Emotional Bean-Counting

In his lecture series The Passions: Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions, Robert Solomon presents a number of wonderful lectures which I plan to review over the next long while. (Yes, I understand that I have way too many projects going on right now, especially for how slow the posting has been.) One of these great lectures is concerning the relatively shallow way in which we classify emotions as being either good or bad. We will see that such a view, especially as found in the all-too-common reduction to pain and pleasure, is simply inadequate on a number of levels.

Embodied Realism

In their book Philosophy in the Flesh Lakoff and Johnson argue that our understanding of the human mind, as developed in modern cognitive science, forces us to entirely reevaluate many philosophical ideas and assumptions which have shaped the debates over the millennia. They argue that since 1) the human mind as well as all reason and rationality is fully and inherently embodied, 2) the large majority of human thought is unconscious and 3) abstract concepts are for the most part metaphorical rather than literal that most of our ideas concerning metaphysics, epistemology, mind, language, ethics, etc. are based in an incorrect foundation. While I plan to dedicate a number of posts to considering these bold assertions in more detail, in this post I plan to outline the basic approach which the authors take through out the book.