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STOCKER, Michael with Elizabeth Hegeman. Valuing Emotions. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
xxvii + 353 pp. Cloth, $64.95; paper, $21.95-Michael Stocker believes that philosophers idealize reason and demonize emotion, and that this is a bad thing. Valuing Emotions was written with Elizabeth Hegeman, a psychoanalyst and anthropologist who collaborated on four of the book's ten major chapters, but four of Stocker's previously published papers are also incorporated in the book. Its central theme is that emotions are more positively important than contemporary ethicists customarily grant: having proper emotions is a crucial part of being a good person and living a good life, and is also crucial for evaluative knowledge. The book develops no overarching theory of the emotions, however, consisting instead of a number of relatively distinct and diverse sections.
Part 1 is introductory. Its first chapter suggests that philosophical psychology should broaden its concern from emotions and interests to "affectivity" in general, something Stocker does not define. Affectivity is taken to involve "feelings," which are at least analogous to traditional phenomenal states, but which can be unconscious. Stocker believes that the feelings relevant to one's emotions are not exhausted by phenomenal experience of one's body, but also include what he calls "psychic feelings." Stocker maintains that many contemporary philosophical analyses of the emotions-for...