Abstract

This book will please different people for different reasons. Those who have felt the lack of an adequate analysis of the emotions will be gratified by the author’s clarity and comprehension of view in distinguishing among feelings, desires, and pleasures. Ethical theorists may benefit from his analysis of the difference between motives and intentions. Philosophers who have been puzzled by Wittgenstein’s remarks on sensation in Parts I and II of Philosophical Investigations may expect to find some relief in the author’s straightforward discussion of feelings under Wittgenstein’s inspiration. And philosophers who, for whatever reason, have regretted the lack of communication between the Scholastic tradition and the tradition of Modern Empiricism will be heartened by the lively way in which insights of St Thomas Aquinas and of Aristotle himself are brought to bear in relevant terms upon problems of human action and emotion inherited from Descartes and Hume. The author is partisan in this book. He sides generally with Aristotle, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Anscombe and Geach, and generally against Descartes, Hume, Russell, Ryle and various contemporary logicians. But the price of this alignment does not include befuddlement about what his antagonists have to say, nor blindness to some of the virtues of their positions. In this respect alone, if not only in this respect, the author’s discussion is both refreshing and worthy of a student with teachers such as his.