No aspect of life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than the passionate embrace of all things good and beautiful, making life worth living. But negative emotions can also make existence an intolerable burden. Many philosophers before and after David Hume opposed morality to the passions, understanding ‘Reason’ as the appropriate foundation for choosing right from wrong and how to live a good live. Hume proposed that the true basis of all morality is emotion and that reason is only in the service of those often unconscious, feelings. The course will begin with an in-depth analysis of Hume’s moral philosophy. We will then track his theory to the best secular ethicists of the 20th and 21st century.
- David Hume - Primary Texts: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
- Martha Nussbaum - Primary Texts: Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004), The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (2013), Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013)
- Transitional Anger Article Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2015, Vol.1
- Anger and Forgiveness (2016)
- The Cosmopolitan Tradition (2019)
- Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (2000)
- David Hume: Personal and Historical Context - David Hume’s (1711–1776) wide-ranging philosophical works discuss the emotions at length, most notably in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), which devotes the second of its three books to the passions, as well as in the Dissertation on the Passions. Hume does not merely discuss the emotions theoretically, he narrates the philosophical experience of them in Book I of the Treatise. This section treats the narrator’s emotional landscape as a response to his skeptical conclusions about reason, sense-perception, and the self. During a depressive period in Hume’s youth he feels himself “a strange, uncouth monster,” shunned by society and marooned in a skeptical isolation. Hume treats this unhappy, skeptical view as a kind of illness, which eventually receives a cure from “nature herself.”
- Hume: Reason and Passion - Hume holds that the passions are not themselves directly subject to rational evaluation. In fact, it seems something of a category error to think that they could be either rational or irrational. Reasoning is a matter of connecting various ideas in order to come to a belief; it may apply to, or even form, the circumstances under which passions arise. But reason can generate no impulse by itself. There are multiple puzzles here, one of which is the problem of abstract concepts such as justice: what moves humanity to develop the practices and conventions of justice or promise-keeping in the first place.
- Martha Nussbaum - Martha Nussbaum (b.1947) is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department. Her 2001 book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions engaged her in a dialogue with Hume on the role of emotions. Nussbaum’s treatise offers a lucid counterpoint to the old idea that our emotions are merely animal energies or primal impulses wholly separate from our cognition. Instead, she argues that they are a centrepiece of thought and that any substantive theory of ethics necessitates an understanding of the emotions. Nussbaum continued developing her theory of emotions in subsequent works: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013), Anger and Forgiveness (2016), The Cosmopolitan Tradition (2019),
- Simon Blackburn and Peter Singer - We will then look at two other philosophers who have engaged with the issue of the role of emotions in ethics: The English philosopher Simon Blackburn and Australian ethicist Peter Singer. Both have made significant contributions to the field and their disagreements are an important aspect of the ongoing debate.
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Recognise the different types of myths in film and the way they may influence social ideas
- Make the connection between the ideological elements in social history and the transfer of those ideologies to film
- Discuss some of the technical mechanisms used in film to achieve the ‘reality’ effect
- Analyse the connection between the narrative elements of film and the various emotional triggers connected with different narratives.
