campaign to reinstate the
passions or to revise emotion in light of passion. In Chapter Four, the thesis reiterates its criticism

41
See RS Peters and CA Mace, “Emotions and the Category of Passivity,” 1962, 119-120.
42
Ronald De Sousa, “The Rationality of Emotion,” in Rorty, Explaining Emotions, 1980, 127.
43
In the succeeding chapters of this thesis, these three ways of understanding passivity in the philosophy of emotions will
progressively be nuanced, starting with data from history of the emotions in Chapter 2 and 3, and a close examination of a theory of
emotion, while focusing on passivity, in Chapter 4.

15
of the philosophy of emotion by showing that until 2016, even with Martha Nussbaum’s valuable
contributions, passivity remains a deep problem. Philosophy of emotion must confront this if it
wishes to advance our understanding of emotion.
In the Conclusion, the thesis submits that passivity is a polysemous concept which meant
many different things to various authors in the history of the philosophy of emotion. As a
fundamental aspect, it renders emotion a problematically underdefined concept. Passivity fuels
philosophical disputes involving theories of emotion precisely because of its breadth of scope or
the various meanings it encapsulates. Philosophy of emotion, therefore, needs to reconsider
passivity and the space it gives to it in present discussions on the fundamental nature, if we are to
advance in our understanding of emotion. At the personal level, too, such an understanding can
help us—to some degree at least—deal with our emotional lives, in all their messiness and
astonishing depth.

16
 Chapter 2

Passivity in Subsequent Years: Sidelined, Solved and Shunned

2.1 Cognitive theories of emotion

Cognitivism is praised for clarifying the cognitive nature of the emotions, their
intentionality, and their important role in our evaluations of self, others, and the world. Cognitivism
explained the passivity of emotions in the following lines: Emotions are no longer seen as irrational
and irruptive states that take over the personality against or regardless of our will, clouding and
distorting judgment, but rather intelligent and intentional appraisals that inform us about the
world, ourselves, and others. Emotions are no longer understood as non-reasoning movements that
move a person obtusely, but rather judgments that are suffused with discernment and that have a
close connection to our beliefs and values.
Here I will highlight three important features of the emotions that the cognitive theory
staunchly defended: the intentionality and cognitive content of the emotions, or their relationship
with thoughts and judgments; and our responsibility for our emotions, given their important roles
in our evaluations, if not being evaluations themselves.

2.1.1 The traditional view of emotion

One way of looking at works that centered on defending such important features of
emotions could be that they are a concerted effort to reject feeling-centered views on the emotions.
Indeed, negative conceptions of the emotions may be attributed to what philosophers call
‘Traditional View of Emotion’—a terminology first used by Errol Bedford in his 1957 article
“Emotions”.44 This view has been commonly associated with David Hume, William James, James
Lange,45 and Charles Darwin.46 It has a few different versions and has therefore been named
differently by its critics: Traditional Theory of the Emotions, Feeling and Hydraulic Theory of the
Emotions, Feeling and Behaviorist view, or simply, Feeling-Centered Conception of Emotion.
The traditional view claims that ‘to have an emotion is just to have a certain unique inner
feeling or group of inner feelings, to undergo a special inner experience.’ Most versions understand

44
Errol Bedford, “Emotions,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1957; reprinted in Essays in Philosophical Psychology,
ed. D. Gustafson, (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1963). See also George Pitcher’s “Emotion,” in Mind 74, 1965, pp. 326 – 46.
45
Carl Georg Lange and William James, The Emotions (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, [1922] 1967).
46
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, (London: Murray, 1872). Reprinted with introduction
and notes by Paul Ekman, and co-edited by Philip Prodger, (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998). The second edition of The
Expression of the Emotions, edited by his son Francis, appeared posthumously in 1889, seven years after Darwin’s death.

17
‘inner’ as mental. The ‘feelings’ involved are like sensations such as pains, tickles, and itches, in that
they are immediately felt or experienced, and that they have a definite duration. But they differ
from sensations precisely for being mental (i.e. ‘inner’) rather than physical (supposedly ‘external’,
following the mind-body dichotomy).47 Emotions, following this view, are special types of feelings
or inner experiences that precede or accompany behavior. This means that, in emotional
experiences, what moves us into action is some inner force.48
Another equally influential version was held by William James. In probably the most quoted
passage in the history of emotion research, James writes that emotions are the sensations of bodily
changes that occur upon a perception of an exciting fact. For this reason, emotions are not
peculiarly mental, but rather, bodily: “My theory… is that the bodily changes follow directly the
perception of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the
emotion.”49
This view of the emotions—that they are brute sensations or special types of inner
experiences that involve feelings—gained prominence in empiricist-driven philosophy and
cognitive psychology.50 According to this view, emotions are irrational and harmful to thought
because they are ‘unthinking animal energies or non-reasoning forces that move, and move a
person, obtusely, without vision of an object or beliefs about it’. Because of this, they are deemed
as ‘physiology plus blind sensation,’51 that are bereft of thought and intentionality. That they are
like these means that emotions come from an “animal” part of our nature and that they are “bodily”
rather than “mental,” or “pushes rather than pulls”.52 Emotions, especially in the case of James and
Lange, are visceral, as they are felt physiological disturbances.53
The earliest works in the philosophy of emotions systematically argued against the
traditional view of emotion. Errol Bedford’s “Emotions” (1957), Anthony Kenny’s Action, Emotion

47
Pitcher, “Emotion,” 1965, 326. Most philosophers of emotion agree that Hume certainly held this view. See A Treatise of
Human Nature, Book II, Part I, Section 1.
48
Bedford, “Emotions,” 1963, 281-282.
49
William James, The Principles of Psychology, ii, 449. Emphasis is mine. For an extended discussion of James and Lange’s
theories, see also: Jesse Prinz, “Embodied Emotions,” in Solomon, Thinking About Feeling, 2004, 44-58.
50
Indeed, as Nussbaum observes, this was the case until recent years. See footnote 7 in UT, 2001, 25. She also cites Deigh (1994)
for a good account for why these views gained prominence. Deigh argues that removing intentionality came to seem characteristic of
modern scientific approaches, by contrast with their medieval predecessors.
51
See Robert Solomon’s Introduction to Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 3.
52
See Nussbaum, UT, 2001, 24-33. Nussbaum also refers to the traditional view as ‘the adversarial view,’ that is, the adversary
of the position that emotions are judgements of value, and that, therefore, they contain thoughts and beliefs regarding important things
and people, and which also means that they are about what we care about (i.e. emotions are intentional).
53
More recently, philosopher Robert Kraut and psychologist Robert Zajonc holds the same view. 1980. See: Robert Zajonc,
“Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences,” in American Psychologist, 35(2), 1984, 151–175; and “On the primacy of affect,” in
American Psychologist, 39(2), 117–123.

18
and Will (1963), Irving Thalberg’s “Emotion and Thought,” and George Pitcher’s “Emotion” (1965)54
identified major considerations concerning emotions that the traditional view has difficulties
explaining. There are at least four of these considerations, which seem characteristic of typical
emotion-situations.
1) Emotions are very often, perhaps always, about something.
2) We can ask a person about his reasons for having an emotion and depending on these reasons, we can
judge whether he is warranted or unwarranted, justified or unjustified, for having an emotion.
3) Factual knowledge or belief seems to be required when having an emotion, and that a bare minimum
condition for having an emotion is to have some form of apprehension of the object.
4) In emotion-situations, the person acts or behaves, or at least has an inclination to act or behave, in
certain ways.55

2.1.2 The intentionality of emotion

Emotions have objects or are directed towards an object. Take the following examples of
emotion-situations: Gian is afraid of a possible intruder at dawn, upon hearing footsteps outside
his window; and, a husband grieves after learning that his wife died in the fatal plane crash. In these
cases, the emotions are unlike thoughtless natural energies: they are about something. Gian is afraid
of a possible intruder. The husband grieves over the death of his wife. In the case of Gian’s fear, the
fear’s very identity, as fear, depends on its having an object: take this away and it becomes mere
trembling and heart-leaping. Furthermore, the object is an intentional object: it figures in the
emotion as it is seen or interpreted by the person whose emotion it is.56 There is, Pitcher writes, a
reference to something beyond the person or the emotion itself. Bodily sensations, or mental
sensations, do not seem to contain anything that would allow them to be directed toward an object.
In other words, the traditional view is forced to admit that there must be some kind of ‘cognition’
accompanying an emotion, to explain an emotion’s having an object.57
Emotions may be justified or unjustified, whereas sensations cannot be justified or unjustified.
Another consideration which renders the traditional view untenable is the fact that we can ask a
person’s reasons for his emotion, or the grounds of his emotion. We can ask why Gian is afraid of
the sound of footsteps, or why he is angry at a classmate who spreads false rumors about him.

54
Strictly speaking, Bedford, Pitcher, and for that matter, Kenny, did not identify themselves as cognitive theorists. They are,
however, most commonly cited when cognitive theorists trace the beginnings of their respective theories, or when they speak of the
cognitive theory in general. The most outspoken and explicit in identifying themselves as cognitive theorists are Robert Solomon, Martha
Nussbaum, William Lyons, Jerome Neu and John Elster.
55
Bedford, “Emotions” 1957, pp. 281-304; Irving Thalberg, “Emotion and Thought,” in American Philosophical Quarterly,
Volume 1, Number 1, January 1964, 45-55; Kenny, Action, Emotions and Will, 1963, especially Chapters 3 and 4, (see also the second edition
of this book, reprinted by Routledge in 2003, with an extended Preface to the new edition); and, Pitcher, “Emotion,” 1965, 326-327, 332-
333.
56
See Nussbaum, UT, 2001, 27.
57
Pitcher, “Emotion,” 1965, 327.

19
Depending on the goodness and badness of the reasons, we can say whether the emotion is
reasonable or unreasonable, warranted or unwarranted, justified or unjustified. This is why we can
say, “You shouldn’t be angry at him” or “Your fear is unreasonable”. If we do the same for bodily
sensations, the demand for reasons would seem not to make sense. For instance, we cannot speak
of an itch being justified or unjustified.
Factual knowledge or belief seems to be required when having an emotion. And a minimum
condition for having an emotion is to have some form of apprehension of the object. Change in belief
seems to alter emotions. The husband’s grief consists in the belief that his wife died in the plane
crash. This grief could instantly turn into joy when the husband learns that his wife did not die in
the plane crash because she missed her plane. If a person is irritated that it is raining, he must
believe, know, or assume—he must apprehend—that it is raining. It seems that part of the identity
of emotions are beliefs.58 Indeed, cognitive theorists, against the traditional view, believe that
emotions are judgments or evaluations. Emotions are not only oriented towards a certain object or
states of affairs, they also involve an evaluation of that object or situation.
Finally, given a particular emotion, a person acts or behaves, or at least has an inclination to
act or behave, in certain ways. Indeed, a salient characteristic of emotions is a desire to do (or not
do) something, a desire that such-and-such a situation or condition should (or should not) happen
or exist, or should (or should not) cease to exist. Part of the grief of the husband is to wish, against
all hope, that news about his wife being part of the casualties of the plane crash, is mistaken. Or,
upon learning that she missed the plane and was therefore not part of the accident, he will want to
rush to the airport to see her immediately, or give her a call immediately, he will want to see for
himself that she is alive and well. If Gian believes that there is an intruder outside his room, he will
hold his breath, move very silently, and peek slowly through the window. He will have his phone
ready in case he needs to alert his landlord immediately. Modes of behavior, or inclination to them,
are typical of emotion-situations like these. In claiming that emotions are sensations, therefore, the
traditional view runs into serious difficulties of explaining these important considerations about
typical emotion-situations.
Furthermore, the traditional view says Bedford, grossly misconceives the nature and
function of emotions. For Bedford, to understand emotions as special inner experiences of ‘occult’

58
Aristotle believed, for instance, that in order to have fear, one must believe that some threat, some danger, or some bad
event, is impending. Aristotle, Rhetoric, II.5.

20
nature59 is to be unable to explain how emotions relate behavior to the complex background in
which it is enacted and therefore make human actions intelligible. As a matter of fact, contrary to
what the traditional view claims, an emotion presupposes concepts of social relationships and
institutions, and concepts belonging to systems of judgments, moral, aesthetic, and legal.
It could be seen that in refuting the Traditional Theory of the Emotions, the defense of the
intentionality of emotions was a response to views that emphasize a perceived difference between
emotions and reason, as affective and bodily, rather than cognitive and mental, especially with the
version held by James and Lange. Defense of the intentionality of emotions meant rejecting
previous dichotomies between heart and mind. It tries to bridge, indeed close, that gap which
proves to be a persistent reason for claiming that emotions cannot be about anything whatsoever
because emotions are but brute sensations.
Hence, in the case of passivity, the defense of the intentionality of emotions attempts to
show how emotions can be about something, and indeed, how often this is the case. Factual
knowledge or belief very often causes, or accompanies emotions. We have reasons for feeling
certain emotions, and these reasons may be deemed justified or unjustified. Emotions, in this sense,
are far from being animal energies or forces lacking thoughts. For this reason, they have deep
connections with certain actions. This is a sharp response to the first way of understanding
passivity: the intentionality of emotions, their about-ness, shows us that emotions may not be so
different from our active and cognitive evaluations after all.

2.1.3 The cognitive element of emotion: thoughts and judgments

Cognitive theorists also focus our attention on the fact that many emotions appear to be
founded or based upon some thought or belief. Or, more generally, to the fact that most, if not all,
emotions have cognitive elements. For a cattleman to feel dismay and anxiety upon learning about
falling meat prices, says Thalberg (1964), is for him to be relatively sure of the decreasing market
value of meat: he must not only imagine it to be so.60 The husband’s grief over the passing of his
wife is largely due to the thought that this person is valuable and is now irrevocably cut off from
him. Fear involves the belief that some danger is about to happen. Anger involves the thought that
one is slighted. It is, of course, not immediately apparent what kind of dependency or relationship
this is.

59
Bedford quoting Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind, p.10.
60
See Irving Thalberg, “Emotion and Thought,” in American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 1, January 1964, p. 45.

21
 The cognitive theory of emotions61 is at the forefront of establishing this precise relationship
that emotions have with thoughts and beliefs. William Lyons (1980) defines the cognitive theory in
the following lines: “In general, a cognitive theory of emotions is one that makes some aspect of
thought, usually a belief, central to the concept of emotion and, at least in some cognitive theories,
essential to distinguishing the different emotions from one another … For cognitive theories in
general, the primary cause of the feelings and physiological aspects of emotion is belief.” Deigh
(1994) notes that because of this apparent emphasis on the centrality of thought or belief, the
cognitive theory is also called ‘thought-centered conception of emotions’.
The general claim of the cognitive theory is that a cognitive element—whether it be
thought, belief, appraisal, evaluation, judgment, or cognition—is central to emotion. Within this
broad claim, however, there is a great variety of further specifications. Some authors distinguish
between strong cognitive theories and weak cognitive theories. Of the more prominent cognitive
theorists are Robert Solomon (1973, 1976, 2003) and Martha Nussbaum (2001, 2004, 2013, 2016).62
Cognitive theories trace their origin in Aristotle and the Stoics.63 Solomon (1988), in
responding to feeling-centered theories that maintain the contrast between reason and passion,
claims that this critical distinction between reason and passion, judgment, and emotion, does not
get questioned. In his own attempt to question this distinction, he argues that judgments play a
crucial role in emotions. Citing Aristotle’s detailed analysis of anger in the Rhetoric, where anger
was defined as the perception of an offense (real or merely perceived), a kind of recognition coupled
with a desire for action (namely, revenge), Solomon writes:

[T]he perception and the desire were not effects of emotion but its constituents. It would be irrational for
a man not to get angry in certain circumstances, Aristotle insists … Reason here is not distinct from passion
but a part and a parcel of it, just as passion is part of—and not an intrusion into—the rational life.”64

61
It should be noted that the label ‘cognitive theory of emotions’ is a borrowing from psychology and cognitive science. It was
not coined by the philosophers who are today understood as major representative of the said theory, foremost of whom are Robert
Solomon and Martha Nussbaum. Solomon, for instance, “fought it for years, not because it was wrong but because ‘cognition’ is so
variously or ill-defined.” It is, in many ways, says Solomon, not a very informative technical term. Despite this concern, however, the
label has been widely used. (Other authors refer to the cognitive theory simply as ‘cognitivism’.) For this reason, Solomon, and Nussbaum
for that matter, sticks to using ‘judgments’ when referring to emotions in their theories. See Robert Solomon, “Emotions, Thoughts and
Feelings: What is a Cognitive of the Emotions and Does it Neglect Affectivity?” in Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed.) Philosophy and the
Emotions, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1-3.
62
Other authors believed to hold similar philosophical positions are Jerome Neu (1977), William Lyons (1980), and Robert
Gordon (1987). I will not be undertaking a detailed analysis of these different versions here. Comprehensive accounts involving these
philosophers are found in Deigh (1994) and Griffiths (1997).
63
At other times, Solomon also explicitly draws from Sartre and Nietzsche.
64
See Robert Solomon, “On Emotions as Judgements,” in Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 78. This article was original printed in 1988, in the American Philosophical Quarterly 25 (2): 183-191. Emphases
are mine. The exact quotation from the Rhetoric is: “Anger …is a desire accompanied by pain for an imagined retribution on account of
an imagined slighting inflicted by people who have no legitimate reason to slight oneself or one’s own”. See Rhetoric 1378a31–33, as cited
in Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 17.

22
 The Stoics had more or less the same view: emotions are judgments, or ways of perceiving
and understanding the world. Only that, for the Stoics, emotional judgments are irrational, for they
may be misinformed or distorted by desire. This is why the Stoics held the radical normative thesis
of complete extirpation of the passions. Nonetheless, both passion and reason now belong to the
same realm: that of judgments.
Solomon in “Emotions and Choice” (1973) argued that, contrary to the recent but traditional
view which claims that emotions are feelings, sensations, or physiological disturbances,
“[E]motions are not occurrences and do not happen to us. Emotions are rational and purposive
rather than irrational and disruptive, are very much like actions, and that we choose an emotion
much as we choose a course of action.”65
Solomon takes the intentionality of emotions as his crucial departure point. That emotions
are ‘about’ something means that they are not like moods such as euphoria and melancholy. Moods
do not have a specific object, although they may be caused by some particular incident. But a more
important point, for Solomon, is that emotions are not feelings,66 in the sense that feelings have no
directions. This is definitive of the difference between the two. It must be reiterated that an emotion
cannot be identified without its object. To say “I am angry” requires that there must be more
information available, that is precisely why the question “What are you angry about?” typically
follows immediately, and why this question makes sense to us. Feelings, on the other hand, have
no such requirements. Solomon reiterates, feelings may accompany emotions, but they are ‘never
sufficient to differentiate and identify emotions’ on top of the notable fact that ‘one can have
emotions without feeling anything,’ as in the case of dispositional emotions67 such as hatred and
grief.
Furthermore, the object towards which the emotion is directed is determined by the
emotion. In this sense, emotions “share an important conceptual property of beliefs: ‘being angry
about…’ is very much like ‘believing that…’” Change in what I am angry about demands change in

65
Robert Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” in The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Sep., 1973), 20. Also reprinted in
Amelie Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 251-282. And in: Robert Solomon, Not Passion’s
Slave: Emotions and Choice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). It goes without saying that Solomon’s work was also trying to
respond to yet another reason that contributed to the negative view of emotions, within moral philosophy: the ethical theory of
emotivism and the dominance of Kantian ethics. For a detailed and comprehensive account of this, see Williams, “Morality and the
Emotions” (1973).
66
Solomon did recognize that the term ‘feeling’ in everyday use is broader than the way it is used in this statement, that is, in
the way it is used in philosophy of emotions particularly the traditional view of emotion (also called feeling-centered views). See his
footnote 2 in the 1980 version of “Emotions and Choice.” A more interesting discussion of this will be seen in Nussbaum.
67
Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” 1973, 20. Philosophers of emotion draw a distinction between occurrent and dispositional
emotions. The primary basis of the distinction is duration. Occurrent emotions typically last for seconds, whereas dispositional emotions
may last for a longer period of time, such as months or years.

23
my anger. In other words, emotions change with our opinions. In this sense, emotions are ‘rational’
in a very important sense. In this sense, emotions are interestingly similar to beliefs. Indeed, a case
can be made—and this is what Solomon claimed—that emotions are judgments. That is to say,
normative and often moral judgments. Solomon writes:

“I am angry at John for taking my car” entails that I believe that John has somehow wronged me … The
(moral) judgments entailed by my anger is not a judgment about my anger … My anger is that judgment …
If I do not believe that I have somehow been wronged, I cannot be angry … If I do not find my situation
awkward, I cannot be ashamed or embarrassed. If I do not judge that I have suffered a loss, I cannot be sad
or jealous. I am not sure whether all emotions entail such judgments; moods (depression and euphoria)
surely present special problems. But emotions in general do appear to require this feature: to have an
emotion is to hold a normative judgment about one’s situation.68

This is what Solomon means in saying that the perception, or judgment, is a constituent, that is to
say, part and parcel of, emotion. In many cases, as in the passage above, Solomon alternates with
saying that the judgment is the emotion. Judgment—that I am slighted, that he took my car—are
part of the identity of the emotion itself.
This emphasis on judgment is shared by renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum. In her
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001) and subsequent works, she defends the
thesis: ‘emotions are judgments of value and importance’. Emotions are judgments, that is to say,
judgments about things which are important for our well-being. Nussbaum’s view contains three
salient ideas: the idea of a cognitive appraisal or evaluation; the idea of one’s own flourishing or one’s
important goals and projects; and the idea of the salience of external objects as elements in one’s own
scheme of goals.69 It is apparent from these ideas that Nussbaum emphasizes thought (or more
specifically, judgment), in much the same way that Solomon did. Nussbaum argued that all
emotions always involve thought of an object combined with the thought of the object’s salience
or importance, and in that sense, they always involve appraisal or evaluation.70 That thought (or
appraisal, judgment, cognition, belief) is essential to emotion is precisely the reason why Nussbaum
refers to her view as a type of ‘cognitive-evaluative’ view, or simply, cognitive view.71 Nussbaum
follows the early works in philosophy of emotions, from Bedford onwards, in believing that beliefs

68
Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” 1973, 27.
69
See Nussbaum, UT, 2001, 4.
70
Ibid., 23. Emphases are mine. In her other subsequent works where the theory was summarized and applied in various
topics, this is how Nussbaum would define her theory: ‘all emotions involve intentional thought or perception directed at an object and
some type of evaluative appraisal of that object made from the agent’s own personal viewpoint.’ See her Political Emotions: Why Love
Matters for Justice, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 399-404; Hiding from Humanity:
Disgust, Shame and the Law, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 19-70, 340-350; and, Anger, 2016, 251-255.
71
It should be noted that she qualified what she meant by ‘cognition’: “By cognition I mean nothing more than ‘concerned
with receiving and processing information’. I do not mean to imply the presence of elaborate calculation, of computation, or even of
reflexive self-awareness.” See UT, 2001, 23.

24
are essential to the identity of the emotion: the feeling of heart-trembling will not itself tell me
whether what I am feeling if fear, love, or jealousy. Only an inspection of the thoughts involved will
be able to identify my emotion and discriminate it from other kinds of emotion.
In holding this view, Nussbaum believes that emotions are, like other mental processes,
bodily and that seeing them as in every case taking place in a living body does not give us reason to
reduce their intentional/cognitive components to nonintentional bodily movements,72 contrary to
what the traditional view of emotion holds. The aboutness of emotions73 is not a mechanical kind
of directedness but is rather an active way of seeing and interpreting, a looking at the object through
one’s window,74 so to speak.
But more than this emphasis on thought, cognition, or belief, is Nussbaum’s effort to explain
the emotions’ ability to passively assail the person experiencing them, and the conditions of the
possibility of knowing their meaning—the second and third ways of understanding passivity. These
features of the emotions, says Nussbaum, is fundamentally due to their being concerned with value:
they see the object as invested with significant value or importance. She instantiates:

Suppose I did not love my mother or consider her a person of great importance; suppose I considered her
about as important as a branch on a tree next to my house. Then (unless I had invested the tree-branch
itself with an unusual degree of value) I would not fear her death, or hope so passionately for her recovery.
My experience records this in many ways … I wished her restored to health and wit … in the grief itself
there was the same perception – of enormous significance, permanently removed. This indeed is why the
sight of the dead body of someone one loves is so intolerable: because the same sight that is a reminder of
value is also an evidence of irrevocable loss.75

It is interesting how, in this passage, we see a remarkable intermingling of all the responses
of Nussbaum, as a cognitive theorist, to all three senses of passivity. Emotions are cognitive, in that
they do not only involve thoughts but that thoughts are essential to their identity; emotions can
assail us because they involve things and people of great importance and concern to us; and, this is
precisely where we find their meaning, i.e., in what we value, in what we care most about—in our
thoughts about these things. Indeed, these form the core of her thesis that emotions are judgments
of value and importance.
Here then lies what serves as the cognitive theory’s decisive assessments of the passivity of
emotion. In espousing these positions, the cognitive theorists launched a complete turnaround in

72
She notes that she has presented her general position on this issue in an article co-authored with Hilary Putnam: “Changing
Aristotle’s Mind,” in Martha C. Nussbaum & Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, (Clarendon Press, 1992), pp.
27-56.
73
See an earlier version of this in: Robert Gordon, “The Aboutness of Emotions,” American Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1974),
pp. 27-36.
74
Nussbaum, UT, 2001, 27-28.
75
Ibid., 30.

25
the way we understand emotions: emotions are not brute, they are intelligent; emotions can
overwhelm and carry us away essentially because they are about things and people we greatly value;
and, emotions’ meaning is not a complete mystery, rather, we find it in their cognitive content, and
the social contexts that are presupposed in emotional situations.

2.1.4 Being responsible for emotions

Philosopher Robert Solomon’s work on the emotions is perhaps our best source for seeing
how the philosophy of emotions could put involuntary talk regarding the emotions under sustained
scrutiny. His work bravely and persistently challenged the sharp divide between emotions and
rationality, as it argued for the rejection of the established notion that emotions are involuntary,
and that we should instead think of emotions as judgments. His “Emotions and Choice” (1973) was
eventually reprinted together with other essays, under the title Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and
Choice (2003), reiterating the fact that emotions are not things that happen to us, but rather things
we bring into being. Emotions are not things we suffer, but rather things we can regulate through
cognitive control, and so things for which we can be held responsible.76 Indeed, this may have been
his great legacy to the field. He provocatively opened “Emotions and Choice” with the following
lines:
Do we choose our emotions? Can we be held responsible for our anger? For jealousy? For falling in love or
succumbing to resentment or hatred? The suggestion sounds odd because emotions are typically
considered occurrences that happen to (or ‘in’) us: emotions are taken to be the hallmark of the irrational
and the disruptive. Controlling one’s emotions is supposed to be like the caging and taming of a wild beast,
the suppression and sublimation of a Freudian ‘it’.77

Can we be held responsible for our emotions? If we can, how? What does it mean to be held
accountable for our emotions? Being responsible for emotions—does this mean that we choose our
emotions, that they are voluntary acts? Does this mean that emotions are within the sphere of what
we actively cause and fully control?
We can recall Solomon’s thesis that emotions are judgments. By this he means that emotions
have specific objects, i.e., they are about something. In this sense, they are like beliefs. I am angry
at John for stealing my car. My anger consists in the thought—the belief or judgment—that John
did steal my car. Remove this thought, or change this belief—say, John turns out to have bought a
car very similar to mine and therefore did not steal my car—and my emotion (immediately)

76
Robert Solomon, Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). “Emotions and
Choice” was also reprinted in Amelie Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
77
Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” in The Review of Metaphysics, XVII, I (Sept 1973), 20.

26
dissipates. This is where Solomon’s account of the possibility of being held responsible for our
emotions comes in:

If emotions are judgments and can be ‘defused’ (and also instigated) by considerations of other judgments,
it is clear how our emotions are in a sense our doing, and how we are responsible for them. Normative
judgments can themselves be criticized, argued against, and refuted. Now if you criticize my anger at John
by maintaining that he has not wronged me, you may conclude that my anger is unreasonable, unfair, and
perhaps unbecoming. But if you should convince me that John has not wronged me, I do not simply
conclude that my anger is unreasonable, unfair, or unbecoming. I cease to be angry. Similarly, I can make
myself angry at John by allowing myself to be convinced that he has wronged me. I can dwell on minor
behavioral misdemeanors on John’s part, building them into a pattern of overall deceit and abuse, and then
become angry at any one or any number of these incidents.

Since normative judgments can be changed through influence, argument, and evidence, and since I can go
about my own seeking influence, provoking argument, and looking for evidence, I am responsible for my
emotions as I am for the judgments I make. My emotions are judgments I make … [M]aking judgments is
something I do, not something that happens to me and not something I simply cause.78

According to Solomon, judgments are something we do; which means, judgments are actions.
That emotions are judgments, means that emotions are something we do.79 Furthermore, if
emotions are judgments, then they can be rational in the same sense that judgments can be rational.
Being responsible for emotions, therefore, consists largely of the same things we observe when we
take responsibility for forming good judgments. For instance, the need to be scrupulous in the
search for evidence and knowledge of circumstance, knowing that lack of evidence is a serious
deficiency in arriving at a conclusion, judgment, or decision. Being responsible for one’s emotions
also means, Solomon says, training oneself in self-understanding regarding one’s prejudices and
influences. By placing oneself in appropriate circumstances, ‘[one] can determine the kinds of
judgments [one] will tend to make,’ that is to say, the kinds of emotions one may have.
What follows from the claim that emotions are not mere feelings or occurrences—that
emotions are judgments—is the claim that emotions are conceptually tied to behavior. If it is true
that emotions are rational, then it follows that they fit into one’s overall behavior in a significant
way, that they follow a regular pattern (one’s ‘personality’), that they can be explained in terms of
a coherent set of causes. 80 We are then responsible for our emotions to the extent that they are our
judgments. They are our doings, which are a matter of choice, in much the same way that we act,
and transform our beliefs, according to the person we hope to be, or according to the kind of life
we choose to lead.

78
Ibid., 31 – 32.
79
Ibid. See also: Solomon, “On the Passivity of the Passions” 2004; and “Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What is a ‘Cognitive
Theory’ of the Emotions and Does it Neglect Affectivity?
80
Ibid., 32.

27
 But what explains the emotions’ heat and haste that in many instances overpower us? Why,
Solomon asks, do they so often appear disruptions in our lives, threats to our successes, aberrations
in our rational behavior? Solomon identifies three distinct accounts of the so-called irrationality of
emotions: a) emotions are urgent judgments in that they are emergency behaviors in difficult
situations; b) emotions are short-term responses; and, from an anthropological perspective, c)
emotions are irrational for a society that gives premium to cool calculation and places taboos on
emotional behavior.81
Firstly, in unusual or difficult situations, emotions are rational responses that differ from cool
judgments or normal rational deliberations, in that they are prompted in urgency and in contexts
in which one’s usual repertoire of actions and considered judgments will not suffice. Emotions,
therefore, are necessarily hasty, sometimes even desperate, judgments, when one finds oneself
impotent, frustrated, or unprepared. Secondly, emotions may be rational in that they fit into the
person’s overall purposive behavior, but, being short-term responses, they are often in conflict or
is not consistent with long-term purposes. This is why emotions are called ‘myopic’, if not ‘blind’.
Finally, for a society that condemns emotion in men and belittles it in women, it is not difficult to
see that emotions are seen as irrational. For such a society, emotions are, right from the start, not
the way to go: they are bad strategies. But that they are short-term emergency responses does not
necessarily mean that they are irrational or brute, not having any content or reasonable purposes.
To approach them with lenses already colored with societal prejudices is just plain unfairness, an
attitude whose unpacking and possible rectification is precisely one of the philosophy of emotions’
main reasons for being.

2.1.5 What passivity of emotions means at the beginning of the philosophy of emotion
Taking all of these into account,82 then, one can see cognitivism’s analysis of the passivity of
emotion. Cognitive theories insisted on the emotions’ intentionality, clarified the emotions’
cognitive nature, and highlighted their important role in our thoughts and evaluations of self,
others, and the world. Through this, cognitive theories showed how we can be held responsible for
emotions. It is therefore apparent that insofar as the three ways of understanding passivity of
emotions is concerned—that emotions seem different from our active and cognitive evaluations,

81
Ibid., 34-37.
82
I note that responses to the claims of the cognitive theory have not been presented in this chapter. Such responses will be
dealt with in the next chapter, since these responses came in later years, and since the aim of the present chapter is simply to present
the claims of the cognitive theory vis-à-vis their motivations and origins.

28
that emotions carry us away in their overwhelming force, and that emotions’ meaning seems to
elude our grasp—the cognitive theory’s accomplishments are well-aimed rejoinders.
The passivity of emotion was a central problem during these years: what constitutes it, what
its place is in the emotions, and what possible implications this has for the theory of emotions in
particular, and the theory of action and our concept of mind in general. The emotions’ restoration
into a more respectable status at the same time consisted in focusing attention on explaining
passivity.

2.2 Why Passivity is No Longer as Significantly Discussed

The previous section showed how philosophers of emotion steadily fought feeling-centered
views which emphasized the emotions’ passivity. Beginning from the 1990s,83 however, the passivity
of emotion was no longer seen as huge a problem as it used to be in the philosophy of emotions.
This is largely due to the successes of the cognitive theory (which brought focus on the cognitive
and intentional nature of emotions), along with other developments in the philosophy of emotion
which transpired beginning from 1980 through 1990.

2.2.1 Research focused on the cognitive nature of the emotions

Emotions are cognitive, intentional, and can be controlled or regulated. We must, therefore,
refrain from talking about emotions using involuntary terms, such as phenomena before which we
are impotent.
Indeed, cognitivism has become so successful, it became “the touchstone of all
philosophical theorizing about emotion, for or against.”84 The demise of feeling-centered views is
itself evidence to such pre-eminence, Deigh (1994) tells us. Many more philosophers from this point
onward would write about the dominance and influence of the cognitive theory. The following
decades would see the proliferation of works on other cognitive theorists, such as William Lyons

83
It might be interesting to note that during this period, psychology also witnessed a ‘cognitive revolution’. See for instance the
works of cognitive psychologists Richard Lazarus and Andrew Ortony: Richard S. Lazarus, Emotion and adaptation, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991); and, Andrew Ortony, “Value and emotion,” in W. Kessen, A. Ortony & F. Craik (eds.), Memories, thoughts, and
emotions: Essays in honor of George Mandler, (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991), pp. 337–353. A recent review of appraisal theories in
psychology is found in Klaus R. Scherer, “The nature and study of appraisal: A review of the issues,” in K. R. Scherer, A. Schorr & T.
Johnstone (eds.), Appraisal approaches in emotion: Theory, methods, research, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 369–391.
84
Robert Solomon, “Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What is a ‘Cognitive Theory’ of the Emotions and Does it Neglect
Affectivity?” in Philosophy and the Emotions, Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1.

29
(1980), Robert Gordon (1987), O. H. Green (1992), and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000);85 or books on the
rationality of emotions, such as De Sousa (1987) and Elster (1999);86 or works on the relationship
between and among emotions, reason and the human brain;87 the implications of these to morality,
in particular, to agency, character, and responsibility;88 links with epistemology;89 or whether
philosophers in earlier periods of the history of philosophy have already produced theories of the
same kind as the cognitive theory.90
There are, however, some few works during these years that have challenged the claims of
the cognitive theory. Prominent examples to this would be philosopher Ronald De Sousa’s The
Rationality of Emotions (1987),91 notable for developing the notion of paradigm scenarios; Antonio
Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1993), and Joseph LeDoux’s The
Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of the Emotional Life (1996). These works
emphasize evolutionary explanations of emotions and their contexts. More than the content of
emotions (such as thoughts and judgments), emotions could be best understood, and explained,
with reference to behavioral training that the person has undergone from infancy through

85
William Lyons, Emotion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Robert M. Gordon, The Structure of Emotions:
Investigations in Cognitive Philosophy, (Cambridge University Press, 1987); O. H. Green, The Emotions: A Philosophical Theory, (Springer,
1992); and, Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions, (MIT Press, 2000).
86
See Ronald De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987); and, John Elster, Alchemies of
the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions, (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
87
See: Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1993); LeDoux, The
Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of the Emotional Life, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); and, Tim Dalgleish and
Michael Power (eds.), Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, (New York: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1999).
88
See: John Sabini and Mauri Silver, Emotion, Character and Responsibility, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and:
Robert Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); or: Christine Tappolet,
Emotions, Values and Agency, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
89
See: Georg Brun, Ulvi Doğuoğlu and Dominique Kuenzle. Epistemology and Emotions (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.,
2008); and, Michael S. Brady, Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience, (Oxford University Press, 2013); or, Rick
Anthony Furtak, Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience, (Oxford University Press, 2018).
90
See the following, for Ancient and Hellenistic Philosophy: John T. Fitzgerald, (ed.), Passion and Progress in Greco-Roman
Thought (New York: Routledge, 2008); Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, (New York: Oxford University,
2004); Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
and, Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).
For Medieval Philosophy: Dominik Perler, Feelings Transformed Philosophical Theories of the Emotions 1270 – 1670, Translated
from the German by Tony Crawford, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Lisa Shapiro and Mark Pickavé (eds.), Emotion and
Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the
Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry, (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 2009).
For Modern Philosophy: Ute Frevert and Thomas Dixon, Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling
1700–2000, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Susan James’s Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and, Amy M. Schmitter, “Passions and Affections,” in The Oxford Handbook in British Philosophy
in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Peter R. Anstey, (Oxford University Press, 2013).
And for general history: Alix Cohen and Robert Stern, Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical History, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017); Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015); Ute Frevert, Emotions in
History—Lost and Found, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011); Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of
Emotion, (Oxford University Press, 2010), especially its “Part II History of Emotion” which presents six articles, discussing Plato through
contemporary times; and, Keith Oatley, Emotions: A Brief History, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
91
An earlier version of his views on this book have been published much earlier in 1980, in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Explaining
Emotions.

30
adulthood, or what De Sousa calls paradigm scenarios.92 The emphasis of these works on
neurophysiology, social contexts, and behavioral expressions of emotions, follows from Darwin and
James, who are the philosophical ancestors of feeling-centered views. Save for these few works,
however, the philosophical scene was dominated by the concern for cognition, and its relationship
with the emotions.93

2.2.2 The achievements of the cognitive theory have explained away passivity
A more direct response to the issue of passivity, however, is found in Robert Gordon’s “The
Passivity of Emotions” (1986).94 In particular, this work directly addresses passivity in the second
sense: that emotions often assail us, seemingly making us powerless before them. Gordon argues
that there is a misconception on what passivity consists of, of what it is for something to be a
passion.95 Contrary to the assumption of several philosophers, Gordon writes, it is not a
consequence of the passivity of emotions that they are states with respect to which we are passive,
or that they are states we suffer. More specifically, it is not a consequence of the passivity of
emotions that they are (1) states that act on us, and (2) involuntary states, states that are not ‘up to
us.’ In arguing for this, he identified himself with philosophers who objected to the traditional
classification of emotions as passions. Specifically, philosophers like Robert Solomon who
proceeded from that very assumption, and insisted that emotions are to be classified instead as
actions. Gordon explains:

A brute-cause state such as intoxication may strike us as a paradigm of a ‘passive’ state. It may be
enlightening, therefore, to notice what the ‘passivity’ of even a brute-state such as intoxication is
compatible with: particularly, the degree of control, freedom, and responsibility it allows.
First, although one does not simply ‘intoxicate,’ that is not to say that one could not cause oneself to be
intoxicated. This is something one does by way of doing something else, namely, administering (or causing
someone to administer) an intoxicant. One can also prevent oneself from being intoxicated. This may be
done by preventing the administration of an intoxicant; or possibly, even after intake of an intoxicant, by
taking measures that prevent it from ‘taking effect.’ For intoxication may depend on, among other things,
the presence (or the absence) of certain other substances besides the intoxicant itself; thus one may be able
to take, for example, the appropriate ‘antagonist’ or ‘antidote.’ A training regimen may also affect some of

92
The concept of paradigm scenarios will be discussed in further detail in the next section.
93
For a list of the publications produced in these years, refer to Appendix D for major works in the philosophy of emotions,
which are commonly cited in the literature.
94
Robert Gordon, “The Passivity of Emotions,” in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 371 – 392. Note that
this seminal article appeared in 1986, that is, before the 1990’s which saw the explosion of work on cognition and related issues. It may
be surmised that the influence of the conclusions of this paper, along with Solomon’s works, will be seen in the focus on cognition, and
relative absence of the passivity problem, in the succeeding years.
95
See Roland Nash, “Cognitive Theories of Emotion,” in Nous, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Sep., 1989), pp. 481 – 504. A deeper discussion on
how the fact that emotions are not passions (which is an older term), meant shifting of focus in analyzing emotions, will be presented
in the third section of this chapter, on the history of emotions. The claim that there is indeed a shift in focus will also be demonstrated
further in the same section.

31
 the conditions on which intoxication depends. Finally, even where the intoxicant has already taken effect,
one may be able to curb some of the effects of intoxication, particularly effects on overt behavior.96

This is the same way of saying that, while emotions are very often reactions to events that
happen to us, it does not follow that the emotion itself is something that happens to us. Take, for
instance, the case of embarrassment, which Gordon uses as a case in point in his article. One does
not simply embarrass (intransitive verb): rather, there must be something that embarrasses one.
But is it not the case that for some cases, a subject will embarrass only if he “assents” to being
embarrassed? Or, if he first believes he is (or will become) embarrassed. Furthermore, even when
embarrassment has taken effect, one can curb some of the effects of the embarrassment. Gordon
then insists:
[E]mbarrassants are not ingested substances but perceived (or otherwise “ “cognized”) states of affairs, and
the effects of such cognitions notoriously depend on other cognitive and attitudinal states a person is in…
[T]he grammatically passive character of being intoxicated is compatible with the subject’s having a wide
range of active roles to play in controlling his state. Any of the points of possible intervention I have
mentioned should be taken into consideration, it would seem, in an adequate treatment of responsibility
97
for being intoxicated or for being embarrassed.

What this means for us is, in Gordon’s defense of the cognitive thesis (along with Robert Solomon),
he was able to clarify some very important features of the passivity of emotions. While it is true that
‘we do not think our way into most emotions,’ or that ‘we do not simply decide to have an emotion,’
it becomes clear, however, that there is room for some degree of control and responsibility for many
emotional experiences.98
At this point, it is important to note that Gordon’s conclusions in this work provide invaluable
illumination on the discourse. Gordon put deep nuance on the third way of speaking of passivity
(‘an emotion’s meaning often eludes our full understanding, if not control’). At the same time, he
effectively refuted the first and second senses of passivity: that emotions seem different from our
active cognitive evaluations, and that emotions often assail us. The passive character of our
language in expressing and describing many emotions is compatible with a wide range of active
roles for the subject of the emotion. To say that one is embarrassed is to be knowledgeable of
embarrassing situations, and to perceive—that is to say, to know—that one is in an embarrassing
situation, and possibly to think of ways to escape such a situation.99 To say that one grieves over the
loss of a dear friend is to say that the loss of a dear friend is indeed an occasion for grieving. Also,

96
Gordon, “The Passivity of Emotions,” 377.
97
Ibid., 378 – 379.
98
See also: Robert Solomon, “On the Passivity of the Passions,” in Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 11 – 29.
99
This is why some philosophers would urge us to ‘shape our action space’ instead. Or for that matter, to recognize which aspects
of our situations are within our control, and which are not, as so often the Stoics, both ancient and contemporary, remind us.

32
an event or state of affairs—the loss of a dear friend—happens to us.100 The emotion of grief is our
reaction to this state of affairs—upon knowing it, upon cognizing it. It is events or states of affairs—
that I have indeed lost a dear friend—that assail us, not the emotion itself. The fact that my dear
friend is irrevocably and permanently gone, shocks me, overwhelming me in ways I cannot accept
yet, as it may.

2.2.3 General skepticism toward ‘emotions’ and ‘passivity’101

Finally, the third reason why passivity, beginning in the 1990s, is no longer as significantly
discussed as it was during the early years of the philosophy of emotions as a field: Emotions are
not a natural kind; hence we must shy away from discussing them as if they fall under a single
unified category, just like what the category of passivity avails us. This has been the claim of the
eminent philosopher Amelie Oksenberg Rorty in her introductory piece, and her article
contribution, in one of the earliest collection of works done on the philosophy of emotions,
Explaining Emotions (1980): emotions do not form a natural class. Hence, her battle cry, even in her
more recent articles, of which one such telling example, as it reflects precisely what she means by
insisting that emotions do not form a natural class, is entitled, “Enough Already with Theories of
Emotion” (2004).102 This claim has also been forwarded by John Sabini and Maury Silver, in “On the
Possible Non-Existence of Emotions: The Passions” (1996).103 Furthermore, this same position has
since been staunchly defended by philosopher of science Paul E. Griffiths, which he developed in
his book, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Concepts (1997), and other
works.104 This claim may be understood as two-pronged: (1) emotions do not constitute a proper
class, there is no single criterion (or set of criteria) that define ‘emotion,’ that is why they are not a

100
Elster (2004) makes a similar observation, though coming from a different position than Gordon: “The spontaneous urge of
the angry man to take revenge, or of the envious man to destroy the object of his envy, is a brute fact of human nature—neither rational
nor irrational. These urges are not passions. They become passions only when they override reason rather than submitting to it. Yet even
when overriding reason, passion wants, as we have seen, to justify itself by reason.” See his: “Emotions and Rationality,” 231-32.
101
See Robert Solomon, “In Defense of Emotions (and Passions too),” in Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior (1997) 27:4, p.
489.
102
See: Amelie Oksenberg Rorty’s “Introduction,” and “Explaining Emotions,” in Explaining Emotions, pp. 1-8, pp. 103-126; and
her “Enough Already with Theories of Emotions,” in Robert Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling, pp. 269-278.
103
See John Sabini and Maury Silver, “On the Possible Non-Existence of Emotions: The Passions,” in the Journal for the Theory
of Social Behavior (1996) 26:4, pp. 375 - 398.
104
See: Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Concepts, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997), pp. 14-17, 241-247; and his “Is Emotion a Natural Kind?” in Robert Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling, pp. 233-249. His other
works include the following: “Cladistic Classification and Functional Explanation.” Philosophy of Science (1994) 61.2: 206–27; “Darwinism,
Process Structuralism, and Natural Kinds,” in Philosophy of Science 63 (Supplement: PSA 1996 contributed papers), S1–S9; “The Historical
Turn in the Study of Adaptation,” in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47.4: 511–32; “Squaring the Circle: Natural Kinds with
Historical Essences,” in Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by R. A. Wilson, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

33
‘natural kind,’105 and (2) an emotion is not a ‘thing’ or entity, not a ‘distinctive item in the furniture
of the mind.’106
According to this claim, to speak of ‘emotions’—whether as evaluative intentional judgments,
perceptual feelings, etc.—is to proceed from the assumption that they are an undifferentiated block
of phenomenon forming a single kind. In the case of the passivity of emotions, involuntary talk of
the emotions, which passions evoke, is largely predicated upon the (single) category of passivity.107
The idea that emotions render us passive has an underlying assumption: that emotions are more or
less the same. That is, (all) emotions are ‘ways of being acted upon.’ Or: emotions belong to the
category of passivity. But Rorty (1980 and 2004) makes a case against this position, based on the
history of the philosophy of mind. She tells us that emotions have come to form a heterogeneous
group, after a long history of debates concerning their classification. For this very reason, a still
larger problem is that such a classification was developed for different reasons, based on different
grounds, and against the background of shifting contrasts.108 Rorty explains:

Emotions do not form a natural class. A set of distinctions that has generally haunted the philosophy of
mind stands in the way of giving good descriptions of the phenomena. We have inherited distinctions
between being active and being passive; between psychological states primarily explained by physical
processes and psychological states not reducible to nor adequately explained by physical processes;
distinction between states that are primarily nonrational and those that are either rational or irrational;
between voluntary and nonvoluntary states. Once these distinctions were drawn, types of psychological
activities were then parcelled out en bloc to one or another side of the dichotomies. That having been done,
the next step was to argue reclassification. Historically, the list of emotions has expanded as a result of
these controversies. For instance, the opponents of Hobbes, wanting to secure benevolence, sympathy and
other disinterested attitudes as counterbalances to self-interest, introduced them as sentiments with
motivational power. Passions became emotions and were classified as activities. When the intentionality
of emotions was discussed, the list expanded still further: ressentiment, aesthetic and religious awe, anxiety
and dread were included. Emotions became affects or attitudes. As the class grew, its members became
more heterogenous; the analysis became more ambiguous; and counterexamples were explained away by
charges of self-deception.109

105
See Griffiths, 1997, 14 – 17; and Griffiths, 2004, 233. What Griffiths mean, in more technical terms by ‘natural kind’ is that the
term is used to denote categories that admit reliable extrapolation from samples of the category to the whole category. Based on
fundamental practices of induction and explanation, a category may be considered a natural kind, when correlations observed in a set
of samples can be reliably ‘projected’ (based on Goodman 1954) to other instances of the category.
106
See Solomon, 1997, 489, where he also referred to Robert Gordon in the new Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995): ‘The
various states typically classified as emotions appear to be linked together only by overlapping family resemblances rather than by a set
of necessary and sufficient conditions.’ (p. 222). A similar statement is also found in R. S. Peters, “The Education of the Emotions” in
Education and the Development of Reason (London: Routledge and Kegan-Paul, 1963).
107
R.S. Peters (1962), for instance, makes the observation that what is distinctive about emotions (say, what is distinctive about
talking of fear and jealousy as emotions, rather than as motives) is evident when we look at the standard uses of the word ‘emotions’ and
its derivatives. Such uses provide important clues to the work done by the concept of emotion. See his: “Emotions and the Category of
passivity,” 119.
108
Rorty, “Introduction,” 1.
109
Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” 104-105. The issue of the history of emotions, in this case in relation to developments in the
philosophy of mind, will be discussed further in the succeeding sections of this chapter.

34
Specifically, Rorty (1982) identifies the period from Descartes to Rousseau, when the mind’s
“domain was redefined, its activities were redescribed, and its powers were redistributed.” During
this time, it was thought that one way of tracing changes in the mind is to trace changes in one of
its activities, namely, the transformation of the passions to emotions and sentiments. The passions,
once thought of as reactions to invasions from something external, became the very activities of the
mind, became its very motions.110 This problem on the history of emotions—a recent subfield in
emotion research—would eventually become a critical point of investigation in the philosophy of
emotion of the coming decades, where the problem would develop a life of its own, prompting even
the creation of an entirely new subfield.111 For this chapter, however, suffice it to say that this
problem in the history of emotions, concerning origins and developments in the process of
classification, have led to skepticism on whether there is interesting common ground among such
a wide range of phenomena, or whether there is such a thing as the emotions at all. 112
To make matters more complicated, Rorty identifies specific cases that put into question
existing classifications of emotions.113 Some emotions, for instance, can be induced physiologically,
controlled chemically, and behaviorally identifiable. Some are cross-culturally invariant (e.g.,
anger), whereas others are highly culturally variable (e.g. Japanese amae114). Some emotions may be
classified based on the passivity/activity distinction, still others on voluntary/involuntary and
behaviorally/intentionally defined.115 Thus, the diverse psychological states and processes that fall
under the vernacular category of emotion suggest that they are too varied that there are no
necessary and sufficient ground conditions that ground them, but only resemblances.116

110
See Rorty, “From Passions,” 1982, 159.
111
See: Anna Wierzbicka, “The ‘History of Emotions’ and the Future of Emotion Research,” in Emotion Review, Vol. 2, No. 3 (July
2010) 269 – 273; and, Kirk Essary, “Passions, Affections, or Emotions?” On the Ambiguity of 16th-Century Terminology,” in Emotion
Review, 2017, 1-8.
112
Dominik Perler (2018) refers to this problem in the philosophy of emotions as the problem of unity: “The problem of unity, [in
general], asks whether there is such a thing as the emotions at all. Is the concept of emotion sufficiently definite that it can be applied
to a unified class of phenomena? An affirmative answer seems obvious, because we seem to find it easy to assign joy, fear, anger, outrage,
and many other emotions to a single class, which we distinguish from the class of beliefs and from that of sensations.” See his Feelings
Transformed, 4.
113
R.S. Peters (1962), too, have earlier cautioned against misconceptions caused by treating emotions as classificatory terms, as
did Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949). See his: “Emotions and the Category of Passivity,” 120-121.
114
amae (甘え) is a noun used for “a uniquely Japanese need to be in good favour with, and be able to depend on, the people
around oneself”. The Kanji 甘 literally means “sweet, to coax, to be content” but its nuance is to be dependent on others or to lack self-
reliance. See for instance Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence, (Tokyo, Japan: Kodansha), 1971. And: Chie Nakane, Japanese Society,
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 1970.
115
Rorty (1986) demonstrates this in great detail in her “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love Is Not Love Which Alters
Not When It Alteration Finds,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, X (1986), pp. 399 – 412. Specifically, how a set of psychological attitudes
such as love, joy, and perhaps some sorts of desires, can be individuated by the character of the subject, the character of the object, and
the relation between them.
116
See Robert Gordon, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995), p. 222. See also his “In Defense of the Emotions,” 1997, 489.

35
 Griffiths (1997 and 2004) adds further that, “[t]he psychological, neuroscientific, and
biological theories that best explain any particular subset of human emotions will not adequately
explain all human emotions.”117 One cannot, for instance, contrast the general class, emotions,
together with its specific varieties, with other classes such as ‘motives’ and ‘cognitive attitudes’.118
In our previous example, grief is experienced upon knowing about the passing of a dear friend. But
in this particular case, grief, the ‘emotion,’ cannot be easily separated, nor contrasted, from the
cognitive attitude toward the proposition that, indeed, a dear friend is gone.
We must, therefore, be wary of referring to ‘emotions,’ as so often scholars in previous years
have. Psychologist Peter Zachar (2010), in a much later date, would go as far as completely dissolve
emotions.119 Solomon, too, calls Sabini and Silver’s (1997) position as a form of ‘eliminativism’.120
Still, the other, and what might be called weaker version, of this position, is to shy away from
umbrella categories, such as ‘emotions’ or ‘passions,’ and direct attention instead to the
investigation of individual emotions.121 Such is the case with works in the following decades: Patricia
Greenspan (1995) on guilt;122 Jerome Neu (2000) on jealousy;123 Martha Nussbaum (2001, 2004, 2013,
2016 and 2018) on compassion and grief, disgust, love and compassion, anger, and fear,
respectively;124 and, Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Frabrice Teroni (2012) on shame.125

117
See Griffiths, 2004, 235. Apply this, for instance, to Rorty’s (1980) list of examples of emotions: fear, religious awe, exuberant
delight, pity, loving devotion, panic, regret, anxiety, nostalgia, rage, disdain, admiration, gratitude, pride, remorse, indignation,
contempt, disgust, resignation, compassion, etc.
118
It should be noted that this is usually done—distinguishing emotions from motives, for instance— to understand better its
precise relationship with yet other classes, such as action, as in the case of R. S. Peters, in his “Emotions and the Category of Passivity,”
1962, pp. 117, 120-122.
119
Peter Zachar, “Has there Been Conceptual Progress in The Science of Emotion,” in Emotion Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (October 2010)
381–382 . Zachar states his objective in this short commentary piece: “[to argue] that the lack of consensus on emotion as a unitary
construct could be considered to represent the dissolution of emotions.”
120
While Patricia and Paul Churchland have been called ‘neurological eliminativists’ for claiming that folk psychology is wrong,
and that there are no beliefs and desires but only brain processes. Sabini and Silver are less extreme: for them, ‘at least some emotions
do not exist, such as anger and fear, which we ordinarily call emotions.’ Emphasis is mine.
121
Note that Griffiths (1997, 17; and 2004, 233) does not share this. In What Emotions Really Are, he argued that his slogan
‘emotions are not a natural kind,’ is probably true of many specific emotion categories, such as emotion and love.
122
Patricia S. Greenspan, Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
123
Jerome Neu, A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion, (Oxford University Press, 2000).
124
Martha Nussbaum on grief and compassion: UT (2001); on disgust and shame: Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the
Law (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004); on love and compassion: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); on anger: Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment,
Generosity, and Justice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); and finally, on fear: The Monarchy of Fear, (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2018).
The effort to focus on particular emotions is particularly heavy with Nussbaum, whose work on the UT (2001) led her into the
need to look closer at specific emotions, noting their identity, contexts, relationship with other emotions, etc. She has mentioned this
too in her interviews with various philosophy outlets. See her profile in the Emotion Researcher entitled “Ong Anger, Disgust and Love”
published in February 2017, URL: http://emotionresearcher.com/on-anger-disgust-love/; and in the Daily Stoic, entitled “Martha
Nussbaum: The Renowned Philosoher on Stoicism, Emotions and Must Read Books,” URL: https://dailystoic.com/martha-nussbaum/
125
Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Frabrice Teroni, In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion (Oxford University Press,
2012).

36
 Such a skepticism regarding the plausibility of a general class of ‘emotions,’ along with
dispelled misconceptions concerning the nature of passivity of emotions that philosophers such as
Gordon have done, and the immense attention given to cognition and related issues, might be seen
to have contributed to the distance felt from the need to look closer at passivity. However, one
might wonder why, despite the insistence of philosophers such as Rorty and Griffiths, theorizing
about the emotions continued, and proliferated. While there are various works on individual
emotions, such as fear, grief, anger, etc., philosophers nonetheless continued with referring to such
as ‘emotions’.
Griffiths and Rorty’s steady insistence on their claim prompted pointed responses from
leading cognitive theorists and philosophers of emotion, particularly, Robert Solomon (1997 and
2004), Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2000), and Martha Nussbaum (2001). For one, Nussbaum and Solomon
think that, in defending their position, Griffiths, and Sabini and Silver, fall into the same trap they
claim to have snared their opponents. Griffiths, and Sabini and Silver, in criticizing the reliance on
ordinary use and ordinary conceptions of ‘feelings,’ ‘emotions,’ etc. are themselves uncritical in
using such, in the way they use those terms loosely.126 Nussbaum, Ben-Ze’ev and Solomon, warn
against such forms of reductionism in the treatment of folk psychology, as we find in Griffiths,
Sabini and Siver.
Solomon, for instance, does not find a problem with starting the analysis of emotions with
‘family resemblances,’ and from there, particularize. Nussbaum, on the other hand, is Aristotelian
and Socratic in approach: start with “experience [in other words, what Griffiths, Sabini, Silver, and
Rorty would call ordinary terms, conceptions; or simply, folk psychology], explore differences
among different emotions, and among different experiences of a given emotion, while retaining
enough definiteness to illuminate the diverse phenomena.” It starts with people’s general ability to
group instances but deploys philosophical investigation to give theoretical explanations. It starts
with what people think is intuitively true in their ordinary experiences of emotion but does not rely
on ordinary notions for clear and sufficient definitions. In this procedure, she argues, as she did in
the entirety of the Upheavals, one will see that a core phenomenon will remain, which we call
‘emotion,’ in ordinary parlance as well as in serious academic scholarship.127
But also, many philosophers do not share Rorty’s bid to cease with talking about, or more
specifically, theorizing, about ‘emotions’. Some philosophers find her charges against theory

126
See Nussbaum, UT, 2001, 8, footnote 6; and Solomon, “In Defense,” 1997, 491 – 496.
127
See Nussbaum, UT, 8 – 11.

37
construction as too pessimistic, if not unfair, especially when she explicitly referred to the
procedures of theory construction as simply tactics of cleverness in avoiding rebuttals: “Flush with
the enthusiasm of theory construction, philosophers and psychologists can nevertheless use two
strategies to respond to apparent counterexamples: species qualification and astute
gerrymandering.” Philosophers such as Nussbaum (2001) would respond by a call for philosophers
to advance theory construction, rather than cease from doing the work. In the Upheavals (2001), for
instance, Nussbaum defends her project and procedure of analyzing the emotions against such
skepticism, while affirming the value of looking into individual emotions (although for reasons that
are contrary to the skeptic’s):
[D]espite this focus on certain cases [such as shame, disgust, envy, and anger], it is also clear
that my project is to construct an analytical framework for thinking about emotions in general.
This procedure requires comment, because some would claim that there is no interesting
common ground among such a wide range of phenomena [referring to Griffiths, 1997]. One can
only defeat that kind of skepticism by forging ahead and proposing an account that is
illuminating, and yet does not neglect significant difference among the emotions… I agree with
the skeptic to the extent that I think any adequate account of emotions need to go into complex
details about the specific content of particular emotions; little of interest can be said without
that. Nonetheless, when we do get into the analysis of particular emotions, we find that there
are close relationships among them, both conceptual and causal, that we need to trace if we are
128
to have a good understanding even of the specific varieties.

Finally, it should be noted, the claim that to talk about emotions is to necessarily hold that
they are a single undifferentiated block, is far from true. One can speak about emotions, whether
generally or individually, while maintaining a reflexive, if not skeptical, attitude concerning their
nature. This is precisely the work of theory construction, and works on specific emotions, as
Nussbaum astutely reminds us: to forge a way forward to understanding emotions better by looking
at their potential unity, relatives, differences, etc. The next decades in the philosophy of emotions
will see precisely this: marching forward in pursuit of understanding better what emotions are.
Particularly, this would mean addressing the cognitive theory along with other tasks. For this will
mean asking what happened to passivity during these years, in specific developments.

2.3 Chapter Summary

This chapter showed that a close look at the literature in the philosophy of emotion from
1990 onwards shows that passivity was no longer as significantly discussed as the early years of the
field. The years preceding 1990 saw the emergence of philosophical works that emphasized the

128
Ibid., 8.

38
restoration of emotion—a task which can be only be accomplished if one gives central importance
to confronting the problem passivity and its place in emotions. If this was the direction that the
philosophy of emotion was taking at the time, why then did the passivity problem decrease in
importance?
This chapter examined developments in the philosophy of emotion from 1957 through 1973,
and then from 1973 through 2000. There are at least three primary reasons that could explain
passivity’s diminution. Research focused on Cognition and Judgment. Passivity was considered
explained away by cognitivism. There was also a general skepticism concerning the plausibility of a
category of ‘emotion’ or any other umbrella category such as the category of the passivity of
emotion. Especially given that the various psychological activities and processes that fall under such
categories are too varied they do not form a natural kind. The next chapter will trace what happened
to the passivity of emotion afterward.

39
 Chapter 3

Passivity Problem Persists

3.1 Cognitivism challenged: identity-claim, voluntarism, and optimistic rationalism

Concerning the thought-centeredness of cognitive theory, Solomon, in his earlier thought
claimed that emotions are judgments that are actively—though unreflectively—made by us.129 By
‘judgment,’ Solomon means some kind of perception, or a way of perceiving and understanding the
world:130 of indignation, the judgment that John stole my car; of grief, the judgment that my dear
friend is gone. Martha Nussbaum, on the other hand, claims that emotions are judgments of value
and importance, which always involve cognitive appraisal or evaluation of the salience of the object
of emotion.131 By ‘judgment’, Nussbaum means ‘ways of seeing an object’ or ‘complex beliefs’ about
the emotion’s intentional object. This is essential in the identity of the emotion. The aboutness of
emotions comes from the active way of seeing and interpreting x as y, that is, in the way the object
is perceived: in fear, as a threat, but with some chance for escape; in hope, as in some uncertainty,
but with a chance for a good outcome; in grief, as loss; in love, as invested with a special sort of
radiance.132
Because of these claims, Robinson (2004, 2010) have consistently referred to the cognitive
theories of Solomon and Nussbaum as the ‘judgment’ theory of emotion. For obvious reasons, this
refers to cognitive theory’s claim that at the heart of emotion is a cognitive state: an emotion either
is or essentially includes a judgment or belief. If I am afraid of a huge barking dog in front of me, I
do not just experience a pang; I judge the dog to be dangerous to me. At the heart of love is the
judgment that he is a very important person to me; at the heart of fear is the judgment that some
bad event is impending.133 Now, the claims of Solomon and Nussbaum show that their theories do
not only emphasize the centrality of thought in emotion but more so, assimilate emotion with
judgment. The relationship of emotion to thought becomes one of (exhaustive) identity: the

129
See Solomon “Emotions and Choice” (1973), and Not Passion’s Slave (2007). Chapter 8 of The Passions also discussed this claim
extensively. See his The Passions, (Garden City: Anchor, 1996).
130
Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” 1973, 27.
131
See Nussbaum, UT, 2001, 4, 23-28, and passim. This claim is also defended in her succeeding works on emotions: Hiding from
Humanity (2004), Political Emotions (2013), Anger and Forgiveness (2016) and Monarchy of Fear (2018). This very claim is the title for her
contribution in Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion (2004): “Emotions as Judgments of Value and
Importance,” pp. 183-199.
132
Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance,” 2004, 188.
133
See Jenefer Robinson, “Emotion: Biological Fact or Social Construction?”, in Robert Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling,
2004, pp. 28 – 43; and her “Bob Solomon and William James: A Rapprochement,” in Emotion Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan 2010) 53–60

40
emotion just is the cognitive state.134 This is what critics refer to when they speak of an ‘identity-
claim’ in the cognitive theory: precisely the claim of cognitive theories that the emotion is identical
to the cognitive state.
It should be recalled that the previous chapter of this thesis has shown that the identity claim
is part and parcel of the effort to make emotion more respectable. Restore the emotions by
identifying or assimilating it with belief. The next question, however, is whether this effort has (or
could) achieved the result it originally intended to accomplish. Cognitive theories have been under
considerable fire from the 1990s onwards precisely due to the identity-claim. There are at least three
major comments directed to cognitive theory, insofar as the identity-claim is concerned: first, the
question on voluntarism and optimistic rationalism; second, the question of redundancy; and third,
the case of hot cognition. All these pose a threat to the claim of the cognitivist.
Nussbaum and Solomon draw on a form of voluntarism to support their view that emotion,
as forms of judgment, is under our control. That is, voluntarism in the sense that emotions are
within the scope of voluntary action, within the bounds of what we can control, shape, regulate,
redirect, etc. Nussbaum (1994) based on her reading of the Stoics, offers an account of judgment as
assent to a proposition and argues for our control of belief in terms of the capacity to withhold such
assent at will. Judgment in this case is something like the ascent to a proposition, where the ascent
is made by an act of will, which may be suspended, withheld, curbed, etc.
If emotions are like judgments, we should be able to control emotion through the exercise of
will. The problem is: is voluntarism about beliefs and judgments plausible, at least in a radical form?
Bernard Williams in “Deciding what to believe” (1973), for instance, interrogates this kind of
voluntarism about beliefs. We do not normally choose, Williams says, what to believe. Being aware
that appearances may mislead, we may examine our beliefs critically, and we can revise them.135 But
the conditions under which we can do so may not be entirely a matter of will.136 The cognitive

134
It is for this reason that Solomon and Nussbaum’s theories are also variously called ‘pure cognitive theory’, ‘extreme cognitive
theory’, ‘judgmentalist theory’, or ‘identity theory’. For a comprehensive discussion of this, see: Rietti, “Being Good with Feeling,”
especially Chapter 3.
Spinoza is also believed to hold the same view: emotions are essentially ‘thoughts’ moved by desire, though they are not
necessarily unreasonable. For a comprehensive analysis of Spinoza’s view, see Jerome Neu, “Emotion, Thought and Therapy: A Study of
Hume, Spinoza and Freud on Thought and Passion,” PhD Dissertation, Oxford University, 1974. See also his A Tear is an Intellectual
Thing, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
135
Rietti, 2003, 91, 93-94, Williams 1973, “Deciding what to believe.”
136
Very recently, Amia Srinivasan (2013) argued along similar lines, when she wrote about epistemic fragility, or the ‘way in which
our knowledge – of our own minds, of whether we are in violation of the epistemic and ethical norms, and of the philosophical truths
themselves – is hostage to forces outside our control’. See her “The Fragile Estate: Essays on Luminosity, Normativity and
Metaphilosophy,” PhD Thesis, Oxford University, 2013. Essays in this thesis have been published in various journals: “Are We
Luminous?”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90 (2), 2013, 294 – 319; and, “The Archimedean Urge,” in Philosophical
Perspectives, 20 (1), 2015, 325 – 362.

41
theory, in its voluntarist thesis, may be seen to be endorsing some form of optimistic rationalism.
That is to say, optimistic rationalism concerning our capacity to suspend belief in regarding
situations, or to curb them at will. But the intensity of emotional experiences throws shade over the
nature and possibility of such optimism. One cannot, for instance, simply withhold tears upon
knowing the death of a very dear loved one. It is this inability to withhold tears in emotional
experiences that the cognitive theory has set out to explain in its original effort to lend the emotions
respectability.

3.1.1 Other worries on the identity claim: questions on redundancy and hot cognition
There is also the question of redundancy and hot cognition, which the identity-claim brings,
along with voluntarism and optimistic rationalism. In general, the questions on redundancy and
hot cognition ask: why the redundancy of emotions and judgments? Does emotion have a distinct
contribution to make or to add, to judgments? Nussbaum and Solomon say emotions are judgments
about things that concern us. Either they are sources of salience, or they reveal patterns of salience
among objects of attention and lines of inquiry.137 They are cognitions that are hot precisely because
of this—they are evaluative judgments in the sense that they speak about things that are of extreme
importance to us, within our goals, in our picture of the good human life. This is why they are
distinct from cold, disinterested, and disengaged forms of judgments. The problem is, if this is the
case, then hot cognition will not help the cause of cognitivism. Because now, cognitive theories
must explain two things: first, why emotions have such hotness which typical beliefs and judgments
do not usually have; and second, the many cases when we can hold evaluative beliefs unemotionally
and disinterestedly, such as what other philosophers of emotion would call ‘calm passions’.
Ordinary experience, too, says that emotion is distinct from belief; so that it is counterintuitive to

137
De Sousa (1980) recognized this too. See his “The Rationality of Emotion,” 1980, 458. The wide-ranging implications of this
feature of emotion is recognized by many epistemologists too. Emotions give focus on certain aspects of a particular situation; here they
act as “spotlights.” But more than putting some aspects of a situation to the fore, for scrutiny, they are “a frame of mind or pattern of
attention that synchronizes feelings, attitudes, actions, and circumstances.” In other words, they can be likened to beliefs in the sense
of being attitudes to certain propositions or situations. See: Ellen Peters, “The Functions of Affect in the Construction of Preference,” in
Sarah Lichtenstein and Paul Slovic (eds.) The Construction of Preference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also
Catherine Z. Elgin, Considered Judgment, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and, her “True Enough,” in Ernest Sosa and
Enrique Villanueva (eds.), “Epistemology,” in Philosophical Issues 14 (2004): 113–31.
The feature of salience is also intechangeably called “seriousness” by other philosophers of emotion. Emotions, in this sense,
are states of mind where an object is taken seriously. Monteleone (2017), for instance, explains that seriousness involves a
phenomenological change in attention and non-indifference towards an object. See John M. Monteleone, “Concerns and the Seriousness
of Emotions,” in Dialectica, Vol. 71, 2 (2017), pp. 181 – 207.

42
say that emotion is belief. Rietti (2003) sums up these threats which the cognitivist thesis must
stand:
The identity theorists [Nussbaum and Solomon] posit that emotion just is evaluative judgment. But they
do not explain why evaluative judgment should be emotion. And there seems to be nothing specifically
emotional that is essential to the judgmentalist account of emotion. On the other hand, hot cognition
looks suspiciously like judgment with affective tone. So it seems that either the identity-assumption has to
go, or emotion is redundant. For if any role could be performed by evaluative judgment, it seems we do
not need emotion.138

Hence, as Robinson (1995, 2010) and Prinz (2004) have noted, it is quite possible to make whatever
judgment is identified as constituting a particular emotion, without actually being in that emotional
state. One can judge that one has suffered a loss without being sad; one can be resigned
unemotional and indifferent. Otherwise, if the cognitive theory will not be able to explain this, then
emotion, on this picture, looks like an irruptive and intrusive state, a hot commotion against a
general background of cold judgments. This subverts the status of judgments, as well as on the
plausibility of the identification itself. Because, if emotion is something beyond just judgment, the
identity-assumption collapses. In the end, if emotion is to acquire restoration, or respectability, by
identification with judgment, we would need not only to establish that this identity holds, but also
that judgment itself possesses the respectability that it is intended to lend emotion by
identification.
In the end, the adversary of cognitive theory charges it with extremism: it is just ‘too strong’.
The cognitive theory is “Apollonian”:139 it leaves out what is messy and ungovernable in the life of
the passions. This shortcoming on the side of the cognitive theory is precisely the reason why the
succeeding years would see the emergence of new approaches in the theory of emotion, such as
perceptual accounts.
Here then lies our case for passivity. It is worthy of note that even Rietti (2003) affirms that
these arise from concerns regarding passivity, albeit in a sporadic manner: “[I]f passivity as such is
not a problem, there seems to be less motivation for singling out emotion over judgment on the
count of passivity, and less motivation for identifying emotion with judgment to lend it
respectability.”140 The problems surrounding the voluntarist aspect of the cognitive thesis, and the
need to explain the hotness of cognition, if emotions are indeed judgments or cognitions, all arise
from passivity. Insofar as our three pegs are concerned, the cognitive theory stands wanting of

138
Sophie Rietti, “Being Good with Feeling: Some Problems about the Place of Emotion in Moral Agency,” PhD dissertation,
University of Edinburgh, 2003, Edinburgh Research Archive, p. 97.
139
Nussbaum, for instance, acknowledge the presence of this criticism in the UT, 2001, 16. See her footnote 11, where she identifies
Blackburn, 1998, 89, for having held this charge against the cognitive theory.
140
Rietti, 2003, 95.

43
sufficient explanations as to why, in the enterprise of identifying emotions with thoughts (first
sense of passivity), they are faced with the challenge to do exactly the opposite: explain the sense
in which emotions are not judgments, emotions being hot and irruptive. Concerning the third sense
of passivity, that an emotion’s meaning eludes us, the voluntarist could mean, it does not elude us,
essentially. We can suspend judgments (if indeed emotions are judgments) or curb ascent to
specific judgments. But this necessitates a response to the fact that there we do not always choose
what we believe, at least in the degree the voluntarist makes it appear. This also brings us back to
the case of hotness (and urgency) of emotional situations. Where shock overwhelms us or grief
tears the self apart, one is hardly able to find time to suspend nor restrain how one sees the world.

3.1.2 Neglect of feelings and the body

Critics say that cognitivism underplays a central experiential feature of emotion: they are
felt. Whether occurrent or dispositional, an underlying relation to feelings seems fairly basic to
identify emotion. Take, for instance, the case of grief. One might not feel the emotion all the time,
but if someone’s feeling grieved never manifests as an occurrent feeling at all, one would think that
such a person is at least rather unusual and unfortunate in their psychological makeup. If feeling
grieved never manifests, we might not believe such a person is genuinely grieving.
This is why many find as incredulous Anaxagoras’s Stoic response to his son’s death told in
a famous anecdote on Stoicism. The story is narrated to us by Cicero, wherein we learn that
Anaxagoras received his son’s death with the remarkable words: “I was already aware that I had
begotten a mortal” (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 3.30). 141 Not many people would find this radical
detachment of the Stoic sage—the detachment that ‘greets slavery and even torture with
equanimity,’ the detachment which receives the news of a child or a parent’s death with perfect
calmness and steady composedness—fit nor agreeable in capturing what emotions are and how we
experience them.
This concern for feelings is brought about by worries on the identity-claim of cognitive
theories, specifically on the voluntarist feature, and the case of hot cognition. While it is true that
feeling-centered views were heavily criticized for their inability to account for the intentionality of
emotions, their concern for the phenomenology of emotion is nonetheless widely recognized. Even

141
See Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 363. See also her footnote 19, in the same page, where she explains that this story about Anaxagoras is told by
various philosophers to use him as example of the right Stoic response. It occurs in many primary sources: Diels-Kranz, A33; Diogenes
Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers, 2.13; and, cited by Posidonius, in Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis (On the Views of
Hippocrates and Plato), 4.7.9-10, 282D.

44
in the philosophy of mind, the concern for feelings, their hotness. and localization in the body, has
been recognized early on. Goldie (2010) says: “The emotions are messier, seeming somehow to be
represented on both sides of the mind-body divide—both paradigmatically mental, and
paradigmatically bodily.” Uncertainty concerning this specific feature of emotions, Goldie tells us,
is precisely what explains the tendency in Anglo Saxon philosophy of mind to assimilate emotion
into other more familiar (and supposedly better understood) kinds of mental state such as belief
and desire, such as what cognitive theories did. This tendency is exemplified, for instance, in
decision theory and functionalism. This is what, Goldie notes, “[left] the ‘feeling’ side of emotion to
the psychologists”.142
This demand for feeling refers to the place of the body in the talk of emotions. Whether by
‘feeling,’ we mean physical sensations or the awareness of physical occurrences, the point is, they
are felt in (or by) the body. This is why Solomon was compelled to revise his claim on the emotions
in his later thought when he then said: emotions are judgments that can be ‘bodily judgments’
analogous to ‘kinesthetic judgments’.143 Solomon (2003) writes that the motivations behind his
revision of his initial view are precisely the concern for feelings and the place of the body:

“[W]hat has lead me to this increasing concern about both the role of the body and the nature and
role of feelings in emotion is in fact just the suspicion that my own cognitive theory had been cut too
‘thin,’ that in the pursuit of an alternative to the feeling theory I had veered too far in the other
direction. I am now coming to appreciate that accounting for feelings (not just sensations) in emotion
is not a secondary concern and not independent of appreciating the essential role of the body in
emotional experience… I now agree that feelings have been ‘left out’ of the cognitive account, but I
also believe that ‘cognition’ or ‘judgment’ properly construed captures that missing ingredient. The
analogy with kinesthetic judgments suggests the possibility of bringing feelings of the body into
analysis of emotion in a straightforward way.144

Even with this acknowledgment of the place for and the body in emotion, Solomon maintains two
things. First, that “‘cognition’ or ‘judgment’ properly construed captures that missing ingredient.”
Second, that this is still compatible with his voluntarist thesis:
[B]ut between intentional and full-blown deliberate action and straightforward passivity [in this case, the
first sense of passivity: that emotion seem importantly different from cognition, being experiences felt by
the body]…there is an enormous range of behaviors and ‘undergoings’ that might nevertheless be
145
considered within the realm of the voluntary and as matters of responsibility.

142
See Goldie, “Introduction,” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, 2010, 1
143
See his “Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What is a Cognitive of the Emotions and Does it Neglect Affectivity?” in Anthony
Hatzimoysis (ed.) Philosophy and the Emotions, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1-18; reprinted as Chapter 11 of Not
Passion’s Slave in 2007.
144
See his “Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What is a ‘Cognitive Theory’ of the Emotions and Does it Neglect Affectivity?” in
Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed.), Philosophy and the Emotions, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12 – 13.
145
Ibid., 17. This voluntarist thesis, however, especially its implications to control over emotions, have been heavily criticized.
See, for instance, Roberts (1984) piercing review, in Robert C. Roberts, “Solomon on the Control of Emotions,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. 44, No. 3 (March 1984), pp. 395 – 403.

45
In Solomon’s view, therefore, a cognitive theory can affirm the essential role of both cognition and
feelings. To put it in another way, a cognitive theory in maintaining the crucial role of judgments
can have an equally important place for feelings.
This concern for feelings and the body also lead to the revision of cognitivism (not only that
of Solomon) into a weaker version, that of William Lyons (1980). Lyons felt compelled to introduce
physiological arousal into his account of emotion. To give way for feelings and the body, and
respond to charges of being ‘Apollonian,’ Lyons maintains that the hotness, (or what other
philosophers call ‘emotionality’) of emotion comes from physiological arousal of various kinds.146
Whereas, on account of the demand for feelings vis-à-vis Solomon’s cognitive theory’s
insistence on emotions being evaluative and so hot, philosopher Jenefer Robinson (2010) gives a
pointed response. When Solomon noted that ‘judgments central to emotion are intrinsically
different from other judgments,’ that ‘it is the judgment itself which is emotional…since it always
involves a personal evaluation of the significance of the object of emotion… [and] since they are
self-involved partly because they matter to us intensely,’ Robinson challenges that one can feel an
emotion that is not self-involved (think of pride in Manchester United with whom one has no
connection except that one once lived in Manchester). It makes no sense, Robinson insists, that
judgments are intense, urgent, and emotional.147
Furthermore, this criticism arising from feelings and the place of the body is important, not
only for the reason that feelings may help us identify an emotion, but also that feelings could affect
judgment. This challenge, then, puts further nuance in our quest to understand passivity and its
place in emotions. That emotions seem different from our active cognitions of ourselves, the world,
and others—the first way of speaking about passivity—now means that while emotions are certainly
intentional and importantly have a cognitive nature, they are also undoubtedly felt in/by the body.
However, it should be noted that this particular debate does not end here. Martha Nussbaum
(2001, 2013, 2016) would respond to Goldie, Robinson, and Prinz. In brief, Nussbaum maintains that
while emotions are embodied, feelings and bodily states do not have the constancy and regular
association with emotion that would compel us to include them in the definition of emotion. For
instance, the case of bodily manifestations changes or dissipates over time, while one continues to
have the emotion, as in the case of grief, when mourning for the loss of a son or parent, for years.148

146
See Lyons, 1980, especially Chapters 7 and 8.
147
Robinson, “Bob Solomon and William James,” 2010, 54 – 55. In ‘Emotions and Choice,’ emotions are described as ‘intense,’
hasty, urgent judgments, ‘undeliberated, unarticulated, and unreflective’ (Solomon, 1980, p. 264)
148
See Nussbaum’s Appendices in Anger and Forgiveness (2013) and Political Emotions (2016), whose brief discussions and claims
regarding the place of feelings and bodily states have been demonstrated in various ways in the entirety of the books.

46
3.1.3 Further arguments from the Neo-Jamesians: the case of paradigm scenarios
The fight for the place of feelings and the body in emotion is most staunchly defended by
philosophers (and psychologists and neuroscientists) who identify themselves as Neo-Jamesians.
These scholars generally endorse William James’s (1981, 1984) suggestion that “emotions are
initiated by the ‘automatic, instinctive’ appraisals that register important information in the body
and are recorded by body-mapping brain areas.”149
This claim includes considerations of several other important elements found in emotion,
apart from the supposedly non-cognitive elements of feelings and bodily states. It also includes
emotion in babies and non-human animals, the developmental character of emotion, and the role
of social norms and societal circumstances. In this section, I focus the analysis on philosopher
Ronald De Sousa (1987) whose work has challenged cognitivism in the late 1980s,150 and whose work
includes more or less all the elements that the Neo-Jamesians have been concerned about, all the
while defending the rationality of emotion.
Responding to the long tradition that views all emotions as threats to rationality, and which
treats them as brief bouts of madness,151 De Sousa aimed at working out schemes to assess the
rationality of emotions, in a way that leaves room for the traditional view (or feeling-centered view).
De Sousa, for instance, is explicit about the biological background of his work on emotion, which
is William James's theory of emotions and Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Specifically,
in The Rationality of Emotion (1987), he assessed James’s theory in the light of neurophysiological
research and examined the concepts of instinct, teleology, and intentionality in the light of neo-
Darwinian evolutionary theory. Furthermore, there are many interesting ideas and claims in De
Sousa (1980, 1987), such as his survey of perennial philosophical problems involving the emotions,
and his examination of models of the person vis-à-vis theories of mind. But here I focus mainly on
his notion of paradigm scenarios. Because it is in this particular notion that we will see the crucial
points of De Sousa’s review of the cognitive theory: the central importance of evolutionary and/or

149
See Robinson “Bob Solomon and William James,” 2010, p. 53. In this same piece, Robinson referred to various scholars as Neo-
Jamesians: psychologists Robert Zajonc (1980, 1984, 1994) and Paul Ekman (2003), philosophers Nico Frijda (1986) and De Sousa (1987),
neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (1996).
150
In his 1987 book The Rationality of Emotions. But this book appeared earlier as an article in Amelie Rorty’s (ed.), Explaining
Emotions, 1980, pp. 127 – 152.
151
As what the ordinary expression ‘passion blinds us’ conveys, with roots (at least in the Anglo-American tradition) in the Latin
expression, ira brevis furor (anger is a brief bout of madness). In philosophy, Hume and the emotivists say: ‘reason is and ought to be
nothing but the slaves to the passions.’

47
behavioral training concerning the learning and expression of emotion, and the emphasis on
emotion contexts over the content of emotions, cognitive or otherwise.
De Sousa’s key ideas about emotions are that they are ‘rather like language and that they
have an essentially dramatic structure’. The names of emotions do not refer to some simple
experience; rather, they ‘get their meaning from their relation to a situation type, a kind of original
drama that defines the roles, feelings, and reactions characteristic of that emotion’. These original
defining dramas are what De Sousa calls paradigm scenarios.152 They are understood as the origin
of our capacity for specific emotions because they are the terms by which emotions are learned.
They are like ‘little dramas in which our natural capacities for emotional response were first
listed.’153 Emotions have a semantics that derives from paradigm scenarios, in terms of which our
emotional repertoire is learned and the formal objects of our emotions fixed.
Now, the objectivity and rationality of emotion are measured in terms of the relation
between the target situation154 and the paradigm scenario in terms of which it is perceived. More
specifically, the role of proper or formal objects of emotions155 is explained with reference to
paradigm scenarios. De Sousa (1980) specifies:

We are made familiar with the vocabulary of emotion by association with paradigm scenarios,
drawn first from our daily life as small children, and then later reinforced by the stories and fairy tales to
which we are exposed, and, later still, supplemented and refined by literature and art. Paradigm scenarios
involve two aspects: first a paradigm situation providing the characteristic objects of the emotion (where
objects can be of various sorts, sometimes more suitably labeled ‘target,’ or ‘occasion’), and second, a set
of characteristic or ‘normal’ responses to the situation. It is in large part in virtue of the response
component of the scenarios that emotions are commonly held to motivate: though this is, in a way, back-
to-front: for the emotion often takes its name from the response disposition and is only afterward assumed
to cause it. There is little doubt that a child is genetically programmed to respond in specific ways to the
situational components of some paradigm scenarios. An essential part of education consists in identifying
these responses, giving the child a name for them in the context of a scenario, and thus teaching it that it
is experiencing a particular emotion.
The essential thought-dependency of certain emotions and the lesser extent of that dependency in
some of the more ‘primitive’ ones (such as lust or terror) is easily explained in terms of the kinds of
paradigm scenarios to which they are related. If the paradigm scenario cannot be apprehended without
complex linguistic skills, for example, we shall not expect to find in whoever lacks those skills an emotion
specifically tuned to that scenario. That is why, as Iris Murdoch has put it, ‘The most essential and
fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and
understand human situations’ (The Sovereignty of Good, 1970, p. 34). …
The way that paradigm scenarios fit into my central hypothesis should be obvious. Learning to
‘gestalt’ situations in terms of such scenarios is learning to attend differentially to certain features of an

152
De Sousa, 1987, especially Chapters 6 and 7, pp. 141 – 204. De Sousa also defends how paradigm scenarios bear some
resemblance to scripts of AI (p.72).
153
Ibid., 45.
154
Or what other emotion scholars simply call ‘emotion situation,’ or ‘emotional experience.’ Or simply: the situation whereby a
person experiences emotion, whether occurrent or dispositional. Many philosophers avoid using ‘emotional episode’ because of the
technical baggage of the term ‘episode,’ where emotion is understood as short-lived or like a series of impressions (both remain topics
of debates).
155
Note that by ‘formal object’ De Sousa refers to the “quality that is tied to the paradigm scenarios”, whereas he refers to the
general object of emotions as evoking situations. See De Sousa, 1980, 148 – 149; 1987, 186 – 187.

48
 actual situation, to inquire into the presence of further features of the scenario, and to make inferences
that the scenario suggests. Armed with the notion of paradigm scenarios, then, we can now return to the
questions asked at the conclusion of our discussion of rationality.156

Chiefly significant here is the biological function of paradigm scenarios in the rational
determination of judgment and desire, by fixing the salience of objects of attention and inquiry,
and preferred inference patterns.157 This is important because the determination of salience and
preferred inference patterns—aspects of emotion which are present in human babies and non-
human animals and which are aspects that both cognitive and feeling theories agree are present in
emotion—cannot wait for the development of full-fledged rationality.158 Also, contexts are of
paramount importance and influence. A child is not only ‘genetically programmed in specific ways,’
but also, learns situations and how to gestalt them, through paradigm scenarios. In teaching a child
that she is experiencing a particular emotion, the child is trained in certain response dispositions.159
Exactly how do De Sousa’s claims present challenges to cognitivism? Paradigm scenarios
are De Sousa’s basis for saying that emotions remain sui generis: they are not to be identified with
a species of judgment. While emotions are sufficiently close to the cognitive type of rationality in
admitting a close analogue of truth, which is a distinct species of intrinsic “success”, the rationality
of transitions among emotions, however, is more akin to the strategic kind.160 For this reason, De
Sousa insists that we must resist assimilating emotions to beliefs or desires. Here, De Sousa is
particularly deliberate in distancing himself from what he deems extremism of (existential)
attempts which show that ‘emotions are judgments or courses of behavior directly liable to
assessments of rationality’ (referring to Sartre and Solomon).161 Here, we see De Sousa, too, sharing
criticisms against cognitivism as being ‘too strong’, not to mention the cognitive theory’s position
against primitive conceptions of emotions as basically physiological or simply neurological
syndromes, which again takes its roots on Charles Darwin and William James.
However, De Sousa’s criticisms to cognitive theories make a case for rationality, one of the
marks of being active, while starting with premises based on our very passivity, i.e. to our

156
De Sousa 1980, 142 – 143; 1987, 182 – 183.
157
Ibid., 148 – 149; 1987, 203.
158
De Sousa 1980, 142.
159
For an interesting account of children’s education in emotions, and the role of literature, see: Ute Frevert et. al, Learning How
to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, (Oxford University Press, 2014); Chapter 4 “Emotions and Infancy,” of
Nussbaum, UT, 2001, pp. 174 – 248; Stephanie Olsen (ed.), Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and
Global Perspectives, (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
160
De Sousa 1980, 148; 1987, 203.
161
Jean Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1948), and Robert Solomon, The
Passions, (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1976).

49
upbringing, to who our caregivers, when we were infants are, to societal contexts, and even to the
norms of the society we live in. Particularly significant here is De Sousa’s emphasis on our biology
and situatedness. In this picture of situatedness, the role of emotion is crucial in leading a rational
life. De Sousa argued that when the calculi of reason have become sufficiently sophisticated, they
would be powerless without the contribution of emotion, especially the emotions’ crucial role on
salience, over what would otherwise be a plethora of objects, interpretations, and strategies. But
one thing remains of the old opposition between reason and emotion, and one that cognitive
theories seem unwilling to hold: that emotions are not reducible to beliefs or wants.
In emotions’ capacity to tell us about what is ‘really there,’ the chief analogy is not belief,
but rather perception. De Sousa speculates that the biological function of emotions is to make up
for certain insufficiencies of unaided reason: specifically, in accessing one’s store of knowledge in a
cost-effective way and in making the rationally arbitrary choice between conservative and risky
strategies of decision making. Emotions make up for these insufficiencies by imposing “determinate
patterns of salience” on our thought processes: guiding our attention, our lines of inquiry, and our
inferential strategies.162 We see here a clear instantiation of what De Sousa means when he speaks
about emotions being the most biological and most somatic of our mental functions. Like
Descartes’s pineal gland, emotions are the functions where mind and body most closely and
mysteriously interact.163
A case can be made here for passivity. In De Sousa’s insistence on the biological function of
emotions, he brings back to the discussion the emotions’ difference from cognitive activities such
as believing and thinking. They are very much somatic, or more specifically, genetic, and
behaviorally learned. But also, their close affinity to thoughts—their rationality. Whereas,
concerning the third sense of passivity whereby emotions’ meaning seems hidden from us, for De
Sousa, this cannot be entirely true. Paradigm scenarios function precisely for that—to show the
context within which particular emotions make sense. Paradigm scenarios encrypt behaviors and
responses found in dramas and stories taught to us from childhood on, through literature and the
arts. Our passivity before such facts of life—biology and training—however minimal or influential,

162
See Robert Gordon’s Book Review of The Rationality of Emotions, in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 100, No.2 (April 1991), pp.
284 – 288, where Gordon presents his disagreements to De Sousa, especially on this score. Gordon believes that this biological
generalization has considerable initial appeal, but is, on the whole, implausible. The biological function of emotions do not, in fact,
attribute to the emotions a perceptual function. Such a function does not seem to consist in the acquisition of objective information that
the target is, say, worthy of fright. What is more plausible is that the biological functions of emotions give us information about the way
things seem to us, but not about perceptions of what is objectively “there” (p. 287).
163
De Sousa, 1987, xvi.

50
are the material that makes up De Sousa’s answer to this specific point, and his appeals and for
cognitivism to consider, in general.
On the whole, various challenges to cognitive theories are motivated by passivity: the case
of hot cognition, worries on the voluntarist thesis, neglect of feelings and the body, and finally, the
case of paradigm scenarios. All such challenges to cognitive theories emphasize the passivity of
emotions, in various ways: the differences and similarities of emotion with thoughts, being felt and
bodily, while being rational on the other hand; the level of passivity before beliefs, and before our
childhood, education, and society. This is the sense in which many say, albeit sporadically, that
cognitivism is the dominant view on the emotions today, but it is very often criticized for its
inability to account for passivity.164

3.2 Challenges from the History of Emotions

A distinct and more general response, this time not only involving the claims of cognitive
theories but the very concepts and trajectory with which philosophy of emotion was operating,
issues from history. It might also be mentioned that this challenge is directed not only to cognitive
theories but to most theories of emotion, for that matter. The resulting considerations will affect
not only cognitivism in particular but also the numerous problems of philosophy of emotion in
general.165
Emotions, as presented in current discussions, seem an ahistorical category. But research
tells us that there is a huge cloud of ambiguity concerning its relationship with earlier categories,
particularly the category of passions. Those who espouse this reading of the history of emotion and
emotion research would tell us that many of the debates in the philosophy of emotion could be
solved by looking precisely at this uncertain relationship. In this section, the thesis presents
criticisms against cognitive theories, not only from the specific history of philosophy of mind but
also from the more general discipline of history, as well as data from medical history,
psychopathology, and psychiatry.166 Such fields have in recent years contributed to very lively

164
This has been sporadically identified by various scholars. None have attempted to confront the problem in a systematic way.
See, for instance, Maclaren 2010, 45; Griffiths 1997, 27 – 30; Rietti 2003, 95 – 97; Elster 1999; and, Roland Alan Nash, “Cognitive Theories
of Emotion,” in Nous, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Sep., 1989), 481.
165
On the one hand, there are challenges directed to the cognitive theory of emotion, which, I argued in the previous section,
issue from the concern for passivity of emotion, one way or another. On the other hand, there are general problems that philosophy of
emotion is grappling with. Dominik Perler in his Feelings Transformed: Philosophical Theories of the Emotions (1270 – 1670) [2018]
identified five such overarching problems – the problem of unity, structure, ascription, categories and imputation. See Perler, Feelings
Transformed, 2018, 1 – 5.
166
Thinkers I have in mind here are the following: Amelie Rorty for history of philosophy of mind; historian Thomas Dixon for
history; philosopher of emotion, medicine and psychiatry Louis Charland; historian of modern philosophy, emotion and medicine Fay

51
discussions with philosophers of emotion. In all these fields, and many others, so much research is
rapidly developing today, so much so that a new subdiscipline in history and philosophy has
developed in recent years: the history of emotions.167

3.2.1 What are the challenges from the history of emotions?

Anxiety in the historical semantics of emotions.168 Emotion research today is fraught
with ‘semantic anxiety’.169 It is facing the “modernity question,” which says that sometime in the
late seventeenth century, new ways of thinking and feeling emerged, and emotions in their modern
mental realms were invented.170 The term ‘emotion,’ says historian Thomas Dixon, is a ‘keyword in
crisis’.171 It is in crisis primarily for the reason that it is ambiguous, if not very wide. Dixon (2012a)
notes: “The founders of the discipline of psychology in the late 19th century bequeathed to their
successors a usage of ‘emotion’ in which the relationship between mind and body and between
thought and feeling were confused and unresolved, and which named a category of feelings and
behaviors so broad as to cover almost all of human mental life…”172
Surveys from the discipline of psychology run along similar lines. Boston University
psychologist Maria Gendron (2010) tells us that the effort to define ‘emotion’ in scientific terms is

Bound Alberti; historian of philosophy Dominik Perler; and, German historian of modern and contemporary Germany and director of
the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Ute Frevert, among others.
167
See Alix Cohen and Robert Stern, Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017); Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015); Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, Doing
Emotions History (eds.), (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Ute Frevert, Emotions in History—Lost and Found, (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2011); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, (Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
And: Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions? (Polity Press, 2017); Rob Boddice, The
History of Emotions (Historical Approaches), (Manchester University Press, 2017);
See also: Anna Wierzbicka, “The ‘History of Emotions’ and the Future of Emotion Research,” in Emotion Review Vol. 2, No. 3
(July 2010), pp. 269 – 273; Jan Plamper, “The history of emotions: An interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter
Stearns,” in History and Theory (2010), 49, 237–265; and, William Reddy, “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions,” in Emotion
Review, Vol. 1, No. 4 (October 2009), pp. 302 – 315.
168
The term ‘historical semantics of emotions’ is from Ute Frevert, “Defining Emotions: Concepts and Debates over Three
Centuries,” in Ute Frevert et. al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700 – 2000, (Oxford University
Press, 2014), pp. 1 – 31.
169
See Kirk Essary, “Passions, Affections, or Emotions? On the Ambiguity of 16th-Century Terminology,” in Emotion Review (2017),
1 – 8.
170
See Fay Bound Alberti, “Emotions in the Early Modern Medical Tradition,” and, Thomas Dixon, “Patients and Passions:
Languages of Medicine and Emotion, 1789–1850.” Both are in Fay Bound Alberti (ed.) Medicine, Emotion, and Disease, 1750–1950
(Palgrave, 2006), pp. 1 – 21, and pp. 22–52, respectively. It should be noted that Fay Bound Alberti argued against historical meta-
narratives of emotional change which characterize the emergence of ‘modern’ emotional behavior as a history of affective restraint versus
indulgence. See her works: ‘Emotion in Early Modern England, 1660–1760: Performativity and Practice at the Church Courts of York’
(DPhil, University of York, 2000); ‘Writing the Self? Love and the Letter in England c. 1660–c. 1760’, Literature and History (2002), 11, pp.
1–19; and, ‘An “Angry and Malicious Mind”? Narratives of Slander at the Church Courts of York, c. 1660–c. 1760’, History Workshop Journal
(2003), 56, pp. 59–77. See also Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’ Review Essay, The American Historical
Review (2002), 107, pp. 821–45.
171
See Thomas Dixon, ‘“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review 4 (2012): 338–44; “Revolting Passions,” in
Modern Theology, 27:2 April 2011, 298-312; From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
172
Dixon, 2012a, 342. Emphases are mine. See his discussion of the context of this legacy in pp. 342-344.

52
as old as the field of psychology.173 To date, there are at least two reviews of definitions of emotion
throughout the history of psychology, Plutchik (1980) and Izard (2010), and they arrived at similar
conclusions: “there is no sense of the definitions moving in a certain direction with time,”174 and,
“the term ‘emotion’ lacks a consensus definition,”175 respectively.
Notice, for instance, how the affective life has been a convivial host to a rich variety of
terminologies for emotions in contemporary Anglo-American speech. We see, in both everyday and
scientific language, the use of ‘affects’, ‘affections’, ‘passions’, ‘feelings’, ‘states of feeling,’
‘sentiments’, ‘pleasures,’ ‘pains,’ ‘sensibility,’ ‘temper,’ ‘fervor,’ and ‘agitations’. In comparison to
these older words for the affective domain, ‘emotion,’ Dixon tells us, is a relatively new category.
Dixon (2003, 2011, 2012) notes that the modern acceptance of the term ‘emotion’ as a
psychological category dates from the nineteenth century.176 While philosopher Amy Schmitter
(2006) points to Lord Kames’s definition of ‘emotion’ as a mental term in 1762.177 When emotion
became increasingly used, it encapsulated other previous psychological categories. J. M. Baldwin,
in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901), for instance, noted that “The use of the word
emotion in English psychology is comparatively modern. It is found in Hume, but even he speaks
generally rather of passions or affections. When the word emotion did become current its
application was very wide, covering all possible varieties of feeling, except those that are purely
sensational in their origin.”178
If all these points are taken together, at least three major interlinked considerations are
powering semantic anxiety in emotion research: first, the term ‘emotion’ is a new invention; second,
this new category encapsulated previously disaggregated phenomena such as passions, affects,
sentiments, etc.; and, third, as a result, the category of emotion is at best ambiguous, and worst,

173
See Maria Gendron, “Defining Emotion: A Brief History,” in Emotion Review Vol. 2, No. 4 (October 2010) 371–372. See also:
Maria Gendron & L. F. Barrett, “Reconstructing the past: A century of ideas about emotion in psychology,” in Emotion Review (2009), 1,
316–339.
174
See Robert Plutchik, Emotion: A psychoevolutionary synthesis, (New York: Harper Row, 1980), 80.
175
See Carroll E. Izard, “The many meanings/aspects of emotion: Definitions, functions, activation, and regulation,” in Emotion
Review (2010), 2, 363–370.
176
While noting that the word ‘emotion’ has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French
émotion, meaning a physical disturbance. It gained wider use in the 18th century, often to refer to mental experiences. But it was only in
the 19th century when the term became a fully-fledged theoretical term. Dixon notes that this is modern acceptance in the 19th century
is mainly due to the influence of two Scottish philosopher-physicians: Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. See Thomas Dixon, ‘“Emotion”:
The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review 4 (2012): 338–44; “Revolting Passions,” in Modern Theology, 27:2 April 2011, 298-312;
From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
177
See Amy M. Schmitter, ‘Passions, Affections, Sentiments: Taxonomy and Terminology’, in The Oxford Handbook of British
Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. James A. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 197–225.
178
See J. M. Baldwin, ‘Emotion’, in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1901), I, p. 316. See also the
‘Introduction’ of in Alix Cohen and Robert Stern, Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017). Emphases are mine.

53
lacking any definition altogether.179 There is a need, says Dixon (2012a), to articulate the assumed
relationships between psychological processes and mental experiences, and between states of
feelings and states of thought. Something went wrong in the modern concepts of ‘emotion,’ and
perhaps we can learn from writers of the 19th century (and before) whose works have been excluded
from the canon of the history of psychology (such as philosopher-physicians Thomas Brown and
Charles Bell), and who resisted the conglomeration of ‘passions’ and ‘affections’ into ‘emotions.’180
Here, it must be recalled that the emphasis on the cognitive nature of emotions, in turn, led
to what seemed a consensus that emotions are unlike the passions after all. That is, emotions are a
(new) category distinct from the (old) category of passions. This perceived transformation from
passion to emotion, or the historical relationship that emotions have with the passions, is also
recognized by disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, and psychopathology.181
Some transformations transpired in history. In the words of Amelie Rorty in “From Passions
to Emotions and Sentiments” (1982), the mind changed, and the passions vanished. Rorty (1982)
tells us that from Descartes to Rousseau, the mind changed.182 The mind’s “domain was redefined,
its activities were redescribed, and its powers were redistributed.” During this time, it was thought
that one way of tracing changes in the mind is to trace changes in one of its activities, namely, the
transformation of the passions to emotions and sentiments. The passions, once thought of as
reactions to invasions from something external, became the very activities of the mind, became its
very motions.183
During this time, too, passivity became a central topic of discussion because tracing changes
in one of the activities of the mind, especially the transformations of the passions to emotions and
sentiments, is used to locate other changes in the mind. For instance, passions are no longer seen
as mere reactions to invasions from the external world, but rather as activities of the mind,
themselves being the mind’s motions. They have become proper motives, like desires. Emotions

179
It should be noted, however, that some philosophers of emotion do not hold this understanding. John Elster, for instance, in
comparing ancient and modern thinking about the emotions, explicitly says “By ‘passion,’ they [ancient philosophers] mean more or less
what modern writers mean by ‘emotion’.”
180
Dixon, 2012a, 343.
181
See Robert M. Gordon, “The Passivity of Emotions,” 1986; Kym Maclaren, “Emotional clichés and authentic passions,” (2011);
John T. Fitzgerald, (ed.), Passion and Progress in Greco-Roman Thought, 2008; Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 1994; and Louis
Charland, “Reinstating the Passions,” 2010, among others.
182
In documenting reasons behind such changes, historians of emotion have focused on different combinations of factors:
sometimes the reasons for the change might be found by looking for other changes within a society; sometimes they might be found by
looking at the influence of a particular thinker or thinkers; and sometimes they might be found by looking at some combination of these:
perhaps a particular thinker had the influence that he did have because of what was going on elsewhere, or perhaps the converse. See
Peter Goldie, Review Article of Solomon’s Not Passion’s Slave and Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions, in the European Journal of
Philosophy 15:1 (2007), pp. 106–110.
183
See Rorty, “From Passions,” 1982, 159.

54
ceased to become turbulent commotions, they have instead become ways of feeling, evaluations,
and guides to action. Rorty also observed that from having been brute facts of the fallen condition—
physical states with which a moral person must contend, and which he must redirect, control,
transform or suppress—passions become motives, a person’s sources and direction of energy, and
then, as sentiments, they provide the conditions for civilized society.184
One major result of these numerous changes is that the passions have vanished, precisely
because they were transformed into another entity—the emotions. This is what philosopher Louis
Charland (2010) notes in his, “Reinstating the Passions: Arguments from the History of
Psychopathology”: we are now in the age of emotions.185 While Ute Frevert, in her article, “Defining
Emotions: Concepts and Debates over Three Centuries” (2014) called this period in the study of
emotions the ‘age of therapy of the second half of the twentieth century’.186 By therapy, Frevert
suggests the ‘cleansing’ of the emotions from the passions, the passions being irruptive states or
intrusive forces over which we have no control. The passions here are pictured as mental
happenings that we undergo, while the more recent category of emotion are actions that we
perform.187
We must be careful in reading these accounts. In one instance, based on these accounts,
emotions are different from the passions, to the extent that emotions have been cleansed from the
violent nature of the passions. Emotions, in this case, are amenable to reason and morality. In
another instance, emotions are passions. Emotions are what were called passions in the past. We
are referring to the same thing but from different periods of history. Rorty says “the passions, once
thought of as reactions to invasions from something external, became the very activities of the mind,
became its very motions.” What Frevert (2014) refers to as “emotions are actions that we perform”
rather than passions we undergo, Rorty (1982) explains as “passions are no longer seen as mere
reactions to invasions from the external world, but rather as activities of the mind, themselves being
the mind’s motions.” On the one hand, there are developments in our understanding of mental
states, that is why we must abandon older ways of thinking about specific mental states. On the

184
Ibid., 159 – 160. Notice that here, Rorty refer to sentiments as well.
185
Louis C. Charland, “Reinstating the Passions: Arguments from the History of Psychopathology,” in Peter Goldie (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 239-240.
186
Ute Frevert and Thomas Dixon, Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 1.
187
Ibid., 11 – 13.

55
other hand, in these developments, some old ways of understanding have been carried over to
newer categories, concepts, and terminologies.188
There is today a call to reinstate the passions, precisely because of the multifarious problems
that the term ‘emotion’ meets.189 And that perhaps, the other constituents of the affective realm can
benefit emotions research. Or more specifically, help emotion research address its semantic
anxiety, and move forward by disaggregating the various psychological categories that ‘emotion’
supposedly lumped together.
To others, this meant the bid to abandon the term ‘emotion’. Philosophy of emotion has in
recent years witnessed calls to abandon the term ‘emotions’ because of its culturally specific
baggage or anachronistic implications in historical research. Dixon (2003, 2011, 2012) for instance,
argued that from Augustine through Descartes, there had been a pervasive tendency to firmly
distinguish “affections” from “passions”. Take the following specific passage from From Passions to
Emotions (2003):

The Christian psychologist would talk about fear of God, the physicalist about fear of a bear. If
the distinction between passions and affections had been available, it could have been
acknowledged, perhaps, that the physicalist definition was more appropriate to appetites and
passions such as fear of a bear, and that the cognitive definition was more fitting for affections
such as the fear of God and for sentiments such as apathy.190

For Dixon, this tradition is more accurate in employing a variety of terms in describing various
psychological categories. All such categories are now anachronistically lumped together in the
secular psychological category of ‘emotion,’ effectively paving the way for the demise of earlier
distinctions. Dixon’s suggestion is either to do away altogether with the modern category of
emotion or move our emotional category back in several hundred years.191 Rejuvenating the
‘classical Christian’ categories of affection and passion, according to Dixon, will benefit current
emotions research, and relieve it from the semantic anxiety it is presently experiencing due to the
“problematic metacategory of ‘emotion’”.192

188
It must be noted that participants of this debate are careful in differentiating ‘words’ from ‘concepts’. See John Deigh,
“Comments on Dixon, Scarantino, and Mulligan and Scherer,” in Emotion Review (2012), 4, pp. 371–374; and Thomas Dixon, The invention
of altruism: Making moral meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 33 – 40.
189
See Charland, “Reinstating the Passions,” 2010; and Dixon, 2012a, 343.
190
See Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, 2003, pp. 245–246.
191
See Dixon From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, 2003; “Revolting Passions,” in Modern
Theology, 27:2 April 2011, 298-312; ‘“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis’, Emotion Review 4 (2012): 338–44.
192
In 2003, in From Passions, Dixon was more timid in suggesting that the ‘old-fashioned terminology of passions and affections
was unlikely to find favour in future psychological theories’. See Dixon, 2012, 343.

56
 In the case of the discipline of psychology, among the scientists surveyed by Izard (2010),
there was moderate support for the view that the term emotion is “ambiguous and has no status in
science.”193 As a result of her survey, Izard (2010) recommends that the noun ‘emotion’ should be
contextualized in scientific discourse, presumably because it is ambiguous. Still, in other periods of
the history of psychology, some psychologists have questioned the utility of ‘emotion’. In 1934,
Elizabeth Duffy, in her article “Is emotion a mere term of convenience?” suggested that we study
emotions in their own right, and under precise labels that do not mean different things on different
occasions and to different writers.194
During that time, the more extreme conclusion was to “abandon the term ‘emotion’ as a
scientific construct because it did not efficiently communicate a set of predictable features.” But
there is a less radical conclusion: that ‘emotion’ be contextualized in every case (or as Izard suggests,
further specified based on discrete emotion categories). Gendron, however, thinks that it is unclear
how psychology will advance given this less radical conclusion. What is clear, says Gendron (2010),
is that psychology has yet to converge on a definition of emotion and may have difficulty in doing
so in the future.195 There is, however, a way forward: work towards building a longer historical lens,
in the hope that this will afford us a more cumulative science. Ideally, such a historical lens would
all the more be better if non-Western contexts will be included.196

3.2.2 Why these challenges from history matter

If we abandon ‘emotions,’ what will happen to ordinary use? LeDoux (2012) makes an
intriguing suggestion. Because of the ambiguity of the term ‘emotion,’ neuroscience, if it will
preserve the term at all, will use it not to refer to everyday mental states such as fear, joy, or anger,
but to deeper-lying functions such as defense, reproduction, and homeostasis.197 This is interesting
because it shows the divergence between everyday and scientific language. It is unlikely, for
instance, for English speakers to stop referring to fear, joy, and anger as ‘emotions’.198
If we abandon ‘emotions,’ then we must agree that Dixon is correct in his claim that
the term ‘emotion’ muddles discourse rather than help it categorize concepts more clearly and more

193
See Carroll E. Izard, “The many meanings/aspects of emotion,” 2010, 367 – 368.
194
See Elizabeth Duffy, “Is emotion a mere term of convenience?” in Psychological Review (1934), 41, 103 – 103.
195
Gendron, 2010, 371.
196
American psychologist Kurt Danzinger (1997), for instance, suggested that the term ‘emotion’ may itself be a Western
psychological conception. See his Naming the Mind: how psychology found its Language, (London: Sage, 1997).
197
See Joseph LeDoux, “A neuroscientist’s perspective on debates about the nature of emotion,” in Emotion Review (2012), 4, 375
– 379.
198
Asifa Majid (2012) made the same observation concerning the disjunction between everyday and scientific languages. See her
“The role of language in a science of emotion,” in Emotion Review (2012), 4, 380 – 381.

57
efficiently. The problem is, Kirk Essary (2017) has found serious problems with Dixon’s claims.199
Essary (2017) argues that period dictionaries, the works of Christian humanists, and those of
Erasmus of Rotterdam and John Calvin,200 complicate, defy, and prove wrong Thomas Dixon’s
assertion that “classical Christian” usage from Augustine through the 18th century consists of a
generally firm distinction between affectus and passio. Sixteenth-century Christian humanists
prefer affectus to passio, to describe a wide range of phenomena, whether sinful or not, but there is
rarely the explicit value distinction between these two terms that Dixon ascribes to them. These
two terms are quite often synonymous.201 There is no consistent usage of affectus or passio, or their
cognates in some of the most influential writers of the 16th century, in their translations of the New
Testament, nor in the dictionaries they used. Essary (2017) has rightly pointed out that if distinction
between the two terms, affectus and passio, and their non-Latin cognates (which are a fundamental
aspect of Dixon’s categorization), are especially irregular during the 16th century, during the
formative years of the Renaissance, then it would be problematic for a program which aims at
employing such terms precisely to disambiguate emotion terminology.202
In short, how can Dixon’s advice (to either do away with the modern term of ‘emotion’
altogether or move back our emotional vocabulary to several hundred years) hold, when the very
premise it hinges upon—that earlier periods had clearer, more accurate and more useful
distinctions of psychological categories—stands on shaky ground? How can we heed Dixon’s
advice, when Essary has shown that such periods in history were equally unclear and uncertain in
their emotional vocabulary? This is remarkably important because Dixon’s claim, written in his
From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (2003) is a widely
influential account of the history of emotion terms in the West.

199
So did Max Rosenkrantz. See his Review Article of Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions, in the Journal of the History of
Philosophy 43:2 (April 2005), pp. 214 – 215. In this section, however, I focus on Essary since he has presented substantial evidences for his
counterarguments against Dixon.
200
Essary explains that the 16th century, the period of these two thinkers, is both a momentous time of linguistic change for
European languages (including Latin), and often for some reason neglected by historians of emotion trying to tell a longer story about
emotion terminology. The 16th century also represents the early days of development for what would become the modern lexicon (p.3).
Essary closely examined how lexicons in 16th-century (a period covered by Dixon’s claims) and a few prominent figures in the Renaissance
and Reformation handle the basic Latin emotion terms affectus and passio.
201
Essary, 2017, 5. The sixteenth century affectus, Essary tells us, regularly both the ‘sinful passions’ and the more permissible
‘religious affections,’ among other things—indeed, it looks as suspiciously wide in its semantic scope as the contemporary term
‘emotions’. See also: Michael Champion, Raphaele Garrod, Yasmin Haskell, and Juanita Ruys, “But Were They talking About Emotions?
Affectus, Affectio, and the History of Emotions,” in Revista Storia Italiana (2016) 128, 521 – 543.
202
Essary, 2017, 1. In succeeding sections of the article, Essary presents analyses of period dictionaries (Latin, Greek, and
vernacular) wherein muddled usage and a complex of synonyms could be seen in several relevant entries. See his justification for the
method of looking at period dictionaries, especially the role and context of humanists at the time, in p.3.
The Greek lexicon Lexicon graeco-latinum (1554), on the other hand, follows Quintillian’s distinction between the stronger and
more generally Greek pathos and milder Greek ethos. See G. Budé, et al., Lexicon graeco-latinum, seu Thesaurus linguae graecae, (Geneva,
Switzerland: Jean Crespin, 1554).

58
 It should be noted too that Fay Bound Alberti (2006), contra Dixon (2003, 2011, 2012), and
Charland (2010), argued against historical meta-narratives of emotional change which characterize
the emergence of ‘modern’ emotional behavior as a history of affective restraint versus
indulgence.203 Arguing along similar lines with Essary (2017), Alberti notes that a look at emotions
in early modern England, particularly from the late 1600s through 1700s, the period preceding what
Dixon calls the precursor of the modern usage of emotion, will show us that this is not the case.
Emotions during these periods of history are not as ‘cleansed’ and ‘different’ from passions as Dixon
(2012), Charland (2010), and Frevert’s (2014) age of therapy describe it.
In which case, however, it is clear that the job now is to work towards disambiguation.204
This includes evaluating whether theories of emotion or philosophy of emotion will indeed progress
given less radical conclusions such as defining emotion in every case while maintaining awareness
and reflexivity regarding the historical contexts of terms used. For historians of emotion, this means
constantly reminding themselves that history of emotions operates on the assumption that
conceptions of emotions, and emotions themselves, are highly dependent upon cultural
circumstance and change over time. This means never losing sight of the fact that their cultural
significance and biological register, are always undergoing modification and reinterpretation.205
Many scholars (Novaes 2015, Srinivasan 2003, Wierzbicka 2010) have persistently reminded us not
to underestimate the importance of this perspective.
In the case of Essary (2017), his analysis of the lexical latitude of Renaissance Latin writers
concerning emotional vocabulary lead him to conclusion opposite of Dixon: the term “emotion(s)”
is a perfectly viable option for historians today, and that it gets the most work done when trying to
navigate what in many cases would be an artificial distinction between passions and affections.206
The effort to disambiguate is remarkably important because challenges arising from the
history of emotions have huge implications on the ontology of emotions. This is practically
true for the the five broad and overarching problems on emotions identified by Dominik Perler in
Feelings Transformed: Philosophical Theories of the Emotions 1270 – 1670 (2018):

203
See her works: Fay Bound, ‘Emotion in Early Modern England, 1660–1760: Performativity and Practice at the Church Courts
of York’ (DPhil, University of York, 2000); ‘Writing the Self? Love and the Letter in England c. 1660–c. 1760’, Literature and History (2002),
11, pp. 1–19; and, ‘An “Angry and Malicious Mind”? Narratives of Slander at the Church Courts of York, c. 1660–c. 1760’, History Workshop
Journal (2003), 56, pp. 59–77. See also Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’ Review Essay, The American
Historical Review (2002), 107, pp. 821–45.
204
I will not undertake my contribution to this task here, because my main purpose in this chapter does not require it. I will,
however, present my contributions more systematically in the final two chapters of this essay.
205
Essary, 2017, 2.
206
Ibid., 7.

59
 1) problem of unity which asks whether there is such a thing as emotions at all, or whether the concept of
emotion is sufficiently definite that it can be applied to a unified class of phenomena;
2) problem of structure which asks what characterizes the different phenomena we call ‘emotion,’ or what
particular structural characteristic allows one to distinguish emotions from other mental phenomena;
3) problem of ascription which asks about to whom or to what should emotions be ascribed;
4) problem of categories which asks what kind of entities emotions are, or to what categories they belong;
and,
5) problem of imputation which asks whether we can ascribe emotion to a person (or perhaps to an animal)
as something that they can somehow direct or control and that therefore falls within the sphere of what
can be imputed to them, for which they can be held responsible. which asks whether there is such a
thing as the emotions at all.207

What this tells us, as rightly pointed out by Alix Cohen and Robert Stern (2017), is that such
categorization issues are usually more than merely taxonomic or matters of intellectual house-
keeping. Rather, can tell us a great deal about the assumptions underlying the proposed
classifications.208 A sharp ontological claim, for instance, became Dixon’s (2012b) conclusion:
historical disputes concerning the transformation from passion to emotion tell us that the term
‘emotion’ names neither a natural kind nor a coherent psychological category.209 In the same way,
Rorty (1982), illustrates the distinctive theoretical implications carried by the connotations of
various terms:
Passion suggests fervor; feeling connoted sensation; affect implies a change; sentiment indicates a cognitive
attitude; and emotion (ex-motu) suggests a motivational charge. The utility and plausibility of any of these
various theories of emotions—its explanatory power—depends on its integration within a relatively
complete theory of mental functioning. The meaning and import—the claims—of the views of Aristotle
on pathe, Seneca on ira and passio, Spinoza on affectus, Hume on the passions, Rousseau on sentiment,
Sartre on emotion are deeply embedded in their metaphysics and philosophy of mind, on the force of their
distinctions between activity and passivity, their theories of the essential or individuating properties of
persons. The presumptive category of emotion can play a role in philosophy of mind only when its function
is coordinated or opposed to other psychological activities: sensation, perception, imagination, belief,
desire, choice, propositional attitudes.210

To many philosophers, psychologists, and historians then (not to mention the other fields
who are equally involved in the study of emotions), the relationship between emotion and passion,
and other mental states, is not merely historical: it is primarily ontological. It concerns the
fundamental nature of emotions. As Perler (2018) has observed, the relationship between and
among the expressions passio (Latin) and passion (French) with affectus and emotion, is more than

207
See Perler, Feelings Transformed, 2018, 1 – 5.
208
See Alix Cohen and Robert Stern (eds.), Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical History, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017), 3.
209
Thomas Dixon, “’Emotion’: One Word, Many Concepts,” in Emotion Review, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 2012) 387 – 388. Dixon
makes a comment that his view has received substantial support from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and
anthropology, and that it is perhaps the philosophers who seem to remain most wedded to ‘emotion’.
210
Rorty, “From Passions,” 1982, 270.

60
a peculiarity of language. This relationship remarkably demonstrates the lack of clarity in what
makes up this supposed uniform class of mental phenomenon that today we call ‘emotion’.211
Furthermore, Goldie (2007) notes how the significance of this problem changes when applied
to psychological categories, in contrast to applying it to other categories. He tells us that when it
comes to psychological categories, how we conceive of something can change the thing conceived
of. The category of emotion is very much a case in point. For example, how we think of love can
change the way we love; whereas how we think of a tail doesn’t change the way it’s wagged.212 The
task of disambiguation, then, cannot be taken lightly.

3.2.3 Further implications: towards a deeper investigation of passivity

Concerns regarding the historical relationship that emotions have with the passions and
other older categories do not stop at these larger ontological problems mentioned. Further
implications point us to other equally serious worries. First and foremost, in which side of the
debate over the passion-emotion (non)link: whether Dixon is correct in saying that emotions are
not passions, or Essary is right in saying that ‘emotions’ are often synonymous to the ‘passions’—
our problem remains: how do we think about the emotions’ passivity? Both sides of the debate are
motivated by the passivity problem of thinking whether emotions are unlike the vicious, irruptive
passions, or whether emotions are these and the more civilized, more virtuous calm affections and
sentiments. This is all the more supported by Fay Bound Alberti’s arguments against metahistorical
narratives of the ‘modernity’ of emotions or the ‘age of cleansing’. Our confrontation of the passivity
problem hangs on these considerations.
Secondly, it has become evident from previous discussions in this section that there is an
evident lack of a systematic account of the origins of passivity-related discourse, such as what
undergirds the assumed relationships between psychological processes and mental experiences,
and between states of feelings and states of thought. Perler (2018), Dixon (2012), Charland (2010)
have all noted that the standard cognitive claim regarding emotions in contemporary times is quite
different from the basis of the categorizations in the past, when the terms used were affectus and
passio. Worries on the meanings of the concept of emotion appeared simultaneously with other

211
See Perler, Feelings Transformed, 2018, p. 9. Perler gave two illustrations for this: John Duns Scotus’s passiones and Spinoza’s
affectus. Perler notes: “John Duns Scotus opens his analysis of the passiones, written around 1300, by distinguishing the ‘low’ ones , in
the sensual soul, from the ‘higher’ ones, which are in the rational soul. The first group includes, paradigmatically, pains; the second,
states of sadness … [Whereas] Spinoza lists all the emotional states, which he calls affectus, [whereby] he finds that desire is a
fundamental one of them, which is nothing but a form of aspiration [appetitus], and then enumerates many other forms, including love
and hate, joy and sadness—and also ambition [ambitio] and indulgence [luxuria] (p.9-10).
212
Goldie, 2007, 106.

61
challenges to the supposed ‘standard view’ of emotion, cognitivism. For instance, in earlier periods
of history, this category (or the categories it used to be, and now is encapsulated in the term
‘emotion’) were not secular, and not as (strongly) ‘cognitive’ as it is construed today. Especially
because earlier periods of history were pervaded by the thought-feeling divide. The basis of some
earlier categorizations, again, is that passio or the passions are vicious, whereas affectus or
affections and sentiments are calm, controlled, and virtuous.213 Not to mention the long tradition
of treating the emotions in the Christian tradition as irrational or sinful, which has been proven
inaccurate since many emotion scholars have already shown that not all Christian thinkers treated
emotions in this way.214 This, too, is a huge step forward in the pursuit of a more nuanced and more
complete history of emotions, especially because the long history of Christianity in the West has
always been identified by many as the primary (if not sole) suspect for the maligning of emotions
as ‘disturbances’ or ‘diseases of the soul’.
Third, and in response to the question of where these considerations leave us in our quest to
map the philosophy of emotion and cognitive theories’ relationship with passivity, I submit that
the problem of passivity in emotions persists. This problem never left the discussions, even during
the years when philosophers have thought that the achievements of cognitivism have already
eclipsed, if not solved, this old problem. Challenges to cognitive theories demonstrate this—
whether on the historical relationship that emotions have with earlier categories, or whether its
substantial claims on judgments, voluntarism, and the place of feelings and the body. In more
explicit terms, our response to the question of whether the passivity of emotions was ever
successfully and conclusively explained away in the philosophy of emotions, the answer would be,
perhaps not. For passivity related concerns, even with cognitivism at the helm, have never been
completely shelved, or have never been reconciled—if reconciling and solving it is—with the
supposedly more cognitive nature of thoughts, beliefs, propositions, attitudes, or judgments.
Passivity persists as a problem in emotions.
Cognitive theories, especially in the case of Solomon, hoped to put involutarist/passivity talks
to a halt. Or that Gordon’s (1986) conclusions have been thought to have effectively explained
(away) the passivity of emotions. These, in turn, raise the question of whether we have understood
cognitive theories enough for us to say these concerning their role in passivity discourse. This leads

213
Or what Dixon explains: “the more violent and self-regarding ‘passions’ and ‘appetites’ on the one hand, and the milder and
more enlightened ‘interests,’ social ‘affections,’ and ‘moral sentiments’ on the other.” See Dixon, 2012a, 339.
214
See Perler 2018, Goldie 2010, and James 1997. Perler’s Feelings Transformed (2018) is one such example of a very fine and
rigorous examination of Medieval philosophers, and their respective emotion theories.

62
me to believe that if we will continue in asking about passivity, this is one of the major tasks at
hand: to examine individual cognitive theories and see for ourselves the nature of their claims and
the implications of these to passivity (and vice versa). This task would be pretentious and indeed
vain if we do not launch a sustained and detailed examination of at least one major cognitive theory,
lest the appeal to unfairness would be charged. But this move is not simply for the sake of the
principle of charity. This is a vital task that must be confronted if the quest would become fruitful.
This task is the business of the next chapter of the thesis.

3.3 Chapter Summary: Conceptual Genealogy of Passivity of Emotion from 2000 Onwards215
From the analysis of the disputes between cognitive theorists and critics, one can see what
happened to the concept of passivity from 2000 onwards. With the dominance of cognitivism, the
passivity of emotion means:
(1) Emotions are not irruptive animalistic forces: they are very much cognitive;
they are thoughts and judgments imbued with rich intentionality
(2) They are hot, intense and urgent experiences, but this does not mean they
are irruptive animalistic forces
(3) We are not (entirely) passive before emotions. There is room for some
degree of control and responsibility for many emotional experiences.
But with the criticisms against cognitive theories,216 the passivity of emotion means:
(1) Emotions are not (just) thoughts – which are calm, cool, and
calculated. We must account for their felt nature!
(2) Emotions are hot, intense, and urgent, that is why they cannot (just) be
identified with thoughts and judgments as the cognitive theory does.
(3) That they are not just thoughts means we must account for the role of
biology and culture in emotions, for their meanings may lie here too.
Furthermore, a distinct meaning is added with the birth of the field of history of emotions.217 Here
passivity of emotion means:

215
See Appendix B: Passivity: Continuities and Changes for a summary of these results in the context of the whole thesis.
216
The first set of evidences in this chapter showed worries on the cognitive claim, with respect to its identity-claim and
voluntarist thesis. If emotions are judgments, then cognitive theories must be prepared to show that emotions have a contribution to
make, lest it risks redundancy. Also, if emotions are judgements, then cognitive theories should be able to explain the extent to which
judgments or beliefs are within our control, whether to believe or correct. Such an identity-claim, moreover, runs against the
phenomenological data that most judgments are calm and cool, whereas emotions are markedly hot and urgent. This in turn calls to
mind the phenomenology of emotions: they are felt. Most times, they are localized in the body. Furthermore, proclivity to specific
emotions are in certain respects inherited. Emotions are also learned from infancy through adulthood. These are what paradigm
scenarios illustrate. But the cognitive claim seems to have neglected these essential aspects of emotions.
217
The second set of evidences in this chapter show that the historical origins, and/or divorce, of the emotions with the earlier
category of the passions (among other mental attitudes and processes) resurrected once again the earlier concerns of what it means for
emotions to be passions—as urgent, irruptive and powerful mental activities—or the concern for whether there lurk major problems in
saying that we remain, in specific ways, passive to emotions.

63
 (4) Emotions are passions, i.e. turbulent commotions or states which
befall a person, or which a person must contend with and attempt to
master

This portion of conceptual genealogy shows that the passivity of emotion persists as a
problem in the philosophy of emotion. Through this, this chapter criticized the history and progress
of the philosophy of emotion for not recognizing the importance of passivity in the discourse on
emotions. Given this analysis, the importance of passivity in the discourse of emotion is reiterated.
Criticisms against cognitivism arise from passivity. They highlight, interestingly, both the
unlikeness and likeness of emotions with our active cognitions of the self, others, and the world, as
in the case of fighting for the place of feeling and the body and the case of the emotions’ heat. They
ask about the extent to which emotions and their meanings are within our will, or control, as in the
case of paradigm scenarios and the voluntarist thesis. They interrogate claims on the close ties (if
not interchangeability), or divorce (or unlikeness), of the emotions with the passions. All such
considerations are the material of the three ways in which the passivity of emotions has been
discussed in the philosophy of emotion. These three ways have so far served as our main pegs when
referring to the passivity of emotions in this thesis, initially discussed in the first chapter of this
thesis: first, experientially, emotions seem importantly different from our active, cognitive
evaluations of the world, ourselves and others; second, we often seem to be passively assailed by
emotions; and third, we are often not in full possession of an emotion’s meaning but rather seem
to be carried away by something that eludes our grasp.
All these criticisms to cognitivism point us to a serious need to reconsider passivity as it is
applied to the emotions. A more nuanced account of the passivity of emotions will not only
vindicate cognitive theories but will also illuminate many problems found in the philosophy of
emotion.

64
 Chapter 4

Martha Nussbaum:
Passivity at the Heart of a Cognitive Theory

4.1 Martha Nussbaum and the Philosophy of Emotion

This chapter continues further the genealogical analysis of passivity, focusing on 2001
through 2016. It criticizes further the history and progress of the philosophy of emotion with a focus
in its treatment of the concept of passivity. It shows that until 2016, even with Martha Nussbaum’s
valuable contributions, passivity remains a deep problem. Philosophy of emotion must do
something about this if it wishes to advance in its understanding of emotion.
Nussbaum’s contributions to the problem of passivity are defended by showing that her
account is a significant step towards a more robust appreciation of both passivity and emotion. But
her theory is also criticized on account of passivity, especially her take on voluntarism and
optimistic rationalism toward the emotions, and her lack of a clear reference to the older categories
of passions, despite being aware of this history. In this way, this chapter criticizes the philosophy
of emotion by exposing the following: its lack of a systematic account of passivity in specific
respects; its urgent need to confront the issue of passivity by doing a longer conceptual genealogy
of passivity and emotions;218 and its need to be fair in its treatment of specific theories by minding
theories’ claims and contexts.
By employing the philosophical methodology of conceptual genealogy, this thesis situates
Martha Nussbaum in a period in the history of philosophy of emotion where the nature and
importance of passivity became uncertain219 and is today in need of clarification. This means that
this chapter of the thesis involves a detailed consideration of a cognitive theory and the challenge
of failing to account for passivity, at precisely the time when philosophers thought they have already
gone past passivity-related problems of emotion: Why the persistence of passivity?
The context of this chapter then is 2001 until 2016,220 where the chapter argues that one can
give an account that will unpack the pointed exchanges between cognitive theories and critics, and

218
Because the results of this thesis show a more nuanced concept of passivity even with just a relatively snapshot period of 61
years, compared to a cognitive theory that harks back to as early as the tragic poets (which Nussbaum studied), or even to the Vedas and
other classic texts.
219
By ‘uncertain’ I mean a conspicuous lack of a systematic account of what remains of passivity given the achievements of the
cognitive theory on the problem of passivity and the criticisms it received on account of passivity.
220
I note that Nussbaum’s book which focuses on emotion most systematically, UT, was released in 2001. But she started thinking
and writing on the emotions as early as 1970’s (years of drafting Fragility) and 1990’s (with Love’s Knowledge). The chapters of UTs are in
fact revised versions of the Gifford Lectures she delivered in Edinburgh in 1993. On the other hand, 2018 saw the publication of Monarchy
of Fear, Nussbaum’s latest book on the emotions, which records the updates to her emotion theory.

65
will, therefore, give clarity to the problem concerning the nature of passivity and its place in
emotions, not only by historicizing the development of the problem (as did Chapters 1 through 3)
but also by looking closely at a representative cognitive theory. Naturally, my examination of
Martha Nussbaum’s cognitive/evaluative theory of the emotions focuses on its understanding of
passivity and its effort to grapple with it. It should be noted that Nussbaum’s theory has been the
recipient of various passivity-related criticisms. Towards the end of the chapter, as a result of such
examination, further nuance will be given to the concept of passivity. But a pressing result shows
itself: there is a critical need for a more adequate account of the passivity of emotion, even with the
relatively more nuanced concept that the examination of this thesis has resulted in.
Nussbaum’s theory remains unexamined systematically in the literature. Despite the
extensive oeuvre of Martha Nussbaum, most commentaries, studies, and criticisms of her thought
have come in short articles dealing with a specific issue or aspect of her work.221 One will not find
even book-length studies on her work. This is especially true in the case of the emotions. To date,
no such reviews have yet been written on her emotion theory as it is updated in The Monarchy of
Fear (2018).222 Existing reviews contain little to no reference to earlier works of Nussbaum, which
contain her more elaborate defenses of specific aspects of her emotion theory, such as our openness
and dependence to external goods, and the Stoics’ treatment of the passions. Foremost of these
works are Fragility of Goodness (1986, 2001) and Therapy of Desire (1994). Her theory, too, which
was developed in the Upheavals of Thought (2001), served as the theoretical background of
succeeding works on emotions such as Political Emotions (2016) and Anger and Forgiveness (2013).
This thesis will make use of Political Emotions (2016) in examining the consequences of Nussbaum’s
theory to passivity, as already mentioned in the introductory chapter of the thesis.
Review of how Nussbaum’s emotion theory understands and grapples with passivity and
how criticisms use passivity-motivated notions and concerns to criticize Nussbaum’s theory show
us illuminating results. The chapter argues that there are critical pieces of evidence in Nussbaum’s
theory that bear much weight in our hope to probe deeper into passivity. Some of these include the

221
On the topic of emotions, perhaps the most comprehensive reviews are the following: Diana Cates, “Conceiving Emotions:
Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought,” in Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2003, pp. 325–341; and Lester Hunt, “Martha
Nussbaum on the Emotions,” in Ethics, Vol. 116, No. 3, (August 2006), pp. 552 – 577. But both these works do not contain references to
Nussbaum’s earlier works, and because they were published shortly after the UT, they therefore do not reflect updates in Nussbaum’s
theory which she wrote in succeeding years, such as Political Emotions (2013), Anger and Forgiveness (2016), and The Monarchy of Fear
(2018).
222
Nussbaum explicitly reports that Monarchy of Fear contains updates in her theory of emotions, saying that new insights
have led her to believe that her previous theory of the emotions ‘have not gone deep enough’. See Preface of The Monarchy of Fear: A
Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018). Henceforth referred to as TMF. The next section will
discuss such updates, along with Nussbaum’s core contentions.

66
following: Nussbaum’s account of the fragility of goodness where she emphasizes the central role
of emotions in registering our lack of control over parts of the world that we do not fully control;
her insistence on the fact that her emotion theory, while cognitivist, does not neglect feeling, all
the while arguing that feelings do not have an essential place in emotions; and finally, her lack of
an account of the passion-emotion link while remaining methodologically frank about this lack. All
of these could be used to determine the nature and place of passivity in emotions in illuminating
ways. Nussbaum’s work is a fertile ground for potential solutions to passivity-motivated problems
in the philosophy of emotion, and a more robust appreciation of such problems.
This chapter will proceed as follows. The first section fleshes out elements of passivity in
different aspects of Nussbaum’s emotion theory. In light of such findings, the second section
presents an evaluation of Nussbaum vis-à-vis the criticisms against cognitive theories discussed in
the previous chapter of the thesis. It is asked: given a close look at Nussbaum’s theory, which
challenges can now be fairly directed at her? Are there notable details that illuminate existing
debates on the passivity of emotions? The third section identifies issues where Nussbaum does not
stand scrutiny. Deficiencies in her theory are identified. Foremost of these are two important
concerns motivated by passivity: first, the issue of voluntarism or the extent of control we have
toward the emotions; and second, the link of emotions to passions or the concern on whether
emotions remain as phenomena before which we are passive since this is what is meant by them
being historically referred to as ‘passions.’ Finally, the fourth section asks what happens to the
concept of passivity in light of Nussbaum’s contributions. As a reconsideration of the concept of
passivity, the three ways of understanding passivity discussed and used in this thesis are reviewed.
The results of the previous chapters of this thesis are recalled. A synthesis of the series of changes
and reinterpretations that the concept of passivity has undergone in the course of sixty-one years
from 1957 through 2016 is made. The result would be a conceptual genealogy of passivity where the
said concept is shown as a polysemous concept that meant many different things to various authors
in the history of the philosophy of emotion. The chapter ends with a summary of what all four
sections of this chapter have accomplished. It culminates in showing that what makes passivity
cause deep problems to theories of emotion is the breadth of its scope and polysemous nature. This
is made more urgent because the problems fueled by the concept of passivity involve standing
disputes between the dominant theory of cognitivism and its critics, both of whom are committed
to the enterprise of understanding what emotions are.

67
4.2 Passivity in Martha Nussbaum’s Theory of Emotion

The story of an emotion, I shall argue, is the story of judgements about important things,
judgments in which we acknowledge our neediness and incompleteness before those
elements that we do not fully control.
Martha Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance”223

For the past five decades, Martha Nussbaum has been working on various themes.224 She
calls her theory of emotions ‘a cognitive/evaluative view of the emotions.’ Within this theory, she
engaged in a theoretical reflection on the nature of emotions in their personal, ethical, literary, and
historical dimensions. Nussbaum is concerned with rethinking and constructing ‘an analytical
framework for thinking about emotions in general,’ i.e. a valuable explanatory theory that is
responsive to, and critical of, human experience.225
To identify elements of passivity, this section will present a critical assessment of
Nussbaum’s theory of the emotions,226 focusing on three major aspects: its central cognitive claim,
its Neo-Stoic character, and its background on the fragility of the good life. (Updates from The
Monarchy of Fear, where pertinent, are explicitly mentioned in discussions of this section and
succeeding ones.)
First, the theory’s central cognitive claim is discussed in two parts: a) a discussion of
Nussbaum’s reasons in classifying her theory as a ‘pure cognitive theory’, where she explained the
sufficiency of cognition or appraisal in emotion, and where she defended against the necessity of
non-cognitive components like feelings and bodily states in the definition of emotion; and b) how
all this substantiates Nussbaum’s view that emotions are ‘intelligent’. These will especially be
important in our later discussion of Nussbaum’s exchanges with critics, those who insist on
challenging the identity-claim, such as arguments relating to hot cognition, and the place of
feelings and the body. It should be noted that our goal of clarifying the concept of passivity hinges

223
Nussbaum in Solomon, Thinking About Feeling, 2004, p. 184.
224
The Preface to the Revised Edition of the Fragility notes that she began drafting the book in 1971. Fragility contains various
themes of Nussbaum’s works.. She has been profiled in many platforms to discuss her work. According to Nussbaum, the most accurate
of these is published in Emotion Researcher. See “On Anger, Disgust and Love: An Interview with Andrea Scarantino (February 2007),”
URL: http://emotionresearcher.com/on-anger-disgust-love/.
225
Martha Nussbaum, UT, 2001, 7 – 11, 23 – 24. Nussbaum emphasized that such a theory will have to go into complex details
about the specific content of particular emotions … and how a certain amount of definiteness can be retained, illuminating diverse
phenomena and allowing us to group them in one class. Such a theory, too, will have to be prepared to point out the multiple ambiguities
present in the casual and frequently loose use of terms such as ‘feelings,’ ‘emotions,’ and ‘passions’.
Nussbaum also notes that her criterion of correctness for such a theory is distinctively Aristotelian: ‘[an account] that preserves
the truth of the greatest number and the most basic of these experiences’ (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1147a), and one that provides
convincing explanations for the errors in classification that it eventually ascribes to experience.
226
A precis of UT, by Nussbaum herself, appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, March
2004, pp. 443 – 449. In the same volume, reviews of UT by eminent philosophers Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, John Deigh and Nancy Sherman,
together with Nussbaum’s responses to them, is published. I discuss these exchanges in this chapter.

68
on the extent to which we can unpack the claims of Nussbaum concerning the cognitive nature of
emotions vis-à-vis critics’ challenges. Since the motivation behind this heated exchange, as
discussed in the previous chapter, is precisely the disagreements over the claim that thoughts and
beliefs (supposedly constituting or accompanying emotions) are things we choose and are under
our control. But that emotions in their overwhelming power and heat seem to be things that are
not within our full control. Our goal of clarifying the concept of passivity hinges on the extent to
which we can understand Nussbaum’s claims on the passivity of emotions: how emotions are
dis/similar to traditionally considered cognitive acts and what role this supposed nature plays in
emotions’ ability to overpower the personality, and in the question over the extent to which we can
control them or be made responsible for them.
Secondly, its Neo-stoic character, where Nussbaum modifies the original Stoic position on
the emotions, is summarized. Nussbaum asserts three things here: a) a case for a flexible account
of ‘cognition’ which includes non-linguistic evaluative cognitions as displayed by non-human
animals, human infants, and by emotions (better) captured in music; b) the significance of the
developmental aspect of emotions; c) the role of human societies and cultures in shaping emotions.
In all these, Nussbaum maintains the core Stoic claim that emotions are evaluative judgments that
ascribe very high value to external goods. These will be important in our discussion of Nussbaum’s
chances of facing criticisms asserting the place of biology and culture in a cognitive theory of
emotion, and claiming that cognitivism over-intellectualized the emotions at the expense of the
body.
Finally, the background against which Nussbaum wrote on the emotions is discussed: the
fragility of the good life, or the need to recognize the difficulty of living a virtuous life given our
exposure to things we do not fully control. Emotions, seen in this context, are ‘responses to areas
of vulnerability.’ They register the damages we suffered, might suffer, or luckily have failed to suffer.
This is of course most important in contextualizing Nussbaum’s responses to critics in explaining
emotion’s heat and urgency as evaluative judgments. Here is it quite easy to see how emotions
feature in our passivity before external goods. That is, as human beings, we are subject to facticity,
finitude, and fortune; and emotions play a vital role in helping us grapple with these facts of
existence.
Towards the end of the section, the hope is to have spelled out a bit clearer what Nussbaum
means when she says that it is precisely the emotions’ intelligence—the complicated thoughts that
they are—that is the source of their potentially terrifying character, their peculiar depth, their

69
ability to cause agony and delight, confusion and lucidity.227 For this might mean that the emotions’
being complicated thoughts may not be so opposed to the person’s sense of passivity before them,
as is often supposed.

4.2.1 The central cognitive claim

Fairly ordinary experience suggests that emotions are heated and forceful experiences that
render us passive and impotent. Emotions are messy and tumultuous experiences that mark our
lives ‘uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal.’ They tend to distort thinking and get in the way of
rational practical deliberations. They can fill us with delight, strike us by surprise, or torment us
mentally. That is why it is quite surprising that in answer to the question, what are emotions?
Martha Nussbaum answers, “they are judgments of value and importance.”228 Or more specifically,
they involve “judgments about important things, judgments which, appraising an external object
as salient for our well-being, we acknowledge our neediness and incompleteness before parts of the
world that we do not fully control.”229 To Nussbaum, judgments or thoughts are central to emotion;
they occupy an essential place in the nature of emotion. For this reason, they are the anchor point
of other claims on emotions, and so forms the basis for critics’ challenges when examining
Nussbaum’s claims on cognitivism.
The cognitive structure of emotions. Nussbaum endorses a cognitive/evaluative theory of
the emotions. She argues that emotions are best construed as thoughts or cognitions. The view is
not ‘componential’, meaning emotions are composed of various components, and one of which is
thoughts. Rather, it is a ‘pure cognitive theory’, given its central claim that emotions are
essentially thoughts or cognitions; and that such thoughts or cognitions are necessary and
sufficient for the definition of emotion. According to Nussbaum, all emotions always involve
thought of an object combined with thought of the object’s salience or importance … they always
involve appraisal or evaluation.230 She alternates with different ways of describing this similarity
with thoughts or cognitions: “emotions are forms of evaluative judgment”;231 “intentional

227
UT, 2001, 16.
228
Ibid., 4 and passim. Nussbaum herself acknowledged that “it might seem very strange to suggest that emotions are forms
of judgment,” especially in light of such features of emotions as their urgency and heat; their tendency to take over the personality and
to move it to action with overwhelming force; their connection with important attachments, in terms of which a person defines her life;
the person’s sense of passivity before them; their apparently adversarial relation to “rationality” in the sense of cool calculation or cost-
benefit analysis; and their close connections with one another. See UT, p. 22.
229
UT, 2001, 19 and passim.
230
Ibid., 23. See also PE, p. 399. Emphases are mine.
231
Ibid., 22.

70
perceptions and beliefs are characteristic of emotions”; “emotions see their object as invested with
value or importance”;232 “emotions are ways of assenting to an appearance (of states of affairs, real
or imagined)”;233 “emotions are ways of committing ourselves to a view of the way things really are”;
234
or, “emotions are acknowledgments of neediness and lack of self-sufficiency”.235 It is important
to note that she argues that emotions are cognitions or thoughts,236 not that they include thoughts,
as well as other components.
How did Nussbaum defend this position? In the first part of the UT (2001), Nussbaum
grappled with the question of what counts as necessary and sufficient in the definition of emotion,
i.e. elements that maintain regularity and constancy amidst changes in the experience of a
particular emotion or given varieties of a particular emotion type. That is to say, what remains
central to the identity of an emotion and to discriminations between one emotion and another,
after examining many complex and varying situations in which we claim to experience one
particular emotion. In her search for such necessary and sufficient elements, Nussbaum found that
what remains are the following: emotions’ aboutness, their basis in beliefs, their connection with
evaluation. All these make emotions look very much like thoughts or cognitions. It is these
cognitive elements that are the essential part of an emotion’s identity, and of what differentiates
one emotion from other emotions.237
Her defense of this position is also at the same time her defense of her neo-Stoic view in the
face of adversarial views which claim that emotions are ‘non-reasoning movements’ or unthinking
energies that push the person around.238 In making her case, Nussbaum imitated Seneca in using
his own life as a source of exempla: Nussbaum constructed a philosophical exemplum to produce a
narrative of her mother’s death.239 This narrative shows that if emotions are non-reasoning

232
Ibid., 30.
233
Ibid., 37 – 38.
234
Ibid., 38.
235
Ibid., 22.
236
In other passages, Nussbaum refers to emotions as ‘beliefs’, such as the case of page 46 in UT. I note that Chapter 1 of UT,
Nussbaum uses “the language of belief,” for the purposes of discussion. She will progressively put nuance to this in Chapter 2 through a
discussion of “seeing as” in the case of animal emotions. She noted this caveat in page 28 of UT.
237
Ibid., 27 – 30, 33.
238
By adversarial views, Nussbaum is referring to views we discussed in previous chapters of the present essay: the Traditional
View of emotion, hydraulic and feeling models, and feeling and behaviorist views. See her footnote 7 in page 25 of UT for references on
these views.
239
The story is narrated in pp. 19 – 22 of UT. This exemplum demonstrated several features of the emotions, such as “their
urgency and heat; their tendency to take over the personality and to move it to action with overwhelming force; their connection with
important attachments, in terms of which a person defines her life; the person’s sense of passivity before them; their apparently
adversarial relation to ‘rationality’ in the sense of cool calculation and cost-benefit analysis; their close connection with one another, as
hope alternates uneasily with fear, as a single event transforms hope into grief, as grief, looking about for a cause, expresses itself as
anger, as all of these can be vehicles of an underlying love.”

71
movements or energies, then the adversarial view is unable to explain that emotions are about
something, or that they have an object. Nussbaum explains:
My fear, my hope, and my ultimate grief, are all about my mother and directed at her and her life. A wind
may hit against something, a current in the blood may pound against something: but they are not in the
same way about the things they strike in their way. My fear’s very identity as fear depends on its having
some such object: take that away and it becomes a mere trembling or heart-leaping. The identity of the
wind as wind does not in the same way depend on any particular object against which it may pound.240

The emotion’s identity depends upon its object or what it is about. That is why thinking that
emotions as obtuse and devoid of reason is to lose sight of an emotion’s identity and to be unable
to explain that distinguishes such emotion from other types of emotion. This problem poses a huge
inadequacy on the part of adversarial views.
Furthermore, if emotions are unthinking movements or energies, then the adversarial view is
unable to explain that an emotion’s object is an intentional object. That is, “it figures in the emotion
as it is seen or interpreted by the person whose emotion it is.” It requires an active way of seeing
‘through one’s own window’. Notice how fear is distinguished from grief not so much by the identity
of the object but by the way the object is seen: grief feels like a tearing of oneself because it sees an
important person or object as permanently lost, whereas fear sees oneself or what one loves as
seriously threatened. These are prominent features of the experience of said emotions; and the
adversarial view, in claiming that emotions are unreasoning forces inside a person, is unable to
explain how most people identify and individuate emotional experiences.241
Also, emotions embody beliefs about the object. These beliefs are often very complex and
complicated. As Aristotle said, to have fear, one must believe that bad events are impending. To
have anger, one must believe that some damage has occurred to me or to somebody I care for, that
the damage is not trivial but significant, that it was done by someone, and probably, that it was
done willingly. These beliefs are essential to the identity of anger: the feeling of heart-leaping,
boiling of the blood, or trembling, will not make the cut. These feelings are also unable to tell me
whether it is anger or grief that I have.242
Finally, the intentional perceptions and beliefs characteristic of emotions are markedly
concerned with value: they see the object as invested with value or importance. They are evaluative
and eudaimonistic. Had I not considered my mother as a person of great importance, Nussbaum

240
Ibid., 27.
241
UT, 2001, 28.
242
Ibid., 28 – 29.

72
says, I would not fear her death or hope so passionately for her recovery. The emotion records this
experience. Grief records the intolerable fact that somebody dearly loved is irrevocably lost.243
To this extent, then, the adversarial view gets a lot of things wrong and is unable to explain
many important aspects of emotion. We see how Nussbaum’s ‘pure cognitive theory’ originated
from the ancient Greek Stoics. Her theory agrees with the Stoics in holding that: (1) emotions always
have an object; (2) the object is an intentional object, that is to say, it figures in the emotion as the
creature itself sees it (thus one might grieve based on false information); (3) the directedness toward
an object is typically combined with beliefs about the fortunes of the object, whether it is doing
well or badly, whether it is threatened or safe, etc. (in the case of animals, Nussbaum explains the
capacity of seeing-as, which will be explained in the next sections); (4) these beliefs or whatever we
shall call them appraise or evaluate the object as important; and (5) this importance is relative to
the person’s own conception of eudaimonia. (Thus one might believe that all human beings are of
equal worth and yet grieve for the deaths of only a few of them, those to whom one is attached –
the source of much moral difficulty.)244
All of these make them look very much like thoughts indeed. But, as Nussbaum also
recognized, still far from conclusively proving that emotions are defined in terms of evaluative
judgment alone, which was her claim.245 Especially because all of the considerations discussed above
can be satisfied by a weaker cognitive view, which could claim that thoughts, beliefs, or perceptions
play a huge role in emotions, but are not identical to them. This matter shall be returned to shortly.
It requires a discussion of Nussbaum’s defense of the sufficiency of the cognitive element in
emotion, through an explanation of Stoic claims on the nature of judgment.
That Nussbaum’s is a ‘pure cognitive theory’ will be understood further if we will look at its
position against the necessity of non-cognitive components like feelings and bodily states
in the definition of an emotion. Pace critics, Nussbaum maintains that while it is true that all
emotions are embodied in some way, non-cognitive components (such as leaping of the heart and
boiling of the blood) nonetheless do not have the regularity and constancy with emotions—both of
which would have to be required if they are to be included in the definition of an emotion.
Evaluation or judgment is central in emotion in a way that feelings are not.

243
Ibid., 30.
244
See Nussbaum’s profile in Andrea Scarantino, Emotion Researcher, February 2017.
245
See UT, 2001, 33.

73
 What are Nussbaum’s reasons for excluding non-cognitive components in emotion? There
are at least two: first, because of the variety with which an emotion is realized in different people
or what she calls the multiple realizability argument; and second, emotions can be non-
conscious.246 For instance, fear is frequently accompanied by shivering and trembling, and in some
cases, paralyzing. Nussbaum thinks that we should grant that in typical cases emotions are
conscious experiences, just like beliefs in general.247 But in the same emotion type, there are
counterexamples like the fear of death. Or evidence showing the lack of constancy of feelings: while
fear of death may have motivational power and psychological reality, there is sometimes no
conscious feeling at all. Usually, we are not even conscious that we are shivering and trembling. A
grieving person may feel sometimes achy, sometimes exhausted, sometimes endowed with extra
energy, and yet it would be wrong to say that she is still not grieving. Nussbaum insists:
We can still insist that emotions typically feel visceral and profoundly agitating (not the nonconscious
ones, however), but we just do not, and should not, associate a given emotion type with any one particular
feeling state. Furthermore, we should understand correctly what the agitation is. What feels wrenching
about emotions is often not independent of their cognitive dimension. The death of a loved individual is
unlike a stomach virus because it violently tears the fabric of attachment, hope, and expectation that we
have built up around that person.248

Again, for Nussbaum, we should certainly grant that all human experiences are embodied, and thus
realized in some kind of material process. In that sense, all human emotions are bodily processes.
But the fact that they are bodily (i.e., taking place in a living body) does not give us reason to reduce
their intentional/cognitive components to nonintentional movements.249
The necessity and sufficiency of cognition. To return to Nussbaum’s defense of the
sufficiency to the cognitive element (i.e., judgments, thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, or appraisals)
in emotion, to support her claim that emotions are defined in terms of evaluative appraisals alone
(which makes her theory a purely cognitive one), it should be recalled that Nussbaum was already

246
Nussbaum, “Precis of UT”, 2004, 443.
247
UT, 2001, 71.
248
Nussbaum, PE, Appendix, 400. In UT, Nussbaum tells us that with regard to this issue, we need only to ask: Are there any
bodily states or processes that are constantly correlated with our experiences of emotion, in such a way that we will want to put that
particular bodily state in to the definition of a given emotion-type? We must note, says Nussbaum, the plasticity of the human organism
or the multiple realizability of mental states. In her defense, Nussbaum constantly clarifies, feelings and bodily states may accompany
an emotion of a given type and they may not—but that they are not absolutely necessary for it. See UT, 2001, pp. 68 – 70.
249
UT, 2001, 25. Nussbaum here makes a reference (for those who wish to know) with her general position on mind/body
reduction found in her article co-authored with Hilary Putnam, “Changing Aristotle’s Mind,” in Martha C. Nussbaum & Amelie
Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 27-56.
George Pitcher (1965) shares the same position as Nussbaum. Pitcher’s analysis of emotion captures the way in which
variations in circumstance and personality affect the extent to which people experience the so-called characteristic feelings of anger and
fear. He notes: “[W]e appear to have type-identities between emotions and judgments—or, to put it more elastically … between emotions
and value-laden cognitive states. Emotions can be defined in terms of these evaluative recognitions alone, though we must recognize
some feelings of tumult or ‘arousal’ will often accompany them, and sometimes feelings of a more type-specific kind, and although we
must recall that they are at every point embodied.” See Pitcher, “Emotion,” 1965, pp. 73 – 74.

74
able to show that cognitive elements are essential to an emotion’s identity and the discrimination
of one particular emotion with others, what remains now is to show in which form the cognitive
part suffices. Is it for the presence of other parts (i.e., as sufficient condition for emotion), or merely
a necessary condition?
A common rebuttal to the necessity claim is the existence of recalcitrant emotions: emotions
that persist despite a change in belief. To put this more explicitly: since some emotions persist
despite a change, correction, revision, or even unlearning of associated beliefs, then beliefs are not
necessary for emotion. For this Nussbaum has a simple answer: recalcitrant emotions do not
support the conclusion that beliefs may not be necessary for emotions, for the simple reason that
oftentimes we hold contradictory beliefs. This is especially true with beliefs developed through long
habituation. Here Nussbaum cites Seneca’s advice: changing such beliefs requires a lifetime of
patient self-examination, and even that is not always successful. The mind has complex archeology,
and false beliefs are difficult to shake, unlearn, regulate, or correct entirely. What this rebuttal was
able to show was that recalcitrant emotions exist – which cognitivism does not deny. What it was
able to show was not that beliefs are not necessary for emotions, but that the mind has a
complicated cognitive structure, which a theory of emotion must be able to account for.
To understand Nussbaum’s defense of the sufficiency of the cognitive element in emotions,
one must understand what the original Greek Stoic view means by ‘judgment’ and by the view that
emotions are judgments. According to the Stoics, a judgment is an assent to an appearance. It is a
process that has two stages (though in some cases there may not be two cases, but rather both
happen simultaneously, as will be shown later on). First, it occurs to me or strikes me that such and
such is the case. This stage has three possibilities: I can accept the way things look, repudiate it, or
suspend my belief about it. At this point, it must be noted that for the Stoics, assent was always a
voluntary act and that we always had it in our power to assent or refuse to assent to any appearance.
(Nussbaum notes that the Stoics denied emotions to animals and children so here they are talking
about adults.) Nussbaum, however, tells us that we need not accept this voluntarist claim to accept
the general picture of judgment, especially because “habit, attachment, and the sheer weight of
events may frequently extract assent from us; it is not to be imagined as an act that we always
deliberately perform.”250

250
UT, 2001, 38.

75
 The first stage is what happens during that phone call with some hospital staff telling you
that your mother, who is very dear to you, is in jeopardy. The second stage is when one finally
embraces or repudiates, the appearance. This happens when you finally arrive at the hospital room,
with her dead body before you. Here Nussbaum asks: Can I assent to the idea that someone
tremendously beloved is forever lost to me, and yet preserve emotional equanimity? Nussbaum tells
us that the neo-Stoic claims one cannot. Acceptance of the appearance includes all of its evaluative
elements too: it is not “Betty Craven is dead,” but rather, “My mother, a person I deeply love, who
is central to my life, is permanently gone.”251
Furthermore, judgments that are identified with emotions, according to Stoics, all have a
common subject matter: they are concerned with external goods that lie outside the person’s
complete control. These things are therefore vulnerable things, things that may arrive by surprise,
things that can be affected by events in the world, and can, therefore, be destroyed or removed even
when one does not wish it.252 These are things and people which lie outside one’s grasp, for they lie
‘at the hands of the world,’ to use Nussbaum’s metaphor. Acceptance of the appearance, Nussbaum
tells us, says something about the person: that she allows herself and her good to depend upon
things beyond her control, that she acknowledges a certain passivity before the world.253
It is here that Nussbaum concludes: judgments of the sort described above are not only
necessary constituent elements in emotion but also that they are sufficient. They do not only
explain the cognitive content of emotions, or their rich intentionality; they also explain why they
are hot, urgent, and intense experiences. They feel this way because they are evaluative: they involve
very important things and people, whose entire fate lies outside the person’s hands. Emotions feel
this way because they record the undeniable fact of vulnerability, incompleteness, and dependence
upon uncontrolled things that is the inevitable fate of being human, situated in a world that is
oftentimes indifferent to a person’s strivings.
But what of the fact that it seems counterintuitive to make emotion a function of our
cognitive faculties, rather than a nonrational movement produced in some way by cognition? The
element that experiences the shock of grief is my mind, says Nussbaum: when I think about my
mother when I embrace in my mind the fact that she will never be with me again – and I am shaken.
I unmistakably experience bodily sensations: uncontrollable tears, fluttering of hands, trembling of

251
Ibid., 40 – 41.
252
UT, 2001, 42.
253
Ibid., 43. See also “Precis of UT”, 2004, 444.

76
limbs; but it is not here that I say my grief is. What my grief has is the perception of the beloved
object and her importance; my grief puts a stake in the depth of my love for this person, and its
centrality in my life. The upheaval, the violent projection of one’s mind, is part and parcel of the
experience of what it is like to have those thoughts.254 This is what the Stoics meant in their view
that judging is dynamic and not static. Nussbaum expounds:
Reason here moves, embraces, refuses; it can move rapidly or slowly, it can move directly or with hesitation.
I have imagined it entertaining the appearance of my mother’s death and then, so to speak, rushing toward
it, opening itself to take it in. So why would such a dynamic faculty be unable to house, as well, the
disorderly motions of grief? And this is not just a cheat: I am not stuffing into thought kinetic properties
that properly belong to the arms and legs, or imagining reason as accidentally colored by the kinetic
properties of the bloodstream. The movement toward my mother was a movement of my thought about
what is most important in the world; that seems to be exactly what there is to be said about it. If anything,
the movement of my arms and legs, as I ran vainly through South Philadelphia to University Hospital, was
a kind of vain mimesis of the movement of my thought toward her. It was my thought that was receiving
and being shaken by the knowledge of her death. I think that if we say anything else, we lose the close
connection between the recognition and the being shaken that experience gives us. The recognizing and
the upheaval, we want to say, belong to one and the same part of me, the part with which I make sense of the
world.255

Emotions do not just show the person acknowledging her passivity and powerlessness before
the world, they are also inextricably linked with flourishing and what we value. This is precisely
why Proust called them sudden, immense, and powerful geological upheavals of thought: they all
relate to uncontrolled external goods; things we deeply care about but do not control. Furthermore,
these evaluative judgments always accompany emotional situations, both occurrent and
dispositional, in a way that feelings and bodily states do not. For Nussbaum, this account of the
emotions passes the criterion of correctness she set out to satisfy: “an account that preserves the
truth of the greatest number and the most basic of these experiences”. Such an account provides
convincing explanations for the errors in classification that it eventually ascribes to experience.
Evaluative judgments do not just satisfy the regularity and constancy that is required for inclusion
in the definition of emotion. They also explain several features of emotions: their urgency and heat,
their tendency to take over the personality and to move it to action with overwhelming force, their
connection with important attachments, in terms of which a person defines her life, the person’s
sense of passivity before them, their adversarial relation to ‘rationality’ in the sense of cool
calculation or cost-benefit analysis, their close connections with one another.256 They are able to do
so precisely because involve judgments about the salience for our well-being of uncontrolled

254
Ibid., 44 and 71.
255
UT, 2001, 45. Emphases are mine.
256
UT, 2001, 22.

77
external objects, judgments in which ‘the mind of the judge is projected unstably outward into a
world of objects.’257
Emotions are intelligent. As forms of evaluative thought, too, emotions are suffused with
intelligence and discernment; they are highly discriminating responses to the perception of
significance.258 But this does not mean that they are always correct, or that we should give them a
privileged place of trust. Nussbaum tells us at the outset of UT (2001) that the fact that emotions
are about things that are important to us might be the very reason why we should be suspicious of
them, because they may be no more reliable than any entrenched belief.259
In various venues, Nussbaum has been repeatedly asked on this matter: does saying that
emotions are intelligent mean that emotions are rational? ‘Rational,’ Nussbaum notes, is a slippery
word.260 Emotions are rational if by this we mean ‘based on thought or involving thought.’ Whereas
emotions are not rational if by this we mean ‘based on good (factually correct, inferentially sound)
thought’.261 This is especially true if we remember that emotions are frequently disproportionate to
their objects. But this is usually because the person has a skewed view of the object, seeing it as
more or less important than it really is.262 The issue of importance is shown by differences in
intensity. While differences in intensity are occasioned by differences in eudaimonistic evaluation.
The anger we feel is proportionate to the size of the harm that we think has occurred; the grief we
feel is proportional to the extent of the loss.263
That emotions are intelligent also means that some cases of emotion that are typically found
reasonable, as analysis of emotions in/and law shows. Anger at an assault—either on oneself or a
family member—is often treated as paradigmatic of what a ‘reasonable man’ would feel. The same
is true with fear for one’s life or reputation or well-being, and citizen’s outrage at homicide. In HH
(2004), Nussbaum emphasizes that the very fact of the law is a statement that these attitudes are
indeed reasonable. Many particular instances of anger or fear may indeed be irrational in the

257
Ibid., 2.
258
Ibid., 1.
259
Ibid., 2.
260
HH, 2004, 10.
261
Or, as Chapter 1 of Hiding from Humanity, 2004, describes: “bad thought in some normative sense,” or simply, “thinking
badly”. That is to say, based on beliefs that are false and ungrounded; irrational in the sense that embodies defective thoughts, or
thoughts that should never guide us in important matters. See Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law, (Princeton University
Press, 2004). Henceforth cited as HH.
See one of Nussbaum’s interviews for this clarification: Nussbaum in Paula Erizanu and David Maclean, “How to Escape Fear:
An Interview with Martha Nussbaum,” IAI News interview, 10 August 2018. URL: https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/escaping-the-monarchy-
of-fear-an-interview-with-martha-nussbaum-auid-1128. May also be found in Nussbaum’s faculty page, in the University of Chicago Law
School website.
262
UT, 2001, 56.
263
Ibid., 65.

78
normative sense. They may be irrational because they are based upon false values, as would be the
case if someone reacted with overwhelming anger to a minor assault. But such judgments,
Nussbaum notes, are typically particularistic. The law does not say “All anger and fear are
irrational.” It says, “This instance of anger is not the anger of a reasonable person,” “This instance
of fear is ill-grounded.” They take place against the background of a shared judgment that emotions
are sometimes reasonable, in the normative sense. In other words, these emotions are justified by
what has happened, against the background of reasonable views about what matters.264
This account of the emotions as intelligent responses to the perception of value has immense
implications to ethics, as Nussbaum herself pointed out. This means that emotions contain in
themselves an awareness of value and importance, and so they cannot be sidelined in accounts of
ethical judgments.265 The fact that they include in their content judgments that can either be true
or false, good or bad guides to ethical choice means that they are part and parcel of the system of
ethical reasoning; which calls for further investigation.266 For obvious reasons, it is not difficult to
see how Nussbaum’s account of the emotions has undermined the strong dichotomy of reason
versus emotion, so often used in ordinary life and even in academic circles.267 Nussbaum has been
clear through and through that emotions, insofar as her theory is concerned, are not just the fuel
that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, rather they are parts—highly
complex and messy parts—of the creature’s reasoning itself.268 This is precisely what critics call the
identity-claim. Nussbaum did not just undermine the dichotomy: she identified emotions with
thoughts. The next section of this chapter will comment on this, as it involves the identity-claim
which has attracted several criticisms, as shown in the previous chapter of the thesis.

264
HH, 2004, 5 – 10.
265
UT, 2001, 1.
266
Many in fact heeded this call. Sophie Rietti’s work is a remarkable example. Her PhD Thesis was written when the UT was
still being drafted, for this reason she had access to manuscripts and lectures by Nussbaum only. See her “Being Good with Feeling: Some
Problems about the Place of Emotion in Moral Agency,” PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2003, Edinburgh Research Archive.
See also Kristine A. Hein, “Emotional rationality and the fear of death,” PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2007.
Appendix on Major Works in Philosophy of Emotion reflect works in succeeding years with this problem in focus.
267
Earlier works have demonstrated this already. For a good example, see Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion: The Basic Social
Emotion,” in Social Philosophy and Policy, 1996, pp. 26 – 58.
268
UT, 2001, 3. Passages in the Fragility of Goodness (2001) already discusses this, albeit in different ways, as the book involved
exegesis of Greek and Roman works. See for instance Aristotle’s assault on the Platonic forms. Aristotle argued that emotions are not
obstacles to good reasoning, and that proper passivity and passional responsiveness is at the core of good deliberation. See Nussbaum,
The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, (Cambridge University Press,2001), 307. Henceforth cited as
FoG.
In fact, since emotions are not “devoid of thought,” nor “mindless impulses,” and still less, “electric impulses jolting through
a person;” since are intelligent for they are very much bound up with thought, however complicated these may be, then this means they
are educable. Their intelligence is the very reason why they can be assessed, taught, regulated, or managed, etc. In the Therapy of Desire,
Nussbaum called this “Hellenistic therapeutic argument,” in reference to the Hellenistic Schools’ emphasis on practices of argumentation
and psychological interaction aimed at personal and societal change. More will be said on this matter in the succeeding sections. See
Introduction of Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 6 – 9. Henceforth cited
as TD.

79
4.2.2 Revising the Stoics
Nussbaum’s view of the emotions is not simply purely cognitive, it is also “neo-Stoic”. What
her theory owes to the ancient Greek Stoics have already been mentioned previously. To the extent
that the original Greek view holds that emotions are appraisals or value judgments that ascribe to
things and persons outside the person’s control great importance for that person’s flourishing,
Nussbaum agrees with it.269 But Nussbaum reshaped and revised this Stoic view for various reasons.
First, because of related (and important) topics that the Stoics did not address, such as the place of
feelings and bodily states in emotion, already discussed earlier. Second, because of the Stoics’
implausible view of denying emotions to infants and non-human animals270 (for which modern
work on ethology and cognitive psychology have shown evidence). Third, because of the Stoics’
limited account of evaluative cognition that focuses on linguistically formulable propositions (given
their view of animals as simply lower forms of being incapable of higher forms of cognitive abilities
such as emotions).271 Fourth, because Nussbaum hopes to emphasize the commonality between
humans and other animals, the role of social norms, and the complexities of individual history.272
Fifth and most important, because of Nussbaum’s profuse disagreement with the ancient Greek
Stoics in their normative view of complete extirpation of the emotions. That is, in their view that
all emotions involve high evaluation of aspects of the world that we do not fully control, that is why
such evaluations are always mistaken; and so emotions are normatively irrational as a class.273
Nussbaum maintains that we can still mine the Stoic’s fertile ideas concerning the emotions,

269
Aside from Nussbaum’s TD (1994) and UT (2001), excellent discussions of the original Stoic view on emotion are found in
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Temptation to Christian Agitation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and
Margaret R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, (London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., 2007). Sorabji reviewed Graver’s book in “Did
the Stoics Value Emotion and Feeling?” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 234 (Jan., 2009), pp. 150 – 162.
Nussbaum clarified the differences of her reading of the Stoic texts from some of Sorabji’s readings. She explained her
criticisms on Sorabji in her interview with Andrea Scarantino, for the online philosophy journal, Emotion Researcher, February 2007.
270
Many scholars point out that the cognitive theory is unable to accommodate emotions in beasts and babies but Nussbaum
is exempted from this charge. Philosopher John Deigh reviewed this criticism to the cognitive theory at length in “Concepts of Emotions
in Modern Philosophy and Psychology,” in Peter Goldie (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Emotion, (Oxford Unievrsity Press,
2010), pp. 17 – 40.
271
Nussbaum, contra the Stoics, thinks that emotions are not propositional attitudes, nor are they bound to language. Indeed
in the UT and in later works, Nussbaum argued that even very sophisticated emotions of a human adult may not be linguistically
formulable, but formulable, or more accurately formulable, in musical terms. See Chapter 5 of UT “Music and Emotion” where Mahler
was discussed; Chapters 2 and 4 of PE where the music of Mozart and Tagore were discussed, “Equality and Love: Rousseau, Herder and
Mozart,” and “Religions of Humanity II: Rabindranath Tagore.” Recently too, in 2016, Nussbaum wrote on the modern conception of
mercy influenced by Stoicism, which focuses on the equal vulnerability of all human beings to error, through a reflection of the opera,
specifically Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. See her “’If You Could See This Heart’: Mozart’s Mercy,” in Ruth R. Caston and Robert A. Kaster,
Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical World, (Oxford University Press, 2016).
272
UT, 2001, 4 – 8.
273
HH, 2004, 5.

80
without following this normative view which the Stoics are known to have held.274 It has already
been made clear in earlier discussions that for Nussbaum, many emotions are not irrational nor
contrary to human flourishing. This will progressively be discussed as this chapter proceeds.
This section will discuss three modifications which Nussbaum made on the Stoic view: first,
a more capacious account of non-linguistic cognition; second, the explanatory role of culture,
society, and norms; and finally, the developmental dimension of emotions.
A flexible and broad account of cognition: emotions in beasts and babies.275 In Chapter
2 of the UT, Nussbaum demonstrated how the Stoic view needs very basic modification to do justice
to the emotions of non-linguistic creatures such as infants and non-human animals. For
Nussbaum, all moving animals (not including sponges and mollusks) have emotions, which are
important in explaining their movements.276 All moving animals are capable of appraisal, and most
scientists working closely on animals now agree on this.
Nussbaum aimed at explaining animal emotions to modify the Stoic view of emotions, in a
way that will make it a more adequate account of human emotions too; and to use findings of such
as a basis in understanding distinctions between emotions and appetites, emotions and moods,
emotions and desires for action. This sub-section, however, focuses on her account of said
modification to highlight the fact that emotions have a biological basis, and that human beings
share some emotional characteristics with animals.
The ancient Greek Stoic view that animals are incapable of intentionality, selective attention,
and appraisal, and Chrysippus’s view that emotions involve acceptance of lekta or proposition-like
entities corresponding to the sentences in a language, have made the Stoic view narrow, inadequate,
and illegitimately anthropomorphic in accounting for non-human animals’ capacity for perception
of things and events significant for their well-being, and in explaining the emotional development
of infants and young children. In pursuit of a more adequate account of emotion, then, Nussbaum
defends the possibility of non-linguistic cognition, starting with non-human animals. In her
illustrations, Nussbaum cited the cases of elephants, dogs, and chimpanzees. The case of
chimpanzees is cited here. Nussbaum narrates one research by eminent primatologist Jane Goodall:

274
Nussbaum have written an extensive exegesis of this view in Chapter 10 of TD, “The Stoics on the Extirpation of the
Passions,” pp. 359 – 401.
275
I borrow those terms – “beasts and babies” – from John Deigh, “Nussbaum’s Account of Compassion,” in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, March 2004, pp. 465 – 472.
276
Nussbaum’s PhD dissertation in Harvard was precisely on this topic: Aristotle’s treatise on the movement of animals. Her
dissertation has subsequently been published into a book. See Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978).

81
 Flo, a female chimpanzee, died of old age by the side of a stream. Flint, her son, stayed near
her corpse, grabbing one of her arms and trying to pull her up by the hand. He slept near her
body all night, and in the morning he showed signs of depression. In the days following, no
matter where he wandered off, he always returned to his mother’s body, trying to remove the
maggots from it. Finally, attacked by the maggots himself, he stopped coming back, but he
stayed fifty yards away, and would not move. In ten days, he lost about a third of his body
weight. Finally, after his mother’s corpse had been removed for burial, he sat down on a rock
near where she had lain down, and died. The postmortem showed no cause of death.
Primatologist Jane Goodall concludes that the major cause of death had to be grief. “His whole
world had revolved around Flo, and with her gone, life was hollow and meaningless.”277

The attitudes which Flint displayed here cannot be envisaged as involving a linguistically
formulable proposition, and the beliefs are not propositional in form if that means linguistically
formulable. What we need, says Nussbaum, is a looser and more inclusive notion of predication or
combination: emotions combine perception of an object with some processing of information about
the current fate of the object.278 It should be noted that by cognition, Nussbaum means “nothing
more than ‘concerned with receiving and processing information’ [and not] the presence of
elaborate calculation, of computation, or even of reflexive self-awareness.”279 In the case of non-
human animals like Flint, what Nussbaum argues is for there to be less focus on language and the
acceptance of linguistically formulable propositions, and more on the general ability to see X as Y,
where Y involves a notion of salience or importance for the creature’s well-being.280 Flint’s
perception of helplessness in the face of Flo’s death obviously cannot be expressed in words (lekta),
and it would be grossly anthropomorphic to deny him emotional experience based on this lack.281
Nussbaum has repeatedly called for caution over excessive emphasis on the verbal. For what
animal emotions show is that cognitive appraisals need not all be objects of reflexive self-
consciousness. They could be as wide as discriminating threatening from non-threatening, the
welcome from the unwelcome, etc. Seeing X as Y only means conscious awareness: that there is
something the world is like to animals, and that this intentional looking at the world is significant
in explaining their actions. Again, this need not imply that they study their awareness. In the same
way, humans have self-consciousness but we do not always exercise it in emotion-situations. The
whole history of emotions being maligned as blinding or clouding thought speak of this! Even in

277
Nussbaum, UT, 2001, p. 89, citing Jane Goodall, Through a Window, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), p. 165.
278
See “On Anger, Disgust and Love: An Interview with Andrea Scarantino (February 2007),” Published by Emotion Researcher,
URL: http://emotionresearcher.com/on-anger-disgust-love/.
279
UT, 2001, 23.
280
Nussbaum, “Precis of UT”, 2004, 444.
281
Nussbaum acknowledges that we inevitably lack first-person reports of animal cases, but that we can come as close to that
as possible by focusing on a detailed narrative of the emotions of particular animals, made by an observer who has unusual empathy and
unusual awareness of the specific capacities of the animals in question. See UT, 2001, 92.

82
adult emotional experience, the issue of the definiteness of the verbal remains questionable, to the
extent that many emotional experiences show these inchoate and lacking clear boundaries.282
The case of infants, on the other hand, shows us that the complicated cognitive structure of
emotions is in part narrative in form, involving our relation to cherished objects that extends over
time, beginning from infancy. This means that the history of patterns of attachment that extend
back into infancy is recorded in emotions, although this does not mean that they are easily
recognizable nor accessible in adulthood.283 Cognition is even broader (and indeed more
complicated) if we include the huge role of imagination and memory, much of which is shaped in
our early years with caregivers. More will be said about this shortly, in the discussion of Nussbaum’s
view on the developmental dimension of emotions.
By the time Nussbaum is through with this particular modification of the original Stoic view,
her cognitive/evaluative theory of emotion has adopted a looser and more capacious account of the
relevant cognitions. The original Stoic view holds that emotions are judgments. Nussbaum, with
this modification, holds that emotions are evaluative and eudaimonistic perceptions or thoughts;
they involve appraising something as important for one’s well-being. This is true for beasts as well
as babies who lack the capacity for linguistically formulable expression of emotions, but
undoubtedly have the capacity for non-linguistic cognition and appraisals such as perceptions of
helplessness, as modern work on ethology and child psychology have shown evidence for.
Further revisions on the original Stoic claim: the explanatory role of culture, society,
and norms. It is interesting that Nussbaum, in recognizing that ‘social construction’ entails that
our emotions are made out of (or influenced by) elements that we have not made ourselves, makes
room for human freedom. Notice for instance how there are many cases where one endorses a
picture of emotions different from what widely accepted cultural norms entail. This is especially
true for parents, for instance, who believe that racial hatred is dangerous, if not evil. Believing that
the cognitive content of racial hatred is not one to teach a child, they shape the content of their
own emotions, and in turn, their children’s emotional education. Such parents (and some political
leaders) struggle with their own deeply implanted cultural impulses, as they try to mold the course
of the emotional development of the next generation. They take seriously what cues, beliefs,
actions, and instructions they transmit to children, concerning what and whom to fear, what
occasions for anger are reasonable, what behavior is shameful, what actions are commendable, etc.

282
Ibid., 126 – 128.
283
UT, 2001, 2.

83
Social construction here, says Nussbaum, leads to a recognition of space and freedom, rather than
the reverse.284
Reflective endorsement, then, takes central stage in this picture. That is why many of the
elements of social construction are in fact ‘intelligent pieces of human normative activity, of the
sort that can in principle, within certain limits, be changed by more intelligent human activity’. The
cognitive/evaluative view of emotion then shows where both societies and individuals have the
freedom to make improvements. If one recognizes that emotions have the element of evaluation,
then one also sees that they can themselves be evaluated and in turn be regulated or altered, if they
do not survive evaluation. Alteration of beliefs and emotions may take gradual and partial progress,
but possible.285
In other words, what people usually invoke in involuntary talk about emotions—‘I was
taught this way’, ‘In my culture, this is how we mourn’—may be the key towards vindicating, if not
championing, human freedom. It is precisely because emotions are learned that they can be
transformed and unlearned. Or for that matter, chosen for nurturing and promoting. In this picture
of the emotional life, there is so much space for creativity and invention even. In Political Emotions,
Nussbaum reminds us of this freedom, in a passage that captures her staunch belief in the power
and importance of such freedom: “The Romantic idea that emotion is not worthy unless it becomes
unbidden should be rejected: we can learn to feel appropriately, just as we can learn to act
appropriately.”286
Further revisions on the original Stoic claim – The developmental dimension of
emotions: ‘past loves shadow present attachments, and take up residence in them.’287
Nussbaum argues that childhood history of emotions shapes adult emotional life. This is actually
how she explains the possibility of recalcitrant emotions.288 Emotions in mature experience
sometimes feel as if ‘they flood up out of nowhere, in ways that do not match our present view of

284
Ibid., 171 – 173.
285
UT, 2002, 173.
286
PE, 2016, 65. Emphasis added.
287
UT, 2001, 2. This is also Nussbaum’s defense for the essential role of literature and other works of art in understanding
emotions. If emotions have a complicated narrative history, and we are beings with a complex temporal history, then we need to turn to
texts that are in part narrative in form, so we may refine our understanding of ourselves and our emotions.
288
Recalcitrant emotions run counter to evaluative judgement. They involve a cognitive conflict between experiential state
and better judgement. In Nussbaum’s example: the dissonance that many of us feel between what we are aware of intending and what
we suddenly find ourselves experiencing under certain circumstances. This may be a difference in kind, or in degree. “The past swells up
in us, in ways that surprise the deliberately intending self,” says Nussbaum (UT, p. 232). See Sabine A. Döring, “What's Wrong With
Recalcitrant Emotions? From Irrationality to Challenge of Agential Identity,” in Dialectica, Vol. 69, Issue 3, September 2015, pp. 381 –
402; and, Sabine A. Döring, “Why Recalcitrant Emotions Are Not Irrational,” in Sabine Roeser and Cain Todd, Emotion and Value,
(Oxford University 2014), where she argued that the subject, in experiencing recalcitrant emotions, is not irrational because he does
not contradict himself. See also Michael S. Brady, “Recalcitrant Emotions and Visual Illusions,” in American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol.
44, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 273-284.

84
our objects or their value.’ Such recalcitrance may even be masked from oneself, as in the case of
false self-defense. Many deep emotions, says Nussbaum persist from childhood and motivate
mature emotional experience in ways that even the person may not consciously understand.
Indeed, Nussbaum insists, in a way that directly confronts the problem of passivity:
When these emotions manifest themselves, or when their motivating activity is made clear, the person
may well feel as if forces of a noncognitive kind were pushing her around: for the cognitive content of these
emotions may not be available to her, even to the extent that it is available it may have an archaic and
infantile form. Moreover, it may not match at all the thoughts about the value of objects that she is aware
of having. And she may stick to her view despite her conscious thoughts and the evidence before her.289

Nussbaum’s cognitive view, then, by including a developmental dimension, makes room for
‘the mysterious and ungoverned aspects of the emotional life’. What is interesting in this account
of emotions and infancy is, Nussbaum finds it perfectly compatible, and strong support to, a
cognitive account, unlike De Sousa (1987) whose account of paradigm scenarios lead him to an
account with evolutionary/biological leanings. Nussbaum insists that what a developmental
account of emotion shows us is still at root a cognitive difference: a difference in one’s perception
of value and salience, a difference in the narratives of need and dependency one has come to accept,
a difference of personal histories. Narrative artworks do ‘not only represent the narrative structure
or history of emotions, they enter into it’. Storytelling and narrative play are therefore essential in
cultivating a child’s emotions, and in understanding any single emotion.
Moreover, Nussbaum is explicit about the picture of character this view supports. All
cognitive views of emotion, Nussbaum says, entail that emotions can be modified by a change in
the way one evaluates objects,290 in much the same way that social construction of emotions leads
one to recognize the space it gives to one’s agency and reflection. This does not mean that changing
the emotional life is easy. Nussbaum is right to devote much time in pointing this out. Many
emotions are formed early in life. Familiarity, reliance, habit, and investment of importance, all play
a role in the difficulty of bringing change in the emotional life. The Stoics recognized this difficulty,
but, as Nussbaum perceptively observed, their cognitive view tells us that there is a task to be
undertaken, and not that the task is easily done. Here Nussbaum interestingly adds: perhaps this
task could not be completed at all.291 The task is not easily accomplished, again, precisely because

289
UT, 2001, 230.
290
Ibid., 232.
291
Nussbaum mentions philosopher Iris Murdoch’s emphasis on the long and painful effort of vision, the painstaking inner
moral work, that is required if we are to change our ways of seeing people we fear, or hate, or resent. Nussbaum adds that her work goes
further than Murdoch and the Stoics (and Aristotle) in her suggestion that we might be quite ignorant of what emotion-cognitions are,
and that we may have a lot invested in not changing them. Seeing oneself as perfect or shameful is not just a habit to be changed. This
way of seeing oneself may not emerge in full awareness. If they do, so much has already been invested that changing it may constitute a
large-scale upheaval, for which a person may not be prepared at all. See UT, pp. 233 – 234.

85
they are habitual and important to us. It is here that we must be careful in prescribing unachievable
norms of perfection, for these are precisely what wreak emotional havoc. Simply telling people to
‘bring emotions in line with reason’s dictates’292 may be an insensible goal to set, given human
ambivalence and vulnerability, and the resulting emotions out of these.

4.2.3 The setting: the fragility of the good life

That I am an agent, but also a plant; that much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever
I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently
incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help
being false to something or doing some wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without
my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one’s good to friends, lovers, or
country and to try to have a good life without them – all these I take not just the material of tragedy,
but everyday facts of lived practical reason.
Martha Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness

Emotions and being human: Nussbaum’s moral and political thought. All the claims
which Nussbaum makes on the emotions have context. She was working on practical conflict as
depicted in Greek tragedies (and the implications of these to Anglo-American moral philosophy,
which was, at the time of the publication of The Fragility of Goodness, enmired in Kantian and
utilitarian discussions)293 when she began developing her theory on the emotions.294 In a quite
moving passage, she shows not only the variety of her wide-ranging work’s major themes but more
so the logic that connects all of them. The anchor point and background of her thought, including
those on the emotions, can be gleaned in the following lines:

Academics can be too detached from human realities to do good work about the texture of human life.
That’s a risk inherent in academic freedom and tenure, wonderful institutions that did not protect
philosophers of most earlier eras. My own commitments and efforts have always led me to want to restore
to philosophy the wide set of concerns that it had in the days of the Greeks and Romans: concerns with
the emotions and the struggle for flourishing lives in troubled times; with love and friendship; with the
human life span (including aging, so well-studied by Cicero); with the hope for a just world. I’ve had a lot
of partners in this search for a human philosophy (and several superb mentors, including Stanley Cavell,
Hilary Putnam, and Bernard Williams). But I’m hoping that my own history, both in its unearned privileges
295
and in its awareness of inequalities, has helped my search well.

This admonition on the deep roots of disgust, shame and anger, will be demonstrated comprehensively in Nussbaum’s works
that follow UT: Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law (2004) and Anger and Forgiveness (2016).
292
Again, Nussbaum alerts us: “The roots of anger, hatred and disgust lie very deep in the structure of human life, in our
ambivalent relation to our lack of control over objects and the helplessness of our own bodies. … My view, then, urges us to reject as
both too simple and too cruel any picture of character that tells us to bring every emotion into line with reason’s dictates, or the dictates
of the person’s ideals, whatever that is. … To this extent, my Neo-Stoic view of emotion, by providing the emotions with a history, has
already diverged from normative Stoic ethics, and even from Aristotle; for already in my psychological account, I provide the basis for
condemning those normative approaches as excessively violent toward human complexity and frailty.” See UT, pp. 234 – 235.
293
See Bernard Williams, “Morality and the emotions”, 1973; Charles Taylor, “Review of Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of
Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy,” in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 805 – 814;
Martha Nussbaum, “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?
294
She started thinking and writing on the emotions as early as 1970’s (years of drafting Fragility) and 1990’s (with Love’s
Knowledge), as she narrates in the Preface to the Revised edition of the FoG.
295
Nussbaum, Monarchy of Fear, 2019, Preface.

86
 What gives much texture in human life, she tells us in the UT (2001), is the messy material of
grief and love, fear and anger, and the tumultuous experiences that these are in the face of our
thinking about the good and the just. Life would be simple if grief were only a pain in the leg, or
jealousy but a very bad headache; if these emotions do not torment us mentally, if they do not serve
as sources of agony or delight; and if their peculiar depth and terrifying character do not drive us
mad in search for understanding.296
This concept of the human (which Nussbaum extended to non-human animals, as in the case
of her revision of the Stoics discussed earlier) is crucial in a deeper understanding of Nussbaum’s
emotion theory. That this human being is an agent who deliberates, hopes, and plans; but also a
plant, which is dependent on things outside it for growth and nourishment, for protection and love.
Human beings can choose and decide actively over values and ends but are also tender as plants,
which are open to fortune, catastrophe, and many other contingencies and vulnerabilities that are
not up to us.297 The mere fact of managing to lead a flourishing life – of being able to function as a
citizen, or to be able to engage in activities such as friendship and love – require external conditions
or events that are beyond the person’s control, and which may cause harm, including ethical harm.
Many values and activities of the struggle to becoming a good person – caring about children, or
about political citizenship and action, or caring in general about being able to act rather than simply
to be – simply open the human being to risk. The very fact of having a body makes one liable to
injury, and the fact of living with others to relational conflicts. All these concerns and attachments
put the person who cherishes them at the mercy of luck in at least some ways.
This concept of the human, too, includes the importance of relationships as among valuable
goods. Valuable goods are plural. Even with careful planning and deliberation, even with a clear
hierarchy of goods, the human being’s neediness and incompleteness still open her to risks where
she may be asked to choose among competing and incommensurable goods. The human being’s
neediness opens her to circumstances that may force her to a position in which she cannot help
being false to something or doing some wrong, or that an event that simply happens to her that

296
UT, 2001, 16.
297
For reference on discussion of the problems this picture of the human being show, in the very specific problem of duties,
and in the context of Nussbaum’s moral philosophy vis-à-vis another the other ethical theory of deontology, see W. A. Hart, “Nussbaum,
Kant and Conflicts Between Duties,” in Philosophy 73, 1998, pp. 609 – 618. Philosopher Robert Roberts writes along the same lines, too,
in the context of personal relationships. See Robert Roberts, “Emotional Consciousness and Personal Relationships,” in Emotion Review,
Vol. 1, No. 3 (July 2009), pp. 281 – 288.

87
may, without her consent, alter her life. Relationships, like other valuable goods, can incapacitate
a person, and dislodge her from flourishing. These may impoverish her life as to be not worth living.
This concept of the human is significant in a deeper understanding of Nussbaum’s emotion
theory because it is emotions that inform us about the significance of such risks and reversals. For
this reason, emotions as appraisals or perceptions of value and importance have immense ethical
significance. Emotions inform us about values and what we deeply care about, which in many cases
may be hidden from us otherwise. Emotions remind us of our inherent incompleteness as finite
mortals. Emotions remind us, sometimes in urgent and overwhelming ways, that we live in a world
that is in large part indifferent to our strivings, and that the struggle to lead flourishing lives is
always faced with this stark fact. The emotions’ immense importance on this score cannot be denied
nor discounted: emotions are perceptions of value inform us of facts of existence which we so often
forget or shun, especially in favor of more stable ways of leading one’s life. Nussbaum, along with
the tragic poets, Aristotle and Stoics, keep on telling us: emotions are sources of powerful insight.
Just this reason already commands commitment to understand them better, so that life in all its
messiness and complexity may find illumination.
This concept of the human is significant in understanding deeper Nussbaum’s emotion theory
because this picture shows that emotions are constituent elements of a good human life.298
Especially if we note that it is on account of attachments to external goods that emotions render us
vulnerable. But it is also problematic, as many moral philosophers recognized, following Nussbaum
in the FoG (1986, 2001), to try to have a good life without entrusting one’s good to things outside
our control. Without such commitments and risks, emotions would have no place in our lives. Our
lives would not be fully human.299 Many philosophers seek to limit such risks brought by
uncontrolled goods, for the sake of stability. Nussbaum’s FoG (1986, 2001) investigated many of
these thinkers who go too far and produce an account of the good that is impoverished and narrow.
This does not mean that Nussbaum did away with stability – she, along with the tragic poets, thinks
that is reasonable and essential. Aristotle holds a more nuanced view in prizing some goods, in part
on account of their stability. That is why he prizes friendship based on character over other less
stable forms. But like the tragic poets, he never exalted immunity from fortune as a dominant end.
He prizes friendship as among the most important goods even if this means risking grief and loss.300

298
As Galen acknowledges: “The doctrine of the virtues follows necessarily from the doctrine of the emotions” Galen (PHP
5.6.1). To speak of virtue without giving due attention to the emotions was as impossible as it was inconceivable.
299
Philosopher Claudia Card acknowledges, like many moral philosophers do, Nussbaum’s enduring legacy in this topic. See
Claudia Card, “Stoicism, Evil, and the Possibility of Morality,” in Metaphilosophy, Vol. 29, No. 4, (October 1998), p. 246.
300
FoG, 2001, xxix.

88
 To be sure, there have been many efforts in the history of mankind which tried to deny the
neediness and incompleteness that emotions are known to reveal to us, many times in shocking
and paralyzing ways (as captured by the geological upheaval metaphor). Nussbaum’s works,
prominently FoG (1986, 2001) and LK (1999), have shown inherent problems with projects of
redesigning our scheme of goals and ends that seek to remove the influence of chance altogether
from human life. These projects, Nussbaum reminds us, run the risk of removing genuine human
goods that make life worth living.301 Such projects commonly include in their central aspirations
the elimination—or at least the reduction—of the troublesome force of the passions. This is
precisely the motivation of the ancient Greek Stoics in their normative view of complete extirpation
of the emotions: to make our lives safe from fortune (tuché) was to make them safe, as well, from
these internal sources of uncontrolled danger.302 The imposition of perfect goals over imperfect
mortals as already mentioned in earlier sections, is precisely the cause of many vehement emotions
and ethical harm. Investigations of these projects in the FoG (1986, 2001) as well as in Nussbaum’s
other works have formed the material of Nussbaum’s enduring bid to embrace our neediness and
incompleteness as mortals, and to take seriously our responses to areas that highlight these aspects
of being human, especially when such responses include eliminating emotions from life
altogether303 if indeed this is possible.
In her other works, such as the Political Emotions (2016), human vulnerability and
powerlessness are written in almost every page of PE: of the wet and needy infant, the dependent
chimpanzee, the insecure local loyalties, the excluded homosexual, the imperfect society aspiring
for justice. In contrast to Aristotle’s gods in the Nicomachean Ethics, who do not need receipts or
contracts, and who do not need to be afraid or be generous,304 human beings are, from the moment

301
Here Nussbaum gives an important caveat: the reminder that a completely invulnerable life is likely to prove impoverished
by no means entails that we should prefer risky lives to more stable lives, or seek to maximize our own vulnerability, as if it were a good
in itself. She clarifies her position: [u]p to a point, vulnerability is a necessary background condition of certain genuine goods, but she
never endorsed the romantic position that vulnerability and fragility are to be prized in their own right. See FoG, 2001, xxx. A very
interesting article that reflects on the opposite sides of the position of favoring a life of stability is Martha Beck’s “Virtue Without Fragility:
Martha Nussbaum’s Account of Detachment in the Republic, the Crito, and the Phaedo,” in Sophia, Vol. 40, No. 1, June 2001, pp. 45 – 59.
302
See FoG, 2001, 307.
303
In the final chapter of LK (1999), Nussbaum investigated a parallel aspiration that has been recorded in many works of
fiction and history: the aspiration to transcend humanity (i.e., mortality). See her “Transcending Humanity,” in LK, 1999, pp. 365 – 392.
304
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Translated with an Introduction And Notes by Martin Ostwald (NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.,
1999). Emotions are bound up with our being human, with our being finite, dependent, and mortal beings. Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge
illustrates this very well:
[T]he gods are seen as gods: beings better than us, worthy of our worship and emulation. They are better than we are,
above all, because they lack certain limits and defects that characterize human life. They are immortal, athanatoi, while
humans are mortals, thnētoi. They are always healthy and vigorous; we suffer disease and debilitation. They are always
in their prime; we move from the impotence of childhood through a brief flourishing to the impotence of age. Their
lives are stable; our are vexed by unanticipated accidents. They have what they want without effort; our life is
characterized by painful toil. Their beauty is not undermined by fatigue or illness or anxiety; ours, prone to all these, is

89
of birth, naked and exposed, weak and needy. This mortal, who is reliant on others for survival, is
also a creature capable of transcending the limitations of life in various ways. This same mortal who
is fully human in his lack of self-sufficiency and who belongs to a family and a nation, have the
inherent tendency for radical evil, inclination to be greedy, and yet is capable of extended love
beyond the family and even beyond the nation.
This is one of the senses in which Nussbaum tells us that our emotions are entailed by our
humanity: being in need, we look toward others for help, this being the cause of either envy and
greed, or cooperation and generosity. Emotions, in this sense, are responses to various areas of
vulnerability, responses in which we register the damages we suffered, might suffer, or luckily have
failed to suffer.305 The idea of emotion is closely linked with the idea of being human, in that
invulnerable, totally self-sufficient beings would have no reason to fear an impending bad event,
no reasons for anger at wrongful damages, or grief at the profound loss of loved ones.306 The mortal’s
dependence is part and parcel of the messiness of being “merely human,” of the human this-worldly
life.307 Notice how the denial of emotion entails a denial of some form of vulnerability.308
It is here that Nussbaum’s ethics and politics are apparent—an ethics that recognizes this
person and this kind of person: messy, needy, and complicated.309 This being is capable of
resignation, but also of work and effort. This person wants to fulfill national duty but also wants to
take good care of the very personal concerns of family, childcare, health, and education. A mortal
who has both narrow and extended concerns, and so an individual capable of emotions. This is also
why emotions, says Nussbaum, contain an ineliminable reference to this kind of person’s
individuality: to the fact that it is my scheme of goals and projects. The fact that it is my mother is
not simply a fact like any other fact about the world: it is what structures the geography of the
whole situation, and we cannot capture the emotion without including that element. It is not just

never as good. They understand everything; we are ignorant and limited. Their loved ones will be with them forever
(unless they fall in love with mortals…); our loves end in grief and mourning.
See Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 371. Henceforth cited
as LK.
305
Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law (Princeton University Press, 2004), 6. Nussbaum’s
definition of politics, which guides her numerous writings on the topic, is that politics is all about using human intelligence to support
human neediness.” See LK, 1999, 373.
306
HH, 2004, 7.
307
PE, 2016, 27.
308
HH, 2004, 7.
309
For two references (she wrote a lot) on Nussbaum’s excellent work on this topic, see Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotle on
human nature and the foundations of ethics,” in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical
Philosophy of Bernard Williams, (Cambridge University Press, 1995 [2012]) , pp. 86 – 131; and Martha Nussbaum, “Political Animals: Love,
Luck and Dignity,” in Metaphilosophy, Vol. 29, No. 4 (October 1998), 273 – 287.

90
the fact that Betty Craven has died. It’s the fact that Betty Craven is my mother. 310 Much of emotions’
urgency and intensity is owed to this feature: emotions see the world from my point of view, which
is inevitably colored by my personality, and in many ways influenced by what I value and care about.
This also explains why Nussbaum rightly observes we do not grieve all the deaths in the world, but
the death of a loved one feels wrenching, it feels like a violent tearing of the self into pieces.311 Now,
if it is true that helplessness (i.e., being needy and incomplete) is part and parcel of the messiness
of being ‘merely human,’312 and being human as such entails emotions (i.e., emotions as evaluative
judgments which register areas of vulnerability), then passivity as such – as helplessness before
catastrophe, as openness to fortune, as proneness to reversal, as being at the receiving end of many
things, as subject to many contingencies – is central to emotion. Nussbaum has shown it so. To say
otherwise is to present counterarguments to her view of the emotions as evaluative judgments
which contain the idea of importance of external goods in one’s flourishing. It is to deny any of the
claims comprising Nussbaum’s thesis on the emotions, namely, (1) that emotions are appraisals or
perceptions; (2) that these appraisals or perceptions are about important things; and, (3) these are
appraisals or perceptions in which we acknowledge our neediness and incompleteness before those
elements that we do not fully control. The next section will review some of these counterarguments
and the extent to which they destabilize Nussbaum’s view on the emotions.

4.3 Nussbaum, Passivity, and the Challenges to the Cognitive Theory

So far, our examination showed how Nussbaum’s pure cognitive theory, considered by many
as a representative of the extreme cognitivist camp, could be seen from another important light:
the centrality of passivity in her emotion theory. This complicates ways of looking at Nussbaum’s
theory. Because in this sense, she seems an anomaly to present categorizations. She is identified by
emotion scholars as a ‘strong’ cognitivist, and yet she has passivity at the heart of cognitivism. In
her cognitive claim, the passivity of emotion takes front and center.
But passivity in what sense? Passivity with respect to externals, or things we do not fully
control, has been extensively discussed in Nussbaum’s account of judgment. Another one is
abstracted: Passivity as experienced by human beings and animals, referring to the phenomenology
of emotions. This refers to the various ways in which we feel or experience emotions, from the

310
UT, 2001, 62. Nussbaum wrote a very fine article on the emotions’ ability to individuate, in Chapter 13 of LK (1999), “Love
and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration”.
311
PE, 2016, 400.
312
Ibid., 16.

91
calmest through the strongest forms, from the more mental through the more bodily or
physiological. Examples of these are the following: mental torment (in the case of grief), a puncture
in the stomach, paralysis, and/or sweating of palms or trembling hands and dry throat (fear), stab
in the heart (jealousy), heat swelling in one’s body, or cold achy feeling (anger). Nussbaum in the
UT (2001) repeatedly emphasized that these ways of experiencing emotions are hardly distinct from
their being thoughts or evaluative cognitions. This shall be discussed this in further detail in the
last section of the present chapter, when the concept of passivity is reconsidered, in light of the
overall results of this chapter, alongside the results of the previous chapters.
There seem to be two important and opposite ways by which we can conceive of Nussbaum’s
relationship with passivity. Insofar as we take her as espousing emotions to be cognitive, intelligent,
and intentional judgments, then she might seem so far from passivity, which says that emotions are
irruptive states that assail the person. But, on the other hand, if we remember her invaluable
contributions to emphasizing the significance of luck, dependence, lack of self-sufficiency, and
recognition of things that we do not fully control, then she has deep connections with passivity.
Especially when she identifies emotions with evaluative appraisals that involve valuable external
goods. But of course, this way of presenting the problem is too neat. For does endorsing a cognitive
theory necessarily commit one to junk passivity altogether? Is our notion of ‘cognitive,’ intelligent,
or intentional completely devoid of passivity? If it is not, how much of passivity is then left after
cognitive theories of emotion? To these questions, we now turn.

4.3.1 Criticisms against Nussbaum’s cognitive/evaluative theory313

In this section, criticisms against cognitivism are reviewed, this time with Nussbaum’s
theory in focus. I also explain the sense in which these are passivity-motivated. The main question
asks whether these challenges subvert any of the claims included in Nussbaum’s view that emotions
are evaluative appraisals that register areas of neediness and incompleteness before parts of the
world that we do not fully control.

313
I note that there are other invaluable reviews of some other aspects of Nussbaum’s theory, such as her account of compassion.
I do not include these here for the reason that my argument concerns the criticisms to the cognitive theory which the previous chapter
already laid out. Such reviews have little to no bearing on my argument concerning the problem of passivity in emotion. See these reviews
in John Deigh, “Nussbaum’s Account of Compassion,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, March 2004, pp.
465 – 472; and Nancy Sherman, “‘It is no little thing to make mine eyes to sweat compassion’,” APA comments of Martha Nussbaum’s
Upheavals of Thought, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, March 2004, pp. 458 – 464. Both these reviews
focused on compassion. Deigh’s major suggestion is to make a distinction between moral and non-moral compassion, a suggestion which
Nussbaum recognized as important in her account of compassion.

92
 The section starts with problems associated with the identity-claim, such as the notion of
judgment, reductionist tendencies, and hot cognition. Followed by challenges arising from the
place of feelings and the body, and then the role of biology and culture in emotions. Two criticisms
are discussed in separate sections: first, the challenge concerning voluntarism and optimistic
rationalism occasioned by the identity-claim of cognitive theories; and second, the challenge arising
from the history of emotion, concerning the need to look closely at the relationship of emotions
with earlier categories.
Nussbaum a ‘judgmentalist’.314 It is odd that many critics call Nussbaum a ‘judgmentalist,’
when she insisted on the modification of the original Stoic view that emotions are judgments to
make room for the emotions of non-human animals and infants, resulting to her theory which holds
that emotions are evaluative and eudaimonistic perceptions or thoughts which involve appraising
something as important for one’s well-being. (A related criticism directed to her theory is that it is
a ‘propositional attitude approach’.)315 Nussbaum made it clear that she holds a looser and broader
account of non-linguistic appraisals or perceptions than the original Greek view of emotions as
judgments.316
Identity-claim as reductionist: include feelings and desire (or motivation) as well.
Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (2004), in his APA comment “Emotions Are Not Mere Judgments”, reviewed
Nussbaum’s theory as it is discussed in the UT (2001).317 Ben-Ze’ev, contra Nussbaum, argues that
emotions are too complex to be defined by reference to thought alone. Feelings and motivations
must also be mentioned in the account of the typical case of emotion. For this reason, Nussbaum’s
cognitive-evaluative emotion theory, which identifies emotion with just one central component, is
reductionist.
My first issue with this criticism is that Ben-Ze’ev and Nussbaum have different aims in their
accounts. Ben-Ze’ev was after characterizing typical cases of emotions, whereas Nussbaum was after
necessary and sufficient conditions in the definition of emotions (i.e., the traditional philosophical
project of attempting to offer definitions). For this reason, they may not differ, or for that matter,

314
In her interview with the Emotion Researcher in 2007, she has pointed this out: “[I]t is astonishing to me that philosophers
have classified my approach as “judgmentalist,” showing that they have not read beyond Chapter 1. It’s okay to put a book down if you
don’t like it, but not to write about the person’s theory without doing the requisite work.”
315
Griffiths, 2000, 27.
316
See for instance Jenefer Robinson, “Emotion: Biological Fact or Social Construction?”; and Jesse Prinz, “Embodied Emotions,”
in Robert Solomon, Thinking About Feeling, 2004. See also: See Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, “Emotions Are Not Mere Judgments,” in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, March 2004, pp. 450 – 457, to which Nussbaum responded. And: Kym Maclaren,
“Emotional clichés and authentic passions: A phenomenological revision of a cognitive theory of emotion,” in Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences (2011) 10, 45 – 65.
317
See Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, “Emotions Are Not Mere Judgments,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXVIII, No.
2, March 2004, pp. 450 – 457.

93
they may be talking past each other.318 This leads me to my second issue concerning this criticism
on Nussbaum: no critic has faced her reasons forthrightly. Take her exchanges not only with Aaron
Ben-Ze’ev (2000, 2004) but also with Sophie Rietti (2003).
Nussbaum’s preface is, ‘feeling’ is a slippery word. It could be synonymous with emotion, or
it may refer to feeling without rich intentionality or cognitive content, like feelings of fatigue or
feelings of extra energy. Feelings of the first type may be emotion, if not a variant of the term
emotion. Nussbaum’s argument against feelings deals with the second type only—the ones without
rich intentionality or what some emotion researchers call Jamesian feelings. Rietti (2003) was
referring to this type of feeling when she addressed Nussbaum. Rietti (2003) says that it might seem
like there is something wrong in her psychological makeup if a person never felt feelings associated
with grief and yet she says she is grieving. But Nussbaum did not say that a person should not feel
anything; what she says is that the association of feeling with emotion is not regular nor constant,
within the same person over time, and between different people experiencing the same emotion. A
person may feel some of the feelings associated with grieving, or may not, and there are such cases.
This again is the multiple realizability problem. A single sort of emotion, like grief, can be realized
in many different ways by a single individual, and across different individuals. An individual may
sometimes feel an achy feeling, sometimes fatigue, and sometimes no particular feeling at all. In
the case of fear, for one individual, it feels like a throbbing of the chest or boiling feeling, while for
another individual, there is no noticeable feeling. In fact, in other cases, they may not be aware of
experiencing this emotion at all, as in the case of some women who were brought up to think that
anger is inappropriate. It would be problematic to say that he is not grieving when there is no
particular feeling at all. Nussbaum insists (and is explicit about it) on necessary and sufficient
conditions for allowing feelings an essential place in the definition of emotions, but criticisms
directed at her do not confront this straightforwardly at all.
The same is true with the related challenge arising from concerns on the place of the body.
Nussbaum has been forthright from the start in saying that emotions, like other mental processes,
are bodily. Nussbaum’s primary concern, as the passage above records, is feelings’ non-directedness
or lack of intentionality. For to allow feelings an essential place in emotions is to justify their
necessity, and Nussbaum has shown counterexamples to this. The paradigmatic example, it can be
recalled is the fear of death, for which many people are normally not only not conscious, but rather

318
Martha Nussbaum acknowledged this possibility in UT, 2001, 57. But Ben-Ze’ev did not say anything about this comment
in his review published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Nussbaum reiterated it again in her response piece.

94
accompanies no characteristic feelings at all. This matter must be confronted, before arguments
against the necessity and sufficiency of thoughts alone can even begin.
Identity-claim on the issue of hot cognition.319 If only for the fact that passivity to external
goods is built into the core of Nussbaum’s definition of emotion, it can already happily submit that
the criticism of sidestepping passivity cannot be fairly directed at Nussbaum’s theory. That fact that
for Nussbaum passivity to external goods is central to emotion, and so undoubtedly accounted for
is fairly intelligible by now. But this criticism does not seem to die easily.
Jenefer Robinson (2004), for one, does not believe that emotions “always involve a personal
evaluation of the significance” or “self-involved”. For Robinson, not all emotions are self-involved:
“think of my pride in Manchester United with whom I have no connection except that I once lived
in Manchester … And although emotions seem to be somehow intense or urgent responses, how
can a judgment be intense or urgent? Surely this makes no sense.”320
There are three comments to be made. First, that Nussbaum did not restrict her view with
‘judgment’ as it is understood in general, i.e. as synonymous with belief. It should be recalled that
Nussbaum insists that what feels wrenching about the emotions is often not independent of their
cognitive dimension. “The death of a loved individual is unlike a stomach virus because it violently
tears the fabric of attachment, hope, and experience that we have built up around that person,” she
says.321 Nussbaum was very much aware that thoughts are characteristically calm, and paradigmatic
of things under our control, whereas emotions are experiences of passivity and vulnerability. But
Nussbaum’s account of emotion involves dynamic elements. This is accounted for by the fact that
for her and the Stoics, the act of “assent” is kinetic, they are not inert pieces of cogitation. This is
why her modification of the original Stoic theory is very important: it is the act of appraisal of a fact
of the world about which I cannot do anything to reverse or change; it is the act of my mind
accepting a yet unacceptable fact: that “I am now seeing that my very dear mother is dead, and
permanently gone.”
Nussbaum has a loose and broad view of cognitive appraisal which cannot be restricted to
judgment as commonly understood, namely, it is not simply a list of propositional terms to be

319
See how she anticipated this criticism in UT 12-13, 22, 26-27. In a later explanation of her theory she says: [T]he neo-Stoic
view appears to be in trouble… For if emotions are a kind of judgment or thought, it would be difficult to account for their urgency and
heat; thoughts are usually imagined as detached and calm. Also, it is difficult to find in them the passivity that we undoubtedly
experience: for judgments are actively made, not just suffered. Their inability to dismember the self is also overlooked: for thoughts are
paradigmatic, as it were, of what we control, and of the most securedly managed parts of our identity. See: Nussbaum, “Emotions are
Judgments of Value and Importance,” 2004, 187.
320
Jenefer Robinson, “Emotion: Biological Fact or Social Construction?” in Robert Solomon, Thinking About Feeling, 2004.
321
PE, 2016, 400.

95
understood by the intellect, but a fact of the world that includes very important things to me which
I do not control. Again, cognition or perception in Nussbaum’s emotion theory is a complex
response of the entire personality, an appropriate acknowledgment of the features of the situation
on which action is to be based. It is, to use an Aristotelian phrase, a recognition of the particular.
To have a correct perception of the death of a loved one is not simply to take note of this fact with
intellect or judgment. If someone noted the fact but was devoid of emotional response, we would
be inclined to say that he did not see, take in, recognize, what has happened; that he did not
acknowledge the situation for what it was.322 If Nussbaum is followed, the idea of uncontrolled
goods, of events which the personality does not wish to happen, but have now happened and
nothing more can be done about it but acceptance, and even cognitive acceptance cannot be given
except unwillingly – all of these make the whole experience of emotion hot and urgent. The problem
is, often this important aspect of Nussbaum’s modifications of the original Stoic view, and its
corresponding implications in her effort to explain emotions’ hotness, is rarely if ever recognized.
The second and third comments include whether Nussbaum’s account satisfies the critic’s
request, which involves the related issue of redundancy. It seems that both parties are liable to
answer to the redundancy question. On the one hand, critics must show that Nussbaum indeed
commits the identity claim, and this thesis showed various points that complicate her theory, so
that it does not commit a simple identification (see previous comments on critics not forthrightly
responding to her arguments against non-inclusion of feelings and bodily states in the definition of
emotion, while maintaining her overall aim of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for a
definition of emotions). On the other hand, it would be a lot better if Nussbaum will explain her
take on the redundancy question, as an adjacent implication, should one theory claim that
emotions are thoughts. (I do, however, recognize that she is not obliged to do this, given that her
theory has made relevant caveats to secure its claims.) Emotions are about processing information
in general, as in the simple perception of states of affairs, but this is already assigned to beliefs.
Hence, either we revise or expand the notion of thought and perception to include the emotions or
make emotions distinct altogether.
To what extent do these challenges dislodge Nussbaum’s view of the emotions? The present
section has shown that in many counts, challenges to Nussbaum’s theory must clarify their charges
first, and aim for her claims straightforwardly. Disentanglements from the issues are hinged upon

322
UT, 2001, 26 – 27; FoG, 2001, 309.

96
these tasks. It should be reiterated, for instance, that her arguments concerning the necessary and
sufficient conditions for emotions remain counterproof, making her position not only intelligible
but also solid.

4.4 Nussbaum Does Not Stand Scrutiny

But this thesis criticizes Nussbaum, too, on account of passivity. This section presents two
major comments on Nussbaum’s view of the emotions. First, it will argue that (and show evidence
for) there is tension in Nussbaum’s take on voluntarism toward the emotions. This tension would
have been solved had she been more forthright and clear on the issue, and (the second comment)
if she had an account of the relationship of emotions with the earlier category of the passions
instead of choosing to use these terms interchangeably. The section will start with showing the
tension in her thought concerning voluntarism since it requires a substantial amount of evidence,
which will be given through a summary of her take on the issue as it is explained in various aspects
of her emotions theory, and through a close analysis of her thought on emotions at a later time,
namely her book on Political Emotions (2016).323 The second comment will find further justification
given the tension which will be discussed in the first comment.

4.4.1 Tension in Nussbaum’s position on voluntarism (and optimistic rationalism) toward

the emotions
The issue of voluntarism, again, involves the question over whether emotions are within the
sphere of voluntary action, control, and responsibility, in the sense that they can be
changed/modified, regulated/controlled/curbed, withheld/suspended, educated, etc. at will. It
should be recalled from the previous chapter of this thesis that Nussbaum (along with Robert
Solomon) was thought to draw on a form of voluntarism to support her view that emotions as forms
of thought or belief are under our control. In other words, they can be shaped just like any other
thought or belief. This is also what critics meant when they read Nussbaum as endorsing optimistic
rationalism involving the emotions: she defends a positive attitude regarding the emotions’
susceptibility to change. She rejects the traditionally pejorative attitude of looking at emotions as
turbulent and obtuse animal forces with unknown causes. Rather, her theory shows that because

323
I note that this book concerns a quite different kind of emotions than those discussed in the UT (2001), but this point does
not bear any problem in the case I make. It must be noted that Nussbaum acknowledged that the UT serves as the theoretical background
of PE (2016), and since the UT, while discussing the more personal emotions of grief and love, nonetheless discussed the political
dimensions of these emotions. The implications of her emotion theory, then, is demonstrated in detail in PE (2016).

97
emotions are thoughts about important uncontrolled things, then they are imbued with rich
intentionality and cognitive content, which makes them open to change or regulation. In this
section, Nussbaum’s position on voluntarism and optimistic rationalism concerning the emotions
is taken seriously. The section argues that her position contains unresolved tensions which causes
a grave threat to her cognitive theory’s success in explaining the emotions and their passivity.
Nussbaum’s thought is torn between opposing attitudes concerning the extent of control we have
over emotions.
Assent to appearances is not a deliberate act. Nussbaum was explicit in saying that while
she accepts the Stoics’ picture of judgment, she does not however accept their voluntarist thesis
that we always had it in our power to assent or refuse to assent to any appearance, especially because
“habit, attachment, and the sheer weight of events may frequently extract assent from us.”324 Assent
to an appearance is not to be imagined as an act that we always deliberately perform. Assent to an
appearance includes taking in their evaluative dimension – and oftentimes emotional experiences
passively assail us by this. How can somebody preserve emotional equanimity on the face of seeing
(viz. knowing) that someone loved is now irrevocably gone? The sheer weight of this appearance
entails an emotionally wrenching experience – not to feel it this way is almost tantamount to not
being human. It must feel wrenching for somebody who cares, whose relationships are important
to one’s scheme of a life well-lived, or simply of a human life for that matter. Indeed this may be
one of the major differences she has with Robert Solomon’s earlier claim that we can choose our
emotions, and can therefore be made responsible for them.325 If this is not Nussbaum’s take on
voluntarism toward the emotions, then what is?
Insofar as her reaction to the original Greek Stoics is concerned, Nussbaum does not think
that emotions as appraisals or perceptions of value cannot always be changed at will. They should
not be understood as such from the beginning. Perhaps we should look to other aspects of her
emotion theory to see her take on voluntarism. For instance, when she explained that emotions’
meaning/s may or may not be available, but they are still at bottom cognitive. For Nussbaum,
the primary aim of explaining the developmental dimension of emotions is to make room for the
mysterious and ungoverned aspects of the emotional life. In some cases, she says, the meaning/s of
emotions may not be available to the person even in archaic and infantile form. Their

324
UT, 2001, 38.
325
See “Emotions and Choice”, 1973; and Solomon’s later updates on this claim in his “What is a Cognitive Theory of Emotion”
in Hatzimoysis (ed.), Philosophy and the Emotions, 2003.

98
developmental dimension shows us that their origins go back to as early as infancy. For Nussbaum,
this does not mean we go back to looking at emotions as inner forces with occult origins. Generally,
cognitive theories of emotion hold that emotions can be modified by a change in the way one
evaluates objects. As in the case of the fear a loving husband feels for his wife’s life suddenly shifting
into joy when he learns that his wife missed her plane (which met an unfortunate accident, causing
the death of passengers). Emotions are still at bottom cognitive: they have cognitive contents that
can be evaluated, and which individuates one emotion type from another. The trouble for
Nussbaum here is, this is precisely the support given for sui generis approaches to emotion. That
while they are closely associated with beliefs, emotions nonetheless maintain some elements that
make them unlike belief, or that require us to include other elements in their nature – precisely the
kind of response needed to dislodge Nussbaum’s pure cognitive theory.
In another instance, Nussbaum holds that (appropriate) emotions can be learned. In PE
(2016) she warns us of the dangers of thinking otherwise. Nussbaum advised readers to reject the
Romantic idea that emotion is not worthy unless it comes unbidden, because ‘we can learn to feel
appropriately, just as we can learn to act appropriately’.326 There is much room for human freedom
in the face of social construction and conditioning. A parent who believes that racial hatred is
dangerous actively shapes her emotions and molds her child’s emotions accordingly. We must
reject involuntary talk about the emotions, in the face of the significance of recognizing the power
of human freedom over things which we commonly assume to be outside our ability to change.
But, for Nussbaum, how far can the power human freedom bring us? In explaining what is
entailed by the difficulty of changing the emotional life, Nussbaum tells us that in some instances,
this task is simply too difficult; it may not even be possibly attained completely. This is especially
the case with some people who find the slow and painful effort of constantly examining and
changing the inner life too demanding. This is why Nussbaum cautions us against setting (possibly
unachievable) norms of perfection in the emotional life, such as simply saying ‘make emotions
follow reason’s dictates’ because it is these prescriptions that cause emotional havoc. In her account
of recalcitrant emotions, Nussbaum teaches us to acknowledge the complexity of the mind’s
archeology. Where the extent of transforming or regulating the emotions is in question, Nussbaum
turns from human freedom’s power over emotional education on the one hand, to the ability of
familiarity, reliance, habit, and investment of importance to overpower the personality on the other

326
PE, 2016, 65.

99
hand. The latter is precisely what makes emotional experiences feel as if the person is being carried
away unwillingly by powerful elements. As explained earlier she admits that the task of winning
over habit and familiarity may not be accomplished all the time, if at all this is possible.327
Reject or affirm the Stoic attitude toward the emotions? In the case of such powerful
emotions overtaking the person, Nussbaum affirms the value of the Stoic response of extirpation of
emotions. This is especially the case with specific emotions like retributive anger and projective
disgust.328 But denying or purging the emotions in favor of more stable ways of leading one’s life
makes our lives short of being human – this strategy, while attractive to many, makes our lives
impoverished and narrow. Emotions do not only show us the messiness and complexity of living as
a vulnerable being, they also help us make sense of life, to the extent that they contain information
about what we care about. Some such information may, again, be hidden from us until emotional
experiences force us to confront them. But then again for Nussbaum stability is reasonable and
essential, but not to be treated as a dominant end. Per Nussbaum’s advice, we must rather embrace
our neediness and take seriously how we react to it.
How can we clarify Nussbaum’s position on whether emotions are things that we can
control? Her positions discussed above form the material of my criticism against Nussbaum: she
alternates from one position of (non-) control to another making it very difficult to pin down her
answer to the question of whether emotions are within the sphere of voluntary action, control, and
responsibility. A subtle but deep tension in Nussbaum’s thinking can be found when the concern
for control and responsibility is raised. Can emotions be shaped by education? Yes, but it would be
difficult. It may not end up successful in some cases. Can emotions be changed or modified? In
some cases, yes, with the change of belief. In some cases, they may not be, due to the developmental
dimension of emotions which teaches us that emotions’ meaning/s may not always be entirely
accessible to us. Can they be controlled at will? The ideal or requirement of control may be an
impossible requirement since external objects which inform much of emotional experiences are
outside our control right from the start. Even saying “it’s your response that matters, for that is
what you can control and change” may prove problematic. For suspending or curbing the emotions

327
UT, 2001, 234.
328
Retributive anger is paradigmatically portrayed by the anger of Medea which caused her to murder her children to
demonstrate exacting revenge against Jason, in Euripides’s Medea. See Nussbaum Anger and Forgiveness, 2013. Projective disgust is
inscribed in various instances of the law involving issues of racism, homophobia and xenophobia. See Nussbaum, HH, 2004.

100
is difficult if we remember that assent to appearances can happen almost instantaneously – and
many times no longer a matter of will.329 Nussbaum’s PE (2016) is plagued by this tension too.
Nussbaum’s Political Emotions and the Janus face of emotions.330 In PE (2016),
Nussbaum reflected on the role of emotions in liberal democracies’ active pursuit of justice. In
thinking and working towards a just society, what are the place of love, compassion, grief, anger,
disgust, and all the other emotions which are the stuff of everyday human life? What kind of
attitude is best and wisest to take when dealing with emotions? With these concerns in mind,
Nussbaum provocatively asked: Should we dispense with emotions altogether? Is personal life and
public good better without the emotions?331
To meaningfully raise these questions is to be acquainted with political emotions. These
emotions take as their object the nation, the nation’s goals, its institutions and leaders, its
geography, and one’s fellow citizens seen as fellow inhabitants of a common public space. They are
directed at the nation in the sense that they are channeled towards national commitments such as
inclusiveness, equality, relief of misery, and end of slavery. The most common examples of emotions
that can take this kind are anger, fear, sympathy, disgust, envy, guilt, grief, and many forms of love.
Sometimes interchangeably called ‘public emotions,’ they are frequently intense and have large-
scale consequences for the nation’s progress toward (or regress from) its goals and aspirations.332
In this sense, political emotions, like many other kinds of emotions, are Janus-faced: they
could propel a nation towards its dreams, or derail it; they could give vigor, or create divisions,
tensions and hierarchies. Political emotions can take the form of unconditional (sometimes even
unexplainable) love and compassion in the sight of undeserved suffering, of anger at injustice, and
of the hope of limiting envy and disgust; or they can move people to a selfish narrowing of interests,
and the exclusion of others. This tendency of political emotions is very real even in the personal
sphere. An individual who wants to take good care of the very personal concerns of family,
childcare, health, and education – a mortal who has both narrow and extended concerns – is an
individual liable to experience political emotions. They are also real in the public sphere. Political
emotions are typically recorded in songs such as national anthems, in poetry expressing love and

329
A similar kind of tension was observed by eminent philosopher Charles Taylor (1988) though in another aspect of
Nussbaum’s work: her position against transcending the human aspiration to immortality and embracing fragility as discussed in FoG
(1986). Nussbaum acknowledges this criticism and responds to it in the final chapter of LK, “Transcending Humanity,” 1999.
330
The ideas contained in this section have been drafted and submitted as a final requirement in Professor Zosimo Lee’s PhD
class on Nussbaum’s Political Emotions, which I have been very fortunate to have been allowed to join in 2018. These ideas were teased
out by probing questions from the Professor and from classmates. Errors that remain are mine.
331
See PE, 2016, 219.
332
PE, 2016, 16 and passim

101
pride in the beauty of the land, and in parks, memorials, and monuments, marking sadness and
mourning over times past, like glorious histories long gone and forgotten, or wars that caused the
death of millions. Because of this, political emotions may serve as fuel for political principles, both
good and bad.333
Notice how, in these characterizations of political emotions, Nussbaum struggles between
two potentially opposing attitudes toward the emotions in general: recognizing their power over us
and knowing our power over them. Both attitudes are rooted and oriented by need. On the one
hand, greed (or narrow sympathy/love) in a person elected in a national office will certainly move
this person to favor personal interests, over national projects that will distribute wealth to many.
On the other hand, proper education in critical thinking and empathy can make better and more
compassionate individuals in the future. In the interest of seeking Nussbaum’s position on
voluntarism toward the emotions, this section asks: could the philosopher have veered too much
in the direction of knowing our power over the emotions, risking a limited account of their power
over us?
Knowing our power over our emotions is certainly a very emboldening message for
individuals in their personal life and leaders in the public realm. We can do something about our
emotions. We can shape them, in much the same way that they can shape the terrains of our lives
and relationships. This is precisely what Nussbaum was telling us when she wrote that “All the
major emotions are eudaimonistic... [B]ecoming virtuous is a matter of cultivating appropriate
habits, in emotion as in conduct. The Romantic idea that emotion is not worthy unless it becomes
unbidden should be rejected: we can learn to feel appropriately, just as we can learn to act
appropriately.”334
Following Nussbaum here, we as a society can choose which emotions to feel. Political
leaders can (and should, says Nussbaum) choose which emotions to cultivate in its citizens. In the
choosing and cultivating, poems and songs, memorials and photographs, novels and news articles,
form a crucial role. Indeed, they can move people in many different ways. This is the principle
behind the various proposals which Nussbaum discussed in Part I of PE. Rousseau thought that
civic order and stability can be achieved by a coercive and mandatory civil religion, punishing
dissenters and nonparticipants. Herder, on the other hand, thought that political emotions cannot

333
Ibid., 1 – 3, and passim. A repeated example of political emotions in PE, which is marked by a public space, is the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington D. C.
334
PE, 2016, 65. Emphasis added.

102
be shaped positively by impositions, but by play, humor and heterogeneity. Comte believed in the
power of ritual to organize emotions. John Stuart Mill endorsed poetry, history, fiction, music,
visual art, and even love for nature, to develop sympathy. Tagore emphasized molding emotions in
the public domain through the school system, festivals, ceremonies, the rhetoric of leaders and the
choice of public songs and poetry.335 These are some of the ways in which we have power over our
emotions: direct them, lead them, educate them.
But Nussbaum saw, as well, the emotions’ power over us. Recognition of this is precisely the
background of Nussbaum’s analysis of the historical precedents in PE’s Part I – II, precisely the
background of her proposals eventually. As she says, emotions in their intensity can derail a nation’s
goals. Causing tensions and divisions, they can exclude others, or dampen the national spirit.
“Frequently intense,”336 they can move people to act, or cause them to retreat. One reason Abraham
Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were such great political
leaders, says Nussbaum, is their refusal to ‘cede the terrain of emotion’ to antiliberal forces that
could move people away from the common work before them.337 This is the book’s main project: to
ask how a decent society can do more for stability and motivation, and to imagine ways in which
emotions can support the basic principles of the political culture of an aspiring but imperfect
society.338 In stating this project, Nussbaum makes clear and explicit a crucial part of her proposed
solution: “emotions, in my view, are not just impulses, but contain appraisals that have an
evaluative content.”339 How crucial is this caveat?
In cases when emotions take the form of heated and forceful experiences, there are various
possibilities. They can render us passive and impotent. They can distort thinking and get in the way
of rational practical deliberations. They can fill us with delight, strike us by surprise, or torment us
mentally. Indeed, the ubiquity of this way of understanding the emotions’ tendencies in ordinary
experience is astonishing. The public realm is no exception. Nussbaum, on patriotic love, for
example, speaks of “the inherent tendency of emotions to lead to the stigmatization and
subordination of vulnerable groups.”340 She wonders, in a rather telling tone: “Given [the] dangers,
one might wonder whether it is not better to dispense with patriotic love altogether, in favor of
sentiments more principle-dependent, cooler, and therefore, it might seem, more reliable.”341

335
Ibid., 27 – 111.
336
Ibid., 2.
337
Ibid., 2.
338
PE, 2016, 5–6.
339
Ibid., 6.
340
Ibid., 211 – 219.
341
Ibid., 219.

103
 More principle-dependent emotions seem more reliable because, in their intensity,
emotions could take the forms that the history of thought has usually attributed to them: turbulent
commotions, invading passions, and enemies of thought. The very origin of the term, from the
French emotion, originally means ‘physical disturbance.’342 Emotions, according to this thinking,
are disruptive threats that impede reasoning. They are animal forces, alien to human reasoning.
Precisely the antithesis of Nussbaum’s view. The view that Nussbaum wants us to understand and
criticize if political emotions are to support basic political principles, and if we want to motivate
people to work toward stability. Should we reject this thinking of the emotions as turbulent
commotions, invading passions, and enemies of thought, altogether?
How can we move forward from this apparent tension in Nussbaum’s thought? First,
the question of control and responsibility needs to be unpacked, in the way this section attempted
in the above discussions in this section. The discussions showed that Nussbaum distinguished
between and among different forms of control and responsibility: educating the emotions, molding
them through a lifetime of effort, choosing which ones to cultivate, etc. Or non-control: accepting
the fact that their urgency and intensity can take us by surprise or paralyze us, or being mindful of
the tendency to aspire for eliminating the emotions. This is as far as this section was able to unpack
in this criticism against Nussbaum’s cognitive theory, and as far as it was able to seek her answers
and attempt to write them into a coherent whole. This subject on the nature and extent of control
and responsibility one may have over the emotions vis-à-vis their cognitive nature needs further
studies to fill it.
Secondly, the more important question is, why? What motivates the question of whether
emotions are within the sphere of control and voluntary action? Why raise this question in the first
place? Because if the motivation for asking is to spare oneself and others from messiness and
complexity, vulnerability and unwanted reversals, unevenness and instability, then Nussbaum
showed that this is not entirely possible, given our being human. Nussbaum has repeatedly advised
against construing this as a dominant end. But if the motivation is simply to know how far emotions
can support or subvert personal and national goals, then perhaps it is not a question of control, but
rather the kind of recognition of emotions that goals entail: Is it to completely purge away the
emotions from the picture? Is it to seek full control of every aspect of emotional experience? This
results to more pressing problems that cognitivism must face. Perhaps emotions are not really as

342
See Thomas Dixon, “‘Emotion’: History of a Keyword in Crisis,” in Emotion Review, Vol 4, No 4, (October 2012) 338 – 344.

104
cognitivism believes it to be. Perhaps thinking that they are thoughts is not a satisfactory answer.
Perhaps emotions are, as a recent camp in the general theory of emotion says, sui generis. They
occupy a class of their own, not to be fixed under preexisting categories such as thoughts or beliefs.
Perhaps too we must examine the implications to the expansion of concepts such as appraisal or
belief, which cognitivism holds. Indeed how can we progress from these concerns?

4.4.2 Using ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ interchangeably

The other promising path forward in confronting the question of control and responsibility
for the emotions, already explained in the previous chapter of this thesis, is through a more nuanced
view of the historical relationship between ‘emotions’ and the older category of ‘passions’.
Historians of emotion believe that there is much to be learned from this relationship, on whether
there lurks a specific sense in which emotions are passions, or perhaps emotions had been the
passions. The problem is, in the PE (2016), as well as in earlier works, Martha Nussbaum does not
have a full-blown account of the relationship of the emotions with passions. She does however
recognize the resemblances of the modern term ‘emotion’ with pathe. Consider the following
passages:

In what follows, I shall use these two words more or less interchangeably, making no salient
distinction between them. “Emotions” is the more common modern generic term, while
“passions” is both etymologically closer to the most common Greek and Latin terms and more
firmly entrenched in the Western philosophical tradition. In any case, what I mean to designate
by these terms is a genus of which experiences such as fear, love, grief, anger, envy, jealousy,
and other relatives—but not bodily appetites such as hunger and thirst—are the species. (This
corresponds to the Stoic use of the Greek pathe, though other Greek writers sometimes use
pathe more broadly, to apply to any affect of the creature—preserving the general connection
with the word paschein.) This family of experience, which we call emotions as opposed to
appetites, is grouped together by many Greek thinkers, beginning at least with Plato, and his
account of the soul’s middle part. The Stoics and Plato recognize the same family grouping,
though Plato and Chrysippus differ on the family’s proper analysis and definition, and also on
the question whether these experiences are properly ascribed to animals and children;
Posidonius revives the Platonic analysis.343

As explained there, I use them [emotions and passions] interchangeably, to refer to the genus
of which grief, fear, pity, anger, love, joy, and other relatives are the species.344

Nussbaum in these passages was explaining the subject of her study: emotions, which were
called by the Greeks as ‘passions’ (pathe). One can see Nussbaum’s explicitness in her

343
Nussbaum, Therapy, 319, footnote 4. An earlier version of this remark is found in Nussbaum’s article “Stoics on the
Extirpation of the Passions,” in Apeiron 20, 1987, pp. 129 – 175.
344
Nussbaum, footnote 33 in TD, 1994, 37.

105
interchangeable use of the two terms, emotions and passions. At the same, she identifies what she
means by the terms when she uses them while noting the historical context of such use and
meanings.
The Stoics used the Greek pathe, pathos, and paskein, terms which are etymologically closer
to ‘passions’. In Latin, these Greek terms were translated into passio and patior, which brought the
English ‘passion’.345 These words connote ways, or product of ways, of “being acted on”; they refer
to things we suffer, and ourselves as helpless and blameless victims. They refer to phenomena which
happen to us quite apart from our preferences or intentions, and not something we bring into being
somehow: they are not “up to us” for they “befall us”. Passion, Meyers (2000) tells us, is the sign of
the contingency in man, of what he wishes to master. Passion upsets, destabilizes and disorients by
reproducing the uncertainty of the world as well as the course of events.346 These include the human
condition of finitude, facticity, natality, mortality, and Nussbaum adds, fortune.
These meanings of passion have been repeatedly examined in the course of the history of the
philosophy of emotion since 1957. From the first chapter of this thesis through the present one, we
have seen emotions incorporate some of these meanings while shedding away others. Nussbaum,
however, despite being aware of this history, did not make a conscious attempt to flesh out what
remains and what was discarded of the old meanings. She uses ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’
interchangeably, “making no salient distinction between them”. Nussbaum takes the modernity of
the term ‘emotion’ as a given, eventhough the species of the genus she is referring to – fear, love,
grief, anger, envy, jealousy, and other relatives – were grouped by the Stoics and Plato under pathe
or passions. This concern on the history of the terms poses huge problems to her theory, as it does
to other theories in the philosophy of emotion.347
Other portions of UT (2001) show Nussbaum’s reasons for not distinguishing the two
concepts. For instance, in discussing the conceptual and causal relationship among specific
varieties of emotions, Nussbaum tells us that we will find common ground if we simply looked at

345
Victor Beceaga, The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology (NY: Springer, 2010), 1.
346
See ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in Michael Meyers, Philosophy and Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature, Translation,
Preface, Introduction and Bibliography by Robert F. Barsky, (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), xxvi.
347
Dominik Perler (2018) has excellently demonstrated these problems in full detail in Feelings Transformed (2018). See also
Alix Cohen and Robert Stern (eds.), Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical History, 2017.
In another work, Juan Pablo Mira Chaparro (2017) makes a distinction between “pathe as general affections” and “pathe as
emotions”. He notes that the modern term emotion finds its equivalent in the Greek pathos (πάθος), and that while emotion refers to
some sort of psychological affection, the Greek pathos however is an ambiguous term. For this reason, he advises that it is necessary to
distinguish when Aristotle uses the term pathos to refer to a phenomenon that is equivalent to our modern emotion from the usage of
the term to refer to something different. See Mira Chapparro, “Aristotle on Music and the Emotions,” PhD dissertation, University of
Edinburgh, 2017, pp. 20 – 39. See also: Juha Sihvola, ‘Emotional Animals: Do Aristotelian Emotions Require Beliefs?’ Apeiron 29 (2), pp.
105-144, 1996.

106
our casual and frequently loose use of words such as ‘feeling,’ ‘emotion,’ and ‘passion’. She even
thinks that a valuable theory of emotion should be prepared to point out multiple ambiguities in
the use of such terms and concepts.348 In Nussbaum’s defense against the inclusion of feelings and
bodily states in the definition of emotion, she tells us that if we look at the way we use ‘feelings’,
there are many instances in which they are synonymous with emotions. In this case, the
interchangeable use is excused. We begin to discriminate only when feelings refer to experiences
devoid of rich intentionality. In other words, Nussbaum recognizes the potential ambiguities these
terms carry. But the ambiguities remain in the case of passions, perhaps more than with feelings.349
This is the other sense in which this thesis takes issue with Nussbaum’s account of the
emotions. Her apparent lack of a clear and adequate account of the complex relationship between
passion and emotion, as demonstrated by her undifferentiated use of such terms, shows how in one
important sense her notion of (political) emotions risks silence over our sense of passivity before
them. It is a serious deficiency, too, because the problem of passivity—whether emotions are
involuntary feelings that we experience or cognitive acts that we actively do—is at the heart of the
question on the moral status of emotions. A more nuanced understanding of the passivity of
emotions, through an account of the complex relationship between passion and emotion, is
therefore wanting. This demand is also urgent. In 2018, eminent scholar of affective science, Louis
Charland, delivered a lecture at the University of Geneva. The title conveys the core of the lecture’s
argument: “The Distinction between Passion and Emotion: A Distinction We Ignore at Our
Philosophical Peril.”350 More and more works are being written to investigate the matter, including
history and psychology in the search.
This remains a gaping hole in our picture of emotion. It is a serious deficiency in Nussbaum’s
emotion theory, and consequently in the overall quest to understand what emotions really are. Just
the extent of this investigation already shows a comprehensive task to be done, before any definite
and meaningful comment can be made of passivity.

348
UT, 2001, 8 – 9.
349
I note here the development of perceptual accounts in recent years. Rietti (2003), for instance, argued that even when the
feeling involved in emotion is physical, they may not brute. They may be quasi-intentional and quasi-cognitive. These accounts however
need to be examined in more detail, to know the extent of disagreement they have with Jamesian notion of feelings, or what Nussbaum
calls adversarial views. See Rietti, 2003, 86.
350
This lecture follows Charland’s contribution in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Emotions, 2010, entitled,
“Reinstating the Passions: Arguments from the History of Psychopathology,” pp. 239-240.

107
4.5 Towards a Conceptual Genealogy of Passivity351
The previous section showed that despite Martha Nussbaum’s invaluable contributions to the
problem of passivity in emotion, there remain at least two major points which she fails to account
for: the issue of voluntarism concerning the emotions and the issue of the historical link between
passions and emotions. This section now asks what happens to passivity given this result of
examining a major cognitive theory.
The concept of passivity is reconsidered through a review of the three ways of understanding
the concept used in the thesis until now. The results of the previous chapters of this thesis will be
recalled to synthesize the changes and reinterpretations that passivity has undergone in the course
of sixty-one years from 1957 through 2016. The result would be a conceptual genealogy of passivity
where the said concept is shown as a wide concept that meant many different things to various
authors in the history of the philosophy of emotion. Passivity fuels philosophical disputes involving
theories of emotion precisely because of its breadth of scope or the various meanings it
encapsulates.
There are two strands in the analysis of the concept of passivity. The first concerns the
significance accorded to the concept of passivity in the philosophy of emotion, while the second
concerns the meanings which the concept of passivity assumed in different periods of the history
of philosophy of emotion. This thesis analyzed both strands in the context of the three
periodizations identified at the outset of the thesis. As a work employing conceptual genealogy this
thesis focuses on aspects of continuity and change: Which meanings remained over time? Which
ones were discarded?
1957 – 1973 were the years when the significance of the concept of passivity was paramount.
Philosophy of emotion which began with restoring the emotions had to explain the passive aspect
of emotions or the person’s sense of passivity before the emotions. During this time, the passivity
of emotion meant at least three things: (1) passivity refers to the fact that emotions seem
importantly different from active cognitive acts such as beliefs, thoughts and judgments, in the
sense that they are irruptive states, turbulent commotions, inner animal forces, or unreasoning
movements.; (2) passivity refers to the fact that emotions are hot, intense, and urgent experiences
which take us by surprise, paralyze us, or torment us, as if against our will; and (3) passivity refers
to the fact that emotions’ meaning/s seem elusive, since they are phenomena that do not only befall

351
Appendix C and D shows a virtual representation of the summary of this section.

108
us, but also passively assail us. During these years, the significance of passivity in discussions is
closely associated with the task of restoring the emotions from years of being maligned as
‘unreasoning movements’, ‘turbulent motions’, or ‘mysterious inner forces’ that move people
obtusely.
1973 – 2000 were the years when cognitivism successfully displaced feeling-theories as the
most authoritative account of emotions. Cognitivism explained that emotions are very much like
thoughts, in that they have intentional objects. For this reason, they are not obtuse nor
unreasoning. The cognitive showed that emotions contain intelligence and discernment insofar as
they are cognitive appraisals concerning very important things outside the person’s control. For
this reason, they are unlike feelings and bodily states that do not have directions and are devoid of
rich intentionality. Cognitivism also showed that because of these very reasons, we can then be
made responsible for our emotions. Since they are about important things, then we play a large role
in their cognitive content and their regulation or control. Cognitivism has shown, contra previous
years of maligning emotions as forces outside us with ungovernable nature, that emotions are
within the sphere of our control. At this point, during the preeminence of the cognitive theory,
unobserving eyes would think that passivity is gone.
But cognitivism is far from winning the game. Critics were quick to respond: cognitive
theories failed to account for the passivity of emotions. If emotions are like thoughts, beliefs, or
judgments, then cognitive theories must explain emotions’ heat, urgency, and intensity –
characteristics that make them unlike thoughts which are calm, cool, and steady. If emotions are
within our control, what explains the person’s sense of passivity before them: when fear paralyzes,
grief overwhelms, or anger leads a person to commit murder – all such cases often without the
person’s conscious consent.
Thus it is asked: what happened to passivity during the intervening years of cognitive
theories’ success and failure on its account? Conspicuously, from 1973 which was when Robert
Solomon’s article “Emotions and Choice” was published with its mantra “emotions are judgment”
through 2000 which was the publication of Aaron Ben-Ze’ev’s The Subtlety of Emotions and is
explicitly a member of the cognitive camp, Cognition and Judgment took center stage in
discussions, at the expense of passivity. But passivity was not only sidelined by this emphasis in
emotion research, it was also thought to have been explained away by the achievements of
cognitivism. To add to this, passivity was an umbrella concept, which philosophers treated with
skepticism. Passivity, just like emotion, does not constitute a natural class. These two concepts are

109
too diverse and complex to belong to a class. For this reason, we must abandon such a concept, in
favor of more definite phenomena.
Around this time, the field of history of emotions was born, with the primary concern of
solving the semantic anxiety researchers feel towards the modern term ‘emotion’. The modern term
‘emotion’, in encapsulating previously aggregated phenomena such as passions, affections, and
sentiments, has become an ambiguous term. It lacks a clear definition that would guide researchers
into what exactly they are examining, or which mental phenomena they are referring to when
discussing ‘emotions’. For this reason, any emotion theory, if it wishes to understand better the
concept of passivity as it is applied to emotion, must determine the relationship it has with older
categories, particularly that of the passions.
2001 – 2016 were the years when Martha Nussbaum came to the defense of cognitivism, by
putting passivity at the heart of cognitivism. Emotions, says Nussbaum, are cognitive appraisals
that involve very important things outside the person’s control. Emotions are entailed by our being
human – inevitably subject to facticity, finitude, and fortune. We are passive before these things
that render our lives prone to risks, catastrophe, and reversal – materials that inform, cause, and
even make up, much of emotions. Grief registers the gravity of permanent and great loss. Fear
includes in its content an impending threat. Anger registers the fact of an undeserved downranking
of oneself or someone loved. For this reason, emotions are heated, urgent, and intense – because
they involve significant things and people which we would save, protect, and keep at all cost.
Emotions are intelligent and discerning; they are very much like thoughts. Their intentionality,
evaluative nature and close link with flourishing make them unlike feelings and bodily states.
Nonetheless, they are, like all other mental processes, bodily; meaning they happen in the body.
The cognitive element – in Nussbaum’s account of a lose, flexible and broad notion of ‘appraisals’
as ‘a way of processing information, and the ability to see X as Y’ – is a necessary and sufficient
condition for the definition of emotion. The cognitive element is constant and regular in all cases
of emotion, having the ability to identify an emotion and discriminate it from other types of
emotion. Feelings and bodily states do not have the same characteristics, as in the case of emotions
without accompanying feelings or consciousness on the part of the person, such as fear of death.
They are not regular and constant even for just one type of emotion, as in the case of anger which
feels chilling and boiling for some people, while no feeling at all for some who were trained not to
feel anger. This makes them unnecessary elements in the definition of emotion. This makes

110
emotion very close, if not identified with, cognition. To this extent, Nussbaum’s emotion theory is
a significant step towards a more robust appreciation of emotion and passivity.
But Nussbaum failed to account for passivity, when in her writings she alternates from one
idea of (non)control to another. In one instance, we can and should shape the emotions for the
good of both personal and public spheres of life. In another instance, we cannot be made
responsible for emotions, to the extent that their developmental aspect explains our lack of access
to some of their meanings even in archaic form, and to the extent that the sheer weight of events,
habit and familiarity takes over the personality, causing intense emotions even before the person
can choose which emotions to feel. Nussbaum does not have an account of the passion-emotion
link as well, and even uses the two terms interchangeably, making no salient distinction between
the two, despite being aware of the relevant historical backgrounds. Nussbaum, even with her
invaluable contributions in affirming the significance of passivity in the philosophy of emotion, and
in putting much nuance in what passivity of emotion means, remains deficient on account of these.
Overall, this synthesis of 61 years of the philosophy of emotion shows that passivity is a wide
concept that meant many things in the course of the development of disputes between cognitive
theories and its critics. There are at least four of these meanings: (1) the issue of what state emotions
really are, whether they are cognitive, affective, physiological, or all of these together is primarily
an issue of the ontological nature of emotions; (2) the issue of what we experience when we undergo
emotional experiences is primarily an issue of phenomenology; (3) the issue of whether emotions
are within the scope of voluntary action or not is primarily an issue of control or responsibility (or
ascription); and, (4) the issue of whether we should abandon the modern term ‘emotion’ and revive
older categories such as passions is undoubtedly a problem of history.
It is these things that we discuss when we argue concerning the passivity of emotion. This thesis
then concludes that passivity persists as a problem in the philosophy of emotion, which the field
must confront if it will advance in its aim of understanding what emotions really are. Passivity
persists as a problem for it fuels disputes between cognitive theories and critics – both of whom
need of a more adequate account of passivity to progress in their quest to understand emotions.

4.6 Chapter Summary

This chapter reviewed Martha Nussbaum’s cognitive/evaluative theory of emotion, with a
focus on three aspects: (1) its central cognitive claim which contains Nussbaum’s defense a pure
cognitive theory on the basis of the necessity and sufficiency judgments as evaluative appraisals

111
containing thoughts about significant things and people which as often not within the person’s
control; (2) its modifications on the ancient Greek Stoic view on the emotions, to make room for
emotions in animals and infants, the explanatory role of society and culture concerning emotions,
and the developmental aspect of emotions; and, (3) its background and anchor point on the fragility
of goodness, or human being’s neediness and incompleteness before things they do not fully
control. All such aspects were examined to understand how Nussbaum accounted for passivity in
her emotion theory.
There are at least two senses of passivity which can be gleaned from her theory. First,
passivity before external goods, inscribed in the Stoics’ (and Nussbaum’s) general picture of
judgments, and significant in explaining the centrality of passivity in her theory, which maintains
that helplessness or vulnerability to suffering and reversal is part of being human, and that
emotions record such helplessness, as they are entailed by being human. Second, the sense of
passivity that the person feels when experiencing emotions, or passivity as felt aspect of emotional
experiences. This refers to emotions’ characteristic heat, urgency, and intensity, as grief feels like a
dismembering of the self, as love feels like a special sort of radiance, and as fear feels that danger is
at hand. Nussbaum had emphasized that these ways of experiencing emotion are hardly distinct
from the cognitive evaluations that they are.
This chapter argued that these senses of passivity form the core of Nussbaum’s contribution
to the problem of passivity as it is applied to emotions. Both are inscribed in Nussbaum’s claim that
emotions are cognitive appraisals or perceptions that involve important things outside the person’s
control. The sense of helplessness, when very important things and people are involved, and for
which the person can do nothing but accept very unwillingly, explains much of the emotions’
urgency, heat and intensity. Nussbaum’s supports for these claims remain largely unchallenged.
Critics have not conclusively shown that they have subverted Nussbaum’s claims. However, the
chapter identified two major deficiencies in Nussbaum’s theory, involving her take on voluntarism
and optimistic rationalism, and her lack of a clear account of the relationship of emotions with
earlier categories. Both of these deficiencies, and critics’ task of responding fairly and
straightforwardly to Nussbaum, are important in elucidating the problem of passivity in emotion.
The overall argument of the whole thesis claims that progress in the philosophy of emotion,
i.e. significant advancement in our understanding of emotion, will not be possible without a more
adequate account of the passivity of emotion. The whole chapter on Nussbaum has been all about
examining a major emotion theory, that it may be assessed side by side disputes and see evidence

112
of deficiencies that fuel such disputes. The results of this task have shown that there is a pressing
need to look further into passivity. Only with a more adequate account of it will entanglements be
clarified and competing claims be leveled.

113
 Conclusion
A. Conclusion
The main objective of this thesis is to show that passivity persists as a problem in the
philosophy of emotion by proving that it powers criticisms to the dominant theory of cognitivism.
More specifically, it aimed for the following objectives: (1) to underscore the importance of passivity
in the discourse of emotions; (2) to criticize the history and progress of the philosophy of emotion
with special focus on passivity; and (3) to show that Martha Nussbaum’s emotion theory is a
significant step towards a more robust appreciation of emotions in general, and passivity in
particular.
This thesis pursued these objectives by employing the philosophical methodology of
conceptual genealogy in historically tracing this problem as it developed in the philosophy of
emotion. As a result, the thesis showed that passivity is immensely important in the discourse of
emotions for it fuels criticisms directed at the dominant theory of cognitivism. For this reason, the
advancement of cognitivism, and the field of philosophy of emotion in general, hinges on
understanding passivity by giving it its due attention. Without this, cognitivism as applied to
emotions will remain in deep dispute, without the hope of solving its problems.
This thesis also criticized the history and progress of the philosophy of emotion for not
recognizing the importance of passivity to existing debates on the nature of emotion. Discourses
on passivity suffered in the intervening years of cognitivism’s successes due to the emphasis on
concepts such as Cognition and Judgment. It remains so until today, especially with issues
concerning the control and the historical account of passions. This is apparent in the analysis of
Martha Nussbaum’s theory. Because of the discipline’s lack of recognition in the importance of
passivity to existing debates on the nature of emotion, passivity issues continue to haunt the field.
As an initial way of responding to this criticism, this thesis provided a way out of deep
philosophical disputes by developing a conceptual genealogy of passivity, where it located the
concept in key periods of the history of the philosophy of emotion from 1957 through 2016. As a
result, the thesis showed the series of reinterpretations and transformations that the concept of
passivity has undergone. Through this, this thesis emphasized the significance of looking at the
contingent nature of concepts such as passivity and emotion. In addition, it has given justification

114
for the urgency of doing so, given that the clarification and possible resolution of disputes hinges
upon the deeper understanding of such neglected concepts.352
Finally, this thesis also showed that Martha Nussbaum’s theory of emotion provides a more
robust appreciation of passivity and emotion. It proved that the supposed failure of the cognitive
theories to account for passivity is not only unfair but also misguided. The emphasis on “cognition”
of the prevailing cognitive theories of emotion does not mean these theories cannot account for a
person’s passivity before them. In each case, criticisms against cognitivism must show a cognizance
of each theory’s contexts, claims, and updates. This step – examining a major cognitive theory of
emotion, focusing in its effort to grapple with the problem of passivity, that we may assess cognitive
theories, and not just in general terms – led this thesis to rich results. In the review of Nussbaum,
this thesis was able to show that she has addressed major aspects of the passivity of emotion and
that she lacks answers in crucial respects. In particular, her claim that emotions are ‘cognitive
appraisals involving important things outside the person’s control’ has put passivity at the center
cognitivism. Because of this, she effectively accounted for passivity as vulnerability and openness
to catastrophe and reversal, including the feelings of intensity and urgency caused by such
openness.
However, her claim failed to be forthright and exhaustive in its account of voluntarism and
historical link with the passions, causing serious deficiencies in her account. Nussbaum has
presented a more robust understanding of passivity and emotion by extending the achievements of
the UT (2001) on personal emotions to the political sphere in the PE (2016) but these deficiencies
undermine this achievement. This is especially true if we highlight the importance of passivity in
public life. The presence of propaganda, where emotions can be used and designed to support
pernicious ends, show that there are immense dangers that result from a lack of nuanced
understanding of passivity. If we do not take passivity seriously, it could mean emotions being used
as tools to influence or condition people to support greed, discrimination, xenophobia, and other
forms of injustice. This alone makes fatal Nussbaum’s deficiencies in her theory. Further studies on
these may be pursued later.
Overall, these results support my claim that indeed, the passivity problem persists in the
philosophy of emotion until today. Martha Nussbaum’s emotion theory, which this thesis has
shown to be a significant step towards a more robust appreciation of passivity and emotion, is not

352
See Appendix B and C for a Tabular Summary of the changes that happened to the concept of passivity through the years.

115
spared from this problem. The test of the passivity problem – to develop a more adequate account
of passivity – then, is something that both cognitive theories and critics must confront and pass.
This thesis has shown what is at stake if they do not do so. Philosophy of emotion needs to
reconsider passivity, especially in the account of the fundamental nature of emotion, if it is to
advance our understanding of emotion.

B. Further Thoughts
Most of the recommendations which will be given here are from the third chapter of the thesis.
Kirk Essary (2017) examined a period often neglected by historians of emotion trying to write a longer
story about emotion terminology – 16th-century emotion terms and meanings in period dictionaries and
the writings of Christian humanists like Erasmus of Rotterdam and John Calvin. Whereas Wierzbicka
(2010) has remarked, “descriptions of emotions change in and over time, and as a result, habitual feelings
change too, together with shared ways of thinking and feeling.”353 I think both authors point to the need
to look at descriptions of emotions in very dynamic ways, starting with neglected periods with a
conspicuous lack of emotion research. Both synchronic and diachronic approaches to doing such work
prove valuable. I should note here that there is a need for such a task in the Filipino setting. Consuelo J.
Paz’s Ginhawa, Kapalaran, Dalamhati: Essays on Well-Being, Opportunity/Destiny, and Anguish (2008),
for instance, is a superb work that examined the Filipino’s description and experience of deep sorrow,
and its deep connections with our notions of a life lived well. Such starting points have provided us
interesting paths to follow.
Maria Gendron (2010), too, suggested that a longer history might show more progress and/or
variety in psychology’s effort to define the term. Colleagues in the psychology discipline have produced
first-rate researches on Filipino emotions, but more historical works on Filipino emotions would
probably find willing minds from psychology too. A collaboration with philosophy and history would
certainly result in more comprehensive and nuanced results.
In a yet narrower scope, I have found that emotions in Cordillera texts (songs, epics, textiles) are
a goldmine of such ideas. These texts do not only provide accounts of personal and collective emotions,
but also bring us closer to a deeper appreciation of the people and culture. All of these insights are the
results of reflecting on the nature of emotion as they are lived by people and recorded in history—
already quite far from this thesis’ hope of understanding emotion further by employing the methods of
philosophy and history. The work of better understanding emotions and ourselves, nonetheless,
continues.

353
Wierzbicka 2010, 272.

116
 Reference List
Alberti, Fay Bound. 2006. “Emotions in the Early Modern Medical Tradition.” In Medicine, Emotion and
Disease, 1700–1950, edited by Fay Bound Alberti, 1–21. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286030_1.
Amy M. Schmitter. 2013. “Passions and Affections.” Edited by Peter R. Anstey, August.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199549993.013.0020.
Annas, Julia. 1995. The Morality of Happiness. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Aristoteles, and Martha Craven Nussbaum. 1985. Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (griech. u. engl.). Princeton:
Princeton U. P.
Aristotle. 1962. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Martin Ostwald. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Aristotle, W. Rhys Roberts, Ingram Bywater, Friedrich Solmsen, and Aristotle. 1954. Rhetoric. New York:
Modern Library.
Audi, Robert, ed. 1995. In The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 222.
Baldwin, James Mark. 1901. Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. New York; London: Macmillan.
Beck, Martha C. 2001. “Virtue without Fragility: Nussbaum’s Account of Detachment in the Republic, the
Crito, and the Phaedo.” Sophia 40 (1): 45–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02894578.
Bedford, Errol. 1957. “XII.—Emotions.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57 (1): 281–304.
https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/57.1.281.
Bell, Jeffrey A. 2015. Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century.
1st ed. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315766621.
Ben-Ze’Ev, Aaron. 2004. “Emotions Are Not Mere Judgments.” Edited by Martha C. Nussbaum. Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 68 (2): 450–57.
Biceaga, Victor. 2010. The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology,
v. 60. Dordrecht ; New York: Springer.
Bloser, Tim. 2011. “Emotional Feelings.” Philosophical Papers 40 (2): 179–205.
https://doi.org/10.1080/05568641.2011.591773.
Boddice, Rob. 2018. The History of Emotions. Historical Approaches. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Bound, Fay. 2000. “Emotion in Early Modern England, 1660-1760 : Performativity and Practice at the Church
Courts of York.” Ph.D., University of York. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/9854/.
———. 2002. “Writing the Self? Love and the Letter in England, c. 1660–c. 1760.” Literature & History 11 (1):
1–19. https://doi.org/10.7227/LH.11.1.1.
———. 2003. “‘An Angry and Malicious Mind’? Narratives of Slander at the Church Courts of York, c.1660–
c.1760.” History Workshop Journal 56 (1): 59–77. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/56.1.59.
Brady, Michael S. 2007. “Recalcitrant Emotions and Visual Illusions.” American Philosophical Quarterly 44
(3): 273–84.
———. 2013. Emotional Insight: The Epistemic Role of Emotional Experience. Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Brun, Georg, Ulvi Doğuoğlu, and Dominique Kuenzle. 2016. Epistemology and Emotions. London; New York:
Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315580128.
Card, Claudia. 1998. “Stoicism, Evil, and the Possibility of Morality.” Metaphilosophy 29 (4): 245–53.
Cates, Diana Fritz. 2009. Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry. Moral Traditions Series.
Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press.
Charland, Louis C. 1997. “Reconciling Cognitive and Perceptual Theories of Emotion: A Representational
Proposal.” Philosophy of Science 64 (4): 555–79.
———. 2010. “Reinstating the Passions: Arguments from the History of Psychopathology.” Edited by Peter
Goldie, January. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199235018.003.0011.
Cohen, Alix, and Robert Stern, eds. 2017. Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical History. First edition.
Mind Association Occasional Series. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

xii
Considine, John. 2008. Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dalgleish, Tim, and Michael J. Power, eds. 1999. Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Chichester, England ;
New York: Wiley.
Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam.
Danziger, Kurt. 1997. Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language. London.
https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221815.
Darwin, Charles, Martin Marc Cummings, G.-B Duchenne, O. G Rejlander, and John Murray (Firm). 1872. The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray.
De Sousa, Ronald. 1987. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Deigh, John. 1994. “Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions.” Ethics 104 (4): 824–54.
https://doi.org/10.1086/293657.
———. 2004. “Nussbaum’s Account of Compassion.” Edited by Martha C. Nussbaum. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 68 (2): 465–72.
———. 2012. “Comments on Dixon, Scarantino, and Mulligan and Scherer.” Emotion Review 4 (4): 371–74.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912445816.
Deonna, Julien, Raffaele Rodogno, and Fabrice Teroni. 2011. In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion.
Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Dixon, Thomas. 2003. From Passions to Emotions the Creation of a Secular Psychological Category.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2006. “Patients and Passions: Languages of Medicine and Emotion, 1789–18501.” In Medicine, Emotion
and Disease, 1700–1950, edited by Fay Bound Alberti, 22–52. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286030_2.
———. 2011. “Revolting Passions.” Modern Theology 27 (2): 298–312. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-
0025.2010.01677.x.
———. 2012a. “‘Emotion’: One Word, Many Concepts.” Emotion Review 4 (4): 387–88.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912445826.
———. 2012b. “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis.” Emotion Review 4 (4): 338–44.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912445814.
———. n.d. The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. The Invention of Altruism.
British Academy. Accessed May 27, 2020.
https://britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5871/bacad/9780197264263.001.000
1/upso-9780197264263.
Doi, Takeo. 1971. The Anatomy of Dependence. Tokyo, Japan: Kodansha.
Döring, Sabine A. 2014. “Why Recalcitrant Emotions Are Not Irrational.” In Emotion and Value, edited by
Sabine Roeser and Cain Todd, 124–36. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199686094.003.0008.
———. 2015. “What’s Wrong With Recalcitrant Emotions? From Irrationality to Challenge of Agential
Identity: What’s Wrong With Recalcitrant Emotions?” Dialectica 69 (3): 381–402.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1746-8361.12109.
Dr. Martha Craven Nussbaum -- The 2016 Kyoto Prize Commemorative Lecture. n.d. Accessed May 15, 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPVjp-QVfo&feature=youtu.be.
Elgin, Catherine Z. 1999. Considered Judgment. 2. print. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
———. 2004. “True Enough.” Philosophical Issues 14 (1): 113–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-
6077.2004.00023.x.
Elster, Jon. 2004. “Emotions and Rationality.” In Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium, edited
by A. S. R. Manstead, Nico H. Frijda, and Agneta Fischer. Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction.
Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Essary, Kirk. 2017. “Passions, Affections, or Emotions? On the Ambiguity of 16th-Century Terminology.”
Emotion Review 9 (4): 367–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916679007.
Fitzgerald, John T., ed. 2008. Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought. Routledge Monographs
in Classical Studies. London ; New York: Routledge.

xiii
Frevert, Ute. 2011. Emotions in History – Lost and Found. NED-New edition, 1. Vol. 4. Central European
University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7829/j.ctt1281z9.
———. 2014. “Defining Emotions: Concepts and Debates over Three Centuries.” In Emotional Lexicons:
Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000, 1–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199655731.003.0001.
Frevert, Ute, Christian Bailey, Pascal Eitler, Benno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, Margrit Pernau, Monique Scheer,
Anne Schmidt, and Nina Verheyen. 2014. Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the
Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000. Emotions in History. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Frevert, Ute, Pascal Eitler, Stephanie Olsen, Uffa Jensen, Margrit Pernau, Daniel Brückenhaus, Magdalena
Beljan, et al. 2014. Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870-1970.
Emotions in History. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Furtak, Rick Anthony. 2018. Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience. Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Gendron, Maria. 2010. “Defining Emotion: A Brief History.” Emotion Review 2 (4): 371–72.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073910374669.
Gendron, Maria, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. 2009. “Reconstructing the Past: A Century of Ideas About Emotion
in Psychology.” Emotion Review 1 (4): 316–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909338877.
Goldie, Peter. 2004. “Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World.” In Thinking About Feeling:
Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, edited by Robert C. Solomon. Series in Affective Science.
Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
———, ed. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Goodall, Jane. 2000. Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe.
Gordon, Robert M. 1974. “The Aboutness of Emotions.” American Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1): 27–36.
———. 1986. “The Passivity of Emotions.” The Philosophical Review 95 (3): 371–92.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2185465.
———. 1991. Review of Review of The Rationality of Emotion, by Ronald de Sousa. The Philosophical Review
100 (2): 284–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/2185305.
Graver, Margaret. 2007. Stoicism and Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenspan, P. S. 1995. Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Griffiths, P. E. 1994. “Cladistic Classification and Functional Explanation.” Philosophy of Science 61 (2): 206–
27. https://doi.org/10.1086/289796.
Griffiths, Paul. 1997. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Concepts. Science and Its
Conceptual Foundations. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Griffiths, Paul E. 1996a. “Darwinism, Process Structuralism, and Natural Kinds.” Philosophy of Science 63
(September): S1–9. https://doi.org/10.1086/289930.
———. 1996b. “The Historical Turn in the Study of Adaptation.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science 47 (4): 511–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/47.4.511.
———. 2001a. “From Adaptive Heuristic to Phylogenetic Perspective: Some Lessons from the Evolutionary
Psychology of Emotion.” In Conceptual Challenges in Evolutionary Psychology, edited by Harmon R.
Holcomb, 27:309–25. Studies in Cognitive Systems. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0618-7_11.
———. 2001b. “Emotion and the Problem of Psychological Categories.” In Emotions, Qualia, and
Consciousness, by Alfred Kaszniak, 28–41. WORLD SCIENTIFIC.
https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812810687_0003.
———. 2003. “III. Basic Emotions, Complex Emotions, Machiavellian Emotions1.” Royal Institute of
Philosophy Supplements 52 (March): 39–67. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246100007888.
———. 2004. “Is Emotion a Natural Kind.” In Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on
Emotions, edited by Robert C. Solomon, 233–49. Series in Affective Science. Oxford ; New York:
Oxford University Press.
———. n.d. “Towards a Machiavellian Theory of Emotional Appraisal.” In In P. Cruse & D. Evans (Eds.),
Emotion, Evolution and Rationality, 89–105. University Press.

xiv
Griffiths, Paul E. 2004. “Emotions as Natural and Normative Kinds.” Philosophy of Science 71 (5): 901–11.
https://doi.org/10.1086/425944.
Hart, W. A. 1998. “Nussbaum, Kant and Conflicts between Duties.” Philosophy 73 (286): 609–18.
“How To Escape Fear: An Interview With Martha Nussbaum » IAI TV.” n.d. Accessed May 15, 2020.
https://iai.tv/articles/escaping-the-monarchy-of-fear-an-interview-with-martha-nussbaum-auid-
1128.
Hume, David, and Michael P Levine. 2005. “Part I: Pride and Humility.” In A Treatise of Human Nature. New
York, N.Y.: Barnes & Noble.
Izard, Carroll E. 2010. “The Many Meanings/Aspects of Emotion: Definitions, Functions, Activation, and
Regulation.” Emotion Review 2 (4): 363–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073910374661.
James A. Harris. 2013. “Passions, Affections, Sentiments: Taxonomy and Terminology.” Edited by Amy M.
Schmitter, December. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199549023.013.010.
James, Susan. 1999. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Kenny, Anthony. 2003. Action, Emotion, and Will. London ; New York: Routledge.
Kessen, William, Andrew Ortony, and Fergus Craik, eds. 1991. “Value and Emotion.” In Memories, Thoughts
and Emotions: Essays in Honor of George Mandler., 337–53. Place of publication not identified:
PSYCHOLOGY Press.
Knuuttila, Simo. 2006. Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. 1st publ. in paperb. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Kriegel, Uriah. 2014. “Towards a New Feeling Theory of Emotion.” European Journal of Philosophy 22 (3): 420–
42. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2011.00493.x.
Lange, Carl Georg, and William James. 1967. The Emotions. New York: Hafner.
Lazarus, Richard S. 2006. Emotion and Adaptation. New York, NY; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/AbstractView/S9780195361476.
LeDoux, Joseph. 2012. “A Neuroscientist’s Perspective on Debates about the Nature of Emotion.” Emotion
Review 4 (4): 375–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912445822.
LeDoux, Joseph E. 1998. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. 1st.
Touchstone ed. A Touchstone Book. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Lyons, William. 1980. Emotion. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609244.
Maclaren, Kym. 2011. “Emotional Clichés and Authentic Passions: A Phenomenological Revision of a Cognitive
Theory of Emotion.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (1): 45–65.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9160-4.
Majid, Asifa. 2012. “The Role of Language in a Science of Emotion.” Emotion Review 4 (4): 380–81.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912445819.
Manstead, A. S. R., Nico H. Frijda, and Agneta Fischer, eds. 2004. Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam
Symposium. Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge
University Press.
“Martha C. Nussbaum | University of Chicago Law School.” n.d. Accessed May 15, 2020.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/nussbaum.
“Martha Nussbaum on Emotions, Ethics, and Literature.” 2016. The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
(blog). August 12, 2016. https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/08/12/martha-nussbaum-on-
emotions-ethics-and-literature/.
“Martha Nussbaum: The Renowned Philosopher on Stoicism, Emotions, and Must Read Books.” n.d. Accessed
May 15, 2020. https://dailystoic.com/martha-nussbaum/.
Mira Chaparro, Juan Pablo. 2017. “Aristotle on Music and the Emotions.” The University of Edinburgh. College
of Humanities and Social Science.
Meyer, Michel. 2000. Philosophy and the Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature. Translated by Robert
F. Barsky. Literature and Philosophy. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Monteleone, John M. 2017. “Concerns and the Seriousness of Emotion.” Dialectica 71 (2): 181–207.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1746-8361.12178.
Moss, Ann. 2003. Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

xv
Nakane, Chie. 1970. Japanese Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Nash, Ronald Alan. 1989. “Cognitive Theories of Emotion.” Noûs 23 (4): 481–504.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2215879.
Neu, Jerome. 1974. “Emotion, Thought, and Therapy : A Study of Hume, Spinoza and Freud on Thought and
Passion.” Ph.D., University of Oxford. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:93c26de1-cde0-469a-9947-
2df9a62a7e34.
———. 2000. A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion. Oxford, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2017. Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings. Edited by Keith
Ansell-Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. 3rd ed. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316562987.
Novaes, Catarina Dutilh. 2008. “An Intensional Interpretation of Ockham’s Theory of Supposition.” Journal
of the History of Philosophy 46 (3): 365–93. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.0.0030.
———. 2011. “The Different Ways in Which Logic Is (Said to Be) Formal.” History and Philosophy of Logic 32
(4): 303–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/01445340.2011.555505.
———. 2012a. “Form and Matter in Later Latin Medieval Logic: The Cases of Suppositio and Consequentia.”
Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (3): 339–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2012.0045.
———. 2012b. “Reassessing Logical Hylomorphism and the Demarcation of Logical Constants.” Synthese 185
(3): 387–410.
———. 2015. “Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy.” In Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide:
Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and
Paul M. Livingston, 1st ed., 75–108. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315766621.
Nussbaum, Martha. 1987. “The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions.” Apeiron 20 (2).
https://doi.org/10.1515/APEIRON.1987.20.2.129.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1995. “Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics.” In World, Mind, and
Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross
Harrison, 86–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621086.007.
NUSSBAUM, MARTHA C. 1998. “POLITICAL ANIMALS: LUCK, LOVE, AND DIGNITY.” Metaphilosophy 29
(4): 273–87.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1999. “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” The Journal of Ethics 3 (3): 163–201.
https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009877217694.
———. 2016. “‘If You Could See This Heart’: Mozart’s Mercy.” In Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical
World, edited by Ruth R. Caston and Robert A. Kaster, 226–40. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190278298.003.0012.
Nussbaum, Martha C., and Hilary Putnam. 1995. “Changing Aristotle’s Mind.” In Essays on Aristotle’s De
Anima, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 27–56. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/019823600X.003.0004.
Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge ; New York:
Cambridge University Press.
———. 2006. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. 2. print. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press.
———. 2009. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. New ed. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press.
———. 2013. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
———. 2016. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Oatley, Keith. 2004. Emotions: A Brief History. Blackwell Brief Histories of Psychology. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Pub.
Olsen, Stephanie. 2015. Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global
Perspectives. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4082269.
“On Anger, Disgust, and Love | Emotion Researcher.” n.d. Accessed May 15, 2020.
http://emotionresearcher.com/on-anger-disgust-love/.

xvi
Paz, Consuelo, ed. 2008. Ginhawa, Kapalaran, Dalamhati: Essays on Well0Being, Opportunity/Destiny, and
Anguish. Diliman, Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press.
Perler, Dominik. 2018. Feelings Transformed: Philosophical Theories of the Emotions, 1270-1670. Emotions of
the Past. New York: Oxford University Press.
Peter R. Anstey, ed. 2013. “Passions and Affection.” In The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the
Seventeenth Century. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199549993.013.0020.
Peters, Ellen. 2006. “The Functions of Affect in the Construction of Preferences.” In The Construction of
Preference, edited by Paul Slovic and Sarah Lichtenstein, 454–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618031.025.
Peters, Francis E. 1967. Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon. New York: New York University Press.
Peters, R. S., and C. A. Mace. 1961. “Emotions and the Category of Passivity.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 62: 117–42.
Peters, R.S. 1972. “The Education of the Emotions.” In Education and the Development of Reason, edited by
R.F. Dearden, Paul H. Hirst, and R.S. Peters. London ;Boston: Routledge and K. Paul.
“Philosophical Moral Psychology: An International Meeting of Classic and Empirically Informed Philosophy.”
n.d. Accessed May 15, 2020. https://philevents.org/event/show/76490;
“Philosophy in the Service of Humanity: An Excerpt of Martha C. Nussbaum’s Kyoto Prize Commemorative
Lecture | University of Chicago Law School.” n.d. Accessed May 15, 2020.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/philosophy-service-humanity-excerpt-martha-c-nussbaums-
kyoto-prize-commemorative-lecture.
Pickavé, Martin, and Lisa Shapiro, eds. 2012. Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern
Philosophy. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Pitcher, George. 1965. “Emotion.” Mind 74 (295): 326–46.
Plamper, Jan. 2017. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Emotions in History. Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Plamper, Jan, William M. Reddy, Barbara H Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. 2010. “THE HISTORY OF
EMOTIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM REDDY, BARBARA ROSENWEIN, AND PETER
STEARNS.” History and Theory 49 (2): 237–65.
Plutchik, Robert. 1980. Emotion, a Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. New York: Harper & Row.
Preus, Anthony. 2007. Historical Dictionary of Ancient Greek Philosophy. Historical Dictionaries of Religions,
Philosophies, and Movements, no. 78. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press.
Prinz, Jesse. 2004. “Embodied Emotions.” In Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions,
edited by Robert C. Solomon. Series in Affective Science. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2006. “The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgments.” Philosophical Explorations 9 (1): 29–43.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13869790500492466.
———. 2007. The Emotional Construction of Morals. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2010. “For Valence.” Emotion Review 2 (1): 5–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909345546.
Prinz, Jesse J. 2006. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Philosophy of Mind. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Reath, Andrews, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard, eds. 1997. Reclaiming the History of Ethics:
Essays for John Rawls. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527258.
Reddy, William M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge,
U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2009. “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions.” Emotion Review 1 (4): 302–15.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909338306.
Rietti, Sophie. 2003. “The Role of Emotion in Moral Agency: Some Meta-Ethical Issues in the Moral
Psychology of Emotion.” The University of Edinburgh. College of Humanities and Social Science.
Roberts, Robert C. 1984. “Solomon on the Control of Emotions.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
44 (3): 395–403. https://doi.org/10.2307/2107692.
———. 2003. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610202.

xvii
———. 2009. “Emotional Consciousness and Personal Relationships.” Emotion Review 1 (3): 281–88.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909103597.
Robinson, Jenefer M. 2010. “Bob Solomon and William James: A Rapprochement.” Emotion Review 2 (1): 53–
60. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909345550.
Rorty, Amélie, ed. 1980a. Explaining Emotions. Topics in Philosophy ; 5. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
———, ed. 1980b. “The Rationality of Emotion.” In Explaining Emotions. Topics in Philosophy ; 5. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. 1982. “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments.” Philosophy 57 (220): 159–72.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100050749.
Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg. 1987. “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love Is Not Love Which Alters
Not When It Alteration Finds.” Midwest Studies In Philosophy 10 (1): 399–412.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1987.tb00548.x.
Rosenkrantz, Max. 2005. “From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category
(Review).” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43 (2): 214–15. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2005.0123.
Rosenwein, Barbara H. 2002. “Worrying about Emotions in History.” The American Historical Review 107 (3):
821–45. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.3.821.
Rosenwein, Barbara H, and Riccardo Cristiani. 2018. What Is the History of Emotions.
http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5188202.
Ryle, Gilbert. 2020. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: Barakaldo Books.
http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6179215.
Sabini, John, and Maury Silver. 1996. “On the Possible Non-Existence of Emotions: The Passions.” Journal for
the Theory of Social Behaviour 26 (4): 375–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5914.1996.tb00298.x.
———, eds. 1998. Emotion, Character, and Responsibility. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2012. Emotions: Outline of a Theory. Philosophical Library/Open Road.
http://www.myilibrary.com?id=595380.
Scherer, K., A. Schorr, and T. Johnstone, eds. 2001. “A Review of Issues.” In Appraisal Processes in Emotion:
Theory, Methods, Research, 369–91. Series in Affective Science. Oxford, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Sherman, Nancy. 1997. “Kantian Virtue: Priggish or Passional?” In Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for
John Rawls, edited by Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard, 270–96.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527258.011.
———. 2004. “‘It Is No Little Thing to Make Mine Eyes to Sweat Compassion’: APA Comments of Martha
Nussbaum’s ‘Upheavals of Thought.’” Edited by Martha C. Nussbaum. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 68 (2): 458–64.
Sizer, Laura. 2006. “What Feelings Can’t Do.” Mind and Language 21 (1): 108–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-
0017.2006.00308.x.
Smart, J. J. C., and Bernard Williams. 1973. Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press.
Solomon, Robert. 1997. “In Defense of the Emotions (and Passions Too).” Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour 27 (4): 489–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00053.
Solomon, Robert C. 1973. “Emotions and Choice.” The Review of Metaphysics 27 (1): 20–41.
Solomon, Robert C. 1976. The Passions. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Solomon, Robert C. 2003a. Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice. The Passionate Life. Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press.
———. 2003b. “I. Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: What Is a ‘Cognitive Theory’ of the Emotions and Does
It Neglect Affectivity?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 (March): 1–18.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246100007864.
———, ed. 2004a. “Emotion: Biological Fact or Social Construction?” In Thinking About Feeling:
Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, 28–43. Series in Affective Science. Oxford ; New York:
Oxford University Press.
———. 2004b. “On the Passivity of the Passions.” In Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium,
edited by A. S. R. Manstead, Nico H. Frijda, and Agneta Fischer. Studies in Emotion and Social
Interaction. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

xviii
———, ed. 2004c. Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions. Series in Affective
Science. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Sorabji, Richard. 2002. Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation. Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Srinivasan, Amia. 2015. “The Archimedean Urge: The Archimedean Urge.” Philosophical Perspectives 29 (1):
325–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12068.
Srinivasan, Amia Parvathi. 2013. “The Fragile Estate : Essays on Luminosity, Normativity and
Metaphilosophy.” Ph.D., University of Oxford. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:23b7a5c9-448d-
421b-b26c-5cae3591aee3.
Tappolet, Christine. 2016. Emotions, Values, and Agency. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1988. “Review of Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek
Tragedy and Philosophy.” Edited by Martha C. Nussbaum. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (4):
805–14.
Thalberg, Irving. 1964. “Emotion and Thought.” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1): 45–55.
Wassmann, Claudia. 2012. “On Emotion and the Emotions: A Comment to Dixon, Mulligan and Scherer, and
Scarantino.” Emotion Review 4 (4): 385–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912445821.
“When Fear Becomes Hope | University of Chicago Law School.” n.d. Accessed May 15, 2020.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/when-fear-becomes-hope.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2010. “The ‘History of Emotions’ and the Future of Emotion Research.” Emotion Review 2
(3): 269–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073910361983.
Williams, Bernard, ed. 1973a. “Deciding to Believe.” In Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972,
136–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621253.011.
———, ed. 1973b. “Morality and the Emotions.” In Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972, 207–
29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621253.015.
———. 2004. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. 4. printing, and 1. paperback printing. Princeton
Paperbacks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
Wilson, Robert A, ed. 1999. “Squaring the Circle: Natural Kinds with Historical Essences.” In Species: New
Interdisciplinary Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=4127.
Zachar, Peter. 2010. “Has There Been Conceptual Progress in The Science of Emotion?” Emotion Review 2 (4):
381–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073910374668.
Zajonc, R. B. 1980. “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences.” American Psychologist 35 (2): 151–
75. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.2.151.
———. 1984. “On the Primacy of Affect.” American Psychologist 39 (2): 117–23. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-
066X.39.2.117.

xix
 Appendix A
Topic Outline of Major Chapters
Chapter 1 Passivity: A Central Problem in the Philosophy of Emotion
1.1 Background of the Study
1.1.1 Restoring the emotions from passivity
1.1.2 The preeminence of the cognitive theory
1.1.3 The cognitive theory failed to account for passivity
1.1.4 The birth of history of emotions
1.2 Statement of the Problem
1.2.1 Main Research Question
1.2.1.1 How is philosophy of emotion going to advance in its understanding of emotion?
1.2.2 Specific research questions
1.2.2.1 What happened to passivity during the intervening years of the cognitive theory’s
success and failure on its account?
1.2.2.2 How can we find a way of out philosophical disputes on emotions’ passivity
involving cognitive theory and its critics?
1.2.2.3 Is the criticism of failing to account for passivity a fair complaint to direct at
cognitive theories of emotion?
1.2.3 Thesis Statement
1.2.3.1 Progress in the philosophy of emotion, i.e. significant advance in the
understanding of emotion will not be possible without a more adequate account of
passivity.
1.3 Objectives
1.3.1 To underscore the importance of passivity in the discourse of emotions
1.3.2 To criticize the history and progress of the philosophy of emotion with focus on passivity
1.3.3 To show that Martha Nussbaum’s emotion theory is a significant step towards a more
robust appreciation of emotions in general, and passivity in particular.
1.4 Significance of the Study
1.5 Scope and Limitations
1.6 Methodology
1.6.1 The philosophical methodology of ‘conceptual genealogy’
1.6.1.1 Passivity was central in debates: 1957 – 1973
1.6.1.2 Diminution of passivity in debates: 1973 – 2000
1.6.1.3 Passivity problem persists: 2001 - 2016
1.7 Conceptual and Theoretical Framework
1.7.1 Three ways of understanding passivity
1.8 Chapter Contents

Chapter 2 Passivity in Subsequent Years: Sidelined, Solved and Shunned?

2.1 Why Passivity is Central at the Beginning of Philosophy of Emotion

2.1.1 The cognitive theory of emotions
2.1.2 The traditional view of the emotions
2.1.3 The intentionality of emotions
2.1.3.1 Emotions have objects
2.1.3.2 Emotions may be justified
2.1.3.3 Factual knowledge is necessary for emotions
2.1.3.4 Certain behaviors accompany an emotion
2.1.4 The cognitive element: thoughts and judgments
2.1.5 Being responsible for emotions
2.2 Why Passivity is No Longer as Significantly Discussed
2.2.1 Research focused on cognition
2.2.2 The cognitive theory explained away passivity
2.2.3 Emotions are not a natural kind
2.3 Chapter Summary

xx
Chapter 3 Passivity Problem Persists
3.1 Challenges to the cognitive claim
3.1.1 Some worries on the identity-claim: voluntarism and optimistic rationalism
3.1.2 Other worries on the identity claim: questions on redundancy and hot cognition
3.1.3 Neglect of feelings and the body
3.1.4 Further arguments from the Neo-Jamesians: the case of paradigm scenarios
3.2 Challenges from the history of emotions
3.2.1 What are the challenges from the history of emotions?
3.2.1.1 Anxiety in the historical semantics of emotions
3.2.1.2 The mind changed and the passions vanished
3.2.1.3 Abandon the term ‘emotion’
3.2.2 Why these challenges from history matter
3.2.2.1 If we abandon ‘emotions,’ what will happen to ordinary use?
3.2.2.2 If we abandon ‘emotions,’ then we must agree that Dixon is correct
3.2.2.3 The job now is to work towards disambiguation
3.2.2.4 Challenges arising from history of emotions have huge implications on the ontology
of emotions
3.2.2.5 Further implications: towards a deeper investigation of passivity
3.3 Chapter Summary

Chapter 4 Martha Nussbaum: Review of a Representative Theory

4.1 Martha Nussbaum and the Philosophy of Emotion
4.2 Passivity in Martha Nussbaum’s Theory of Emotion
4.2.1 The central cognitive claim
4.2.1.1 The cognitive structure of emotions
4.2.1.1.1 Emotions are essentially thoughts or cognitions
4.2.1.1.2 Thoughts or cognitions satisfy necessary and
sufficient elements in the definition of emotion
4.2.1.1.3 Against the necessity of non-cognitive components
like feelings and bodily states in the definition of
emotion
4.2.1.2 The necessity and sufficiency of cognition
4.2.1.3 Emotions are intelligent
4.2.2 Revising the Stoics
4.2.2.1 A flexible and broad account of cognition: emotions in beasts and
babies
4.2.2.2 Further revisions on the original Stoic claim: the explanatory role
of culture, society and norms
4.2.2.3 Further revisions on the original Stoic claim – the developmental
dimension of emotions: ‘past loves shadow present attachments,
and take up residence in them’
4.2.3 The setting: fragility of the good life
4.2.3.1 Emotions and being human: Nussbaum’s moral and political
thought
4.3 Nussbaum, passivity, and the challenges to the cognitive theory
4.3.1 Challenges to Nussbaum’s cognitive/evaluative theory
4.3.1.1 Nussbaum a ‘judgmentalist’
4.3.1.2 Identity-claim as reductionist: include feelings and desire (or
motivation) as well
4.3.1.3 Identity-claim on the issue of hot cognition
4.3.1.4 The related issue of redundancy
4.4 Nussbaum does not stand scrutiny
4.4.1 Tension in Nussbaum’s take on voluntarism and optimistic rationalism
4.4.2 Using ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ interchangeably
4.5 Towards a conceptual genealogy of passivity
4.6 Chapter Summary

xxi
 Appendix B
Passivity of Emotion: Continuities and Changes
Philosophy of Emotion Passivity of Emotion
1957 – 1973 With the birth of the philosophy of emotion, passivity of emotion means:
Passivity Central in Debates (1) Emotions are irruptive states, turbulent commotions, inner forces,
animal forces
(2) Hot, intense, urgent motions that passively assail a person
(3) As irruptive states, then they are states that cannot be controlled
nor experiences for which we can be held responsible (they are
not within our grasp). For this reason, their meanings may not be
available to us.

1973 – 2000 With the dominance of cognitive theory, passivity of emotion means:
Diminution of Passivity (4) Emotions are not irruptive animalistic forces: they are very much
Due to the Dominance of cognitive; they are thoughts and judgments imbued with rich
the Cognitive Theory intentionality
(5) They are hot, intense and urgent experiences, but this does not
mean they are irruptive animalistic forces
(6) We are not (entirely) passive before emotions. There is room for
some degree of control and responsibility with respect to many
emotional experiences.

With the criticisms to the cognitive theory, passivity of emotion means:

(5) Emotions are not (just) thoughts – which are calm, cool and
calculated. We must account for their felt nature!
(6) Emotions are hot, intense and urgent, that is why they cannot
(just) be identified with thoughts and judgments as the cognitive
theory does.
(7) That they are not just thoughts means we must account for the
role of biology and culture in emotions, for their meanings may lie
here too.

2001 – 2016 With Martha Nussbaum, passivity of emotion means:

Passivity Problem Persists (1) Emotions are cognitive appraisals of important things and people
outside our control.
(2) Emotions are hot, intense and urgent because they are about very
important things which we cannot control.
(3) We can control and be responsible for emotions insofar as they
are our thoughts. Though there may be cases where we may not
be in control of them, because habit and the sheer weight of events
can take over the person even before she can think of what to do or
what to feel. Emotions also have a developmental aspect where
some of their meanings may not be available to us since they
have developed as early as infancy.

xxii
 With the birth of the field of history of emotions, passivity of emotion
means:
(4) Emotions are passions, i.e. turbulent commotions or states
which befall a person, or which a person must contend with and
attempt to master

What this thesis argued for This thesis developed a conceptual genealogy of passivity of emotion.
a. In this genealogy, passivity of emotion changed numerous times.
The three periodizations reflect these changes.
b. This genealogy proved that passivity of emotion is broad concept
that covers a number of distinct issues:
(1) Is primarily an issue of the ontological nature of
emotions: whether they are cognitive states, affective
states, physiological states, or all of these at once.
(2) Is primarily an issue of the phenomenology of emotions:
why we experience or feel them in this and that way.
(3) Is primarily an issue of control or ascription: what is the
extent of our power over emotions; what is the extent of
saying this is my emotion if I cannot control it or if I
cannot determine its meanings
(4) Is primarily an issue of history: has the modern term
‘emotion’ assumed a entirely separate meaning from the
older category of ‘passion’ or has it retained some of its
previous meanings as passion.
c. In this genealogy, the following key issues concerning passivity
and the cognitive theory remain:
- With respect to (1) critics must squarely attack Nussbaum’s
defense of the cognitive theory that emotions are cognitive
appraisals. Critics have not adequately done so.
- With respect to (2) the cognitive theory must prove the
causal relationship between (cool and calm) thoughts and
(heated, intense and urgent) experiences or feelings
- With respect to (3) the cognitive theory should be clear
about their position on control of emotions
- With respect to (4) the cognitive theory must develop an
account of the historical link between passions and
emotions.
d. Given these results, passivity of emotion is a problem that
philosophy of emotion must confront.
e. This conceptual genealogy demonstrated progressive steps to the
extent that it showed that the concept of passivity as applied to
emotions is broad and is covering a number of issues at once.
f. This means that further studies on conceptual engineering of the
said concept now begin.

xxiii
 Appendix C

Conceptual Genealogy of Passivity

Problem of Passivity in the Philosophy of Emotion

Deep philosophical disputes over passivity haunt the philosophy of emotion. Disputes go back and forth in inquiring whether emotions are states that happen to us, and not states that we actively
induce; whether they are experiences we undergo, and not experiences we choose; whether emotions are something that surprises, torments or even paralyzes us, and not something we fully
control; or whether they are experiences that are unlike calm and steady reason, in that they are brute and myopic.

Thesis
CONCEPTUAL GENEALOGY OF PASSIVITY OF EMOTION

Timeline Significance of Passivity of Emotion Meaning of Passivity of Emotion

Chapter 1 Philosophy of emotion’s restorative work sought to explain:

1957 – 1973 Passivity: A Central Problem in the Philosophy of Emotion
Passivity was central in the restorative work of emotions (1) Emotions are irruptive states, turbulent commotions, inner forces, unreasoning
movements, animal forces versus calm and cool reason, beliefs, thoughts and
judgments.

(2) Emotions are hot, intense, urgent, irruptive, turbulent, take us by surprise, paralyze
us, etc.

xxiv
(3) Emotions can be directed, regulated, modified, educated
Voluntarism: change at will
Optimistic rationalism: we can change them
We can be responsible for them

1973 – 2000 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

Passivity: Sidelined, Solved or Shunned? Passivity Problem Persists

Diminution of passivity in debates Unobserving eyes would think that passivity is gone

Passivity took a backseat to concepts such as Cognition and Judgment A. But passivity persisted in the criticisms to cognitive theories’ cognitive claim
during the emergence and eventual dominance of the cognitive theory
1. Over-intellectualized emotions: emotions cannot be identified (one and the same)
with thoughts! Must accommodate feelings and desires (or motivations). Must
Issue of focus explain the role of biology and culture.
Why: emphasis on cognition and judgment 2. Emotions are hot, thoughts or cognitions are not
3. We cannot change / modify emotions at will! They are very difficult to change.
Issue of success
Why: passivity explained away by cognitivism B. Passivity persisted in the criticisms to cognitive theories from history of emotions
1. “emotion” is a modern term fraught with semantic anxiety
Ontological issue 2. Must account for the link of “emotion” with older category of “passions”
Why: emotions (and passivity) not a natural class
Forge forward, maintaining frankness and explicitness in subject of study
 2001 – 2018 Chapter 4 Passivity persisted in the criticisms to Martha Nussbaum’s cognitive theory
Martha Nussbaum:
Passivity at the Heart of a Cognitive Theory A. Passivity persisted in the criticisms to Nussbaum cognitive theory’s
cognitive claim
Passivity at the center of the cognitive theory thru Martha
Nussbaum’s cognitive/evaluative theory of the emotion 1. Over-intellectualized emotions: emotions cannot be identified (one and
the same) with thoughts! Must accommodate feelings and desires (or
motivations). Must explain the role of biology and culture.
à Nussbaum: Emotions can be identified with thoughts, appraisals, or
perceptions.
à Critics must subvert Nussbaum’s claims squarely.

2. Emotions are hot, thoughts or cognitions are not

à But what feels wrenching about the emotions can be hardly
distinguished from their cognitive nature

3. We cannot change / modify emotions at will! They are very difficult to

change.
à Nussbaum’s theory stand wanting

xxv
B. Passivity persisted in the criticisms to cognitive theories from history of
emotions
1. “emotion” is a modern term fraught with semantic anxiety
à Nussbaum solved this by being frank with what she is referring to
when talking about “emotions”
2. Must account for the link of “emotion” with older category of “passions”
à Nussbaum is guilty of this. She used the two terms interchangeably
despite being aware of their history.

CONCLUSION Passivity persists as a problem in the philosophy of emotion, which Passivity is a wide concept that meant many things in the course of the development
the field must confront if it will advance in its aim of understanding of disputes between the cognitive theory and its critics:
what emotions really are. (1) Is primarily an issue of the nature of emotions: of what state emotions
really are – cognitive, affective, physiological?
Passivity persists as a problem, in the sense that it fuels disputes (2) Is primarily an issue of phenomenology: of what we experience when we
between the cognitive theory and critics – both of whom are in undergo emotional experiences
need of a more adequate account of passivity in order to progress (3) Is primarily an issue of control or responsibility: of whether they are within
in their quest to understand emotions. the scope of voluntary action or not
(4) Have developed into a problem of history: of whether we should abandon
the modern term ‘emotion’ and revive older categories such as passions
 Appendix D
Major Works in the Philosophy of Emotion*
(In Chronological Order)

1872 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, (London: Murray, 1872). Reprinted
with introduction and notes by Paul Ekman, and co-edited by Philip Prodger, (London: Harper Collins
Publishers, 1998).354
1922 Carl Georg Lange and William James, The Emotions (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, [1922] 1967).
1928 Martin Reymert (ed.), Feelings and Emotions The Wittenberg Symposium, (Worcester, Massachusetts:
Clark University Press, 1928).**
1950 Martin Reymet (ed), Feelings and Emotions The Mooseheart Symposium, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, Inc. 1950).**
1957 Errol Bedford, “Emotions” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1957; reprinted in Essays in
Philosophical Psychology, ed. D. Gustafson, (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1963).
1961 R. S. Peters and C. A. Mace, “Emotions and the Category of Passivity,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, New Series, Vol. 62 (1961 - 1962), pp. 117-142.
1963 Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1963).
1964 Irving Thalberg, “Emotion and Thought,” in American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1964,
pp. 45-55.
1965 George Pitcher, “Emotion,” in Mind, New Series, Vol. 74, No. 295 (Jul., 1965), pp. 326-346.

1970’s

1970 Magda Arnold (ed.), Feelings and Emotions The Loyola Symposium, (New York: American Academic Press
Inc., 1970).
1973 Robert Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” in The Review of Metaphysics, XVII, i (Sept., 1973), and reprinted
in Amelie Rorty, Explaining Emotions, 1980.
1973 Bernard Williams, “Morality and the Emotions” in Problems of Self: Philosophical Papers 1956 – 1972,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
1977 Robert Solomon, "The Rationality of Emotions," in Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 8 (Summer
1977), pp. 105-114.

1980’s

1980 Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press,
1980).
1980 William Lyons, Emotion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
1982 Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments,” in Philosophy 57, 1982, 159-172.
1984 Cheshire Calhoun and Robert Solomon, What is an Emotion? (Oxford University Press, 1984).
1984 William James, “What is an Emotion?” in Cheshire Calhoun and Robert Solomon, What is an Emotion?
(Oxford University Press, 1984).
1986 Robert M. Gordon, “The Passivity of Emotions,” in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp.
371-392.
1987 Ronald De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987).
1987 Robert M. Gordon, The Structure of Emotions: Investigations in Cognitive Philosophy, (Cambridge
University Press, 1987).
1988 A. Ortony, G. L. Clore and A. Collins, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions (Cambridge University Press,
1988).
1988 Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification (New York: Routledge,
1988).
1989 Roland Alan Nash, “Cognitive Theories of Emotion,” in Nous, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Sep., 1989), 481.

354
The second edition of The Expression of the Emotions, edited by his son Francis, appeared posthumously in 1889, seven
years after Darwin’s death.

xxvi
 1990’s

1992 Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions (London: Routledge, 1992).
1992 Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (Routledge, 1992).**
1992 O. H. Green, The Emotions: A Philosophical Theory, (Springer, 1992)
1993 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1993).
1994 Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, (Princeton: New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
1994 John Deigh, “Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions,” in Ethics 104 (1994), 824-854.
1994 Joel Marks and Roger T. Ames (eds.), Emotions in Asian Thought, (State University of New York Press,
1994).
1995 Patricia S. Greenspan, Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995).
1996 LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of the Emotional Life, (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996).
1997 Robert Solomon, “In Defense of Emotions (and Passions too), in Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior
27:4, 489 – 497.
1998 John Sabini and Mauri Silver, Emotion, Character and Responsibility, (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998).
1999 Tim Dalgleish and Michael Power (eds.), Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, (New York: John Wiley &
Sons Ltd. 1999).
1999 John Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions, (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
1999 Wollheim, Richard. On the Emotions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

2000’s

2000 Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
2000 Aaron Ben-Zeev, The Subtlety of Emotions, (MIT Press, 2000).
2000 Jerome Neu, A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion, (Oxford University Press, 2000).
2000 Nico H. Fridja, Antony S. R. Manstead, and Sacha Bem (eds.), Emotions and Beliefs: How Emotions
Influence Beliefs, (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
2001 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
2003 Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed.), Philosophy and the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2003 Robert Solomon, Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
2003 Robert Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
2003 Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Category, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003)
2004 Robert Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
2004 Anthony S. R. Manstead, Nico Frijda and Agneta Fischer (eds), Feelings and Emotions The Amsterdam
Symposium, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2004 Keith Oatley, Emotions: A Brief History, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
2004 Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, (New York: Oxford University, 2004).
2004 Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 2004).
2005 Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
2007 Robert Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
2007 Jerome Kagan, What Is Emotion? History, Measures, Meanings (New York: Yale University Press, 2007).
2007 Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).

xxvii
2008 Georg Brun, Ulvi Doğuoğlu and Dominique Kuenzle. Epistemology and Emotions (Hampshire: Ashgate
Publishing Ltd., 2008).
2008 John T. Fitzgerald, (ed.), Passion and Progress in Greco-Roman Thought (New York: Routledge, 2008).

2010’s

2010 Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotions, (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
2011 Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2011).
2011 Carla Bagnoli (ed.), Morality and the Emotions, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
2011 Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, (Oxford University
Press, 2011)
2012 Jeffrey G. Murphy, Punishment and the Moral Emotions, (Oxford University Press, 2012).
2012 Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, and Frabrice Teroni, In Defense of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion,
(Oxford University Press, 2012).
2012 Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion and the Mind, (Oxford University Press, 2012).
2013 John Deigh, On Emotions: Philosophical Essays, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
2013 Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).
2014 Ute Frevert and Thomas Dixon, Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling
1700–2000, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
2016 Christine Tappolet, Emotions, Values and Agency, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
2016 Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization (University of Illinois
Press, 2016).
2016 Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016).
2017 Alix Cohen and Robert Stern, Thinking about the Emotions: A Philosophical History, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017).
2017 Aaron Ben Ze’ev and Angelika Krebs, Philosophy of Emotion (Critical Concepts in Philosophy), (Routledge,
2017).
2018 Hichem Naar and Farbice Teroni (eds), The Ontology of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
2018 Dominik Perler, Feelings Transformed Philosophical Theories of the Emotions 1270 – 1670, Translated from
the German by Tony Crawford, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
2018 Martha Nussbaum: The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2018).
2018 Liesbeth Huppes-Cluysenaer and Nuno M.M.S. Coelho (eds.), Aristotle on Emotions in Law and Politics,
(Springer, 2018).
2019 Laura Candiotto, The Value of Emotions for Knowledge, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

* This is in no way an exhaustive list. While the Philosophy of Emotions interacted actively with psychologists (and to a certain extent
anthropology, sociology and political thought, among others), I focused this listing mainly on philosophers, especially those whose ideas
and works have been at the center stage of debates concerning the cognitive theory. Some of the prominent psychologists cited in the
philosophy of emotions are Nico Frijda, Richard Lazarus, and Keith Oatley. Furthermore, this listing does not reflect philosophy journals
with focus on emotions, some of which have been established during this same timeline. Some of these include: Emotion Review,
Dialectica, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Mind, among others.

** Unable to obtain copy, whether online or printed version.

xxviii