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Upheavals of Thought
Nussbaum's 2001 750-page treatise defending the cognitive theory of emotions — the book that established emotions as forms of intelligent judgment essential to ethical perception.
The book mounts the most sustained philosophical defense of the cognitive theory of emotions in contemporary moral philosophy. Drawing on ancient philosophy, contemporary cognitive science, and close readings of Proust, Joyce, Mahler, and other artists whose work is saturated with emotional intelligence, Nussbaum argues that emotions are not irrational disturbances but cognitive evaluations — judgments about the significance of events for a person's flourishing. The book's central chapters on grief, compassion, and love provide the philosophical resources for understanding the emotional landscape of the AI transition: why the grief of the displaced is accurate perception, why compassion is a political necessity, and why the compound feeling of simultaneous gain and loss is moral sophistication rather than confusion.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's scope is extraordinary. It traces the cognitive theory from its ancient sources through medieval Christian thought, its Renaissance recovery, its Enlightenment eclipse, and its contemporary rearticulation. It engages sympathetically but critically with the Stoic tradition (which recognized emotions as judgments