Abstract

In the last chapter I give and argue for a biconditional construal of justified conscious anger at and I give a biconditional construal of justified biological anger at. I then suggest that biological anger at and conscious anger at may be identical. I close with a discussion of this possibility. ;Strictly speaking x can't be fictional because of the first condition on the biconditional and the principle of weak intracategoriality. ;Chapter five contains a discussion of how we focus our citations of causes to suit our instrumental purposes. I argue that, at least prima facie, the following biconditional truly describes conscious anger at. Where x and z are individuals and e is an event. x is consciously angry at z if and only if there is some e such that x is made angry by e, and x consciously believes that there is some e such that e made x angry, and e is untoward, and z did e. ;In chapter six I give a biconditional for biological anger at and I argue that to understand conscious anger at evolutionarily, we need to generally restrict the objects of episodes of these kinds of anger to entities which actually entered into their causal genesis. ;In chapter three causal language is discussed. In this chapter I discuss singular causal statements. I argue that we need to be able to make singular causal statements even though we do not know the technical content of the covering laws for those statements. I use some of these distinctions to argue against Russell's claim that "cause" has nothing to do with science. ;Chapter four serves as a transition from the earlier discussion of causes per se to the later discussion of anger in causal terms. Here I discuss the relations which I will take seriously in my attempt to give a partial description of anger, viz., the being made angry by relation , and the being consciously angry at relation , and the being biologically angry at relation , and the being justifiably consciously angry at relation , and the being justifiably biologically angry at relation . ;In the last section of chapter four I discuss the "x is made angry by e" relation. I argue for the following biconditional description of x is made angry by e: x is made angry by e if and only if x is angry, and e is a cause of x's anger. ;This dissertation is about anger. Much of my talk about anger is causal talk, so the first half of the dissertation is devoted to getting clear on the causal principles which will be applied to anger in the second half of the dissertation. ;The first chapter is a discussion of some ontological aspects of causation. The main result from chapter one used in later chapters is that fictional entities do not causally affect real temporal entities. I call this restriction on the causal relation the weak intracategoriality of causal relations. ;Chapter two contains a discussion of some epistemological aspects of weak intracategoriality, viz., we do not look for real temporal effects of fictional "causes", and we do not look for fictional "causes" of a real temporal effect.