This course concerns the basic structure of emotions and the range of human motivation, how emotions are related to character and action, and how they are involved in the development of a distinct "self." Starting from Sartre's theory that emotions involve rational judgment, we'll trace developments and critiques of this thesis from its Hellenistic past to contemporary psychology.
Although the course focuses on recent developments in philosophical analyses of emotion, the course will also be valuable for students in psychology, and any student interested in the way that human reason shapes and is shaped by our emotional experience. The course presuppose no background beyond the freshman and sophomore philosophy core courses.

Topics include:
– basic states like fear, irritation, and sexual attraction and their difference from more complex
states like empathy, romantic love, hatred, pride, envy, shame, remorse;
– ‘reactive attitudes' as complex emotions involving moral judgments;
– whether ‘emotions' form a genus of psychic states with a similar cognitive and motivational
structure, or whether there are fundamentally different kinds of states among ‘emotions;'
– what role emotions play in the cares and commitments that define our identity;
– how emotion and desire are related to concepts like "character" and "virtue";
– how the traditional opposition of reason and emotion has been overturned;
– philosophical critiques of several classical and psychological models of emotion and feeling;
– the peculiar ways in which human agents work to alter their own emotions and also to deceive
themselves about their emotions (including paradoxes arising from these complications).
– what sort of philosophical assumptions underlie "personality trait" tests like
the Myers-Briggs inventory, used by many employers and career counselors;
– the relation between emotions and the new theory of "intrinsic motivation" in psychology.

Likely Readings (selections from the following books and articles):
Martha Nussbaum's The Theraphy of Desire
Nagel's "Sexual Perversion," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979)                                                                      "Four Jackies" by Andy Warhol
Robert Solomon's The Passions (Hackett, 1993)   
Owen Flanagan's Varieties of Moral Personality (Harvard University Press, 1991).
Ronald de Sousa's The Rationality of Emotions (MIT Press, 1997).
Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge, 2003).
Robert Gordon, The Structure of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
John Elster, Alchemies of the Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Craig Delancey, Passionate Engines (Oxford University Press, 2005).