Upheavals of Thought

The book's cognitive theory of emotion is most directly indebted to the Stoic analysis of pathē as judgements of value, especially in Chrysippus and Seneca — though Nussbaum rejects the Stoic conclusion that all such judgements should be eradicated.

"Emotions, I argue, are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature; they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature's reasoning itself." (Upheavals of Thought, Introduction)

The argument is conducted in the tools of mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy — close attention to the intentional content of mental states, careful distinctions between belief, judgement, and emotion.

"Emotions have an intentional object: I grieve not at the world in general but at the loss of someone in particular. They have a propositional content: that this loss matters." (Upheavals of Thought, ch. 1)

Nussbaum is a moral realist about the objects of emotion: there are facts about value (the irreplaceability of persons, the badness of pain) that correctly grounded emotions track.

"The cognitive content of emotion can be true or false; this means emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate, well-grounded or unfounded." (Upheavals of Thought, ch. 1)

The treatment of particular emotions — grief, compassion, love — is phenomenologically rich, drawing extensively on literature (Proust, Whitman, Mahler) as primary evidence for the structure of emotional experience.

"Music is, I argue, perhaps the most pertinent of all the arts to the question of the emotional life — because of all the arts it most closely resembles the kinaesthetic and physiological dynamics of the emotions themselves." (Upheavals of Thought, ch. 5)

The treatment of love as ascent through stages — Plato's Symposium, Augustine, Dante, Mahler — is structured by a (heavily revised) Platonist erotic ladder.

"Plato's ladder of love provides a framework against which the subsequent ascents — Augustine's, Dante's, Whitman's — can be measured and read." (Upheavals of Thought, ch. 12)

Augustine and Dante are treated with theological seriousness — not reduced to non-cognitive expression — even though Nussbaum is a secular Jew who is not herself committed to their religious frameworks.

"Augustine's account of love is the most important reformulation of the Platonist position in Western thought; it must be understood on its own terms before it can be criticised." (Upheavals of Thought, ch. 13)

The neo-Aristotelian framework, with its emphasis on virtue and practical reason, overlaps substantially with the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition's treatment of the passions.

"Aristotle's account of the emotions, in Rhetoric II and Nicomachean Ethics, has the right shape — emotions are evaluative responses to objects, and the well-educated emotions are part of the virtuous life." (Upheavals of Thought, ch. 2)