Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) - Tapa dura

Winner, 2015 CSCP Symposium Book Award Moral Emotions builds upon the philosophical theory of persons begun in Phenomenology and Mysticism and marks a new stage of phenomenology. Author Anthony J. Steinbock finds personhood analyzing key emotions, called moral emotions. Moral Emotions offers a systematic account of the moral emotions, described here as pride, shame, and guilt as emotions of self-givenness; repentance, hope, and despair as emotions of possibility; and trusting, loving, and humility as emotions of otherness. The author argues these reveal basic structures of interpersonal experience. By exhibiting their own kind of cognition and evidence, the moral emotions not only help to clarify the meaning of person, they reveal novel concepts of freedom, critique, and normativity. As such, they are able to engage our contemporary social imaginaries at the impasse of modernity and postmodernity.

ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Phenomenology Research Center at Southern Illinois University. He is the editor of Northwestern University Press's Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy series and the editor in chief of Continental Philosophy Review; his previous books include Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (2007) and Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl (Northwestern, 1995).